Desert Queen (78 page)

I
t was a Saturday morning in March 1926 when the writer Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson’s wife, came to Baghdad. She had struggled by train from Basrah, had bumped along the dusty roads in an old Ford, then skidded through the mud to Gertrude’s house. Pushing the door in the blank wall, Vita limped along the path, past the pots of carnations lining the edge, past the white pony peeking out of the stable door, past the dogs—gray salukis and a little yellow cocker spaniel—and hobbled up to the verandah, where a peacock strutted about. Gertrude called out hello. They had known each other in Constantinople, had lunched in Paris and dined in England, but it was clear to Vita that it was here in Iraq that Gertrude was at home. Gertrude’s spirits were up: she had been given a free-standing building for her museum, and her plans, she said, were to make it like the British Museum, “only a little smaller.”

As soon as she spotted Vita she let flow a stream of questions; “Had it been very hot in the Gulf?” she asked. Did Vita have fever? Did she have a sprained ankle as well? “Too bad!” Would Vita like porridge first, or a bath?

“She had the gift of making every one feel suddenly eager; of making you feel that life was full and rich and exciting,” Vita observed. When her guest expressed a wish for a saluki, Gertrude rushed to the telephone and ordered a selection of the slender, silky-haired dogs to be brought over at once. “Then she was back in her chair, pouring out information: the state of Iraq, the excavations at Ur, the need for a decent museum. What new books had come out? What was happening in England? The doctors had told her she ought not to go through another summer in Baghdad, but what should she do in England, eating out her heart for Iraq? Next year, perhaps … but I couldn’t say she looked ill, could I? I could, and did. She laughed and brushed that aside. Then, jumping up—for all her movements were quick and impatient—if I had finished my breakfast wouldn’t I like my bath? and she must go to her office but would be back for luncheon. Oh yes, and there were people to luncheon; and so, still talking, still laughing, she pinned on a hat without looking in the glass, and took her departure.”

Later that day they went to visit the King, who looked, Vita said, “as though he were the prey to a romantic, an almost Byronic, melancholy.” As Vita listened, Gertrude and Faisal discussed the kitchen lineoleum for his new country house and the virtues of his new cook and the latest troubles in the government. Then, driving back to Baghdad, Gertrude spoke of Faisal’s loneliness. “He likes me to ring up and ask to go to tea,” she told her friend.

T
he news from England a few weeks later, that her father was deeply depressed over Hugo’s death, and that Rounton had finally been abandoned, left Gertrude dazed. “All this sorrow,” she wrote to Molly, “has made me feel very numb.… I don’t think I have any other strong feelings left.” Her romance with Ken had dissolved into companionship, a relationship she now called “comforting,” and she clung to her quotidian work to keep her going. At least the new museum captured her thoughts.

When, in May 1926 her parents asked if she was coming to London, she refused to commit herself to any plans. Her finances had suffered as a result of a general strike in England, and a trip for just the summer was too expensive. She wanted to finish her work and then go away, she told Florence. Besides, she admitted, she was afraid to leave everything she had been doing to find herself “rather loose on the world. I don’t see at all clearly what I shall do, but of course I can’t stay here forever.” Once in a while Ken stopped by, but for the most part she was alone, shunned by the younger and newer members of the male British staff. Mornings she worked at the museum, and every day Dobbs still kindly invited her to lunch, but, she confessed to her father, “The afternoons, after tea, hang rather heavy on my hands.” She ached with loneliness, and the doctor had given her Dial, a sleeping potion, to help her fall asleep.

The new museum was nearly finished, and she hoped that she would be named its official director and put on the payroll of Iraq—just for six months, she said; she could not justify asking for more. Her job with the High Commissioner was almost over. “Politics are dropping out and giving place to big administrative questions in which I’m not concerned and at which I’m no good. On the other hand,” she noted, “the Department of Antiquities is now a full time job.”

In June there was cause for celebration. The treaty with the Turks, granting Mosul to Iraq, was finally signed. And the following day, at the opening of her new museum, the King helped out at the small ceremony. It pleased her that more than a dozen Baghdadis hurried to see the three thousand objects she had collected. But a letter from home brought more discouraging news. Her father was still depressed and hoped she would come back to England soon. “I don’t see for the moment what I can do,” she scrawled stubbornly. “You see I have undertaken this very grave responsibility of the Museum.” She could not leave “except for the gravest reasons,” she insisted; “it’s a gigantic task.” Nor could she resign from her post as Oriental Secretary. It would mean giving up a salary of a thousand pounds a year plus the greater part of her house rent. “Let us wait for a bit, don’t you think, and see how things look.”

