Stewart, Angus (4 page)

'Near Windsor,' Jay said. He paused seven seconds leapt to his feet, and clasped the old lady's only functioning hand. 'Goodness I must be on my way too!'

A slow smile about the company seemed to be sufficient for Gurney. Dutifully, Jay followed suit. He took a quick glance through the window, gauging the garden's suitability for a bird-table. The possibilities looked quite bright. A strange quartet now moved out into the hall, among the dusty, armour: Jaqueline and the rambling Gurney; Jay and. the stooped nonagenarian. The very young maid followed behind.

'Dan, what about a piggy-back?' Jay said. Jaqueline was unbolting the front door.

'Oh, he is still frightened of the dogs!' Jaqueline laughed.'

'Yes,' Jay said.

Mrs. Diergardt was pawing unnoticed at Gurney's sleeve. She barely reached to his elbow. 'You'd like some arum lilies wouldn't you? . . . wouldn't you?' she quavered.

Gurney courteously refused this offer; and Jay became aware of the maid standing in shadow behind him. She was pathetically holding Gurney's muffler. Jay dropped his hand On to the
back of her thigh; then felt upwards through the foamy skirts to her tight buttocks. She looked at him with slow, animal eyes. Her mouth didn't move at all. She stepped forward mechanically with Gurney's scarf.

What had happened to the dogs perhaps Allah knew. They weren't in evidence. At the outer gate Jay looked back. The girl was bent reaping lilies in the garden. She had great armfuls—for some other guest, he supposed. Jaqueline stood, hands on hips, directing the harvest.

'Christ, that squawling baybee!' Gurney said in the cab. 'Looked a bit
black to
me. Touch of the tar brush somewhere . . . I dunno.' He mumbled on for some moments. The taxi lurched down the road towards the white city. Through the rear window the sun was poised for its sudden drop behind the purple line of hills where the Rif Mountains began. 'Oh —before I forget—Frederick Halliday at the bookshop's been trying to contact you. You know him?'

Jay turned to look at Gurney. 'Only of him,' he said slowly.

'Well, you'll have to wait a day or so. He's gone to Casa—or
is just going.'

'Any idea what about?'

'Maybe he wants a literate assistant in the shop.' Gurney
looked at Jay sideways. 'He's pretty much a hermit. Funny you never met him.'

Jay said nothing. The 'literate' assistant couldn't have been accidental.

  *  *  *  *  *

High above the Kasbah, exactly one mile from the Villa
Perce-neige
on the Beni Makada hill, and commanding, as it were, the other tip or extremity of the crescent-shaped city from an almost identical elevation, Lady Simpson lifted her telephone receiver in the Dar Aloussi. To do so she had first to dislodge a cheetah which had fallen asleep across the instrument. 'Please!' Lady Simpson said severely, and the beast loped disconsolately out of the room.

Left alone, Caroline Adam gazed a moment into her gin and tonic, shrugged her shoulders, and flicked her knees up beneath her on the sofa. She had a lot to think about. As the new assistant matron of the Pastoral Orphanage, she was bound to listen carefully to one of the founder members. She had been listening for an hour. During this time she thought she had also understood Lady Simpson to have founded the American University at Beirut. Things were confusing. The running of the Orphanage itself appeared not to be without complications. If Jay Gadston had passingly wondered how a Christian charity could operate within an Islamic state, never mind a proudly nationalist one that had only recently thrown off colonial domination, Caroline Adam was beginning to find out.

'Perfectly respectable,' Lady Simpson said into the 'phone. 'He's making me a bird-table . . . No, mine's a stone one . . . I think he might . . . But he doesn't have a set fee, Kate . . . It’s by arrangement, and very reasonable . . . Yes, Eton . . . Dear, I have
not
been hiding him from you . . . He's a very withdrawn young man.'

The line went dead. Most probably it had been accidentally shot through by celebrating tribesmen. Lady Simpson had witnessed too many referendums in Arab countries to be disconcerted. She hung up. Caroline Adam untucked her legs smartly as she came through into the drawing room again.

