Complete Short Stories (VMC) (101 page)

Habib smiled shyly, and nodded.

‘To Fatma?’

They had heard of Fatma before.

Habib nodded again. ‘Two little children,’ he said, turning to Rose. That was her province, he felt, although, as it emerged in a minute or two, she had none of her own. He was sorry for Harry about that.

‘Boys, or girls, or both?’

‘Two girls,’ he said, smiling bravely.

Harry got up and called for more coffee. As soon as it was served, Habib darted inside the café and came out with a few roasted almonds in a screw of sad old brown paper. He pushed them towards Rose, tapping the table, insisting that she should eat.

‘It is like old times,’ she said.

‘The photograph,’ he said eagerly, turning from one to the other and at last to Rose. ‘You, me, Mustapha …’ He waved his hand. ‘It is hanging on the wall of my new house.’

‘Where is your house?’

‘It is a very fine house, very large. In the country,’ he added vaguely. He thought about it for a while, then said, ‘I shall take you there. For a certainty. I shall introduce you to Fatma and the children. I shall cook for you.
La haute cuisine
.
Crêpes flambées
, you know.’

‘That will be very nice,’ Rose said. ‘Thank you.’

‘You have a car?’ he asked Harry, who nodded.

‘Then we shall make many journeys.’

‘What about your work?’

‘On my free day. In the mornings before I go to the hotel. Perhaps in the afternoons. All the time you are here, I shall not take my
siesta
.’

He knew
they
never did, had, from the upper window of
La Sirène
, while yawning, and scratching his chest, and preparing for his sleep, seen them going off, with bathing things, or scrambling on the rocks.

‘Now I am afraid I must go to the hotel, to
la haute cuisine
.’

‘We must dine there one evening, and sample your cooking,’ Harry said.

‘It is superb.’

He stood up and shook hands. ‘This evening at nine o’clock, I shall be in the café next to the new cinema,’ he said carelessly. He did not invite them to join him and, before they could reply, he had gone, moving swiftly as always, through the medina gateway, still only half-shaved.

After dinner at their own hotel, Rose and Harry strolled under the eucalyptus trees, through which a few street-lamps filtered their light, towards the cinema. The wind had, for the time being, dropped, and the air held a romantic stillness.

The barbers’ shops, which were everywhere, were still open, and there was a leisurely coming-and-going in the rubble-strewn streets. Mahmoud Souk was beginning to be as they had remembered it.

At the café by the cinema, men in their brown
djellabahs
sat at the tables smoking, playing cards and dominoes. There were no Europeans, no women. The Germans had stayed in the hotel lounge, writing their picture-postcards of cobalt skies and camels and palm trees, and comparing the prices of rugs and copper-work. Dinner had been rather geared to them, with liver dumplings and
sauerkraut
. The old French influence was fading.

‘Perhaps Habib’s hotel would be better,’ Rose said, sitting outside the café, her fluffy coat wrapped round her. ‘To think of
him
becoming a chef! When one remembers the deplorable
couscous
.

They laughed, and then looked round cautiously.

The
couscous
had been a calamity. Habib had invited them as his guests to
La Sirène
. They had sat in a small room at the back, mercifully alone, and the big dish of greasy semolina and hunks of fat mutton and enormous carrots had been set before them. It was cold and daunting. Every time Habib popped his head round the door from serving a customer, they had nodded appreciatively, their mouths full. He went back to report on the pleasure they were having, and sometimes a customer looked in to see for himself. They had plodded on – Rose, especially, in much distress – but had seemed to make no impression upon the great heap on the dish. Then Rose had her clever idea. In her handbag was a folded plastic rain-hood. Furtively, she opened it and – whenever the coast seemed clear – dropped a handful of
couscous
into it.

‘All gone,’ Habib went back at last, triumphantly, to declare.

After that, those hoods were always known to Rose and Harry as
couscous
bags. The idea had been good; but the sequel to it was bad. She had tipped the contents, later, down the lavatory in the hotel, and blocked the drains.

The semolina must have swollen there, as some of it had already swollen inside her.

‘The meal in his house,’ she said, looking round again, and speaking in a low voice, although in English. ‘This time we shan’t be alone …’

‘He has promised us
la haute cuisine
.’

