“It’s just that I would rather see you in your office,” she said.
Captain Fairfather made no comment. That she approved.
“Five o’clock suit you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
There could be no nonsense with Captain Fairfather. He was a man whose compliments were likely to be embarrassing if one looked too attractive. A bloody man—Armande from a child had used stronger expressions to herself than ever passed her lips—with a lewd bald head. Bald heads, she decided in her annoyance at this disturbance of her peace, were always lewd. Italians had bald heads. So did commercial travellers. And bankers. But not people with any real culture and gentleness of insight. What did Laurence Fairfather do in peacetime? She didn’t know. Some commercial job abroad which took him home to London at regular intervals. Tweeds and smart tweeds were the right wear to intimidate Captain Fairfather.
“You look like something out of the Tatler,” he said when she entered his office.
“Yes?” she replied indifferently.
“Point to point. So refreshing after all this local colour. A cigarette?”
“Thank you. I was told to come and see you by my colonel.”
“Very naughty of him.”
“Oh, please!” said Armande impatiently.
“But it was. He’s not supposed to indicate to you in any way why you lost your job. Of course it would be ideal if every employer were a born actor and could pretend, when we order him to sack somebody, that the reason was disgraceful conduct or inefficiency. But they aren’t actors.”
“So it’s true you had something to do with it!”
“I, personally? Nothing at all. Nor your Sergeant Prayle either.”
“Then for heaven’s sake tell me what has happened.”
“Certainly. You have been black-listed for employment by any of the Services.”
Armande stared at him. The Jewish and Arab employees in the army offices had talked mysteriously of this black-listing. It was one of the bogeys, like arms dealing, to be discussed only in a lowered voice; and dreaded, since its victims, from the point of view of the humble, seemed to be arbitrarily chosen. They were cut off, then and there, from all further attempts to bleed the army pay roll.
What a phrase! Armande shuddered at her racing, uncharitable thoughts. And yet how many of them had sacrificed anything at all to work for the garrison? If they could get more money elsewhere, they got it. Devotion? Damn you, she exclaimed to herself, won’t you allow devotion to anyone but Armande? Not those, anyway! And when it comes to having the impertinence to black-list a British subject of standing (what standing, darling, damn you again?) I’ll … I’ll …
“Why?” she asked casually, as if the whole matter concerned some other woman.
“Because, I suppose, we are afraid of you.”
“No, you are not. Not a bit. Is this a punishment because I have Jewish friends?”
“As many as I?” he asked gently.
“Oh, you! You can get away with anything.”
“So can you. Or at least you ought to be able to. I don’t know what has gone wrong. I don’t know why you are so touchy on this Palestine problem. Just what is your opinion of Zionism?”
“I think we have broken our word,” she exclaimed with a flashing vehemence that sprang from her personal humiliation rather than any political anger. “I think the White Paper was a scandal, and the League of Nations said it was a scandal. We have stopped the Jews building up their National Home. And it doesn’t matter in the least what the meaning of National Home is.”
“We also kept the Arabs quiet.”
“That may be. But if I were a Jew, I’d be an extremist.”
“Do you often say things like that?”
“Yes, if I feel like it. Is that why I’m black-listed?”
“No. We aren’t quite such fools, you know. Your opinions, of course, might be considered—well, some slight additional evidence. But I don’t know if anyone ever bothered with them.”
He offered her another cigarette, and lit it. His eyes were annoyingly and steadily returning to hers.
“Good God, what a glowing person you are!” he said with a half laugh. “And we continue to talk nonsense.”
Armande, raging internally, kept her temper.
“You think that has nothing to do with it, but it has,” he went on. “I wouldn’t use those words of some obvious little trickster. You’re mysterious, yes. But it’s so clear from your face that … well, Spencer, isn’t it? For of the soule the bodie forme doth take: For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make. I can’t feel you could ever be harmful to anything I believe in. That sounds conceited, I know. And naturally what I believe doesn’t matter to you in the least.”
