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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 converse 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 practiced 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 one-thirty already, and at two-thirty government offices shut down for the day.
    “Ah, homeward bound,” Parsons said pleasantly,