‘I
know
,’ she said doubtfully.

‘We’ll go to his hotel and try it first,’ he said.

‘Isn’t he awfully late?’ she suggested.

Harry looked at his watch. ‘Only half an hour,’ he said, and ordered another drink.

‘It’s getting chilly.’

‘Well, let’s go inside.’

But she hardly liked to. It seemed very much a man’s place in there. Habib might be embarrassed.

When the time came for the next drink, however, she was driven there, shivering. No one took any notice.

It was much later – when they were talking of going back to the hotel – when Habib arrived, coming swiftly on his plimsolled feet. He was smoothly shaven now.

Rather aloof with his acquaintances, he hardly paused to speak to them as he passed their table. He came and shook hands and sat down, leaning forward to talk to them in a both confident and confiding manner.

‘So many people asking for
crêpes flambées
at the last moment,’ he explained importantly.

‘You do French cooking always?’ Rose asked.

‘Every kind; any kind,’ he replied.

He handed round cigarettes and leant back, crossing one leg over the other, displaying the fluorescent socks.

‘Tomorrow morning, you shall take some photographs, I think,’ he said. Photographs had always been of extreme importance to him. ‘You will take me and Monsieur Harry, if you please,’ he told Rose, who was not hurt, knowing her place. ‘If you are able,’ he added. Then, looking at Harry, he said, ‘In exchange, I will give you a picture of Madame Bourguiba. In colour.’

‘Well, that would be splendid. I will also take photographs of Fatma and your children,’ he promised.

Habib nodded vaguely, as if his family were a thing he had made up, and then forgotten.

‘And of your house.’

He brightened. ‘It is a very big house. Quite new. There are beds, cupboards, chairs, everything.’ He did not know the French for grass-matting, so pointed to some at their feet. ‘A goat,’ he went on, ‘hens, donkey, vines. All you could wish.’

‘You earn good money then,’ asked Harry, who could ask anything.

‘Excellent. Forty
dinars
a month.’

Harry, who was quick, worked it out at six pounds, ten shillings a week. Rose, trying to do the sum, failed (without pencil and paper) and lapsed from the conversation.

Surely, he must be only a kitchen boy for that wage, Harry thought.

‘In England, would a good chef have as much?’ asked Habib complacently.

Harry was torn between loyalty to his country’s system, and the wish not to hurt.

‘Perhaps even a little more,’ he said with a vague air. ‘I know very little about that business.’

‘It is a good business,’ Habib said simply. ‘Not as good as yours, I think,’ he added, glancing at Harry’s gold watch, as he had often glanced at it before. Yet, he thought, Rose had nothing grand about
her
– no ear-rings or bracelets, simply a thin plain wedding ring. Fatma had more. Even his little girls had ear-rings. But wealth – great wealth – seemed indicated all the same. For instance, the Leica camera, the hired car, the hotel. Rose had perhaps been the lucky one, coming to Harry with a small dowry, no paraphernalia, and so thin, too, and with little brown spots –
rousseurs
– all over her face and arms. Beautiful eyes, though, that would look fine
just
seen above the fold of a
haïk
: in the bare face, they looked meaningless.

He toyed with the idea of westernising Fatma, even of bringing her to the café, dressed
à la
Madame Bourguiba, modern, the new Tunisian woman. But it would not do. Who would look after the little girls? It would
be expensive. What would his mother say? Reputations would be lost, and difficulties would arise, and Fatma might get ideas into her head.

‘Shall we drive you home to the country?’ Harry asked, feeling tired – from the wind, and then the sun, and then the beer.

Habib made his pouting, secretive face, and explained in his soft voice that he had to meet a friend later. ‘I will walk back to the hotel with you while I wait,’ he said.

They set off down the dark street, stepping carefully over the uneven ground. Trenches being dug for drains were a trap.

Near the hotel was another open, rubbly place.

‘Wasn’t this, when we came before, a cemetery?’ Rose asked.

Habib shivered. ‘They moved the graves because of the new road,’ he explained. ‘But I am still afraid when I walk this way alone at night. One lady,’ he said, edging closer, more confidentially, towards Harry, ‘one lady in the town died in child-birth. The next day they went to bury her, and as they were putting her in the ground, she sat up.’

