Tremor (32 page)

Everybody was talking together now – except for Leon, who bit at his fingers and tried to catch the French. He had come back to America and was living and working in Philadelphia near his wife's parents. He had three children, all now almost grown up, and it had been a good marriage. Thor had always wanted to go to Agadir to see the site of the earthquake of which he had heard so much. His father not wanting to make such a long journey, he had arranged this holiday with his mother, but a week before they were due to leave his father had heard of the death of his first wife, Ann. She was eighty-three and had died of a heart attack after hauling a dinghy up the shingle in some seaside part of New Zealand where she was living. Although he had not seen her for many years (Thor had only ever seen photographs of her) this had upset Lee a lot, and Letty had felt she could not leave him on his own at this time. So sooner than cancel and waste their bookings, Thor had persuaded Leon to come in her place.

‘And then,' said Thor, sitting on the arm of Matthew's chair, ‘ you built a hospital, didn't you. It was all in that magazine about what it had cost, the fact that you didn't want to be interviewed.'

Matthew smiled and made a dismissive gesture. ‘All that was exaggerated. Good bit of PR, you know. I didn't build a hospital, for Pete's sake. They were building a new hospital, and I contributed to the children's wing. I meant it to be anonymous, but the hospital people leaked it. It was just one of those things.'

Shortly afterwards he excused himself and went up to bed. He had only arrived two days ago, and already was beset by ghosts. He was rather relieved that the woman he remembered as Vicky, after her spontaneous recognition and outburst of gratitude, had not pursued the subject in further detail. It occurred to him that perhaps she was not too keen to remember or have remembered in public some elements of her own past life.

As he reached his bedroom he wondered whether he should ring up Edouard de Blaye, see if he happened to be there. He already knew the answer. Pierre was dead and the house turned into a hotel. He had not heard of Edouard for years. It was all ghosts.

He was up early next morning as he was due to leave that day. A plane left for Paris at five this afternoon. He planned a couple of days there walking round his old haunts, then he was going to Madrid where there had been a special call for him. Not London. Even now he did not feel like facing London.

He had not thought it worthwhile to hire a car, but after breakfast he took a taxi up to the Kasbah. He felt he would like to see what remained of it before he left.

In fact nothing remained of it but heaps of rubble and piled brick. He wondered how many of the six hundred buried here were unrecovered. Probably most. It was just a vast burial mound.

But there was a wonderful view. Below him stretched the great sweep of the bay and all the new white buildings along its perimeter. He remembered that first morning so long ago when he had swum along the beach and idly wished he had money to invest in buying land and building property in a region where growth – and profit – were an obvious proposition. And so, in spite of the great catastrophe, it had proved. Life had moved on. Agadir had become such a widely popular holiday resort that thousands flocked here regardless – and mostly ignorant – of what had happened a quarter of a century ago.

As it turned out he had needed no such property speculation to make him rich. Perhaps he hadn't even needed the contents of a suitcase – though without that he would never have gone to Australia, and all the rest would not have followed.

It had not happened at once: he had lived comfortably and well off the takings for more than five years, and it was the merest chance which had turned him into a rich man in his own right.

Years before that occurred he had one day been reading an English
Sunday Telegraph
two weeks old and had come upon an article devoted to him – ‘a young man of great talent untimely lost in the Agadir earthquake'. Apparently someone had ‘ discovered' his two novels; they had been reprinted and become something of a cult. (He wondered sourly if this would have happened if he had still been alive. There was nothing like an untimely death to interest literary critics.)

He had been spending his first years in Sydney chiefly surfing and sunning himself, and on bad days or in the winter he would sit for hours playing the expensive guitar he had bought. Evenings he socialized a bit, and had a number of brief friendships with friendly girls. But it occurred to him at this stage that he might take this as a suitable opportunity to recover his memory and return to England. It appealed very much to his self-esteem that his two novels were now being highly praised, and if he went back now, the money that remained to him – reduced now by more than half – could be left behind in Australia and he could capitalize on the new prestige by writing a third novel. Heaven knew, he had had plenty of new experience to draw on over the last five years!

