The Towers of Trebizond Page 24

  I said, "I dare say you are being watched, only more tactfully than before. I should think your telephone is certainly tapped."

  Aunt Dot agreed that this was probably the case: she did not seem to mind.

  "I have been thinking what I can say on it to interest them. I feel I do owe them that, after all I said to interest the Russians. You've no idea how easy it is to interest foreigners, it takes no effort whatever, only a little mild invention. But now what I want, after these months of excitement, is a little quiet home life. When I get my mare out of quarantine, I must start training her in English ways. She isn't used to lanes and roads, only to steppes and mountains. Do you think I ought to have the camel here, and let them get used to each other? But I suppose they would both bite and kick. Animals have such bad tempers. Actually, the mare and the camel are both a little mad. Halide says so many animals are, not at all only bulls. They are mental from birth, she says, and every so often go quite round the bend. And of course the way they are brought up makes them worse; most come from broken homes; their fathers take no notice of them as a rule, and we often take them from their mothers too young, and treat them most oddly, and of course they feel deprived and frustrated and their minds and tempers and nerves give way, not that their minds and tempers are ever strong at the best, they're so neurotic."

  I told her how Suliman's mind and temper had been improved by religion and moral teaching, but she did not think this would do much for the camel or the mare, who were less assimilative.

  "How very nice," she added, "it will be to go to church again. That is one thing that travel teaches one—there is really no other service so good as our own High Mass. I keep telling the B.B.C. Religious Department that if they televised it every Sunday they would make hundreds of converts, but they don't take much notice, though they often televise the Roman one, which most viewers don't understand because it's Latin, you know how unlettered they are, while all the time and every Sunday in half our London churches we have this superb service, with everything people like, beautiful singing, clouds of incense, priests in fine vestments moving about in the most impressive way, the action of the Mass, a magnificent liturgy, and all in English but for the Kyrie and a few oddments, so it really can be followed. Father Hugh thinks it would have a tremendous effect on simple, inexperienced people like televiewers; he thinks they would say, 'I must join the Church, if that's what its services are like.' Mind you, I wouldn't let him take part, he'd put in far too much Latin and worry people. For all he says he isn't, he's a bit of an ultramontane, in practice though not in theory, and we can't have that in the Church of England, we must stay dyed-in-the-wool Anglican. I don't say the B.B.C. doesn't try to be fair, it does provide an equal number of communion services from all the chief denominations, but look at the type of Anglican service they usually have, whether it's sound or television—oh very dignified, cathedral and what not, or some simple middle-of-the-road church, nice of course, but dull not showy, not the kind that impresses and excites and converts. So that the majority think we haven't got High Mass at all, and that they must go to Rome for it. What they mostly get on sound radio is an Anglican monkish office set to music with a sermon thrown in, or else prayers and hymns from some Nonconformist chapel, which I've nothing against if nonconformists like them, it's their affair, but I do complain of the choice of Anglican churches, because that's our affair, and I shall go on complaining. If you ask me, it's a popish plot to reclaim England for Rome."

  I felt sure that aunt Dot would go on complaining. I did not share her anxiety, because I am less bigoted about the Church of England, and anyhow I do not listen to radio services and am not a televiewer, and I am not really a missionary either, as aunt Dot is, so I do not care what other people listen to or view. Though I personally think Anglicanism is the most attractive branch of the Christian Church, its prayers being dignified and beautiful and in fine English, and not abject or sentimentally pious, or hearty and pally and common, or in Latin, and having a theology which is subject to new light and development, and a Mass mainly from pre-Reformation rites, and church ornament and much of its architecture on the whole, though by no means always, in good taste—though I like all this, and could never belong to any other Church (indeed, I only with difficulty, and in part, belong to this one), I see no reason to press it on other people, who may prefer, as they obviously do, to be Roman Catholics or dissenters or agnostics, and seem to get on all right as they are, in fact often much better than I do. So I live and let live, but that is not what aunt Dot does at all, she is a true missionary, and has it in her blood, and I have too, but with me it has not taken so well.

  Next day aunt Dot had a letter from Halide. She wrote a little guardedly, as if she was not quite sure just how far aunt Dot had gone in espionage, but was grudgingly willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. She had married her Moslem man after all, and had reverted to Islam, and not only because of her marriage, for,

  I have come to see, she wrote, that we emancipated Turkish women, if we are to lead our poor countrywomen into freedom, must do this from within. What is the use that I speak to them in villages and tell them I belong to the Church of England? What is that to them, when they belong to the Church of Turkey? What is the use to tell them, as many do, that we, the educated women, have no religious faith at all, when this is to the simple men and women the great sin against Allah? No, we must speak to them as Moslems, we must tell them that our religion and theirs allows these things that they think they may not do, and this way we shall wake them to ambition and to progress, and make their men ashamed to keep them down. There is now a band of educated truly Moslem women, who will go into the backward villages and teach them along these lines. So, my dear Dot, do not come with your Church of England missions, nor Father Pigg, for that is not the way. I can assure you that I am very happy, and determined to atone for my Anglican error and infidelity by serving my country and my faith as best I may. Perhaps you and I may meet again one day, though now it is rather soon that I condone that strange Russian expedition, and what you may have told them about Turkey how can I know? I can only hope that, if the great war breaks out between our enemy and us, they will not find themselves assisted by anything which you and Imam Pigg have told them, but more probably they knew it all before, and could find their way from Trua to Eski-Stamboul better than you. All the same, you should not have gone to Russia, I cannot condone that. But I send you my affection, and the faithful well wishes of a friend. Also to Laurie, and I hope the camel grows better now that it leads a quieter life.

