Dreamers of the Day (11 page)

Well, not entirely without.

Built like a bull. Great strength in the shoulders and chest.
Karl’s description of Lawrence seemed more a self-portrait…

“Ah, vain delusion!” wrote the poet. “The fancy that flits before my mind is not the truth.”

There’s no fool like an old fool,
Mumma sneered.

Pay no attention!
Mildred advised.
She’s just jealous.

“What do you think, Rosie?” I asked as she chewed meditatively on her toes. Receiving no clear reply, I answered for her. “You think he’s a nice man who feeds you sausage, don’t you!”

And for the moment, that was good enough for me.

I was awakened in the full heat of late afternoon by the sound of knuckles rapping on wood. Convinced now that the room was hers to defend, Rosie hurtled off the bed, barking maniacally until I could make myself decent, pick her up, and open the door.

It was Karl. Merry eyes averted, he murmured apologies for interrupting my nap and explained that he’d overheard the desk clerk’s instructions to deliver a message immediately and wait for an answer.

Blinking and benumbed by interrupted sleep, I traded Rosie for the loosely folded note Karl offered on a silver salver as though he were the hotel bellhop. “I took the liberty,” he admitted and waited, smiling broadly, for my reaction.

The handwriting was small, upright, and worth no better than a C for penmanship.
“Miss Shanklin: Dinner party this evening. The Semiramis, 8
P.M.
Short notice, but may I send a taxi for you? TEL”

Colonel Lawrence had by that time completely slipped my mind, but he had not forgotten about me. I looked at Karl, astonished, then abashed. “Oh, no, I—I couldn’t possibly.”

“Agnes, why not?” Karl cried quietly, coming inside and pulling the door closed behind him. It seemed so natural—not forward or frightening. It was the simple act of one who wished a private word with a friend. Perhaps you, too, have met a stranger with whom each hour is so open and so enjoyable that you feel you have always known each other?

Anyway, Karl sat down on the slipper chair in the corner of my room and lifted Rosie onto his lap. “Agnes,” he said, face serious and hilarious at once, “the Uncrowned King of Arabia invites you to dinner and you will refuse him? Tell me why, please. This, I wish to understand.”

Bit by bit, Karl pulled the story from me. I was trying to make a comedy of my excruciating experience at the entrance of the Semiramis when Karl raised a hand to stop me. “Winston Darling?” He looked confused and then delighted. “As in the Barrie play of
Peter Pan
? Like Wendy’s father, yes? Mr. Darling? Agnes, you are adorable!” he declared, then continued with specious formality: “My dear Miss Shanklin, if I am not mistaken, the gentleman’s surname is Churchill, not Darling. You really must tell me what you think of him when you meet him. I am not inclined in his favor, but I will trust your judgment.”

For my part, I trusted Karl’s own goodwill toward me, and my growing confidence in this friendship was confirmed when I got to the part about Gertrude Bell and her obnoxious remark about my clothing.

“Ah, Miss Bell,” Karl said with a roll of his eyes. “Immensely knowledgeable but not beloved, I may say to you. She must make everyone aware immediately that she is a person of importance—telling you who she knows and where she has traveled and what she has done. She believes herself the equal of any man on earth, saving her father. No doubt she is more capable than most. She can often bring men round to her way of thinking, but it must annoy her to work always through her inferiors. As for other women, well…You are distressing reminders that she herself is female. And now that all women are claiming the freedom she took for herself many years ago, she is not so special, do you see?”

Karl looked into the middle distance, considering the circumstances of our encounter. “Miss Bell used to travel like a queen—her caravans had a cook, muleteers, servants. Twenty camels. A bathtub for her tent! Wedgwood china and silver cutlery for her meals. In those days she was quite stylish—Paris shops would send crates of clothing to her tents in the sand.” His merry eyes met mine. “Perhaps,” he said with a wicked grin, “when she saw you, she was dismayed to realize that she has fallen rather behind times?”

Oh, Miss Shanklin, he really is a living doll,
said Mildred, and I admit I found Karl’s suggestion deeply satisfying.

“That said,” he continued more soberly, “the entire female population of the Middle East is a millennium behind the times. Dress rules for Muslim women are quite strict. They don’t apply to infidels, but it wouldn’t go amiss if you were to cover up a bit while in public. A matter of courtesy, if you like. However, at a dinner for Europeans? You may be as fashionable as you like! Miss Bell may not even be attending, but if she is?” His hands spread and his brows rose in a theatrical display of guilelessness. “After such a catty remark, it would be fair play to show her up a bit, don’t you think?”