‘Oh, dear,’ Rose said. ‘I don’t like that.’ It was an old horror with her. ‘Do you have …’ She sought the word – ‘
les cercueils
?’

‘No.’ He hesitated, then he stroked his hands over his clothes – the old brown coat – and shuddered.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said, with a change of voice. ‘I shall be at the café at nine-thirty.’

He disappeared, racing back past the place where the cemetery had been, alone, without Harry to protect him from the dead.

The hotel lounge was empty. The Germans had gone to bed early to be in readiness for the sunbathing arrangements of the morrow.

‘What a funny holiday,’ Rose said, when they were in bed. ‘All alone, except for an Arab chef.’

‘If he is,’ Harry said.

‘Will he become a bore, a tie?’

‘Can’t hurt feelings. He’s a sensitive fellow. Does no harm to us to spend an hour or two with him.’

This was so much what Rose thought that she did not answer. Habib seemed different, away from his café and his comrades. Unshared, she could see him becoming a burden.

‘I am longing to see inside an Arab house,’ she said, ‘and to meet Fatma and the two little girls.’

Now, they were not thinking along the same lines, for Harry had doubts he did not, for her sake, like to voice.

The pattern of their days was pleasant. The weather, though fitful, improved a little, and they drove out to bathing places and stayed the day
there, alone, with a picnic lunch of bread and cheese and dates and wine. But the sun was never as hot or the sea as warm to swim in as it had been four years ago and always the wind blew steadily.

In the evenings, after dinner, they met Habib briefly at the café. Apart from him, they rarely spoke to anyone. They were running through the books they had brought.

The wind both chopped and changed, and if there were any shelter to be found, the Germans were there first, with their possessions spread about the terrace. Every morning at about seven, Rose and Harry were wakened by the two men talking outside the window, as they made sure of the
chaises-longues
for the day. There were just enough for their party, and just enough sheltering wall to the terrace. To sit on the sand was impossible. The top layer of it was always shifting in the wind.

One morning, Harry woke up at half-past six to see Rose, in her swimming suit, climbing over the balcony and jumping on to the terrace a foot or two below. She lay down on one
chaise-longue
, and put a book and a towel on the other, and waited for the consternation on the Germans’ faces.

The wind had veered round in the night, and the sea beyond the shore road had white caps far out. It looked most un-Mediterranean. More like the North Sea, Rose thought. The sun shone, but every minute or so was obscured by huge, fast-scudding clouds. ‘It will get warmer later on,’ Rose thought; but a drop of rain fell on her bare ankle, then another on her forehead. Just before the storm broke, she scrambled back over the balcony and into the bedroom where Harry was warm in bed, and laughing.

That morning the Germans did not arrive on the terrace. And once more, Rose had to postpone taking Habib’s photograph.

The rain stopped, and puddles reflected a cold, blue sky. Rose and Harry, each hiding depression from the other, went for a walk round the town. The contents of the shop windows they now knew by heart.

Habib was in the café, sitting just inside the doorway. For something to do, they joined him and ordered coffee they did not want. They listened – without any more amusement – to his tales of grandeur; his fine house and his fine cooking.

‘
Steak au poivre
,’ he said at random. ‘What about that?’

‘Not my favourite thing,’ Harry said, in a grumpy voice.

Outside the door, on the pavement, the metal chairs dripped steadily.

‘
Soufflé
Grand Marnier,’ suggested Habib, as if he were tempting Harry to eat, and Harry said, ‘I’m not really hungry.’

‘As you do not like French cooking, when you come to my house, we shall eat Tunisian.’

‘We
do
like French food,’ Rose said hastily.

He put his lips together in a funny little smile, like a self-conscious child’s. Seeing a beggar approaching, he began to rummage in his old purse, and Harry was surprised to see him drop a coin into the outstretched hand. Rather shamefacedly, he did the same. He had thought that only foreigners on their first day out gave alms, and also believed in the English principle that begging should be discouraged.

Habib was in the middle of describing his bedroom at home. Fatma had a dressing-table, he said, with pleated pink silk under a plate-glass top, and bulrushes painted on the mirror. He went into every detail.