To Florence she confided, “It is too lonely, my existence here; one can’t go on forever living alone. At least I don’t feel I can.”

And to her former assistant J. M. Wilson, now living in England, she revealed the painful truth: “My horizon is not at all pleasant. The coal strike hits us very hard; I don’t know where we shall be this year. I have been caught in the meshes of the museum (oh, for your help with it!) and I can’t go away leaving it in its present chaos. So I shall probably stay here through the summer and when I come back, come back for good. Except for the museum, I am not enjoying life at all. One has the sharp sense of being near the end of things with no certainty as to what, if anything, one will do next. It is also very dull, but for the work. I don’t know what to do with myself of an afternoon.… It is a very lonely business living here now.”

An envelope arrived, the printed invitation announcing the state Banquet for the signing of the treaty with Turkey, to be held on the twenty-fifth of June 1926. Standing before the mirror, her slim figure even more fragile, her blue eyes even more piercing, Gertrude dressed for her final victory. Stepping carefully into her gown, with Marie’s help, she attached her ribbons of honor to her dress and pinned her tiara to her hair, and then, with her cape over her shoulders, she motored off for the familiar drive to the palace. It was the last official function she would ever attend.

At the dinner, the King rose and expressed his profound thanks to the British Government and its representatives for all they had done for Iraq, and as he looked around the room, she knew he was speaking of her. But the glorious days were gone. Like the image she had drawn of snow, her power had melted away. Her reign of influence was over. Her family fortune had disappeared. Her last love had turned his back. Her health had declined. Physically tried and emotionally spent, she knew she had done all she could do for Iraq and all she could do for the British Empire. The future now lay in the hands of others.

T
he July heat had forced most Baghdadis from the city: her assistant had gone, the King was taking the cures at Vichy, and the Sindersons were leaving for an around-the-world trip, not unlike the one she had taken with Hugo more than twenty years earlier. After seeing off her friends at the train station, Gertrude stood alone, small and frail, looking to Mrs. Sinderson “like a leaf that could be blown away by a breath.” A few nights later she was invited by Henry Dobbs to a dinner for a visiting guest. Percy Lorraine, the British Ambassador to Teheran, was going home to report the news that Reza Pahlevi had established himself as Shah of Persia. It was thirty-five years since Gertrude had first met his predecessor, enveloped in his royal tents, attending a parade in Teheran. What memories she had of Persia! What hope she had held then, a young woman of twenty-three, visiting her uncle Frank Lascelles, the British Ambassador. What joy she had felt when she had met Henry Cadogan, handsome, attentive, well read and worldly. With what youthful exuberance she had breathed in the air of the East. Pomegranates and rose bushes, warm breezes drifting across the desert, languid hours by the river with Henry reading the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:

Oh, come with old Khayyám, and leave the wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that life flies
;
One thing is certain, and the rest is lies
;
The flower that once hath blown for ever dies.

On Sunday July 11, 1926, three days before her fifty-eighth birthday, Gertrude lunched with Henry Dobbs and Lionel Smith and then went home alone to face the cloud of depression that hung over her every afternoon. Later, after a nap, she joined the Sunday swimming party, but the river current was strong, and she came back exhausted from the swim and the heat. She walked slowly through her garden, past her flowers and her animals, and went inside to ready herself for bed. Too tired to finish a letter to her parents, or even to leave a note, she asked only that Marie awaken her at six the next morning. But she had other plans. Wiping away the dreary future, she took an extra dose of the sleeping pills on her nightstand, turned out the light and went to sleep, a deep sleep from which she never awoke.

Epilogue

R
umors raced through the city, denials of a suicide as strong as those of a natural death. But while acquaintances were shocked to hear that Miss Bell may have taken her own life, those who knew her well were not surprised at all. Her closest friends had known of her dark depression. The Political Officer in charge of organizing her papers called the next day at her house. Her servant admitted that Miss Bell had taken an extra dose of pills. In his public report, Colonel Frank Stafford declared that the Khatun had died of natural causes. But in his private account he concluded that the bulk of evidence pointed to suicide.