‘I’ve been busy,’ I said, making a pointless apology.
‘There’s no need,’ said Iain. ‘I can see that. And I won’t pretend I’m not deeply worried about it all. But I haven’t called on my own behalf, or Harriet’s. James Fergusson asked me to drop by. He needs to see you, but he doesn’t think you’d take to his calling in out of the blue.’
He paused and sipped his tea.
‘I haven’t seen Fergusson in a little while,’ I said. ‘He’s written to me a few times, but the truth is, I have no time for the man.’
‘That’s fair enough, I don’t like him either. But the fact is, he’s your boss, and he has a right to know what you’ve been up to. The university pays your salary, and it expects results. Look, Andrew, you may as well know – Fergusson is not going to recommend the renewal of your contract after July. And I don’t think he’s prepared to write a favourable report either. I don’t think you’re going to find it easy to get a new post, not unless you do something drastic between now and the summer.’
‘I’ve been working like a slave. I . . .’
‘You haven’t been doing the work you were contracted to do. What you did at first was excellent, and we all appreciated it. But you’ve allowed yourself to get side-tracked.’
‘It’s research all the same.’
‘No, Andrew, it’s not. Not any longer. You’ve buried yourself so deeply in this thing, you can’t see clearly any longer. But I promised not to preach to you, so I won’t. I’ll just pass on Fergusson’s message and leave you. It’s up to you what you do about it.’
Perhaps I give the impression that I remained cool throughout this conversation. Inwardly, though, I was torn. I wanted to reassure Iain that I still valued his friendship and that of Harriet, that I did not want to lose them. But something held me back. It was, I think, fear of the high price I might have to pay in order to regain Iain’s trust.
Iain drained his mug and set it down on the floor beside him.
‘Andrew,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry if this seems tiresome, but there is something I want to tell you. It won’t take long, and I promise I’ll go when I’ve finished.’
There was a knock at the door. Glancing at the clock, my heart sank: it could only be Duncan.
The moment he came in, he guessed something was wrong. He wore a warm overcoat and soft kid gloves. His cheeks were red and his hair tossed from the wind. I felt weak beside him.
‘What’s the matter, Andrew? You seem on edge.’
I shook my head. At that moment, Iain appeared in the doorway of the living room, his coat over one arm.
Duncan noticed the dog-collar, I could tell. They looked at each other like old enemies meeting on neutral ground. When he stepped forward, I noticed that Iain kept his distance from Duncan.
‘I’m on my way,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the tea, Andrew. I’ll give James Fergusson your message. Remember to get in touch if you have a moment.’
‘I will,’ I said, then, in an effort to ease things, I introduced them.
‘Duncan, this is Iain Gillespie. He’s a lecturer at New College. Iain’s been a great help to me with some of my work.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Duncan, stripping off a glove and stretching out his hand. ‘Duncan Mylne, a friend of Andrew’s.’ He paused. ‘Haven’t we met before? Your name seems familiar.’
‘We may have bumped into one another; Edinburgh’s a small town. And your name is familiar enough to me, Mr Mylne. Now, perhaps you’ll excuse me. I have a seminar to run.’
He thanked me again and left, turning once as he went through the door to wave goodbye to me. His face seemed troubled.
‘A man of the cloth,’ said Duncan, going ahead of me into the living room. ‘I didn’t know you had such exotic taste in friends.’
‘Iain’s not a friend, ‘I lied. It hurt to hear myself saying it. ‘But he’s a good sociologist of religion, an expert on Berger.’
I was flustered. While Duncan settled himself, I tidied up the tea things and hurried them out of the room.
That night, for the first time since our acquaintance began, we spoke of personal matters. He told me that his father had been a doctor, and that his family’s wealth had come from his grandfather, a cloth importer who had traded with the Levant and North Africa. He had once been married, and there had been several women in his life, by none of whom had he had children. That was something he now regretted. He had, he said, more than just material possessions to pass on to an heir. It pained him to think that the knowledge and arcane wisdom he had gathered in his lifetime should die with him.
