Moroccan Traffic (44 page)

Springing out from the rocks, Morgan cannoned into him just as he did it. I heard Kingsley shout, and down below, Sullivan echoed it with a scream, his hand clapped to his shoulder, his rifle clattering out of his grasp. After the first second of shock, it was the loss of the rifle that revived him. He looked up once, before he turned to lurch downhill after it. His face, in the dim, opal light showed impatience, and pain, and a sort of preoccupied anger. I looked at the silent darkness below and wondered what he would find if he ran. A carload of frightened tourists, perhaps. Or perhaps not. If the silent newcomers were from the kasbah, they hadn’t rushed to his rescue. If they were from the kasbah, they might even want rid of him, a liability like Sir Robert and Oppenheim. Then they would climb the hill and pick us all off. It wouldn’t be difficult. Sir Robert could shoot, but Morgan and I were unarmed. Johnson couldn’t do anything.

I think I got to my feet. I know Kingsley threw Morgan off. And Morgan himself turned, prepared to crash his way down. Loud and distinct and authoritative, a man’s voice said ‘Stand clear.’

It came from high ground, and quite a different quarter, and was without passion, or effort, or urgency. Then a revolver fired once, and Sebastian Sullivan threw his arms up and fell.

Nobody spoke. The last of the light stole uphill, leaving us standing in darkness. For a moment Sirwa glowed still, and then was extinguished. I could hear men softly moving about me, but couldn’t distinguish their dress: cap or turban or robes. I started to shiver. A torch clicked, and the brilliant light rested on Sullivan’s lifeless body, and the waving gold hair, and the silk scarf that was yellow and red. Then it moved up and focused on Kingsley, the bantering lines turned into graffiti, and on Morgan, caught half-descended, with his narrow face gaunt, and finally on Johnson himself, still as a saltire, with his face like a teacher’s behind the two dazzling lenses.

There were no ledges; only an unevenness in the stone. He had adhered to the crevice with nothing but pressure and willpower, but it was impossible that he could stay there much longer. Morgan, sliding and scrabbling, was coming as fast as he could.

Unmoving, Johnson said, ‘How shall I thank you?’ He spoke in English. The man who had killed Sullivan had spoken in English.

The torch didn’t waver. The man who had killed Sullivan said, ‘I make my own choices, Jay. Stop holding. We’re here to catch you.’

I knew the voice now. I hadn’t felt like weeping till then. I didn’t wonder, then, why they hadn’t intervened long before.

Johnson turned his head slightly. Every facet below him was sheer except the way he had come. The traverse up had been shocking, but to attempt it downwards was nothing but suicide. Morgan, the mystic idiot, said suddenly, ‘There are rules about being a nuisance. It would stretch three good men to retrieve you, whereas I can bring you down in one pitch on my own. You!’ His eyes steady on Johnson, he was calling the torchbearer. ‘Are you who I think you are?’

‘Probably,’ said the man. He had been at Rita’s last night. I recognised his voice. One from Frances, and one from Joanna, he’d said. Sir Bernard Emerson, I remembered his name.

‘Then go on down,’ Morgan said. ‘Flash Gordon and I will come after you.’

Sir Robert found me where I stood trembling, and another man with a torch gave me his coat, and helped me down to the cars, where we waited. Sir Bernard’s was a big Mercedes, and warm. There was a lot of efficient movement. They had Sullivan’s body to carry down. I wondered if Gerry was dead. I remembered Pymm, and thought I was the only one who had, and what a pity it was. Then Emerson came with some brandy and made me drink it.

‘They’re down safely,’ he said. ‘Sir Robert is coming with me. Would you like to stay with me, or go back with Johnson and Morgan?’

Lumped together, they sounded like motor mechanics. He had used the intimate name, on the hill. I said, ‘I’d like to go back in the Land Rover.’

‘Good. I’ll see you at the Gazelle tomorrow. Here’s Sir Robert.’

It was the formal bit of the parting that had already happened. We faced one another in the darkness and he said, ‘I don’t suppose we shall meet again. Have I made things frightfully difficult for you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘That’s rotten old life, isn’t? Look after yourself, won’t you?’

And that was all.

The Land Rover was to leave first. I walked to it on my own, rather slowly, and found Morgan by himself at the wheel. His face in the car light was yellowish. Then he saw me, and gave me a wholehearted, open-pea smile that made my tears start again. He said, ‘Come in, girl. You’ve been swilling brandy. Oh, my God, didn’t you know what I wanted most in the world was a pretty girl stinking of alcohol?’

