Stewart, Angus (24 page)

For some minutes none of them said anything. Then Lom lit a cigarette, and the autumn bonfire smell of
kif
reached Jay.

'Wouldn't it be better to lay off that—at least till we get you back to town?' he suggested. His petulance largely masked the confusion of his own feelings. The revelation that primeval forces could take such radical possession of him was more terrifying than tribesmen with stones. And he was unsure whether their threat had ever been more than nominal. He knew obscurely that life had assumed a darker bias; could never be quite the same. More consciously, he resented Lom for having initiated the discovery. Worse, it had been quite the opposite, a transcendental experience with Naima, that had been superseded by the moment of near murder. Now that happiness seemed a long time ago. Perhaps it was even irreparably spoiled.

'I'm all right now,' Lom said. 'I think you saved my life from those men with guns.'

'You didn't want it saved,' Jay said bitterly. And when nothing broke the ugly ambivalence of the pause, he let the child take over completely. 'This, incidentally, is Naima. Not
the maid
.'

'I'm sorry,' Lom said, with a social propriety that struck Jay as ridiculous in their circumstances. 'I confused her with someone else.'

'Just what did you do out there?' Jay was unappeased. They still crouched, fugitives on the ground. Now Lom sat up. 'I was photographing. There was a wild dance. And a fire. Men were trying to overcome death . . .'

'Bloody fool!' Jay interrupted, feeling contention might insure against Lom's losing himself again. 'Didn't anything tell you this was a Muslim religious festival?'

Lom seemed to be rationalising something slowly. He became aware of the blood all over him. 'It was instinctive'

'To what end?' Jay asked grimly. 'Self-preservation?'

'Some sort of perpetuity, I think.' Lom weighed the remark out thoughtfully.

'Perpetuity!' Jay exploded, with nothing tactically considered
now. 'You hunt perpetuity with a damned tin box and expect us to be gratefully murdered for it! What the hell did you think they'd do if they'd caught you? Take the film to the nearest chemist, and exhibit the pictures in Rabat?'

'They would have taken the camera to the fire, I think,' Lom said, quietly as before.

'Oh no!' Jay said, before the chill behind Lom's fatalism could fully affect him. 'They'd have sold it. And whoever did that would have more sense than to leave the film in. Particularly as the body of one Nazarene photographer might be dug up in the vicinity of Sidi Ali,' he added.

'I'm not a Nazarene.'

'To them you're near enough, believe me.' Confronted by the inane simplicity of logic operating in Lom, Jay felt unabashed.

'But I do utterly apologise for endangering you and Miss . . . Miss . . .?'

'Just Naima,' Jay said. There had been a moment of total blankness. Perhaps it was indeed all beyond him. 'We've got to get out of here.'

Lom had stood up. Jay was reminded of their first meeting, and of his thinking at the time that he looked a sick man. Naima had been a stranger too; sullen, in foamy taffeta. 'I'll go alone.'

'No,' Jay said. 'But did you get here in a cab?'

'It's waiting,'

'Then an Arab.' Jay was inexplicably, almost deliriously freed at the thought of action. 'Duffle coat, mud from the stream, off shoe and socks, stooped, a stick, hung head. You've been defecating down here, and your daughter will lead you.—We'll make him an Arab,' he said to Naima.
Rhais
.'
He made to smear Lom's face, indicating the mud in the bottom of the gorge, and smiling faintly to himself as he remembered it was a word Achmed had first taught him. Naima went to work delightedly. Lom stood heavily penitent and submissive.

'Which leaves me just a blatantly zany tourist Christian who set out this evening for a quiet talk about a flat with an English gent whose name almost certainly isn't really Brown,' Jay babbled happily on, consigning Lom's socks and single shoe to the wilderness.

'Brown?' Lom asked dully.

'That's right.' Jay clapped a suitably knarled branch he had broken off into Lom's hand, and patted the hooded head into a more convincing stoop. 'Simon Brown. Next on our salvage list, I suspect; and a man some small part of
whom would appreciate this hobbling literary allusion—yes! But lean and fumble on the stick.' Jay motioned the pathetic caravan on its way. ' "Leder muder, lette me in!" '

'A Chaucerian reference to the longings of the Wandering Jew?'