He seemed a little afraid of death, he would not say why. It was, I presumed, in part that dread of severance from his own hard-earned heritage. But I sensed that he had also experienced loss and, in spite of his occult learning, could find no belief to assure him of reunion in another life. Those, at least, were my first thoughts. It was only later that I came to understand that his fear came, not from lack of knowledge, but from too much.
He did, however, tell me that both his parents were dead, his father in a shooting accident, his mother of cancer. It was that which prompted me to speak to him of Catriona, though I had at first vowed never to do so. He listened to my story with sympathy and, I thought, the sensitivity of one who has known what it is to lose someone near.
‘Where do you think she is now?’ he asked, quite abruptly, when I had finished talking. ‘At peace, as your clerical friend might put it? In heaven? In hell?’
‘Oh, I could never think that,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe that anyone could be condemned to hell. The whole concept is totally unjust. And Catriona . . . No, I could never think that.’
‘But you would like to see her again?’
‘I have no hope of that,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe in an afterlife of any sort.’
‘Then the Reverend Gillespie has had no luck with you?’
I flushed.
‘I’ve already told you, I scarcely know him. He’s never spoken to me about his beliefs.’
‘Oh, I’ve little doubt. They’ve grown subtle nowadays. But not even a desire to see Catriona once more can convince you of the possibility?’
I shook my head.
‘And yet,’ he said, choosing his words with great care, ‘and yet I wonder if you are right. We have already spoken of other realities. In time, you will learn much more of them. Your Catriona may not be so far away as you think.’ He looked past me a fraction, as though staring at something or someone behind my shoulder. ‘Who knows? She may be with you now. Perhaps she has never left you.’
I could not help myself. I glanced round, looking in the direction indicated by him. But, of course, there was no one there. He laughed softly.
‘It’s time I was away, Andrew. We’ve talked enough for tonight. Come to my rooms tomorrow. I have a new book for you to read.’
I had the dream that night again, the dream of Catriona. This time she was not alone, this time a second figure stood beside her. Something made me think it was Iain, but the face was in darkness, the figure itself blurred.
I was wakened the next morning by the telephone. It was Iain.
‘Andrew, I’m sorry to disturb you. It’s nothing very important. Just that I thought I left my scarf at your place yesterday. Could you check if it’s there?’
I looked everywhere I could think of, but it was nowhere to be seen.
‘I can’t find it, Iain,’ I said. ‘It was with you when you arrived, I remember that, so you must have taken it away with you. Did you go anywhere after my place?’
‘No, I came straight home. There was no seminar. Well, it’s very odd, then. If you do come across it, perhaps you’ll give me a ring. You know the one, purple, blue, and white stripes.’
‘Iain . . .’ I halted, not certain what it was I had wanted to say.
‘What is it, Andrew?’
I did know after all what had been on my tongue. But I could not say it.
‘Nothing,’ I sa
id instead, ‘it’s nothing. I’ll get in touch. I promise. Very soon.’
He said goodbye, and I was alone again in my silent rooms with my books all around me. Or perhaps . . . I thought of what Duncan had said the night before. Perhaps I was not alone after all.
NINE
That evening, after our studies, Duncan grew expansive again. He asked more about my family and my life on Lewis, then came back to the subject of Catriona, in which he seemed particularly interested. At his request, I had brought some photo- graphs, which I showed him: he was the first person I had allowed to see them since Catriona’s death. He looked through them slowly, saying nothing. His fingers caressed the surface of each one gently, with a soft rotating motion. He whispered something beneath his breath, then handed them back to me.
‘What did you say just now?’ I asked.
He shook his head.
‘Not now,’ he said. ‘Later. When it is time.’
I did not ask what he meant. I had learned when to keep silent. I knew that he was interested in Catriona and in what she had meant to me. More than ever, I became sure that he had suffered a similar tragedy and that he would in time come to speak of it to me.