The ivory silk charmeuse,
Mildred whispered. I turned to the wardrobe and pulled the dress out. “With pearls?” I asked.

A long, slow smile bloomed on Karl’s face. “Perfect. It’s settled. You will go to dinner with Lawrence and I’ll take care of Rosie, and you will tell me all about it when you get back!”

It was a quarter of nine before my cab arrived at the Semiramis that evening. Colonel Lawrence was waiting for me at the hotel’s taxi stand, propped against a low stone wall with arms folded over his chest. He had on the same badly fitted brown suit he’d worn the day before. Oh, my, I thought, am I completely overdressed or is that the only suit he has?

He leaned in to pay the driver and held my door open as I climbed out. We could clearly hear the chant of
“Ah-bah sure-shill! Ah-bah sure-shill!”
a few blocks away.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” I said. “The police have roped off the road down at the corner. There’s some kind of demonstration.”

“Egyptian nationalists,” Lawrence said. “Allenby keeps smashing their uprisings, but everyone blames Winston for the bloodshed.” He took up the chant and translated it. “
À bas
Churchill: Down with Churchill.”

“
À bas?
But that’s French, isn’t it?”

“Ever since Napoleon was here, it’s been traditional to riot in French. Where is your little dog?”

When I said I’d made arrangements for her at the Continental, Lawrence seemed disappointed. He’d been prepared to do battle on Rosie’s behalf, he told me, and produced a bad-boy giggle.

“Brace yourself,” he advised then, cryptically.

He stood aside as I approached the exalted precinct of the Semiramis lobby, grinning when I stopped dead, immobilized by a quarryful of marble, mines of gold leaf, forests of precious woods. The Continental had seemed extravagantly appointed to me, but this! This was—

“Enough to turn you Bolshevik?” Colonel Lawrence supplied, reading my expression.

“Ghastly,” I agreed.

He touched my elbow briefly to get me moving again. “The dining room’s worse,” he warned and a good thing, too, or I’d have been stupefied by the display.

Just beyond tall double doors we could see a dozen round tables. Set for eight, each was crowded with extravagantly gilded porcelain surrounded by a myriad of crystal stemware and enough silver to supply the U.S. Mint with a decade’s worth of dimes. Filled to capacity by close to a hundred guests, the room was vivid with flowers and patterned silk and beaded bags. Black tuxedo jackets and red dress uniforms contrasted dramatically with white linen tablecloths. Champagne fizzed and sparkled within candlelit cut glass. Cigarettes in ebony or tortoiseshell holders dipped and waved. Now and then, shrills of feminine laughter rang out above the manly buzz of conversation.

The entry to that Aladdin’s Cave was guarded by a gentleman who stood well over six feet tall and had the physique and demeanor of a prizefighter who has yet to lose a bout. Some of my students’ fathers were more frightening, but none of them was more imposing. He and Lawrence exchanged a few words before I was introduced to the colossus. Naturally, I offered my name and waited to hear this gentleman’s in return. He seemed surprised and gratified that anyone would bother and said, “Detective Sergeant Thompson, miss.”

I don’t know what came over me. Certainly I had taken an instant dislike to the ostentation of the Semiramis and its guests, whereas Thompson seemed one of my own kind—outranked and out of place amid that dazzling assembly. Perhaps—with Karl’s encouragement—I was simply feeling confidently well dressed, and that let me imagine what Mildred might say, although with better diction. “Nice to meet you, Sergeant,” I said brightly. “Have they got you here to keep the riffraff out of the party or to guard the silver?”

He stifled a laugh. “Bit of both, miss.” And then he turned his attention to the next pair of glittering party guests, arriving even later than Lawrence and I had.

“Thompson is Scotland Yard. Churchill’s bodyguard,” Lawrence informed me quietly as we entered the dining room. “You’re not supposed to notice him.”

“He’s rather difficult to overlook,” I pointed out, smiling over my shoulder at the policeman.

