They Came to Baghdad Read online

  A slender girl, with an agreeable figure and first-class legs, Victoria’s features might actually have been described as plain. They were small and neat. But there was a piquancy about her, for “little indiarubber face,” as one of her admirers had named her, could twist those immobile features into a startling mimicry of almost anybody.

  It was this last-named talent that had led to her present predicament. Employed as a typist by Mr. Greenholtz of Greenholtz, Simmons and Lederbetter, of Graysholme Street, WC2, Victoria had been whiling away a dull morning by entertaining the three other typists and the office boy with a vivid performance of Mrs. Greenholtz paying a visit to her husband’s office. Secure in the knowledge that Mr. Greenholtz had gone round to his solicitors, Victoria let herself go.

  “Why do you say we not have that Knole settee, Daddee?” she demanded in a high whining voice. “Mrs. Dievtakis she have one in electric blue satin. You say it is money that is tight? But then why you take that blonde girl out dining and dancing—Ah! you think I do not know—and if you take that girl—then I have a settee and all done plum-coloured and gold cushions. And when you say it is a business dinner you are a damn’ fool—yes—and come back with lipstick on your shirt. So I have the Knole settee and I order a fur cape—very nice—all like mink but not really mink and I get him very cheap and it is good business—”

  The sudden failure of her audience—at first entranced, but now suddenly resuming work with spontaneous agreement, caused Victoria to break off and swing round to where Mr. Greenholtz was standing in the doorway observing her.

  Victoria, unable to think of anything relevant to say, merely said, “Oh!”

  Mr. Greenholtz grunted.

  Flinging off his overcoat, Mr. Greenholtz proceeded to his private office and banged the door. Almost immediately his buzzer sounded, two shorts and a long. That was a summons for Victoria.

  “It’s for you, Jonesey,” a colleague remarked unnecessarily, her eyes alight with the pleasure occasioned by the misfortunes of others. The other typists collaborated in this sentiment by ejaculating: “You’re for it, Jones,” and “On the mat, Jonesey.” The office boy, an unpleasant child, contented himself with drawing a forefinger across his throat and uttering a sinister noise.

  Victoria picked up her notebook and pencil and sailed into Mr. Greenholtz’s office with such assurance as she could muster.

  “You want me, Mr. Greenholtz?” she murmured, fixing a limpid gaze on him.

  Mr. Greenholtz was rustling three pound notes and searching his pockets for coin of the realm.

  “So there you are,” he observed. “I’ve had about enough of you, young lady. Do you see any particular reason why I shouldn’t pay you a week’s salary in lieu of notice and pack you off here and now?”

  Victoria (an orphan) had just opened her mouth to explain how the plight of a mother at this moment suffering a major operation had so demoralized her that she had become completely light-headed, and how her small salary was all the aforesaid mother had to depend upon, when, taking an opening glance at Mr. Greenholtz’s unwholesome face, she shut her mouth and changed her mind.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” she said heartily and pleasantly. “I think you’re absolutely right, if you know what I mean.”

  Mr. Greenholtz appeared slightly taken aback. He was not used to having his dismissals treated in this approving and congratulatory spirit. To conceal a slight discomfiture he sorted through a pile of coins on the desk in front of him. He then sought once more in his pockets.

  “Ninepence short,” he murmured gloomily.

  “Never mind,” said Victoria kindly. “Take yourself to the pictures or spend it on sweets.”

  “Don’t seem to have any stamps, either.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I never write letters.”

  “I could send it after you,” said Mr. Greenholtz but without much conviction.

  “Don’t bother. What about a reference?” said Victoria.

  Mr. Greenholtz’s choler returned.

  “Why the hell should I give you a reference?” he demanded wrathfully.

  “It’s usual,” said Victoria.

  Mr. Greenholtz drew a piece of paper towards him and scrawled a few lines. He shoved it towards her.

  “That do for you?”

  Miss Jones has been with me two months as a shorthand typist. Her shorthand is inaccurate and she cannot spell. She is leaving owing to wasting time in office hours.

  Victoria made a grimace.

  “Hardly a recommendation,” she observed.

  “It wasn’t meant to be,” said Mr. Greenholtz.

  “I think,” said Victoria, “that you ought at least to say I’m honest, sober and respectable. I am, you know. And perhaps you might add that I’m discreet.”

  “Discreet?” barked Mr. Greenholtz.

  Victoria met his gaze with an innocent stare.

  “Discreet,” she said gently.

  Remembering sundry letters taken down and typed by Victoria, Mr. Greenholtz decided that prudence was the better part of rancour.

  He snatched back the paper, tore it up and indited a fresh one.

  Miss Jones has been with me for two months as a shorthand typist. She is leaving owing to redundancy of office staff.

  “How about that?”

  “It could be better,” said Victoria, “but it will do.”

  II

  So it was that with a week’s salary (less ninepence) in her bag Victoria was sitting in meditation upon a bench in FitzJames Gardens which are a triangular plantation of rather sad shrubs flanking a church and overlooked by a tall warehouse.

