‘Okay, I’ll fill them in at the end.’
‘Don’t be too creative, though. We don’t want future generations of desert morphologists barking up the wrong cactus.’
‘I’m not actually like this,’ Nina said. Her image of herself as a decent, honest, unselfish person was impregnable to occasional lapses of behaviour.
‘I know. That’s why I like you.’
‘It’s all Hugo’s fault,’ she burst out, cutting him off mid-compliment. All her life’s trials and irritations could eventually be traced back to him, she was convinced. ‘I wanted to finish with Martin before we left England. Now look at the mess I’m in.’ What she really wanted to say was ‘Where do we go from here?’ but she thought that might be to presume too much.
‘If being found out is what’s worrying you, then you can rest easy. Martin will still be asleep, and Hugo’s far too self-absorbed to suspect anything. All shall be well,’ said Guy, taking a final drag on his cigarette and flinging the butt over his shoulder. ‘All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.’
‘That’s probably how they start in the first place,’ Nina observed, following the trajectory of the burning stub with her eyes. ‘Like oysters with grit. Under every dune a single cigarette butt. Who said “All shall be well”?’
‘Julian of Norwich.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘Her. She was a religious nutter in the Middle Ages. Lived in a cell, cut off from all human contact.’
‘Sounds eminently sensible to me,’ said Nina with a sigh.
‘Don’t worry, your sordid secret is safe with me,’ were Hugo’s first words to Nina when, a little over an hour later, he took her place in the tent. Speechless, she gaped beyond him to where Guy, illuminated by the interior light of the Land Rover, was miming an apologetic palms-up shrug.
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ said Guy, as Nina climbed in beside him, her face like thunder. ‘He was waiting for me when I got back and guessed straight away. I tried to deny it but he just laughed.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Nina. ‘Absolutely brilliant. That’s the golden rule of discretion – blurt everything out to the first person you meet. Especially if it happens to be a tactless troublemaker like Hugo.’
‘I did not blurt,’ Guy protested. ‘Anyway, Hugo won’t say or do anything that would jeopardize his research. It’s all he cares about.’
And what do you care about? Nina wondered, thinking for the first time how little she knew him.
30
At the time no one except Nina gave any thought to Hugo’s story of the angry Arab on the donkey. It was just another anecdote to take home with them, richly illustrative of the oddness of foreigners, which would be exaggerated with every retelling.
Hugo had been working out on the dune in the afternoon when the figure of a man on a donkey had shimmered into view over the horizon from the direction of In Salah. Hugo had watched his approach with interest. It seemed likely that it was the observation tent, and not Tamanrasset – seven hundred kilometres further on – that was his destination: the donkey did not look especially fit.
‘He said the Land Rover had been parked all day under his palm tree and he’d come to collect the rent,’ Hugo explained to Martin and Guy, while Nina was working her shift. They were at the palmery, where the temperature was a degree or two lower than at the met. station, and where the Land Rover was indeed parked in the shade of the disputed date palm. All three were sitting on the edge of one of the water tanks, cooling their feet and smoking, like locals.
‘So what did you say?’ Martin wanted to know.
‘Well . . .’ Hugo was inhibited in his narration by the fact that Guy had already had a version of the story on the drive back and would therefore be alert to any embellishments. ‘I told him it was impossible, because for part of the day, at least, the Land Rover was out on the dune with Guy. And secondly that I should like to see evidence of his ownership of the tree. And thirdly that I didn’t recall entering into any rental agreement with him and had no intention of paying.’
‘To which he replied?’
‘To be honest his English was so hopeless I think the finer points might have been lost on him. But he must have understood the last bit because he pointed at my watch. I thought at first that he was asking the time, but he was actually suggesting I hand it over in payment. It was at that point that I started to lose patience.’
‘Don’t tell me you got into a fight,’ begged Martin. That was all they needed – an international incident to stir up a bit of local ill will.
‘No, no, nothing like that. I just told him to be on his way – words to that effect – and he started to rant a bit and actually said you had sent him to pick up the money from me.’ Hugo’s laugh tailed off as he took in Martin and Guy’s frozen smiles. ‘Did you?’ he demanded.
