by Tom Stacey
It is the disclaimer that riles.
‘I don’t know what newspaper Mr Stuart-Smith reads. Reveille perhaps?’ Jones turns from one to the other. ‘In the Korean war, in a couple of years, no less than seven British journalists were killed, all colleagues of mine, mostly friends too. Seven of about twenty, in all. Mr Stuart-Smith would say they were after the headlines. I would prefer to say they were after the facts.’
Stuart-Smith argues with the finesse of a charging rhino. ‘With great respect,’ he returns nastily, ‘I’ve seldom known a journalist get his facts right. Not in my line of business.’
Jones enquires whether he would be right in thinking he liked to keep the press out of his line of business?
‘Most certainly.’
‘Except when you need them,’ Jones says. ‘Then you feed them.’
Stuart-Smith gives a thick cynical smile, from the inviolability of a fat contract. But Jones taunts him now.
‘Lenin and Stalin shared your view of the press. For the truth, try Pravda.’
‘Oh, fisticuffs!’ exclaims Fenton.
Burton intervenes. ‘You wouldn’t allow, Jones, by and large, that the press leans to the sensational?’
‘The press leans, Sir Geoffrey, towards what people in various readership brackets will read. At least, that is so in a free country. People are interested in what is unexpected and new. Hence the term “news”.’
‘Just what I mean.’ Stuart-Smith has turned for a second charge. ‘You chaps twist it to get headlines.’ He throws Romy a self-congratulatory look.
But she has dug him a little pit, taking her time.
‘Don’t you think, Mr Stuart-Smith, it is often a mistake to generalise.’
She makes this much more of a statement of truth than a question, and the precision of her tone somehow has Stuart-Smith with his horn in the earth and all four legs in the air, so much so that her quick triumphant glance to Jones contains pity for the man.
‘Well, Jones,’ Burton says, ‘you have secured my daughter’s support.’
It is the first time since childhood that Jones can remember his face turning hot from confusion. Burton’s daughter. But of course. Burton a widower, naturally.
‘That was indeed unexpected,’ he murmurs, rattled by his obtuseness, though quite why so rattled, his error not having been betrayed, he could not tell. The reason is of course that it is already too late to put in place the proper divide between his generation and this woman’s. And soon afterwards he could see this idiotic misapprehension to have been the third stroke of caprice, like the last digit of a combination lock, that opened him to . . .
4
. . . to love.
When Jones woke again it was already four in the afternoon.
The parrot had left her droppings on the floor and the chair. He propped himself up and tuned to the BBC World Service and was a minute late for the news. The first item was almost identical to the 7 a.m. broadcast that he had missed. The only additional piece of information was of a complete news blackout from the island: all telecommunications had been severed and the airport was closed.
Jones lay for a while in total immobility with the mild nausea of a man winded. He heard the whole broadcast right through, including the now-extended commentaries. This was the biggest news to have come out of the island in the twenty-five years he had lived here. He remembered how after that first dinner the Wazir had taken him to a corner, and he who throughout his career had kept reporters out of his Gulf began talking about a ‘top-class journalist’, actually stationed on the island, being ‘a sight better for us than the garbled rubbish that gets fed to London via Cairo or Beirut, most of it emanating from Al-Bakr and his ilk’. He couldn’t mean Jones himself – that was unthinkable: but the wide-eyed look he got from Romy, just in earshot beyond the sofa, told of her gay bewilderment at the sudden conversion Jones had seemingly wrought.
He put out his shaky fingers to turn the dial of his radio to the local frequency. It was playing European music from a half-forgotten era. He recognised ‘Roses of Picardy’ and then ‘The Eton Boating Song’. The music stopped in mid-bar for an announcement in Arabic which he supposed was about the curfew. The newsmen in the Darwish, it was obvious, would have the whole story: some would surely have filed by now – that young weasel from Reuters, for instance; and Sandy McCulloch, who strung for AP. They would be all over the London papers in the morning. And the TV screens that very evening, quite probably, would be filled with the face of that Rivers, pontificating over his dangling charms.
