Arabesque by Geoffrey Household

Author:Geoffrey Household [Household, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0729-0
Publisher: Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller

Chapter Ten

Burnt Offering

Rain, week after week, danced upon the tarmac of the ancient highway that ran from camp to melancholy camp along the Syrian shore. The red mud of Lebanon, the sands of Palestine, choked the culverts and sucked at the wounds of the road where the wheels and tracks of divisions, relieving one another between Tobruk and the Euphrates, had worn away the level and lovely route of peace. The men, huddled in their gas capes, ploughing through the mud under the olive trees, cursing the water that found its way through infinitesimal meandering into petrol cans and pumps, longed for the cleanliness of the desert. Then came the snow, lying deep upon Jerusalem and the hills, even weighing down for a day the great leaves of the banana groves until it splashed on to the semitropical sand of Beirut Bay.

Armande’s lonely mood harmonised with, indeed was in part created by, that of the great garrison of the Middle East. She was doubly an alien, being a woman on sufferance among these soldiers who themselves were utterly alien to their surroundings. In her work there was neither gaiety nor excitement; nor, after the bitter use that had been made of her, did she seek either. She was checking stores in two languages. The fact that some of the stores were confidential made the job no more interesting. She was checking stores, and probably would continue to check until the war ended.

Communication with home was worse than ever. For Armande there was little comfort in the exchange of letters with her husband. Letters from England answered those that she herself had written four months earlier. Her own words were lost in the passing of time. She had forgotten what on earth the correspondent was replying to, so that the response was either stale or meaningless. Much of marriage, she now thought, depended on the little daily intimacies; those lost, a husband and wife had no live subjects to talk about in letters.

What, she wondered, had really happened to the great lovers of fiction and history when they were years absent from one another? Surely their longing must have been so desperate that longing alone created a bond? Each, deprived of half a soul, lived in darkness, and of the darkness wrote. Longing she had, but it was for the life she had lost—not so much for John as for John coming home from the office, John opposite to her at the dinner table, John fussing about the oddness of her friends. Longing for John as a lover—but of that she did not think. It was inconvenient, difficult and led to disloyalty of thought. Observing the emotional follies of these exiled men and women with no conventional outlet for their capacity to love, she could not believe that she had a passionate temperament, or that hers was a passionate marriage.

Her mother’s letters she disliked; they were too full of patriotism and complaint. The hotel seemed to have become an expensive rest home for Free French, and Maman exulted over her dear boys and her profits in successive sentences.

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