  Your friend,

  Halide Yorum

  I wondered if Halide's Moslem man could, by chance, be that Mr. Yorum to whom I had so often asked the staff of the Yessilyurt Oteli at Trebizond to telephone, and who had at last arrived there, and with whom I had, until he got tired of me, enjoyed more than one drink. Anyhow, the relations between Halide and my family seemed for the time being closed, and I was sorry, so was aunt Dot.

  "Turks," she said, "won't condone, they won't co-exist. And that old-fashioned religion they have will get their women nowhere. I think Halide has made a great mistake. I am disappointed in her. But I shall ask her later to come and stay, so that we can thrash things out, and I can tell her about Russia. She can go to mosque in Oxford, on the camel, to remind her of home. But for the moment I shall leave the camel in the Zoo, and concentrate on training the mare."

  I asked if I could leave Suliman at Troutlands when I was in my flat. I told her how useful he was helping in the garden, sweeping up leaves, pulling up weeds (though here he was a little indiscriminate) and bicycling to the village on errands. Aunt Dot said all right, so long as he didn't get too violent at croquet or paint on the walls without leave or bother Emily in the kitchen or insist on driving the car. She would not, however, take him to church, she thought this a little on the irreverent side, and the vicar and the churchwardens did not care for it either, so Suliman had better be a blue-domer.

  I said
I did not care, so long as he did not take to chapel, which I did not think would suit him. Aunt Dot said that no one from Troutlands had ever done that, so far as she knew. Anyhow Suliman was a born ritualist, and if he was ever to stray from the Anglican church, it would be into a Roman one, and there they would not let him in.

  So aunt Dot settled down to home life again, and got very busy with her Turkey book. I showed her the parts I had done since we parted, and she thought I ought to have put in more about the Black Sea women as compared with the Arab ones in Syria and Jordan and the women of Israel, but I told her that this was her job, and she could now put in the women of Russia as well.

  "And a very fine lot they are," said aunt Dot. "If Halide knew them, she would like them. Idiotically patriotic, of course, but then so is she. Smug, too; they think they are doing things no women have ever done before, and when I told them what our own women do, and did in the war, I am certain the interpreter didn't translate it properly, because they only looked smugger than ever, and quite sorry for me. Of course I can speak a little Russian, but not their kind, and when they looked as if they understood me, the interpreter always chipped in. What I am going specially to enjoy now is walking about the villages talking to every one, and not being followed and watched. You know how absurd I have always thought it to boast about the free world, slaves as we all are, but we certainly do have some freedoms they don't."

  I said, "On the contrary, you will be followed and watched all the time by the local police force and relays of reporters, all hoping that you will get talking to one of your contacts. You and Father Hugh will now always be under observation. Probably I am considered smeared too."

  Aunt Dot said, "Fiddle-de-dee!" and she is the only person I know who utters this cry. (I have known her also to exclaim "Tilly vally!" but this is only when she is a good deal annoyed). She added, "Anyhow, they'll soon get tired of it."

  Chapter 24

  So life ran on again, and it was very pleasant. Through the winter I worked at the book and the illustrations, partly in my flat and partly with aunt Dot. We thought the book was shaping pretty well, and we both rather liked my pictures; particularly aunt Dot liked the ones of the shawled women trudging along behind the men riding, or cowering against the wall hiding their faces, but I preferred those I had done in Trebizond, of the Comnenus palace ruins standing among the little Turkish gardens and hovels in the sunshine, of the slopes of Boz Tepe striped with all the colours of the evening light, of Hagia Sophia with its sculptured west portal, of the fishing boats on the beach, and of the palace as I had seen it after I had drunk the enchanter's potion and fallen half asleep—I had painted the throne-room and the emperor on his throne, the mosaicked floor and the gold-starred ceiling and the painted walls, the crowd of Byzantine courtiers and priests and jugglers, and in one corner the man playing chess with the ape, and the ape I drew from Suliman. I liked that picture, and so did aunt Dot. I told her about the enchanter and his potion, and she said she was not at all surprised, as of course there had always been enchanters in Trebizond. I wished I could meet him again, as I would have liked to get some more of the potion, and I thought I would return one day to Trebizond and look him up, and lay in a good stock of the stuff.

  By Easter, my part of the book was finished, and Vere and I went off for a fortnight to Venice, driving in my car. I left aunt Dot cantering about Oxfordshire on her Caucasian mare, which she had got into good training, so that it no longer bolted like a cannon ball when it met cars, leaping over hedges and galloping for miles, as if pursued by wolves over boundless steppes, bucking and kicking its heels up as if it hoped that aunt Dot would be thrown upside down and would ride on in that position singing, like the Cossacks. Now that it was more British mannered, aunt Dot liked riding it very much; she said it saved a lot of time, taking her about much quicker than the camel did, I told aunt Dot we were going to Venice.

