by Alec Waugh
My fortnight in the Lebanon passed quickly. I made new friends and saw old ones. Changed though so much there was, the changes that I found in my friends’ lives were slighter far than those that I had found in their opposite numbers on my return to London and New York. Most of them were living in the same flats or houses.
I called to inquire after ‘Bien Sur’. She had, I had learnt on my last leave in ’44, married her Free French sailor. She was in Paris now, her mother told me, and had two daughters. Her husband was doing well as a mechanic. It was five years since she had gone away. But she was a good daughter, she wrote regularly every month. The small boy who had brought me notes had now left school. He was a problem: unemployed, at a time when there was a lack of work. The little girl who had peered at me from behind a door was now eighteen and very like ‘Bien Sur’. She was working in a dress shop and there was something in her eye suggesting that she was getting a good deal of enjoyment out of life. The father had died some years ago, and the mother complained about the cost of living; but the house had been freshly painted; there was a new cloth upon the table. There was an air of general well-being. As there was everywhere I went. Everyone was complaining about the cost of living, everyone was complaining about the slump, yet everyone seemed to be doing well. There were parties and smart clothes, and more Scotch being drunk than Arak.
At the same time it may be that I should be giving a false impression both of Lebanon to-day and Lebanon in the past if I presented it exclusively in terms of an astute people that has always known how to adapt itself to circumstances. Dark things have happened in the past, and dark things may well be waiting in the future. Perhaps I should present a truer picture of the country if I were to close this section, not with the picture of ‘Bien Sur’ but of one to whom chance has been less kind.
3
When I met her first, during the war, within a few weeks of my arrival, Annette Drollet was twenty-one years old. She was little and slim and dark, pale-skinned, with her hair worn loose upon her shoulders. In appearance she was typically Lebanese, and her problems were of a kind that only a Lebanese would have. The Drollets were a patrician family; a network of cousinship, every strand a gilded one, linked them to the Surcock aristocracy. Annette was the youngest of three sisters, both of whom had married Frenchmen. She should have gone to Paris for her finishing year in the first autumn of the war, and had been highly indignant when her father refused to let her go. Even now, with Paris in German hands, she felt ill-used. Her sisters, judging from their letters, were having all the fun that they could use— theatres, dances, the shop-windows full. It was just British and Free French propaganda that painted Paris as a city of the dead. Besides, the war could not go on for ever.
She had a grievance, not against Hitler or Mussolini, not even against Roosevelt or Churchill, but against life in general. She had been cheated. She had been promised that finishing year in Paris, and the chance that it would have given her to marry the best kind of Frenchman. She was not, however, a sulky girl. She was making the best of a bad job; had taken a post-graduate course at the American University and, since her chances of marrying a Frenchman had considerably diminished, was looking round to see what England had to offer. On one point she was resolved—not to marry a fellow countryman. In all of which she was typically Lebanese.
I met her through Blanche Ammoun. And it would be impossible for me to write of Lebanon without making a reference to the most charming and the most talented friend I made there. Married now to a French officer, the mother of three children, Blanche when I met her first was on the brink of thirty. Her father had been a minister in the Turkish days; her mother a Baghdadi—whose nieces, the Ghannams, were later in Iraq to become my friends; her brother Charles a barrister with an interest in politics that has since brought him prominence. Blanche was, however, very much more than a member of an important family. An excellent painter, she has written and illustrated a history of the Lebanon, which is no less a serious work of scholarship because it is told lightly, almost frivolously: she was the first Lebanese woman to be called to the Bar. In addition to all of which she was extremely pretty, in the Lebanese fashion of pale skin and glistening black hair worn loose upon the shoulders. She was very small, and by her right nostril was a small black mole, the dimensions of which in self-portraiture she was at pains to magnify. She was so elegant and neat and small that it was possible at a first meeting to classify her as just another very pretty girl: it was only later that I came to realise how much character she possessed, to guess at the amount of ruthlessness and resolve that must have been required for her to develop her talents in two such different directions. Our friendship is one that I shall always recall with happiness and pride, and it was a matter of very real regret that on this last visit both she and her brother Charles were away in Europe.
Blanche Ammoun is an exceptional person. She was recognised as such. She was held in respect and she was held in awe. She was able to make her own rules for her own conduct. Herself of exemplary behaviour, she was able to ignore convention. As I have previously suggested, the chaperone is one of the major nuisances of Lebanese society. Not only is it impossible for a man and a woman to go out alone together, but when two men take out two girls they are invariably disconcerted by the sudden and uninvited appearance of a brother or a cousin. Blanche refused to tolerate such constraints, and so great was her personal prestige that even the mothers of marriageable daughters were forced to accept her point of view and concede that it ‘really was all right provided Blanche was there’.
It was as a friend of Blanche’s that I met Annette, but it was because another member of the Mission, Michael Sinclair, fell in love with her that I saw so much of her.
