The Man Who Knew Everything Read online

  You were (and are) one of the surviving mythic figures of the old-time Fleet Street, in which each of us grew up a generation apart. In that respect you resemble Gran Jones. And I somehow feel that if a putsch had occurred on your chosen island, your professional daemon would have taken over in some such way as Gran Jones’s. You would have set aside every consideration except getting to the core of it all and then moving your copy (as we would say) come hell or high water or, if need be, heaven. So I have borrowed that from you, as I have borrowed your car, your parrot and the architecture of your home.

  All else I have made out of the dust of years of travelling and foreign corresponding – the old Emir and his tricky son, those pushy young newsmen, Al Bakr the ageing revolutionary, my sturdy seamen Nasir and Ismail, well-meaning Williams. And Romy – ah, Romy . . . All to tell the tale of a man of whom in the end it seemed nothing was left: nothing, that is, except his consuming métier.

  Yours ever

  Tom

  1

  Friday was the day of rest, and since it was a Friday, and not long before lunch, Gran Jones drifted into the bar-room of the Darwish Hotel with his unopened mail and copies of the Morning Post in their blue airmail wrappers, and settled his spent and lofty frame into one of the deep chairs by the long window. He wouldn’t have long to wait for Abdullah to bring him what Abdullah had brought him at midday on a Friday for years. Viewed from the window, the only blemish on the shallow Gulf’s mottled aquamarine was the distant speckling of oil rigs. It was all quite normal, you might even say serene. It was years since he’d wished for anything out of the ordinary. It was probably quite a while since he had looked for it. He knew that wasn’t a professional attitude for a journalist, but he wasn’t going to let that bother him. He was all but done up, an old man now, and a dessicated pattern of existence was the right of old men. Who was there to tell him different?

  He frowned across at the bunch of fellow expatriates at the bar. Wasn’t it rather more crowded than usual?

  He might be taciturn, but wasn’t a cold man. Regulars from the island’s British community would usually greet him from the bar with a nod or a little wave, and those who knew him well might wander over to his table. He would down his first Tuborg before opening his mail, the worthless stuff first . . . not that the rest of it would contain anything of consequence. Once a week was often enough to collect this kind of mail. Any companions so far gathered would chat among themselves as he scanned his correspondence, which he held at arm’s length since for at least ten years now he had put off getting new glasses. After the tedious letters he broke the wrappers of the Post with a chunky, half-crouched finger. Opening up a newspaper was still a pleasure.

  As a rule he would sip his Tuborg until about two o’clock, then consume a small helping of the curry or meat pie the Darwish served in the bar on Fridays. For a big-framed man he ate little. There was no flesh on him. He would linger on until about three or four with his coffee and a cigar, depending on who there was to talk to. Then he would gather up his copies of the Post and the letters, leaving the wrappers and the envelopes for Abdullah to clear away. He would climb into his twenty-year-old white Packard which had had trouble with its silencer for as long as his friends could remember, and drive back very slowly through the modern part of town into what was left of the warren of the old town, where he lived.

  Jones had always used the Darwish’s post-box as his own. When he had first come to live on the island, the Darwish was the only hotel, apart from a few Arab doss-houses. When wealth struck the island, devastating nine tenths of what the place had once been, other locally financed amateurish hotels sprang up like rank weeds and made quick easy money. The Darwish met the challenge first by attempting to air-condition its spacious airy rooms (a futile endeavour), and then with a great heave-ho and at a scrambling pace rebuilt itself on its own site grandly. They even rewrote the lunch and dinner menus in Egyptian-flavoured American restaurant rodomontade. For a while it held on to its reputation as the only hotel of quality. Then up went the Sheraton and Hilton and Holiday Inn and Ramada Palace. The Darwish settled for the old Gulf hands, the discerning, those who liked to suppose their visits to the island were prompted by more than mere avarice – actual fondness for the place, for instance, a nostalgic British allegiance to it. The Darwish kept its staff, knew its customers, and allowed its habitués credit.

