Strange Music (15 page)

Willard said, ‘In America you can say “a quarter of eight” – meaning “quarter to.”'

‘You can say it here, too, pal,' Eric said magnanimously. ‘I think we can all agree to allow that, eh?' He looked round the table. ‘Carried
nem con
! The port is with you, Alex.'

As the decanter made its round, Eric continued: ‘What do we all think of Felix becoming a Jew, eh?'

Marianne looked at him sharply. ‘I don't think we should discuss it at all. It's entirely a private matter.'

‘Not since he spilled the beans to me, it isn't,' he responded. ‘I thought it was a cry for help, as a matter of fact – considering, you know, Felix and beans.'

‘What do the French say?' Isabella asked. ‘Eight
less
a quarter and we say quarter
to
eight!'

‘I advised him to take a holiday in Israel,' Eric continued. ‘The light would be pretty good, I'd imagine. And those wind-scoured Crusader castles would suggest lots of themes to a sculptor.'

‘Isn't he already Jewish?' Willard asked. ‘Otherwise why did they put him—'

‘Half Jewish,' Eric said. ‘Or quarter, actually. What the Nazis called a
Mischling
. Though mind you – anatomically he's an
entire
gentile, which will be fun for him when the mohel reaches for the broken bottle.'

‘Is there anything you take seriously, Eric?' Alex asked.

‘Humour. I take that very seriously. Kierkegaard said it is morality's stoutest shield.'

‘I've only met Felix once, briefly, this afternoon, but I don't imagine wind-scoured Crusader castles would lure him all the way to Israel.'

‘Well, I may also have mentioned the side-attraction of meeting Jews in the top-dog position, no longer outcast and persecuted. He should experience that before he takes the plunge.'

‘And do you think that might change his mind?'

‘From half-informed to fully-informed? Yes.'

‘I was thinking more on the lines of “from half-inclined to not on your life.”'

Eric smiled. ‘It's one of many possibilities. But you can blame my public school for the suggestion. We fourth-formers were flogged and abused without mercy by boys just three years older than us, and we often resolved that we'd behave
sooo
differently when we were top dogs. But we didn't, of course. It's something in human nature.'

‘
Boys
' nature,' his wife said.

‘I beg to differ,' Faith put in, remembering the days before she was expelled from Cheltenham.

The door opened and Terence Lanyon stuck his head inside. ‘Hilary? No Hilary.'

‘She came earlier,' Marianne told him, ‘about collecting for a new piano for the school. She's probably with the Palmers. Join us – have a coffee. Or a glass of port.'

He accepted the invitation and she introduced him to Alex.

‘Is that your
DB
2 in the yard?' Terence asked eagerly.

‘My brother's, actually. You're at
LSE
? Just across the road from me – I'm at Bush House.'

‘Oh! Well then, we must meet . . . compare canteens.'

‘We certainly must. You've just been appointed to the new Economic Advisory Council, I think?' He suddenly caught himself and looked around with a grimace. ‘Sorry all! Shop! Not good.' He turned again to Terence, who was open-mouthed. ‘Yes, it's the new Aston Martin, with the Lagonda engine. Pretty soon now they'll walk away with the Le Mans twenty-four hour – I'm sure of it.'

Willard said, ‘Felix is thinking of converting one hundred per cent to—'

‘I heard,' Terence said. ‘Is that what you were discussing?'

Faith said, ‘Eric has advised him to go to Israel first and nobody can tell whether it's one of his jokey jokes or one of his serious ones. But Felix is taking it seriously.'

‘You've been out there recently, haven't you?' Marianne asked.

Terence nodded. ‘Going again, too. Maybe we can travel together.'

‘What's he going to find?' Willard asked.

