Dreamers of the Day (12 page)

Having found this ally, I was hoping to be seated at the children’s table with her, but Colonel Lawrence reappeared at my side and steered me toward a damask-covered expanse with the Churchills and the Coxes, Miss Bell and Colonel Wilson.

“Cleveland,” Wilson noted, having heard the drunken girl’s cry. “Standard Oil, of course. And do you know Mr. Rockefeller?”

“Colonel Wilson served in Mesopotamia until recently,” Lady Cox informed me with a condescending pat. “He is with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company now.”

My reply was delayed by the arrival of an army of Egyptian waiters. Wearing spotless white gloves and starched linen jackets, they distributed the first of what would become a farcical number of courses. I hoped everyone would forget that I’d been asked a question, but the table remained attentive, so I answered, “Mr. Rockefeller and I do not ordinarily move in the same circles, Colonel Wilson, although I did work near a settlement house named for his daughter. I was a teacher until recently. I’m here on holiday.”

“How nice for you,” Mrs. Churchill said after an awkward pause that conveyed what everyone was thinking:
Why on earth has Lawrence invited a nonentity like her to the table? Is this some sort of prank?

“Miss Shanklin’s sister was my hostess in Jebail when I was starting my thesis on crusader military architecture,” Lawrence told them.

I’d spent enough time with schoolboys to find his tone suspiciously innocent, but everyone else seemed happy with his explanation. Parallel conversations quickly developed. With a teacher at the table, Mrs. Churchill took the opportunity to talk about her children, the latest of whom was a daughter named Marigold, of all things. No, the children were not traveling with their parents, my query was answered. The Churchills had been separated a great deal during the war. This trip to Cairo was a chance for the couple to enjoy some time together, a sort of second honeymoon.

Over and around Mrs. Churchill’s praise for the nanny who was taking care of her younger children while she traveled, snatches of the conversation across the table reached me. Colonel Wilson, Mr. Churchill, and Miss Bell were all engrossed in the topic of oil and the administration of the lands it lay beneath. Lord Cox merely harrumphed occasionally, as though dismissive of everything he heard. He reminded me of the mummies at the Egyptian Museum: fleshless, lipless, rigid. On my right, Colonel Lawrence grinned, taking it all in and occasionally tossing out an incisive remark, rarely more than a few words long. Happily left out of that discussion, I leaned toward Lawrence to ask, “Were you by chance a middle child, Colonel Lawrence?”

“Temporarily,” he whispered. “I was the second of five brothers, and you’re right: one had to be quick to slip a word in.”

“What you must understand, Wilson, is that the British people are sick of war,” Mr. Churchill rumbled in a slightly slurred baritone. “We simply cannot sustain an expenditure of thirty millions a year to control the place.”

“You know as well as anyone, Winston: the Royal Navy needs oil,” Colonel Wilson replied. “There’s every indication that Mesopotamia has fields as productive as Persia—”

“The cost is all out of proportion to whatever we can expect to reap from that wilderness. If we pull the troops back, Trenchard assures me that we can keep order with airpower.”

“Nonsense,” Wilson snapped. “We need more troops on the ground, not fewer.”

“And with Marigold ill with influenza, the whole experience was positively nightmarish!” Mrs. Churchill was saying.

I tried to look interested and sympathetic, but I was distracted by a rising tension between Miss Bell and Colonel Wilson. They sat side by side, staring straight ahead, but now addressed their remarks to each other. Mrs. Churchill and Lady Cox began to discuss the scandalous state of “checkers.” When I looked lost, Lawrence told me in a low voice that they were speaking not of the board game but of the prime minister’s official residence. “Chequers was built in the reign of Henry II for his clerk of the Exchequer. Hence the name,” he said. The home was last remodeled in 1580. I gathered it was in need of repair.

“Arnold,” Miss Bell was telling Colonel Wilson, “when we have made Mesopotamia a model state, there won’t be an Arab in Syria or Palestine who won’t want to be part of it, but they will never accept direct rule. You saw that last year.”

“Gertrude,” he countered, “you cannot simply draw a line around Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra and declare everything inside it a nation! It won’t matter whom you use as the figurehead.”

“Well, of course,” Miss Bell said airily, “we’ll have to take Kurdish sentiments into account.”

“I rather like our Gertrude’s idea,” Mr. Churchill declared. “Saves the expense of administration in triplicate.”