He had flushed with relief. I realised no one had comforted him. I said, ‘Where. . . ?’

‘Flash Gordon? Flaked out in the back. They gave him one of the jags he doesn’t like. Another barracking tomorrow, no doubt.’

I said, ‘You tried to save Sullivan.’ I failed to shut the door twice. Finally he leaned over and banged it.

He started the engine. ‘Yeah: and Emerson promptly shot him. Ever feel you’ve made a silly mistake? Ever feel you don’t know what the hell is going on, and you wish all you had was a place of your own and a nice friendly girl snuggling up next to you?’

I looked at him, and he was smiling again, at the windscreen. ‘It’s all right, sweetie,’ he said. ‘Any sandwiches left?’

There were orange blossoms on my table at breakfast, which seemed a pernicious waste, since nothing that had happened that week had had anything to do with wedded or even unwedded love, unless you counted Val Dresden. I sat alone under their bony petals and brilliant yellow silk filaments. The scent of them was the first thing I remembered of my arrival at the Gazelle d’Or the previous night. A wall of perfume, hitting the Land Rover and making Morgan sneeze until the windscreen started to drip.

We had travelled in silence, partly because Morgan was the only one wholly awake, and sometimes I had my doubts even of him. Now and then he glanced over his shoulder and once he drew off the road and went round to check, as he said, on his Mastermind. He returned with a nod, but without his anorak. Then, in due course, there came the odour of orange blossom.

The Gazelle d’Or is the kind of hotel made up of a palatial nucleus, surrounded by garden pavilions. We arrived at a side door in darkness, and were met by a number of helpers who went immediately to the back of the Land Rover. By the time I got down it was empty, and Morgan was waiting to say goodnight to me. He looked exhausted; but wherever his charge had been lodged, he didn’t want me to help, though I offered. He gave me a hug and a kiss before going. He is, as Rita said, a really nice man. Then the hotel staff came, and I was taken through the gardens, and into a private pavilion.

It was big enough to hold two apartments and furnished with everything, including a bedroom. They offered me supper, but I couldn’t have eaten. I remembered the brandy, and had another. I undressed while I drank it and fell into bed, huddling under the covers with my mascara all over the pillow. And slept like the dead, to waken to scent and sunlight and breakfast.

There was no one else there. I drank a lot of coffee, and washed, and walked shakily round the apartment. My dirty clothes of last night had all gone, and my luggage was in Ouarzazate. I made a kanga out of my bath sheet, and barefoot, stepped into the gardens.

The orange groves, in full and stifling blossom, were at the end. I turned my back on them and walked under trees, among dappled flowers. The silence was absolute. When I heard the ripple of water, I followed it. A channel led me up to the heart of the hotel. It looked like Designer Alhambra. Two ghosts in white headbands, slippers and robes appeared and vanished from a patio now empty and soundless. I felt like the person who survived the Black Death and took a homecoming trip to Pompeii. I climbed marble steps and began to search suites of reception rooms, as deserted as the
Mary Celeste.

I was not without expectations. Only one person would keep Ginkgo biloba and micronised marine algae in her bathroom, and a wet printed sheet headed ‘What To Do When Your Boss is a Career Barrier’. I knew who had taken my clothes.

My mother wasn’t in the main lounge, with its marble floor and its silken peach curtains. She wasn’t in the rotunda, full of stucco and brass, with an inlaid zodiac floor, and a damascened bronze gazelle in an alcove. She wasn’t in the corridor hung with inlaid and unloaded rifles. If she’d been in the unoccupied card rooms I couldn’t smell her fags or see a trace of her socks, although I found a half-finished game of Monopoly. Someone had bought three hotels in Park Lane and the Waterworks. To Doris, that would have been both small beer and peanuts. I went the whole way back to the front porch, and emerged under a mat of bougainvillea. And I was alone in my towel no longer, but face to face with eight video cameras and five dozen fully dressed men and women, flushed with vintage champagne and exuberance. The cars had completed their rally.

It was Matchbox Day in Morocco. The vintage cars were drawn up in a row, their engines washed, their silver done, their leather buffed, their paintwork burnished like jewellery. Beside them, posing with a good deal of ragging and laughter, were their owners in period rig-outs. In the centre was the big ‘33 Chrysler with a bouquet of flowers on its bonnet, along with the wife of the owner in a cloche hat and strap shoes and silk stockings. The service men stood at the back looking happy, and the hotel staff had crammed into the yard, and quite a lot of casuals who were either gardeners or guests. Phrases sprang into the air: ‘romped up the hill’, ‘cleaned the section’, ‘cranked her up that last bend’, ‘floor-boarded the bloody thing twice’.

