H.E. paused at a place where, in the midst of immaculate colour and greenness, weeds as tall and ugly as camels’ heads grew. He shook his head. Soon he stuck his glass in his eye to squint angrily at the abomination.
‘Can’t something be done about this bloody thing?’ he asked. ‘It’s an eyesore.’
Wint made sucking noises of concurrence.
‘What I mean is,’ said H.E. ‘all over Christendom, piety is weakening daily. A pity, you might think,’ he scowled around at his assistant – who wasn’t sure what expression was diplomatically correct, and fell back on simpering prepaid acquiescence – ‘but nevertheless a fact. I am sure the same obtains in the Moslem world. Well then, why this?’
‘As you know, sir, it was included in the sale of the ground—’
‘Yes, of course I know, Alan. I should know; you yourself have told me at least a dozen times.’
Because, you irascible bugger, thought Wint beneath his sleek mask, you’ve asked at least a dozen times.
‘We should never have agreed to it in the first place.’
‘Then they would never have sold us the site, sir.’
‘Well, don’t they themselves consider the ability to double-cross an indication of maturity? Apart from anything else, I don’t much care for the idea of having a holy man’s bones buried so close to the house in which I’m living.’ He glanced round and saw the crane. ‘It sleeps here, you know, right on top of the mound. Often I look out, before getting into bed, and here it is, sleeping in the moonlight, on one leg for all I know. Molly won’t look; she says it gives her the creeps. D’you think it could be the old boy back again? Don’t snigger, Alan. When I was in Leopoldville I heard of queerer things.’
‘I wasn’t sniggering, sir. It’s the orderly at the gate. I told him to let me know if there was anything coming.’
‘But it’s only twenty to.’
‘Some do come early, sir.’
‘Alan, I was here last year, if you remember.’
They walked swiftly but not quite breaking into a trot. They took a short cut across the lawn, past the crane. It opened a yellow eye, baleful with hellish wisdom, thought Wint.
They were safely at their posts when the car arrived, bringing a general and his attendant colonel, both fat, noisy with medals and vivid with scarlet braid.
These two, fed into the machine, proved its efficiency, though Katherine Winn cried when she saw them come down the carpeted staircase: ‘Oh God, I think he’s the one that nips your bottom.’ And indeed as the plump general waddled purposefully towards the marquee she noticed that his thumb and forefinger were already close together, ready to nip or, as turned out to be the case, to snatch up a glassful of whisky and empty it fast, before any mullah or pussyfooting Moslem arrived. His colonel could not have been more faithful in his attendance.
So the party began and continued for the next two hours, with the machine, or Ali’s dragon as Howard Winfield called it, taking in guests at its mouth, passing them along its alimentary canal (represented by the hard-working Ambassador and his wife), and dropping them out at the other end, with much relief. In all, there were thirty-three nationalities. The Afghans and the Americans were the hardest to digest. Hardest of all were Katherine Winn’s three friends, and Abdul Wahab.
The girls, glamorous as models, arrived in a borrowed Chevrolet, pink and cream. Howard Winfield received them with the relish of a small boy stuffing his mouth with toffee. He was slow in passing them on to the Colonel and his wife, with the result that Alan Wint, waiting at the ballroom entrance, hopped from one foot to the other, like the same small boy needing to relieve himself. He knew they had not been invited and knew that Lady Beauly knew. But what could he do, with the Iranian Ambassador hovering behind them, and the Russian Consul and his stout wife getting out of their car at the door? The girls, too, giggled and confused him with swirls of perfume and coloured satin. It was out of the question for him to wink at Lady Beauly to show that he was well aware they were gate-crashing. No, he just had to go through with it: greet them with smiles, shake hands, announce their names, and present them. He had to admit that with their charming consciousness of the honour of being presented, there under the portrait of Her Majesty, they were really more worthy guests than the majority of those with bona fide invitations. Nevertheless he could tell from Lady Beauly’s face that there would be an inquest at which he would be blamed.
