Dust on the Paw Page 11

  Meanwhile Gillie had been waiting, not so much for permission to proceed, as for the moment when saliva would be bitterest in his mouth – or so his expression indicated.

  ‘What about it?’ asked H.E.

  ‘You sent it to me, sir, with a note attached, to the effect that it had been found in your flower bed.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I’m afraid, sir, I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do with it.’

  ‘I see.’ Sir Gervase looked round at them all. ‘Did you seek advice?’

  The First Secretary glanced sternly up. ‘I was consulted, sir. I suggested to Bob that obviously you intended him to find out who had been using your flower bed as a little bin.’

  ‘And you, Howard, what did you suggest?’

  ‘Well, sir, I believed I said you may have meant it as a kind of intelligence test.’

  ‘Everything I send down to the Chancery could of course be so regarded. In what particular way did you think this was such a test?’

  Howard reached forward and started to pick up the pack, to examine it; but Gillie snatched it away from him. Howard’s hand was much amused by its rebuff.

  ‘I believe I mentioned Freud, sir, but to be candid I don’t quite remember how I put it.’

  H.E. grinned. He liked Howard and appreciated Freudian witticisms.

  ‘If I may butt in, sir,’ said the Colonel, ‘I’ve been passing the word around among those who have American friends, and also among the Americans themselves, to be a bit more considerate where they drop their empty cigarette packs.’

  ‘And what about you, John? Have you exerted your wisdom upon the mystery?’

  ‘Only to the extent, sir, of comparing the prices of American cigarettes with British.’

  ‘I see. The commercial aspect?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Gillie then spoke, with some difficulty; rage stuck in his throat. Veins stood out under his eyes. ‘It happened to come, sir, when I was overwhelmed by work.’

  A little pink with suppressed annoyance, H.E. said: ‘Yes?’

  ‘So I’m afraid I’ve not been able to do anything about it.’

  ‘That’s not quite so, Bob,’ said Alan Wint anxiously. ‘You’ve been round the staff, you’ve made inquiries, you’ve made it clear to everyone that that sort of thing mustn’t happen again.’

  ‘I have done nothing of the sort. I have made myself a laughing-stock; that is all. I want to know, sir, what precisely I was supposed to do about it. If it was intended as a joke, very well, I shall laugh with the rest; but if it wasn’t, then obviously I’m too obtuse for my job. That’s what it amounts to.’

  Then red-faced as his rose, he sat scowling, with his big fist sprawling like a spider over the cigarette pack.

  Silly bastard, thought Langford, in sullen sympathy: this isn’t just costiveness of intellect, this is complete stoppage. Muriel’s haverings these days are said to be menopausic in origin. Can a dutiful husband be affected too?

  The Colonel narrowed his eyes shrewdly, to discover when they were almost closed that he didn’t know why he had done it.

  Wint was swiftly examining his own position and rushing up reinforcements of arguments where he felt it to be weak. As always, during a crisis, he felt his bowels ache in gratitude that he had Paula to run to soon and make consoling love to.

  Howard Winfield grinned behind his face. It was his opinion that the matter was trival, and he was determined to treat it as such. It was also his opinion, derived from a study of history, that kings, dictators, prime ministers, and generals had often behaved in a childish manner. Therefore he was not surprised that an ambassador and a consul should do so too; indeed he was moved by it a little, for if it did not excuse his own incorrigible childishness, it at least made it less remarkable.

  ‘You see, sir,’ said Gillie, ‘I am well aware that I am not given the credit of being as quick-witted as others.’

  H.E. decided to adopt a kindly tone. ‘I think, Bob,’ he said, ‘you and I had better discuss this in private. In front of the others I shall say this, though: I’m sorry you’ve taken my little jeux d’esprit in this way. When I saw that damn thing among my flowers, I felt really annoyed. Why? Because it seemed to me to symbolize an indifference to what’s beautiful, what’s dignified, and what’s worthy of respect.’

  In other words, they saw now, it was a symbol of his anti-Americanism.