'No, the French murdered him,' Lady Simpson resumed. 'And I think poor Mohammed Cinq knew what must happen to him. Heaven knows what the Quai d'Orsay paid the anaesthetist. He was an
Arab
!'
This memory of treachery had Lady Simpson quivering with rage. Her glass of Dutch gin wobbled perilously. 'Perhaps you'd help me shut up the house,' the said. 'Then I'll call a taxi to take you home.' Caroline protested in vain.

'They've been voting, and it'll soon be dark,' Lady Simpson said.

The tour of the house wholly enchanted Caroline. In Nice, where she had lived much of her childhood, its siting alone must have been worth tens of thousands of pounds. Standing some eighty feet sheer above the Mediterranean, it had once belonged to a Moorish merchant of consequence. Beneath its windows green slopes grazed over by sheep fell down to the sea. Herdsmen passed it quite silently save for the strains of Cairo Radio issuing from beneath the folds of their coarse
djellabas
.
The house itself had been built about an open patio, now roofed over to form a large salon. Smaller, finely proportioned rooms, opened off three sides of this area. Crenellated Moorish windows gave one way on to the sunset; the other down towards the harbour, where the lavender hull of a Union Castle liner lay berthed. Upstairs there was no more than a servant's room, a wash-house, and the enormous flat terrace.

'This one always gives trouble,' Lady Simpson said. Caroline, transferring armsful of Damascene ironmongery from the sill, was inclined to agree. Eventually she reached an arm through the guarding bars, caught hold of the hinged shutters, drew them to, and bolted them. The home was now dramatically sealed.

'I don't expect you got across into Spain from Gibraltar, what with all the La Linea frontier business.' She paused on the winding stairs, political indignation rising in her again. 'But how could anyone
expect
that Mr. Wilson to be able to deal diplomatically with a great statesman like Franco!'

Caroline said nothing. Her mother's only brother had been killed in the Civil War. Now she herself was on the other side. 'Let me get you another gin-tonic,' Lady Simpson said. 'I'm sure you'll very quickly come to find your way about the town. It seems to be particularly full of well-to-do young men at the moment. They come, you know, for the drugs or the Arab boys'

'I couldn't help overhearing that you have an Etonian building you a bird-table,' Caroline laughed. It was possibly an unwise confession, but she saw no harm in advancing idle pleasantries. Lady Simpson was nothing if not a delightful anachronism. Unshakably British, with that peculiarly severe righteousness of the
colon
,
she
combined a confused fascism with a regard for the Moroccans that was more than simply ornate and sentimental.

'He's a charming—if rather
scruffy
young man,' she said now. 'But not at all well-to-do. He seems always to be hungry! I automatically give him a meal whenever he's working here. His father was Brigadier Gadston of the Long Range Desert Group, but also something of an undercover maker and breaker of kings. He was involved with Feisal, and later with Zog of Albania. Young Jay can only have been in his early teens when he was assassinated in unexplained circumstances in Amman. He was serving in Egypt at the time when my husband was killed there. They knew each other quite well; although we never met.' Lady Simpson reached for another native cigarette and placed it carefully in her silver holder. She would sometimes talk for sentences at a time with this forgotten in the comer of her mouth. Strangely, the action added to her dignity, rather than detracted from it. At the mention of her dead husband her eyes had lost focus. 'I
like
Jay, she went on defensively. 'Only I wish he would settle to a proper career!'

It was clear that Lady Simpson had proprietary feelings about this young man. In the circumstances Caroline saw it would be unedifying in her to wonder whether the garden architect was in Tangier for the 'drugs or the Arab boys'. When one thought about it, there was no valid reason why those whom Lady Simpson termed 'well-to-do' should not be there for both.

Walking to the waiting taxi, Caroline looked back on the house. When the patio had been roofed concessions had necessarily been made to modernity, and there were windows in the exterior walls. It no longer presented the blank, whitewashed facade, which, more than anything perhaps, was the defining symbol of Morocco. But few of the city's grander native houses had avoided European influence, even at
the time of their building. Too many generations of soldiers and merchants had come and gone from the small promontory of land. The city's walls had been opened, and so had its people's eyes. With the sunlight there had flowed in influences as potent, though less benign. As if to illustrate this train of though, from some nearby suburb the raucous cry of the Coca-Cola loudspeaker van drifted down on the quiet garden overhanging the sea. Lady Simpson peered a moment through the wire grille in her outer gate. A lot of ragged children surrounded Caroline. The contention seemed to be that the taxi only stood where it did through their good aegis. It was rather like God and the tree in the quad. Its continued existence had been guaranteed by virtue of their presence alone; and this was a matter for payment. Bolder spirits lightly touched her sleeve. She closed the car door to a twittering chorus of, '
Mahm'selle!, Mahm'selle!
' and looked back once more at the house, with its European windows, now shuttered.