His own professional shame now gave way to grief. His old friend was surely dead: the fiction of the ‘Regency’ was a palliative, a soft landing for ordinary people who admired him or even loved him, and certainly needed him; simple folk needed kings and rulers beyond whom there is no authority but God, whatever ancestral brigand had been first of the line. The Emir was the same age as himself. He had striven so to make sense of all that had overtaken his little country. He didn’t deserve to be murdered by that glib and cocky boy of his. Jones found himself praying for his old man’s soul, he who believed in neither souls nor prayers.
How, exactly, would the Emir have died? A sudden knife? Any islander could get an audience. Once recently the Emir had told Jones of his Diwan’s complaints – ‘ “Emir, why you let any person come to you? Why you not let me decide who will see you?” I reply to my Diwan, “The strong will see me whether you say yes or whether you say no. So your no will prevent only the weak, who need me more than the strong.” ’
He had exchanged his sarong for trousers, took his canvas hat, and drove very slowly towards the Darwish. The engine was unusually loud in the deserted lanes of the old town. Shops were open, he supposed by order, but few were buying. At the major crossroads troops stood in tight fidgety groups: Jones spotted the insignia of the neighbouring republic from which, injudiciously, the old Emir had lately been persuaded to invite a training unit for his own small army, for the sake of ‘Arab solidarity’.
The Darwish stood back isolated on its spit of land. Jones pulled up at a line of rocks across the road. Immediately, an overwhelming voice turned the whole air against him. From the road-block thirty yards ahead, at the start of the hotel’s upward-sweeping approach, a loudspeaker was trained on him.
‘Barra assayara.’ Get out of your car.
He did so.
The great voice rasped, this time in English, ‘Who ahr you?’
‘Jones.’
His own voice was pathetically weak and could nowhere near span the distance.
He stood there in his canvas hat with his arms out in an attitude not of suppliance but exasperation.
‘Jones,’ he called again. ‘Inglisi.’
The sun was in his eyes. He was imprecisely aware of uniformed men and vehicles drawn up ahead. He mistrusted all uniforms.
‘Come forrward,’ the loudspeaker menaced.
He walked stiffly into the sun towards the road-block. When he got there he discovered at once: though manned by soldiers from the island, a pot-bellied foreign captain from the neighbouring republic’s so-called training unit was in command.
Jones ignored him. He addressed himself instead to the single officer present from the island’s army, a young two-pipper. He gently explained that he required to visit the Darwish to collect his mail and send a telex. This lieutenant replied to him with nervous gruffness. He had orders, he said – trying not to let it seem that he was all the time aware of the foreign captain – that no one may enter or leave the hotel and that all telex machines were out of bounds. (In the hotel, Jones thought, Shark’s-tooth Rivers and his whippersnapper friends would be buzzing around like bluebottles in a jam-jar.)
Jones courteously enquired of the young man his name, and when he swiftly mentioned a kinsman known to him the man’s gruffness changed to furtive humour.
‘And from whom did your orders proceed?’ Jones sought to know.
‘From the palace. His Highness has ma
de a proclamation.’
Jones felt dizzy in the fierce sun. Every fidget and twitch signalled, through the corner of his eye, the disapproval of the captain beside them. ‘Have you seen it?’ he pressed gently.
The captain could hold back no longer. ‘It is not your business, Mister. Every unit has a copy. Shuf!’ He withdrew from his shirt pocket a folded sheet of paper. Jones’s eye turned on the man lazily. He took the paper with slow distaste and opened it up. It was a photostat of a document in Arabic with an English translation, erratically typed beneath, which read, ‘In the name of Allah. In the light of my failing health and high age, I have appointed my son, the prince Hatim bin Ahmed Al Asnan as my Regent until my death to whom all obey. In the name of Allah.’
