Stewart, Angus

by Snow in Harvest

  ANGUS STEWART (1969)

  Clarence:

  O, do not slander him, for he is kind!

  1st Murderer: Right,

  As snow in harvest. Thou deceivest thyself:

  'Tis he that sent us hither now to slaughter thee.

  King Richard III

  To my parents: a second novel;

  a brother for Anthony Sandel

  The Moroccan currency unit, the dirham, exchanges at some thirteen to £1 sterling, and is roughly equivalent to the new French franc. However, as in France, the earlier terminology lingers: people say: 'ten dirham', or 'a thousand francs' indiscriminately.

  'GET in,' Dan Gurney said. 'I'm going to have to pay this bloody Arab, so we might as well both use his cab.'

  They stood on the corner where Murillo joined the Boulevard. From the rocks' junction there was the central city's only view of the sea. Lord Bute owned the open lots, it was said. Nobody knew how the government had acquired them; why they'd been relinquished.

  'Right,' said Jay Gadston.

  The sea was a brilliant kingfisher wing. On the left the Kasba, spilt into it like an untidy pile of children's bricks that had been left a long time in the sun. All about them generations of Europe had raised concrete business blocks to the sky, flamboyant Andalusian wrought-iron grilles guarding their lower windows like armoured codpieces. Jay, holding the taxi door open while Gurney lowered his bulk into the rear seat, stared unthinkingly about him. It was four o'clock. The first of the shopkeepers were forcing open their steel shutters like rusty eyelids. They used long poles. Two shoeless men with a handcart of charcoal stopped by the taxi's offside door and looked hopefully at Gurney.

  'Imshi! Not today!' Gurney said; and, as Jay climbed in beside him, 'Christ, you'd think they'd know by now!'

  'What?'

  'That apartments use only butagas,' Gurney said. 'Bloody hell—those two have been persecuting me every week for fifteen years. One's the widower uncle or something of my fatimah.'

  'Your maid?'

  'Beni Makada: Villa Perce-neige,' Gurney said to the driver, ignoring Jay.

  The taxi swung into the Boulevard. 'Christ!' Gurney exclaimed without much reverence. He stretched out his leg and massaged it within the narrow space. His bulk, in a worn tropical suit, looked like a loosely filled hessian sack.

  'Rheumatism?' Jay suggested concernedly.

  'That and all sorts of things.' Gurney looked at Jay quite humorously. His eyes came alive in the pouchy surround of his face. 'What is it you want exactly?'

  'Two rooms and water at around twelve thousand.'

  'You won't find it,' Gurney said without emphasis. 'I've got nothing like that. There's voting, the king's coming, and the tourists are beginning to arrive.'

  Jay didn't say he couldn't see the connection between these things.

  'This Mrs. Diergardt has a little villa,' Gurney ruminated. 'Around sixty thousand, I think. That any good to you?'

  'Don't know how to manage servants,' Jay said, laughing openly for the first time. 'Where are you now?'

  ' "Ibiza'', Dan, as you well know,' Jay said, warming to the old man as one always did somehow.

  'The block with that beatnik writer somebody Wilburs? Bloke with the wig?'

  'That's right. He's an American critic.'

  'Yea, the beatnik. Doesn't he write for magazines?'

  'I don't know!' Jay was exasperated. 'I don't know anything about American magazines. All I know is Brodie Chalmers told me that this man in my block called Selly Wilburn was a critic.'

  'Drown 'em,' Gurney said, looking unseeingly out of the window. 'All those beatniks ought to be drowned. All they do is raid the mule trains coming down from the hills with marijuana. If they want the marijuana, why not give it to them? I don't care.'

  Now whatever are we talking about, Jay wondered; but Gurney unexpectedly came back on track. 'What's wrong with the place you're in now?'

  'Too big to clean and decorate, no furniture, about three acres of glass without curtain, and blocked bog,' Jay listed mechanically.

  'Fellow called Brown in Rue Rabelais has a couple of flats,' Gurney said. 'Moves into a shack in Dradheb when he rents them. Tried him?'

  'Yes, I know of him,' Jay said noncommittally. Two years in the city had taught him that while the knowledgeable wisecrack might give passing satisfaction it didn't pay long-term dividends. The webs of political, financial, and even amorous fibres being as invisibly suspended as they were, one owned to no very great knowledge of A when talking to B. It was a different thing either to challenge, or to concur with them, directly and individually. Besides, the mention of Simon Brown had put Jay on the defensive. Gurney must have seen Jay about with Achmed in the old days.

