Stewart, Angus (29 page)

'Simon, no thinking man attempts suicide by throwing himself off a balcony,' Jay said quietly. 'But Dan
Gurney
?
Possibly to lie crippled on the pavement, with "bloody wogs" standing round wondering what to do . . .'

Brown drank; shrugging now as though it were all too much for him. 'Terror?' he hazarded. 'Suddenly unbearable pain? Who can know?'

'Pain need never be unbearable,' Harold Lom said. Where he had sprung from, Jay could only guess at. The large room was now quite crowded. 'Judge for yourself.' He handed Jay a photographic print with a modest flourish. 'And perhaps you may judge now too whether our adventure was not worth while; when you may, please, forgive me once more.—Had Mr. Gadston and his lovely lady friend not been resting in a dark river bed at Sidi Ali last night I might have been stoned to death!' he explained triumphantly to Brown.

'River bed?' Brown echoed uncertainly; then rallied. 'Actually, I heard about it. It was my duffle coat turned you into, I believe, an Arab.'

'Safe!' Lom exclaimed. 'Cleaned and waiting!' His exuberance was perhaps owing in part to the plateful of
'Majoun
cookies' he held.

The
photograph, Jay was admitting to himself, was indeed extraordinary. Before a bonfire, a man in a wild trance was in the act of tearing open his chest with a jaggedly broken bottle. His face had an expression of rapt ecstasy, although blood was pouring from the terrible wound. But he realised something more. Either the occasion of this unique human document had produced the terrifying, tragi-pathetic creature with whom he had attempted to deal (and already his conscious was burying his own moment of horror), or else it had taken the ghastly darkness in Lom to discover, to create this moment.

'Yes, I'm afraid I haven't yet done your pictures of the little boy,' Lom was saying to Brown, who looked pained by this description of Manolo.

Jay handed back the photograph.

‘And tomorrow I set out on a little expedition. A trip south,' Lom said to him. 'Alas, I must defer the dinner I promised the two of you.'

'Why, Simon and I are off on a little holiday tomorrow; Caroline said, joining them. 'What fun! Perhaps we'll meet.'

It was clearly desirable that they shouldn't. 'But where are you going?'

'Marrakesh, probably. Possibly into the desert a bit.' Lom was vague. 'And You?'

'Oh Lord, we've not really thought, have we Simon?' Caroline said, laughing.

'Not really.' Brown, Jay noticed, was struggling to look enthusiastic.

But at that moment Jay's eye was distracted by Achmed and Manolo. They appeared to be engaged in some sort of conference, Achmed looking resentful, Manolo cocky and dominant. Then he saw that Manolo was showing Achmed a British passport. Now Manolo pulled up one of his trouser legs and produced what looked like a nine-inch ebony ruler, held there by a garter. There was a sharp snap, and the flick-knife sprung an equal length of steel, while Achmed watched fascinated.

Brown also heard the snap and swung round furiously. 'Manolito, how many times have I told you not to carry that thing,' he called out 'Give it to me!'

Manolo brought the knife across, looking discovered and resigned.

'You
know
what sort of trouble this could get us into,' Brown said. Did you have it at school today?'

Manolo said nothing.

Vainly, and with growing agitation, Brown tried to fit the knife into his pocket. Even re-sprung it was an impossible length. 'Then until you learn to leave it in the flat you will wear shorts; Brown said.

'Here, let me!' Caroline came to his rescue, opening her hand-bag. She dropped the knife in.

'Now, off home,' Brown said, looking at his watch.

Jay held up his spare key enquiringly at Achmed, who came over and collected it.

'And thank Raphael,' Brown dismissed Manolo. 'If I'd reckoned on that naked girl in the hall . . .' he muttered, leaving the sentence unfinished, as the boys departed.

On the far side of the room Jay noticed only that an argument had begun between them. Manolo appeared suddenly to catch sight of something slung about Achmed's neck, and, inspired by what perhaps was reprisal, plucked it out from his shirt front. He leant forward to study it more closely; then stood back with a start, profoundly shocked. There was a sharp tussle, in the course of which the charm, some obscure part of a wild animal most probably, became severed from Achmed's neck. Then Achmed had it again, firmly clasped in his hand. Jay turned idly back to Lom.

'Hoping to get more dramatic pictures on your trip?' he asked.