  There was a silence, neither deep nor wide, but enough for so astute a diplomatic swimmer as Alan Wint to slip in quietly.

  ‘Something I ought to mention, sir,’ he said, ‘if I may?’

  ‘You may not, if it’s still about this.’

  ‘Oh no, sir. Not at all. Something altogether different. Moffatt came up to see me about it.’

  H.E. frowned. He was thought not to approve of Harold Moffatt, who had, besides, American friends.

  ‘I might have mentioned it while Mrs Mohebzada was under discussion, but I didn’t want to confuse the issue. It appears that another Englishwoman, a Miss Johnstone from Manchester, is coming out here to Kabul, with the intention of marrying an Afghan.’

  H.E. toyed with his pipe on the table. He had already heard of this Miss Johnstone; indeed, she had been in bed with him and his wife last night. He had been given instructions about her. The circumstances had been such, though, that he was now hazy as to what he had promised.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded.

  ‘The point is, sir, very briefly: should we do anything, in an official way, to dissuade her from coming?’

  ‘What in particular have you in mind?’

  ‘Nothing really, sir. Except that I thought of asking Pierce-Smith to see her in London and make sure at least she’s got no illusions about the kind of life in front of her if she does marry an Afghan here. You see, sir, it might well develop into another Mohebzada case. This man she’s proposing to marry, Abdul Wahab’s his name, isn’t any better off than Mohebzada. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s turned her head with tales of his wealth and importance. In point of fact, he’s a teacher of science at Isban College, with eight pounds or so a month. Moreover, he has his family to help to support. I may say Moffatt was quite upset about it.’

  ‘Why?’ asked H.E.

  Alan was about to answer confidently when he suddenly stopped and let a few words of hesitation dribble from his lips. For the first time he was considering Moffatt’s motives, and he could not be sure what they were. Simple compassion was hardly enough as an explanation. In spite of his fat bonhomie Harold Moffatt was a complex fellow, full of twists and complications; and of course being married to a Chinese woman, however charming, must surely contribute to any man’s eccentricity.

  ‘He doesn’t know the girl, does he?’ asked H.E. testily.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Well, what’s his interest?’

  ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t say, sir.’

  ‘I think I could,’ said Langford. ‘He’s a good sort. His heart’s in the right place.’

  ‘I think I agree with that,’ said the Colonel. ‘I know he writes poetry. There was one that might have been about me; he got it into that rag, the New Statesman, too. Rubbish about toy soldiers. But apart from that he’s quite a decent type.’

  H.E. turned to Howard, whose judgment he trusted. ‘What’s your opinion?’

  ‘Of Harold Moffatt, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d rather not say, sir.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t think I understand him well enough.’

  ‘You’re surely being very coy?’

  ‘No, sir. Just careful. I really don’t understand him. This woman who’s coming may be associated in some way in his mind with his wife.’

  ‘She’s Chinese, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘An admirable race in many respects, but I’m damned if I would ever have married one of them.’ He remembered a joke about Chinese women and grinned.

  ‘In
any case, sir,’ said Wint, ‘he was really furious when I refused to promise to take any official action to prevent her from coming. It’s common knowledge of course that he thinks diplomats are ineffective creatures.’

  H.E. grunted.

  ‘I’m afraid so, sir. He boasts he does more for British goodwill than the whole Embassy combined.’

  ‘Infernal impertinence! I take it he thinks the Afghans would be flattered to be informed that marriage to one of them is a fate worse than death for a schoolmam from Manchester?’

  ‘The curious thing is’ said Wint, ‘he’s always praising them, the Afghans, I mean.’

  ‘Don’t expect consistency from a fellow that dabbles in poetry,’ remarked the Colonel wisely.

  ‘You’re all missing the point,’ said Gillie ponderously.

  All were astonished. H.E. in addition was indignant.

  Even Wint, eager to rescue the Consul from his own savage ill-humour, could find nothing to say; true, he was also busy examining his own position. After all, to be charged with irrelevance was a bit much when his every remark had been a model not only of tact, and helpfulness, but of aptness too. In the nursery, at school, University, and all during his career, he had made a point of keeping to the point, no matter what seductions had tried to lure him away. As a consequence he had earned himself nicknames, and had left shoals of exasperated infants, schoolmates, fellow students, colleagues, and especially subordinates, in his wake.

