The Wooden Shepherdess (32 page)

Ludovic glanced at the clock. “Talking about ‘old men,' my Papa's away: why don't you both stop to lunch?” He turned towards Joan: “Do stop: I'm off on a trip to Morocco, and shan't see you or Augustine again for a while—unless he would like to come too?”

After lunching with Ludo, Joan and Augustine crossed the Abbey grounds on their way to the Rectory gate in silence, a yard apart and avoiding each other's eyes—like children suddenly taken shy and increasingly dreading speech till the silence grows more impossible still to break. Relations between these two were come to their point of no return, and both of them knew it: both felt highly charged with emotion, and knew that at any moment an accidental touch or a single word could alter the course of their lives.... At the prospect Joan felt panicky, torn in two. In earlier days she'd have married him like a shot had he asked her then, but as time went by and he didn't, in self-defense she had grown more critical. Now she was pulled one way by the man she had loved at sight, the other by dreary jingles about young men who come to the age of twenty-six without a career of any kind (for surely the beauty of private means is your freedom of choice what work you do, not having no aim in life and doing no work at all?). Now that he seemed at last to have fallen in love with her too, she was finding it hard to break down these very defenses she'd raised herself.... Able young men who drift through life without ever showing the faintest desire to leave their mark....

Perversely, it wasn't till Joan had already begun to show signs of disillusioned withdrawal that slow-coach Augustine had even begun to find her desirable. Now he most certainly did: he was well aware that his feelings towards this friend of his had lately been changing fast, and might soon be beyond control if they weren't already so. But Augustine also was feeling torn in two this afternoon; and that had been Ludo's doing, for Ludo's harping on Germans all morning had conjured up Mitzi's ghost.... However much he might long for Joan, how could he ever marry her knowing he'd never love anyone quite like Mitzi again if he lived to a hundred? No wonder Augustine was torn two ways, for imagine Joan in a Newton whose mistress he once had expected Mitzi to be: with the ghost of Mitzi blindly feeling its way room-by-room to wherever they were—creeping between them in bed.... Yet the thought of renouncing Joan was a terrible thing to face; and in fact (he asked himself) decently could he, still? Or had he gone so far that Joan by now had the right to expect him to speak? If only he'd time to think all this out.... With his eye he measured the distance ahead: to the Rectory gate was some three hundred yards, if their silence could last that far.

When they got to the gate at last Joan seemed to expect him to follow her in, but dumbly he shook his head. “
You never know when you're lucky
” the gate he was holding open seemed to creak: which made him look at its well-worn paint in surprise, for when had he heard those words before? Then he had a sudden inspiration: “You heard what Ludo said—about Morocco, I mean.” He paused, with averted face. “I'm going back to the house to see if he'll really take me too.”

In spite of a heart which fell like a lump of lead Joan breathed at least a tiny sigh of relief: she felt pretty sure of him now, and a few weeks' absence should help her to make up her mind. “Yes, I think that's the best thing to do” she told him at last, and even managed to launch a tentative smile at the back of his head.

Of course she knew nothing about that intrusive ghost, or that speaking (ambiguous) gate.

Their boat would leave Southampton early tomorrow morning: Augustine must bundle his things in a sheet and take empty cases to pack when they got on board.... He could buy his ticket on board.... Ludo had sounded delighted; and when he got back to the Chase Augustine found Gilbert delighted too. Augustine had given him no explanation but none was needed— it stood out a mile: “Against all the betting” thought jubilant Gilbert “Joan must have turned him down, and he's off to Morocco to lick his wounds.” Joan had always been much too good for Augustine: thank God she had found that out in time! Then a further thought: after this, the girl was bound to feel a bit lonely.... Glad of a sympathetic friend.... Open to new impressions.... They'd have to do all they could to keep her amused: it was only decent to do so, the proper thing....

For a while his day-dreaming rambled on in this pleasant vein, only marred by the fleeting thought “But Mary had set her heart on the match. She'll take this badly.” Then came the Bentley's sonorous voice in farewell as Augustine departed, a bundle of boots and clothes in the dicky.

*

When Gilbert expounded to Mary the cause (as he thought) of Augustine's headlong departure she certainly took it badly. Fond as she had been of Joan, she couldn't forgive her for treating Augustine like that: the girl was a conscienceless vamp, and comforting lonesome damsels was out—right out, so far as all Wadamys were concerned (to Gilbert's heartfelt regret, but not entirely to Mary's who read rather more of his mind than Gilbert supposed).

