The Forgiven
Authors: Lawrence Osborne
ALSO BY LAWRENCE OSBORNE
Bangkok Days
The Naked Tourist
The Accidental Connoisseur
American Normal
The Poisoned Embrace
Paris Dreambook
Ania Malina
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Lawrence Osborne
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Osborne, Lawrence, 1958–
The forgiven : a novel / Lawrence Osborne.
p. cm.
1. Married people—Fiction. 2. English—Morocco—Fiction.
3. Visitors, Foreign—Morocco—Fiction. 4. Accidents—Fiction.
5. Parties—Fiction. 6. Master and servant—Fiction.
7. Muslims—Fiction. 8. Morocco—Race relations—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6065.S23F67 2012
823′.914—dc23
2011025942
eISBN: 978-0-307-88905-8
Jacket design by Christopher Brand
Jacket photograph by Aaron Keogh
v3.1
FOR MY MOTHER, KATHLEEN MARY GRIEVE, 1933–2011
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Many roads do not lead to the heart.
—
MOROCCAN PROVERB
One
HEY DIDN
’
T SEE AFRICA UNTIL HALF PAST ELEVEN
. The mists broke apart and motorboats with European millionaires came swooping out of the blue with Sotogrande flags and a flash of tumblers. The migrants on the top deck began to shoulder their bags, revived by the idea of home, and the look of anxiety that hovered in their faces began to dispel. Perhaps it was just the sun. Their secondhand cars stored in the hull revved as their children scattered about with oranges in their hands, and an energy seemed to reach out from the edge of Africa to the Algeciras ferry, polarizing it. The Europeans stiffened.
Sunbathing in their deck chairs, the British couple were surprised by the height of the land. On the tops of the mountains stood white antenna masts like lighthouses made of wire, and the mountains had a feltlike greenness that made you want to reach out and touch them.
The Pillars of Hercules had stood near here, where the Atlantic rushes into the Mediterranean. There are places that are destined to seem like gates. One can’t avoid the sensation of being sucked through a portal. The Englishman, a doctor of a certain age, shaded his eyes with a hand bristling with ginger hairs.
Even with the naked eye, they could make out the snaking outlines of roads that might have been there since Roman times. David Henniger thought, “Perhaps it’ll be easier than we think, this drive. Perhaps it’ll be a pleasure after all.” From a boom box near the flagpole came a few bars of
raï
, of Paris hip-hop. He watched his wife reading a Spanish paper, flicking the pages back and forth indifferently, then glanced down at his watch. People were waving from the approaching city, raising handkerchiefs and fingers, and Jo took off her shades for a moment to see where she was. He admired the frank confusion written all over her face. L’Afrique.
THEY WENT FOR A BEER AT THE HÔTEL D
’
ANGLETERRE. IT
was not hot. The air was wet with recently broken mist. Con men and pretty “guides” danced around them while the sun drenched the terrace with a smell of varnish and peppercorns and stale beer. A laughing mood dominated the seedy expats and their hangers-on nursing their plates of unshelled nuts and their cooled gins. We were once the most formidable bohemians, their faces said to the newcomers, and now we are delightful, playful shits because we have no choice.
The Hennigers had arranged for an agent to deal with the car rental, a man who would run back and forth with keys and contracts, and while they waited for him, they had a few beers with grenadine and some fried goat cheese
cigares
. He waited to form an impression. The streets seemed massively solid with their French facades, and there was a gritty shade at their bottom. The girls were swift and insolent, with adultery in their eyes. It wasn’t bad.
“I’m glad we aren’t staying,” she said, biting her lip.
“We’ll stay on the way back. It’ll be interesting.”
He took off his tie. His eyes felt intensely alive somehow and he wondered if she ever noticed these slight alterations of mood, of intention. “I like it,” he thought. “I like it better than she does. Maybe we’ll stay a little after the weekend.”
On the road to Chefchaouen, they didn’t speak. The car rented from Avis Tangier was an old Camry, its brakes soft and its red leather torn. He drove it nervously in his perforated driving gloves, warily avoiding the women in ribboned straw hats who infested the hard shoulder, pushing mules ahead of them with sticks. The sun grew fierce; it was a long road bordered by stones and orange trees, and above it rose the hillside slums, the gimcrack apartment blocks, the antennas that decorate every middle-income city. One couldn’t see the beginning or the end of it. There was just the taste of sea.
All was dust. He drove on doggedly, determined to get out of the city as fast as possible. The light all day had finally worn his eyes down; the road was reduced to a geometric glare alive with hostile movements: animals, children, trucks, broken-down thirty-year-old Mercedes.
The suburbs of Tangier were ruined, but the gardens were still there. And so were the crippled lemon trees and olives, the dogged disillusion and empty factories, the smell of seething young men.
THE HOTEL SALAM IN CHEFCHAOUEN LOOKED OVER A RIVER
called the Oued el Kebir and a gorge; the road on which it stood, avenue Hassan II, was a steep lane of hotels, for the Marrakech and the Madrid were just next door, and along it the city walls loomed up, white and monkish. The tour buses were already there; the salon was full of Dutch couples feeding upon mountains of turmeric eggs. The Hennigers were not sure whether to enter the hotel lounge and participate in this buffet orgy or to stay aloof. The Dutch looked frantic and disturbed, as if they hadn’t eaten in days. David wondered if they were
given sandwiches on their immense buses. They were faintly disgusting, with their big red faces and their beefy adolescent ruminants grazing around the buffet tables. He was hungry himself.
“Let’s eat straightaway,” he said excitedly, “but not here. Perhaps outside, away from the Continental wildebeest? I wonder if one can get a drink that isn’t Pellegrino Citrus?”
Fortunately the Salam had its own terrace and it was not too crowded. They took a table with views and ate their
tagine citron
with a bottle of cold Boullebemme. It was wine, at least, and he said a silent thank-you to it.
“Should you be drinking?” she asked quietly.
“Oh, it’s just a glass. A glass of fly pee. This stuff is
fly pee
. Look at it.”
“It’s not fly pee. It’s fourteen percent. You have to drive another five hours.”
She began to devour the salted olives at their table. David always took these sorts of remarks in his stride, and he settled down.
“It’ll make it easier. I know it’s the lame excuse of every alcoholic. But it will.”
“I shouldn’t let you, Stumblebum.”
“I would anyway. The roads are empty.”
“What about the trees?”
There had been eleven years of this sort of contest; the exact, fastidious Jo crossing lances with the bad-tempered David, who always felt that women were out to suppress the peccadilloes that made life half worth living. Why did they do this? Were they envious of life shimmering away with improvised masculine curiosities and pleasures without their consent? One had to ask the question. You could smile or not—it was up to you. Jo was ten years younger than him, a mere forty-one, but she acted like an ancient nanny. She enjoyed reproving him, pulling him back from tiny adventures that would have no consequences even if they were allowed to degenerate to their natural conclusions. “I’d never hit a tree anyway,” he thought. “Never in
a thousand years. Not even in my sleep.” She swallowed half a glass of the raw Moroccan wine and he raised an arch eyebrow. She wiped her mouth defiantly. The blood rushed into her brow, into the corners of her mouth.
“You always get what you want, David. It’s our schema, isn’t it? You always do what you bloody want.”
“I’m not putting your life in danger.” His voice was a little pleading. “That’s absurd.”
We’ll see if it’s absurd, she thought.
“Also,” he went on coolly, “it’s patently not true. I very rarely, as you put it, get to do what I want. Most of the time, I am following orders.”