‘I have good, kind friends,’ said Juliette, sighing.
‘You have, Juliette. But they may not be enough. There will be times when you are alone at night-’
‘I hope you are not going to suggest anything improper, Constant!’
‘At a time like this? Oh, Juliette, how could you think that! I was thinking of you. Alone in that big house. Thinking sad thoughts. You need someone there when your friends are not there. Someone to stay with you and cheer you up-’
‘Constant, you are being improper!’
‘Not at all! I protest, not at all! I was thinking’ — casting around — ‘of a woman.’
‘A woman!’ said Juliette coldly.
‘As a companion for you. At this distressing time.’
‘I hope you were not thinking of Monique.’
‘The last person I would think of!’
‘That bitch!’
‘Come, now, Juliette. Be generous. She shares your loss.’
‘She wants to share the money. He’s not left her anything, has he? That apartment-’
‘It does belong to her, Juliette. It is registered in her name.’
‘But it belongs to me! It was bought with Bossu’s money. My money!’
‘But it’s in her name, Juliette. That’s the problem.’
‘Well, you’ll just have to do something about it. Get it off her. You’re looking after my interests, Constant. My interests. Not hers. Unless — Oh, Constant! You’re not betraying me with that bitch, are you? Oh, Constant! How could you!’
‘I assure you, I assure you-’
‘Monsieur Seymour, you are not going to stand by and see a poor woman robbed?’
She turned towards him her beautiful tear-stained face.
‘Assuredly not, Madame!’ said Seymour fervently, carried away, for the moment.
‘Juliette-’ began Renaud wretchedly.
‘You cannot imagine, Monsieur,’ she said, looking up at Seymour with blue, tragic eyes, ‘what it is for a woman to lose her husband in such a way. Murdered! Killed by those fanatics!’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘ Les negres. The blacks. They hate us, you know. And they hated him. Even though he had lived in the country for all that time. Thirty years! He gave his life to this damned country. And see how they repay him!’
‘But, Juliette, we do not know-’
‘Of course we do! Who else could it have been? A spear, in the bushes? From behind? That is how they fight. And how they kill!’
Renaud, discomfited, did not, after all, stay behind and he and Seymour drove into Tangier together. As they reached the bottom of the slope and slowed down to turn into Tangier, Seymour felt the carriage tip suddenly at the rear and guessed that they had been joined.
Chapter Three
The city, when they got there, was oddly still. The streets were empty. The peanut sellers, sticky-sweet sellers and dirty postcard sellers with whom they had previously been crowded had all vanished. The beggars, who had been at least as numerous, had retired into the shade. The shops were not exactly closed — their fronts remained open to the world — but no one was in them. It was, he suddenly realized, the hour of siesta.
Renaud shook hands and departed and Seymour, with nothing to do until five o’clock, when he was seeing Macfarlane, went back to his hotel.
That, too, was deserted. He had half hoped to see the receptionist again and was slightly disappointed when he didn’t. She was still probably doubling up as a journalist at the Tent.
The coolness of the hotel, though, was welcome after the heat outside and he climbed up the marble stairs to his room and lay on the bed. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep — he never could during the day — but he felt a need to sort out the jumble of impressions which had crowded in on him in the short forty-eight hours that he had been in Tangier: the variety of peoples — Arab, Berber, French, Jewish, Negroes (from the Sudan? or West Africa?); the exotic, besieging smells of spices and sand and fresh leather and sandalwood — even the bales of cloth in the tailor’s shop had smelt differently from the way they would have done in England; the different perfumes of the women, light, intoxicating in the case of the Frenchwomen, heavy, sensuous in the case of the Moroccans; the bright colours of the long gowns, pink and salmon and hectic green and blue, alongside the blackness of the veiled women, the sounds, the braying of donkeys, the thin wailing of flutes, the distant beating of drums, the babble and chatter of the streets.
Above all, the words. Seymour had an unusually acute ear for language and now he was quite dazed. All morning he had been speaking French. That was all right, he spoke it well; but the suddenness and totality of his immersion in it was rather disorienting.
And then the odd mixture of French and Arabic! The shopkeepers, the people you heard talking as they passed you in the streets — they all spoke French. Even Mustapha and Idris habitually spoke French. But the poorer people, the workmen, the men sweeping up the donkey dung, spoke Arabic. Seymour spoke some Arabic, he had picked it up in Istanbul, but that was a different Arabic from this. Yet he felt its undertone beneath the French, continuously there in the background.
The words continued to dance in his mind now, both Arabic and French, all jumbled together, as he lay there on his bed, watching the ripples of sunlight playing on the ceiling, reflected somehow from the bay, the words, but also the things, all mixed up: the French soldiers wearing Bedouin headdresses, the shopkeepers, with their polite, cultivated French, but sitting on the counters. Everything all jumbled up, all mixed. France and Africa.
Macfarlane came punctually at five. There were some people he should see ‘in order to clear things’. First, as etiquette demanded, the People of the Parasol.
‘You know about the Royal Parasol? No? Well, whenever the Sultan goes out, a slave goes with him holding the Royal Parasol over his head. It is a splendid affair, all blue and green and glittering, like a peacock’s tail. Everything beneath it is, as it were, in the shade conferred by the Sultan. And so a saying has grown up: “Under the Parasol.” What is under the Sultan’s protection. Meaning Morocco. No longer, I’m afraid.’
They were going, he said, to see the Vizier for the Interior, Suleiman Fazi.
‘There are several Viziers: for Foreign Affairs, Trade, War — you remember Sheikh Musa? He was Vizier for War until he resigned in protest over the Sultan’s agreement to the French establishing a Protectorate. The Viziers are like Ministers and they have that standing. Together they form the Mahzen, the Sultan’s Government.’
Suleiman Fazi offered them mint tea — mint tea, Seymour soon learned, was the staple of Moroccan social life — which was served at a low table in the ante-room to his office. He seemed in no hurry to turn to business and Macfarlane was too experienced in Moroccan ways to attempt to press him. For some time the conversation was confined to inquiries about their respective families.
‘And how is Awad?’ asked Macfarlane. ‘He must have finished his law studies now.’
‘He has, yes.’
‘Satisfactorily, I hope?’
‘Oh, yes. No worries on that score. He’s a bright lad.’
‘And what is he going to do now?’
‘That, alas, remains to be seen.’
‘Something in the Mahzen?’
‘He’s not keen.’
Macfarlane looked surprised.
‘I would have thought, with his advantages-’
‘Oh, something could be found. Has, indeed, been offered. But — he is thinking of working elsewhere.’
‘Elsewhere?’
‘In another country.’
Suleiman Fazi looked unhappy.
‘Morocco, of course, is not as it was,’ he said quietly. ‘The Sultan keeps his Parasol, but nothing under it remains the same.’
‘And Awad doesn’t like that? He’s not happy about the Protectorate?’
‘He is thinking of leaving.’
‘Of leaving Morocco? But where would he go to?’