Dust on the Paw

by Robin Jenkins

  ‘He didn’t show you much consideration, did he? Most women don’t like being assaulted.’

  But Laura in her mind had already changed the subject. ‘He’s on the threshold of a brilliant career. It’s not out of the question for him to become Minister of Education one day. But if he marries me, all that’s unlikely.’

  ‘Did he say so?’

  ‘If I were young and attractive, it might be different. But, as you know, I am not; and I have a limp. He is unwilling to let me meet his family. There is no doubt they will refuse to give their consent. Who could blame them? In what possible way could it be an advantage to him to marry me?’

  Lan could not help thinking that though Laura might be sincere enough in this self-depreciation, she was at the same time finding much peculiar enjoyment in it. Her intention appeared to be to pretend never to be going to see Wahab again, and indeed to carry the pretence to the point of refusing, for a few days at least, to let him come near her. But really it was all a kind of cruel game, and her true desire, which she would be as implacable as a tigress in achieving, was marriage to him and the opportunity at leisure to unravel this tight knot of sexual revulsion. Well, there were innumerable approaches to love and marriage, and this had as good a chance of success as many others.

  ‘He will come to see you. What has he to be told?’

  Laura smiled. ‘Yes, he will come, won’t he? Say I’m ill, and I never want to see him again. No, perhaps that would be going too far. After all, it isn’t his fault. Poor Dul. He’s so temperamental, up in the clouds one minute, down in the mud the next. I suppose all Afghans are a bit like that?’

  ‘They are emotional.’

  ‘Still, he’s got to learn. Yes, say I’m ill, and I’d rather not see him, in the meantime. But let me know at once if he does call.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you. I know I have no right to burden you with my troubles. But there is one thing more. I should like very much to have a talk with Mrs Mohebzada. Could it be arranged?’

  ‘Yes.’ But Lan was wondering if she should arrange it. It was one thing to let Wahab be the mouse to this strange cat; it was another thing altogether to expose Liz Mohebzada to these unscrupulous pounces and deadly claws.

  ‘Ever since your husband and Mrs Mossaour pushed her forward as a dreadful example to me, I have felt I must meet her.’

  Lan rose. ‘I must see to breakfast. Do you want yours in here, or would you rather have it out on the terrace with us?’

  Laura laughed. ‘If I had it here, who would bring it? It’s very strange having only men servants.’

  ‘I should bring it myself

  ‘Oh, I won’t trouble you. I shall get up.’

  ‘Very well.’ Lan turned at the door. ‘Mrs Mohebzada’s very young. Perhaps she’s not very intelligent, either; and it’s true she came here expecting a life of luxury. But she’s suffered a great deal.’

  ‘I doubt it. I’ve had some experience of her type. As you say, unintelligent and self-seeking; but worse still, unimaginative. Can you suffer deeply without imagination?’

  ‘Yes, I think you can.’

  In the sitting room Harold saw at once how disturbed she was. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘For God’s sake, don’t tell me she’s really ill?’

  ‘She’s not ill at all. She’s having breakfast out on the terrace with us, though she might have taken it in bed if either Sofi or Zahir had taken it to her.’

  Harold laughed. ‘And she still in her honeymoon nightie?’

  ‘I can’t laugh at her. She’s decided Wahab’s not to be allowed to see her for a day or two.’

  ‘Letting him simmer in his remorse? She’s taking a risk.’

  ‘She’s aware of that. I don’t know what her cards are – she takes care to deal them herself; but I do know she’ll play them very cleverly.’

  ‘I’m sure of it. This Wahab’s a reckless fellow. Does he think he can deflower a Bachelor of Economics from Manchester, and get away with it? But I hope she’s taking into consideration the fact that, if the shaddry is abolished, the streets here will be full of Cleopatras.’

  ‘I’m sure she’s thought of everything.’

  Then the telephone rang.

  ‘It’ll be Wahab,’ said Lan. ‘You answer it.’

  ‘My dear, it would be kinder if you did.’