Caroline left the taxi short of the Orphanage. She walked down a broad avenue flanked by prosperous villas which the ending of the International Zone and Free Port had left empty. Many were vast, set behind heavy wrought-iron railings, often lost sight in the smothering confusion of their unkempt gardens. Shuttered and silent for almost a decade, they gave the impression of having given up all hope of redemption, relapsing into melancholy aloofness behind padlocked gates. It would be perhaps another fifteen years before the Moroccan middle class emerged in sufficient numbers to fill the similarly abandoned apartment blocks. Unless the owners of those often preposterous villas saw fit to
open them
to the homeless, they were
unlikely ever to be lived in again. The evening was very still. Late sunlight filtered through the dusty eucalyptus trees and made patterns of shadow on the road. Sometimes it was a swallow that banked above the ruined gardens, and sometimes a bat. An old man on a donkey passed Caroline: the rider lost in the preoccupied trance of the country Arab; the beast hurrying forward with the clear ring of hooves, though equally unperturbed. Stretched out on the pavement, before a particularly secretive lodge, was an even older man who might have been dead, or merely sleeping. The rider didn't glance at him. Caroline passed only two other people: a pair of elegant, veiled women, with patent-leather handbags, most probably off on a daring outing to the cinema. She could catch nothing of their muted chatter as they went by, but their fine brown eyes dwelt on her own blue ones curiously for a moment. Probably she didn't look very like a tourist.

At the moment she was only a provisional helper at the Orphanage: her appointment didn't take effect for some days. Harold Lom had instructed her to be in the Petit Socco, at 7 p.m. that night. She would have to find her way there. Caroline unburdened herself of some back numbers of the
New Yorker
which Lady Simpson had insisted she take for the children. Without pausing to change, she collected the nit-comb and went to work on the heads of four of these who had gone berserk in a single bathtub.

  *  *  *  *  *

Jay Gadston would sometimes make pilgrimage to one or other of his former dwellings. The obeisance consisted of sitting as close as possible to it and considering his decline. When Gurney's taxi dropped him, he made his way towards the Rue Rabelais. For one thing he wanted to shy clear of the centre of the town, on which wild-eyed groups in
djellabas
of uniformly white hairiness were converging with banners; for another, Mrs. Diergardt's tea party had left him with an irrational longing for the sardine sandwich that only this particular old
bacal
could provide.

Soon he was sitting on the pavement outside the shop, leaning back against the wall of his former apartment block, and munching the stuffed loaf. For all its lack of elevation this was a vantage point. He could see the giant star built over the Rabat road again. 'The block stood isolated in a bowl of dust two small boys, scarcely more than infants, were exhibiting curious territorial behaviour near the wall of the Garage Vulcain. One dropped his pants, and, failing to defecate after a few moments, plucked them up, and ran off a few yards through the dust to another spot. Here he evidently succeeded; for the second, following, and taking up a similar squatting position beside the first, regarded him with deep jealousy. The first, having yanked up his pants again, ran off once more. The second continued to squat, eyeing his companion surreptitiously; anxious now lest his failure be discerned by the successful.

To be out of the Medina was to be out of the crowd: to be out of the crowd was to be exposed to the wind. It could cross this brown land all right. The area of abandon spreading before Jay was the size of several football pitches Like grandstands, the extreme perimeter of vision was formed by the
Palais de Justice
,
the Central Post Office, and the National Bank, the last guarded as always by its sad, bedraggled soldier with a sub-machine gun. When the wind really blew, the dust-bowl in between the buildings became like a fire hydrant feeding sand to a hundred haphazard hoses. A jet could set you grazed and bowling towards the bank; another politely divert you at right-angles into the sea. Sidi Hassan's green and red star was very fine engineering indeed. It had stood now for over a year.