Stewart, Angus Page 2

  Jay looked enquiry at her.

  'This frightful business in the Diplomatic Forest,' she said. 'But you must have heard. I was out there with Sally Cline—oh, she's a great friend of mine—and this man threatened us with a great stone. He threw it at the windscreen—it cost a frightful lot to have repaired. Sally said, drive on, and I did. But I noticed the man had a green bicycle. Lying in the ditch. Then next day two Englishwomen went picnicking in the Forest. They had their husbands with them—enough thank you . . .' Mrs. Allen said to the maid, who was putting sugar her tea. She took a long gulp from the cup, and turned back to Jay. 'Well, of course, rape is a very serious offence. One of the women was raped. Really quite horribly. We knew we ought to tell the police. I mean, we had to. A man had thrown a stone at my car only the day before. Anyway—to cut a long story short—I went out there with a police van. And they found the man with the green bicycle. I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to identify anyone. But I think they saw that I recognised the bicycle. It was quite enough.' Mrs. Allen took another long swallow of tea, and shuddered profoundly. 'Of course, they hung him up by his heels—beat him and all that. And it turned out it was the same man. The man who had raped the Englishwoman. Frightful relief. Jonnie used to say that they have to beat prisoners because the people can't read, you see. They have to be shown things.'

  'Don't you think it may simply be that a percentage of any authoritarian regime will always be sadistic thug?' Lom asked quietly. Jay was unaware that he had been listening to the monologue.

  'Oh, I don't know anything about that!' Mrs. Allen said.

  Lom looked a little hurt. 'I mean, this is an absolute autocracy, you know. A medieval monarchy has its benevolent aspects, yes. But it must have a ruthless executive. Ruthless executives attract some very unpleasant men. Why, they even get paid! Is it not so?'

  'Some of the lavatories are certainly medieval,' said Mrs. Allen. 'Mine dribbles all night long.—Kate, dear,' she called across the room, 'I must go home now. Because of the voting. It may get very noisy in the town.'

  When Mrs. Allen had been shown out, Mrs. Diergardt settled herself between Jay and the American writer, Elton Hoover. Lom appeared to be discussing Europe with Jaqueline, while Dan Gurney exchanged heavy, sporadic remarks with the American Fulbright. The American's Spanish-looking wife contentedly dandled the baby.

  'Do you know anything about the English Pastoral Orphanage here?' Mrs. Diergardt asked Jay. She talked in short, careful gasps, and her head continued to oscillate gently as though balanced on hairsprings.

  'Not really—what is it?'

  'It's a foundation for orphaned Moroccan children here, and it's administered by a Church of England Trust in London.'

  'A Christian foundation. English money?'

  'Yes. But the Sultan helps, and is often very kind to the children when he comes. Last year he gave them thirty thousand francs for two new lavatories. He gave the English matron some lovely Japanese tea-towels. There's a great need for charity in the world today.'

  'Yes,' Jay said, baffled. Mrs. Diergardt had a disconcerting habit of bringing her bloodless face to within inches of one's own. Her steady eyes and salivating mouth were expectant and reproachful at the same time like a dog waiting to be fed something. Only sympathy, perhaps.

  'Are you fond of children?' Mrs. Diergardt drooled earnestly.

  Jay realised with discomfort that the old lady belonged to a class and generation that consciously talked to the young; that this was what he was being subjected to. Irritation at the dogs rose in him again.

  'Heavens yes! Quite as much as the next man!' Jay affected a little bounce of enthusiasm; and something ground to a standstill inside him.

  'Good,' Mrs. Diergardt said. 'There's such a nice English girl here who's come to help—Caroline Adam. But just now she's acting as an interpreter for Mr. Lom's film team.' The old lady's face continued to quiver in expectation beneath his. There was a perfectly meaningless pause. 'I'm looking for someone to put down a little money to found a club for working Moorish girls,' she went on eventually. 'You know, there's nothing for them to do. They only get into trouble. Often they come to me but I can do very little for them. I'm not a rich woman. Perhaps if you travel around you may meet someone who might be interested . . . Just a little money . . . we have a crèche here already, you know.'