Luckily, as always, his Paula was there and would still be there at night, more lovely and consoling with her clothes off even than with them on, which was a marvel causing his heart several times almost to melt. Through the back door he caught a glimpse of the Langfords receiving the girls after the Ambassador and Lady Beauly were done with them, and, for a moment of terrible but thrilling disloyalty, he imagined Paula and himself living in the same house but never sleeping together and never seeing each other’s naked bodies, only each other’s naked souls. That terrifying picture was in his mind several times that afternoon, once when he was presenting the French First Secretary and his wife, considered the most elegant woman in Kabul. With admirable loyalty, Alan again compared the slim dark Frenchwoman with his fair Paula, from the point of view of bedworthiness, and again decided whole-heartedly in favour of his own wife. The Frenchwoman no doubt would bring elegance to the act, and that for once or twice might be preferable to Paula’s hockey-girl romp; but only for once or twice. He and Paula were deeply English, and he knew enough about modern literature to know that pornography came from across the Channel, disguised as significance. The love-making of a happily married couple ought indeed to be a jolly romp, with nothing esoteric or subtle or affected about it. Was he not, as a result, a virile well-adjusted man, and were not his children healthy and sports-loving?
Then the Moffatts arrived, with Abdul Wahab.
From the moment that the perspiring Head of Chancery received them from the Military Attaché to the moment when he presented them respectfully to the Ambassador, no more than thirty seconds passed, and yet through his mind rushed another torrent of thoughts and impressions. In the first place, Mrs Moffatt wore a high Chinese dress of light-blue, decorated with an amazing yellow dragon that breathed fire and twisted round her body. She had no doubt designed it herself and wore it with a magnificence that excited and yet dismayed him. He saw that his Paula, whose own bosom and hips were gleaming with green tussore, was almost plebeian and courtesan in comparison. Even Lady Beauly, who could not keep out of her well-prepared face the grimaces of pain which her feet gave her, was made to look common and undistinguished beside the small Chinese woman. Most astonishing of all, Mrs Moffatt looked happy, and her eyes were bright with a maturity of love that, try as he might, Wint could not condemn as frigid and idealistic; there was in it a sexual quality that he had seen often enough in Paula’s, though there never quite so refined. As he watched her walk with exquisite dignity, despite the tightness of her skirt, he remembered her husband’s drunken anatomical joke, and felt aggrieved that she, so fundamentally misshapen, could so easily succeed in making his Paula, so athletic on squash and tennis courts, appear arthritic by contrast.
These thoughts, and others, cascaded through his mind during that half minute.
The others concerned her husband, who had the impertinence to appear in his role of poet; that was to say, he managed, by some miracle, to look worthy of his wife’s love. They would, Wint saw, have children, and those children would be, in shape, colour and mind, mysteriously beautiful; beside them his Annette and Paula, so carefully nurtured in the English upper middle-class mold, would be dully calculable in every thought and reaction. This was, he knew, the bottommost depth of treachery; but he could not help it. The effect of that glimpse, however, was not to decrease his love for his own children, but rather to increase it by a measure of compassion. Hitherto he had always thought them fortunate – having himself and Paula for parents, being educated in the English Public School tradition, and expecting quite considerable legacies
from their mother’s people. Now he realized that vast tracts of human experience would all their lives be remote from them.
Those thoughts too added to the river of regret pouring loudly between his ears.
In that river Abdul Wahab might be regarded as a rock, in the centre, in a narrow place, causing uproar and congestion.
