The Forgiven (18 page)

He observed everything more attentively throughout the house, and there came a weekend when Roger had to go back to England to attend to his business affairs. They told him merrily at breakfast, and Roger leaned over and said to him, very seriously, that he would have to “look after” Angela while he was away, and when he returned, they would talk about his plan to go to Paris. Maybe they could help.

“Thank you,” Driss said, with tears in his eyes, because he felt he had been very patient with his issue and that finally his patience had received some recognition. He had tended that garden faithfully every day for four months.

“Though, I must say,” Roger went on, “I cannot see how we could ever find anyone to replace you. You have saved our business.”

What he had meant when he referred to Paris was putting Driss’s papers in order. But Driss had not understood this at all. Driss thought, “He’ll buy me a train ticket to Paris!” If Roger did this, however, it would only solve a quarter of his problems.

“So did he buy the ticket?” Ismael asked.

“It would not have mattered. I needed more money than that. This is the way life is.”

Twelve

WO BOYS IN
TARBOUCHES
STOOD ON EITHER SIDE OF
Richard with incongruous glasses of minted iced lemonade, lit like Egyptian statues in the heightened light created by the gate lamps, which had all been turned on as if to expose any possible subterfuge. It was a curious parting gesture on the part of an embarrassed host who took his duties seriously. A gesture of inadequate regret. A third boy carried David’s two bags. The wind picked up now, scattering dust over all present. The Englishman looked once again like a kid being packed off to some distant, unpleasant boarding school from which he might not return entirely intact. Jo, Richard thought, looked surprisingly energetic.

“We’re giving you a sleeping bag, too,” he said in a chatty way as David and Jo drank their lemonades. “Stone floors and all that.”

“Sleeping bag?”

The look of horror on David’s face was more than comical.

“They might not have a bed out there. They don’t always sleep on beds.”

“What?”

Richard laughed and clapped his arm.

“Don’t look so terrified. It’s like camping. It’ll do your spine good.”

“My spine’s perfectly fine.”

A final gloom came over David’s face and he gritted his teeth in a very demonstrative way, so that everyone knew he was gritting them and why. Jo took his hand, then swung herself against him and gave him a long kiss. As if slighted by this show of affection, the Aït Kebbash turned away toward their battered vehicle, and this was the sign that the discussions and delays were over and that it was time to attend to more serious things. A body must be buried with all haste, and every delay is a breach of contract with the holy texts. A kiss is nothing, marital affection a gust of wind.

On one side of the jeep David now saw that there was a crude yellow painting of a trilobite. The floor was littered with prepping tools and rolls of old newspapers. A tall man wearing a lime-green sweater in the suffocating heat came up quickly to open the front passenger door for him, skipping around him with a spurt of agility. David watched his hand yank open the door; it was practically black, the nails clogged with oil. The Aït Kebbash uttered some curt farewells and piled into the car with the force of a rugby scrum, squeezing themselves into the available spaces with a few ominously angry words. Jo and Richard came to the window, which was broken but half down. The servants were already filing back inside, and the disco music had grown louder, booming against the silence of the desert. One by one, the mental strings that bound David to the knowable world began to snap apart, and he drifted away, gripping the window glass and frowning.

“Look after her, Dicky.”

“I expect one of them will give you a ride back afterward,” Richard said affably, putting his arm around Jo and pulling her a little toward him. “If not, call us on your cell and we’ll figure something out.”

“Will it work out there?”

“Of course it will. We use ours all the time.”

It was the father who got in to drive. He didn’t care that the
gaouri
were talking among themselves: he started the engine with a gruff motion.

“Call as often as you can anyway,” Jo pleaded.

There was still a trace of orange flare in the eastern sky as the car began to roll down to the long road that connected Tafnet to the main highway to Errachidia. The owner of Azna and a few others watched it approach the first bend, its taillights flickering on and off, and it was only there that its headlight came on and the prickly pears appeared on the edges of the cliffs. “Poor sod,” Richard thought, and then he said it, only louder than he had thought it.

“Poor sod. It’ll be a difficult couple of days. I somehow suspect that David has never slept on a stone floor before.”

“Never,” Jo said.

“It’ll be a learning experience. Shall we go in and get a drink? We’ll call him in a couple of hours and make sure they haven’t raped him. No, darling, I’m just kidding. He was looking rather cute with those bags, though. Like a Boy Scout on his way to Auschwitz.”

“David is
anything
but a Boy Scout.”

SHE COULDN
’
T HELP SMILING AT THIS REMARK, AND THE
distortion of her face lasted all the way to the first of the open-air bars that had been set up around the dance floor, where the glare of the metal palm trees and the sudden onset of loud music drowned out her misery, but also her natural cautiousness and reserve. Richard’s chirpiness, his jauntiness, reassured her because one was never jaunty
when things were serious, or when people might get hurt. And Richard knew the desert far better than either she or David. She relaxed much more quickly than she might have thought possible, and as they threaded their way into the crowd, and Richard slickly procured her a double gin and tonic with a sliver of shaved cucumber, she let herself give in at last to the spirit of a long, confused party. He thrust the cold glass between her hands and gave her a quick asexual hug, a kiss on the side of her face.

