Stewart, Angus

by Snow in Harvest

  'I'm taking the midnight 'plane from Marrakesh if we can make it,' Caroline said. 'There'll be money for you if you want to leave.'

  'You're taking the midnight 'plane from Marrakesh,' Jay echoed stupidly. 'Just clearing out.' He looked at Brown. 'What about you?'

  Brown drank more whisky. 'It's time for a family move to Tunisia. I want to finish my book on Gide.'

  'We'll see about that,' Jay said grimly. 'Within ten days you're having your bloody M or whoever produce you a Decree Absolute. Yes, "all correct in Somerset House",' he mimicked bitterly.

  Brown started, with the uncorked bottle half way to his lips. 'What do you mean?'

  'I mean,' Jay said 'that I'm flying Nashib to Gibraltar tomorrow and having him made a ward of court. He's a British subject now, remember. And if you don't bestir yourself then, I'll see Naima files suit for divorce citing Manolo as co-respondent. Manolo, no less.'

  The bottle remained idiotically poised at Brown's chin. He stared at Jay with sore, red eyes. 'You wouldn't.'

  'Oh, but I would, Simon! And I will. Either way you'll lose Nashib. You're just going to have to earn more irregular payment for another dirty job.'

  'But I can't! How?' Brown was looking desperate.

  'The proposed job in Black Africa, perhaps?' Jay suggested sourly.

  'Shut up both of you!' Caroline snapped. 'We're coming to the check.' She spoke rapidly to Achmed in Arabic. Now, over her shoulder, she passed a heavy wrench to Brown. 'I've told the boy if he makes any move you'll stun him with this. Jay, if you think, you won't interfere.'

  'Bloody hell!' Jay muttered incredulously. To Achmed he made a pleading gesture to keep quiet. But he was still not registering at all.

  'Why not detour?' Brown asked tensely.

  Pityingly Jay looked at him. 'Just try lobbing the bottle cork a few yards out there,' he indicated the track side. 'Secret Agent! I wouldn't hire you for temporary Cub Master! Even if you were a castrato,' he added as afterthought.

  'You're both being so thoroughly childish!' Caroline called angrily back. It was the first sign of tension she had betrayed since the first seconds after the disaster.

  The deceptively pathetic barrier loomed ahead. Caroline braked several yards before the brightly painted pole. Evidently she was to be content with nothing less than leaping officiously down from the Land Rover. She seemed to be in argument with one of the sentries. Suddenly, imperiously, she pointed at the small command hut. The soldier appeared to be pleading. Then an extraordinary thing happened. The man was stripping off his uniform; had actually thrown himself in the dust at Caroline's feet. The terrifying malignance on her face as she stood over him could only be imagined, as her back was turned towards the gaping watchers in the Land Rover. Now she had swung on her heel and was coining back towards them. The second sentry raised the barrier and saluted. They swept noisily through, Caroline's face a mask of hauteur.

  'Well . . .?' Brown stammered.

  'I asked for radio link with a 'phone number in Rabat, then changed my mind and dismissed him from the army,' was all Caroline said.

  Jay and Brown stared at one another; their mutual amazement forging a temporary truce.

  'But you would hire her for Guide Mistress?' Brown got out.

  'They're simply not used to women in authority,' Caroline added more lightly. 'I wonder how many of these people could believe they have a woman Ambassador in London.'

  Brown turned his lower lip down in a despairing gesture at Caroline's back. 'That's straight nepotism. The king likes keeping things in the family.'

  'So do you, it would seem,' Jay came back relentlessly. 'Simply as convenience. Are you proposing to take Naima to Tunisia?'

  'Well . . . no.' Brown met his eyes uneasily. 'I wasn't'

  'So there we have it,' Jay said. 'You achieve your dubious repair, or that's my guess, at the price of this girl's freedom. Just until guilt catches up with you again. It can't but. There's nothing but phoneyness echoing phoneyness right down the line. On top of which the two of you make my tenure in the country impossible by murdering a Moroccan and virtually pinning my name and address on the corpse. It's great. All for what? That's what I'd like to know.'

  Jays' eyes wandered once more over Achmed. His dejection was uplifting. Brown too looked defeated now, quite beaten. Anyone more charitably disposed towards him than Jay was at that moment might have seen him as a confused child. One about whom things had got hopelessly out of control. The heat was unrelenting. Baked by eight hours of sun, the earth threw up as intense a smouldering as came from above them. The Land Rover sped on towards the mountains.

  'They were communists,' Brown said tonelessly; and Jay could sense he was deliberately striking out in defiance of Caroline. 'Dan Gurney was almost certainly murdered by them. And Halliday too.'

  'So they were communists!' Jay affected amazed enlightenment.

  'You've lost your job when I reach London,' Caroline put in quietly.

  'I resign,' Brown said, abstractedly. 'And the government wanted a count of soldiers down here,' he persisted to Jay. 'That's about the sum of it. The dispositions of the Moroccan army were all we were curious to discover. But we seem to have got involved with one of the communist undercovers. Who was clearly out to get us.'

  'Remember to knock one soldier off your final figures,' Jay said eventually.

  'If he was that.'

  'How do you mean?'

  'It was you who said you'd seen him touting round the Socco,' Brown said.

  Jay looked again at Achmed. And for the first time the boy was moving. He had taken up, and uncorked the two water flasks, as if to compare their contents. Then he pitched them, spilling, far behind into the dusty road. It was a pathetic gesture. The mountains were safely in sight. Once more Achmed settled, darkly unresponsive within himself.

  'Yes, it's great to have disposed of one communist,' Jay said. 'That's an achievement.'

  * * * * *

  Time lost meaning in the heat. It could have been an hour later when Brown's whole body convulsed inexplicably, and he collapsed. No one had moved or spoken. The Land Rover had careered onwards, a steel hell enclosing passengers as unthinking as rag dolls.