‘It was a joke. We didn’t seriously think he’d trot off ten miles into the desert on his donkey,’ Martin said.
Hugo turned on Guy. ‘You never told me this on the way here.’
‘You never asked. He came up to us here this morning and spun this yarn about owning the bit of shade we’d parked in, so we offered to move the Land Rover, but he said we still owed him for the time we’d already had. Then I said that we didn’t have any money and he should discuss it with our leader, who lived in an orange tent on the road to Tamanrasset.’
‘We were only taking the piss,’ said Martin. ‘We thought he was just the local wide-boy, trying it on.’
‘That’s exactly what he is,’ said Hugo. ‘He had a good old gawp at the measuring equipment as well, while I was talking to him. Probably wondering if he could nick that.’
‘So how did you get rid of him in the end?’ Martin asked.
‘Well, he was shouting at me by this stage, not in any language I could understand, so I’m afraid I had to resort to that turn of phrase which so offended Hamid the other day.’
‘You mean the one he said you should never say?’ Guy asked. Hugo had omitted this detail in his original account.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Hugo, oblivious to Guy’s attempt at irony. ‘I must say, Hamid didn’t exaggerate the touchiness of these guys. Jesus. Talk about hypersensitive. I thought he was going to have a coronary. It did the trick though. He muttered something under his breath and rode off on the donkey, whacking it with a stick all the way.’ And they all laughed, united for once in a spontaneous rush of xenophobia. ‘Anyway, Martin,’ said Hugo, noticing for the first time that the former invalid was up and about, apparently cured, ‘since you’re out of bed at last perhaps you’d like to do the next shift.’
Nina, broiling out on the dune again, couldn’t decide whether the fact that her fling with Guy coincided with Martin’s re-emergence into society was a matter of good or bad timing. It meant that the opportunities for her and Guy to be together and indulge in potentially embarrassing apologies or declarations were severely limited. This was surely a good thing. But it also left the matter hanging, unresolved. It meant, too, that she was required to behave in a girlfriendly manner towards Martin, something which his recent isolation had spared her. She was finding the strain of acting unnaturally with both men hard to bear, and she tended to be withdrawn and silent to avoid giving herself away. But keeping silent was itself contrary to all her instincts. She felt as though somewhere, beneath these layers of pretence, the real Nina lay buried, awaiting excavation. On those occasions when she found herself in Guy’s company, Nina noticed an electric awkwardness between them, which intensified to a high-pitched humming in her ears whenever Martin was also present. Sometimes Guy might say ‘Are you all right, Nina?’ and she would nod and say ‘Yes, fine, fine’, in a reassuring voice, perfectly pitched so he would know she wasn’t suffering. Her dignity was still important to her. As for Guy, he was non-committal to a fault, asking for nothing and giving nothing away. Patience, Nina thought. In a few weeks’ time we’ll be home and I can tell Martin I’m moving out. ‘All ma
nner of thing shall be well.’ She remembered Guy’s words and repeated them, loudly and confidently, into the void.
31
The feeling of unease which Nina had been nursing since she had heard about Hugo’s altercation with the man on the donkey condensed in a sliding sweat when she and Guy pulled up opposite the observation tent to collect Martin from his first shift and found it empty, the equipment missing, and Martin himself nowhere to be seen.
‘Something’s happened,’ said Nina at once, panic rising in her throat like vomit. The sand at the opening of the tent was churned up with footprints and pitted with dark brown spots. On top of the dune and at the horns of the crescent, the anemometers whirled unchecked, their wires trailing on the ground.
For a moment they stood rooted to the spot with fear and confusion, entirely at a loss. How were they supposed to search in a landscape with no hiding places?
‘MARTIN!’ Guy bellowed through cupped hands, but the wide blue sky and parched ground failed to give back even an echo in reply.
‘Let’s go back and fetch the gendarmes. Something’s happened to him,’ said Nina, tugging at Guy’s arm to shake him out of his temporary paralysis, but he was staring past her into the middle distance.