“It will cost more in the long run,” Colonel Wilson insisted. “What do you propose to do about the Shi’a in Karbala and Najaf? The level of religious bigotry in those regions is staggering! The Persian clergy spends half its time fostering hatred—”

“And what age of child do you teach, Miss Shanklin?” Mrs. Churchill asked, trying to draw me back into the ladies’ conversation.

“Fifth grade,” I said. “That would be ten-year-olds, for the most part.”

“Tikrit!” Colonel Wilson cried. “Don’t talk to me about Tikrit—that city is home to the most brutal, boorish, savage—”

“Ten? Why, that’s just my Randolph’s age,” Mrs. Churchill said, raising her voice slightly as Colonel Wilson’s grew louder.

“You must miss him very much,” I offered, hoping to send her off on a maternal soliloquy so I could hear what Miss Bell would say in reply.

“I simply do not understand that child,” Mrs. Churchill confessed. “His sister Diana is high-spirited, but Randolph!” She lifted her eyes heavenward, and I saw the look of exasperated incomprehension that my own mother so often wore in my childhood.

Half-listening to Mrs. Churchill’s complaints about her son, I thought it obvious that the boy was doing everything he could think of to get his peripatetic parents to stay home for a change and pay some attention to him. With no children of my own, I had no right to voice an opinion, so I confined myself to mute courtesy during her despairing account of the governesses her son had driven away with a dismaying series of insurrections.

“Yes, like the one last summer,” said her husband. I thought he was referring to his young son’s rebellion, but Mr. Churchill went on, “And not just in Mesopotamia. We’ll be lucky to hold off the Bolsheviks in Persia—there’s no shifting them from Russia now. There’s trouble in Ireland, and India. And Egypt! And Palestine! And why our esteemed prime minister has decided to back the Greeks against the Turks in Cyprus simply passeth understanding.”

To my astonishment, the cadaverous Lord Cox turned unblinking eyes toward me and growled, “We have your President Wilson to thank for these rebellions. All that talk about the end of colonial rule—”

“The Great Promiser,” Mr. Churchill sighed. “Freedom and democracy for all!”

“Arab nationalism is a fraud. Their loyalty is to their tribe,” Lord Cox declared, glaring at me. “They have no concept of
democracy,
” he said, making the word sound as though it were a synonym for “turd.” “They believe freedom is an object that can be delivered, like a parcel that arrives in the post.”

“They must surely know what freedom isn’t,” I said. “It isn’t having British troops all over their land. It isn’t taxation without representation.”

At the sound of that ringing phrase, Miss Bell informed me tartly that the taxes we Americans had protested were incurred when the Plymouth colonists started a war with the Wampanoag and wiped out the buffer tribes that had shielded them from the Iroquois Confederacy. “You needed troops and we taxed you to pay for them,” she told me, and then addressed the table: “Our American cousins…often ignorant, but never without opinions.”

“Well, perhaps if you’d asked our opinion about the troops and the taxes, you might have avoided a war,” I replied. Lawrence giggled happily, and thus encouraged, I went on, even though the others began to look uncomfortable. “It appears to me that Britain proposes to follow American footsteps in the Philippines,” I said, “and I don’t recommend it. We helped the Filipinos overthrow the Spanish, but did we allow them then to choose their own form of government? No! We annexed the islands. We installed a colonial administrator, and for the next fourteen years, we had one hundred and twenty thousand American troops there! Four thousand of our boys were killed—fighting the very same guerrillas we encouraged to rebel against the Spanish. Who knows how many natives died? Is that what you want in the Middle East?”

“Goodness, you are quite well informed, Miss Shanklin,” said Mrs. Churchill, her voice sweet. “And what do you think of your new president? Mr. Harding is from Ohio, I understand. That’s near Cleveland, isn’t it?”

“I passed through Cleveland on the way to Niagara Falls from Chicago,” said Miss Bell. “Dreadful. Did you vote for Harding?” she asked me, her brows arched. “Many women did, of course. Handsome man, if vacuous. So much for suffrage.”

“‘O! Why did God, Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven with Spirits masculine, create at last this novelty on Earth, this fair defect of Nature?’” Mr. Churchill declaimed, his fork stirring the air. “Be careful, Miss Shanklin. Our Gertrude has as low an opinion of her sex as the immortal Milton. She lent her considerable energies to the Anti-Suffrage League when she was at home before the war.”

