I retreated back into my own quarters, where the light seemed to have redoubled. I sank down on my bed, and contemplated the flies in wonderment. It was their room now, not mine. I lay on the bed watching them, too tired to strip off. A moment later, I heard fast footsteps on the gravel beyond. The door was thrown open, and Ahmad entered. He carried a string bag with food in it, and a brown paper parcel. He stared at me challengingly.
‘Salaam,’ I said at length, since it was obvious that he would not say it. He nodded, not so much to return the greeting as to confirm his victory. He looked with satisfaction at the flies.
‘A really, really poor show,’ he said.
His English was excellent – I had to give him that. You’d think he’d spent years in the saloon bars of London; or the dining rooms, since he didn’t drink. He said something very rapidly, which might very well have been: ‘The other kafir. Where’s he got to?’, in which case I ought to have stood him down on the spot, but that would have taken more energy than I possessed just then, and in any case I couldn’t be sure. He moved rapidly towards me, and leant over me, so as to emphasise his hawkish features.
‘Effendi Jarvis . . .’ and he flashed a look towards the scullery. He knew Jarvis was in there. ‘. . . he is crack-ing?’
He had made a question of it; but he shook his head furiously, as though to erase the word he had spoken. He leant into me again. ‘He is crack-ers.’ This time he nodded in satisfaction, pleased at having found the right expression, but I considered that either would serve, as it happened. Speaking very slowly and carefully, Ahmad said, ‘What do you want to do about it?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘I want to sleep.’
He was unwrapping the parcel – a new flytrap. He walked around to the other side of the bed, and picked up the old one. ‘This’, he said, holding it up, ‘bust.’ He put the new one down, and wound it up. He leant over to me again (as the representative of the imperial power, I really ought to have been the one standing up), saying in an under-breath, ‘In night . . . he . . . really big racket. He . . .’
And with his mouth six inches from my ear, he let out a fearful scream.
‘Out!’ I said, badly shaken up. ‘Get out! I’m going to sleep.’
And presently – if only for a very short while – I actually did.
Chapter Twelve
‘Jarvis,’ I said, ‘you’ve a bowl of meat on the floor in your room.’
‘Yes‚ sir, it shouldn’t be there. It’s for the dogs.’
‘What dogs?’
‘The pi-dogs that are all over town sir. It’s short for pariah, which is an Indian word meaning “outsider”.’
‘And you feed them?’
‘We’re British‚ sir; we can’t just let all the dogs die.’
Giving that rum observation the go-by, I said, ‘Now . . . You were in the show at Kut . . .’
‘The battle, sir – the first one. Not the siege, when the Turks came back at us. I was out of it by then.’
He took a pull on his beer. I was in for the whole story, I knew. It was four o’clock on the day after my return from Samarrah, and Jarvis and I sat under the palms in the rose garden. I had decided to get on terms with the man, so I’d asked what had been agitating him, and he had told me, ‘This place, sir. Also what happened to Captain Boyd – I can’t stand not knowing. Apart from that, it’s memories, sir – and not of the best.’
As to Boyd, we had resolved to visit his former quarters and speak to his Arab servant in company with Ahmad, who would translate. Meanwhile, I was in for the memories.
‘September 1915, sir,’ said Jarvis, ‘and we were steaming up the Tigris. General Townshend’s Regatta, it was called. Barges lashed port and starboard of the steamers. I was on a barge, sir, and I knew it was a bad look-out. Every morning when the sun was full up, the captain of the steamer would call out the temperature – a hundred and seventeen degrees . . . a hundred and eighteen degrees. I didn’t care for that man at all, sir. It was just as though he was in league with the sun. There’d be Arabs on the bank sir, fishing from smashed-up jetties, and dressed in rags, but they were laughing at us. Well, they could see the field ambulances driving up the bank alongside us, so they knew we were for it.
‘We came up to the camp at a spot called Ah Gharbi. Eleven thousand men – only there were tents for twice that number.’
I was meant to ask why, so I did.
‘Put the wind up Johnny Turk, sir. That was General Townshend for you. He had the reputation for being tactically brilliant.’