‘What’s that?’ he said, squinting against the glare. ‘There’s something up ahead by the side of the road.’ Nina followed the direction of his gaze and made out, through the trembling heat-haze, a distant streak of colour: denim blue. For the first time in weeks she felt icy cold all over; goose pimples sprang up on her skin and her scalp tightened. Then the two of them scrambled into the Land Rover without another word, the slam of the doors in the silence ringing out like gunshots. And they drove towards the scene that would always now be waiting for them whenever they closed their eyes, and that they would never be able to forget, even when they were old and confused and had forgotten almost everything else.
He had tried to crawl along the road for help – the very worst thing he could have done with his injuries. He had been beaten about the head with a stick and left in the sun to die: the motive, apparently, theft. The digital recording machine (useless without the anemometers and not, one would have imagined, desperately saleable with them) along with Martin’s Woolworths watch and camera were the only items stolen. Martin had, in any case, set off in the wrong direction – away from In Salah – and the position in which they found his body, and the marks in the sand beyond it, suggested he had belatedly realized this and turned back again before collapsing.
It was Nina who got everything done. From the moment she saw him face down in the sand, his blond hair black with blood and flies, all normal emotional responses shut down and she felt herself overtaken by a robotic zeal to get him home to his mother. It was in this sub-human frame of mind that she was able to take on the sort of labyrinthine bureaucracy which, in other circumstances, would have overwhelmed her. It was she who persuaded Guy that they should take Martin’s body back to the gendarmerie themselves, who contacted the British embassy in Algiers and made that terrible long-distance call to Irene in London. She gave exhaustively detailed witness statements in English and French to a succession of uniformed policemen, including Hugo’s description of the angry rent-collector, to which they listened without much interest, and without taking notes. The official response to the tragedy had so far been to shout at her for moving the body and to confiscate passports. She, Guy and Hugo were only saved from being left in the cells overnight by the intervention of Hamid’s uncle, who was apparently Somebody in Sidi bel Abbes. It had never occurred to them that they might be considered suspects.
The man from the embassy, Mr Aspinall, was kindness itself, explaining over a crossed telephone line the complex procedures surrounding a local inquest and the repatriation of a body in such circumstances, and offering to send legal representation should they become embroiled in a criminal investigation. He sounded very much like a younger version of Nina’s father, whose name she dropped into the conversation in the hope that it might oil a few hinges. It turned out that the two men’s career paths had indeed crossed in Kuala Lumpur. Mr Aspinall then promised to make the journey to In Salah himself to give them any assistance they might need, and the phonecall ended on a note of the utmost cordiality.
Nina’s parents themselves, when she had finally run them to ground, holidaying in Rhodesia, were ready to fly out at a moment’s notice, and Nina had accepted the offer with the proviso that her mother remain behind. If there was anything technical, legal, bureaucratic to be managed, her father and Mr Aspinall could do it. Her mother could not be relied upon to contribute anything more than tears, and Nina felt inclined to guard her reserves of consolation for the truly needy.
Oddly, it was Guy, who had known Martin least, who seemed to cope the worst. ‘I’ve been such a shit,’ he kept saying. Or, ‘I keep thinking it’s my fault’, over and over again. Whenever she walked into the met. station on the way to or from yet another errand, he would be sitting on one of the chairs, staring into space, arms dangling, or slumped with his head in his hands, no use to her whatsoever. Hugo, who might have had firmer grounds for self-reproach, expressed no such qualms. Nina couldn’t help entertaining the suspicion that his vengeful expressions of outrage and grief were as much for his sabotaged research as for the loss of a friend. On that first dreadful day, when she had been browbeaten by the gendarmes and treated like a nuisance, and no one had shown her a drop of human sympathy, she had caught Guy and Hugo clinging to each other and crying. For a second she had felt tempted to join them – to collapse into their arms and abandon herself to hysterics, but instead she had slunk away unseen. Then, later, Guy had come up to her as if to give her a hug – at least he had twitched his arms in her direction – and she had cringed away.
‘You’re in shock,’ he said.
