Страница 41 из 69
“Back to the groves of academe, I suppose. I’m trying to write a memoir. A lot of that going around,” he said, as though authorship were the flu. “Have you heard the old joke about Job sitting on his dunghill?” he asked, his tired eyes flickering with amusement. “He tells his friends all his troubles and at the end, one of them says, ‘Yes, but you know … there could be a book in it!’ ”
He had recently written an introduction for a new edition of Doughty’s Arabia Deserta and hoped to make “a few quid” from the same publisher by providing book translations from French to English. We talked of novels next, and I was surprised to learn that he had read Dornford Yates’s Berry tales, which were light and humorous courtroom stories. Those were, Lawrence told me, the only things that could make him laugh after the war. He was fond as well of W. W. Jacobs and George Birmingham but particularly taken with Richard Garnett’s study The Twilight of the Gods. “Garnett’s scholarship is so easy and exact, so deep, but so unobtrusive,” he said with boyish enthusiasm. Lawrence had begun to consider reinterpreting The Odyssey, which he had carried in the original Greek throughout the desert campaign. He thought a soldier’s perspective would add dimension to a translation like Butler’s.
When he got back to England, he was eager to meet poets like Hardy and Sassoon and Blunden. They had some secret he hoped to learn—a technical mastery of words that he wanted to study, as an apprentice carver learns the use of mallet and chisel. Writers, painters, and composers fascinated him, and he believed their essential labor differed only in the medium they employed. He’d approached several artists about illustrations for the war book that he was writing. It was going to have photographs, woodblocks, paintings, even cartoons. In fact, he’d offered himself to the artists as a model and looked forward to long, quiet days watching them work and asking questions.
At a bare two miles an hour, the camels plodded down dunes where the sand gave way like fresh snow, then joltingly stumbled up the next ridge, sliding a foot backward for every eighteen inches of advance. In the presence of that busy, far-ranging mind, time passed quickly and I began to understand, to some small extent, how he had kept sane during endless empty hours in the desert. But when we crested yet another ridge with nothing to show for it, I thought, This is hell. And a little while later, Sergeant Thompson said as much aloud.
Hearing that, Lawrence excused himself, touched up his camel, and shouted something to our Arab escort. Suddenly our pack animals were beaten into a loping run and the sheiks on horseback dashed away as though on a bandit raid, leaving us to plod along behind them.
Several ridges later, we crested to find a cup-shaped depression in the land where boxes and baskets of supplies had been emptied and arranged for us to use as chairs. Two circular tents were erected, umbrella-fashion, each upon a center pole, their fabric pulled taut on ropes fastened to stakes driven into the sand. The closest was an unadorned black woolen affair in which a native cook worked over a large stove of admirable simplicity. It consisted of nothing more than an iron trough on legs, its bottom pierced by small holes like those of a sieve, for air. On its bed of burning charcoal, the cook had set out an array of battered pots and kettles. Their contents smelled divine.
Groaning, we rocked and flopped and lurched as our mounts folded up their long legs and jackknifed onto the ground. One by one, we slid off stiffly with chuckling cries of pain. Ladies and gentlemen separated into two simple washing areas behind plain canvas walls. When we emerged, tea was served by the camel boys, who’d turned themselves into waiters by putting on red tarbooshes and belting their long white gowns with matching red sashes.
The dining tent was brilliant against the colorless noonday desert, decorated with abstract appliqués cut from heavy canvas in dazzling colors: crimson and blue, chrome yellow and acid green, rose and turquoise and violet. Inside the tent, Oriental rugs covered the sand, and off to the right there was a serving table with wine, Scotch, and soda. Flanked by camp stools, long tables were laid with white damask, china, glassware, silver cutlery, and tall brass candlesticks. Soup was served, then grilled fish fresh from the Nile. We ate roasted chicken, and mutton with rice, a salad with squab. There was a pudding for dessert. At the very end, the boys passed small dishes of nuts, raisins, and candies, and platters heaped with segments of exquisite local oranges. Replete, we staggered outside and dropped in small groups to rest on the carpet-covered sand and yawn, and yawn, and yawn.
Contentedly on my own, I lay back and closed my eyes. The sun’s radiant warmth was perfectly balanced by a springtime breeze that cooled my face and hands. Drowsing, I listened to the desert wind singing in my ears and to the mournful, minor chanting of the Arabs as they packed up the equipment …
A smoker’s cough roused me. I opened my eyes and beheld Miss Bell, who seemed twelve feet tall from where I lay. She had a cigarette dangling between her lips and a china cup in each hand. “May I join you?” she asked.
“Not if you’re going to tell me my skirt is too short,” I replied.
“I didn’t think you had that in you,” she said, sounding as though she approved. “Coffee?”
I sat up and accepted the drink, sipping carefully so as not to disturb the muddy sludge of grounds at the bottom. Miss Bell lowered herself beside me and leaned back on an elbow. For a time, we were silently companionable while I watched some sort of beetle scooping out a home. As the sand moved backward, the beetle’s rear feet caught and threw it farther behind him. His frenzied determination reminded me of Rosie maniacally digging through snow. Now that I was looking, I noticed a whole colony of such beetles; we were surrounded by tiny geysers of sand.
Clementine’s musical laughter floated out on the still air. Miss Bell, for whom desert beetles had long since lost their novelty, stared bale-fully over the rim of her coffee cup at the Churchills. “When Winston was away at the front,” she told me, “Clementine ran soldiers’ canteens that fed a thousand men at a sitting. Raised the money, bought the supplies, hired the staff, ran the whole operation. Now look at her!”
With both small neat hands, Clementine had clasped her dumpy husband’s round arm and laid her forehead against his shoulder, fawning.
“ ‘And the two shall be as one,’ ” Miss Bell intoned. “The one, of course, is always the husband. Why have you never married?” she asked abruptly, but allowed no time for a reply. “I had my chances,” she said, “but … the war, you know.”
Her eyes shifted to Colonel Lawrence, who was sitting on the other side of the encampment with two of the men in uniform. “We were close once, or so I believed. We hardly speak now. Tell me, Miss Shanklin, is the dear boy satisfied with this fortnight’s work? He should be,” she said, not waiting for an answer. “I wouldn’t have thought it, but he has a talent for negotiation. It is something female in him. He despises it, as an intelligent woman would, but uses it nevertheless. You see how he listens and listens?” she asked, lifting her chin toward the three men. “When all the others have talked themselves out, he will suggest just the right words, just the right formula … The art of diplomacy: everyone gets something, no one gets everything.”
The French would get Syria and the Lebanon, she said, to govern and exploit as they wished. In return they had accepted nominal Arab rule in the British protectorates. The oil fields of Mosul would most likely go to the British; that was still to be worked out. Miss Bell herself had drawn the borders that would bring the Kurds, the Su