He spoke slowly, and Armande had time to regain an uneasy balance. Her thoughts were too ragged for her to feel any sort of relaxation, but she liked what he said; it sounded sincere. The man might be a nuisance, yet less ordinary than she had imagined.
“Home is so far away, Captain Fairfather. Have we got to fence with one another?” she begged. “What crime am I supposed to have committed?”
“Really I don’t know. It’s in Beirut that they know, or think they know. It appears that in a moment of carelessness or idealism—not, I am sure, for money—you did a job for the French or the Jews.”
“I did neither,” Armande retorted indignantly. “Doesn’t one department of Intelligence ever tell another what it is doing?”
“Not if one department is Abu Tisein.”
“You mean I’ve been sacrificed to—what?”
“Something worthy, I hope. I’m not in this, you see. Palestine—contrary to what you thought—has nothing whatever against you. My only information comes from Wyne, whom I trust, and he trusts Prayle, and Prayle says—he’s far from complimentary for so devoted an admirer—he says you are not only innocent, but sweet innocent into the bargain.”
“Sergeant Prayle said that?” she asked coldly.
“Well, I’m translating his thought into my own words, you know. He may have put it quite differently.”
“Something about my little loaf, probably,” Armande replied, measuring contempt into every word.
Captain Fairfather chuckled.
“Noggin, I think,” he corrected her.
Armande had to smile. Nevertheless Prayle’s impudence was exasperating. A sweet innocent, indeed—she a disciplined, calm, worldly woman, who had taken an active interest in every intellectual movement of her time!
“Why on earth don’t you people ask David Nachmias about me?” she said.
“Has it occured to you that he must have been asked before you were black-listed?”
Armande stared at him.
“Oh!”
It was a cry of pain, childlike and uncontrollable, as if caused by some small, surprising wound. His words opened an abyss of human infamy. And it was no valley through which she had to pass. She was in it. Now. And what he said was true, so obviously and unchallengeably true.
“But then—I’m back where I was.”
“Where was that?” he asked.
“Oh, just—Beirut.”
“I don’t know what sort of hell that means to you. But you aren’t back where you were.”
“Yes.”
“What about friends?”
“Not much use, are they, in this sort of thing?”
“I didn’t mean the brigadiers,” he said, smiling.
“They would shy off, wouldn’t they?” she agreed bitterly. “No, I’m grateful. Thank you.”
“Don’t. I hate injustice too.”
“How do you know there has been any?”
“Oh, refer to our earlier conversation … My poor Armande, this is a scandalous thing!”
She accepted the sudden use of her Christian name. So timed, it nearly made her cry.
“What am I to do?”
“Well, if I were you, I should go to Egypt.”
“Will I be …?”
> She hesitated over the word.
“Black-listed there too? Yes, I’m afraid so. But there are two good reasons for going. One is that you may get home from there. The other—you’re better out of Palestine till this can be cleared up. In your present situation you’re open to police slanders, exploitation, anything. My driver has an odd story of women changing into men, and I see a man is wanted who disappeared from Beit Chabab. No, don’t tell me anything! I liked your Sergeant Prayle. But the connection with you is there to be made if the right policeman reads our black list. Have you a passport?”
“Of course.”
“Give it me. I’ll fix up your visa.”
“I can do it myself, really,” she protested.
“Perhaps.”
“Only perhaps?”
“Anyway, I could do it much more quickly.”
Laurence Fairfather’s suggestion that she should go to Egypt was wise. She had certainly no wish to be asked any polite questions about Fouad. And every intimate impulse prompted her to get out of Palestine. It was impossible to sit idly in her flat and put off all the awkward and friendly inquiries; impossible even to talk to her acquaintances while wondering how much they knew.
“Who knows about this?” she asked.
“About what?”
“About what I am supposed to have done.”
“Your name us just one among hundreds. If you don’t apply for jobs with the Services, and don’t come to the notice of officialdom—”
“But how long must I endure this?” she interrupted. “Can’t I be cleared? Can’t I ask for some sort of inquiry?”
