The Spider's House (25 page)

Stenham awoke the next morning with a slight headache. The food at Si Jaffar’s had been unusually heavy, and as a result he had passed a night of fitful sleep during whose frequent moments of wakefulness he was leadenly conscious that he was suffering from indigestion.
Bastela
at noon, and then at night lamb with lemon and almonds, drowned in hot olive oil, and that glutinous bread, helped down by six glasses of mint tea that was so sweet it stung the throat…. The more honor they wanted to pay you, the more inedible they made the food, weighing it down with sugar and oil.

It was a day of violent clarity, throbbing with sunlight. Any part of the sky he stared at from his pillow blinded him. The doves that had their nests somewhere outside his windows gurgled beatifically, and he had the feeling that they were some sweet substance melting out there in the fierce morning sun;
soon they would be nothing more than a bubbling syrup, but the sound would go on, the same as now. He yawned, stretched, and got slowly out of bed. The telephone was attached to the opposite wall. Moss found this an insufferable inconvenience. “I shouldn’t like to have to stagger across the room to order breakfast,” he had said when he first saw it. “Do take a comfortable room, and with a proper bath,” he had urged him. “Like yours?” Stenham had said. “Yours happens to be just four times as expensive as this. Have you thought of that?” “Come, now, John. When things are as cheap as they are here, such mathematics don’t mean anything,” Moss had objected. “And you have dollars. I with my poor pounds have some excuse for trying to make my money stretch.” This was another facet of the little game they played together. Stenham knew perfectly well that Moss had one of the largest fortunes left in England, and that moreover he owned apartment houses, cinemas and hotels in places that dotted the globe from Havana to Singapore, including several cities of Morocco, to which he made constant little trips, referring to these as “tours of inspection.” But he also knew that it gave Moss intense pleasure to play poor, to pretend that the security which his several million pounds gave him was not there in the background, because, as he had exclaimed one day when he was in a confiding mood, “it’s a stifling sensation, I assure you; every consideration is dictated by the existence of that
thing
there behind you. You have no freedom—none.” At the time Stenham had replied rather tartly that you had whatever freedom you really desired. But he was willing to abet him in his pretense.

He took the receiver off the hook; it began to make a loud, tinny purring which continued until there was a small explosion as a man’s voice said: “Oui,
monsieur “

“I should like to order breakfast.”

“Oui, monsieur, tout de suite.”

The man hung up and the noise began again. Furious, Stenham jiggled the hook until the voice returned and spoke again with some asperity. “Vous
désirez, monsieur?”

“I want breakfast,” said Stenham with exaggerated clarity;

“mais ce matin j’ai envie de boire du thé. Au citron. Vous avez compris?”

“But I have already ordered coffee for you, the same as every day,” the voice objected.

“Change the order.”

“I shall do my best,” the voice said with dignity, “but it will be somewhat difficult, since the coffee is at this moment being prepared in the kitchen.”

“I won’t drink the coffee,” announced Stenham severely. “I want tea.” He hung up, certain that he was going to find it impossible to work this morning. Any small incident at this hour could prove a barrier. And now the blood seemed to be pounding harder in his head. After swallowing two Empirins with a glass of cold water, he unlocked the door into the corridor and lay back to relax. He knew it was absurd to think so, but a day which did not provide at least some progress to his book seemed a day completely lost. In vain he argued with himself that a man could scarcely make his writing a reason for living unless he believed in the validity of that writing. The difficulty was that he could find no other reason; the work had to be it. At the same time he was unable to attach any importance to the work itself. He
knew,
no matter what anyone said to the contrary, that it was valueless save as a personal therapy. “Life has to be got through some way or other,” he would tell himself. To others he said: “Writing is harmless, and it keeps me in dinners and out of trouble.”

