The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [436]
‘A notebook,’
Telford was a large man draped in ill-cut clothes and a spotted blue bow tie. His complexion was blotchy and of the kind which tears easily under a razor-blade; consequently there was always a small tuft of cotton wool sticking to chin or ear, stanching a wound. Always voluble and bursting with the wrong sort of expansive bonhomie he gave the impression of being at war with his dentures, which were ill-fitting. He gobbled and gasped, biting on loose stoppings, or swallowing a soft palate, gasping like a fish as he uttered his pleasantries or laughed at his own jokes like a man riding a bone-shaker, his top set of teeth bumping up and down on his gums. ‘I say, old fruit, that was rich’ he would exclaim.
I did not find him too disagreeable an inmate of the office which we shared at the censorship, for the work was not exacting and he, as an old hand, was always ready to give me advice or help with it; I enjoyed too his obstinately recurring stories of the mythical
‘old days’, when he, Little Tommy Telford, had been a personage of great importance, second only in rank and power to the great Maskelyne, our present Chief. He always referred to him as ‘The Brig’, and made it very clear that the department, which had once been Arab Bureau, had seen better times, had in fact been down-graded to a mere censorship department dealing with the ebb and flow of civilian correspondence over the Middle East. A menial role compared to ‘Espiona ge’ which he pronounced in four separate syllables.
Stories of this ancient glory, which had now faded beyond recall, formed part of the Homeric Cycle, so to speak, of office life: to be recited wistfully during intervals between snatches of work or on afternoons when some small mishap like a broken fan had made concentration in those airless buildings all but impossible. It was from Telford that I learned of the long internecine struggle between Pursewarden and Maskelyne — a struggle which was, in a sense, continuing on another plane between the silent Brigadier and Mountolive, for Maskelyne was desperately anxious to rejoin his regiment and shed his civilian suit. This desire had been baulked. Mountolive, explained Telford with many a gusty sigh (waving chapped and podgy hands which were stuffed with bluish clusters of veins like plums in a cake) — Mountolive had ‘got at’
the War Office and persuaded them not to countenance Maskelyne’s resignation. I must say the Brigadier, whom I saw perhaps twice a week, did convey an impression of sullen, saturnine fury at being penned up in a civilian department while so much was going on in the desert, but of course any regular soldier would.
‘You see’ said Telford ingenuously, ‘when a war comes along there’s bags of promotion, old thing, bags of it. The Brig has a right to think of his career like any other man. It is different for us. We were born civilians, so to speak.’ He himself had spent many years in the currant trade in the Eastern Levant residing in places like Zante and Patras. His reasons for coming to Egypt were obscure. Perhaps he found life more congenial in a large British colony. Mrs Telford was a fattish little duck who used
mauve lipstick and wore hats like pincushions. She only appeared to live for an invitation to the Embassy on the King’s birthday. (‘Mavis loves her little official “do”, she does.’)
But if the administrative war with Mountolive was so far empty of victory there were consolations, said Telford, from which the Brig could derive a studied enjoyment: for Mountolive was very much in the same boat. This made him (Telford)
‘chortle’ — a characteristic phrase which he often used. Mount-olive, it seemed, was no less eager to abandon his post, and had indeed applied several times for a transfer from Egypt. Unluckily, however, the war had intervened with its policy of ‘freezing personnel’ and Kenilworth, no friend of the Ambassador, had been sent out to execute this policy. If the Brigadier was pinned down by the intrigues of Mountolive, the latter had been pinned down just as certainly