Dust on the Paw Read online

  ‘Yet Voroshilov is coming here soon.’

  ‘That is different.’

  ‘Wahab didn’t strike me as the kind of man who would risk his life for a cause.’

  ‘I do not know, sir. Perhaps he is a spy.’

  ‘A spy?’

  ‘If a man tells you he is a Communist, he is a spy. Kabul is as full of spies as a Hazara’s jacket is full of fleas.’

  ‘He is going to marry an Englishwoman.’

  Rahman grinned. ‘We say that is the best way to get a wife. You pay nothing. Here in Afghanistan a wife will cost you more than ten years’ salary. Do not be offended, sir. It is a joke amongst us.’

  ‘It’s not much of a joke.’

  ‘Really it is not. It is very serious.’

  ‘Do you approve of your countrymen marrying women from the West?’

  ‘You do not, sir?’

  ‘I asked you, Abdul Rahman.’

  ‘We are not inferior, sir, though we are backward. We are not like Negroes, though our skins are darker than yours and our eyes are brown.’ He turned slyly to glance towards the gul-khana where Lan, whose skin was yellow, sat painting. ‘It is possible for an Afghan to love an Englishwoman and wish to marry her. That is possible?’

  ‘Yes. But is it wise?’

  ‘I do not understand, sir.’

  ‘There are Western women at present in Kabul married to Afghans. Most of them are very unhappy. Some are so miserable that they speak of killing themselves.’

  ‘Why is this so, sir? We are not cruel to our wives.’

  ‘You keep them in shaddries.’

  ‘It is not necessary for a Western woman to wear a shaddry. Soon it will be necessary for no woman.’

  ‘It seems to me that what Wahab wants is a woman who will work to keep him and his family. He’s a man I wouldn’t trust.’

  ‘He must be very careful, sir. I can tell you everything which is in my mind, for I am a simple man, satisfied if I get the small increase which my diploma entitles me to. It is therefore easy to trust me.’

  Moffatt shook his head: this picture of Wahab as an Afghan rebel and probable martyr he just could not accept.

  ‘You do not like him, sir. But please, when you speak to the Minister about my diploma, do not mention Abdul Wahab.’

  Moffatt flushed. ‘I’m not one of the fleas in the Hazara’s jacket.’

  But when Rahman left a few minutes later, though he was smiling, he still seemed unconvinced that Moffatt would not, for the Englishwoman’s sake, denounce Wahab to the authorities.

  As she sat in front of the dressing-table mirror in their bedroom, fixing her long jade earrings with what he thought a provocative fastidiousness, Lan said quietly: ‘Harold, I’ve decided to write to Miss Johnstone myself.’

  Seated on the bed at her back, stooping to tie his shoe laces, he now rose, red-faced, with the smell of the shoe polish overwhelming that of her scent. A moment ago he had been thinking of Sofi who had recently confided, with much satisfaction, that in another year he would have saved up enough to buy a wife who would do him credit.

  He tried to smile: ‘You don’t have to do that, Lan. Mrs Mossaour and I were counting on you to collaborate with us.’

  ‘No. I see the whole matter differently.’

  Her manner was just too calm, too wise, too sure of itself. Over her shoulder in its green silk dress he stared angrily at her reflection, and read disloyalty in the narrow eyes, arrogance in the high cheek bones, and stubbornness in the small dainty mouth. It was, he told himself, a vision of madness; this stranger he was seeing, hostile and hateful, was not Lan. But it took him a long difficult minute to dispel it. During that minute he heard, his heart crumbling with dismay, the café loudspeaker emit, in a spiral of harsh shrieks, a Persian love song sung by a woman.

  She must have noticed the resentment on his face, for she waited until it was gone before turning.

  He met her with a puffy flushed grin of appeal. ‘This isn’t important enough for us to quarrel about, Lan.’

  She was so motionless that even her earrings were still. He was reminded of idols he had seen in temples; her strange perfume too helped the recollection.

  ‘After all, Lan, it’s bound to be different for me. She’s a countrywoman of mine. I can’t just sit on my backside and let what’s happened to Mrs Mohebzada happen to her, too. You’d be the first to despise me if I did.’

