They Came to Baghdad

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 pseudo-rural 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 any more 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 did 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, re-enacting 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 any more. 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 Yes-man 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.