‘You reckon? You know, colleague, I think they’re the sort of people who would drop you in a flash if they thought it necessary. Despite everything you’ve done for them.’
‘I have done nothing-’
‘Oh? Well, let’s start with Bossu. He was the man behind the raid on the hotel, wasn’t he? And you were helping him, as you had always helped him. I suppose you were the first to find out that Chantale and her mother had bought the hotel and told him. And then he asked you to arrange a welcome party. Or perhaps he arranged it and merely asked you to tip off Ali Khadr when the time was ripe.’
‘You cannot prove this-’
‘No? Let us go on. With your knowledge of Bossu, Monsieur Renaud, perhaps you can tell me why his animosity towards the de Lissac family was such that he pursued Chantale and her mother, even after Captain de Lissac was dead? No? Well, let me tell you.
‘I take it that you know about the passion that Bossu had originally felt for Marie de Lissac. And about how he had asked her to marry him. And been turned down. And then turned down again when he had pursued her to Algiers. I don’t think he ever forgave that turning down. He was a man who always liked to win. And didn’t like losing. Certainly not to de Lissac.
‘It must have been a huge shock to him when de Lissac turned up in Casablanca. Especially when he began making himself a nuisance. But you were there, Monsieur Renaud, and would know. Would know, too, about how he then began to work systematically for de Lissac’s destruction. A popular pursuit in Casablanca at the time, and he soon had plenty of people egging him on. Was that when you first made their acquaintance, cher collegue, and began to have an eye for their interests? Such an eye that it led to you becoming Chief of Police in Tangier?
‘Well, there are other questions. Was it their interests that Bossu was following when he began taking money down to Moulay Hafiz and his supporters in the interior of Morocco? Opening up the interior. Building the railway line which would make possible the development of all that part of the country. Perhaps you don’t know much about all that. That was Bossu’s job, not yours.
‘But there is one thing that you do know about and perhaps you can help me on. You see, I know that you know about it. Because Juliette Bossu obligingly blurted it out. It is to do with the death of Chantale’s father, that long-standing enemy, as he saw it, of Bossu. Bossu persuaded him to drive a truck down to the south. A truck loaded with explosives to Moulay Hafiz. And on the way the truck exploded and Captain de Lissac was killed.’
‘An accident,’ muttered Monsieur Renaud.
‘Ah, no.’
‘It was investigated.’
‘By you?’
‘No, by — by the authorities.’
‘The authorities? Down there?’
He waited.
‘Does that mean Moulay Hafiz? Come on, Renaud, this is something I want to know.’
‘It — it may have been. But — but there were others… Captain de Grassac… An independent…’
‘Not a policeman, though, Renaud. Not a detective. Like you and me. I have investigated it, too. And I have found out things that Captain de Grassac didn’t. Including that it was not an accident.’
‘I–I don’t know anything about it. Bossu handled it. Entirely, I mean. He didn’t tell me anything. It is not the sort of thing that I would-’
‘No, you wouldn’t, Renaud. You’d leave that to others.’
When Seymour went into the hotel Chantale raised her head from her writing and said:
‘Are you doing anything this evening? My mother wonders if you would care to join us for the evening meal. It is, of course, a special one, for it marks the end of Ramadan.’
Seymour said he would be delighted, and at about nine went down to reception, where he found the desk occupied by a polite young man whom he had not seen before. He rose from the desk, tapped softly on the door which led to the family’s private quarters, and showed Seymour through.
Chantale came forward to greet him and led him out on to a small verandah where there was a low table spread for dinner with a white tablecloth. Around it were several large leather cushions. Chantale sat on one and invited him to sit next to her. Her mother appeared shortly after with a tray on which there were several small bowls, which she put on the table. They contained olives of various kinds, nuts and the usual salted cakes. She sat down opposite them.
Seymour had, of course, met her before but then it had been in the business part of the hotel, at reception. Now, in the soft darkness, she seemed completely different, her face more Arab, her eyes larger and darker, more Moroccan. She had partly uncovered her hair. In the hotel it had always been bound up in a kerchief. Now she had let it fall. It was dark and abundant and hung over her shoulders. Seymour sensed that this was significant. He knew that in Morocco a woman’s hair was normally something to be strictly concealed. Was this a gesture of independence, an assertion of difference, a suggestion of other affiliations beside the Moroccan one? Looking at her now he could see how attractive she must have been once, how she could have drawn such men as de Lissac and Bossu. And also how strikingly her daughter resembled her.
There was a difference in the way they sat. The mother sat straight-backed, graceful but firm and unyielding. Chantale reclined rather than sat. It was again very graceful, very easy, very naturaclass="underline" but it was not the way any Englishwoman would have sat. Seymour knew he shouldn’t be looking at her too much: but he was just about knocked out.
Initially Chantale’s mother did not speak much, leaving the conversation to her daughter and Seymour, but gradually she let herself be drawn in.
He asked her how she liked running a hotel. She said that at first she had found it difficult because when her husband had died she had withdrawn into herself and then when they had moved into the hotel she had had to force herself out again. The publicness of hotel life had shocked her and the constant need to assert herself. However, now she rather enjoyed it. It gave her a chance to meet people, different people from those she would usually have met, men especially, hommes civilises, civilized men — a chance, she said, with a flash of her daughter’s rebelliousness, that Moroccan women did not usually get!
Seymour said that he imagined that was particularly important for Chantale. Madame de Lissac agreed that it was and said that she was very grateful to those who had made it possible. And yet…
She hesitated.
And yet it was equally important that Chantale did not allow herself to be cut off from ‘the other side’ because that was her inheritance, too. That was what she had had in mind in bringing Chantale back here. She had grown up in the quarter and people remembered her from when she was a child. That made it easier for them to accept her. Even though, of course, she would always be different.
‘You make me sound a freak,’ said Chantale.
‘Not a freak,’ said Chantale’s mother. ‘Just different. And you will have to live with that.’
‘I manage very well,’ said Chantale.
‘Yes, but what happens when you grow up?’
‘Mother! I am grown up.’
‘And need to find a husband?’
‘Mother!’ said Chantale, and got up hastily from the table, and took the bowls inside.
When her husband had died, she had said. Did she know how he had died, wondered Seymour? Did Chantale?
Seymour said that he could understand at least some of the difficulties, perhaps better than they might think. He told them about his own family: about the Polish grandfather who had served in the Tsarist army and been forced to leave Russia in a hurry because of his radical activities; about his grandfather on his mother’s side, who had died in an Austro-Hungarian prison — also for unwise political activity; about the mother from Vojvodina, and the father who had grown up in England and wanted none of this sort of thing, only to be a boring, unrevolutionary Englishman ‘Were they all revolutionaries?’ asked Chantale, who had returned with some bowls of hot, spicy soup.