He contemplated it, then thought of it, and at the last drew back. The explanations would be enormous, and even if he retreated into the excuse of a failed memory there seemed so many pitfalls. He agonized for a month.

One of the major obstacles to his return now was that he had just met a girl called Pola and fallen in love with her. If it was not the feeling that he had had for Nadine, it was the nearest he had ever come, and the thought of leaving her, or of trying to explain the situation to her and persuading her to return with him to England, was more than he could face.

So he decided to write another novel where he was and to write it under the name of Henry Delaware.

It took more than a year, and by the time it was finished he had asked Pola to marry him and she had accepted. Their marriage burned his boats. When the novel was finished he looked around for a publisher. He did not feel he could safely submit it to the firm who had issued his other two books. Australia remained almost exclusively within the English sphere. One or two English publishers had offices in Sydney and Melbourne, but they were outposts, the embassies of a friendly power. Times were in fact just beginning to change, and one or two publishers were issuing an Australian list, but he looked for a worldwide market.

Then someone told him of a firm of agents, a go-ahead group with their head office in Toronto, who already had offices in New York and London and were about to open a branch in Sydney. They had a reputation for being influential. With his pseudo link with Canada, Matthew would have preferred another provenance, but they said the head of the agency, a man called Chadwick, would be over next month and would be delighted to meet him.

They met, and Chadwick read the book, also Mather, who was to head the Australian office. They took a modest view of the book, but were happy to handle it at the usual commission; they thought their people in London would probably be able to place it with one of the smaller firms, and a copy of the typescript would certainly go to New York.

Over lunch, Mr Chadwick, a tall, big-boned man with heavy glasses, discussed the novel at greater length and Matthew drew a few extra criticisms from him which gave the impression that the book's chance of publication was not much more than 50/50. Matthew's experience of agents in England had taught him that optimism was not their most pronounced characteristic, so with the coffee he confessed to Mr Chadwick (Jim to you, Henry) that he had in part modelled his style on that suddenly popular novelist, the late Matthew Sorensen.

‘Sorensen?' Chadwick put two lumps of sugar in his cup. ‘Sorensen? That's the guy who was killed. Yep. Good writer. I specially thought well of his first book. What was it called? I can't remember.'

‘
Chance Medley
,' said Matthew.

‘That's it. You – more or less had those books in mind when you wrote yours?'

‘I admired his work. I thought it was a general style I might adopt.'

Chadwick stirred his coffee, tested it with his spoon and then put in another lump of sugar. ‘Sorensen. Well …' He shook his head. ‘Can't see any great resemblance, Henry. Honestly, I can't. I don't want to be depressing but Sorensen is something rather special. D'you know? It's a matter of personality, isn't it. It's all how you bring your own personality into the writing that matters, that marks what you might call a good book from a not quite so good book. Sorensen had a way of writing, you know. It isn't quite yours.'

Matthew had dismissed the taxi, and thought he would walk back. The exercise would do him good.

Unnoticed by him while he was looking over the great expanse of the bay, an old bus had ground its way up the hill, and at the top a group of Moroccan women had climbed out. Some were in white robes, others in black: they chattered in groups as they walked about, and some sat down to look over the sea. Some just stood in the sun.

Along with them, the only Europeans in the bus, were two big elderly people, a man and a woman, both in their sixties. He wore a loud light check suit with two-toned shoes and a white golfing cap. She was in a summery print dress of over-floral design, hair dyed black, no hat but a hair net. Heavy earrings and a gold chain. He used a stick. They walked across the road and climbed the rubble not far from Matthew, staring down, as everyone was staring down, at the wonderfully picturesque scene and the water glinting and the ships moving like toys in the bay.