  ‘When camels are browsing in the foyer of the Hilton,’ Jones had been heard to comment, ‘the Darwish will still be in business.’ Jones had authority to engage in this kind of prophecy among the expatriates since such venerable age, which reached indefinitely back to before the present era of the island’s history, seemed to reach indefinitely forward also. It seemed plausible that Jones himself would still be found in the Darwish in this future epoch of Hilton-browsing camels, and his own bar account still overdue.

  Few who patronised the Darwish did not know Gran Jones, and vitually every permanent resident of the island, native and expatriate alike, knew of him. The Arab tongue has difficulty with the elision of certain consonants, and many an island Arab called him Jonas, which would often slide into the Islamic name Yunus. This Jonas or Yunus was known by virtue of having lived on the island longer than any other Westerner, and – in a Western way – for his unrivalled knowledge. As for those Westerners who came and went, whether on visits of two or three weeks, or two or three years, they would advise each other sagely to ‘have a word with Gran Jones: he knows everything’. They would turn up at the Darwish bar on a Friday especially to consult him; for the price of a round of drinks they picked up what they needed – perhaps the name of an official with influence in this or that department of government, or which booth in the old suk still dealt in brass-bound Gulf chests.

  These last several years so much money had been around that if Jones had been rewarded with, say, one per cent of the profit resulting from the knowledge he gratuitously disbursed, he would have been a rich man. But he had no interest in money and consequently no knack of making it. Amid a community of extraordinary wealth, amid profligacy that was often flagrant, Jones remained perilously poor.

  His only regular income came from retainer fees provided from London’s Morning Post and an American political weekly as their local stringer. The island’s oil wealth and its role as a base for entrepreneurs in the upper Gulf made the place significant. It seldom produced news and for years the Emir had pursued a policy of keeping the island and himself out of the news. In this policy the Emir had been advised by Jones – advice which was against Jones’s own financial interest since only by being asked for a dispatch, or by volunteering one which was published, could he supplement his paltry retainer fees. His single undisputed skill was that of a newspaperman. In his time he had been one of the most celebrated of his profession, not just in the Gulf or even in the Middle East, but as a worldwide roving correspondent for the selfsame Morning Post.

  So the island did not warrant staff correspondents, and, once having made the bizarre decision to settle in the Gulf, Jones could earn his living only as a freelance. Widely known staff reporters breezed in from time to time, when the price of oil got jumpy, or political realignment threatened the fragile equilibrium of the region, or an American Secretary of State stopped over on a courtesy call. These visiting newsmen would pick Jones’s brains over a few glasses of Tuborg; they might obtain an interview with one of the Emir’s ministers; after a night or two at the Darwish (which had a reputation among newspapermen) they would file their twelve hundred words or make their little broadcasts, and, grousing about the lack of press facilities, fly out.

  Although the value of his sterling retainer fees had shrunk to a third of their original worth, Jones hadn’t dared ask for an increase for years now, lest his semi-masters decided to make his plea an excuse to hire some young newshound from the local English-language paper in his place. He could envisage a role for a busy young journalist who could cover the whole Gulf from the island and string for half
the principal journals and broadcast networks of the English-speaking world. Such a fellow could blank him out, take the last bread from his mouth. And then what? He hadn’t saved anything, there was no pension secretly accumulating, no country cottage in Dorset . . . As it was, only one of the news agencies, Associated Press, had got around to appointing their own stringer on the island. Young McCulloch didn’t constitute a threat. For one thing, as editor of the local English daily, McCulloch couldn’t put his resident’s permit at risk by stirring things up; and, for another, wire services like AP didn’t expect their stringer to dig for news.

  Not that one had had to dig, lately. It was common knowledge that the Emir’s younger son Hatim, after two years at a quite small, new, English university not yet numbered with Oxford and Cambridge, was now under house arrest in a princely villa and had grown to become, however improbably, a kind of figurehead for supporters of the regional underground ‘liberation’ movement, for which the island was the clandestine base. The elder son, considered feeble, was occupied with a seemingly unending course of general instruction at a Texan university. Neither had been named heir apparent. For succession not to be resolved in one of the world’s richest states (in capital reserves) was an unsettling factor in the affairs of the region.