The tea came, brought by Rhaissa, who had a new tale of woe. Her relatives from the country had arrived without warning and deposited themselves in her house, seven of them, and being, of course, wildly envious of her good fortune as a city-dweller, had set about making her life miserable. They had appropriated her clothing, some of which they had sold in the Joteya; the rest they were wearing on their persons at the moment. They had broken several of her dishes, and let the children gouge holes in her walls. And worst of all, they had either stolen or destroyed her precious sodium perborate, because in an unguarded moment she had been foolish enough to tell
them of its magic properties. Her eyes blazed with indignation when she came to this part of the recital. Stenham lay back against the pillows watching her, sipping his tea, thinking that at least the two disturbances had come simultaneously, that it would have been worse had the tea difficulty been today and Rhaissa’s saga tomorrow. When she had stopped he said, with the inflection of outrage he had learned from years of speaking with these people:
“Menène jaou? O allèche?
And why don’t you put them out?”

She smiled sadly. Of course that could not even be considered. They were relatives. One had to put up with them. In another two weeks or so they would be gone, if Allah willed it so. Until then she would have to feed them and bear their depredations in silence.

“Don’t you ever go to visit them?” he asked her.

She shook her head with contempt. Why should she? They lived in the country, far away, and you had to walk or go on a donkey after you got off the bus, and their village was several hours away from the road.

“But if you did go, wouldn’t you do the same thing, just sit down and eat their food and make yourself at home?”

Rhaissa began to laugh gently. Such ingenuousness touched her sense of the ridiculous. In the first place, she explained, they hid all their food when they saw you coming. And then, you never went to visit the people who lived in the country unless there was an important marriage or a death which involved a possible inheritance, because why would anyone go to the country otherwise? It was empty, there was nothing to see. And if for some reason you did have to go, then you took all your food with you from the city.

“But that’s crazy,” objected Stenham. “The food all comes from the country.”

“Hachouma
,” said Rhaissa, shaking her head. (It was the classical Moroccan reply, which, along with “
Haram
,” provided an unanswerable argument that could end any discussion; Shame and Sin were the two most useful words in the common people’s vocabulary.) If you were lucky enough to live in the city,
you had to pay for that privilege by being an uncomplaining, if not eager prey to the greed of your rustic relations; any other course of behavior was shameful, and that was that.

“I’ll give you another paper of powder tomorrow,
incha’Allah”
he told her.

A flood of blessings poured forth. Grinning, Rhaissa went out. Presently he heard her singing as she scrubbed the floor of the corridor.

His headache was going away. At the back of his mind there was expectation: he was looking forward to the tea later in the day with the American girl. “Madame Veyron” was the most inapposite name that fate could have provided for her. She should be called something like Susan Hopkins or Mary Williams. He found himself wondering what her name really was, and what she was really like. But if he allowed himself to dwell on such conjectures he would do nothing all day. Was it a foregone conclusion that he would not be able to work? With the prospect in mind of seeing her, it should be possible for him to discount the telephone scene and Rhaissa’s interruption. He sprang out of bed and shaved. Then he sat and worked quite well until half past twelve, when he dressed and went down to the dining room for an early lunch, having decided to write letters afterward.

If there happened to be many tourists staying in the hotel, the restaurant proved to be slightly understaffed. These last few weeks, however, the news of unrest in Morocco had apparently frightened away all but the most hardy prospective visitors: there had been only a handful of transients, so that the waiters spent most of their time standing along the walls talking together in low voices. The Europeans stood by the entrance door and the Moroccans lined up near the door that led into the kitchen.

The three most desirable tables were those in front of the windows, looking over part of the hotel garden, the crenelated walls of the former palace, and the Medina beyond. Recently Stenham had been able to sit here when he pleased. Today he was annoyed to see that all three tables were occupied by groups
of Americans. He sat down at a small table where the light was fairly good, and began to read. The waiters were used to his eating habits; sometimes he took two hours to complete a meal, turning page after page before he signaled to them that he was ready for the next course.