  'I'll keep my ears open,' Jay said. His eyes at that moment were distracted by the servant girl, but this time it wasn't her young beauty that arrested them. What he had seen was something horrible. It had been no more than the fractional motion of a hand. The girl had just placed three white pills on Mrs. Diergardt's side plate, but had done so with a quick disdain so intense as to have seemed almost incredible. So much for the working Moorish girls.

  The old lady was turning dutifully to Elton Hoover. 'Is it a Psychological novel you're writing, Mr. Hoover?'

  'Well, Mrs. Diergardt, I suppose all novels have been what you might call psychological ever since your Henry Fielding wrote Tom Jones.' Having delivered himself of this, the American seemed to feel his conversational duties were discharged. He seemed to be chewing the cud in some far away grass-roots state. An autistic black kitten was rolling itself up in one of the rugs on the floor. Elton Hoover looked many miles through it, and continued to move his jaw on nothing more substantial than thought.

  'Selly Wilburs was here to lunch last week—did you know?' Jaqueline said, trying to rouse him. 'He was telling us all about your new technique of putting the same word in strange patterns—no?'

  'A very talented young man,' Hoover said. He came back sufficiently to nibble a pastry.

  'This is most mysterious, Dan!' Jaqueline called, turning from the whispering maidservant. 'A taxi has come for you!'

  'Thank you, Jaqueline,' Gurney said, He heaved himself to his feet; and Jay was thinking it was a name only an Australian accent could do justice to. But Mrs. Diergardt had decided it was his turn again.

  'And where were you at school?' she asked.

  'Near Windsor,' Jay said. He paused seven seconds leapt to his feet, and clasped the old lady's only functioning hand. 'Goodness I must be on my way too!'

  A slow smile about the company seemed to be sufficient for Gurney. Dutifully, Jay followed suit. He took a quick glance through the window, gauging the garden's suitability for a bird-table. The possibilities looked quite bright. A strange quartet now moved out into the hall, among the dusty, armour: Jaqueline and the rambling Gurney; Jay and. the stooped nonagenarian. The very young maid followed behind.

  'Dan, what about a piggy-back?' Jay said. Jaqueline was unbolting the front door.

  'Oh, he is still frightened of the dogs!' Jaqueline laughed.'

  'Yes,' Jay said.

  Mrs. Diergardt was pawing unnoticed at Gurney's sleeve. She barely reached to his elbow. 'You'd like some arum lilies wouldn't you? . . . wouldn't you?' she quavered.

  Gurney courteously refused this offer; and Jay became aware of the maid standing in shadow behind him. She was pathetically holding Gurney's muffler. Jay dropped his hand On to the back of her thigh; then felt upwards through the foamy skirts to her tight buttocks. She looked at him with slow, animal eyes. Her mouth didn't move at all. She stepped forward mechanically with Gurney's scarf.

  What had happened to the dogs perhaps Allah knew. They weren't in evidence. At the outer gate Jay looked back. The girl was bent reaping lilies in the garden. She had great armfuls—for some other guest, he supposed. Jaqueline stood, hands on hips, directing the harvest.

  'Christ, that squawling baybee!' Gurney said in the cab. 'Looked a bit black to me. Touch of the tar brush somewhere . . . I dunno.' He mumbled on for some moments. The taxi lurched down the road towards the white city. Through the rear window the sun was poised for its sudden drop behind the purple line of hills where the Rif Mountains began. 'Oh —before I forget—Frederick Halliday at the bookshop's been trying to contact you. You know him?'

  Jay turned to look at Gurney. 'Only of hi
m,' he said slowly.

  'Well, you'll have to wait a day or so. He's gone to Casa—or is just going.'

  'Any idea what about?'

  'Maybe he wants a literate assistant in the shop.' Gurney looked at Jay sideways. 'He's pretty much a hermit. Funny you never met him.'

  Jay said nothing. The 'literate' assistant couldn't have been accidental.

  * * * * *

  High above the Kasbah, exactly one mile from the Villa Perce-neige on the Beni Makada hill, and commanding, as it were, the other tip or extremity of the crescent-shaped city from an almost identical elevation, Lady Simpson lifted her telephone receiver in the Dar Aloussi. To do so she had first to dislodge a cheetah which had fallen asleep across the instrument. 'Please!' Lady Simpson said severely, and the beast loped disconsolately out of the room.

