The Lighthearted Quest (15 page)

“I know!” Julia exclaimed suddenly.

“What do you know?” asked the old lady, squatting back on her heels and wiping her perspiring face with an earthy hand.

“Won't this have been the place where they gutted the fish? Right down here near the shore, you see, and keep the pickling chamber clean. London fishmongers always clean fish in sort of sinks, with running water—you can see them in the backs of the shops.”

Mme La Besse was even more delighted with this second suggestion; she stood up to pat Julia on the shoulder, and said that she was
une fille très intelligente,
then shouted to the
foreman to come over and discuss this new idea. Presently she abandoned the foreman, and led Julia off again—“You must see
all”
she said, “and then we will have lunch.”

There was not much more to see. Out on the open space, as yet undug, between the lowest wall and the sea lay several large blocks of that pock-marked limestone, placed there till either their use or their original positions could be established; one or two had large phalluses carved in relief on the sides, definitely proving, Mme La Besse thought, that they were Phoenician in origin. Julia, her hair spectacular in the sun, and in her huge dark glasses looking like a peculiarly vacant film-star, said in her slow tones—

“Couldn't they be Mithraic, and Roman?”

The old woman cocked her head sharply at the young one.

“I thought you were so ignorant!” she said.

“Oh, well, everyone knows about Mithras now, since that place in the City was being dug up,” said Julia blithely.

“Tiens!
Yes, well, it is possible that these are Mithraic—but I think not.”

They lunched near the shed, sitting on the last fringe of the heathy slope where it fell away to the shore, and Mme La Besse showed Julia some low bushy dumps of palm-leaves which she said were the palmettes from which
crin végétal
was made. Julia was hungry, though the lunch was not very good; she made a mental note that if she was going to come to the site often she would organise the picnic food herself. However, there was a bottle of the good red Moroccan wine which helped down the rather dry sandwiches and the lump of hard Moroccan cheese.

“What impression does the site make on you?” Mme La Besse asked.

“Fascinating! And so much has been done; I suppose to begin with—well, what was there to see?”

“Nothing!—except for a few fallen pillars among the cistuses.”

“Extraordinary,” said Julia. “What fun you must have had.”

The old lady was pleased with these rather moderate tributes, and developed her theories while she masticated the withered sandwiches. The archaeological sites in England to which Geoffrey Consett had sometimes borne Julia in his little car had all been completely excavated, determined, and written up—she had not realised the part that speculation and intelligent interpretation has to play in archaeology. Now she did, and in her casual way she sympathised with her employer's problems; she was really rather moved when the old lady said—

“You like it out here? You will come often? I see that you have intuition, good ideas; you could be a great help to me in the excavation. This notion of cleaning the fish outside the walls—it is formidable!”

Julia asked nothing better than to spend as much time as possible out in this delicious place, thunderously musical with surf along the shore, sweet with wild scents—she said as much, and Mme La Besse patted her hand.

But while they lunched something else held her attention. When Mme La Besse had left the site to eat the Berber labourers also knocked off work; they went out onto the dry white sand of the upper shore and there knelt down with their faces towards Gibraltar—which also happened to be towards Mecca, more or less—and recited their midday prayers, bowing their foreheads to the ground, before they started to eat. Julia remembered what Paddy Lynch had said about a Moslem's faith, and how irreligious they considered Christians—well, there you were. If she were a Catholic she might have said the Angelus, and so might Mme La Besse.
Was
she a Catholic? Julia felt too lazy to ask—she drank another glass of wine and then, poking her head into the shade of a palmette plant, while her body relaxed in the sun, she fell into a doze.

Julia waited rather impatiently during the next few days for the promised letter from Paddy Lynch, which was to report the results of his “snooping” about Colin; she was busy with her work, she wrote away at her Casablanca article, but she had quite sufficient time to wonder why he didn't write, and to ponder uncomfortably over the episode up in the Kasbah. When at last Paddy's letter did come it was profoundly unsatisfactory.