He had not been invited. Only a day or two before, Lady Beauly had remarked, with satisfaction, that no invitation had been sent to him. Wahab had come under discussion, very briefly, because Pierce-Smith had at last replied, to say that his attempt to get Miss Johnstone to come to London to discuss her going to Afghanistan had failed. She had sent him a letter repudiating what she had called official interference. Pierce-Smith had mentioned that he had felt amused and touched, but neither Wint, as Head of Chancery, nor Lady Beauly, as protectress of British women in Kabul, could share his feelings. Lady Beauly had declared that Miss Johnstone seemed a thoroughly ungrateful, unpleasant sort of person. Wint had agreed. And now here, wearing a new ill-made suit much too wide at the shoulders, was Wahab, a little nervous perhaps, but brazenly so. On the walls of the Embassy hall were hung weapons from past British-Afghan wars. For a moment Wint saw himself, in the uniform of an officer of a hundred years ago, with some such sword driving out this dark-faced, insolent intruder. But now, in a degenerate time, there was nothing he could do but shake hands rather coldly, introduce him with a wince to Paula, and take him with the Moffatts to be presented to Sir Gervase and Lady Beauly. The latter’s handshake, he noticed, was as if she were playing that child’s game of touching one’s opponent’s palm with one’s forefinger without letting him imprison one’s hand in his: speed and the most momentary contact were essential.
Wahab appeared hardly perturbed, thus confirming Wint in his own shrewd belief that Afghans were not as thin-skinned as many believed; he had always believed that beneath their superficial tender skin they had another, thick and tough enough to resist insults deadly as scorpions. So, smiling, Wahab, pockmarked and foolish in his teddy-boy suit, strolled out of the ballroom on to the staircase, at the top of which he lingered, gazing not so much down at the brilliant scene below on the lawn but rather beyond, at the high distant mountains. Perhaps, thought Wint, as he hurried not too urgently to receive the next guests, the Reverend Manson Powrie and his wife – perhaps Wahab, poor fellow, is thinking about this formidable Englishwoman who is coming to marry him. Her aeroplane would come rocking over those sharp peaks.
About four o’clock the majority of those invited had arrived. Any still to come did not deserve to be received and presented. Lady Beauly went upstairs to wash her hands, change her gloves, and put on more comfortable shoes. Then she accompanied her husband down the carpeted staircase to mingle with the more important guests on the lawn. To her astonishment she arrived in time to find the most important of all, Mohammed Shir Khan, Prime Minister of Afghanistan, talking to Prince Naim, and, of all people, the upstart teacher Wahab, who was present without proper permission. It was not possible to loiter until Wahab should have been dismissed to obscurity, because etiquette demanded that she and the Ambassador should go first to their chief guest. Therefore she found herself being introduced for the second time to the sly-eyed, pompous little gate-crasher, and this time her handshake had to have an appearance of cordiality, since the introducer was Shir Khan himself, who, his French being excellent and his English comic, chose to speak in the former language.
‘Your Excellency,’ he said, ‘and Lady Beauly, allow me to present to you one of our most promising young men. Abdul Wahab is a scientist who has recently returned from your own country to take over the Principalship of one of our best schools. We hope in time to make it a nursery for scientists of the future. Mr Wahab speaks very good English.’
They had then to talk charmingly to Wahab for a minute or two, during which he answered their questions with a skill and delicacy that irritated Lady Beauly though obviously impressed the Prime Minister. She knew what he didn’t – that Wahab had come uninvited, and therefore, had he been the Prophet himself, could not avoid, every second, adding to his offence.
That was only one of several remarkable conversations Wahab was to have that afternoon.
In a very short time, after he had discreetly stepped back out of the company of his superiors, but not quite from their sight, he found himself surrounded by some compatriots who previously would not have considered him worth a nod. These were important officials from various Ministries who, while the magic of the Prime Minister’s reception was still potent about him, wished to come under its influence themselves. Each had his glass of fruit juice ostentatiously in his hand, but they could not have spoken with more fertile and insincere flattery had it been neat whisky they were drinking. Frequently they peeped around to make sure that the Prime Minister was noticing how attentive they were to the man to whom he had shown favour.
Wahab did not have much to say himself; he smiled, nodded, murmured yes or no, and took plenty of time off to gaze around at the women in their lovely dresses. Those flattering him thought that he was playing the favourite’s part with damnable efficiency. So he was, but there was something else they never guessed at. Amid all that masculine wealth, feminine lusciousness, and political influence, with flatterers outvying one another to please him and with his own brain coolly assessing their contributions, he did not feel proud or triumphant. No, he felt rather a sadness that kept possessing him more and more until, catching a glimpse of the far-off mountains between two of the sleek ambitious heads talking to him, he wished that he were there, a simple man in a simple village, pleased to find his plot of land turn green twice in the season.