  It was Victoria’s habit on any day when it was not actually raining to purchase one cheese, and one lettuce and tomato sandwich at a milk bar and eat this simple lunch in these pseudorural surroundings.

  Today, as she munched meditatively, she was telling herself, not for the first time, that there was a time and place for everything—and that the office was definitely not the place for imitations of the boss’s wife. She must, in future, curb the natural exuberance that led her to brighten up the performance of a dull job. In the meantime, she was free of Greenholtz, Simmons and Lederbetter, and the prospect of obtaining a situation elsewhere filled her with pleasurable anticipation. Victoria was always delighted when she was about to take up a new job. One never knew, she always felt, what might happen.

  She had just distributed the last crumb of bread to three attentive sparrows who immediately fought each other with fury for it, when she became aware of a young man sitting at the other end of the seat. Victoria had noticed him vaguely already, but her mind full of good resolutions for the future, she had not observed him closely until now. What she now saw (out of the corner of her eye) she liked very much. He was a good-looking young man, cherubically fair, but with a firm chin and extremely blue eyes which had been, she rather imagined, examining her with covert admiration for some time.

  Victoria had no inhibitions about making friends with strange young men in public places. She considered herself an excellent judge of character and well able to check any manifestations of freshness on the part of unattached males.

  She proceeded to smile frankly at him and the young man responded like a marionette when you pull the string.

  “Hallo,” said the young man. “Nice place this. Do you often come here?”

  “Nearly every day.”

  “Just my luck that I never came here before. Was that your lunch you were eating?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think you eat enough. I’d be starving if I only had two sandwiches. What about coming along and having a sausage at the SPO in Tottenham Court Road?”

  “No thanks. I’m quite all right. I couldn’t eat anymore now.”

  She rather expected that he would say: “Another day,” but he did not. He merely sighed—then he said:

  “My name’s Edward, what’s yours?”

  “Victoria.”

  “Why di
d your people want to call you after a railway station?”

  “Victoria isn’t only a railway station,” Miss Jones pointed out. “There’s Queen Victoria as well.”

  “Mm yes. What’s your other name?”

  “Jones.”

  “Victoria Jones,” said Edward, trying it over on his tongue. He shook his head. “They don’t go together.”

  “You’re quite right,” said Victoria with feeling. “If I were Jenny it would be rather nice—Jenny Jones. But Victoria needs something with a bit more class to it. Victoria Sackville-West for instance. That’s the kind of thing one needs. Something to roll round the mouth.”

  “You could tack something on to the Jones,” said Edward with sympathetic interest.

  “Bedford Jones.”

  “Carisbrooke Jones.”

  “St. Clair Jones.”

  “Lonsdale Jones.”

  This agreeable game was interrupted by Edward’s glancing at his watch and uttering a horrified ejaculation.

  “I must tear back to my blinking boss—er—what about you?”

  “I’m out of a job. I was sacked this morning.”

  “Oh I say, I am sorry,” said Edward with real concern.

  “Well, don’t waste sympathy, because I’m not sorry at all. For one thing, I’ll easily get another job, and besides that, it was really rather fun.”

  And delaying Edward’s return to duty still further, she gave him a spirited rendering of this morning’s scene, reenacting her impersonation of Mrs. Greenholtz to Edward’s immense enjoyment.

  “You really are marvellous, Victoria,” he said. “You ought to be on the stage.”

  Victoria accepted this tribute with a gratified smile and remarked that Edward had better be running along if he didn’t want to get the sack himself.

  “Yes—and I shouldn’t get another job as easily as you will. It must be wonderful to be a good shorthand typist,” said Edward with envy in his voice.

  “Well, actually I’m not a good shorthand typist,” Victoria admitted frankly, “but fortunately even the lousiest of shorthand typists can get some sort of a job nowadays—at any rate an educational or charitable one—they can’t afford to pay much and so they get people like me. I prefer the learned type of job best. These scientific names and terms are so frightful anyway that if you can’t spell them properly it doesn’t really shame you because nobody could. What’s your job? I suppose you’re out of one of the services. RAF?”

  “Good guess.”

  “Fighter pilot?”

  “Right again. They’re awfully decent about getting us jobs and all that, but you see, the trouble is, that we’re not particularly brainy. I mean one didn’t need to be brainy in the RAF. They put me in an office with a lot of files and figures and some thinking to do and I just folded up. The whole thing seemed utterly purposeless anyway. But there it is. It gets you down a bit to know that you’re absolutely no good.”

  Victoria nodded sympathetically—Edward went on bitterly:

  “Out of touch. Not in the picture anymore. It was all right during the war—one could keep one’s end up all right—I got the DFC for instance—but now—well, I might as well write myself off the map.”

  “But there ought to be—”

  Victoria broke off. She felt unable to put into words her conviction that those qualities that brought a DFC to their owner should somewhere have their appointed place in the world of 1950.

  “It’s got me down, rather,” said Edward. “Being no good at anything, I mean. Well—I’d better be pushing off—I say—would you mind—would it be most awful cheek—if I only could—”

  As Victoria opened surprised eyes, stammering and blushing, Edward produced a small camera.