Terence stared around with a haunted, where-to-begin sort of expression. ‘He'll find a land that, within living memory, was ruled as one caliphate by the Ottoman Turks. Ruled with fairly tolerant inefficiency, which suited most people. In the First World War, the Ottomans sought alliance with us but short-sightedly we turned them down. So they put a clothes peg on their noses and sided with the Germans – which, of course, was their undoing . . . just as I think it will now be ours. Because we did precisely what nobody who lived there wanted us to do. Their former colony of Syria wanted to stay as one unit – in fact, that's what Lawrence promised the Arabs to make sure they fought on our side. But once we no longer needed them we reneged and handed it to the French, who thought only of protecting the Maronite Christians. So, naturally, they split it into
four
: Transjordan, Palestine, Lebanon, and rump Syria. The tribes farther east
wanted
to split into three areas – one friendly with Persia, another friendly with Arabia, and the third wanting to form the nucleus of a Kurdish nation. So what did we do? And by the way, Willard, the “we” here includes Uncle Sam. Or it did until Woodrow Wilson got tired of it all and washed his hands of the lot. What did we do there? We rammed the three of them into one artificial state under the ancient name of Iraq. That was all of twenty . . . thirty years ago. Meanwhile the Zionists had been slowly buying up land in Palestine. That started back in Queen Victoria's time under the Rothschilds. Up until nineteen forty-five something close to half a million acres of Arab Palestine had been bought from them, at a fair and amicable price, by Zionist Jews – just short of eight hundred square miles, which is about a tenth of the present area of Israel.

‘But then, after this latest war – full of guilt at how we'd refused sanctuary to more than a few token Jews in Europe – we said, “You don't need to buy the Arabs' land any more. Just march in and take it.” The thinking seems to be that three mutually hostile people living in Iraq will exhaust themselves squabbling with each other in the usual Arab fashion. And next door, the once-mighty Syria is drawn and quartered, and those quarters will also do the usual Arab thing and squabble with each other, leaving the Zionists to go quietly about their business. So that's “the sick man of Europe” – the old Ottoman caliphate – taken care of. And we'll have a European bridgehead of liberal, intelligent, educated, hard-working people right in the heart of it. Turning the desert into a garden. The odd thing is I still meet people in our Foreign Office who believe it'll happen!'

Alex said, ‘And you think it won't?'

‘Of course it won't. This isn't politics – it's faith. A Battle of the Books. One book promises the land to the Jews and the bit by Joshua tells them precisely how to go about it with God's blessing. And the other book says that
no
other religion has any right whatever to exist on the sacred soil of Islam. It is a blasphemy deserving of death. And we fondly imagine that modern democratic politics will sort it out and the two will eventually coexist in the one land.'

Alex was still curious. ‘May I ask what's your particular interest out there?'

‘What every economist is interested in – oil. And here's the supreme irony. Almost all of
our
oil – the commodity without which we will not be able to live for at least the next hundred years – lies under this land that we have shattered and rendered totally dysfunctional. God help us when, one – they wake up to the power it gives them and, two – they realize what unforgivable things we have done to them. How did I start on all this . . . oh, yes! Felix. Well, I hope he takes up your suggestion, Eric. It'll be interesting to see what he makes of it all.'

Sunday, 23 April 1950

Faith had both driven and ridden in expensive cars as far back as she could remember, everything from her uncle Artie's Phantom 2 right up to Mick Brackenbury's sporty little 30
HP
Allard, but the Aston Martin
DB
2 was like a step into an undreamed-of future. Cars that ‘devoured the road' or ‘ate up the miles' were ten-a-penny in the advertisements and the puffs in the trade magazines, but here at last was one that truly lived up to those fancies. It was unnerving at first to take corners at speeds that would have sent almost every other vehicle sliding off the tarmac, and to feel that mighty thrust at her back whenever they came to a straight bit of road and Alex put his foot down. But once they were through St Albans and scorching toward Watford she was able to relax and stretch as near-horizontal as her seat allowed, and enjoy the day and all that it promised.

‘Want to find some music on that thing?' He pointed to the radio. ‘The Light Programme's on the second button.'

She just smiled at him and shook her head.

‘Not going too fast, am I?'

‘I thought so for the first few miles but not now. This is heavenly. And d'you know what I enjoy most?'

‘What?'

‘When we met in Paris you just mentioned that you had the loan of your brother's car. No other man that I've ever known could have resisted adding in a modest sort of undertone – “an Aston Martin
DB
2, actually.” But you didn't even sound as if you
half
-thought of saying it. I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't turn out to be the
real
controller of the
BBC
.'