  Left alone, Caroline Adam gazed a moment into her gin and tonic, shrugged her shoulders, and flicked her knees up beneath her on the sofa. She had a lot to think about. As the new assistant matron of the Pastoral Orphanage, she was bound to listen carefully to one of the founder members. She had been listening for an hour. During this time she thought she had also understood Lady Simpson to have founded the American University at Beirut. Things were confusing. The running of the Orphanage itself appeared not to be without complications. If Jay Gadston had passingly wondered how a Christian charity could operate within an Islamic state, never mind a proudly nationalist one that had only recently thrown off colonial domination, Caroline Adam was beginning to find out.

  'Perfectly respectable,' Lady Simpson said into the 'phone. 'He's making me a bird-table . . . No, mine's a stone one . . . I think he might . . . But he doesn't have a set fee, Kate . . . It’s by arrangement, and very reasonable . . . Yes, Eton . . . Dear, I have not been hiding him from you . . . He's a very withdrawn young man.'

  The line went dead. Most probably it had been accidentally shot through by celebrating tribesmen. Lady Simpson had witnessed too many referendums in Arab countries to be disconcerted. She hung up. Caroline Adam untucked her legs smartly as she came through into the drawing room again.

  'No, the French murdered him,' Lady Simpson resumed. 'And I think poor Mohammed Cinq knew what must happen to him. Heaven knows what the Quai d'Orsay paid the anaesthetist. He was an Arab!' This memory of treachery had Lady Simpson quivering with rage. Her glass of Dutch gin wobbled perilously. 'Perhaps you'd help me shut up the house,' the said. 'Then I'll call a taxi to take you home.' Caroline protested in vain.

  'They've been voting, and it'll soon be dark,' Lady Simpson said.

  The tour of the house wholly enchanted Caroline. In Nice, where she had lived much of her childhood, its siting alone must have been worth tens of thousands of pounds. Standing some eighty feet sheer above the Mediterranean, it had once belonged to a Moorish merchant of consequence. Beneath its windows green slopes grazed over by sheep fell down to the sea. Herdsmen passed it quite silently save for the strains of Cairo Radio issuing from beneath the folds of their coarse djellabas. The house itself had been built about an open patio, now roofed over to form a large salon. Smaller, finely proportioned rooms, opened off three sides of this area. Crenellated Moorish windows gave one way on to the sunset; the other down towards the harbour, where the lavender hull of a Union Castle liner lay berthed. Upstairs there was no more than a servant's room, a wash-house, and the enormous flat terrace.

  'This one always gives trouble,' Lady Simpson said. Caroline, transferring armsful of Damascene ironmongery from the sill, was inclined to agree. Eventually she reached an arm through the guarding bars, caught hold of the hinged shutters, drew them to, and bolted them. The home was now dramatically sealed.

  'I don't expect you got across into Spain from Gibraltar, what with all the La Linea frontier business.' She paused on the winding stairs, political indignation rising in her again. 'But how could anyone expect that Mr. Wilson to be able to deal diplomatically with a great statesman like Franco!'

  Caroline said nothing. Her mother's only brother had been killed in the Civil War. Now she herself was on the other side. 'Let me get you another gin-tonic,' Lady Simpson said. 'I'm sure you'll very quickly come to find your way about the town. It seems to be particularly full of well-to-do young men at the moment. They come, you know, for the drugs or the Arab boys'

  'I couldn't help overhearing that you have an Etonian building you a bird-table,' Caroline laughed. It was possibly an unwise confession, but she saw no harm in advancing idle pleasantries. Lady Simpson was nothing if not a delightful anachronism. Unshakably British, with that peculiarly severe righteousness of the colon, she combined a confused fascism with a regard for the Moroccans that was more than simply ornate and sentimental.