As I put the photographs back in my briefcase, he asked a curious question.
‘Do you have any photographs of her grave?’
I shook my head.
‘It . . . never occurred to me to take any,’ I said. ‘It’s not really something I like to be reminded of.’
‘But you visit it.’
‘On anniversaries and the like – yes, I do.’
‘The next time you go, take a photograph for me. I would like to see where she is buried.’
Had he asked it months or even weeks before, I would have found the request morbid, perhaps repulsive. But I said meekly I would, and put the matter out of my mind.
His next question was almost as strange.
‘Do you have a current passport?’
‘I expect so. Yes, it doesn’t run out for a year or two.’
‘Good, very good. In that case, I want you to make yourself available to travel this summer.’
‘Travel? Where to?’
He folded his hands on his lap and looked at me intently.
‘I make a journey every summer to Morocco. There are people there I have come to know, extraordinary people whose knowledge I value above any other. Holy men, marabouts, masters of the wisdom you and I have been studying.
‘This year, I want you to accompany me. We shall travel together to Fez and Marrakesh, then into the deep south. You will see things you have only dreamed of, meet people you would never ordinarily meet in a lifetime.’
‘I . . . I don’t think I can afford it. After June I will probably have no income whatever . . .’
He shook his head.
‘Let me take care of everything. It’s not an expensive country. I want you to come with me this year because I think it is time. You have made remarkable progress in your studies, but you have still only touched the externals. In Morocco you will begin to taste the fruit. And then you will be ready for Claremont Place.
‘What’s there?’ I asked.
‘Just a place where I meet now and then with friends. There are people I want to introduce you to. But as I told you before, you are not yet ready. Morocco will help prepare you.’
It took little to persuade me in the end. I would, after all, be virtually penniless from the end of June, and I had already started wondering what would happen if I had to abandon Edinburgh and my studies with Duncan. Now, it seemed, I need worry no longer. All would be taken care of. I was in safe hands.
Early in June, I made a special visit to Glasgow, to the cemetery where Catriona was buried. I brought a small camera with me and took several photographs. The stone had a neglected air. Catriona’s parents lived in Aberdeen now, and they visited the grave infrequently. I cleaned it as well as I could, but it seemed no less dismal to me.
When I showed the photographs to Duncan, he seemed pleased. He asked if he could keep one and, although I thought it strange, I said he could.
We left at the beginning of July, flying from London to Casablanca. Even with the summer sun upon it, Casablanca was revoltingly dull, a steaming metropolis with neither the glamour nor the cunning of a true oriental city. Duncan saw the disappointment on my face that first day when, coming from our hotel in the squalid heart of the town, we set off to find a café in which to drink mint tea and sweet almond milk.
‘There is nothing for us here,’ he said. ‘Just a day to rest in, to help you get your bearings.’
I remember nothing now of Casablanca but constant noise and petrol fumes, grey buildings, weary people, a sense of drab monotony everywhere. We ate that evening in the restaurant of our hotel. I slept heavily, as though drugged.
The next day we travelled by train to Rabat, the capital. I was to learn, throughout that long summer, that Morocco was not a country to be entered all at once, or apprehended in a single week. I came to it slowly by degrees, from city to city, guided at all times by Duncan. It was not one place, but a landscape of the imagination. I saw it in my mind as much as with my eyes. People and towns were veils that had to be stripped away until there was nothing left but pure vision.
It is hard to write from memory the details of those months. I think now that I must have been delirious or drugged much of the time. Duncan had not brought me to Morocco in order to open my mind, but to destroy my soul. I followed him, like a lost spirit, into a Hades he conjured up for me out of its cities and deserts. He was my Virgil, stepping ahead of me into an underworld whose pathways only he could follow.
