Lawrence Durrell - Judith

He stood and watched her, sighing and rubbing his chin. The tall slender figure was slowly swallowed by the velvety darkness. He could hear her footsteps still as he turned downcast to the car. Then they stopped — the footsteps — and he heard her call his name suddenly, with a note of urgency.

“Aaron!”

Instantly he strode towards her and plunged into the dark with arms outspread, for he could see nothing. Suddenly he felt her arms around him and her warm mouth searching for his. It was as if all her reserves and terrors had been shed like a cloak, freeing her body and her mind for just such an embrace. “I am sorry I have been such a bitch,” she said incoherently, “But I am still all tangled up inside.” Aaron’s kisses prevented any further analysis of her feelings. She subsided slowly and luxuriously into the deep soft grass under the trees, feeling his arms tighten around her body. “I have come awake,” she told herself with joy, “I have come awake.”

Much later, at the door of her little cabin, Aaron said good-night with the traditional reluctance of the lover. But his parting was made much less sad for the news he had to give her. “In three months I’ll be back here at Ras Shamir.” Three months only, instead of that fearsome year!

Lawton returned from Egypt at the end of his leave. Grete looked up from her desk and found him standing before her one morning, gazing down on her as if uncertain of his welcome.

“I came to say I was sorry,” he said.

She sprang up in ready sympathy and gave him her hands. “Let us rub it all out — forget it all,” she said.

And his face broke into a smile. “God bless you,” he said. “You have no idea how much I missed you. It ruined my leave. I tried hard not to think about you, but it was useless. I climbed all the pyramids and went to all the night clubs but whenever I was near a telephone the temptation to ring you was almost irresistible.”

“I missed you too,” she said truthfully.

“And as ill luck will have it, I can’t dine with you tonight, I have to go to Government House.”

“Never mind. There will be time.”

“All the time in the world.”

Back in his office once more, Lawton set about expelling Carstairs and his files.

“I thought so.”

“Thought what, dear old skipper?”

“I thought you would muck up my files and litter my room with copies of Vogue and the Ladies’ Home Journal .”

“I only get it for the crosswords old chap. I don’t knit, as you know. At least not yet, I don’t. But I cannot guarantee anything. Another month or two working for this unit may bring about a change of life.”

“Get out,” said Lawton.

“I wanted to ask you something.”

“Then ask and leave me.”

“I see you are dining with H.E. tonight.”

“Yes.”

“Can I dine with Grete?”

“If she can bear it.”

“Oh yes, she loves it. Prefers it in fact. Only accepts your invitations for fear of losing her job.”

“Go away.”

“Well,” said Carstairs, “You can tell H.E. from me that I think he is a vexatious old pontiff and ripe for the ducking stool.”

“I will.”

“And that his ADC is a sycophantic slyboots.”

The weighty Oxford Shorter flew across the room but Carstairs, with the celerity of long practice, had vanished and it banged uselessly upon the door panels.

The vexatious pontiff, alias His Majesty’s High Commissioner in Palestine, ran true to form; once more Lawton found himself sighing with boredom and irritation as he listened to conversations which so perfectly mirrored the official mind. The conversation was kept superficial and trivial in deference to H.E. who, though a man of “fine presence” as it is called, was fundamentally a vague and limited man, who rapidly wearied of anything which suggested thinking or reflecting. By the time they reached the port and cigar stage of the dinner (the service wives having been shepherded out onto the terrace) H.E. was in fairly good spirits, and disposed to make some concessions in the direction of moderately intelligent conversation. Lawton tried to be responsive.

“Had a good leave?”

“Thank you, Sir.”

“I suppose you picked up a good deal in the way of rumours.”

“Inevitably, Sir.”

H.E. sighed, and stared at the end of his cigar. Then he smiled at the end of the table where his lanky ADC sat and said: “Birds of a feather, eh Roland?”

“What does that imply, Sir?” asked Lawton, quick to be wounded.

“It’s just an office joke. Both you lot here and your opposite numbers in Cairo take a very grave view of things. Very grave indeed.”

Lawton flushed. “Yes, Sir. It is true. I think our view is justifiably so. The situation is… like that; balanced on a hair.”

He reached out his hand with spread fingers and wobbled it like a see-saw. H.E. looked at him indulgently and stroked his moustache.

“My dear boy,” he said — Lawton loathed being called so — “I myself am quite impartial in the matter. I am prepared to believe you. I only ask you, when you speak of arms, to show me some, not to repeat rumours only. Do you follow?”

“Yes,” said Lawton. “And there you have me, Sir. I admit we’ve been singularly unsuccessful in capturing the dumps which we have heard about… But I’m convinced our information is correct — that a big build-up is taking place, and that one fine day in the near future…

He paused and, as if to illustrate his sentence, there came a dull bang in the darkness over there, beyond the garden. They looked at one another and turned to peer out of the window in the direction of Jerusalem. There was a patch of flame which flapped red and then white.

“What the devil… said H.E. The ADC went to the telephone in the corner — the red Government House line — and said:

“Give me the police call desk, please.”

They watched in silence, noting that the flame in the darkness grew and waned, moving from left to right. The phone crackled.

“Police desk? This is Government House. There was a bang… yes I know.” The ADC turned his flustered face to Lawton and said: “It’s your office. It has gone up, Major.”

Lawton turned to H.E. and sketched a gesture in the air which asked permission to retire and, without waiting for an answer, raced for the gardens. He found his car and driver after a brief search and rushed down the hill into the town. Sirens were blaring now and police in lorries were closing in on what at first seemed a shapeless white cloud among the houses — a cloud of cordite and brickdust. Lawton plunged into it, choking and swearing. He came upon a little group of firemen emerging from the doorway. They were carrying, with infinite precautions, the limp body of Carstairs.

“He’s dead, Sir,” said one of them, recognizing him. Lawton shook with suppressed rage at the thought. “He’s the only casualty,” added the fireman.

Outside the radius of the smoke he found Brewster nursing a head-wound as he sat on a pile of rubble waiting for the ambulance. “What was he doing in the office at this time?” asked Lawton incoherently, still full of a sense of outrage.

“A service message came over WT and I phoned him, Sir. I thought it might be urgent. No sooner he came than it went off between our teeth, Sir.” He shivered and his teeth began to chatter.

An ambulance raced towards them with its bell jangling. “But the safes all held out,” said Brewster as an afterthought. “I made the firemen check.”

“Damn the safes,” said Lawton as he walked slowly down the street to his villa.