The Alexandria Quartet (80 page)

V

My dear David,

You will be astonished to get a letter of such length from me, I don't doubt. But the news of your appointment only reached me lately in rumoured form, and there is much you should know about the state of affairs here which I could not address to you formally as Ambassador Designate (Confidential: Under Flying Seal) ahem!

Ouf! What a bore! I hate writing letters as you well know. And yet … I myself shall almost certainly be gone by the time you arrive, for I have taken steps to get myself transferred. After a long series of calculated wickednesses I have at
last
managed to persuade poor Enrol that I am unsuitable for the Mission which I have adorned these past months. Months! A lifetime! And Errol himself is so good, so honest, so worthy; a curious goat-like creature who nevertheless conveys the impression of being a breech-delivery! He has put in his paper against me with the greatest reluctance.
Please do nothing to countermand the transfer which will result from it
, as it squares with my own private wishes. I implore you.

The deciding factor has been my desertion of my post for the past five weeks which has caused grave annoyance and finally decided Errol. I will explain everything. Do you remember, I wonder, the fat young French diplomat of the Rue du Bac? Nessim took us round once for drinks? Pombal by name? Well, I have taken refuge with him — he is serving here. It is really quite gay
chez lui
. The summer over, the headless Embassy retired with the Court to winter in Cairo, but this time without Yours Truly. I went underground. Nowadays we rise at eleven, turn out the girls, and after having a hot bath play backgammon until lunch-time; then an
arak
at the Café Al Aktar with Balthazar and Amaril (who send their love) and lunch at the Union Bar. Then perhaps we call on Clea to see what she is painting, or go to a cinema. Pombal is doing all this legitimately; he is on local leave. I am en re
traite
. Occasionally the exasperated Enrol rings up long distance in an attempt to trace me and I answer him in the voice of a
poule
from the Midi. It rattles him badly because he guesses it is me, but isn't quite sure. (The point about a Wykehamist is that he cannot
risk
giving offence.) We have lovely, lovely conversations. Yesterday I told him that I, Pursewarden, was under treatment for a glandular condition chez Professor Pombal but was now out of danger. Poor Errol! One day I shall apologize to him for all the trouble I have caused him. Not now. Not until I get my transfer to Siam or Santos.

All this is very wicked of me, I know, but … the tedium of this Chancery with all these un-grown-up people! The Errols are formidably Britannic. They are, for example,
both
economists. Why
both
, I ask myself? One of them must feel permanently redundant. They make love to two places of decimals only. Their children have all the air of vulgar fractions!

Well. The only nice ones are the Donkins; he is clever and high-spirited, she rather common and fast-looking with too much rouge. But … poor dear, she is over-compensating for the fact that her little husband has grown a beard and turned Moslem! She sits with a hard aggressive air on his desk, swinging her leg and smoking swiftly. Mouth too red. Not quite a lady and hence insecure? Her husband is a clever youth but far too serious. I do not dare to ask if he intends to put in for the extra allowance of wives to which he is entitled.

But let me tell you in my laboured fashion what lies behind all this nonsense. I was sent here, as you know, under contract, and I fulfilled my original task faithfully — as witness the giant roll of paper headed (in a lettering usually reserved for tomb-stones)
Instruments for a Cultural Pact Between the Governments of His Britannic Majesty etc
. Blunt instruments indeed — for what can a Christian culture have in common with a Moslem or a Marxist? Our premises are hopelessly opposed. Never mind! I was told to do it and I done it. And much as I love what they've got here I don't understand the words in relation to an educational system based on the abacus and a theology which got left behind with Augustine and Aquinas. Personally I think we both have made a mess of it, and I have no
parti-pris
in the matter. And so on. I just don't see what D. H. Lawrence has to offer a pasha with seventeen wives, though I believe I know which one of them is happiest.… However, I done it, the Pact I mean.

This done I found myself rapidly sent to the top of the form as a Political and this enabled me to study papers and evaluate the whole Middle Eastern complex as a coherent whole, as a policy venture. Well, let me say that after prolonged study I have come to the reluctant conclusion that it is neither coherent nor even a policy — at any rate a policy capable of withstanding the pressures which are being built up here.