  ‘She is also Mr Gillie’s countrywoman. Indeed, it is his official duty to protect her. Yet he does not seem at all appalled by her prospects.’

  ‘Nor is he by what’s actually happening to Mrs Mohebzada now. As you say, he has the official mind; that’s the way he’s trained himself to see people.’

  ‘And how do you see them, Harold?’

  He was astonished by the question, as if by an act of treachery. How often for the past three years, in poetry as well as prose, had he poured out to her all his humanitarian ambitions and scruples. Sometimes her appreciation had been short of perfect, but he had been able to respect her reservations. Now, though, he was apparently discovering that she had understood nothing at all and had completely failed to sympathize.

  ‘You don’t have to ask that, surely? You know me well enough.’

  ‘Yes, Harold, I think I know you well enough. But I must still repeat my question: How do you see Miss Johnstone?’

  He laughed. ‘Don’t be silly. There’s no mystery about this. I see her simply as a gullible, lonely, rather foolish woman, who’s deceived herself, or let herself be deceived, into thinking that life in Afghanistan as Wahab’s wife will be exciting and romantic.’

  ‘No, Harold. You have not yet seen her as a woman at all.’

  He was puzzled. ‘You know I’ve only seen her photograph.’

  ‘I did not mean that. I meant you have not seen her as a woman, as a human being, in your mind.’

  Though he knew his position was weaker than he liked, and though he expected Lan to be able to reveal that weakness easily, he was surprised by the apparent lack of perception and unfairness of her accusation. It enabled him to recover some of his dignity and assurance by replying quietly: ‘I don’t quite know what you mean, Lan. When I think of Miss Johnstone I think of Mrs Mohebzada too, whom I’ve seen weeping, breaking her heart, in this house. My hand’s been wet with her tears. Surely that’s real enough?’ Yet he had to restrain himself from crying out: ‘And let it be enough, Lan, for Christ’s sake. Leave it at that. Don’t try to dig any deeper. Don’t humiliate me. Don’t really run the risk of breaking us apart.’

  She was watching him with the closeness, he thought, of an enemy. He remembered a remark that Josh Bolton had once mumbled and then in confusion withdrawn: it had been to the effect that, sweet-natured though Lan normally was, he wouldn’t like ever to be at her mercy. Moffatt had been angry at what he had taken to be another of Josh’s crass anti-Chinese prejudices.

  ‘Why is it, Harold, that your hatred of Mr Wahab is making you so strange that I can scarcely recognize you? This afternoon at the school I did not know you; I did not want to know you.’

  He tried to laugh. ‘I don’t seem to be the only one who’s acting, and talking, strangely. But I don’t hate Wahab. I’ve no reason to. I admit that if it’s a case of choosing between him and Miss Johnstone, then I’ll certainly choose her. No, far from hating him, I’m sorry for him.’

  ‘Please, Harold.’

  He saw that, quiet though her voice was, she was really angry. Her breast rose.

  ‘I am not the only one who was left with the impression that you hated him. Mrs Mossaour and Mr Gillie were too; and so was Mr Wahab himself.’

  ‘Nonsense. Gillie says he’s never been able to understand me ever since he tried to read some of my poetry.’

  She did not smile back.

  ‘As for Mrs Mossaour, she’s never deeply enough interested in anybody to know enough to be surprised whatever any person says or does. If she’s ever going to make discoveries about human natu
re, she’ll make them in herself; no other sea is worth voyaging in.’

  ‘She thinks the same about you.’

  ‘I know, but she’s wrong. I’ve got you as my mysterious ocean of discovery, Lan; and this, I must say, is a strange island I’ve run aground on.’

  She looked at the sweat breaking out on his brow and trickling like tears down his cheeks. Love for him stirred in her, but it could not be expressed in the way he wished it.

  ‘I think, Harold,’ she said, with characteristic graceful deliberation, ‘you see personified in Miss Johnstone and Mr Wahab the mistake you and I made.’

  ‘That’s absurd, Lan.’ Yet when, laughing, he leaned forward to take her hand he suddenly stopped, with his face turned hard.

  ‘It is not absurd. Please admit that you feel, in your heart, our marriage had been a mistake.’

  Though she was wrong, for he had never felt that at all, he still could not deny it as utterly as he wished. He jumped up, clutched his head with his hands, and groaned half-humorously, but there was a noticeable incompleteness in his every gesture.