Sinclair was thirty-five years old, a captain in the Economic Section, in private life a barrister not only of promise but achievement; he was tall, round-shouldered, with a long neck and beaklike nose and spectacles. He looked all wrong in uniform. He had been commissioned in the Munich period, through local influence, in a territorial anti-aircraft battery. On the outbreak of war, his commanding officer had been retired to a sedentary occupation, and a new brisk Regular Army colonel had quickly decided that Sinclair was the last type of officer he wanted, had sent him on a gas course and arranged for his transfer in his absence. For eighteen months Sinclair was in a constant process of being moved from one command to another. He had made the mistake that many civilians do, of imagining that the army is an affair exclusively of service; you offer yourself to discipline, and the army, knowing its own needs, decides in what direction it can make best use of you. Actually the army is a career like any other. You have to plot the graph of your own future, identifying your personal interests with the army’s needs. A general once said to me, “In every officer’s career there comes the offer of an appointment that in his own ultimate interests he must refuse.” It is of course only the minority of civilians who take the army seriously, in terms of self-advancement. Indeed, the more ambitious a man is as a civilian, the more likely is he to regard his four or five years in khaki as a sideshow, to accept what is offered him, to say “These fellows are professionals, they know where I fit in. I’ll do as well as I can whatever they may put me on to.”
It was an attitude that Sinclair had found the easier to adopt since he had, as a barrister, been precluded from soliciting work, and had acquired a belief in his capacity to familiarise himself quickly with the essentials of almost any subject. A new appointment was only a new brief to be mugged up. During the first eighteen months of the war he filled seven separate posts. His knowledge of Greek had got him posted to Middle East, but Crete had been evacuated before he arrived in Cairo. Since his French was good, a place was found for him in the Mission, but the only available appointment was in the Economic Section, the very one for which by taste, temperament, and training he was the most unsuited. He had a suspicion that he would not remain there long. “As soon as I’ve learnt one job,” he complained, “I’m poste
d to another.” And he was, of course, a hard man to place, with his unsoldierlike appearance and his air of scholarship. After thirty months of this kind of thing, his face had assumed a bewildered look. He was not at all the kind of man to appeal to a girl like Annette, who pictured romance in terms of cocktail parties, dances, and a smart escort to show her off. Moreover, he was married.
It was not a happy marriage; divorce proceedings had, indeed, begun when war broke out. The delay was only temporary. But Blanche laughed when I explained this to her.
“That’s what every married man says, particularly in war-time. Let him get divorced, then let him start talking.”
But I already foresaw that long before that could happen his opportunities of speaking would have passed. Annette quite liked Sinclair; his attentions flattered her; he was a good conversationalist to the extent that he had a barrister’s capacity to tell an effective story, but he could not hope to compete against a rival such as Major Franklin.
Hugh Franklin was everything Sinclair was not. He was twenty-eight, tall, dark, with a small moustache: athletic with a breezy manner; good company, easy to get on with, always laughing, always the first to stand a round of drinks. He had served as a gunner in the Western Desert; not for very long, but long enough for him to be able every now and then to remind his audiences that though he might now be holding down a staff appointment, he was not, as were the majority of officers in Beyrouth, a chair-born warrior. No one knew exactly what he had been doing before the war, he talked familiarly of London restaurants and the Riviera; but he never talked about his home or school. He was the kind of man we thought who gets his chance in war-time. He was efficient, without being officious; popular both with the men and with his seniors. He would almost certainly finish up with red flannel on his lapels. An American might say of him: “What a relief to find a typical Englishman who’s not standoffish”; while the Colonel Blimps might say: “A Spanish grandmother, I suppose.” It was inevitable that Annette should think him wonderful. Their engagement was announced shortly before I left Beyrouth. A year later in Baghdad I saw in an old copy of the Toiler a picture of their wedding. Franklin, I noticed, was a half colonel.
By the time I went back to Beyrouth on leave, eighteen months later, they were in Cairo. Blanche had had a postcard from Annette describing ecstatically their flat with its view over Gezira. I asked Blanche whether she thought the Drollets had provided a handsome dot. She smiled. A Frenchman, she suggested, would have driven a better bargain, but I did not fancy that Franklin was grumbling, even so. Sinclair by this time had left the Mission: no one quite knew where he was. He was in the Advocate-General’s department someone said. Somewhere in India they believed. His divorce, by the way, was through. I smiled a little wryly when they told me that. If only it had come through a few months earlier! But even if it had, I did not imagine that Sinclair would have stood much chance; not against Hugh Franklin—he and Annette were so very thoroughly each other’s tea.
That was in the autumn of 1943, and that was the last I heard of any of them until one evening in the summer of ’46 I ran into Michael Sinclair on the steps of the London Library. It was close upon six o’clock. He was living in Albany, he said; wouldn’t I go back and have a drink.
We soon got on to the subject of Annette. Yes, he’d seen her; only a few months before. They’d come, the pair of them, to a small cocktail party. Was marriage suiting her? I asked. He nodded. She was more static, more fulfilled, he said. She had a daughter; she was beautiful now, as a girl she’d been merely pretty.
“And she still likes Franklin?”
“She dotes on him.”
“And what about England itself. How’s she liking that? Austerity and all those restrictions?”