The Arabic above, which was also typescript, was signed with the familiar signature and stamped with the royal seal. All manner of document could be mocked up with a photocopier.
He did not stay to argue. You can’t argue with the muzzles of guns. The hours immediately following a coup d’état were trigger-happy ones: it was like a fever with a predictable chart of high danger in the early phase. So many over-eager newsmen had been casually shot on account of choosing the wrong moment to push their luck. His shadow fell before him on the dusty tarmac as he walked back, and he thought all the way, what a fine clean target in the sun his back must be making for pot-belly’s chubby little pistol.
He clambered into his elderly Packard, executed a clumsy turn and moved off with much noise the way he had come, wondering where he should go. It was fair to assume that Hatim’s forces had control of all hotel and all external communications except a few short-wave diplomatic radios (the diplomats would be cowering in their compounds and seldom knew a damn thing anyway). They had cut all telex links: that could be done with the flick of a switch. He guessed they had disconnected only specific telephones, such as his, since they would need the telephone system themselves. But they would have routed all international dialling codes through their own operators. The journalists would stay under guard until the new regime was firmly in place and reversal from within unfeasible. A blackout on all information except the junta’s ‘official’ line would prevent the Emir’s neighbouring monarchies, operating with the tacit approval of America and Britain, from justifying intervention.
It was the standard coup d’état package. A façade of legitimacy had been quite skilfully run up. Very likely they had displayed the document of abdication with the Emir’s signature on television: this could have been picked up on the mainland and wirephotoed to London and the rest of the gullible world.
He chugged slowly in high gear past the entrance to the port which was sealed by two full platoons of troops and here too (he could see) commanded by foreign republican officers. The town appeared cowed, the desert infiltrating the streets; and two lean dogs had entered this emptiness in a fast guilty lope along the strip of shade of the mainstreet banks which should have been open for the evening stint but were manifestly shut. If there had been any shooting, it had all finished now. From time to time military vehicles came by at high speed. A few soldiers, as if to invite hostility, were posted at the entrances of government buildings. He pulled up at the supermarket patronised by the expatriate community. About half the staff were present and fewer customers than staff. An English bank manager’s wife spotted him thankfully and asked him if it was true the Emir was dead, and when he told her that he knew no more than she, and probably less, she looked aggrieved and alarmed at the same time, as if he had deliberately pushed her off his life-raft. An Indian department manager, who had omitted to change his shirt, whispered fearfully that mortar firing had been heard from the oil town and a power cut had brought part of the town to a standstill. Jones bought two tins of evaporated milk.
The Emir’s palace lay beyond the old town where he lived. He wanted to stop and eat some cereal and make a cup of coffee, for he was feeling weak and persistently dizzy and he needed to sit down quietly and consider what he should do. He pulled up outside his home, but did not turn off the engine. In his absence someone had splashed an Arabic slogan in red paint on the wall further down the street: he could not tell whether it was for or against. He put the car into gear and moved off again.
The Packard emerged from the maze of alleys and joined one of the approach roads leading to the roundabout opposite the palace gates. Three armoured personnel carriers were drawn up at the gates, and the whole length of the palace walls was lined with troops carrying machine-guns, one man every few paces. Two anti-tank guns covered the entrance.
The racket of Jones’s car signalled its approach from far away. He drove slowly into the roundabout in his customary top gear, made a complete circle, and pulled up on the further side from the gates. He got out laboriously and walked downwind from the roundabout’s fountain, which played merrily and gave him a light spraying, towards the guardhouse alongside the main gates. He carried nothing. If they shot him, he did not see what he had to lose. But being an old man, owning an aged car, was to his advantage: such a comical figure belonged so little to this world as to present no threat to those who wished to changed it.
