Holloway was a good man to send out to camps and canteens where he could mix with the simple soldiery. If a summary of the morale of British troops in my area was required by I (b), I could provide it by tarting up one of Holloway’s illiterate reports. But he could not get on with the Australians; so I used to send him off into the mountains to get rid of him. He often came back with some choice bit of scandal about Lebanese or French which had nothing to do with Security but could be revealing.
One morning in February Holloway sidled into my office, saluted smartly and announced:
‘Got a bit of news for you, sir! Bit of stuff up in the hills above Sir. English and lives with her mother. Just a marvellous bibi they say she is!’
‘What the devil are they doing up there all alone?’
‘Nobody knows. You ought to run up and interrogate her, sir.’
I replied that I appreciated his kindly thoughts for my welfare, but why hadn’t he shown a bit of enterprise himself?
‘Not my style. Reserved for officers.’
‘What’s their name? I’ll find out about them.’
‘Dunno, sir. But it sounded like Rumson-Bollocks,’ he answered, his expression detaching itself from such vulgarity.
Holloway was running true to form—a little pimping for his commanding officer and a little news. I knew well that he described anything under sixty and in recognisable female form as a marvellous bibi, so my personal interest was small. But duty required that I should find out more about these two unlikely Englishwomen. If they were making friends among the busy little detachments of British troops up in the hills, they could know a lot more than I did of the defence line which was being prospected from Tripoli to Baalbek and the tracks which would lead to strong points and lateral communications.
Since it was the French who were responsible for the policing of the country, I called up Captain Magnat, my opposite number in the Deuxième Bureau, to ask if he had ever heard of Holloway’s two females. Magnat tolerated me, though he was convinced that the chief object of Field Security was to raise a revolt in the Lebanon, using it as an excuse to throw out the French and take over the country. The result of this paranoia was that if you asked him the simplest question he spent half the night analysing your possible motives and chose the worst.
However, the French are a lovable people. In the meanest of them is a hidden angel, and that’s more than one can say of any other nation. Magnat, in spite of his suspicions, could not help being a loyal ally at our humble day-to-day level. He said that the secrecy of his dossiers was inviolable, but that he would consent to talk privately about these ladies on condition that I would come and share the revolting dinner which he was compelled to prepare for himself in the pigsty where he was billeted.
The pigsty was a shed at the back of his office, furnished with a camp bed, some empty ammunition boxes and a wood stove. He was a lonely man, unpopular in the French officers’ mess. There were only five of them in it. Four were ardent catholics, politically conservative. Magnat was a staunch, left-wing, republican atheist.
As well as an exquisite omelet and a steamed grey mullet straight out of the sea, he gave me a tour d’horizon, which none of our own people could have equalled for clarity, starting with a certain Blaise d’Aulnoy—a colonial administrator out of the top drawer who had been ten years in Beirut after distinguished service in Morocco.
D’Aulnoy was loyal to Vichy, from absolute conviction not just deference to the legal government. He belonged to the odd breed of European fascist which thought that Hitler could be Charlemagne all over again. If we had given the Free French a free hand, Magnat said, d’Aulnoy would have spent the war in the cell of a fortress. As it was, we allowed him to remain in luxury at the St. Georges Hotel until he was repatriated by the last boat. It was in Beirut that he had met these women, whose name turned out to be Ronson-Bolbec.
Shortly before the war d’Aulnoy had bought an inaccessible valley above the village of Sir either for retirement or holidays. He had invited the Ronson-Bolbecs to live in his house as long as they liked and look after it for him. Magnat remarked that it appeared to be one of those chivalrous gestures to which the beau monde is prone if it has enough money.
But naturally there remained a question mark, so the Deuxième Bureau had put an enquiry through to our people. They got back a four-line reply that Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec was a colonel’s widow of unimpeachable background and loyalty who should not be bothered unnecessarily. D’Aulnoy and the late Colonel Ronson-Bolbec had been close friends ever since Ronson-Bolbec had been attached to Pétain’s staff in 1918.
That was not good enough for Magnat. He cleaned his képi, polished his boots, borrowed the best horse in the gendarmerie stables and paid a formal call.
‘It is unbelievable,’ he said. ‘There is a war on, and they choose to retire to a place one can only reach by horse or on foot.’
‘What was your impression?’
‘Très snob and desperately indiscreet. A cousin in your Foreign Office. Another cousin in your War Office—the Military Secretary’s department which, it appears, decides promotions. If you want to be a general, cultivate her!’
‘So no security angle at all?’
‘Well, I noticed that Madame had Vichy sympathies—in the sense that she is convinced the Free French do not know how to behave. And to think that I shone like a damned cadet from St. Cyr! Perhaps she is employed by your Secret Service?’
I could not guarantee, I replied, that she wasn’t, but it seemed unlikely in view of the character he had sketched.
‘And what did you make of the daughter?’
‘Pretty as a dream, painfully virginal and struck me as an imbecile. You have by chance read Hamlet? I could see her playing Ophelia in a crown of daisies.’