  “I would like so awfully to have a snapshot of you. You see, I’m going to Baghdad tomorrow.”

  “To Baghdad?” exclaimed Victoria with lively disappointment.

  “Yes. I mean I wish I wasn’t—now. Earlier this morning I was quite bucked about it—it’s why I took this job really—to get out of this country.”

  “What sort of job is it?”

  “Pretty awful. Culture—poetry, all that sort of thing. A Dr. Rathbone’s my boss. Strings of letters after his name, peers at you soulfully through pince-nez. He’s terrifically keen on uplift and spreading it far and wide. He opens bookshops in remote places—he’s starting one in Baghdad. He gets Shakespeare’s and Milton’s works translated into Arabic and Kurdish and Persian and Armenian and has them all on tap. Silly, I think, because you’ve got the British Council doing much the same thing all over the place. Still, there it is. It gives me a job so I oughtn’t to complain.”

  “What do you actually do?” asked Victoria.

  “Well, really it boils down to being the old boy’s personal Yesman and Dogsbody. Buy the tickets, make the reservations, fill up the passport forms, check the packing of all the horrid little poetic manuals, run round here, there, and everywhere. Then, when we get out there I’m supposed to fraternize—kind of glorified youth movement—all nations together in a united drive for uplift.” Edward’s tone became more and more melancholy. “Frankly, it’s pretty ghastly, isn’t it?”

  Victoria was unable to administer much comfort.

  “So you see,” said Edward, “if you wouldn’t mind awfully—one sideways and one looking right at me—oh I say, that’s wonderful—”

  The camera clicked twice and Victoria showed that purring complacence displayed by young women who know they have made an impression on an attractive member of the opposite sex.

  “But it’s pretty foul really, having to go off just when I’ve met you,” said Edward. “I’ve half a mind to chuck it—but I suppose I couldn’t do that at the last moment—not after all those ghastly forms and visas and everything. Wouldn’t be a very good show, what?”

  “It mayn’t turn out as bad as you think,” said Victoria consolingly.

  “N-no,” said Edward doubtfully. “The funny thing is,” he added, “that I’ve got a feeling there’s something fishy somewhere.”

  “Fishy?”

  “Yes. Bogus. Don’t ask me why. I haven’t any reason. Sort of feeling one gets sometimes. Had it once about my port oil. Began fussing about the damned thing and sure enough there was a washer wedged in the spare gear pump.”

  The technical terms in which this was couched made it quite unintelligible to Victoria, but she got the main idea.

  “You think he’s bogus—Rathbone?”

  “Don’t see how he can be. I mean he’s frightfully respectable and learned and belongs to all these societies—and sort of hobnobs with Archbishops and Principals of Colleges. No, it’s just a feeling—well, time will show. So long. I wish you were coming, too.”

  “So do I,” said Victoria.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Go round to St. Guildric’s Agency in Gower Street and look for another job,” said Victoria gloomily.

  “Good-bye, Victoria. Partir, say mourir un peu,” added Edward with a very British accent. “These French johnnies know their stuff. Our English chaps just maunder on about parting being a sweet sorrow—silly asses.”

  “Good-bye, Edward, good luck.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll ever think about me again.”

  “Yes, I shall.”

  “You’re absolutely different from any girl I’ve ever seen before—I only wish—” The clock chimed a quarter, and Edward said, “Oh hell—I must fly—”

  Retreating rapidly, he was swallowed up by the great maw of London. Victoria remaining behind on her seat absorbed in meditation was conscious of two distinct streams of thought.

  One dealt with the theme of Romeo and Juliet. She and Edward, she felt, were somewhat in the position of that unhappy couple, although perhaps Romeo and Juliet had expressed their feelings in rather more high-class language. But the position, Victoria thought, was the same. Meeting, instant attraction—frustration—two fond hearts thrust asunder. A remembrance of
a rhyme once frequently recited by her old nurse came to her mind:

  Jumbo said to Alice I love you,

  Alice said to Jumbo I don’t believe you do,

  If you really loved me as you say you do

  You wouldn’t go to America and leave me in the Zoo.

  Substitute Baghdad for America and there you were!

  Victoria rose at last, dusting crumbs from her lap, and walked briskly out of FitzJames Gardens in the direction of Gower Street. Victoria had come to two decisions: the first was that (like Juliet) she loved this young man, and meant to have him.

  The second decision that Victoria had come to was that as Edward would shortly be in Baghdad, the only thing to do was for her to go to Baghdad also. What was now occupying her mind was how this could be accomplished. That it could be accomplished somehow or other, Victoria did not doubt. She was a young woman of optimism and force of character.

  Parting is such sweet sorrow appealed to her as a sentiment no more than it did to Edward.

  “Somehow,” said Victoria to herself, “I’ve got to get to Baghdad!”

  Three

  I

  The Savoy Hotel welcomed Miss Anna Scheele with the empressement due to an old and valued client—they inquired after the health of Mr. Morganthal—and assured her that if her suite was not to her liking she had only to say so—for Anna Scheele represented DOLLARS.