These rotten states, backward and venal as they are, must be seriously thought about; they cannot be held together just by encouraging what is weakest and most corrupt in them, as we appear to be doing. This approach would presuppose another fifty years of peace and no radical element in the electorate at home: that given, the
status quo
might be maintained. But given this prevailing trend, can England be as short-sighted as this? Perhaps. I don't know. It is not my job to know these things,
as an artist;
as a political I am filled with misgiving. To encourage Arab unity while at the same time losing the power to use the poison-cup seems to me to be a very dubious thing: not policy but lunacy. And to add Arab unity to all the other currents which are running against us seems to me to be an engaging folly. Are we still beset by the doleful dream of the Arabian Nights, fathered on us by three generations of sexually disoriented Victorians whose subconscious reacted wholeheartedly to the thought of more than one legal wife? Or the romantic Bedouin-fever of the Bells and Lawrences? Perhaps. But the Victorians who fathered this dream on us were people who believed in
fighting
for the value of their currency; they knew that the world of politics was a jungle. Today the Foreign Office appears to believe that the best way to deal with the jungle is to turn Nudist and conquer the wild beast by the sight of one's nakedness. I can hear you sigh. ‘Why can't Pursewarden be
more precise
. All these
boutades!'

Very well. I spoke of the pressures. Let us divide them into internal and external, shall we, in the manner of Errol? My views may seem somewhat heretical, but here they are.

Well then, first, the abyss which separates the rich from the poor — it is positively Indian. In Egypt today, for example, six per cent of the people own over three-quarters of the land, thus leaving under
a feddan
a head for the rest to live on. Good! Then the population is doubling itself every second generation — or is it third? But I suppose any economic survey will tell you this. Meanwhile there is the steady growth of a vocal and literate middle-class whose sons are trained at Oxford among our comfy liberalisms — and who find no jobs waiting for them when they come back here. The
babu
is growing in power, and the dull story is being repeated here as elsewhere. ‘Intellectual coolies of the world unite.'

To these internal pressures we are gracefully adding by direct encouragement, the rigour of a nationalism based in a fanatical religion. I personally admire it, but never forget that it is a fighting religion with no metaphysics, only an ethic. The Arab Union, etc.… My dear chap, why are we thinking up these absurd constructs to add to our own discomfiture — specially as it is clear to me that we have lost the basic power to act which alone would ensure that our influence remained paramount here? These tottering backward-looking feudalisms could only be supported by arms against these disintegrating elements inherent in the very nature of things today; but to use arms, ‘to preach with the sword' in the words of Lawrence, one must have a belief in one's own ethos, one's own mystique of life. What does the Foreign Office believe? I just don't know. In Egypt, for example, very little has been done beyond keeping the peace; the High Commission is vanishing after a rule of — since 1888? — and will not leave behind even the vestiges of a trained civil service to stabilize this rabble-ridden grotesque which we now apparently regard as a sovereign state. How long will fair words and courtly sentiments prevail against the massive discontents these people feel? One can trust a treaty king only as long as he can trust his people. How long remains before a flashpoint is reached? I don't know — and to be frank I don't much
care
. But I should say that some unforeseen outside pressure like a war would tumble over these scarecrow principalities at a breath. Anyway, these are my general reasons for wanting a change. I believe we should reorient policy and build Jewry into the power behind the scenes here. And quick.

Now for the particular. Very early in my political life I ran up against a department of the War Office specializing in general intelligence, run by a Brigadier who resented the idea that his office should bow the knee to us. A question of rank, or allowances, or some such rot; under the Commission he had been allowed more or less a free hand. Incidentally, this is the remains of the old Arab Bureau left over from 1918 which has been living on quietly like a toad buried under a stone! Obviously in the general re-alignment, his show must (it seemed to me) integrate with somebody. And now there was only an embryonic Embassy in Egypt. As he had worked formerly to the High Commission's Political Branch, I thought he should work to me — and indeed, after a series of sharp battles, bent if not broke him — Maskelyne is the creature's name. He is so typical as to be rather interesting and I have made extensive notes on him for a book in my usual fashion. (One writes to recover a lost innocence!)