  ‘Do you think so? I don’t feel particularly kind towards him.’

  They both went out to the telephone and spoke to Wahab. Then Harold strolling on to the terrace found Laura already there, wearing a white dress and with – to his astonishment – a white ribbon tied in a bow in her hair. It did make her look younger, in a crafty, precocious way.

  She had started breakfast. ‘Was that Dul?’ she asked.

  ‘It was Abdul Wahab, yes.’

  ‘What was he saying?’

  ‘That what he had done was unforgivable.’

  She said nothing, but went on enjoying her cornflakes.

  ‘As I don’t know what he did, I can’t of course tell whether he was indulging in the national habit of enthusiastic pessimism.’

  ‘You don’t like the Afghans, Mr Moffatt?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I do; but not them all.’

  Lan joined them.

  ‘It is beautiful here,’ said Laura. Her face was already flushed with the sun. ‘Your husband was telling me that was Dul who phoned.’

  ‘Yes. I told him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What you asked me to tell him. That you were ill, and didn’t want to see him.’

  ‘Yes.’ She paused in her spreading of marmalade on a piece of toast. ‘Perhaps I should have spoken to him myself. Scotch marmalade? Can you buy that here?’

  ‘Only at the Embassy commissariat.’

  ‘Are all British subjects allowed to shop there?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Harold. ‘You’ll have to suck in with someone in the Embassy.’

  ‘For the sake of Scotch marmalade?’

  ‘And cornflakes. And English beer. And Scotch.’

  ‘No, thank you. I read somewhere that women in purdah often have bad complexions, owing to the lack of sunshine. Do you think that’s true of Afghan women?’

  It was, so that the Moffatts exchanged glances, like bridge partners surprised by consummate skill on the part of an opponent.

  ‘Many of them do have poor complexions,’ admitted Lan.

  ‘And surely they must all lack – to use a good northern word – gumption? Otherwise surely they would have banded together to get rid of so ridiculous a convention. For of course that’s all it is. There’s nothing in the Koran which requires women’s faces to be hidden. Mrs Mohebzada never wore a shaddry, did she?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m surprised she stood out against it. I suppose hysteria would give her a kind of courage.’

  Before Mrs Mohebzada arrived, Mrs Mossaour came, invited by Lan by telephone. As she walked towards the Moffatts’ gate, she saw Paula Wint being set down outside it by Alan, dressed as a First Secretary, in a hurry to drive off to join the Ambassador at the airport in the diplomatic corps’ reception of President Voroshilov.

  A small, bare-bottomed, nomad boy with a skull cap of dusty faded gilt was tending three emaciated cows that grazed on the strips of grass along the ditch by the side of the road. Because of the way the warm breeze was blowing, a stench of human excrement came from the park, behind whose walls were the most public of lavatories. Paula, fresh from her husband’s kiss, stood with her freckled nose wrinkled a little, as if entranced by the small shepherd’s playing of his pipe. Under her wide straw hat adorned with red artificial flowers, and in a lavender-coloured dress, she looked beautifully at ease, as if this were an English lane in mid-summer, with cricket noises in the background. Yet, so voluptuous and pinkly plump, she did have too that nymph-like calmness and amplitude, which Harold Moffatt had once celebrated in a poem. But to Maud Mossaour she was always a brainl
ess and conscienceless fool; purring like a served pet cat, yet with claws that could draw more bitter blood than Maud’s own honester slashes.

  Physically the two women were alike. To people who remarked on the resemblance, Paula might say, with a smile: ‘Ah yes, but Maud’s clever; she has had the sense to see that English looks like ours, so fair and pink, are insipid, unless set in contrast with the dark romantic handsomeness of the East, such as Pierre’s.’ Maud, on the other hand, would merely shrug her splendid shoulders, but inwardly she always made the same comment: ‘The difference between me and Paula Wint is simple. Out of her white plump body have come two white plump children; out of mine two thin dark ones.’