He laughed. ‘Tread softly because you tread upon my dreams!'

She sat up a little straighter. ‘Why? What would you do if you were?'

‘All the things you spoke about last week in Paris, for a start. Especially
TV
news! It's absurd not to have
visual
news on television. And it's ridiculous to have to shut down between six and seven each evening so that mothers can put their toddlers to bed. And documentaries – everything from a year in the life of a Welsh hill farmer to—'

‘A year in the life of the Queen?'

His jaw dropped, and then he gave a bark of a laugh. ‘Indeed! Why not!' He glanced at her. ‘You've got to apply, you know. I wish I could do more to help. But Auntie needs you down at Lime Grove.'

She gave an abstracted sort of nod. ‘D'you know what I was thinking the other night, watching them broadcast an excerpt from some play that's on in the West End? I mean, the screen is only twelve inches high, so the people were just little Tom Thumbs and you could hardly make out their expressions. And I kept wishing they'd just cut from close-up to close-up so we could see their bloody faces. Television isn't just a tiny cinema screen, it's like a window in our drawing rooms. We watch it from eight feet away so we want to see faces just as they would be if the people were right there – eight feet away. And not only in dramas but in everything. Television is using the . . . can one talk of visual
grammar
?'

‘You can now.'

‘It's
mis
using the grammar of the movies.'

‘If this weren't a Sunday,' he said, ‘I'd turn round right now and drive directly to Lime Grove.' He sighed and added, ‘But we'd only find the workers there.'

They threaded their way through the southern Chilterns – Watford, Rickmansworth, Denham, and Slough – to reach the A4 as soon as possible. There, at last on that great east-west artery between London and Bath, Alex could floor the throttle and really show off the paces of the
DB
2. He could push the beast from thirty to ninety in just a couple of seconds.

Between Maidenhead and Reading he floored it again and the speedo touched a ton. ‘D'you mind?' he asked. ‘I'll slow down if you'd prefer it.'

She shook her head and said, dreamily, ‘It doesn't seem fast at all. I mean, it feels right. Natural.' Settling deep into her seat she added, ‘It's one of those moments when you realize that the war really is over. We've lived so long in its . . . I mean it's been tailing off and—'

‘We still have rationing. And a government that insists it knows best.'

There were few other cars on the road – mostly lorries making for an early opening of the London markets on Monday; their drivers flashed a thumbs-up, meaning ‘no police ahead.' But a series of thumbs-down encounters warned them of a trap at Calcot Row on the far side of Reading; they negotiated it successfully and then it was their turn to flash and to thumbs-down the oncoming drivers.

‘During the war this would have felt vaguely unpatriotic,' Alex said as he exchanged a comradely wave with a driver who got the message. ‘The police were on our side then. Now, if they don't watch out, they'll turn into an army of occupation.'

Just before Newbury the last of the clouds dissolved and a bright spring sun gave the landscape the eye-aching clarity of a Dutch master, picking out cows, knee-deep in pasture, and newly scalped sheep a mile away. At Savernake Forest they stopped for a pee, she to the right of the path, he to the left.

‘I think it's quite possible I was conceived here,' she said as she rejoined him near the car. ‘My father occasionally mentions that they stopped off here on their way home after the wedding in London, and there's always that glint in his eye. And a certain anxious look in my mother's.'

He cleared his throat but ventured nothing. In the silence, the pinging of the exhaust manifold as it cooled was intrusive.

‘I've embarrassed you,' she said.

He laughed as he held the door open for her. ‘Not in what you said, only that I can't think of any bright sort of an answer. Except,
wherever
it happened, thank God it did!'

Between there and Chippenham she fed him and herself from their packed lunch, alternating bite-for-bite from the same sandwich. The gleam of his teeth, unsheathing themselves from his finely moulded lips to take a predatory bite, just fractions of an inch from her long, slender, manicured fingers was powerfully erotic to her. He must have sensed it for he shot her several glances, half uneasy, half hopeful.