‘It is just that I have been listening to the conversation,’ said Seymour.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Ricardo, ‘you have a good ear. And now, perhaps, that you have been here for a while, you are beginning to tell the difference between Catalan and Spanish.’
‘The fishermen are all Catalan?’
‘Mostly.’
Seymour picked a shrimp out of the pot.
‘Was Ramon Mas a Catalan?’ he asked.
‘Andalusian, I think.’
‘But definitely not Catalan?’
‘Definitely not,’ said Ricardo. He signalled to the waiter and he put a bottle on the table. It was the local wine, strong, rough, and with a bit of a tang.
‘Why are you interested in Ramon?’ he asked.
‘I was wondering if Lockhart was interested in Ramon,’ said Seymour.
‘Not very,’ said Ricardo.
‘Someone told me he gave money to Ramon’s family.’
‘Did he?’ said Ricardo. ‘Or was it the police?’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps it was Lockhart. He was always a generous man.’
‘Tender heart?’ suggested Seymour.
‘Why, yes,’ said Ricardo. ‘A tender heart.’
‘Too soft,’ said Seymour, ‘to bear grudges?’
The waiter had brought a basket of coarse, thick, brown bread. Ricardo took one of the pieces and dipped it into the juice at the bottom of the pot.
‘It was not so much that,’ he said. ‘These people can’t afford to bear grudges. They are very poor. So poor that they have no choice other than to be realistic. If they see their livelihood threatened, they have to take action.’
‘Ye-es,’ said Seymour, ‘I see that. But Ramon was poor, too.’
‘Desperately,’ agreed Ricardo. ‘But he thought he saw a short-cut, you see.’
‘Was it that?’ said Seymour. ‘Or was it that he did not entirely share everyone else’s belief in what they were doing?’
‘That is possible,’ conceded Ricardo.
‘He being an Andalusian,’ said Seymour, ‘not a Catalan?’
‘It is possible.’
‘What,’ said Seymour, ‘was it that they were smuggling?’
‘Smuggling?’ said Ricardo.
‘A traditional pursuit along the coast,’ said Seymour, ‘and not one which, I would have thought, Ramon would ordinarily have objected to.’
He waited.
‘Probably not,’ said Ricardo.
‘Nor Lockhart either,’ said Seymour. ‘But, then, I can’t see why Lockhart would have been interested in smuggling, anyway. A bit small beer for him. Unless, for him, it wasn’t entirely to do with profit.’
‘For them, too,’ said Ricardo. ‘They may be poor, but it wasn’t just money. They are proud people. They have beliefs and ideals and values, too.’
‘Arms?’ said Seymour. ‘For the Catalans?’
Ricardo hesitated.
‘Was he selling them to you?’
‘No,’ said Ricardo. ‘It wasn’t like that. We went to him because we knew he could arrange it. With all his contacts.
‘Along the coast,’ said Seymour. ‘And in the military?’
‘Not so much the military,’ said Ricardo, ‘as with their suppliers.’
‘Of course. And with his sympathy for the Catalans.’
‘We paid for the arms,’ said Ricardo, ‘we didn’t pay him. He did it because…’ He shrugged. ‘Well, because he felt the way these poor, brave men do.’
Chantale tied a scarf around her hair and went down alone, without Seymour, to the little market beyond the soot-blackened church. It was an Arab market, of course, and she felt quite at home. She studied the fat tomatoes and squeezed the luminous aubergines and gazed long at the melons. There, too, she talked to the veiled shoppers in their long, dark burkas and compared notes. And she talked to the stall-holders and asked them about the provenance of their products. Were they local or had they come from ‘the other side’, from Algeria or Morocco?
Or Tangier, even? She herself came from Tangier. But she and her husband were thinking about moving over to ‘this side’. Was there scope here for a small fruit business? She had heard that it was hard but that in the long run you could do well. ‘That might be so,’ said the stall-holder she was talking to, but he had been here for six years and found that the run was longer than he had hoped.
‘It is like,’ he said, ‘a bird on a cliff. It can find a niche to build its nest and lay its eggs. But there is not much room on the ledge and the fledglings still have to go somewhere else to fly.’
‘There is not much money here,’ said the woman beside her, ‘even for the Spaniards.’
‘More than there is in Morocco, though,’ said another woman close by.
Chantale nodded.
‘So they say,’ she said.
‘But I haven’t found it yet,’ said the stall-keeper. ‘The Spaniards buy from their own.’
‘And keep to themselves,’ said the woman beside Chantale.
‘You find that?’ said Chantale. ‘We were told that it would not be like that.’
‘Depends what you’re selling,’ said the stall-holder, ‘and where you are.’
‘We were told there was a businessman here who might be able to help us,’ said Chantale. ‘An Englishman, not a Spaniard. His name is Lockhart.’
‘His name was Lockhart,’ corrected the stall-holder. ‘He’s dead now.’
‘Dead?’ said Chantale, as if shocked.
‘He might have helped you. He helped a lot of people.’
‘Arabs?’ said Chantale.
‘Arabs, too.’
‘Even Arabs,’ said the women beside them bitterly.
‘That may have been his undoing,’ said the stall-holder. ‘They say he went too far.’
‘In helping the Arabs?’
‘People here didn’t like it. And, you see, he wasn’t a Spaniard himself. He was an Englishman. And they said, “What is he doing here? Always with the Arabs. But making money from the Spanish.” ’
‘He was married to a woman from Algiers. She came from a big family there. They traded all along the coast. People say they were the ones who gave Lockhart his start.’
‘Certainly he was close to them,’ said the stall-holder.
‘Until they fell out,’ said the woman.
‘Fell out?’ said Chantale.
‘When they heard he was playing around. With other women.’
‘They sent someone over. A brother, I think.’
‘But then it all got sorted out.’
‘They say his wife forgave him,’ said the stall-holder. ‘It’s best like that.’
‘I don’t know,’ objected the woman. ‘It’s always the woman who forgives.’
Chantale was thinking about this as she walked back to the hotel. And then her mind moved on to the difficulty of carving out a new life in a new country. She was thinking about herself, of course, and about Seymour. She was always thinking of that these days. But today she was thinking less about herself and more about Seymour. Suppose, instead of her moving to England, he moved to Morocco? That would get rid of the difficulties, wouldn’t it? At least from her point of view. She would have no hesitation about marrying him then. And he would manage all right in another country. She had seen him. He was at ease in Spain, as he had been at ease in Tangier. His own family had moved to England. His roots were not that deep in England.
But then, what would he do? She had asked herself that question before. He would have to find a job. What as? A policeman again? Not a chance. Neither the Moroccans nor the French, who now called the tune in Morocco, would have it. He would have to do something else. Set up a business, perhaps, as these people she had just been talking to had done. But what sort of business? She smiled. A fruit shop, perhaps? She couldn’t see it. Either for him or for her.
The Arab men were still lounging at the corner. They looked at her as she went past. They looked at her with hot eyes and sullen faces. They made her feel uncomfortable and she hurried on past them and back up past the scorched church and out into the open, leafy space of Las Ramblas. There she felt better.
She met Seymour and they went back to the hotel together. Two women were talking in the foyer. One of them was the proprietress of the hotel, whose grim visage had daunted Seymour’s hopes of the double room. She was always dressed in black. When she went out to the church, which she was always doing, two or three times a day, she covered her head and shoulders with a black shawl. He had never seen her smile.