Stewart, Angus (37 page)

'Simon, you can go back. I mean, surely . . .' Jay didn't know what he offered. Instead there came to him the memory of his sitting on a pavement in Tangier looking at the pompous
Palais de Justice
,
wondering irrationally whether he should march in and ask, 'Does anyone accuse me?' Angrily he shook his head. It cleared only partially.

'Lies, flat lies when I told you my impotence was due to guilt set off by my friend's bastardy,' Brown was saying. 'Nothing's ever as simple as that . . . Guilt is elemental as sex is complicated. Richard Rumbold was right.' For some reason he looked nervously towards the unheeding Caroline as he said this. 'One's trying to reconstruct something unfulfilled . . . A retrospective jealousy . . . And the temporary impotence . . . the temporary impotence because I'd confused my unconscious with speculation—samsara! . . . Enjoy sex as
the
splendid irrational.' Brown's chest was heaving violently. 'Then Jean Delay was right on Gide . . . Association of self with cripples. You See . . . your girl was crippled where I was free . . . so terribly free where I was crippled . . .'

Quietly, Brown was unconscious.

No muscle moved in Achmed's child-like face. Then, undramatically, he spat on Simon Brown's sleeping eyes. The Land Rover roared onward at seventy. Jay found his own eyes and mind mesmerised. But he was staring fixedly at the back of Caroline, who was relaxed, yet somehow infinitely alert.

Jay searched in vain for a water bottle, before he remembered. 'And I spit on you,' he swore simply at Achmed in Moghreb. His lower lip split.

Brown was conscious again. 'A . . . a man was killed back there, wasn't he?' he asked uncertainly, his eyes on Jay's bloody lip.

'Yes'

There was silence for some time.

'Scotch?' Jay offered his bottle to Achmed with gentle irony.

Achmed didn't look at him. Jay reached protestingly for the bottle, but Brown's hand woe already limp.

'I think he's simply asleep now,' Jay said to Caroline.

  *  *  *  *  *

Exhaustion was physical pain. It was only eleven at night when they reached Marrakesh. Yet the day had begun at five. And it had been an unusual one.

Achmed spoke only once. He stopped the Land Rover where there were lights and the sound of people. Incredibly it had been raining here. The streets were glistening.

'At least take money, Fus,' Jay said.

Achmed accepted it, as he climbed down from the Land Rover into the city he had never seen before. Meticulously he folded the notes, which were nine-tenths of all Jay had. Very carefully he tore them into small pieces, which he scattered over the wet road before walking away.

  *  *  *  *  *

'Hurry, or I'll miss the 'plane,' Caroline said.

A recovered Brown drove. She sat beside him. Alone in the back of the Land Rover, hissing now over tarmac, Jay cast about among Lom's abandoned possessions, searching only for
distraction. He found the little strip of contact prints that represented themselves, and which Lom must have made by the Atlas stream. They had become more than dry.

At the airport Caroline gave Jay a huge wad of bank notes. Perhaps she guessed how much he had given away. He shrugged, folded them carefully, and stowed them in his pocket.

'Station,' he said to Brown.

Brown protested agitatedly. 'But won't you drive back—
leisurely
with me?'

'Station,' Jay repeated. 'But there's one other thing. Suppose I take the story—high up somehow, to Rabat. After all, they don't like communists any more than your bosses. It's something I'll have to think about. But if I
can
stay I'm going to want a flat. I've been looking for one all week. If you're off what's the rent of yours?'

'About ten shillings a month?' Brown was hesitant.

'That's about right, yes,' Jay said.

They pulled in at the station. Rain was falling again: not the sweeping downpour of Tangier, but a drizzle that might have been England.

Brown said, 'I will
try
. . .
about the girl. You won't really take Nashib away? Or—what's it called—
cite
Manolo?'

'No.' Jay felt weary. 'And I won't really take Nashib away.' He found he'd unthinkingly produced Lom's prints. 'They're us,' he said. 'Only horribly candid. They need captions' He considered the photographs a moment before handing them to Brown. 'I don't know about you and that super-girl. I'll call mine
Gargoyle for a Mosque
!'

'Goodbye, then,' Brown said, as Jay closed the door of a vehicle he wanted never to see again.

' 'Bye,' Jay called back.

A lot of others seemed to have chosen to spend that night in the gloom of Marrakesh railway station, with the improbable rain falling finely outside. Jay ate and drank something. He had no idea what. His memory searched through sleeplessness. What men, what death of all things, could have so frightened Harold Lom that he had wept? The answer could not elude him for ever.

He tried now to picture Naima. It was when he began to think of Achmed that sleep came finally to cover
his helplessness.