He opened up a second bottle and himself with it. He had dragged up from Egypt as much gossip as a village postmistress. Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec had exhibited her daughter all round Aldershot and was trying Cairo for a son-in-law when war caught them there. Nothing doing! Dozens of proposals, of course, but not up to her standard. Her ambition, Magnat explained ironically, was to spend the rest of her summers on the terrace of an English château watching the deer and having her glass filled by the butler, in return for which she offered one guaranteed virgin of impeccable beauty and breeding—with doctor’s certificate if required.
I said that I thought that kind of thing had gone out in the nineteen-twenties.
‘In your indulgent circles, it is more than probable. But how many colonel’s widows have you met? And they are worse in France!’
His vivid portrait made sense up to a point, but I could understand no more than Magnat the isolation of this mother and daughter in a sensitive area. Why not choose Beirut or its lovely mountain suburbs? The sons of high finance and the aristocracy were probably rare at Ninth Army Headquarters, but there might well be officers on leave with the requisite qualifications.
However, it was obvious that any Field Security officer who made the same suspicious enquiries as the French would receive the same snub from Cairo. So I decided to imitate Magnat, dress in Field Service uniform instead of battledress and see for myself.
I took our spare motorcycle, for I do not ride if I can help it. The retreat of these enigmatic females was a mere sixteen miles east of Tripoli. The first eleven miles, as far as the village of Sir, belonged more or less to the twentieth century. The remaining five were only fit for four-legged animals and I should have thought that the track had been worn out of the stony hillside by their hooves if it had not been for a made ford across a stream which surged down from the snows of Qurnat es Sauda.
My own mount pitched and plunged up to the top of the ridge with no damage but a bent foot-rest. A hundred feet below me was a high valley, narrow and sheltered, with the early green of wheat just showing. On the opposite slope was a hamlet of Moslem Arabs and under my e
yes the red roof of a low, whitewashed house with young poplars around three sides and a neat orchard on the fourth. D’Aulnoy had certainly chosen a paradise. Presumably he would have made a road to it if the peace of the Lebanon had lasted.
It stood to reason that the small estate—just over a square mile at a guess—was self-sufficient. If d’Aulnoy had the devotion of the few inhabitants, which could be counted on since he had brought prosperity into the hungry lives of mountain peasants, the Ronson-Bolbecs were likely to have a good, plain table and to be well served. They were back in the feudal system with all mod. cons. as well.
I shook off some of the dust and prepared for my formal social call. A steep path of hard-packed gravel ran down to the valley, branching at the bottom to connect house, village and fields. The front door, double, wide and country-made from cedar, emphatically proclaimed the residence of an important effendi. As soon as I put the bike on its stand, a manservant came round the corner of the house to greet me, wearing dark blue Turkish trousers with high boots and a blue-and-gold waistcoat hanging open over his shirt. He spoke serviceable French.
I asked ceremoniously if I might have the honour of calling on Madame, if she was at home. That was for the lady’s benefit in case she was within earshot summing up the visitor from behind a curtain. In the silence of the valley the motorcycle would have given ample warning of my arrival.
I was ushered into the living room—white walls, arches, cedar timbers, an open fireplace, all showing North African rather than Lebanese influence. Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec advanced on me with the practised cordiality of an army wife. She was dressed in casual, well-worn tweeds more fitted for February in England. Not that there was all that difference up in the valley. I was glad of the fire.
She was a solid, sandy-coloured woman in her middle forties and not bad-looking. The only exaggerated fleshiness was her bosom, hauled up to formidable prominence. When we shook hands there seemed to be only a foot of space between us. A sub-conscious, sexual offering perhaps. I am sure she did not realise the full extent of the protuberance and launched it at strangers as a gesture of hospitality.
I introduced myself and apologised for my visit. I said that one of the villagers at Sir had told me that an Englishwoman lived over the ridge and another told me that I couldn’t get a motorcycle up the track. I did not believe either of them but accepted the challenge.
She was amused at this, and my first impression was favourable.
‘Where are you stationed?’ she asked.
‘Tripoli.’
‘Attached to the Australians?’
She seemed to be aware that there were no British troops in Tripoli. Nothing surprising in that. But it did show that she was well informed in her isolation.
‘Yes. A sort of liaison job.’
There were a lot more personal and pointed questions which one could not resent. She was obviously playing the motherly colonel’s wife putting the possibly awkward officer at his ease. When she found out that I was not married—it was no business of hers that I once had been—she said:
‘The older men are so gallant to have joined up. They had more to sacrifice than mere boys. I am sure you did?’
I replied untruthfully that my export business carried on without me and that I had not sacrificed anything. I felt I should produce the illusion of a prosperous background.
She went to the door and called musically:
‘Valerie darling!’
A pretty name it seemed to me thirty years ago. My opinion has been widely shared. Is there any suburb without a beauty parlour called Valerie? And it does not matter what stale, fat perfumes drift through the door. At the sight of the name I cross the road out of range and still smell the hillside herbs of Lebanon.