  "Spoilt," she replied, as she combed the mare's long beige mane.

  This was her reaction to most European cities and seaboards. According to her, Rome was spoilt, the Campagna was spoilt, Venice, Florence, the bay of Naples, Capri, Sicily, the whole Italian and French rivieras, most of France and Spain, the best things in Portugal, almost all Britain.

  "I remember it," she would say, if one proposed to visit any city or shore, "forty years ago. Now it's spoilt. If you want somewhere that isn't spoilt yet, you have to go east. Greece, Jugoslavia, Turkey, the islands—they're on the way there, but still attractive. Cyprus is being ruined by us—all those dreadful barracks and pre-fabs round Famagusta, and the hotels on the Troödos, besides what the Cypriots have built round Paphos and all over the place. Rhodes is better. And the smaller islands are still good, though now we have friends living on most of them and running over to call on each other by boat. I never had a more sociable time than staying with Paddy and Joan on Hydra, but I like that. Of course you can't really spoil Venice, because it can't be built on to. But I remember it when there was nothing on the canals but gondolas, none of those horrid steamers and vaporetti. Oh well, go to Venice, you and Vere don't remember the old days. All you people under forty miss a lot of memories. But I dare say you have as good a time. You know I don't approve, but you can send me some picture postcards."

  Aunt Dot had a morbid appetite for these, and what must have been about the largest collection in private hands in the world. I must say picture postcards are nothing like in the same class that once they were, when artists went about Europe painting impressionist views and had them printed on postcards and sold everywhere, and you do not get anything like that now, in fact in the smaller places you are lucky if you find any postcards at all. As aunt Dot would say, the industry is practically spoilt.

  All this about the world being spoilt makes me see it in a kind of green corruption, like over-ripe cheese, glistening in morbid colours and smelling of decay as it moulders to pieces. Of course this is not really what is happening physically, as the spoiling is by raw brashness and ugly drab newness, a kind of rash, spreading and crowding everywhere. I would rather have the greenish putrescence. Vulgar buildings, vulgar music, vulgar pictures, vulgar newspapers, vulgar taste, all raw and brash and ugly, but underneath is the putrescence and the softness and the falling apart like rotten cheese, in which we are the greedy mites, eating away at it all with enjoying relish.

  We set off on Easter Day, and made the Dijon-Mt. Cenis run down France (and France after all is not spoilt except its sea-side), and across Lombardy. We had a night at Verona, and saw Romeo & Juliet, an artificial play to which a ruined Roman theatre does no good, and got to Venice on Thursday. We were met by the gondola of the friend who had lent us his palazzo floor, and the Grand Canal was in festa with music and flags, and when we passed the Piazza it was bannered and glorious for Easter, and a band was playing Verdi. Our gondola took us on to the Rio della Pietà, where was our palazzo, just behind the Schiavoni Riva, and from its balconies we looked west up the Canal to the Salute shining like a great pearl against the sunset.

  It was the best week we had ever had, and there will not be another. I mean by best that it was full of fun and gaiety and beauty and glamour, all the things that Venice can give, and all the things that we could give each other. Vere had wit and brains and prestige; in ten years I had not got used to all that brilliance and delightfulness, nor to the fact of our love. When we were together, peace flowed about us like music, and fun sprang up between us like a shining fountain. We had the gayest week: like Florimel and Olinda in Secret Love, "there were never two so cut out for one another; we both love Singing, Dancing, Treats and Musick . . . we sit and talk, and wrangle, and are friends; when we are together we never hold our tongues; and then we have always a noise of fiddles at our heels, he hunts me as merrily as the Hounds does the Hare; and either this is Love, or I know it not."

  When Venice was the setting for all this, it was like (but of course with important omissions) paradise, where

  . . . they live in such
delight,

  Such pleasure and such play,

  As that to them a thousand years

  Doth seem as yesterday.

  Thy turrets and thy pinnacles

  With carbuncles do shine;

  Thy very streets are paved with gold,

  Surpassing clear and fine.

  Even the gardens and the gallant walks and the sweet and pleasant flowers seemed true that Easter, with massed blossoms on the stalls in every calle, smelling stronger and much sweeter than the canals, and strewing the pavements so that our feet crushed them as we passed.

  There's nectar and ambrosia made,

  There's musk and civet sweet;

  There's many a fair and dainty drug

  Is trodden under feet.

  while

  Quite through the streets with silver sound

  The flood of life doth flow,

  Upon whose banks on every side

  The wood of life doth grow.

  Or, if not woods, carved stone and rust-red brick, and marble steps at which the green water lapped. And look about, and there are marble angels in plenty, and Our Lady singing Magnificat, and St. Ambrose and St. Austin, and old Simeon and Zachary, and Magdalene who hath left her moan (or sometimes not), and all the saints one could wish. Not that I wanted to be reminded of this aspect of Paradise that week; the other aspects were enough.