  ‘Is there a point, old man?’ asked the Colonel affably. ‘I mean, it’s jolly simple. Here’s a silly female going to sacrifice herself on the altar of romance, or some nonsense like that, and here’s Moffatt, not to mention the rest of us, damned sorry to see her do it. And all the sorrier, you might say, because there’s really nothing we can do.’

  ‘As far as Moffatt is concerned,’ said Gillie, ‘there’s a lot more to it.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ asked Langford.

  ‘I shall tell you what I mean.’ Gillie picked up the carton and held it at his chest, as if it was a microphone. ‘I have met this Abdul Wahab. In my capacity as Consul, I was invited by Mrs Mossaour to meet him one afternoon when he visited the school to discuss the possibility of his fiancée’s – he called her that – getting a post there. I may say I thought him, for an Afghan, pleasant enough and possessed of some dignity; but if you were to ask me if I would consider him a fit husband for my daughter, if I had one of marriageable age, I should without hesitation answer in the negative. I have ordinary instincts in such matters. But that is by the way. What really interested me was Moffatt’s reaction, not so much to this Wahab fellow in himself, as to Wahab championed by Mrs Moffatt. For she went out of her way to take Wahab’s part, even when she saw how opposed her husband was to him. It was not a very wifely thing to do and left him exposed in a way I would not have thought possible with so astute a man. I saw very clearly that the reason why he is so opposed to this marriage is because it would reveal his own as the miscegenation that he undoubtedly thinks it is. I am expressing no opinion of my own or adopting any attitude; I am merely describing what I saw revealed in his mind. If you were to suggest that my perception may have been sharpened by his rather obvious scorn of my personal obtuseness – in which he was partnered by Mrs Mossaour – then I would not deny it. I have noticed this before in those intellectuals: they work out their racial broadmindedness as if it were a Euclidean proposition. It is not really in their natures, for after all do they not despise the rest of us who never read Proust, who consider Picasso a charlatan, and who prefer Edward German to Bach? They are by nature narrow-minded, but until they are touched personally they are able to keep up their sham of a breadth of outlook of sympathy. Moffatt, by his marriage, is touched personally. I know what some of you are inclined to tell me, that Moffatt loves his wife and is loved in return by her and so, consequently, their marriage is a happy one. That is what I believed myself before I saw him exposed, as I say, by what he regarded as her treachery. I do not say he hated her at that moment, but I do say that he hated the idea of her. She was, as I have since reflected, a poem which had gone wrong, which could never be finished and which represented the falseness of so many of his previous high-minded declarations. I used to think that was as happy and successful a marriage as I had ever seen, despite its superficial unlikeliness, but now, now I would not give an empty cigarette pack for its chances of survival.’

  Perhaps the fascination of that speech was best shown by the Ambassador’s removing of his eyeglass during it, and his inability thereafter to screw it back into place again.

  Wint too paid it open-mouthed homage; from beginning to end it was the most remarkable exhibition of culpable obtuseness that he had ever listened to.

  Its effect on Howard Winfield was quite contrary. He realized that that devastating conclusion had been planned right from the outset, in the dark cavern of Gillie’s brain, and so revealed there a cleverness and resource that he had never dreamed existed. Therefore, for the rest of his life, he was to look upon pompous fools with warier eyes.

  John Langford, impressed, saw it as a confession that marriage to Muriel was hell too, as marriage to Helen was. Marriage to Lan Moffatt seemed to him to have nothing to do with it, except perhaps by provoking, with its happiness, this revelation of poor Gillie’s misery.

  Only the Colonel had anything to say: ‘Well, by Jove, Bob, all I can say is, you certainly took a jolly deep look at him.’