Thus Mary was left with neither Augustine nor Joan at a time when she sorely needed friends: for a large abdominal swelling had lately developed which secretly made her afraid she was starting a growth. So she was; but her uterine “growth” turned out to be nothing more than another baby. This was as great a surprise to Mary herself as the doctor: she couldn't think how, and Gilbert's answers were all a bit incoherent—implying indeed that a Statesman mustn't be badgered about little personal things in such crucial times, when Baldwin's Mining Industry Bill was before the House re-introducing the 8-hour day.

It must have happened while Mary slept, and the doctor guessed that a “nurse” who had got in the way of interpreting night-duty quite so widely could hardly be proud of his near-necrophilous practices....

Something however which Gilbert was even less likely to want to admit was his succubus-fantasies, turning the quite impersonal body beneath him to Joan's not Mary at all—so that if by Gilbert's off-hand behavior you'd think the baby was barely his, in a sense what it really wasn't was Mary's....

Meanwhile, however, the patient was four months gone: since this was already too late for abortion her doctor advised an operation at once, it was risky to let things run on when normal childbirth was anyhow out of the question. But specialist Second Opinion admitted when pressed that pregnancies quite as abnormal as this one had, on occasion, been brought to successful terminations with skillful obstetric help—that is, if Mary was willing to take the serious risk involved if the baby turned out a large one.

She told them at once that she was.... But that silly old Gilbert! Mary was tickled to death he could want her still—but why not have done it openly?

When the English in 1684 abandoned Tangier to the much more powerful Moors, on leaving they blew up the breakwater. No one had mended it since, although the place was now in international hands and ruled like a tiny stagnant separate state “on the Sultan's behalf” by a concert of European Powers including the English once more. But P. & O. liners made Gib. their port of call, and only the Rotterdam-Lloyd ones called at Tangier—that is, they did so unless there were easterly gales: for a ship that size had to anchor at least a mile from the shore. So the ship that Augustine and Ludo had sailed in was Dutch, with outlandish ideas about serving food; and it made Augustine feel very broad-minded indeed to accept his meat-course before the fish, and to eat cheese only at breakfast.

Among the passengers bound for Java and points even further east were a number of German businessmen, looking remarkably prosperous. Money indeed was said to be running again in that country's veins; and Germany's new prosperity puzzled Augustine, only used like the rest of the world to a Weimar Republic perennially down-and-out. Exercising himself on deck with his friend (the Bay of Biscay was calm—for the Bay of Biscay), Augustine inquired about it and found that—according to Ludo—this economic miracle came from a more than paradoxical source.

“My father says it derives directly from Germany's obligation to pay those unpayable Reparations.”

“I don't doubt your father's word, but I hope he explained to you how.”

“It's Euclid's Reductio ad Absurdum, applied to the Keynesian proposition that vast debts between States can never be paid. Germany has no gold, it's all in Paris already: she's got no foreign exchange, and those debts are far too large to be paid in goods without ruining every creditor's own economy. Only one possible way remains: the ‘absurd' one of borrowing money abroad with which to pay.”

As a sudden squall blew up they sheltered behind a boat, watching the wind blow the tops off the tiny waves.

“That seems an ideal solution,” Augustine mused, “since that way nothing passes but paper and ink. But who's going to lend the money?”

“British as well as American bankers are only too willing to lend—at a price. But the interest rates they charge are exceedingly high, and it's this of course which has proved so advantageous to Germany.”

“Blessed if I see how it can!”

“When you lend to a State, the charges are paid out of taxes?” Augustine nodded. “And taxes can only be paid out of Gross National Product? Only when that goes up can the tax collector's takings rise and the lenders be paid?” Augustine nodded again. “So once you lend the German Government large sums of money at very high rates, in the creditors' interests German Industry has to be given a pretty spectacular shot in the arm; and that has meant further loans from abroad, with private investors tumbling over each other to lend since there's nowhere else that their money could earn so much.”

Augustine gazed at his friend wide-eyed: “You mean, for the Reparations bill to be paid more money has to go into the country as ‘loans' than could ever come out again now or hereafter?”

“Far more. My father thinks just about twice as much.”

“To draw one bucket of water you prime the pump with a couple of buckets....”