He had long experience of guardhouses and the like. The best way of walking past those who might challenge you was to wear a slight smile and fix your gaze on the point you wished to reach, on no account hurrying or faltering or catching anyone’s eye. In such a manner Jones strode straight past the knot of armed soldiers and entered the cool of the guardhouse. Even here he did not hesitate but moved directly through the crowded guardroom to the empty chair opposite a desk and sat down heavily. Behind the desk was seated a major, a foreign republican, chewing gum. Anyone observing Jones for a prolonged period that day would have observed a distinct but unemphatic acquisition of purpose in his stride over the last several paces of his progress.
He leaned forward with a large mottled hand, which the major took as expected, and announced in his primitive Arabic that he was Mr Jones, a friend of His Highness the Emir and His Highness Prince Hatim, who had come to visit His Highness the Emir.
The sort of smile that policemen give to children too young to fear them brought a certain light to the major’s sallow, efficient face. He was not wearing battle kit like the rest but a military shirt tailored to emphasise the breadth of his shoulders, and a tie. Jones was aware that a tie could carry a person a long way in the Third World, involving a complex knot devised by the dominant civilisation; but it was too late now to redeem his own tielessness.
The smile went out. ‘His Highness the Emir is not receiving visitors,’ the major informed him suavely in English and resumed chewing.
‘Perhaps,’ Jones said, ‘someone could tell him that I called.’ From the wallet in his shirt pocket he extracted a visiting-card. He took his time. In situations like these you allow the suspicious and potentially hostile plenty of time. To get the feel of you. To size you up and sniff you around, like a large strange dog. He repeated his name and passed the card across.
The major studied it, first the English, then the Arabic on the other side. He too was taking his time.
‘You are of the press?’
‘Of the press.’
‘You wish to report the change of government? We have a copy here of the proclamation of the Emir Ahmed.’
Oh, he’d seen it, Jones said, and thanked him. He had merely called to see the Emir Ahmed as an old friend. He couldn’t report anything. The telephones didn’t work and the telexes were under guard.
‘We know him, sir,’ one of the island officers present observed in Arabic. ‘He is known to the Emir.’
‘Please sit,’ the major said.
Jones was already sitting. The major rose and went outside with the card, and Jones glimpsed him through the window talking by radio from one of the personnel carriers.
Jones was glad to enjoy the air conditioning. After a minute or two, sweet milkless tea came round on a puddly tin tray and Jones took a glass of it. A few minutes later the major returne
d with two soldiers. Jones thought that he was being arrested, though it surprised him.
‘These men,’ the major said with the same amused condescension he had greeted him with, but intensified now, ‘will take you to the palace.’
Surprise or gratitude were not appropriate at moments like these and Jones showed neither. He trudged between the soldiers in the fierce heat across the palace’s broad forecourt which he had first crossed a quarter of a century before in a moment of immortality. The construction firm of the overweening Stuart-Smith, with his violent handshake and quilted lips, had then only just completed the rebuilding of the palace on the old site. It was in an immoderate Mogul style and faced with brown marble, in which Jones now noticed a bullet chip not there before.
They entered by a small door tucked in beside the imperious main steps, evidently used for the comings and goings of palace staff. The door gave on to a long passage flanked by administrative offices. At one of them Jones was delivered to a young officer of the island’s forces who dismissed the escort and offered Jones a seat in an armchair, the room’s only furniture. A strip light fluttered angrily from the ceiling like a dicky heart. Immediately the man began to harangue Jones, in English, on the island’s happy fortune at the turn of events. ‘The old Emir,’ he assured his visitor from a standing position on the wall-to-wall carpet, ‘was maybe adequate for the past, but today the past is finished. Am I correct? Today we people have reached the modern era, the era of the people themselves. This is what we believe in!’ He spoke with the supercilious zeal of a senior pupil designated to initiate a new boy in the dubious glories of a third-rate school. ‘The English will understand since you are a democratic people,’ he added.
‘Yet I have come to see His Highness, the Emir Ahmed,’ Jones said clearly. He knew well that the young man had no brief to preach at him. ‘That is all I’ve come for.’