  Nine

  MOFFATT’S appointment with the Minister of Education was at three. Usually at quarter to three Lan left the house to stroll across the park to the afternoon session at the school. Though it would have been easy for him to take a route close to the school, he did not offer to give her a lift. If he had, he told himself, she would not have accepted; she liked her solitary walk among the flowers and praying men.

  That afternoon she was wearing European dress. At no time did he think this became her, but then in particular it did what two weeks ago he would have thought impossible: it made her look squat, coarse, unintelligent, and even shifty. As he furtively watched her get ready to leave, he was well aware that, in some sort of revenge, he was betraying her, not only by his intention of discussing Wahab with the Minister, but far more by this systematic exclusion and denigration which he had begun and could not stop. That she was as cheerful as ever, as she gave Sofi and Abdul their instructions, and that they laughed merrily at her shrewd Persian, served only to accentuate the isolation into which he was deliberately forcing her. If she was aware of any peculiarity in his attitude to her, she gave no sign of it, but at last, carrying her books in a yellow straw basket, she kissed him as trustfully as ever and set off, with a white rose in her hair.

  He meant to stay in the house but could not and hurried out on to the terrace to watch Sofi unlock the gate to let her out. She turned and waved; he did not wave back. For a moment she stood still, as if her very heart were still, and then, with a last friendly remark to Sofi, she crossed the road into the park.

  That refusal to wave back had been, he realized, the first open sign of the breaking up of their marriage. Now, trying to imagine what life without her would be for him, and also what without him it would be for her, he walked about on the terrace among the pots of blood-red geraniums, as agitated as any of the ants whose labours his feet kept interrupting or destroying. He knew that if he looked for her in the park he would not yet be able to see her as she wouldn’t have advanced far enough into it. Every second he waited was a separate agony.

  At last he swung round and looked. When he could not at first see her an instant and shattering pang of fear smote him; it was as if he knew he had killed her and yet expected her still to be alive whenever he wanted her to be. He muttered her name aloud and had to restrain himself from shouting it. Then he saw her, not on her usual path, but on one that twisted under some tall shady trees, as if she understood the need to hide from him.

  His fear grew more painful and urgent. Most of the
time he could not see her. She seemed to be walking very slowly, as if she had divined his betrayal and, with her usual calm courage, was thinking what to do about it. He wanted to run after her shouting reassurances; but he knew that if he did so and came upon her so small and resolute under the trees, he would not be able soon enough to find anything to say that would reassure either himself or her. Even if he were to gasp: ‘Oh Lan, to hell with this Miss Johnstone and her Wahab. What have they got to do with us? What matters is that we love each other,’ it would not do. It was their love itself which, in him at any rate, was creating this strain that must soon break them irrevocably apart; and he did not know what could ease it. Not surely the success of his efforts to prevent Miss Johnstone from marrying Wahab. No, but if those efforts involved him in degradation which Lan was willing to share with him, perhaps they might be able to keep going, having made the necessary adjustments to the world’s level.

  Then she came out from under the trees and walked in the bright sunshine among the flower beds. Beyond her were the khaki-coloured mud-brick buildings of the town, and in the distance the high vague mountains. An aeroplane, from Delhi he thought, came roaring overhead, turning to land at the aerodrome. Its pilot, Captain Mabie, an Indian, was a friend of his and Lan’s. Sometimes he would bring his silvery Dakota swooping over the house to let them know he was back, bringing perhaps a bunch of bananas as a present. Mabie was a mixture of irresponsible hilarity and conscientious solemnity. His fiancée waited in Calcutta until he could make up his mind to marry her; but he could never do that, he had told Moffatt and Lan many times, until the astrologer in his village at home declared that the time was auspicious; twice already a time, provisionally approved, had turned out days before not to be auspicious after all. He had shown them her photograph. She was years younger than he and very beautiful. Moffatt had thought then that it might be better for her if the stars remained adverse; now, gazing up at the plane, and knowing that Lan would be gazing up at it too with similar thoughts, he felt a sense of involvement like a sentence of doom. Laura Johnstone too, when she came by aeroplane across the mountains, would find her place here waiting for her. If she did not come, perhaps they could all escape.