  ‘You have tried not to show it, Harold, to me or to anyone; but you have shown it.’

  ‘To others?’

  ‘Yes. Your friends know it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Josh Bolton. Prince Naim. Howard Winfield. Alan Wint.’

  ‘Christ, I must have yelled it from the top of the minaret if Wint knows it, whatever it is.’

  ‘He is not the fool people say he is. Sympathy helps him to see.’

  ‘If there’s one man’s sympathy I can do without, it’s Wint’s. Though what I need sympathy for I just don’t know. It isn’t true that I feel our marriage has been a mistake; it just isn’t true. I loved you when I married you; I still do, more than ever. All these percipient bastards,’ he burst out, ‘do they see that too?’ He crouched beside her. ‘They must, Lan, for the very birds in the garden must see it.’

  ‘It is more important that I know it, my dear.’

  ‘But surely you do!’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Then, for God’s sake, what’s all this about a mistake?’

  ‘You see, Harold my dear, I love you too, very dearly; and yet sometimes I have wondered if our marriage was a mistake.’

  ‘No, no!’

  ‘I wondered again today when you were looking at the photograph of Mrs Mohebzada’s baby, and also when you were talking to Mr Wahab at the school.’

  He felt so guilty, he could have struck her for her judicial calmness.

  ‘A year ago you would not have been so rude to him. A year ago you would have looked at the picture of the baby with pleasure, not with loathing.’

  ‘Not loathing, for God’s sake.’

  ‘It seemed so to me. In spite of yourself, Harold, you are not the same person now.’

  ‘We all change, Lan.’

  ‘So now, without consulting me, you have imposed a condition on our marriage. I do not think I can accept it. I have tried to, but I have been afraid.’

  ‘Afraid? Of what?’

  ‘Of finding our love for each other turned into contempt. How could it do otherwise if you despised yourself, and I myself?’

  He raised his head and met her eyes. ‘Many married people never have children, Lan. Yet they don’t stop loving each other.’

  ‘It depends on why they do not have them. If it is because they cannot, then it is different; they may love each other all the more. But if it is because they are afraid, then they must surely come to despise each other as well as themselves.’

  ‘Not in our case. Is it so outrageous, after all? You know as well as anyone what a bloody unfair thing life can be to children whose parents are of different races. Why is Mrs Mossaour so bitter?’

  ‘If she is, there must be another reason. Maud loves her children; they are her life; she could not be happy without them.’

  ‘Of course she loves them, but the more she does the bitterer she’s bound to feel. She can’t help it. Do you think she’s not aware that whereas she herself is particularly fair-skinned, they, especially the girl, is almost African dark? Do you know what she once said to me? She said: “My breasts are traitresses. There’s a phrase for you to make a poem about.” ’

  ‘And you made it.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘You made it comic.’

  ‘No. Ironic, not comic. Lan, it’s a fact of nature. Birds and animals join together to mob to death one that’s different from the rest. Human beings are civilized; their killing’s more subtly done, and it takes longer. It may take a lifetime, but, Christ, how much crueller it is. You know that’s true. Well then, what’s so shameful about a couple facing up to the fact boldly, and making up their minds not to provide the bastards with more victims? Yes, it means giving up a kind of happiness that’s irreplaceable, but it would also mean avoiding a great deal of the most unbearable kind of suffering.’

  ‘I do not agree,’ she said, after a long silence, ‘that people are as cruel as you say. The Mossaour children are happy. Other children play with them. There is no mobbing. Their colour makes no difference.’

  ‘Yes, here.’

  ‘We are here, and Miss Johnstone would be here.’

  ‘We can’t be here for the rest of our lives.’

  ‘She could be.’

  ‘In her case,’ he said stubbornly, ‘there’s more to it; it’s not only difference in colour that makes Mrs Mohebzada’s child so unfortunate. But, Lan, none of them is important, while there’s this thing between us.’

  ‘I see it represented by them.’

  He shook his head angrily. He could not bear having the egregious Miss Johnstone with the starry eyes, and the pockmarked ridiculous Wahab, invade this narrowing circle of anguish in which he and Lan now found themselves imprisoned.