  'He's a charming—if rather scruffy young man,' she said now. 'But not at all well-to-do. He seems always to be hungry! I automatically give him a meal whenever he's working here. His father was Brigadier Gadston of the Long Range Desert Group, but also something of an undercover maker and breaker of kings. He was involved with Feisal, and later with Zog of Albania. Young Jay can only have been in his early teens when he was assassinated in unexplained circumstances in Amman. He was serving in Egypt at the time when my husband was killed there. They knew each other quite well; although we never met.' Lady Simpson reached for another native cigarette and placed it carefully in her silver holder. She would sometimes talk for sentences at a time with this forgotten in the comer of her mouth. Strangely, the action added to her dignity, rather than detracted from it. At the mention of her dead husband her eyes had lost focus. 'I like Jay, she went on defensively. 'Only I wish he would settle to a proper career!'

  It was clear that Lady Simpson had proprietary feelings about this young man. In the circumstances Caroline saw it would be unedifying in her to wonder whether the garden architect was in Tangier for the 'drugs or the Arab boys'. When one thought about it, there was no valid reason why those whom Lady Simpson termed 'well-to-do' should not be there for both.

  Walking to the waiting taxi, Caroline looked back on the house. When the patio had been roofed concessions had necessarily been made to modernity, and there were windows in the exterior walls. It no longer presented the blank, whitewashed facade, which, more than anything perhaps, was the defining symbol of Morocco. But few of the city's grander native houses had avoided European influence, even at the time of their building. Too many generations of soldiers and merchants had come and gone from the small promontory of land. The city's walls had been opened, and so had its people's eyes. With the sunlight there had flowed in influences as potent, though less benign. As if to illustrate this train of though, from some nearby suburb the raucous cry of the Coca-Cola loudspeaker van drifted down on the quiet garden overhanging the sea. Lady Simpson peered a moment through the wire grille in her outer gate. A lot of ragged children surrounded Caroline. The contention seemed to be that the taxi only stood where it did through their good aegis. It was rather like God and the tree in the quad. Its continued existence had been guaranteed by virtue of their presence alone; and this was a matter for payment. Bolder spirits lightly touched her sleeve. She closed the car door to a twittering chorus of, 'Mahm'selle!, Mahm'selle!' and looked back once more at the house, with its European windows, now shuttered.

  Caroline left the taxi short of the Orphanage. She walked down a broad avenue flanked by prosperous villas which the ending of the International Zone and Free Port had left empty. Many were vast, set behind heavy wrought-iron railings, often lost sight in the smothering confusion of their unkempt gardens. Shuttered and silent for almost a decade, they gave the impression of having given up all hope of redemption, relapsing into melancholy aloofness behind padlocked gates. It would be perhaps another fifteen years before the Moroccan middle class emerged in sufficient numbers to fill the similarly abandoned apartment blocks. Unless the owners of those often preposterous villas saw fit to open them to the homeless, they were unlikely ever to be lived in again. The evening was very still. Late sunlight filte
red through the dusty eucalyptus trees and made patterns of shadow on the road. Sometimes it was a swallow that banked above the ruined gardens, and sometimes a bat. An old man on a donkey passed Caroline: the rider lost in the preoccupied trance of the country Arab; the beast hurrying forward with the clear ring of hooves, though equally unperturbed. Stretched out on the pavement, before a particularly secretive lodge, was an even older man who might have been dead, or merely sleeping. The rider didn't glance at him. Caroline passed only two other people: a pair of elegant, veiled women, with patent-leather handbags, most probably off on a daring outing to the cinema. She could catch nothing of their muted chatter as they went by, but their fine brown eyes dwelt on her own blue ones curiously for a moment. Probably she didn't look very like a tourist.

  At the moment she was only a provisional helper at the Orphanage: her appointment didn't take effect for some days. Harold Lom had instructed her to be in the Petit Socco, at 7 p.m. that night. She would have to find her way there. Caroline unburdened herself of some back numbers of the New Yorker which Lady Simpson had insisted she take for the children. Without pausing to change, she collected the nit-comb and went to work on the heads of four of these who had gone berserk in a single bathtub.

  * * * * *

  Jay Gadston would sometimes make pilgrimage to one or other of his former dwellings. The obeisance consisted of sitting as close as possible to it and considering his decline. When Gurney's taxi dropped him, he made his way towards the Rue Rabelais. For one thing he wanted to shy clear of the centre of the town, on which wild-eyed groups in djellabas of uniformly white hairiness were converging with banners; for another, Mrs. Diergardt's tea party had left him with an irrational longing for the sardine sandwich that only this particular old bacal could provide.