  'That would be right,' Brown said.

  Jay bent over him. 'Right . . .?'

  'Yes. Jay, you must have them.'

  'What?'

  'What we were saying . . . Those tapes . . .'

  'Simon, for fucks' sake!'

  'Heat-stroke helped by whisky,' Caroline said. She didn't slacken speed.

  'I've tapes in England too . . .' There was an uneasy parody of insanity on Brown's drained, swaying face. He laughed horribly; greedily, yet somehow unconsciously, sucked back white froth welling suddenly from his mouth. 'There must be two million words of tapes . . . and cracker jokes. I'm frightened,' he moaned, some new fear gripping him. 'Because the seasons are strange . . . Expatriate wrench. Still, after ten years . . . You can't taste anything here. Is it autumn soon? . . . There isn't one . . .' His eyes were searching without seeing. Thick foam was on his chin again. This time his fingers pushed the moisture towards his mouth, while his mind was far away. 'And it was dignity brought me here,' he said. 'Nothing more . . . I wanted to be strong, I suppose . . . Stupidly, Brown was grinning.

  'Simon, you can go back. I mean, surely . . .' Jay didn't know what he offered. Instead there came to him the memory of his sitting on a pavement in Tangier looking at the pompous Palais de Justice, wondering irrationally whether he should march in and ask, 'Does anyone accuse me?' Angrily he shook his head. It cleared only partially.

  'Lies, flat lies when I told you my impotence was due to guilt set off by my friend's bastardy,' Brown was saying. 'Nothing's ever as simple as that . . . Guilt is elemental as sex is complicated. Richard Rumbold was right.' For some reason he looked nervously towards the unheeding Caroline as he said this. 'One's trying to reconstruct something unfulfilled . . . A retrospective jealousy . . . And the temporary impotence . . . the temporary impo
tence because I'd confused my unconscious with speculation—samsara! . . . Enjoy sex as the splendid irrational.' Brown's chest was heaving violently. 'Then Jean Delay was right on Gide . . . Association of self with cripples. You See . . . your girl was crippled where I was free . . . so terribly free where I was crippled . . .'

  Quietly, Brown was unconscious.

  No muscle moved in Achmed's child-like face. Then, undramatically, he spat on Simon Brown's sleeping eyes. The Land Rover roared onward at seventy. Jay found his own eyes and mind mesmerised. But he was staring fixedly at the back of Caroline, who was relaxed, yet somehow infinitely alert.

  Jay searched in vain for a water bottle, before he remembered. 'And I spit on you,' he swore simply at Achmed in Moghreb. His lower lip split.

  Brown was conscious again. 'A . . . a man was killed back there, wasn't he?' he asked uncertainly, his eyes on Jay's bloody lip.

  'Yes'

  There was silence for some time.

  'Scotch?' Jay offered his bottle to Achmed with gentle irony.

  Achmed didn't look at him. Jay reached protestingly for the bottle, but Brown's hand woe already limp.

  'I think he's simply asleep now,' Jay said to Caroline.

  * * * * *

  Exhaustion was physical pain. It was only eleven at night when they reached Marrakesh. Yet the day had begun at five. And it had been an unusual one.

  Achmed spoke only once. He stopped the Land Rover where there were lights and the sound of people. Incredibly it had been raining here. The streets were glistening.

  'At least take money, Fus,' Jay said.

  Achmed accepted it, as he climbed down from the Land Rover into the city he had never seen before. Meticulously he folded the notes, which were nine-tenths of all Jay had. Very carefully he tore them into small pieces, which he scattered over the wet road before walking away.

  * * * * *

  'Hurry, or I'll miss the 'plane,' Caroline said.

  A recovered Brown drove. She sat beside him. Alone in the back of the Land Rover, hissing now over tarmac, Jay cast about among Lom's abandoned possessions, searching only for distraction. He found the little strip of contact prints that represented themselves, and which Lom must have made by the Atlas stream. They had become more than dry.

  At the airport Caroline gave Jay a huge wad of bank notes. Perhaps she guessed how much he had given away. He shrugged, folded them carefully, and stowed them in his pocket.

  'Station,' he said to Brown.

  Brown protested agitatedly. 'But won't you drive back—leisurely with me?'

  'Station,' Jay repeated. 'But there's one other thing. Suppose I take the story—high up somehow, to Rabat. After all, they don't like communists any more than your bosses. It's something I'll have to think about. But if I can stay I'm going to want a flat. I've been looking for one all week. If you're off what's the rent of yours?'

  'About ten shillings a month?' Brown was hesitant.

  'That's about right, yes,' Jay said.

  They pulled in at the station. Rain was falling again: not the sweeping downpour of Tangier, but a drizzle that might have been England.

  Brown said, 'I will try . . . about the girl. You won't really take Nashib away? Or—what's it called—cite Manolo?'

  'No.' Jay felt weary. 'And I won't really take Nashib away.' He found he'd unthinkingly produced Lom's prints. 'They're us,' he said. 'Only horribly candid. They need captions' He considered the photographs a moment before handing them to Brown. 'I don't know about you and that super-girl. I'll call mine Gargoyle for a Mosque!'

  'Goodbye, then,' Brown said, as Jay closed the door of a vehicle he wanted never to see again.

  ' 'Bye,' Jay called back.

  A lot of others seemed to have chosen to spend that night in the gloom of Marrakesh railway station, with the improbable rain falling finely outside. Jay ate and drank something. He had no idea what. His memory searched through sleeplessness. What men, what death of all things, could have so frightened Harold Lom that he had wept? The answer could not elude him for ever.

  He tried now to picture Naima. It was when he began to think of Achmed that sleep came finally to cover his helplessness.