In Rabat, we spent days obtaining permits for travel into the interior. There was a low-key war in the Western Sahara, there had been trouble on the border with Algeria, and government representatives, obstructive at the best of times, were thoroughly uncooperative. Duncan left me in our hotel or at the Café Maure while he hunted down his papers and stamps at this ministry or that. It cost him a good deal in patience and much more in money spent on bribes, but he was good-humoured about it.
A young man was sent to my room twice a day to practise Moroccan Arabic with me. He had a soft face, like a girl’s, and perpetually sad eyes. His name was Idris. Our time together was mostly spent speaking of the simplest things, using the few words I knew or could guess at from the classical. But once or twice he broke into his clumsy student’s English and spoke to me of himself and the numerous sadnesses of his life. I think he expected me to sleep with him, but I shied away from that, as I had always done.
I felt lonely most of the time. The sunlight on the river facing the café was blinding during the long hot days. At night, when it was cool, Duncan and I would sit in a small courtyard scented with bougainvillaea, and read crabbed Arabic texts by the light of an oil lamp. When we finished, the moon would be high above our heads, almost lost among the branches of tall plane trees, and there would be silence everywhere, and stars across the night sky.
We moved to Tangier, to a small house in the rue Ben Raisouli, near the Petit Socco. The house belonged to Roger Villiers, an old friend of Duncan’s and a long-established inhabitant of the city. An Englishman, he had moved to Tangier in the thirties and had known it in the heyday of the international set. He had introduced Paul Bowles to selected groups of Moroccan writers, had smoked kif with William Burroughs, and had even enjoyed a brief affair with Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress.
Speaking of those things, he could be wickedly funny. He was an old man who had long known his own value and, for that matter, the precise value of everyone he had ever met. Not in monetary terms, but in respect of what they represented, or who or what they knew, or how well read they were.
I think that, on the whole, he despised me, but put up with me for Duncan’s sake. My stilted academic learning was worth nothing to him, and my knowledge of the occult was, I gradually discovered, but a tiny fragment of his own. He showed not the slightest interest in me
or my experiences. I hardly blame him for that. He was, after all, more than a mere man of the world. Without leaving his little house, he had met all the best people, uncovered all the most coveted secrets.
In the evenings, there were small gatherings attended by members of Villiers’s set, who numbered a couple of dozen at most. Three or four would come each evening. None were of my age, or even close to it, and several were so advanced in years as to seem like relics of another civilization. They had rotten teeth and sagging cheeks, set off by that aloof charm the very rich retain when all else is gone. They spoke of friends in Paris or Nice, of relatives in New York, of salons in Rome.
They were all Americans or Europeans, and their conversation was conducted in a mixture of English and French, interspersed with snatches of Moroccan Arabic. There were drinks in tall glasses on the tables beside the banquettes on which they sat, and bundles of hashish cigarettes. I saw other drugs taken quite openly, swallowed or sniffed with the casualness of habituation. I had never taken drugs before. When I told Duncan this, he only smiled and offered me whatever I wanted. I began to smoke hashish and, as time passed, to experiment with the various pills and powders that people handed me.
For the most part, once the introductions had been dispensed with, Roger’s friends ignored me. I did not belong to their world. I was a brazen intruder, untried, uncouth, with nothing of interest to offer them. Duncan, though on the whole their junior, was at ease among them, and was, indeed, treated with a large measure of respect, though I could not tell on what this might be based.
My days were spent, as in Rabat, studying spoken Arabic with a young student, a timid young man with sleek hair and brown eyes named Mohammed. He was studying law at the Université Mohammed V, and knew less English than I did French. Our conversations were severely limited. I tried to discover what he knew about my host, but he was either well enough paid or sufficiently frightened to say nothing.
While I struggled with my Arabic, or the latest text that had been set for me to read, Duncan was busy visiting friends in town or at one of the small villages along the coast. He never took me with him, though he did try to make up for his absences with extra time spent reading together, or just sitting in a local café, talking about his family or mine. After a couple of weeks like this, I began to grow frustrated and angry with him.
The Matrix Page 7