“No go,” he wrote. “I'm frightfully sorry—I did all I could. Johnny Bingham knows nothing, I'm sure of that—so it wouldn't have been any good your using those eyes of yours on him! Tony Panoukian certainly
does
know something, I can see, but he is keeping utterly mum about it. I was very much surprised, really. Your cousin must be on some tremendously hush job, because Tony will usually tell me anything I want to know. They've got his account all right—I got that, quick like the fox, from a clerk before I tackled the high-ups.”

Julia thought Mr. Lynch's letter over carefully, sitting in her room at the Espagnola. She was thoroughly intrigued by this whole series of dead ends—a dead end at the Bank of England, two dead ends in Casablanca, that closed door (than which no end could be deader) in the Kasbah. What
could
be going on? She had said up at Glentoran, she remembered a little ruefully, that detection would be a frolic—but it wasn't really much of a frolic to be thwarted at every turn, and find out
nothing,
delicious as it was to be in Tangier in the sun among flowers, and much as she was enjoying her days out at
“l'excavation”,
searching for thresholds and floor-levels, digging herself with the trowel she had bought at Kent's Emporium, and writing up reports for the old lady.

Time was marching on, and she was getting nowhere. She remembered that Lady Tracy had also expressed a fondness for detection—from her chair; and that afternoon she chartered a taxi by the hour (Spanish-speakers can do this in Tangier) and went up to the house on the cliff.

Lady Tracy was out on the roof—which was flat and festooned with lines of washing—sitting in a deckchair and screaming jests over the low parapet at the Moorish occupants of some rather hovel-like little houses down on the slopes below. The cliffs here were, so to speak, in two tiers: first an upper cliff, then a talus of scree overgrown with grass, now full of grazing goats and those small houses dotted about; then a second vertical fall to the blue water, crashing ceaselessly against the yellow line of rocks.

“They are so
nice,”
Lady Tracy said, when Julia had greeted her and been kissed, waving a gnarled old hand over the parapet. “From here I can watch every detail of their lives: the washing, the cooking—do you see that little stove out in the garden?—milking the goats, and the hunt for eggs. I
must
remember to tell Nilüfer that her brown hen has a nest in that big clump of thistle—do you see it, under the rock? The fact is, I know almost more about them than they know themselves, from this eyrie.”

This was another pleasing facet of Lady Tracy's character, and Julia liked to think of her sitting on her roof-top, watching Moorish domestic life and enjoying long-range conversations with her friends a hundred feet below. However she was glad when presently the old lady asked—“Well, and how is your search going?”

“It isn't going at all. I wanted to ask you if your detection had produced any results, because mine hasn't.”

“Oh, I am sorry. And I am afraid I have been rather useless too. I have a nephew who goes about a lot, and often seems to know things, but unfortunately he is away just now—such a bore.”

“Yes,” said Julia, flatly. “It is, rather. You see I haven't the faintest idea what to do next. When do you expect your nephew to get back?”

“Dear child, I have no idea. One never knows, with him. He's a botanist, and goes flitting off after some flower or other like a butterfly! He knows just where to look for the rarities—which I don't suppose real butterflies care about,” said Lady Tracy, looking vague. “I expect they just want honey, don't you?”

“I suppose so,” said Julia, rather dully. She suddenly felt depressed; she had hoped a good deal from Lady Tracy's help, and now none seemed to be forthcoming.

The old lady saw her depression. She leaned over and patted Julia's hand.

“My dear child, I am
sorry
not to have helped you. I will try to bestir myself somehow, even before Hugh comes back—and in the meantime, do remember what St. Paul said about possessing one's soul in patience.
Was
it St. Paul?”

“I can't remember.”

“Tell me,” said Lady Tracy, with a sudden switch of subject—“How are you getting on with Mme Le Besse?”

“Oh, the dig is heaven,” said Julia more cheerfully, “and she's great fun.”

Lady Tracy said that the Belgian was delighted with Julia and her help. “She says that you have intuitions!” she said with a gleam of amusement.

“Oh, yes, I'm bursting with intuitions,” Julia replied gaily. “And she's nothing like as tatty as you led me to expect—not so far at least.”