  Now, as they met outside the gate, Paula raised her hand languidly in greeting. It would not do, thought Maud, for the Head of Chancery’s wife to have dark sweat patches under her arms. Hence in the heat of the sun this catlike economy of movement.

  ‘Good morning, Maud,’ she said. ‘I often think how lucky you people are who live in town. Think of all the local colour we outcasts miss at the Embassy.’

  Maud sniffed grimly.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it horrid? Alan’s off to the airport to meet Voroshilov. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to come down and say hello to the famous Miss Johnstone. I believe she arrived yesterday.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were there to meet her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Paula laughed. ‘I know, Maud dear, you always contain your enthusiasm so admirably, but you’re sounding positively discouraging.’

  ‘I have made no comment.’

  ‘Maud, you’re absolutely in a cloud of comment. I can hardly see you for it. In what way has Laura fallen so far below your expectation?’

  They watched an Afghan family go by, the husband in front holding his small son by the hand, the shaddried, red-bloomered wife a few paces behind, carrying a baby.

  ‘You know,’ said Paula, ‘I’ve been here for two years and they’re still as mysterious to me now as they were that first day I arrived. If you had judged me then, Maud, you would have found me, too, far below expectation. Of course, my dear, you have such frightfully high standards. What in Miss Johnstone has disappointed you so much? To tell you the truth, neither Alan nor I expected very much.’

  No, hyenas never do, thought Maud; and then found herself feeding the female, which was the more gluttonous of the two.

  ‘I did not expect her to have a limp,’ she said. ‘Apparently the Moffatts knew, but they did not tell me.’

  ‘A limp? What do you mean? Has she hurt herself?’

  ‘It’s permanent, a legacy of poliomyelitis; but it’s very slight. She’s a good bit older than I expected. I saw a snapshot, but it must have been taken years ago. Her hair’s gray.’

  ‘Well, well. I am surprised.’

  ‘And she has as much sexual attraction, I should say, as one of those cows.’

  Paula turned and looked at the cows. ‘Yes, I must say I am surprised. I mean, let’s be frank about it, these Afghans are pretty sexy. It’s not the first time I’ve had my behind pinched black and blue, not in the bazaar, mind you, but at some party given by the Prime Minister and attended by all their big men. It stands to reason, really. Aren’t they shut off from women all their adolescent lives? And this fellow Wahab, from the little I’ve seen of him, struck me as true to type. You and I can tell, Maud, where women like little Lan, for instance, seem unable to: we have the right kind of apparatus for detecting repressed lusts. I felt when Wahab’s nice brown eyes were on me that they were busy taking every stitch of clothing off.’

  ‘Howard was at the airport, too.’ Maud mentioned that, because she wondered if he had passed on to Paula that remark about Wahab.

  ‘Yes, so he said. But he was maddeningly vague, and, now I come to think of it, rather gloomy. He said nothing about a limp. I believe Prince Naim was there too?’

  ‘Yes, and rushed off in a great hurry as soon as he saw her.’

  Paula laughed. ‘Now I’m sure she’s not as forbidding as all that, Maud dear. In any case, you know what they say about Naim. The most beautiful of us are of less interest to him than any chubby urchin in the bazaar.’

  ‘According to Harold, Naim’s been dreaming of her as some kind of goddess coming to give Afghanistan her blessing.’

  This time Paula’s laughter was hearty, showing her fine teeth and healthy gums. ‘But Harold’s a poet! Now when you have a conversation between a poet and a fairy, royal or not, you must look for goddesses. Between ourselves, though, I thought Harold was finding one goddess as much as he could cope with.’

  She waited to see if Maud would offer anything about the Moffatts: a smirk, grunt, wink, or scrape of the broad sandal in the dust would have done. But Maud remained as inscrutable as the Sphinx in her husband’s native land. No, of course that was wrong. Pierre was not a full-blooded wog; he was merely Lebanese. However, there was no need for Maud’s or anyone else’s confirmation as regarded the Moffatts; Paula’s own verdict was so obviously true it needed no support. Lan, the fascinating little witch, was still beautiful, and as long as she was she would hold her fat poet; but God knew how many Helga Larsens he would be saving up, for the time when the lemon was wrinkled and sour and dry.