'Who knows?' There was about Lom's shrug a suggestion that fate would ensure that he did.

'But destination secret?'

Lom simply smiled.

'Whisky doesn't lie around in the
bled
,'
Brown said, appearing with replenished glasses. Lom bit into another '
majoun
cookie',
but Jay didn't even think to feel apprehensive.

'I'm staying quietly put,' he said, but accepted another glass nevertheless. Suddenly, blindingly, all his senses were
in the presence of Naima. What must she be doing now? Was she safe in the squalid house where the sheer muddle and perversity of Brown's life held her prisoner? Tomorrow he would bring her to his flat. There would be motive at last for cleaning it up; meaning behind his doing so. There was no reason why he shouldn't attack the proliferating tapestries of mucor with a bucket of whitewash. If the glass acreage put curtains out of the question, then perhaps there was an attraction, even a positive philosophy in letting the cycle of the sun lighten and blacken that mighty area of sky as it chose. His life with Naima could be carelessly geared as nature. When the last two bulbs burned out in the giant chandelier, he might even not replace them.

  *  *  *  *  *

The hopeful children were gone from the little square. The
bacal was
shuttered, though the street lamp still burned above ft. The
controleur
liked an eye kept on beatnik parties. Seeing the two people were just boys, the idling policeman exhaled
kif
,
and put away his
sebsi
only leisurely. He ambled over to them.

A loop of gold chain hung down from Achmed's tightly clenched hand. The policeman's eyes settled on it.

'Can you tell me where the nearest taxi rank is?' Manolo asked, in polite, meaningless English.

Curiously, the policeman looked him up and down. He gestured to Achmed to unclasp his hand. Manolo repeated his question now in carefully appalling Spanish. The policeman told him.

'Shit! Dog!' Achmed shouted suddenly at him in Moghrebi, as he realised the situation, and Manolo began to walk away.

'
Zamel
!'
I shit on your mother!' Achmed screamed after Manolo.

Quite gently and absently the policeman cuffed him into silence. Manolo walked on as though he had neither heard nor understood. Then he had turned a corner and was gone. Achmed made a hopeless dive at the heavy, bolted door. The policeman looked at it for a moment. None of that lot would reward him for returning the gold. An arrest would break the uneasy boredom of sitting all night in empty streets where bullets were no good against
djnoun.

'
Agi
!'
he said, taking Achmed by the collar.

  *  *  *  *  *

'What!' Jay said, coming properly awake only in the earpiece of his 'phone.

Manolo says he did all he could,' Brown's voice was saying. 'Then it's the familiar routine in the morning—food, and bail out,' Jay said, after a pause. 'I noticed he wasn't here, of course. But didn't think more. Thanks, Simon. Have a good trip south . . .'

The instrument reunited itself. Without relationship a bell pinged. Groggily, Jay was in bed again.

  *  *  *  *  *

'Yes?' From the pillows, Caroline lifted the receiver. She listened and listened. 'But Simon's just English and a bit immature!' she said, trying to laugh scattily. 'The little Spaniard?' Her eyes rolled hopelessly at the ceiling. She could picture the jutting cigarette holder; the tall glass on the damascene tray, even at this hour of night. 'Why, he's sweet!'

'What is
kif
?'
Caroline affected dismay. 'For the drugs and the
what
?'

Suddenly Caroline lifted a sob into her throat. 'Lady Simpson,' she said tremulously, 'I—I'm very fond of Simon. It's just a little holiday. And I won't listen to any m-more Caroline looked curiously at the receiver
her hand had so steadily replaced. 'God, Fot, and Hell!' she muttered in an amazed expression she'd not used since she came down from Girton. 'This town's as tight as Salisbury! Pin-brained and inbred as Buscot, Berks!'

Within seconds she was smilingly asleep.

  *  *  *  *  *

Somehow Jay was standing in his broken salon again, swaying, cursing Filsall for not having put the instrument in the bedroom.

'Mr.
Jay
Gadston? From Finland? Who makes the bird-tables?' The voice quavered at him from the past. 'And at Eton?' Mrs. Allen was so sure she saw you together. She's run away, you see. I was so fond of her:

Slaves? Slaves? Jay's head wandered meaninglessly. 'Not possible,' he said muzzily. 'Oh? I don't really remember your
maid's
face
. . . If I see her, of course . . . G'night.'