“Ah, wait!” said Lady Tracy.

Julia decided to follow one of her intuitions that very evening. Since Lady Tracy had learned nothing—again Julia had failed to put the old lady in possession of
all
the facts, but she overlooked that point—the time had clearly come to ask Purcell flat out about Colin. It was too early for the bar to be
open when she got back to the Espagnola, so she filled in the time by writing a much overdue letter to Edina; that is to say, knowing her Aunt Ellen she wrote two letters: a short boring one saying that she hadn't found Colin yet but hoped to soon, and how lovely Tangier was, and she had taken a job as secretary to support herself—and another for Edina's private eye.

“Colin is evidently up to something quite extraordinary,” she wrote, “though so far I can't find out what, and nor can Paddy”—and she gave a lively version of her encounter with Mr. Panoukian. “I think he was probably
smuggling,
to begin with,” the letter went on; “the mate on the boat, a most odd bearded type called Reeder, suggested it at once—and everyone I've seen puts that up as an hypothesis, Consulate-General and all.
Mo one
sells oranges seriously, Mrs. H. was quite right about the smell of
that
rat; and out here they don't even call it orange-selling, they usually dress up as fishermen—that nonsense was just for home consumption.” Then she pursued the theme of Mr. Reeder.

“He's really quite an enigma. Madly efficient, the Captain told me; he could be at the top of his profession by now—but he sticks on in this subordinate job because he loves this run—so he says. And I couldn't place him at all. He looks
terrible,
in a ghastly old uniform and with that beard, and he is crusty and curt to a degree; but he talks like a complete gent—really rather an ultra-gent, if you follow me—and he knows all about sheep, and wintering away and first-cross lambs. It seems he was brought up in Northumberland, where they have to do much what one does in Argyll about sheep.” And she added as a P.S., in an access of leisurely mischief—

“He says anything with black hair drives him wild.”

As she walked down to post this missive in the English post office on her way to Purcell's Bar, through the calm bright evening air, and the golden light which conferred a certain beauty on even the dullest villas, Julia's depression suddenly
left her. She was beginning to feel at home in Tangier, as if she “belonged”; and she liked the place more than ever—she was no longer afraid of losing her way in the old city, and after buying one of these delicious posies from her enormous flower-woman in the Gran Socco, who greeted her with cries of pleasure, she cut down through the swarming alleys to the Socco Chico, with its thronged cafés and strolling crowd of idlers, and made her way to the quiet little street where Purcell's notice so discreetly beckoned.

She was still too early—the muslin-veiled door was locked. Julia tapped on the glass with the stem of her bouquet; in a moment it opened, and the little Moor peered out. When he saw who it was he drew the door wide to let her in, with a bow and a greeting in what he conceived to be French—Julia felt still more at home. “Monsieur Purcell?” she asked, seeing no sign of him, as she sat down at her usual table; the Moor scurried away, and in a moment Purcell himself was there behind the bar, small, neat, calm and courteous, with a smile of welcome.

“Sorry if I‘m too early, Mr. Purcell, but I wanted to talk to you,” the young woman said. “Yes, a Martini, please.”

“That will be a pleasure,” said Purcell, pouring things into a mixer. “What pretty flowers!”

“Aren't they? There's a heavenly old Berber woman up in the Gran Socco who always makes them—a giantess!”

“I know her,” said Purcell, bringing Julia's drink round the end of the bar and setting it down on the table. “She is a witch with flowers.”

“Yes, she is. Look, Mr. Purcell, sit for two minutes, till people come—I hate shrieking through space!”

Purcell sat.

“You won't drink yourself? You never do, I think?”

“No, I never do. I will have a cup of coffee, though.” He called in a low voice, and ordered coffee from the little Moor.

“Mr. Purcell,” said Julia, “did you ever know a young man
called Colin Monro, who was in and out of here for two or three years on a yacht with some other young Englishmen?”

“Yes, naturally I knew him. He was often here; they hung about for some time, as you say.”