“Exactly. Because the priming process is bound to spill over in projects not even remotely connected with German industrial output. Look at Herr Bürgomeister Konrad Adenauer, playing Cologne's new Kubla Khan and financing his stately pleasure-domes with hundreds of millions of borrowed marks that once were dollars and pounds! He is clearing a ‘Green Belt' right round the city, and building a new kind of super-motor-road out to Bonn—something he calls an ‘Autobahn,' copied from Mussolini's Autostradas. It's all very fine, and gives work to the unemployed—but it doesn't even remotely help to rebuild bombarded Belgium and France.”

“Wow!” said Augustine (by now the squall had passed, and they once more paced the glistening deck): “High finance seems almost as crazy as politics.”

“All the time and all over the place that sort of thing happens. Take Kammstadt, a small Bavarian middle-class market-town and a County Seat where some co-religionist friends of mine are unlucky enough to live.”

“I know the place,” Augustine put in. He frowned: “There's a convent there ...” and his voice tailed off.

“Then you know that her citizens mostly are self-employed: dealers, professional men like lawyers and doctors, skilled artisans and other small tradesmen—not forgetting the publicans....”

“All I've done was to change trains there.”

“The town has almost no industry to promote apart from a small municipal brewery: placid Kammstadt enjoys a notable absence of toiling masses, apart from the railwaymen at the Junction's engine-sheds and its own municipal workers. Nevertheless she too must launch her own municipal loan, if only to keep in the swim: so her City Fathers have planned to replace the derelict rat-ridden wartime army camp outside the town by a new municipal race-track and playing fields, at the cost of God-knows-how-many borrowed marks!”

*

So large a municipal project of course had entailed additional City Hall staff; and this had given Lothar his chance. The gaunt old Geheimrat, his father, was dead. Lothar was now twenty-one, had muffed all his early exams and was tired of studying Law, so was glad of even a minor Local Government job when young Baron Franz persuaded his father to pull the appropriate strings and got him engaged as a clerk.

The weather was luckily fine enough to anchor in Tangier Bay, where Augustine got his first distant glimpse of this westernmost (more-or-less the Meridian of Greenwich) outpost of Islam. Away to the right, on two-hundred-foot cliffs, he could see the crumbling walls and minarets of the Kasbah: below lay the scrambled Arab Medina, and outside the walls of the town to the left stood a few new blatantly European blocks which he tried to ignore. At that moment from one of the minarets a muezzin was calling the Faithful to prayer; and his wailing voice, heard over a mile or so of intervening water, sounded as eerie as wolves in Canadian forests.

Then sweating oarsmen rowed them ashore in a kind of wherry to land on a wooden pier (before that pier had been built they'd have had to be carried shoulder-high through the final surf). They landed in Babel—or Bedlam—or both, with bare-legged hooded porters and touts and hucksters fighting each other and yelling like mad in Arabic, Spanish, or even a lousy word or two of incomprehensible English to get their custom. But Ludovic sorted everything out. Their luggage was hoisted on skeletal donkeys; and soon they were forcing their way through the fancy-dress crowds which thronged the steep and narrow (and only more-or-less cobbled) streets.

As they threaded a maze of alleys all smelling in turn of donkeys and incense and leather and urine and spices Augustine felt strangely elated, as if this was “home” at last! But Ludo told him to wait: Tangier was a mongrel city, with nearly a third of its population impoverished Europeans (assuming Gibraltar's “Rock-Scorpions” counted as such). During the days of Morocco's independence the Sultan had very sensibly kept all Foreign Embassies here in a kind of quarantine-station, instead of allowing them near his Sacred Person: thus even today, when most of the diplomats-proper had moved to Rabat, the place was still a hive of Legations down-graded to overgrown Consulates each with its army of hangers-on. To these you must add some hundreds of down-at-heel Spaniards, unable to earn a living at home and doing no better here or escaped from the Spanish convict-settlements down the coast; and indeed men of all nations fled to Tangier to be out of the reach of the Arm of the Law (much as you may think Augustine had fled from the Arms of Love). Contrabandistas, drug-addicts, perverts—and simpler folk who had merely been rather unlucky with knives in their simple way, or with other men's money.... “No, if you think you like this place you should wait till you've been to Meknes and Fez, and Marrakesh: the real Morocco is very different.”