  ‘So, Harold, I am going to write to her, and tell her that if she decides to come to Kabul, she will be welcome to live here as my guest until she has had time to settle down.’

  She was like a small Mandarin princess as she sat smiling and waiting, having offered him a condition that he must accept. He felt resentful but fascinated too, and curiously proud. Was she at last going to assume that dominion and authority which up to now her persuasive and mysterious charm had made unnecessary?

  ‘Do you agree, Harold?’

  ‘Am I allowed to disagree? All right. If she does come, I suppose it would be as well to have her where we can see to it that Wahab at least plays fair by her. But I shall still try to dissuade her from coming.’

  ‘He will try to play fair. If he does not succeed, it may be because others have not tried to play fair by him.’

  Chief among those others, she implied, might be himself; and her smile, warm with love, was a warning.

  So at any rate he interpreted her smile; and his own smile in return, though loving too, had deceit in it. Her remark about playing fair had given him an idea. When he went to see the Minister about Abdul Mir Rahman’s diploma, there might well be an opportunity, by a little initial unfairness, to make unnecessary any further display of it. If the Minister could be induced, by whatever argument, to arrange that Miss Johnstone was not to be given a visa, then she would just have to stay at home and Wahab would have to look under some shaddry for a pair of brown eyes to greet him as lord and master. There would still of course be this crisis between himself and Lan to get over, but with the complication of Miss Johnstone removed he would feel much more confident.

  It seemed to him that for an instant a look of sad contempt appeared in Lan’s eyes, as if she had read his thoughts; and when, the moment after, she took his head between her small cool hands and kissed him on the brow his doubt was turned into a certainty.

  ‘It’s time for us to go to Mrs Mossaour’s,’ she said.

  Seven

  H.E.’S WIFE, Lady Beauly, at the inaugural meeting of the Sewing Circle, had suggested crisply, as if disagreeing with some previous speaker, though no one else so far had
spoken, that in the circumstances, considering the work they were meeting to do – sewing cheap cotton nightshirts for patients in Kabul hospital – for the hour and a half during which the needles would ply distinctions of protocol (a phrase at which she smiled) should be suspended. As no one dared contradict (Mrs Mossaour at that stage had not been invited) the suggestion was accepted in theory, but in practice, as everyone anticipated, it was immediately ignored by H.E.’s wife herself, who could not have presided with greater punctiliousness if she had been wearing her husband’s official three-cornered hat. With silver-thimbled finger she would tap on the table if a conversation started of which she could not approve. Of all the reasons for disapproval vulgarity came first, which she would have detected, so Annie Parry said, in a discussion on angels among a group of nuns. Annie, the white-haired mother of Tom Parry, one of the ‘junior’ staff, was a devout Catholic, but saw no harm in a remark or jest just a little on the blue side, especially when no men were present.

  There was, however, a reason for Lady Beauly’s hyper-sensitiveness. Her husband, as everyone knew, liked nothing better after a dinner, in that very room as a matter of fact, than to send the women away and remain behind with the men, each of whom had to sing a verse, while the rest sang the choruses, of songs so rollickingly and inventively filthy as to be unknown outside universities. His wife’s prudishness may have been to compensate, but even so it was thought she carried it to eccentric lengths, so that innocent remarks about gallstones or birth or the minaret of the new mosque would quickly find that thimble of silence enfolding them. Discussion of any kind therefore was never easy. As Mrs Mossaour put it in private to Jean Lawson, an atmosphere was created in which everything in that room, from the thimble on one’s finger to the shuttle of the sewing machines, became a phallic symbol or practice. Jean, a frank Australian, agreed. Often her husband Bill, a U.N. veterinarian and a fertile mimic, would invent conversation of the most shocking impropriety, using Lady Beauly’s primmest voice, or Helen Langford’s contemptuous snorts, or even Maud Mossaour’s high tones of scorn.

  Helen was the Commercial Attaché’s wife. Gloved and galoshed, like a grim-faced Ceres, she tended her garden in the Embassy compound and, so Bill Lawson jested, suffered neither worms nor butterflies to make love amid her flowers or roots. Among strangers she and her husband John were civil to each other; when alone, it was rumoured, they were like worms themselves, writhing in an ordained separation.