Well, since the Army discovered that imagination is a major factor in producing cowardice they have trained the Maskelyne breed in the virtues of counter-imagination: a sort of amnesia which is almost Turkish. The contempt for death has been turned into a contempt for life and this type of man accepts life only on his own terms. A frozen brain alone enables him to keep up a routine of exceptional boredom. He is very thin, very tall, and his skin has been tanned by Indian service to the colour of smoked snakeskin, or a scab painted with iodine. His perfect teeth rest as lightly as a feather upon his pipestem. There is a peculiar gesture he has — I wish I could describe it, it interests me so much — of removing his pipe slowly before speaking, levelling his small dark eyes at one, and almost whispering: ‘Oh, do you really think so?' The vowels drawing themselves out infinitely into the lassitude, the boredom of the silence which surrounds him. He is gnawed by the circumscribed perfection of a breeding which makes him uncomfortable in civilian clothes, and indeed he walks about in his well-cut cavalry coat with a
Noli me tangere
air. (Breed for type and you always get anomalies of behaviour.) He is followed everywhere by his magnificent red pointer Nell (named after his wife?) who sleeps on his feet while he works at his files, and on his bed at night. He occupies a room in a hotel in which there is nothing personal — no books, no photographs, no papers. Only a set of silver-backed brushes, a bottle of whisky and a newspaper. (I imagine him sometimes brushing the silent fury out of his own scalp, furiously brushing his dark shiny hair back from the temples, faster and faster. Ah, that's better — that's better!)

He reaches his office at eight having bought his day-late copy of the
Daily Telegraph
. I have never seen him read anything else. He sits at his huge desk, consumed with a slow dark contempt for the venality of the human beings around him, perhaps the human race as a whole; imperturbably he examines and assorts their differing corruptions, their maladies, and outlines them upon marble minute-paper which he always signs with his little silver pen in a small awkward fly's handwriting. The current of his loathing flows through his veins slowly, heavily, like the Nile at flood. Well, you can see what a
numéro
he is. He lives purely in the military imagination for he never sees or meets the subjects of most of his papers; the information he collates comes in from suborned clerks, or discontented valets, or pent-up servants. It does not matter. He prides himself on his readings of it, his I.A. (intelligence appreciation), just like an astrologer working upon charts belonging to unseen, unknown subjects. He is judicial, proud as the Calif, unswerving, I admire him very much. Honestly I do.

Maskelyne has set up two marks between which (as between degree-signs on a calibrated thermometer) the temperatures of his approval and disapproval are allowed to move, expressed in the phrases: ‘A good show for the Raj' and ‘Not such a good show for the Raj'. He is too single-minded of course, ever to be able to imagine a really Bad Show for the Bloody Raj. Such a man seems unable to see the world around him on open sights; but then his profession and the need for reserve make him a complete recluse, make him inexperienced in the ways of the world upon which he sits in judgement.… Well, I am tempted to go on and frame the portrait of our spycatcher, but I will desist. Read my next novel but four, it should also include a sketch of Telford, who is Maskelyne's Number Two — a large blotchy ingratiating civilian with illfitting dentures who manages to call one ‘old fruit' a hundred times a second between nervous guffaws. His worship of the cold snaky soldier is marvellous to behold. ‘Yes, Brigadier', ‘No, Brigadier', falling over a chair in his haste to serve; you would say he was completely in love with his boss. Maskelyne sits and watches his confusion coldly, his brown chin, cleft by a dark dimple, jutting like an arrow. Or he will lean back in his swivel-chair and tap softly on the door of the huge safe behind him with the faintly satisfied air of a gourmet patting his paunch as he says: ‘You don't believe me? I have it all in here, all in here.' Those files, you think, watching this superlative, all-comprehending gesture, must contain material enough to indict the world! Perhaps they do.