  Jones loved the island too much to poke around for trouble. The old Emir was a despot but a benign and respected one, a sight more trustworthy than any populist junta clinging to power with the usual Newspeak and a secret police. What was there to suppose the thinly schooled youth Hatim knew what he was playing with? In any case publicity would nourish the mischievous pretensions of his ‘supporters’. Jones saw no purpose in providing it. Consequently, of symptoms of unrest he reported the minimum. The island came before his income. The old Emir, for his part, although not his landlord, somehow saw to it that the rent Jones paid for his house had not risen as all other property rentals on the island had risen. The old ruler always gave thought to detail.

  Jones occupied one of the merchant houses built in the 19th century, when pearling flourished. It had been a gem of its kind. Jones’s portion of this extensive family compound was complete in itself, with a wind tower to funnel down into the elegantly long main room, the majlis, the lightest breeze during the sweltering summer months. Two little bedrooms and a bathroom formed a right-angle with the kitchen and the majlis, and all the rooms looked inward upon a narrow patio, where a green parrot presided, and a narrow garden. A high coral wall abruptly terminated Jones’s share of garden; the other part, unseen save for the tops of its two date-palms, belonged to the main dwelling which completed the original inward-gathered family compound. There resided Jones’s landlord, an ageing scion of a former pearling family, a man now grown rich again in the frenzy of construction, some of which had taken place on land of which his shaky claims to ownership the Emir had endorsed.

  Today this part of the town was neglected and half abandoned. Litter and rubble cluttered the alleys. Jones’s house missed its annual coat of paint for several years in succession because he could not afford it. The wind tower, blocked off from the majlis years before when the air conditioners were driven into the wall, was beginning to crumble. Within the house, fine dust lay deep. In a perpetual masque of life and death, lizards stalked flies all over the inner walls. Ants occupied the kitchen cupboard and sideboard; the run-off pipe of the sink was broken and released washing-up water on to the floor where morsels of food fattened a tribe of cockroaches. The kitchen was pervaded by an ineradicable odour of decay. In the majlis, littered with newspapers, books and archaeological bric-a-brac, the air conditioner shuddered with such a racket that it was impossible to hear the telephone, which was installed in Jones’s bedroom across the corner of the little court. He meant to have an extra bell put in the majlis, but that would add to his quarterly bill. In any case, around midday he usually put in a call to young McCulloch at the local paper.

  Very few visited Jones. Only a handful knew exactly where he lived, and seldom nowadays did any have the occasion to enter the old quarter. The streets were awkward for cars, and the oil town lay on the other side of the capital.

  For six days a week Jones was rarely seen, unless some feature article had been asked of him that got him out and about. The familiar lofty figure in crumpled canvas hat, old-fashioned denim shirt with buttoned sleeves and colonial shorts and sandals, would appear only at the local shop for a few days’ provisions and seed for the parrot. Every day a borrowed servant, Aziz, lean and wheezy, a poor relation of Jones’s neighbour-landlord, would step round from the adjoining house to make his bed, put the bathroom in order and run water over the dishes of the previous evening’s meal which the ants had half cleaned. For six days a week Jones would stick to his own patch, waking early, rising late. At 7 a.m. he listened to the World Service of the BBC; at 7.15 a.m. he listened to the local news in English. His Arabic was not quite up to understanding the news in the language of the country: as a young man he had learned German, and one extra language would have to do. In bed in the morning he read back through all of the airmailed copies of the Post he collected weekly from the Darwish, except the arts reviews, the religious column, and the stock market reports. He considered it his work. A newsman must know what was going on in the world. How else might he get into proportion any news he might be called upon to file?