  'You don't look all that much of an invalid to me, Dan,' Jay said now. 'What are the hospital in Gib doing to you each week?'

  Gum, raised his hands helplessly. 'Oh—tests, you know. Always these damn tests.'

  'Bloody for you,' Jay said. 'Particularly to have to commute over there all the time with a week-end bag. . .'

  'Oh—yes—frightful! Bloody frightful!' Gurney said; but he gave Jay a leer for a long moment before he said anything at all. Few people could be as confident and nerveless as Gurney who, flouting currency regulations, regularly transferred the profits of his various enterprises to Gibraltar on his own person. But then, ever since a former school friend of Jay's, Rupert Filsall, had seduced a disaffected secretary of Gurney's, and claimed to have discovered from her that Gurney possessed elaborately documented files on virtually all the European residents, Jay had been romantically inclined to suppose that in Gurney he had perhaps stumbled upon Our Man in Tangier. Why the city should boast A Man at all he could not imagine. It was, of course, conceivable that Gurney's purely commercial interests necessitated his having this sort of skeletal hold over people. Whatever the reason Gurney was certainly informed about the life of the city. His next remark confirmed this last thought.

  'Why not take over Lady Simpson's roof? She's been wanting you to for long enough.'

  'Company I keep,' Jay said, after a moment's thought. 'And the gin would kill me. I'd be dragged nightly into those reminiscences. She's sweet. It wouldn't work, though.' Gurney laughed. 'Have you met her new protégée?'

  'No?'

  'Girl out of England. Speaks Arabic, of all things. Supposed to be going to help at that orphanage they're always fussing about. But she's also tied up in some way with a B.B.C. film team that's over here for some rubbish.'

  'Sounds as if a servant is due to arrive with a summons from the Dar Aloussi,' Jay sighed. 'Probably on a day I'm washing my shirt.'

  'You'd better choose between buying a spare one and joining the beatniks,' Gurney said, laughing again.

  Four o'clock was a dead hour. Still, as the taxi passed beneath the giant green and red star, built many months before as a triumphal arch through which the king had driven, it braked violently. A Berber family driving a brand new donkey, that might have been spirited from the soft-toy counter at Harrods, were crossing the road.

  'Jesus Christ!' Gurney said. Genuine apprehension brought out the pitiless vowels of his Australian accent. 'If I was a millionaire I'd have an armoured Cadillac, a chauffeur, my lawyer in the back, and a couple of policemen on the running-board, and I'd mow 'em all down! Run right over them! Any widows and children that were left could be chucked into the grave too.'

  The suburb of Beni Makada sprawls about a perfectly rounded hill at the north-east end of the city, and now the taxi was climbing. Jay looked back at the Moroccan star, forming the arch over the Rabat road. Not even the commandant of the city garrison was given more than a few hours' warning of the king's arrival. A day was rumoured, then indefinitely postponed. Shock troops,
trained by the French Paras, were loosed on the city, which afforded no sight more absurd than these leathery men wandering about the Medina in pairs with linked hands. Meeting such a couple one thought twice about smiling. In fact one tended to step deferentially off the pavement. Meanwhile the new green paint on the triumphal arch embarrassed the authorities. The dusty lots surrounding it were too brown. Daily the military would bring lorry-loads of greenery and scatter it about distractedly. Of course, this got eaten in the night. Now the monument of so much glory had become tonally inseparable from the surrounding land. Perhaps they were not planning to refurbish it this year.

  'This is the place,' Gurney said. The taxi had stopped before high, whitewashed walls, in which gigantic wooden doors were set. 'Hop out and pull that thing.'

  Obediently pulling the bell-handle, Jay wondered suddenly why he was here. 'You think this old lady might be able to help?' he asked Gurney.

  'Not Mrs. Diergardt—Jaqueline. She's the woman who looks after Mrs. Diergardt. Has a few apartments. I have to see her on business.' Gurney looked at his watch. 'Bloody thing is, we'll have to stay to tea now.'

  Probably the bell lever was not connected. 'Open it and we'll go on in,' Gurney said impatiently.