Perhaps he’s right, she thought, as she lay on Martin’s camp-bed in the annexe, wrapped in his grimy, sheet sleeping-bag. Perhaps that’s where I am. She pictured it as a raft, drifting along a smooth, slow-flowing river towards a waterfall. It wasn’t a bad place to be – a little lonely, perhaps, but peaceful, and infinitely better than what lay ahead.
No one was ever brought to trial for the murder, though it might be said that natural justice was served. A month or so after Nina returned home, her father received the following letter from Mr Aspinall.
Dear Charles
I’m sorry that our paths had to cross in such appalling circumstances, but it was nevertheless good to see you again. Some information pertinent to the case has just reached me, and though not entirely satisfactory, it may be of interest to Nina.
About a week ago a man was picked up in El Golea trying to sell Martin’s watch and camera to a couple of German tourists. He confessed to the murder ‘under interrogation’ – I can only leave to your imagination what form this would have taken – and subsequently died in police custody. And there the investigation ends, I’m afraid. Not a triumph for law and order, but a conclusion, at least, to this tragic episode.
I hope you are well and that Nina is bearing up in spite of all.
Yours ever
Peter Aspinall
P.S. I will arrange to have the watch and camera returned to Martin’s mother in due course.
Having fought off grief with such determination, Nina found herself unable to surrender to it when at last the opportunity arose. She didn’t cry when her father arrived, with his money and his list of contacts, and held her tightly and promised everything would be all right. And she was dry-eyed when she said her farewells to Hugo and Guy, who would be driving the Land Rover to Oran and taking the boat to Marseilles. She had already consigned them to the past. It was much later that the tears came: at the second inquest in London, and when she saw Irene at the funeral, so dazed and ghostly, and yet so grateful for the huge turnout and the many testimonies to Martin’s popularity – small crumbs of comfort, hungrily received. And then again, later still, when she found she was pregnant.
&n
bsp; III
32
‘He’s there again,’ the school secretary, Mary, said, parting the Venetian blind so that Guy could see the distant figure skulking by the gate. It was the third time he’d been spotted near the school premises. Paedophile, had been the immediate, unspoken fear, but he didn’t look much more than a child himself, and had made no approaches to anyone entering or leaving the premises. The question was, what did he want? He didn’t look nearly old enough to be a parent – not that that meant anything these days – and, besides, it was a staff training day and there were no children on site to be collected. Guy wondered whether he might not be an animal rights activist. They’d had some bad publicity over that plague of frogs, and a spate of angry calls when it was reported that a man from Pest Control had been called in to flush them out.
‘Maybe he’s an ex-pupil,’ he said, releasing the blind with a twang. ‘Revisiting an old haunt.’
‘Well, in that case why doesn’t he just come in and say hello?’ said Mary reasonably. ‘People often do.’
‘I don’t know.’ Guy took another quick glimpse through the slats. The boy had sauntered a little way down the road and was leaning against a lamp-post. He was holding something black and solid and passing it casually from hand to hand. Of course one read of deranged students in America harbouring murderous grudges and running amok with guns on prom night. But this was Twickenham. ‘Perhaps I’ll stop on my way out and have a word with him,’ said Guy, tucking his trousers into his socks.
Now that the weather was warmer he’d taken to cycling. It was no distance – walkable really, but he was in a hurry to get home today. He and Jane were going away by themselves to a hotel for the night – the first time since the children were born. He had booked a place on the river near Marlow which had a couple of stars in their eight-year-old Good Food Guide. Sophie and Harriet were going to tea and sleeping over with that peculiar friend of Jane’s. Erica. This was the only aspect of the arrangements which gave him any unease. From his own interpretation of various casual remarks Jane had let slip, he had built up a picture of a slatternly alcoholic, devoid of domestic skills or maternal authority, presiding over a household of feral children – an impression not wholly dispelled by that one meeting with her. She was the type of woman, he imagined, who would serve the children food rich in additives and let them stay up until all hours and sleep where they fell – probably in front of post-watershed television; the sort liable to use the f-word freely, have a drink too many and leave cigarettes smouldering . . .
A Dry Spell Page 26