A few minutes later fear, as of drought and barrenness, was to seep into the sadness. With the approach of a really important lion, those lesser ones slunk away. This was the Minister of Justice, Dr Habbibullah, a big thick-set man, more capable than most of steam-rollering the country out of its backwardness, and using, if necessary, the blood and bones of the peasants as foundation for the road into the future. It was whispered that the Russians looked on him as their man. Certainly he had spent much time in Moscow.
Wahab had not been speaking to this potentate for half a minute before he realized that here surely was the Brotherhood leader, whom he had thought to be a general. The voice was the same, harsh and authoritative. The dress, of course was disconcertingly different from the drab shaddry: a suit of pale-blue, semi-tropical cloth, a white silk shirt, and a red tie with a jewelled pin in it.
The hand that plucked Wahab to the quiet place under some trees was hairy, with a gold ring on the fourth finger, and round the massive wrist a gold watch as big as a dahlia, made in Russia. As he bent over Wahab, he now and then, with the hand not holding the glass of whisky, stroked the front of his trousers, as if to hint that in there, black and hideous, lurked the source of life and violence and blood. But his voice, in spite of its habitual rasp, was friendly enough, though the broad nostrils, with thick black hairs protruding, dilated like some venomous creature breathing.
‘Yes, Wahab, things are moving at last,’ he said. ‘Your appointment is just one of the signs. Before you’re much older you’ll see many others. Those without the brains to see what’s needed, and without the guts to see that it’s done, are going to be thrown out. Like Mussein. And like Mohammed Siddiq.’
Siddiq was Wahab’s present deputy Principal.
‘You agree that he’ll have to go too? He’s obstructive, out of sheer habit. He has never had a progressive thought in his life. Look how content he was with the stagnation under Mussein. Out with him too. But it won’t be easy, because as you know there’s opposition, and it’s frightened; it’s unscrupulous, too. For your first assistant you obviously want someone young, energetic, forward-looking, not afraid to use some initiative, capable of inspiring the students, willing to work hard, and with an ideal to aim at. I would say that’s pretty fair description of yourself, Wahab; and it also fits a young man at presen
t on your staff. You know him.’
‘Maftoon?’
‘Right. Maftoon. I believe you had a long confidential conversation this morning? Good. I have an interest in Maftoon; he happens to be my wife’s brother. But if he were my own son and a spineless creature like Mussein, I wouldn’t lift a finger to push him forward. If I show partiality, Wahab, it’s for my country.’
Fascinated, Wahab nodded. In his nose was the rank stink of power; he thought he liked it.
‘Maftoon’s a man who’s going far, Wahab; just like yourself. He’ll not stop and turn back because there’s a nasty mess on the road in front. You’ll need a man like that to help you at Isban, and after Isban. Now I think I’ve convinced Prince Naim that you ought to be given the final say in the choice of your colleagues. After all, it’ll be you who’ll be called to account if results aren’t produced.’
He laughed and revealed three gold teeth; which was coincidence, for Wahab had just caught sight of Mojedaji standing, white-turbaned, looking at them.
The Minister turned, saw the mullah, and grinned, like one beast of prey scenting another.
‘You know of course,’ he said, ‘that our friend Mojedaji was so opposed to your appointment he went right up to the Prime Minister, and was thrown out. Don’t think he’s swallowed all his fury; no, there’s still a great lump of it in his mouth, hidden behind that beard; and it tastes very bitter. Siddiq’s his man, has been for years, a spy. You don’t want a mullah’s man planted at your back, do you?’
Wahab, staring over the fence into the wood, saw a tiny field mouse scurry away among some leaves; it had a twig in its mouth.
‘Like me, Wahab, and like my friends, you see a sane future for our country. Let those who stand in our way look out. All this is in confidence, of course. Mojedaji isn’t as safe as he thinks. Here’s something you’ll be interested to know. At Jeshan the shaddry’s going to be abolished.’
Dust on the Paw Page 28