  Maud at last rang the bell, and while they were waiting for it to be answered Moffatt’s small green car turned into the road at the mosque end. They saw Mrs Mohebzada sitting beside him. When the car stopped it was only the latter who got out. Moffatt spoke to her, waved to the other two women, and at once drove off again.

  Then Paula saw what always astonished and even worried her a little: Maud Mossaour’s compassion for this small thin pale nail-biting whining red-haired ex-shopgirl. In Maud’s place she herself would have been inclined to resent Mrs Mohebzada’s letting the side down, the side being that rather large company of Western women married to Asiatics whose manners might be charming but whose seed was always dark or black. She had not yet seen Mrs Mohebzada’s child and indeed wasn’t sure whether it was male or female, but she did know it was particularly dark-skinned, like Maud’s own. Therefore with such shared vulnerability Maud might have been expected to despise the creature for her whining advertisement of their common predicament, especially as it was by no means the headmistress’s nature to be tolerant with fools. Besides, who would have looked for compassion in Maud, no matter to whom displayed? Yet here she was again, still being her own tall dignified self, and yet at the same time being friendly – no, that was too weak a word – loving almost to this silly common young creature so improbably and for that matter so improperly a mother.

  It occurred to Paula that Maud had never tried to get Liz Mohebzada into the Sewing Circle at the Embassy, as she had done with Lan Moffatt several times. It hadn’t been the inevitable refusal, either, that had held her back; no, it had evidently been the desire to protect the girl from what Paula now for an instant saw would have been stupid, ill-bred callousness.

  She listened to Maud’s inquiries about the baby, and to its mother’s quiet happy replies; it was quite recovered now, thanks to the German doctor.

  ‘I believe it was Prince Naim who sent him,’ said Paula.

  ‘Yes.’

  And how in heaven’s name had the King’s son come to send the King’s physician to the half-caste baby of an insignificant clerk? Again Paula had a feeling that life had left its confines and was ranging wildly and fiercely; but while she was as usual seeking some inanity with which to tame it again, she glanced up and saw on the terrace Lan Moffatt, serene as ever, and the new arrival Miss Johnstone, thin-ankled, and grotesque with a white ribbon tied in a bow in her graying hair.

  ‘You must forgive me, Lan,’ she called, as she went up the terrace steps. ‘I’m afraid I’m butting in. You see, Alan had to go to the airport to help receive Voroshilov, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to come down and meet Miss Johnstone. If I’m in the way – I mean, if this was intended to be some kind of private con
ference – just say the word and I’ll go off bazaaring.’

  ‘Not at all, Paula. You are very welcome.’

  With a skill and graciousness that any ambassador’s wife would have envied, Lan made the introductions. Paula was introduced first, a stroke of courtesy she had not expected, and so her greeting of the schoolteacher from Manchester lacked the assurance of the latter’s greeting of her. Later she had to admit to herself that she might well not have been able to match that brazen assurance, no matter how well-prepared she had been. In the first place, Miss Johnstone stood up and walked a step or two, just enough to show, with such brave pathos, her slight lameness, and so proudly forfeited her right to have remained seated; secondly, her small lean hand had a purposeful grip like a man’s; and thirdly, she managed to convey in the few correct conventional words the impression of a sharp, vigilant intelligence.

  Paula was certain she could never like her, but finding adequate reasons might be very fatiguing.

  Toward Maud Mossaour Miss Johnstone was similarly brisk and capable, but when she turned to shake hands with Liz Mohebzada her smile grew visibly warmer and her handclasp was noticeably longer.

  When she had them all seated Lan asked what they would like to drink. ‘Tea? Coffee? Squash? Sherry? Beer?’

  ‘Squash, please,’ said Maud. ‘Grapefruit, if you have it.’