On the other hand, comparing her appearance with what she had looked like when she had first joined the group in the cage, weeks ago—why, it had been the morning the hijacked jet had landed—she had lost some of her gloss. Her coat was less shiny and her air less detached. She had the scuffed, used look of the other chimps, though she was still set apart. Thus must the emigré aristos in Boston have looked, cobbling and laundering for a living but still set apart from those who had never known Versailles. Even so, Sparrow and Co were making an ape of her. Morris could not regard it as a change for the better. He watched the riot with gloom.
This feeling was little alleviated by the arrival of bin Zair, after a shout from Gaur and an answer from Dyal. The Prime Minister came strutting along the black-and-white tiles with a wad of tattered documents under his arms, and though it was a relief not to have to watch him crawl, Morris could only see his arrival as a further knot in the tangled noon. It was to get away from encounters such as this, dammit, that he had come to Q’Kut at all. That and the money.
Bin Zair thrust his wad of papers at Morris without explanation. It looked like a file on financial matters, but it had been clearly dropped and regathered without sorting.
“His Majesty is where?” asked bin Zair, with no formal greetings at all.
“In my office, alone, with the Frankish woman.”
Morris had seen Arabs express emotion before, but he had never actually seen a beard torn. Now it happened—at least when bin Zair finished his frenzied wrenching several strands of grey hair came away in his fingers.
“What is this?” said Morris, tapping the file.
“Yes, that is urgent also. It is the accounts for the animals before you came. This year his majesty has demanded a budget, with comparative tables of previous expenditure. He has ordered it by next week! My clerks will do the additions, but the file is disordered and I cannot trust them to know what is relevant. Allah! Allah! That he should be wantoning at such a time!”
Allah was mighty that day. At least, at the sound of his name the office door clicked. Morris switched the camera on and moved hurriedly down the corridor to the corner. The flood of anger hit him like a beam of light. Their faces were set. The Sultan’s eyes were cold as stones, and Anne, though flushed and dishevelled, did not now look like a prince’s plaything but more like she had done that first day on the aeroplane wing. Whatever they had borrowed the office for, it hadn’t been a bit of idyll. Both of them looked at Morris as though he had been caught peeping through the keyhole.
“Bin Zair is here,” he muttered. “He’s in a considerable flap.”
“Who would be a monarch?” said the Sultan. “My dear, you had better not let him see you in that rig. He has high standards.”
“Oh, God!” snapped Anne.
“He’s in the top gallery, is he Morris? Well you’d better go along the lower one, my dear. Go straight to the women’s quarters. That’s an order. I’ll come and see you there.”
She opened her mouth but said nothing, then swung away and strode down the short passage with the red cloak streaming behind her. She was moving so rapidly that it seemed to stay in sight long after she herself had vanished round the corner. Morris turned into his office but he had hardly laid the papers on his desk when he heard the Sultan call. He went out into the corner to find bin Zair and the Sultan standing at the top of the steps into the upper gallery.
“Come here a moment, will you, old boy?” said the Sultan. But when Morris reached the top step it was bin Zair who spoke, in a low voice, in Arabic.
“Lord Morris,” he said, “will you go softly to the doors and there tell the young slave who guards them that he is to let no man enter, for any reason. You speak his tongue and can make your meaning clear.”
“Dyal could do it,” said the Sultan. “Morris is not a messenger boy.”
Bin Zair raised his head to the ceiling, as if in prayer. In fact for the moment he looked like a model for St Anthony at the height of his temptations.
“It’s all right—I’ll go,” said Morris.
Round the corner, in the upper gallery, he found Dyal leaning by the observation window, still watching the chimps with large affability. Morris nodded to him and hurried on, to find Gaur in a markedly contrasting state. The young man was just outside the main doors, posed like a sentry but groaning aloud, and with a face so contorted with grief and passion that even the two deaf-and-dumb eunuchs had stopped their touching-game and were looking at him pop-eyed. Morris gave his message quickly and hurried away. He had no desire to witness the fresh outpourings of torment that would probably begin when Anne, going the long way round, reached the lobby. Thank heavens I’ve missed out on all that, he thought, almost scampering past the point where the Sultan, bin Zair and Dyal were already involved in what seemed to be a council of state. Little bin Zair was talking in a low, urgent voice, while the two large men looked down at him in silence. As Morris came into earshot bin Zair stopped speaking, but began again as soon as he had rounded the corner into the short passage that led down to the office. Morris was so anxious not to overhear anything, not to become involved, that he almost fell down the flight of steps.
Deliberately he opened and closed the door with a rattle and a bang, and scuttered to his desk, reaching for the pile of papers bin Zair had brought. He was already reading the top one when a splash of unfamiliar scarlet caught the edge of his vision.
“I hope I’m not in your way,” said Anne, meekly.
“Good God! You’re mad!”
“In one sense, yes. But he’s mad all along the line.”
“You must go. Really. Please. He might . . .”
“OK, OK.”
“And quietly. He’s only just up there round the corner. You’ll just have to hope no one’s looking through the window into the chimp-cage.”
“So long. Thanks for everything.”
She slipped out. As the door opened and closed the deep note of Dyal’s voice reached down to him. Very uneasily he settled to the papers, not even looking up when the Sultan came down the steps and along the passage outside his door, on the way to the lower gallery. His angry voice was punctuated by bin Zair’s deprecating squeaks. Most of the documents turned out to be a mixture from two separate files, the first concerning a lengthy wrangle about who ought to pay for a pair of cheetahs that had been delivered dead after what had evidently been a journey of careless cruelty through the hands of half-a-dozen airlines, and the second consisting of correspondence with the court of a neighbouring Sultan, one of whose sons on a visit to Q’Kut had been foolish enough to lose his left arm between the bars of a lion-cage. Presumably the blood-money was a zoo expense. With these were a number of loose sheets, not apparently consecutive, on which a variety of clerks seemed to have made random attempts to detail more ordinary zoo expenses. The noise of some kind of rumpus in the chimpanzee grove came faintly to him. Normally he would have rushed out to see that Dinah was all right, but now he merely sighed and went on with the papers. He hadn’t even reached the bottom of the pile when somebody scratched at the door.
“What is it?” he called.
Bin Zair entered, looking very wild.
“Be welcome,” said Morris.
“May I rest here?” said bin Zair. “The Sultan is much enraged. He struck his servant. Did you hear?”