“Yes, I think you could. But would you be any better off? Who really were those troops in British uniform who collected the arms?”
“French. Montagne’s French.”
“Who told you that?”
“David Nachmias.”
“When?”
“When Sergeant Prayle was here asking about it.”
“And what did he tell you when you took on the job?”
“That British would collect them.”
“Any witnesses?”
“No.”
“Did he say why on earth we should waste men and money collecting arms in the Lebanon?”
Armande repeated the explanation that David Nachmias had given her on the terrace of the Hotel St. Georges, and the shocking tale of intrigue that he had told her later in her flat.
“Detailed, and to you convincing,” said Fairfather. “I don’t wonder. But when one knows the general layout, it’s tosh! We have enough to do in Syria without bothering about the armament of an old Christian coot in the middle of nowhere. As for David’s second story, we should never encourage these divisions of the French. We would give anything to prevent them. No, Armande, it’s as plain as can be that what you did was to acquire some much wanted Hotchkiss guns for the National Home.
“Now, suppose you had your inquiry. It’s your word against David Nachmias, and whatever half-evidenced and innuendo he can bring to bear. How would you come out? Exactly as you are. That is: probably innocent, but not a good risk. And David Nachmias? Quite certainly guilty, but no legal proof. And still very useful to us in bigger things. You see?”
“But it’s the most horrible treachery!” she cried. “I didn’t know people really did such things.”
“They do. In my job I have seen men’s lives and, worse, men’s honour mercilessly sacrificed. This is war. Everything goes. To myself I stink. But my excuse is that anything is better than the destruction of my country. Is it surprising that the Zionists feel the same? I doubt if to themselves they stink—they are too self-righteous—but their excuse is that anything is better than a world where Jews haven’t a home of their own.”
“But to use me!” she cried. “To make me a common little crook!”
“There is one comfort, Armande. A poor one—but there it is. You needn’t feel ashamed of your own country any longer. We have so much cleaner hands than you believed. Such a policy towards the French as Abu Tisein described for you is utterly unthinkable.”
“Is it? Is anything unthinkable? Even you said that you’d sacrifice honour rather than see your country destroyed.”
“Personal, not national. I meant that I am prepared to stink, so long as my country does not. All this is really a backhanded defence of David Nachmias. He has made a mistake, and he is saving his country’s honour at the expense of his own—and yours. He has to obey orders, but he would much rather be a quiet Turkish gentleman.”
“He said so. And I believed it,” replied Armande bitterly.
“Oh, it’s true. Abu Tisein loathes all these Central Europeans as much as an Arab. He has no personal ambition, but he is convinced—I think rightly—that he is essential to his people.”
When Armande left Laurence Fairfather’s office, Jerusalem was in utter darkness. The heavy clouds of winter made absolute the blackout. The masses of clear masonry which had faintly reflected the brilliant starlight of summer and autumn were not even shapes against the sky or before the outstretched hand. Here and there, under the doorways, were faint blue lamps. Puddles of light appeared and disappeared on the ground as pedestrians flashed their torches and groped their way round the blast walls that obstructed the narrow pavements. In the shuffling silence she could hear the jackals hooting, like little breathless factory sirens, from the valley of Kiriat Shemuel.
Armande walked slowly towards Qatamon, then turned back into the centre of the town. There was nothing any longer at home to welcome her; her room was no more a refuge from the ever-present, ever-insistent society of the garrison. That society did not require her. She ached for comfort, for an older man, a father or an uncle, to whom she could leave, for a time, all the arrangement of her life. She wanted a sort of Laurence Fairfather, but without his unhelpful habit of seeing two sides to every problem, her own included. Two sides? Ten! And believing none of them. Someone wise, to whom she would always be right. Prayle might be like that, if only … but he was crazy, anyway. He was no giver of comfort; he needed mothering. All the same, it would do her good to hear that restful voice, with its odd, jerky rhythms, which she had so liked when she first heard it on the telephone.