Valerie Ronson-Bolbec did not keep us waiting. Magnat’s and Holloway’s reports were understatements. She was about nineteen or twenty with darkish blonde hair falling a little below the shoulder. At any rate it was longer than was fashionable then and somehow gave the impression that she had finished school but not yet come out. She had a low, serene forehead over large, grey eyes and a perfectly oval face. I think she was the most lovely girl I ever set eyes on, of middle height, long-legged, the breasts delicate but both definitely present, sir, and correct—all this neatly outlined by a white jumper and skirt with a loose belt of local embroidery.
She was just the dream of the simple, sex-hungry soldiery, and when I had got over the first dazed impact I was astonished that my reaction was not surrender. But there was a self-controlled calm about the girl—no merry eyes, no immediate warmth, little play of feature. If I had been the local pasha a hundred years earlier I would have bought her like a shot as a collector’s item and kept her to look at until the mixture exploded spontaneously.
Valerie was encouraged to mix us a drink. She then asked me why I was reconnoitring that part of the hill country on a motorcycle. This was even more direct than mother’s questions, so I at once accepted the invitation to be indiscreet.
‘Just a survey. Our defence line against an attack from the Caucasus may run through here.’
It did not of course. The valley was miles to the north of our proposed forward positions. Their reaction was agitated and seemed sincere.
‘Oh God! Then we may have to move.’
‘It’s not all that certain, but I am sure Cairo would look after you.’
‘My cousin thinks India would be better for us,’ said Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec. ‘He’s a friend of Winston’s, you know, and asked his advice.’
If true, that would give an enemy agent something to think about! I wondered whether Churchill was impressed by Rommel’s entry into our private war with the Italians or whether he believed that the Russians were finished and that nothing could stop the German armies roaring on from the Donetz basin to the Caucasus.
‘This is such a lovely spot,’ I said. ‘Nobody would want to leave it. But you must be very lonely.’
‘My daughter and I have had so much of the social round,’ she answered.
I ignored the suggestion of royal garden parties in the rain, and supposed old friends came up to see them.
‘Oh, you are all much too busy! We have to depend on local society.’
Local? There wasn’t any.
‘Do they come by mule or parachute?’
She laughed and again I felt that there was a genuine woman somewhere in spite of her affectations.
‘A horse can make it from Sir in less than an hour,’ she said.
‘Is that how you got here?’
‘Of course. Dear Blaise d’Aulnoy borrowed some horses from the Army of the Orient just before the last of them embarked.’
I noticed that she talked of the Army of the Orient rather than the Vichy troops as the rest of us called them.
‘The Intelligence Corps must be so romantic,’ Valerie remarked, looking up from concentration on a finger nail which had recently been chewed and recognising my badges.
‘Not a bit. When we haven’t got a very definite job and they don’t know what to put us in, they choose the Intelligence Corps.’
‘That’s just what Oliver said,’ she exclaimed.
‘Poor Oliver!’ Ma added with a painfully arch smile. ‘A Captain Enwin. Perhaps you knew him?’
I replied cautiously that I believed I had met him in Cairo.
‘Do you know what he is doing now?’
‘Something in Palestine, I think.’
‘Yes, he was. But he wrote to us that he had been suddenly posted home, and since then we have never heard a word from him.’
I asked if he was a friend of the family.
‘Dear me, no!’ she answered, implying that Oliver Enwin was a nobody. ‘But he was very taken with my daughter, and we couldn’t help seeing rather a lot of him.’
‘In England?’
‘In Cairo just
before the war. He followed us out there. So touching, but of course quite hopeless.’
Soon afterwards I left, telling Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec that if there was anything she needed from Tripoli I should be delighted to send it up by one of my men or bring it myself. She answered without any pretence of hesitation that she would like some gin. She would! It was in very short supply and I should have to sacrifice my own ration to get her any.
Valerie came out with me and showed interest in the motorcycle, drooping her hair over the handlebars.
‘Would you like a ride?’
‘Not in this dress,’ she replied. ‘I wanted to say something to you. There is a bridle path from here to Hermel. No boulders. Usable by tracked vehicles.’
She was obviously repeating someone else’s words.
‘I’m surprised your mother didn’t mention it,’ I said.
‘She doesn’t know. Mummy can’t keep her mouth shut.’
‘Well, this time she could have opened it.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she answered vaguely. ‘But I was asked to tell a British officer and nobody else. So I have.’
‘Who asked you?’
‘Just one of our visitors.’
I let it go at that. She gave the impression that conversation was really not worth the trouble. Since her only companion was her too expansive mother, it was not surprising.
The return journey to Sir was all absorbing and put paid to my only pair of formal trousers. Once down, I dropped into the village café to think and to recover from bruises and a grazed backside. One solid fact was plain. Oliver’s file was wrong in stating that he had come out to Egypt as an archaeologist. He had taken any old job which would provide him with a meal ticket and had no special interest in archaeology as the lack of books had indicated. My other conclusion was less justified. Valerie was more touched by his devotion than her mother—what girl wouldn’t be?—and the ashes in the stove at Nazareth were possibly her letters.
Doom's Caravan Page 3