I was, I must tell you, stunned speechless. Karl had warned me that Miss Bell was hardly a believer in female solidarity, but to oppose votes for women actively? Well, the shock must have shown on my face.

“The role of women in society is fundamentally different from that of men,” Miss Bell said firmly. “They have no business meddling in the affairs of state—”

“Never stopped you, Gert,” Colonel Lawrence remarked, to general amusement.

“But then, I am hardly representative, am I, dear boy? The intelligence and experience of a few do not argue for giving the vote to masses of illiterate and exhausted women surrounded by screaming toddlers and infants wailing for milk.”

“Perhaps if they had the vote,” I said, “they could choose representatives who’d protect their interests. What they need is education—”

“Spoken like a teacher,” Lawrence said.

“I, for one, welcome the opportunity to vote,” Mrs. Churchill said, taking my side.

“But surely you’re not old enough, my dear,” said her husband.

“Women must be over thirty to vote in England,” the elderly Lady Cox informed me with another pat.

“That alone will keep most of them from the ballot box until they’re fifty,” Miss Bell added.

“I am quite old enough to vote, thank you,” said Mrs. Churchill primly, “and not too vain to admit it.”

“Clementine, don’t tell me you were a suffragette!” Lady Cox cried.

“Heavens, no! I supported votes for women, but not like that awful Mrs. Pankhurst and the harridans who followed her,” said Mrs. Churchill bitterly. “One of those women tried to push Winston in front of a train, Miss Shanklin. They threatened to kidnap our children! We had to hire armed guards.”

“Well, I suppose they felt forced to such extremes,” I said recklessly. “In America, women asked courteously for the vote for sixty years. We collected hundreds of thousands of signatures and rolled up miles of petitions. We met with politicians again and again. They reneged on every promise—and when we howled at their lies, they told us we were too emotional to vote!” I said, infuriated by the memory. “Well! When six decades of nice manners fail to produce a result, you have to become a nuisance or you’ll never get justice.”

“I doubt the Arabs will wait sixty years before becoming a nuisance,” said Colonel Lawrence softly. “I’m curious, Miss Shanklin. The Marquis de Lafayette. Generals Kosciuszko and Pulaski…they all came from Europe to aid the American colonists’ fight for independence from the British Empire. What do you suppose would have happened if they’d proposed afterward to divide North America between France and Poland?”

The notion was startling. I thought a moment, imagining the betrayal we’d have felt if such heroes had turned on us after the Revolution. “We certainly wouldn’t have named cities and parks after them,” I said. “After all, if British rule was obnoxious to us—”

“With a shared language, shared laws, centuries of shared history,” Lawrence murmured.

“—we wouldn’t have accepted rule by a different colonial power. We’d have fought Poland and France just as the Filipinos fought us. Five years, fifteen…we’d never give up! Never, never, never.”

Across the room, someone finished telling a joke and laughter erupted, but a withering quiet had settled around our table. Miss Bell sat still, her hands in her lap, shrewd eyes on Lawrence, who grinned gnomishly back. The Cox corpse tossed a linen napkin onto the table in disgust, and Colonel Wilson’s face was stiff.

Well, Agnes,
Mumma said,
I think you’ve had quite enough to say for one evening.

Evidently Mrs. Churchill agreed. For the rest of the meal, she gracefully steered the talk toward topics unlikely to elicit American commentary. Decisively exiled from polite conversation, I finished my meal in silence, trying not to blush. I meant what I’d said, of course, and I’d only been answering Lawrence’s question. Even so, dessert came as a relief. Grateful for a sign that the evening was nearly over, I spooned at something custardy, only vaguely aware of the others until Colonel Wilson leaned over the table and addressed Colonel Lawrence with such venom that we all took notice, one by one, around the room.

“You were in Basra for two weeks! And on the basis of that vast experience, you presumed to lecture those who’ve given years to the region!” Wilson said, punctuating his accusations with a blunt index finger that thumped the table again and again. “You did immense harm to Great Britain at Versailles. Our difficulties with the French in Syria I lay at your doorstep.”

Astonished, I shifted in my seat to look at Lawrence, and so did everyone else in the room. He was smiling slightly, the corners of his wide mouth turned up in a curious, predatory curve, while he watched Wilson with lazy, heavy-lidded eyes. The snickering schoolboy, the Oxford scholar, the teasing gadfly—all these had disappeared; in their flashing, prismatic place was a strong, slim figure of intensely male beauty.