“Come on, bunny. Relax. I am
not
going to let you mope in your room popping pills. Why don’t you meet some people? We invite only the best people, you know. Some of them are quite amusing.”

“I must look like shit.”

“It’s a hundred degrees at nine o’clock. Everyone looks like shit, my darling. And besides, you don’t look like shit at all.
Tout au contraire
. You look splendiferous.”

“I usually don’t drink things as big as this, Richard.”

She looked down at the enormous gin and tonic with its curl of cucumber, and he raised her hands so that the brim of the glass touched her lower lip.

“Doctor’s orders. Drink it all down. It’s mostly ice anyway. It’ll just make you cold.”

His eyes went piggy and funny and she couldn’t help it—she laughed and did as she was told. The ice cubes slammed against her lips as the incredibly strong dose of gin slipped inside her. “Trojan horse,” she thought for some reason, and then leaned back on her heels, felt the sweat emerging on her neck, and watched the mass of dancing bodies.

The whole area was dark apart from the strings of lights shaped like rose hips that swathed the metal trees. The outdoor bar was covered with thick white linen, with the staff done up as corsairs with toy swords, and among the guests, she noticed great balloon-shaped turbans, naked chests and eye patches, wigs and knee-high boots. The music had switched to Sly and the Family Stone, and inside the thicket
of limbs she spotted the American, Day, dancing with a very pretty girl.

Richard stood by her until he was sure she was drinking heartily.

“You can dance,” he said quietly. “It’s not a crime. David’s all right. As we speak, he’s probably having a joint with the Aït Kebbash. They’re enormous potheads, you know. Incorrigible. He’ll be stoned the whole time.”

She said nothing, speaking instead to herself.

“I think I’ll wait till I calm down. Maybe another drink or two.”

“Look, there’s Lord Swann. He came on a helicopter last night that landed at Rich. No, luvvy, that’s a town in these parts, believe it or not. It’s been called Rich for centuries. Perhaps it means
poor
in Berber.”

And there was the lord, who looked like a seventy-year-old plumber, turning on his heels to something funkadelic. Richard clapped his hands, delighted.

“He always shows up for the girls. He has an incredible collection of Sahara fossil aquifers at home. He’ll probably tell you about them when he chats you up later on.”

“I never know what to say to lords. I feel like they’ve run out of things to say.”

“But let’s not hate on them. I find them very tolerant. They are potheads, too, like the Aït Kebbash. I’ve always been meaning to introduce these two groups. I have a feeling they’d get on.”

It seemed like an hour later that she was wandering through the brightly lit house, where the carved wooden screen smelled of patchouli oil and the floors exuded a warm, earthy scent of pine needles. It was, in the end, a house that imposed itself as a personality in its own right, a character with history and emotions, and the stairwells breathed like lungs, with soft, momentary breezes that came and went without noise, with a shuffle of tassels and curtain hems. She found a quiet corner where some antique lances hung on a wall and flipped open her cell phone. The steel blades shone above her and her nostrils
filled with a scent of damp but exotic domesticity. Smoked tea and varnish and carpet dust. She dialed David’s number and heard it ring: a small miracle. She waited impatiently, the phone pressed too tight to her ear, but he didn’t pick up. It was possible, of course, that he had moved out of their reception area, just as it was possible that he would soon move back into it. Richard had warned her there was spotty coverage in the desert. But the futility of the call depressed her. Perhaps he
was
smoking a joint in the car. Finally she gave up and pocketed the phone. She was a little tipsy as she tottered through the galleries and halls, her hands held out to grip things and steady herself. She slipped through a maze of lustrous objects whose specificity she couldn’t quite determine, because she wasn’t paying attention and she didn’t care where she was. There was a large, colorful bird in a cage hanging by a piano, its claws wrapped around a brass swing, and brass lanterns with green glass suspended above her from chains, and pieces of antique weaponry, and skin lamps pierced with hundred-year-old multicolored glass. She walked through the rooms as if she were blind, letting the gin carry her. When she heard voices, she backed away, seeking more pools of isolation.

She was sitting alone on one of the Raj horsehairs in the library when Hamid came to look for her. It was about an hour before midnight, and for some reason the dozen caged birds scattered throughout the house had started singing in five different mutually exclusive keys. She looked up to see Hamid in a cherry sash peering down at her with a cup of coffee in one hand, a spoon balanced on the saucer with a square of wrapped chocolate, as in a restaurant. “Monsieur Richard,” he said, “thought you might want this.” The fire-eaters of Taza were about to perform, and he wanted her to come outside and enjoy it. A coffee would revive her.

“How did he know I was in here?” she asked incredulously.

“Monsieur Richard knows everything, Madame.”

She took the cup and placed it on the arm of the sofa.

“I will wait to take you outside, Madame.”

She really wished he wouldn’t, but now that he had his orders, it would be pointless to try to talk him out of it. She gulped down the coffee and then the sliver of chocolate. The molten black eyes took her in easily. She was shaking very slightly. David didn’t call; the unknown had swallowed him up, and it might as well swallow her up as well. But for her, the unknown was just a rich man’s party.

Hamid seemed to be putting her under surveillance. She stood up when her cup was emptied and asked him to lead the way. He always bowed when asked to do something, but his bows were never entirely compliant. They were reminders that he knew the score and you didn’t.