  A brown-uniformed postman dismounted from his bicycle. 'Madame Diergardt?' he enquired of Jay, indicating the walled garden. Jay nodded. 'Les chiens,' the postman said, and thrust a bundle of letters into Jay's hand. 'Merci beaucoup, monsieur.'

  'Sooner you than him,' Gurney said with his slow leer. 'Shove the bloody thing.'

  Jay put his weight to the small door set in the heavy gates, and several things were happening at once. A couple of giant dobermanns were circling his ankles, a Berber girl dressed as a Victorian housemaid stood in a flower-bed looking ineffectual, and from the porch of the house a stout European woman was laughing heartily at the massacre. It was the childhood situation: an adult insisting the dogs wouldn't bite; the child convinced they well might. Only now the situation was absurdly exaggerated. As the bites became more alarming, the comforting assurances became more fulsome.

  'It's nothing,' Jay said, gathering cloth about his bared calf in the hallway. Gurney, and the woman who must be Jaqueline, were pounding each other's hands. An introduction was made.

  'Splendid creatures,' Jay said abstractedly. His nudity had gone unremarked. With the dogs now shut out he felt able to look about him. The hall where they stood contained no less than four full suits of armour. A selection of two-handed swords, pikes and targets, leant in the corners.

  'They make good guardians for Tangier, no?' the woman said, referring presumably to the dogs. While some myopia evidently prevented her noticing Jay's damaged trousers, she continued to beam, the supremely competent hostess. 'Come! Tea is just now ready, Dan!'

  They moved into a drawing room cluttered with a profusion of Victoriana. It was also filled with people.

  'Kate, darling, Dan is here,' Jaqueline announced, 'and this is Mr. Gadston out from England.'

  A very old lady indeed got up from a moquette settee. Her eyes seemed to be papered about with onion skin. Her mouth hung open without muscular control, and she clung to both Gurney's hands for a moment like a delighted child. 'I was so glad . . . so glad,' she said, and teetered round on Jay. 'From Finland?'

  'England.'

  'Good, Good! Holiday is it . . . is it?' She seemed to Jay to search his face with an unjustifiably tense anxiety.

  'Not really. I've been here about two years.'

  But we've not met before? . . . ever before?'

  Jay smiled. 'No. Never.'

  Catherine Diergardt gyrated like some enfeebled clockwork toy. For all her extreme old age she made introductions effectively. An impeccable young American couple, the girl feeding broken biscuits to a twelve-months' child, were Mr. and Mrs. Cooper-Madison. His haircut and eyes were unquestionably Fullbright. They had connections with the U.S. Consulate; and she taught school. A bruised, leonine woman, wearing a tawny dress and flat suède shoes, was a Mrs. Allen, an English resident. Jay suspected she might have left a hockey stick in the hall. On her right, the lank man with pale, oval face, heavy-rimmed spectacles and coffee-coloured suiting, was Elton Hoover, an American writer. He wore an expression of studied withdrawal, sat upright though relaxed on a straight-backed chair, and inhaled with deep, careful movements from a Casa Sports cigarette. There was evidently some distinction to him. The Englishwoman, however, was busily questioning the man on her left. About him there was an aura of Jewry and Middle Europe. His eyes were felt-brown and shadowed, and his cupola-like forehead heavily pocked.

  'And this is Mr. Harold Lom, who is making a film for the B.B.C. Television,' Mrs. Diergardt said.

  Lom got heavily to his feet as he took Jay's hand.

  'Mr. Gadston has a little colour camera and I've been telling him he must go on a bus to Xauen,' Mrs. Diergardt went on. 'For some time he was with the British Embassy in Finland, though he looks very young.'

  'No!' Jay said desperately. 'I make bird-tables.'

  Mrs. Diergardt's jaw relaxed more helplessly. She panted, her head moving reflexively, and for a moment she looked like an abandoned retriever. For the first time Jay noticed that her left hand was withered. 'Yes Mr. Gadston makes bird-tables,' she said, recovering.

  'How very interesting,' Lom said without irony. He sat again.

  'For a firm in London is it? . . . is it?' Mrs. Diergardt wondered.

  'Locally. To order, as it were,' Jay said. A discussion of his professional capacities struck him as being of no interest to anyone, least of all himself.

  Jaqueline came up. 'Let us sit down and have tea now, Kate, no?' she said, and steered her tottering charge into a chair next the young American.