The Americans nearest him were discussing their purchases, made that morning in the
souks
. Eventually they shifted to the subject of a woman acquaintance who had been present at the bombing of a café in Marrakech; she still had pieces of shrapnel in her, they claimed, and the doctor had told her it was quite safe to leave them there. A man’s voice then declared that such a procedure was dangerous, that they could work their way to the heart. Stenham tried without success to cut the sound of their talk from his consciousness and isolate himself in his book. He went on listening. When the people left the table, he managed to read a bit; this was interrupted by an unexpected tap on his shoulder. He looked up angrily into the amused face of Mme Veyron.

“That’s a good way to get indigestion,” she said as he got to his feet. “Reading at mealtime.”

“How are you? I didn’t see you come in.”

“Of course not. I saw
you
come in. I was sitting over there in the corner.” Today she wore a simple tailored suit of powder-blue sharkskin worsted; the severity of its lines were negated by her mannequin-like figure, whose presence the suit emphatically proclaimed.

“Won’t you sit down a second with me?” he asked her.

She looked hesitant. “My friends are outside waiting. We’re going to have coffee on the terrace.”

“Sit down anyway,” he said firmly, and she did.

“But really, I can’t stay.”

“Who are your friends?” he inquired, conscious of a faint envy: they had had her with them all during lunch.

“An American couple and a friend of theirs I met this morning in the
souks
down below. They’re stationed at one of the air bases near Casablanca somewhere. They asked me to have lunch with them.” She cast a quick glance around the dining-room.
“How does it happen you’re all alone? Where’s Mr. Kenzie? And the other one? I forget his name.”

“Oh, I never eat with them,” he said, as if eager to vindicate himself for having been with the two Englishmen the day before. “Yesterday was a special occasion, unusual. I don’t know where they are.” He looked at her. The flesh could not have been molded more artfully around her cheekbones and the corners of her mouth. Actually it was that, he decided, and nothing else, which made her beauty. It was a face to be sculpted, not painted. The eyes were of a neutral color, grayish hazel, the hair was medium light, halfway between blonde and brunette, perfectly straight and worn quite short in a coiffure that looked too anarchic to have been planned, and too smart to be accidental. It was all in those strange, perfect, multiple curves that led the vision upward from the lips over the cheek to the temple. He knew she was aware of his appraisal and that she felt no self-consciousness or resentment. “It’s nice to see you,” he said after a moment.

“I really can’t sit here. They want to get started back to Casablanca in a few minutes and they’ve been awfully nice to me.”

“Why don’t you join me after they’ve gone? I’ll be sitting over at the end of the terrace at one of the tables under the big palm tree.”

“Well,” she said doubtfully, “they offered to drop me at my hotel on their way back. I don’t know.”

“Remember, you’re due to see me at five, you know, anyway. You hadn’t forgotten?”

“Of course I hadn’t forgotten,” she said indignantly.

“If you have to go home, I’ll take you back in a cab, but stay and have another coffee with me after your friends leave.”

“All right.” She smiled very briefly, but radiantly, and walked out.

He ate the rest of his lunch at what for him was an uncommonly rapid pace; he did not really believe she might change her mind and leave with her friends, but there was, after all, the possibility of it, and the fact that she was now out of sight made it seem more real. But when he went outside he saw her
there in the sun with the others, looking a little grave and nodding her head. In order not to cross the terrace where she sat, he went through the bar and down the dark corridor that led toward the main entrance hall, then out into a small shady courtyard where goldfish swam in a pool beneath a group of tall banana plants. From there he came out upon an extension of the terrace and took a table at the remote end, against the wall, and almost hidden by the huge green fan of spears made by a palm branch that waved in front of his face. When the Americans had left he intended to wait a decent interval, perhaps five minutes, and then go and join her. However, she rose almost immediately and came to his shady corner.

“They’ve gone,” she announced. “I’m thinking of moving to this hotel. I didn’t realize it was as reasonable as it is. They told me they had a double room without bath last night for twelve hundred francs. I’m only staying over at my little horror because I have to watch the pennies these days. But the difference is so little. Do you realize I have to pay seven hundred for my closet, and they don’t even sweep it out? There’s still a big piece of bread under the bed that was there the day I came.”