Should I need to send a wire, he had stressed, it was imperative I did so from the telegraph office of the Residency, since the strategic and diplomatic communications were sent from there rather than from the telegraph office of the Hotel. The men at the Residency were more trusted, in other words. To make use of that office, a fellow needed a document of authorisation, and I had one of these in the same envelope as the code. Most of the words on this chit were typewritten. The important ones, however, were scrawled in a shockingly bad hand that I could not read. It began, ‘For the Attention of’, and then I couldn’t make out who it was for the attention of. Then it said, ‘Captain J. H. Stringer is hereby authorised to despatch and receive telegraphic communications of level . . .’ and the level I couldn’t make out either. It was signed by an unreadable personage (it might have been ‘Manners’) of ‘Department F, War Office’.
I approached the gates of the British Residency, which was another palace on the river, this one set around a quadrangle.
‘It’s no go, sir,’ said the sentry, when I explained my business, showing all necessary credentials.
‘You mean you won’t let me in, Corporal?’
‘By all means go in, sir. You’ll find they’re serving tea and cakes on the veranda. Only, the telegraphic office is shut.’
‘What is it, Corporal? Half-day closing?’
‘Some wires are down, sir.’
‘Cut by the natives?’
‘Ten-to-one on, sir. The telegraph office in the Hotel ought to be operating, sir. Why not try there?’
I shook my head. ‘That’s out,’ I said. ‘I must send to . . .’
I looked through the gates and saw, in the quadrangle of the Residency, the man with the cine camera – bloody Wallace King. He stood by the side of the thing, for now he had an assistant to turn the handle, and the lens pointed directly at me. I turned on my heel, and the sentry called after me, ‘Come back tomorrow, sir! Be all fixed up by then!’
In the labyrinth once more, I reflected that Wallace King and his camera would be the death of me. The man was a liability. But at least this reverse put off the question of whether I should send ‘Gruff’ or ‘Relax’, the two options I’d been revolving.
I found I was wandering amid displays of dates, pastries, biscuits, breads. A sort of roof began to close over my head: wooden beams running between the houses with rushes laid over. Four sepoys came bearing down on me from the opposite direction, the second patrol I’d seen in ten minutes. This would be on account of the cut wires and – perhaps – the discovery of Boyd. I turned two more corners, and broke free of the labyrinth, finding myself walking towards the bridge of boats. Two army vans crawled across it, forcing the Arab river-watchers hard up against the rope barriers on either side . . . And the call to prayer was once more rising up from all over the town. Many Arabs were coming towards me along the river bank road, and I had a feeling of helplessness. I was outnumbered. But they began diverting to the right, towards a steeply rising terrace fringed by palms. It rose up towards a glittering mosque.
I came to a brick and timber quay: a hurly-burly of loading, men and animals. Even the gulls seemed to say ‘Allah! Allah!’ A hot wind rose, sweeping dust off the top of a crumbling yellow brick wall that stood over the road from the quay. It enclosed a garden of palms, orange, lemon and other trees. In this garden – rising up from the river – a horse rider came and went between the trees, and I moved closer to the wall, trying to make sure of what seemed on the face of it an impossibility. The rider was a woman – a white woman. She wore jodhpurs, a white shirt, and some species of bowler hat. It was a funny sort of hat, but then everybody in this town wore a funny sort of hat, and she carried hers off particularly well. There was in general a trimness about her, and this taken together with the command of the horse . . . it all added up to a person I would like to have seen at closer quarters. But as I moved towards the wall in the fading light, an urgency came into the world, so that the wind rose, the prayer-call reached higher notes, the horse’s canter became a gallop, and it was up through the trees, clear of them, over a stretch of gravelled track by flower beds, and gone from sight through the gate of a castellated wall.
I took from my pocket the map Jarvis had supplied. He’d taken a good deal of trouble over it. Some of the highlights of the eastern bank were marked: The Hotel GB, The Residency, Big Bizarre. (By which I took Jarvis to mean ‘Bazaar’.) Some streets were drawn in, and the names given them by the Tommies were set down: Dog-Pack Square, Straight Street, Cemetry View (as Jarvis had it), Clean Street, and here number 11 – the intended destination of Stevens – was marked although no reason given as to why. The park I now faced was also marked. With my back to the river, I looked at it. To the right of it lay streets with names that seemed to take their cues from the park: Rose Lane, Jasmine Lane, Lemon Tree Grove, and the address I’d been allocated, Rose Court. Beyond the park was the Cavalry Barracks, then the North Gate of the wall, which was the principal one. If Turks came back, they’d come by that way.