Matthew's luck had begun soon after the birth of his second child, Marya, named after Pola's grandmother. He often visited churches in Sydney, wherever there was a chance of decent music, of which there was not much, but this Sunday, going into the Greek Orthodox church, he had seen a bald youngish man and heard him accompanying the organ. After the service he had approached him, imagining him probably Russian or Polish, and found to his astonishment that he came from Manchester.

So his friendship with Henry Green, or Greener, had begun, and shortly after this Greener had introduced him to Floyd, and they had struck up instantly a musical affinity, which had led to their making a few records – financed by Matthew. Then Matthew – conscious of the lack of success of his book venture – had spent a couple of weeks in New York hawking the records round the record companies there. Presently one began to talk business.

And that was the way it had happened. In four years they were making LPs and selling in the States and England. In eight they were very rich.

His gesture in helping finance a hospital wing had been a later impulse, a final stirring of conscience over what he had picked up from Johnny Frazier's haul. It did not quite match that amount but went a fair way, and he felt he could sleep untroubled at night knowing that the banking firm of Benson & Benson had done more ultimate good with their money than if they had never lost it.

Not that he had suffered broken nights over the matter at any time.

His marriage to Pola had come adrift four years ago, for reasons very different from those which had brought him to his first divorce, yet with rather the same sort of outcome. He was still on friendly terms with Pola – just as he had been, or would have been, with Rona. They shared the children – to whom they were both devoted – and neither had so far shown any tendency to take another partner. For a while at least Matthew was content to live alone – so far, that was, as he was allowed to in his present high-profile situation – and, as he had done most of his life, keeping his own counsel, thinking his own thoughts, being his own man. In these circumstances he was pleasantly content, and he wondered now why he had felt impelled to come back to Agadir. Now he could not wait to return to Sydney.

On a separate pile of rubble not very far from Matthew, Big Smith stood with his wife, Madge, staring at the splendid panorama.

‘Never been up here before,' he said. ‘Never got the chance. Arrived one night, and
bang!
we was away the next.'

Madge licked her lips distastefully. ‘Don't think that bacon was too good this morning. Bit rancid like. I ought to've sent it back.' She belched in a genteel fashion.

‘Greg Garrett didn't stand a chance, poor bleeder,' Smith said. ‘Squashed, he was, just like a frog under a stone. Blood and guts and brains everywhere.'

‘You've told me forty times,' said his wife. ‘Don't know why you ordered bacon. They don't eat it themselves. We could've done without for a morning or two.'

‘Mine was OK,' said Smith. ‘You want to taste what it's like in stir; that's if you're lucky enough to get any of any sort.'

‘I've never been “in stir”, as you well know. Nor you for twenty years.'

‘Eighteen,' said Smith. ‘I wonder when that bleeding bus is starting back.'

‘It's already gone.'

‘Gone? Why didn't you tell me?'

‘You was too busy talking about your old earthquake. Any road, we can walk. Do you good.'

‘Hell. And I don't suppose we can raise a taxi.'

For two years Big Smith had needed a hip replacement, but he wouldn't trust the Spanish doctors and didn't fancy to return to England. They had a nice little place now on the Costa del Sol, to which Smith had retreated with his wife in 1977, and they lived there eating and drinking comfortably with a few cronies. After another foray under Mr Artemis, which had gone wrong and Smith had served a stretch, he had come out and teamed up with a man called Jones who had been in jail at the same time. Jones didn't have the class of Mr Artemis but he was a quick thinker and a spry mover, and they had successfully pulled off a couple of audacious small jobs together. In some of the Soho joints they frequented together they became known as ‘Alias Smith and Jones'. Smith began to walk with more of a swagger.

Then together they had got away with a clever robbery at Gatwick Airport. It had all depended on effrontery and split-second timing. ‘Got away' was a relative term, and Smith had decided that the moment had come to take his wife off and live in Spain, where extradition laws were interpreted leniently. There was no charge actually out against him but he knew what the British police were like when they held deep suspicions and had got their fingers on a man with a record. He had enough to live on and thought it time to quit.