The Baghdad Railway Club(70)

A Royal Engineer had flung the door wide, and the room emptied in a moment. There was almost laughter from some – what with all the excitement – as we clattered down the shaking iron staircase. Major Findlay seemed to run with his right arm around the shoulder of Miss Bailey. Well, she tolerated it, all right. I thought: She is the one white woman in Baghdad; she must be protected. But of course there was more to it than that.

Major Findlay had not brought away the photograph that had concerned both him and Jarvis. Immediately before quitting the room I had looked at it on the floor‚ and I had seen . . . not Miss Bailey and friends amid the ruins of Babylon, but Miss Bailey in Basrah (I recognised the waterway, the type of the square house with battered veranda behind), and not alone there either. My first thought had been that I was looking at a picture of myself kissing the lady, but I had never done any such thing, not even in my dream. It had been Captain Boyd that I saw. I recognised him from the floor of the Salon de Thé even though his face in the picture had been in profile. It had been not more than two inches away from Miss Bailey’s, who had looked very glad to have it so close.

As our party descended into the dark lobby of the building, with the double doors closed in front of us, it was evident that nobody knew what the next move ought to be, and since there were still gunshots from the square, our lives might depend upon it. But I was still thinking of the photograph, and cursing myself for having left it in the room.





Chapter Fifteen


When we all judged that the Arabs in the square had left off firing, or perhaps somewhat in advance of that moment, Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd opened one of the double doors. The light had begun to fall; one yellow pi-dog wandered through the square. The bells of the Church of the Saviour’s Mother set up a furious clattering – this by way of a belated alarm. The sound only served to point up the emptiness and quietness of Quiet Square.

We bolted into it in chaotic fashion nonetheless. Everybody took off down the different alleyways. I had my own eye on Harriet Bailey and Major Findlay, who both went together towards the narrowest alleyway, heads kept low.

Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd hesitated in the square, a few yards from me. Seconds before, Jarvis had been there with him. I glanced up at the veranda of the room we’d just quit: black smoke tumbled upwards from the shattered windows. Major Findlay whisked Miss Bailey off along the narrow alley, and I saw Shepherd, revolver still in hand, going the same way a moment later. How did things stand between those three? In the meetings of the club, Miss Bailey had seemed keener on Shepherd than Findlay, but that might only have meant that Findlay was really the favoured one, for that sort of game was always a deep one, with many a double bluff involved.

I meant to give chase, but the three had disappeared from the alley by the time I reached the entrance. They might have taken any one of a dozen passageways leading off, and the light was now fading fast. I returned to the middle of the square, where in my uncertainty I made one complete revolution before haring off along the alleyway opposite to the one just mentioned. The direction I’d decided on would take me back to Rose Court. I must put my hands on my own revolver; and I would find Jarvis and quiz him about the meaning of the photograph.

But Jarvis was not at Rose Court, neither was Ahmad, and neither was the Webley. I made a quick search of all rooms. I turned Jarvis’s pack upside down, and found nothing out of the way. There was a picture postcard in there, addressed to Jarvis. The view was of the harbour at Scarborough, and the writer had been mad on exclamation marks. ‘Stan! Billy is back from France! He has bought The Ship Inn with his Blighty Money! He says the loss of three fingers is nothing! He says The Ship will soon be back on an even keel! He says Arras will be the breakthrough on the Western Front! He says you will be wearing your nightshirt all day when you come back, like the Arabs! (But what does Billy know? And we would all now like to hear your own tales, since he is beginning to repeat his. You’ve knocked over the blooming Turks. What’s keeping you?)’

I doubled back rapidly into the labyrinth.

I was looking for Jarvis, Findlay, Shepherd, Miss Bailey – and I wanted to know what had become of the club building. As I ran, I came into a gaslit part of the labyrinth, and it seemed I was seeing things illuminated for a reason – to show me that time itself had gone wrong: a camel reversing down an alleyway, an Arab glimpsed in a doorway, sitting cross-legged on the floor writing with an ink pot balanced on his knee. He seemed to be recording slowly events that were happening fast. The sight of the man distracted me, and I took a wrong turn. I stood in a blank, black alleyway, listening hard, and sure enough I heard a shot. I didn’t know which way to move in order to go away from it or towards. I froze for a moment, then bolted towards an archway that framed a leaning palm. The palm, I saw when I came through the arch, stood alone in a gravelled square made up of three blank walls, and the front – the front only – of a dead-looking red-brick fortification behind which lay a mass of smashed bricks. A man lay along the bottom of this façade, so close up against it that I had not at first noticed him. It was Jarvis, and he was on his back, his face tilted towards the base of the wall, as though inspecting it. But he couldn’t have been inspecting anything, because there was a hole in the back of his head. In his right hand, which lay over his chest, he held the Webley. There was a discolouration on the upper part of his uniform that I turned away from, something thicker, whiter, worse than blood. I heard a footfall on the gravel, turned and Shepherd came pell-mell into the square, gun in hand.