They came to Baghdad - Agatha Christie [61]
‘I don’t know that I should have liked being a slave much,’ said Victoria meditatively, ‘Christian or otherwise.’
‘Milton was quite right,’ said Edward. “‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” I always admired Milton’s Satan.’
‘I never quite got around to Milton,’ said Victoria apologetically. ‘But I did go and see Comus at Sadler’s Wells and it was lovely and Margot Fonteyn danced like a kind of frozen angel.’
‘If you were a slave, Victoria,’ said Edward, ‘I should free you and take you into my harem – over there,’ he added gesticulating vaguely at a pile of debris.
A glint came into Victoria’s eye.
‘Talking of harems –’ she began.
‘How are you getting on with Catherine?’ asked Edward hastily.
‘How did you know I was thinking about Catherine?’
‘Well, you were, weren’t you? Honestly, Viccy, I do want you to become friends with Catherine.’
‘Don’t call me Viccy.’
‘All right, Charing Cross. I want you to become friends with Catherine.’
‘How fatuous men are! Always wanting their girl friends to like each other.’
Edward sat up energetically. He had been reclining with his hands behind his head.
‘You’ve got it all wrong, Charing Cross. Anyway, your references to harems are simply silly –’
‘No, they’re not. The way all those girls glower intensely at you and yearn at you! It makes me mad.’
‘Splendid,’ said Edward. ‘I love you to be mad. But to return to Catherine. The reason I want you to be friends with Catherine is that I’m fairly sure she’s the best way of approach to all the things we want to find out. She knows something.’
‘You really think so?’
‘Remember what I heard her say about Anna Scheele?’
‘I’d forgotten that.’
‘How have you been getting on with Karl Marx? Any results?’
‘Nobody’s made a bee-line at me and invited me into the fold. In fact, Catherine told me yesterday the party wouldn’t accept me, because I’m not sufficiently politically educated. And to have to read all that dreary stuff – honestly, Edward, I haven’t the brains for it.’
‘You are not politically aware, are you?’ Edward laughed. ‘Poor Charing Cross. Well, well, Catherine may be frantic with brains and intensity and political awareness, my fancy is still a little Cockney typist who can’t spell any words of three syllables.’
Victoria frowned suddenly. Edward’s words brought back to her mind the curious interview she had had with Dr Rathbone. She told Edward about it. He seemed much more upset than she would have expected him to be.
‘This is serious, Victoria, really serious. Try and tell me exactly what he said.’
Victoria tried her best to recall the exact words Rathbone had used.
‘But I don’t see,’ she said, ‘why it upsets you so.’
‘Eh?’ Edward seemed abstracted. ‘You don’t see – But my dear girl, don’t you realize that this shows that they’ve got wise to you. They’re warning you off. I don’t like it Victoria – I don’t like it at all.’
He paused and then said gravely:
‘Communists, you know, are very ruthless. It’s part of their creed to stick at nothing. I don’t want you knocked on the head and thrown into the Tigris, darling.’
How odd, thought Victoria, to be sitting amidst the ruins of Babylon debating whether or not she was likely in the near future to be knocked on the head and thrown into the Tigris. Half closing her eyes she thought dreamily, ‘I shall wake up soon and find I’m in London dreaming a wonderful melodramatic dream about dangerous Babylon. Perhaps,’ she thought, closing her eyes altogether, ‘I am in London…and the alarm clock will go off very soon, and I shall get up and go to Mr Greenholtz’s office – and there won’t be any Edward…’
And at that last thought she opened her eyes again hastily to make sure that Edward was indeed really there (and what was it I was going to ask him at Basrah and they interrupted us and I forgot?) and it was not a dream. The sun was glaring down in a dazzling and most un-London-like way, and the ruins of Babylon were pale and