  Dan Gurney, meanwhile, was heavily at ease. Seated beside Jaqueline he became involved in some esoteric discussion relating to real estate. Elton Hoover was talking to his more academic co-national; a slow, ruminative drawl, neatly broken with much, 'Well, Mister Madison.'

  Quite suddenly the infant on the American girl's knee took a swipe at Gurney with a rubber doll. 'Jesus Christ, control that baybee!' Gurney said none too tolerantly.

  'You're filming here?' Jay hazarded to the sad Jew. In the hard shafts of sunlight he looked a sick man; a tortoise stripped of its shell perhaps.

  'That is the idea, yes.' He spoke very precisely.

  'Documentary of some sort?'

  'Yes. There is much of great visual beauty here you know.'

  Jay looked at him quickly. 'Surely'

  'But for me it is almost . . . a holiday,' Lom said. 'Really I have retired.'

  'Never!'

  'But yes! We have another unit coming soon. Not my unit.' The seemed to close up.

  The atmosphere in the room suddenly irritated Jay. The Englishwoman called Mrs. Allen was talking loudly; throwing herself about to illustrate some point. Cups of tea were being handed out by a second maidservant. The very young one followed behind her with a plate of small cakes. The technique appeared to be to automatically pile each guest's sideplate with a large selection of these. Jay followed the girl's skirts down to the floor, wondering vacantly whether she belonged to anyone. The people in the room seemed too disparate for cohesion; the house, with its accumulated junk of a dead Germanic diplomat, too static and alien for sanity.

  'Kate, darling! Henry looks as if he hasn't been dusted for a year!' It was the Englishwoman who suddenly called, and, as if in answer to Jay's thoughts, pointed through the half-open door to where one of the suits of armour was visible in the hall. The Berber girls continued to drift about the room stacking the plates still higher, while Mrs. Allen defined their tribal faults. It was a monograph without ethnological profundity, Jay supposed. For his own part he was wondering what the young one must look like with her clothes off.

  'Ever thought of making a blue movie?' he asked the man called Lom suddenly. Gurney was invoking Christ some more as the all-American infant peppered him with biscuit crumbs, and the
atmosphere of the room was relatively uninhibited. ‘I mean . . . elevating it to an art form, or whatever,'

  To Jay's surprise the Jew looked at him with quickened interest. 'Under the influence of cannabis, yes, many times,' he said succinctly.

  'Kif?'

  'That is right.'

  'Never touch it myself,' Jay said. 'But tell me more.'

  'What is there to tell? These things are visual. They have nothing to do with words.'

  ‘Oh,' Jay said, disappointed.

  'You want, perhaps, the lead part!' Lom said, chuckling now. 'You are young, and perhaps you will have one in life. But not in my movie . . . my blue movie.'

  'Proverbs.'

  'And why not? A film must be a proverb. An exposition of something that is universal. I think only in visual terms. So how can I talk otherwise than in proverbs?'

  'Stalemate.'

  'Exactly. Meanwhile these little almond cakes are good, are they not? The tea is perhaps Lapsang?'

  'Could well be,' Jay said. He buried his nose in his teacup. The gnome-like man did the same.

  For all her senility, Mrs. Diergardt was in command of her mind. She moved from guest to guest, with a word, however meaningless, for each. It was at her instigation that the boisterous Mrs. Allen now flopped down beside Jay, and Harold Lom was insistently trundled away.

  'Goodness! Hallo!' Mrs. Allen said.

  Jay half rose so as to he able to nod the more profoundly.

  'You are English?'

  'Yes,' Jay said.

  'Frightful here, because one never quite knows, does one? I mean, which language to speak.'

  'I imagine it can he confusing. Have you lived here long?'

  'Goodness yes Donkeys' ages. Mohammed Cinq virtually kidnapped Jonnie to sort out their frightful railways. Then Leopold whisked him away to do a trans-Katanga. The blacks got him.'

  'I'm sorry,' Jay said.

  'It was frightfully complicated. They told me the money could only come to the Free Zone, so I stayed. But the Moroccans are so cruel as well as stupid.' Mrs. Allen flounced about some more. She made a dive for a rock cake. Her face was square and heavy, and there seemed to be vaseline smeared about her eyes. 'I'm never going to identify a man for them again.'