'Precisely! And another man of cultivation, b'damned!' Jay's enthusiasm was unabating. It cooled as he peered cautiously over the lip of the gully. But the hunt had obviously been abandoned. Their weird procession came out on to the plateau.

Perhaps his rôle distracted Lost from more esoteric imaginings. It was only the savagery of the people he from time to time invoked. 'Did you know they use children from the gaols to clear mine fields?' he exclaimed suddenly. 'The mines are rusty, and it's a question of weight.'

'Bazaar talk,' Jay laughed. 'Where did you hear a story like that?'

'Oh, a reliable source.' It was curious to hear so precise a voice coming from the hooded, shambling figure whom Naima was leading by the hand.

'At the fire?' Jay mocked gently. He was still anxious to test the degree of Lom's insanity, or the unpredictability of the unpredictability of the
kif
.

'No, but there's a connection.' Lom was adamant. These people like to
think
they've a complete indifference towards death. They reassure themselves with displays of contempt for life.'

So I was right, and that is their appeal for you, Jay thought

There was a moment's confusion at the taxi. Lom insisted on maintaining his disguise until he had fumbled into the back seat 'You must both have dinner with me,' he said, still beneath the hood, 'though I mayn't be in Tangier much longer. Minza.' And with that economy of directives the taxi was gone.

Jay turned to Naima with a bright smile, only to recall he knew so little of her as to be unsure even
how she thought of Brown. 'Now for Mister Brown,' he said firmly. Lom's transformation and exit had delighted her for its pure burlesque. He was quickly learning to read moods from her eyes alone.

'Mektoub,'
he said,
waving in the direction of the departed taxi. 'All that was obviously written.' She had clearly grasped the camera as cause of the adventure, for she raised an imaginary one to her eye now, and reprovingly shook her head.

Brown was already installed in their taxi. He seemed not anxious to talk at first Jay, for his part had determined not to ask whether repair had been effected unless something were volunteered. As unobtrusively as he could, he ushered Naima into the corner this time, sitting himself in the middle.

'So,' Brown said, regarding them each in turn.

Briefly Jay explained the missing duffle coat. Naima concentrated upon making sticky division of pieces of
hawah
, which she then offered them.

'So long as he doesn't get himself killed before delivering the portraits of Manolo,' Brown commented.

Their driver now arrived, perhaps from the silken booths, for he was grinning broadly over some private satisfaction. Brown perhaps sensed the same thing, for he remarked how practically and sensibly the Arabs commemorated religious festivals. But I just went for a little talk,' he said. 'A talk, and more tea.' They moved off.

'How does Manolo derive?' Jay asked curiously, when nothing more was forthcoming about Brown's entertainment by the prostitute.

Brown looked at him steadily for a moment before taking the invitation. 'His mother, extraordinarily enough, was a mistress of the Glaoui. Not of course a member of his hareem—she was Spanish. Unfortunately, she picked up his occasional use of opium, only used it more and more. When T'hami fell in '55 she was already a broken woman. She drifted north as far as Ceuta, and there married a Spanish garrison soldier. Manolo was born in '56—the year of Independence—and she died shortly afterwards. I never knew her. But Pepé was my constant escort when the Spanish grudgingly let a few journalists into Ifni, when it was under siege in '58. I was one of them.

‘He was just a simple man, an Andalusian peasant, a corporal. But we got to know each other well. I learnt, of course, of the child, and a great deal, much probably fanciful, about the incredible splendours and horrors of the Glaoui epoch, which he had absorbed at second hand from his wife.

'The early days of Independence weren't altogether comfortable. I cleared out for a while to Tunisia—there was private research I wanted to do at some oases. It wasn't until nearly eight years later that I learnt quite by chance that Pepé had in fact been killed at Ifni—there was some question of his having defected to the tribesmen too, though heaven knows why—and I naturally wondered about the child. I can't pretend that I felt any sort of responsibility towards Pepé's son, whom I'd never set eyes on. But curiosity took me to Ceuta—still a Spanish possession, as you know. And there he was. In the garrison orphanage. I realised at once that Pepé had been my closest friend. It was quite obvious that a Spanish orphanage was an altogether inappropriate setting for Manolo. He just didn't fit with the wooden porringers and ugly nuns. The
clothes
they had put him in gave me physical pain. After that it was only a question of straightforward corruption. I sprung him from the orphanage with the connivance of a sympathetic priest Of course, he has to be brought up as a Catholic.'