What a conceited little fool she had been! That morning when she had found him teaching the page boy to make a catapult—if only then, instead of fussing over his explanation of the nickname, she had told him what Abu Tisein had asked her to do! Too discreet. Can a person be too discreet? No, darling, but she can be on her dignity with sergeants.
The strong scents of oranges and cooking spices called her back to the outer realities. She was approaching the Jaffa Gate. The carelessly hooded head lamps of two Arab taxis and the chinks of light from the windows of Arab café s revealed, alongside the black pavement, masses of a deeper black which, at a distance of five yards, could be distinguished as sacks of oranges, donkeys and a couched camel. Across the road was the dim outline of the gate. There must, she thought penitently, be some wisdom in this administration if now a woman could grope her way in peace through a city of such burning passions. Three years earlier that darkness would have been the gift of Allah the All-Merciful to raving little mobs of Arabs.
Armande passed under the gate into the Old City, brushing the robes of unseen passers-by, and turned left into the Christian Quarter with the vague impulse of seeking a temporary peace in some church or monastery courtyard; but the heels of the shoes that she had worn for Captain Fairfather, while low enough to suit her tweeds, were far too high for cobble stones in darkness. She sought more earthly but immediate rest in a small Greek restaurant. As soon as she had entered she realised that it was primitive, but also that she was very hungry. She hesitated, and then went boldly to a table.
The place was full of Christian Arabs and a party of young and well-dressed Moslem effendis, who were tasting, with gestures of exaggerated pleasure, the forbidden wine. What a lot of fun they get, she thought with weary envy, these Moslems with their wine, t
hese Jews with a dish of bacon! And to me nothing is forbidden except what I forbid myself.
The customers stared at her with friendly interest as she sat down before a tablecloth matted with oil and egg. One of the younger Moslems spat an obviously insolent remark in Arabic, of which she only understood the word for Jew. He was instantly rebuked by two older members of the party, who bowed and smiled to her an aplolgy, and looked away as if to assure her that their courtesy was wholly disinterested. Did they she wondered, recognise her as an alien Englishwoman or didn’t they care? She decided that her religion was not in the least apparent—with her black hair and big grey eyes she was sometimes mistaken for a Jewess—but that her class was. Arabs seemed to have a strong sense of class, perhaps because they could afford without jealousy, within so true a democracy as Islam, to pay homage to wealth and education.
Wealth? Well, she looked smart. Tatler, damn him! But actually she wouldn’t have much left by the time she had paid her fare to Egypt. An income of five pounds a week had been very useful, though she hadn’t really attempted to live on it. One couldn’t with Palestine prices soaring upwards. Invitation from the military had accounted for a shameful number of her solid meals.
The Greek proprietor, who kept his belly in a sort of box formed by the cash desk, wine barrels and crates of bottles, moved to her with surprising speed, and whisked from a shelf a less revolting tablecloth. She left the menu to his care. Armande could never understand why people made such a to-do over ordering, eating, paying and tipping. As a child of the trade, it was all familiar to her; and something in her manner seemed to proclaim to any purveyor of food that she was aware of routine, circumstance and what there might be on the ice.
The proprietor brought to her crisp fried fish from the Sea of Galilee. Odd, she thought, while enjoying its excellence, how all the good fish in Palestine was Arab, and all the large and tasteless fishes Jewish! Odd that in this filthy little joint—or, for that matter, in Beit Chabab—she felt at home. The frank and kindly stares, the interest of customers and proprietor, were they not more in the ancient European tradition than the neat indifference of Jewish restaurants? All these Palestine British who preferred the Arab to the Jew—was the reason wholly, as the Jews said, that the British liked to be among natives whom they could dominate rather than fellow Europeans whom they could not? The conservative English always disliked the artificial; and Jewish civilisation in Palestine did seem, compared with the true Levantine, unsure if itself and brittle.
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