  At about nine in the morning he would shuffle down the dark passage to the outer door in his flip-flops and sarong to pick up his copy of the local English-language daily, edited by McCulloch. He opened the parrot’s cage and while his coffee was boiling he changed the sand in the tray. Then he took the parrot out on his finger and brought her with the coffee to his bedroom where he got back into bed and read. After all, it was still only just after six o’clock in London, and the middle of the night in New York. If anything broke during the daytime, Jones had three hours in hand. The first edition of the Post went to press around 7 p.m. London time, which was 10 p.m. local time. He knew the island’s telegraphists in person. He knew the international exchange operators in person. He could move a dispatch faster than anyone on the island. He kept the telephone in his bedroom because, he reasoned, if London were to call, the time differential would most likely mean he was taking his siesta, which occupied quite a proportion of the afternoon. (New York never telephoned.)

  Most of the books he read were about the Second World War and the rise of Nazi power. Modern historians kept getting things slightly wrong – played up the wrong events, drew the wrong conclusions. He himself had known many of the major players of that prolonged drama. How much vaster an affair that was than anything that had since taken place. And how the world had shrunk! How paltry its crises! He had known Hitler personally; twice he had interviewed him alone. As a young reporter he had walked two paces behind Hitler into the blazing Reichstag. Once Hitler himself had come on the line to him, in his flat in Berlin, to ask him in strict confidence, as ‘one who understands what we are striving for in the new Reich’ (Jones was then engaged to a Berlin girl: the alliance did not survive the outbreak of war), how the British would react to Ribbentrop’s mission to London to discuss the Polish ‘problem’.

  He knew them all: Wavell, the Auk, Monty, Ike, Patton, Churchill, Eden, Smuts, Menzies, FDR, Truman, Attlee, Cripps, Nehru, Gandhi, Mountbatten, MacArthur. He was at Tehran and Potsdam, he covered the opening of the United Nations in San Francisco. He was not yet forty when the war was over, and one of the three or four leading newspapermen in the English-speaking world. He covered all the big post-war crises – Abadan, Korea, Berlin again, Hungary; he was the first Western reporter to tour the Soviet Union and one of only two to interview Khrushchev in the Kremlin.

  By fifty, what could he add to his achievements but pallid repetitions of a greater past? He was already tired of fame, and something had gone from the centre of him. He craved privacy, and perhaps some deeply precious personal secret.

  Beside his bed stood two photographs. The framed one was of his sons
on a yacht, taken in the Gulf soon after he first arrived here. They were already young men then. The other was of the boys when children, taken with their mother. He had taken both the pictures. He had come across the second one quite recently, and bought a little stand which held it between glass. He used to tell himself it was for his wartime sons and Liz that he had ventured and striven so, to be their hero. So he became, but now he sometimes questioned if he ever really knew Liz. She seldom came into proper focus. He could not reconcile the bright-eyed, coltish young woman – an aspiring journalist herself – whom he joined in such debonair love between assignments in those first years of war, and the uncomprehending loneliness of the mother of his sons, post-war, resentful of his repeated absences, bewildered by his reckless spending. He would come home like an actor between roles to find something expected of him he had no idea how to give. He supposed that (if one was to put it technically) she had fallen in love with the dashing celebrity of the press and he had been captivated by her blind unqualified delight in him.

  For a long long time he did not choose to recall things about himself personally – that is, outside his professional achievements – but lately private recollections had come upon him more and more; they would arrive with extraordinary precision at particular moments, involuntarily, especially when he was settling back to sleep in the afternoons. For instance, there was a certain homecoming in those post-war years when he had flown in from Moscow on a Tubolov 103 (though Washington or Paris were a much more usual point of embarkation), landing at Northolt on a grey March afternoon. Steps are wheeled up and the deafening engines die at last. He himself with his felt hat at its customary angle, steps out in his long dark overcoat, slightly flared and with an Astrakhan collar, which he bought in Berlin before the war for forty marks. And galoshes. In one hand his suitcase and in the other his typewriter – this selfsame Olympia, one of the early portables, its handle festooned with the remnants of countless labels acquired on one assignment or another, like notches in an old soldier’s rifle-butt. There amid the concourse of meeters and greeters glimpsed through the exit from the customs hall, Liz, straining to catch sight of him, the coltishness flaked by the strain of bringing up the boys all on her own, long weeks at a time, never quite knowing when he would announce his imminent return from one theatre of foreign news or another.