Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. Hilary Mantel
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petrol, and that the labourers had injured their backs, and that they were urgently called away now because their grandmother had died in another town. It was better to leave people loopholes, and assume a studied casualness, and then, sometimes, things got done. Or not.
When he arrived in Jeddah, Eric Parsons said to him, ‘We’ll have to take you and introduce you to the Deputy Minister. It’s only a formality.’ When they arrived at the Deputy Minister’s office suite Andrew looked around and wondered why the Ministry thought it needed a new building; but he did not say anything, because the new building was his livelihood. They were shown in, and served mint tea, very sweet, in small glasses. The Deputy Minister had waved them each to a chair without looking at them, and now he continued not to look, but to turn over papers on his desk, and to talk on his special gold and onyx telephone; he conversed loudly in Arabic with men who came in and out.
‘This is Mr Shore,’ Parsons said after they had been there for some time unheeded. ‘I told you about him, do you remember, he’s going to be in charge of the new building. He’s very anxious to set his targets and keep everything on schedule.’
The Deputy Minister did not reply, but picked up his Cartier pen and signed a few papers, with an air at once listless and grim. A Yemeni boy came in with a tray, and served cardamom coffee. Ten minutes passed; the coffee boy stood at the Deputy Minister’s elbow, and when the Deputy Minister had taken three or four refills, he shook his cup to indicate that he wanted no more. The coffee boy collected his tray and went out, and the Deputy Minister reached for his telephone again, and grunted into it, then put it down and stared deliberately out of the window. One hand absently stroked his blotting pad, which was bound in dark green leather and embossed with the crossed scimitars and single palm tree of the House of Saud.
Then very slowly, his dark eyes, rather full like plums, but rather jaundiced like Victoria plums, travelled around the room, and came to rest for the briefest moment on the two men; and he nodded, almost imperceptibly. Parsons seemed to take this as some sort of signal. He rose, with a smooth air of accomplishment, and for just a second gripped Andrew Shore by the elbow; the bland smile he gave the Deputy Minister was quite at odds with the near-painful pressure of his finger and thumb. By the time they reached the office door the Deputy Minister was talking on the telephone again.
‘Is that it?’ Andrew said, in the corridor. Parsons did not reply; but persisted, to Andrew’s annoyance, with his pseudo-mysterious smile. He was a company man, he knew the system and he played it; you would not find him muttering under his breath, or making V-signs outside closed office doors. They walked downstairs and out into the sun.
They were in the car-park, and it seemed that the Deputy Minister had made it before them; he must have come down in his private lift. As he strode across to his Daimler, his white thobe flapping about his legs, and his white ghutra fanning out around his head, a dozen people appeared as if from nowhere and mobbed him. They were identically dressed, except that some wore white headcloths, and others wore the red and white ghutra of tea-towel check. A stiff breeze got up, blowing in from the sea, and billowed out the men’s thobes. With the thrusting arms, and the weaving bodies, it was soon impossible to distinguish the Deputy Minister from the mill of petitioners; and the whole resembled nothing so much as a basket of laundry animated by a poltergeist.
Andrew stopped to watch. ‘What’s happening?’
‘They’re just saying hello,’ Parsons said. ‘After all, he doesn’t get to the Ministry very often, he’s too busy for that.’
‘Busy doing what?’
‘Running his businesses.’
‘It’s not a full-time pursuit then, being a minister?’
‘Oh my goodness, no. After all, he’s not one of the royal family, you know. Why should he neglect his own business to run theirs?’
‘You mean that the Kingdom is a family business?’
‘If you like,’ Parsons said. ‘You could put it that way.’ The Deputy Minister had almost reached his car now, but delayed further while the petitioners kissed him on the cheek. ‘They’re the Ministry’s suppliers, I imagine.’
‘They seem unnecessarily matey. For suppliers.’
‘Most of them are probably his relatives as well. It’s their tradition. Accessibility. You wouldn’t want them walled off, would you, behind their civil service?’
Andrew looked sideways at Parsons, his expression incredulous. Parsons took his pipe out of the top pocket of his bush shirt and stuck it in his mouth. It seemed an odd time to choose; unless it was a tic, which expressed his real feelings, like the pinch on the elbow he had delivered earlier. ‘I have to remark,’ Andrew said, ‘that he didn’t seem very accessible to me.’
‘There are different rules for us,’ Parsons said, barely removing the pipe from his lips. ‘Never forget, Andrew, that as individuals we are very unimportant in the Saudi scheme of things. We are only here on sufferance. They do need Western experts, but of course they are a very rich and proud people and it goes against the grain to admit that they need anyone.’
It had the air of a speech that had been made before. Andrew said, ‘Do you mean that they are rich and proud, or are they just proud because they are rich?’
Parsons did not answer. Andrew was surprised at himself. It was more the question that his wife would have asked. The Deputy Minister had gained his Daimler now, and put the electric window down to convene further with his hangers-on. Andrew felt slightly nauseated from the cups of cardamom coffee which he had not known how to refuse. He felt exasperated by his inability to draw any proper human response from Parsons, anything that was not practised and emollient. ‘Is Turadup very unimportant as well?’ he asked.
Parsons took out his pipe again, and made the sort of movement with his mouth, a twitch of the lip, which in some Englishmen replaces a shrug. ‘We have the contract for the building,’ he said, ‘and for the silos at the missile base, and for a few billion riyals’ worth of work in Riyadh, but of course if they go off us they can always run us out of the place and hand out the work elsewhere. I mean they don’t have the constraints, you see, that you find in the rest of the world. But then on the other hand the company has its Saudi sponsor, and that sponsor gets his percentage, and is of course an even more highly placed gent than that gent you see over there; and think of the incidental profits we bring in, the rents and so on. I suppose you could say that as a company we are not entirely unimportant. But as individuals we are not expected to make our mark. The best we can do, as individuals, is to keep out of trouble.’
The Deputy Minister had put his window up now, and driven away. Almost as soon as the Daimler drew out of the gate a straggle of Saudi staff members emerged from the Ministry’s main door and began to head for their cars; it was 1.30 already, and at 2.30 government offices shut down for the day.
‘Ah, homeward bound,’ Parsons said pleasantly, ‘as we should be, I think, or at least, back to the old Portakabin, eh? I tell you what, Andrew, the best thing is, get into your own little routine. It isn’t easy to get things done but I’ve found over the years that there’s a certain satisfaction in achieving against the odds. Now of course you’ll hear chaps like Pollard sounding off about the Saudis, that’s their privilege, but what good does it do? You may as well learn to take the rough with the smooth.’
They had walked together to Eric Parsons’s car. Parsons wound down the window for a moment, to let out the hot wet air trapped inside, and then wound it up again as the air-conditioner cut in. ‘Bought a little Japanese motor, didn’t you?’ Parsons said. ‘How’s she running?’
‘Fine,’ Andrew said absently. ‘Fine.’
He still felt sick. I was in that bloke’s office for twenty minutes, he thought, and he didn’t speak to me once.
Parsons said, ‘You seem a steady type, Andrew, to me. You’ll feel less strange when your wife comes out, there’s nothing like family life to keep you going in this place. Keep