That dislocated ping again. Dislocated rubber stilts between his chest and the unfocused tiles. A bed. 'Nerve!' Jay said aloud. 'My Naima!'; and plummetted downwards into silence.

  *  *  *  *  *

'If I can get this thing out of gear.' Brown drew the Land Rover in to the roadside. Half an hour earlier he had held his breath while the Gibair Dakota bounced casually off the grass strip and banked away over the sea. Now a ribbon of lemon-coloured light was opening an overcast sky.

'We can't really take it with us,' Caroline said, as the boy hopefully passed the baby tortoise through the window.

'They incubate them in their pockets,' said Brown, who had been handed two rubbery eggs, dangerously soft as wet cardboard. 'It's a planned tourist industry.'

'We have to go too far,' Caroline explained, handing the tortoise and the eggs back to the boys, who began to protest the indestructibility of their wares. She gave them fifty francs apiece.

' "To ensure pacification of natives in rearguard",' Brown indented the trivial expenditure as they drove on.

'I'll never be quite sure whether it was the tortoises you really stopped for,' Caroline said.

They were on the coast road. 'I suppose one's meant to cruise on rear-wheel drive,' Brown said.

Caroline looked at him. 'We've a long run to Kasbah Tadla. Let's play "Why are you?" '

'In this mock-heroic role? You know that already.'

'Or here at all.'

'A determination upon ease and leisure, I think—ironically,' Brown said after a pause. 'No, that's too simple. Expatriates are people who come to a place and suddenly discover there's nothing to go back for where they came from. At first the realisation is deuced uncomfortable, but then it brings its own release. The past has lost focus and coherence, and one feels guilty about that for it while. But men are frightened of what they can't envisage. Soon the only terror is lest, somehow, one might have to go back. Here, of course, it's principally a new tempo that one's adopted. No one works, yet somehow the place does. The indigenous neuroses are different. Probably that's what most expatriates are seeking. They're all of them cripples. Or they are if one accepts that thirty-foot hoarding on Paddington Station announcing that
Happiness is Egg-shaped
.
Perhaps you don't. Presumably most Londoners do, or it wouldn't be there.'

'A competitive consumer society must advertise its wares.'

'I suppose so,' Brown said. 'Otherwise we'd forget what most of them were for. Here eggs still sell themselves.'

'What would you most miss if you had to go back to London?' Caroline asked smiling.

'I suppose the speed at which people walk,' Brown said. The innate dignity and beauty of a Mediterranean people, which is what they really are, though they're also much more. The pavement cafés, the quality of the light, the contraband whisky, the mechanics of expatriate life, particularly among the English community, where
everyone knows, bitchily disapproves of everyone else, while remaining indiseverably tied to them by the bonds any minority develops, the exercise of one's own eccentricity . . .'

'Meaning Manolo,' Caroline cut in remorselessly.

'You and Gadston should really get together,' was all Brown said.

'And why did you change your name?' Caroline was determined.

Brown looked at her. 'You know that too?'

'Only that you did so.'

'Yet you wonder why I distrust the machinery of England?' Brown protested parenthetically. 'When someone casually hands you a complete dossier on an "operative" on the two hundred pounds per annum pay scale?'

'It wasn't really like that,' Caroline said.

'So, I'll tell you.' Brown affected despair. 'I swindled an insurance company. I was born in a miners' cottage, and eventually read Law. Somewhere on the way I came to dislike capitalists.'

'I would have thought insurance companies were precisely poorer people's
defence
against capitalists.'

'Then perhaps I'm a person after all,' Brown said.

Caroline laughed. 'So we have the true immoralist!'

'I'm writing a book on Gide, so it helps,' Brown said. 'Perhaps the file told you.'

'No.'

'And there you are. Didn't I tell you your masters had no interest in real values?'

They turned inland, through tens of square miles of citrus orchards. The trees' blossom was over: their swollen leaves held dark, glazed faces to the sky against the coming heat of summer.

'Have you any idea what the temperature will be by now in the pre-Saharan
jol
?—Upwards of one hundred and twenty-five degrees, I should think,' Brown answered himself. I'm not sure I'd not welcome someone chucking me off a fifth floor balcony before then—only there are no more buildings really high enough
en route
, come to think of it. What brings you in the wake of Lyautey?'