I tapped a man on the shoulder. He was wearing plus-fours and a cap, and his collar was sodden. I said, ‘The Frazer-Nash didn’t make it?’

He turned, in high good humour, and was smitten by my sarong. He was one of the Bugattis. When his eyes got to my level he said, ‘Poor old Tom, no. And Rupert’s big end couldn’t take it. And Chester spewed out a valve and got total brain fade over the tulips. CPSRP, poor old Chester.’

I asked him what he meant. It was the nearest thing to a talk with my mother.

‘Couldn’t Pull the Skin off a Rice Pudding , angel: burns his thumb on a plug change. Hey, didn’t I see you at the Berber market? Not wearing that rig-out though, ha-ha-ha.’

I wished I’d also worn the free plastic shower cap. I said, ‘Yes, I saw you there too. And what about the rest, then? The Lancia?’

‘Crazy Yanks? Couldn’t face the Wiggle-Woggle Shuffle-Shuffle and went off home early. We did that this morning. Did you see us this morning? Did you miss that goddamned landslide? Christ, those two boys in the Sunbeam.’

Someone waved about another bottle of champagne and some of it went down my towel. I said, ‘What happened?’

His face lengthened appropriately. I could see he really was sorry: I had just caught him in a moment of cheerfulness. He said, ‘You didn’t hear? Tried the Taroudant stretch in the dark, and copped a slide of those boulders. Nothing left. Not even the wreckage. At least that’s what they say. I’m going to look. Actually, Charles dashed back this morning to see it, but the bloody police held him off.’

I said, ‘There wouldn’t be anything. Think of those houses.’

‘Well, not much,’ said the Bugatti. ‘But unless you know cars, you don’t realise. You know? Rudge-Whitworth Wire Detachables, even. Lovely single-plate clutch, those three-litres had.’

I said, ‘It was a pity about Owen and Sullivan.’

If he went any redder, it was undetectable. He said, ‘Bit of a fool, old Gerry Owen. That business at Asni. But Seb Sullivan was a bloody good sport. Game for any old prank. Got you out of a spot at Essaouria, yes? Yes,’ he said, slowing down his euphoria a little bit more, ‘you must be pretty upset about Sullivan.’

‘Yes,’ I said soberly. ‘But if he knew, he’d want you to finish the rally. What are you all going to do now?’

They were going to a public luncheon inside the town. He brightened: they were going to buy carvings. Taroudant, of course, was forbidden to Christians when R. Bontine Cunninghame Graham tried a long time ago to get into it; I could rather see why. I knew, now, where Johnson had picked up his alias.

The Bugatti man hadn’t seen or heard of Johnson or Pymm, or he’d surely have mentioned them. He’d seen someone, though. Just as they all started to go, he called across to me. ‘Hey, that little Scottie who swam with the boar? She’s by the pool: saw her this morning. D’you think she should be told about Gerry?’

I knew where my mother was now. They must have driven in first thing this morning. ‘Leave it to me,’ I yelled after him. I knew he was hoping I’d wave.

I stood for a minute watching all the cars rev up and draw slowly away, some of them pinking. I thought I could get to like vintage cars, if it hadn’t been for Gerry and Sullivan. Then I turned and ran back the way I had come, through the hotel, and out into the gardens, and along the shady way to the orange groves.

The swimming pool lay in the sun, surrounded by a lounging area shaded by trees, and a mass of unshaded sunbeds for grilling. Before the chambers for changing and massage stood a line of long tables, upon which covered dishes were being carefully laid. The starving herds for which the buffet was being prepared seemed to be absent. Two of the scruffy dressers from the front had returned to sit in drill shorts under the trees, reading books and sipping drinks at small tables: the kind of money vacationing here was not the kind that gussied itself up in resort wear. The scent of hundreds of trees in full blossom filled the extremely warm air like a drug. I would have felt saner if I could have put the way I felt down to hallucigens. There was no one here, and I wanted somebody. I went and looked into the pool.

A fully developed rhinoceros with a fag in its mouth was heaving its way from one end to the other, pulled forward by a brisk orange head in a sweatband. The mountainous form was my mother, and the retreating figure grasping her chins was the Chief Executive of the Marguerite Geddes Company, in a taut Lycra swimsuit and an air of amiable assurance. My mother saw me first. She looked up, began to cough, and swallowed water as the cigarette fell out of her mouth. Rita stood her on end and I saw the water only came up to her waist. They must have half emptied the pool. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ I could have cried.