The colonel gave a little giggle, for Thompson had indeed made him look half-grown by comparison. In my heels, even I was taller than Lawrence but, as we moved through the throngs of ramrod-straight soldiers and their willowy ladies, I realized that Lawrence was deliberately making himself look worse. Slouching and shoving his hands into the pockets of his cheap brown suit like a snippy schoolboy was a sort of reverse snobbery, I think: a brazen if silent disparagement of the occasion and the company.

“Gerty!” he cried suddenly, spotting Miss Bell. “You two’ve met,” he said with a significant stare, which seemed to remind that lady that she’d been put on notice to play nicely with the new girl.

Miss Bell, tall and sharp-jointed, was covered from neck to ankle in gauzy lace and mushroom-colored silk. My sleek, defiant dress received a cool appraisal, but I held my head up and met her gaze, just as she’d instructed. She nodded, acknowledging this, and I took the opportunity to thank her for sending the lovely dinner to my room the night before. She appeared puzzled. Both of us turned toward Lawrence.

He coughed and found somewhere else to look.

“Dear boy! How very diplomatic,” Miss Bell remarked dryly. “And yet, you do find a way to get credit in the end, don’t you.”

Before Lawrence could respond, she introduced me to the gentleman on her right: “Lieutenant Colonel Arnold Wilson, until recently His Majesty’s high commissioner in Mesopotamia,” Miss Bell informed me. “We worked together in Baghdad.”

In his late thirties, this person matched Miss Bell’s own considerable height and had an equally commanding gaze, but seemed annoyed by the way she had characterized him. There was something muttered about “Persia, these days,” and oil, and then their interrupted conversation resumed without us.

I whispered to Colonel Lawrence as we moved on, “Those two don’t like each other much, do they.”

“It’s been a long day, and they’ve spent it arguing. Gert believes that no people will enjoy being governed very long by another. She’s for indirect rule in our Middle Eastern protectorates. Wilson is of the firm opinion that—apart from a few troublemakers—His Majesty’s colonial subjects desire nothing better than to be granted material and moral progress under the tutelage of Great Britain.”

I snorted, by way of comment. It was a bad habit, the unattractiveness of which Mumma often noted, but Lawrence smiled with enigmatic satisfaction. “I thought an American might be amused.”

“Americans,” I recalled, “were notorious colonial troublemakers.”

“As the Arabs promise to be,” Lawrence said quietly. “A considerable portion of Mesopotamia rose against Wilson’s administration last summer.” Lifting himself on tiptoe to see over and around the shoulders of the crowd, he scanned the room while remarking, “Cost His Majesty’s Government eighteen million pounds to put the rebellion down. The Exchequer has been hemorrhaging money onto the sand ever since. Ah. There’s Winston, who’s angling for chancellor and earnestly desires there be something left in the Exchequer to preside over when he gets the job.”

Lawrence introduced me to His Majesty’s secretary of state for air and for the colonies, and I received a pleasant welcome from the man I’d originally thought was “Winston Darling.” Thickset and square, with a stooping head and hooded eyes, Mr. Churchill was not yet the bulldog he would come to resemble, but all the signs were there, even in 1921. He, in turn, introduced me to his wife, Clementine, a vivacious woman in her mid-thirties, visibly in love with the husband who was perhaps a decade her senior.

Other introductions followed, the names and titles coming at me so quickly I caught only a few of them. There was an elderly couple named Cox who were some sort of nobility, I gathered. Was I to call them Lord and Lady in direct address or some other variation on that imperial theme? The honorifics stuck in my democratic throat. “How nice to meet you both,” I said warmly and let it go at that.

Just then a uniformed gentleman pulled Lawrence aside. I was immediately taken up by a stylish young woman whose name I’d already forgotten. She was holding what may not have been her very first cocktail of the evening and made a point of exclaiming over my dress.

“How lovely! And so becoming!” I was told in a voice meant to be overheard by Miss Bell. “Wherever did you get it? Cleveland? Oh, but it positively screams Paris!”

I returned her compliment, for she was wearing a brilliant green-and-gold gown cut sleeveless and low. Breathlessly up-to-the-moment. She moved to stand at my side so that we could both observe Miss Bell, layered in elaborate Edwardian drapery and holding forth among the gentlemen.

“I heard what the dreaded Gertrude said to you,” the young woman whispered. “You’re not the first, believe me. She made the very same remark to me when my husband and I arrived in Baghdad last year. Horrible old thing…”