Brown had lit a
kif
cigarette
to aid this confessional narrative. 'His mother must have been a great beauty,' he said, some obscure sense of deference moving him. 'Well, that's obvious surely. But I can find no record of her. I've approached some members of the vast and scattered Ghoul family—Hassan, the painter, particularly, whom I know well, in vain. For all I know,' he added thoughtfully, 'Manolo may have upward of a dozen half brothers in Marrakesh and Telouet—think of that! All a little old now, of course.'

'What do you do in Tangier?' Jay asked in the pause.

'I'm writing the definitive book on Gide,' Brown said. 'My publisher feels it's the big scholarly work I'm best qualified for. Otherwise I'm half-hearted house agent like pretty well everyone else that's not of the Mountain—you know, those secretly walled eighteenth-century worlds patrolled by furious dogs and sleepless old men with clubs. Some very odd things go on up there, incidentally. It's rather as if
South Wind
were
multiplied by the
Alexandria Quartet
,
but laced with the enactment of quite incredible personal fantasies sometimes. And, of course, if you're rich you can always pay off the police, while tiresome people never get beyond the guard on the gate.'

'I can imagine,' Jay said. It was an interesting glimpse of Brown's aspirations.

'But you were right about the girl,' Brown changed track suddenly; and Jay sensed that something more than the
kif
was prompting him to revelation. He remembered the strain he had shown when they'd been held up by the accident in Rue Delacroix. In the flat he had been relaxed enough, at least until the attempt to overcome impotence with the bizarre Manolo game, and the chaos of jealousy revealed by the ironical farce over the toothbrush, neither of which factors, Jay was sure, were influencing Brown now. It came to him that Brown was more elementally afraid.

'And I did rather contract for the child—God!' he laughed uncomfortably. 'How awful to talk of it like this in her presence simply because she doesn't understand . . .'

Jay, in fact, had been feeling just this for some time. His left hand, meanwhile, could be leaving Naima in no doubt as to whether she was forgotten. Besides comfort, it sought unconsciously to transmit all the complex emotions he felt towards her at that moment. Then his body was impatient again. His pants were constricting, dangerously wet, so that, in the wildly plunging car, he feared the spontaneous emission of childhood, with its subsequent humiliation, the indignation, more really remorse, because accidental emptying had forestalled conscious preparation, sharpness. And he recognised he wanted Naima more than he had done in the gully. That this was because she was no longer a stranger. He wondered whether there was enough night left to take her back to his flat. Whether the baby would howl, with only the old woman. The thoughts were distorted, for he knew the infant had been left for days at a time. Then there was only a now in his body. Its localised focus absorbed all his senses, occluding wherever his eyes rested on, Brown's talking.

Jay's head bent suddenly low over Naima, he laughed, touched the driver's shoulder, was opening the door. It all happened without conscious licence. 'Silly girl—sorry, Simon! I'd better guard her while she goes.' A second's confusion, best forgotten, and they were alone suddenly in the darkness, Naima's bewilderment scorched, dissolving. Standing, falling, savagely fast, without memory, care of the lit taxi, its occupants and idiot halt, out of sight on the lonely road. And saliva came in jets into Jay's dry mouth, his body ended, aching, crippled as though with fever. They lay trembling like butterflies surrendering summer. Life returning crept first, terribly slowly, into Naima's lips. The smile was unbearable. It described transience so brutally that Jay sickened with the memory of his boorish cruelty to Lom. Naima came more alive. She called him an Arab, affecting awe, touched him intimately, made sweet, comical faces of amazement.

'Church or circumcision and God knows whether we must falsify your age,' Jay heard himself ramble, even his English reflecting what was certainty, fear of dispossession, a partial resentment, all hopelessly confused.

Perhaps Brown was deceived. They had been away only minutes. At any rate, he collected his train of thought easily. To Jay this was disconcerting. He had no memory of what Brown had been saying. Now he attended to him guiltily, feeling once more that Brown's dispassionate deliberations only marked time against the encroachment of some quite radical fear.