He laughed. “I don’t think they’re worrying her much; but I’m afraid that novels had given her a rather rose-coloured impression of English life—she’d pictured it in terms of royalty and country houses. She can’t think why she’s not on the Buckingham Palace invitation list.”
I wondered how Sinclair himself had struck her, in these changed surroundings. He was no longer the bewildered and ineffective economist of the Mission. He looked much better out of uniform, in a dark pin-stripe suit, a loose-collared shirt and a Sulka tie. Annette must have been impressed by the atmosphere of Albany: the uniformed and cockaded porter, the cloistered privacy of the Rope Walk, the dark panelling of the chambers; the Queen Anne bookcase; and Sinclair would surely have been at pains to select fellow-guests who would enhance his own position. Moreover, he was now divorced. I wondered whether Annette had felt any qualms, whether she had doubted, if only for a second, whether she had chosen wisely. I did not think she had. But possibly this thought may have struck her: “If I’d known what he amounted to and if there’d been no Hugh Franklin, yes, I might have waited.”
“How’s Franklin getting along?” I asked.
Sinclair shrugged. “That’s what I asked myself. It’s just one of those things that puzzle me about post-war England. I don’t know how that class of person manages. I know what happens to professional people like myself with very little capital, who earn quite large salaries, but aren’t on anyone’s expense account. We have to be very careful, with income tax at the height it is. What’s left of my income won’t run to double martinis at the Ritz. I know what’s happening to the class with large estates: half of them are committing hara-kiri maintaining their old standards by cutting into capital. Probably they are wise. They may not be left with their capital for long. But there’s another whole world of spivs and semi-spivs, people with expense accounts, who lunch at expensive restaurants, have all the petrol that they need, take trips abroad. Heaven knows how they work things out. They’re the new privileged class. And Franklin’s one of them.”
I was surprised. He was exploiting post-war in the same way that he had war-time conditions. The war had given him his chance and he had taken it. I remembered Turgenev’s simile: ‘when a gale is blowing the lower branches of a tree can touch the top ones’.
That was in ’46.
It was a very different story that I was to hear now on my return to Lebanon. So different that one of my first acts was to get in touch with Annette. I found her living in a first-floor three-roomed apartment, opposite the University, facing the tramlines: it was hot and it was noisy. I remembered her father’s house— cool and dignified and quiet, with study and dining-room and bedrooms opening off the large high hall.
“Oh yes, it’s true enough,” she said.
I asked her how it had all come about. She shrugged. “That’s something I’ve never understood. Perhaps you can help me.”
It had begun three and a half years ago. Up till then everything had been going smoothly. She was happy with Franklin, she was still in love with him. Business was good. No, she had never known exactly what his business was, something to do with the export drive, she fancied. They were partners to the extent that she had invested the greater part of her capital in it. It paid good dividends. They never seemed short of money. Then her father had got ill. She had decided to come out and see him, to take his granddaughter.
To her surprise Hugh had raised objections. It flattered her, but at the same time puzzled her; puzzled her because he would give no cogent reason; he strode backwards and forwards up and down the flat, as near hysteria as she had ever seen him. “It’ll be fatal if you go, fatal, fatal,” he had repeated. She begged him for a reason; any reason. He shook his head. He was obstinate, mulish: she almost lost her temper. For three days it had gone on like that. Then suddenly he had capitulated. “O.K.,” he said. “You go. You probably know best.” And he had become once again what he had always been with her, tender and considerate.
Their last week together had been a second honeymoon.
She was glad, more than glad on her arrival that they had parted on such terms. Her father was worse than she had feared, a final illness, through a long six months, a sad, sad time. “Thank heaven,” she had wr
itten home after the funeral, “I’ve you to come home to.” Just as she was packing, however, she had received a cable. “Do not return yet letter explanation follows.”
The letter of explanation had told her little. Business had become suddenly very bad. He might have to close down his London offices and establish branches overseas, in Canada and South Africa. He would let her know. She did not understand what it was all about, nor did his subsequent letters make it any clearer. Owing to currency regulations, he could not, he explained, send her any money. But he assumed that since her father’s death she would be in a position to support herself. Then he went abroad. Each letter bore a different address. He had advised her not to join him. It would not be fair on their daughter. There was also the financial problem. Things were very bad. She must have gathered from the papers how bad they were.
Every month there had been a new excuse. Then there had been the devaluation of the pound. It was the final blow, their business had been forced into liquidation. She had made out for him a power of attorney before she left, so that the transfer had been effected in her absence. There was some capital left, of which a part was hers, he said; but owing to currency controls, he could not send it out here. But she could rest assured that it was safe. In the meantime, he presumed that she was not in any difficulties.
She was in despair. She did not know what was happening. The temptation to fly back was great; but the habit of obedience to the man of the family was hereditary and ingrained. She did not know where to turn. Then suddenly a few weeks ago the blow had fallen. He had written to tell her that he had fallen in love again, that he wanted to marry a South African, that he was planning to divorce her for desertion under the three years’ law. He could trust her not to defend the case. He was certain that he was acting for the best in all their interests.
