As Eric returned through the patio with the box of tea, Port came in the door from the street.
“Mr. Moresby!” he cried. “What a pleasant surprise!”
Port tried to keep his face from falling. “Hello,” he said. “What are you doing here? I thought I’d recognized your car outside.”
“Just one second. I’ve got to deliver this tea to Mother. She’s in the kitchen waiting for it.” He rushed through the side door, stepping on one of the obscene dogs that lay exhausted just inside in the dark. It yelped lengthily. Port hurried upstairs to Kit and imparted the latest bad news to her. A minute later Eric pounded on the door. “I say, do have tea with us in ten minutes in room eleven. How nice to see you, Mrs. Moresby.”
Room eleven was Mrs. Lyle’s, longer but no less bare than the others, and directly over the entrance. While she drank her tea, she kept rising from the bed where everyone was sitting for lack of chairs, going to the window and crying “Mosh! Mosh!” into the street.
Presently Port could no longer contain his curiosity. “What is that strange word you’re calling out the window, Mrs. Lyle?”
“I’m driving those thiving little niggers away from my car.”
“But what are you saying to them? Is it Arabic?”
“It’s French,” she said, “and it means get out.”
“I see. Do they understand it?”
“They’d jolly well better. More tea, Mrs. Moresby!”
Tunner had begged off, having heard enough about the Lyles from Kit’s description of Eric. According to Mrs. Lyle, Ain Krorfa was a charming town, especially the camel market, where there was a baby camel they must photograph. She had taken several shots of it that morning. “It’s too sweet,” she said. Eric sat devouring Port with his eyes. “He wants more money,” Port thought. Kit noticed his extraordinary expression, too, but she put a different interpretation on it.
When tea was over, and they were taking their leave, since they seemed to have exhausted all the possible subjects for conversation, Eric turned to Port. “If I don’t see you at dinner, I’ll drop in on you tonight afterward. What time do you go to bed?”
Port was vague. “Oh, any time, more or less. We’ll probably be out fairly late looking around the town.”
“Righto,” said Eric, patting his shoulder affectionately as he shut the door.
When they got back to Kit’s room she stood gazing out the window at the skeletal fig tree. “I wish we’d gone to Italy,” she said. Port looked up quickly. “Why do you say that? Is it because of them, because of the hotel?”
“Because of everything.” She turned toward him, smiling. “But I don’t really mean it. This is just the right hour to go out. Let’s.”
Ain Krorfa was beginning to awaken from its daily sun-drugged stupor. Behind the fort, which stood near the mosque on a high rocky hill that rose in the very middle of the town, the streets became informal, there were vestiges of the original haphazard design of the native quarter. In the stalls, whose angry lamps had already begun to gutter and flare, in the open cafés where the hashish smoke hung in the air, even in the dust of the hidden palm-bordered lanes, men squatted, fanning little fires, bringing their tin vessels of water to a boil, making their tea, drinking it.
“Teatime! They’re really Englishmen dressed for a masquerade,” said Kit. She and Port walked very slowly, hand in hand, perfectly in tune with the soft twilight. It was an evening that suggested languor rather than mystery.
They came to the river, here merely a flat expanse of white sand stretching away in the half light, and followed it a while until the sounds of the town became faint and high in the distance. Out here the dogs barked behind the walls, but the walls themselves were far from the river. Ahead of them a fire burned; seated by it was a solitary man playing a flute, and beyond him in the shifting shadows cast by the flames, a dozen or so camels rested, chewing solemnly on their cuds. The man looked toward them as they passed, but continued his music.
“Do you think you can be happy here?” asked Port in a hushed voice.
Kit was startled. “Happy? Happy? How do you mean?”
“Do you think you’ll like it?”
“Oh, I don’t know!” she said, with an edge of annoyance in her voice. “How can I tell? It’s impossible to get into their lives, and know what they’re really thinking.”
“I didn’t ask you that,” Port remarked, nettled.
“You should have. That’s what’s important here.”
“Not at all,” he said. “Not for me. I feel that this town, this river, this sky, all belong to me as much as to them.”
She felt like saying: “Well, you’re crazy,” but she confined herself to: “How strange.”
They circled back toward the town, taking a road that led between garden walls.
“I wish you wouldn’t ask me such questions,” she said suddenly. “I can’t answer them. How could I say: yes, I’m going to be happy in Africa? I like Ain Krorfa very much, but I can’t tell whether I want to stay a month or leave tomorrow.”
“You couldn’t leave tomorrow, for that matter, even if you did want to, unless you went back to Boussif. I found out about the buses. It’s four days before the one for Bou Noura leaves. And it’s forbidden to get rides on trucks to Messad now. They have soldiers who check along the way. There’s a heavy fine for the drivers.”
“So we’re stuck in the Grand Hotel.”
“With Tunner,” thought Port. Aloud: “With the Lyles.”
“God forbid,” Kit murmured.
“I wonder how long we’ve got to keep on running into them. I wish to hell they’d either get ahead of us once and for all, or let us get ahead of them and stay there.”
“Things like that have to be arranged,” said Kit. She, too, was thinking of Tunner. It seemed to her that if presently she were not going to have to sit opposite him over a meal, she could relax completely now, and live in the moment, which was Port’s moment. But it seemed useless even to try, if in an hour she was going to be faced with the living proof of her guilt.
It was completely dark when they got back to the hotel. They ate fairly late, and after dinner, since no one felt like going out, they went to bed. This process took longer than usual because there was only one wash basin and water pitcher—on the roof at the end of the corridor. The town was very quiet. Some café radio was playing a transcription of a record by Abd-el-Wahab: a dirge-like popular song called: I Am Weeping Upon Your Grave. Port listened to the melancholy notes as he washed; they were broken into by nearby outbursts of dogs barking.
He was already in bed when Eric tapped on his door. Unfortunately he had not turned off his light, and for fear that it showed under the door he did not dare pretend to be asleep. The fact that Eric tiptoed into the room, a conspiratorial look on his face, displeased him. He pulled his bathrobe on.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Nobody’s asleep.”
“I hope I’m not disturbing you, old man.” As always, he appeared to be talking to the corners of the room.
“No, no. But it’s lucky you came when you did. Another minute and my light would have been out.”
“Is your wife asleep?”
“I believe she’s reading. She usually does before she goes to sleep. Why?”
“I wondered if I might have that novel she promised me this afternoon.”
“When, now?” He passed Eric a cigarette and lit one himself.
“Oh, not if it will disturb her.”
“Tomorrow would be better, don’t you think?” said Port, looking at him.
“Right you are. What I actually came about was that money—” He hesitated.
“Which?”
“The three hundred francs you lent me. I want to give them back to you.”
“Oh, that’s quite all right.” Port laughed, still looking at him. Neither one spoke for a moment.
“Well, of course, if you like,” Port said finally, wondering if by any unlikely chance he had misjudged the youth and somehow feeling more convinced than ever that he had not.