Tremor
Laura and Vicky continued to see each other once a year, but after her marriage to the doctor Vicky always insisted on coming to Paris to meet her old friend. Laura understood the reason and raised no objection: after all, it was Vicky who had laid the golden egg.
The new Mme Badoit never showed any further interest in camels.
II
In late April 1960 three men meet in a spacious Georgian house near the top of Hampstead village.
Mr Artemis is in his usual discreet charcoal grey, a gold watch-chain dangles in old-fashioned elegance across an expanse of stomach. The big man sitting opposite him is in a blue suit shiny with wear. He has come in on two sticks. The third man is also big, though less big; he is in a thick red jumper caught at the waist by a black belt. He is wearing corduroy trousers and tennis shoes.
‘We know Johnny’s dead,’ Big Smith says. ‘That’s for certain. I seen his corpse. I was lying there waiting for the ambulance to take me away and they brought him out – him and another bloke.’
‘You told us this,’ Mr Artemis says. ‘Did he have nothing with him? A bag or a case or even a mackintosh?’
‘It’s not likely they’d bring anything out with him, is it? They was just bringing out the dead and the wounded. Anyway I couldn’t see nothing. I wasn’t feeling in the best of health myself. Did you ever have two legs broke?’
‘Did you know the man they brought out with him?’ Rooney asks.
‘Nah. Except that he was an A-rab.’
Mr Artemis licks his blood blister. ‘I found out about him. My friend Digby Ephraim, who lives in Tangier. He went down for me last month, asked around. The Arab was a man called Ardrossi, Benjamin Ardrossi, worked in the casino. Maybe he was Johnny’s contact. Anyway, Ardrossi’s dead, so’s his family. My friend Digby says all records have been destroyed. Makes life difficult.’
‘I reckon. Not surprised,’ says Smith.
‘We don’t know if Johnny parted with the slush to someone before the quake,’ says Joe Rooney, ‘whether this Andross – whatever it is – was negotiating or what.’
‘Johnny’d been in Agadir for two days and a half. But I reckon he wouldn’t let go of the stuff easy. That case could still be buried among the ruins.’
‘I reckon.’
There is a pause.
Mr Artemis shifts his stomach. ‘ We have to keep looking. Keep asking. You never know.’
‘One thing,’ Big Smith says. ‘I’m not going back to that fricking city, no, not for all the tea in China. D’ye ever see a man crushed, the way Greg was crushed? He was like a pancake – blood spurted everywhere – and jelly and entrails – you’d never believe what’s inside a man. Why—’
‘Enough,’ says Mr Artemis. ‘That’s quite enough. I realize you’ve been through a very unpleasant ordeal. But it’s necessary still to try to keep track of things.’
‘Ask Rooney,’ Big Smith says. ‘Let Joe have a go!’
Joe grunts. ‘How much we got, boss? I mean here. All the stuff Johnny left behind. It must be worth a tidy bit. And we’ve two less to share it with.’
Mr Artemis looks cautious. ‘Oh, fair. Oh, fair. It is taking time and expense to negotiate. Johnny took the easy stuff. But it’s in process …’
‘How much?’ demands Rooney.
‘Er – can’t say yet. It’s still in process. A few thousand pounds each. Poor reward for all the effort, but some nevertheless.’
‘Hm,’ says Joe. ‘So we got to think of something else soon.’
III
Letty married Lee on the 19th of October, 1960.
The two divorces had gone through without complications, but he had taken much longer than she did to recover from the entombment. Indeed for a while he seemed to be suffering from a poison of the blood not dissimilar from that slowly killing Estrella Thibault. But towards the end of the summer he regained his health, and psychologically the prospect of his remarriage was a powerful boost.
Letty’s hair grew quickly over the ugly scar left by the amateur stitchings, but for the rest of her life she would not be able to part her hair on the right side. Perhaps the tragedy of Agadir had been a crucible in which her reservations about marrying Lee had finally melted. Or conceivably it had happened on the Saturday night they had spent together before the earthquake. He strongly chose to believe that. When he came out of hospital for the second time in September, feeling recovered, it was not so much that she submitted to him as that she welcomed him with a degree of warmth she had not begun to show before.
On the 28th of October of that year Letty wrote to Ann.
Dearest Ann,
Well, it has happened, just as you suggested it might, and schemed it might, all those many, many months ago! I must refuse to believe it! Do you know, I held nothing but scorn for your idea, because, after Carl, I never wanted another man ever to touch me again. Ever. Nor was I in the least attracted to Lee – not in that way, though I thought him a worthy man you did ill to desert.
Well, we are married last week. Once or twice during this ceremony my blood turns to water as I think: What if Ann comes back right now and walks into this ceremony and says, ‘I have changed my mind, I am tired of New Zealand and I wish to come back, and I want him back!’ What would I have said? I will have collapsed, and my pride with me, like a pricked balloon!
We did not go away, for Lee was only just out of hospital after our ordeal in Morocco. But he seems well now, and I am grown ever more fond of him. I shall never take your place in his heart, but at present he seems quite fixated on me and seems to rely on me for his social life. How long will it last? He takes his bridge very seriously – much more than you ever did – and although he is not a very good player he is awfully good-mannered and appreciates everything I do right.
I do not find him dull – as I am sure you did not in most of your life together, isn’t it so? – and dear Ann, dear wicked scheming Ann – I do not find him so unsympathetic in bed! Perhaps he has changed. Perhaps I expected too little. Certainly he has some ideas that I would not have thought of! Anyway I have found something in him that I have not known before, and it gradually obliterates the memory in me of Carl’s coarseness and brutality. I can tell you it took an effort even to go near Lee in those first weeks after you had left.
Well now; well. What of the future? We plan to stay on here. I would dearly love to come out to see you, and it is in my thoughts that perhaps Lee would like to come – but I do not think he ever will because of the way the break occurred – and perhaps it is well that we should not meet. At least, not yet. After such a long interval – for he was in hospital three times – he has taken up his work again with zest and is already deep in two cases – which he brings home to me, as he used to carry them home to you; but I am much less clever than you and I can really only help by listening. He is very busy at the moment advocating the proposal of a bill in Congress which would no longer forbid a lawyer to conduct a case outside his own state. Apparently it is not a popular idea with some members of his profession.
What you tell me of your adventures in Canton – bicycle and all – fills me with no wish ever to do the same! I would have hated it and probably have fallen off my bicycle in terror! When are you returning to New Zealand? Soon, I hope. This letter will await you. Naturally you must not reply to it, for I could not dare that he should see your writing on an envelope and ask to see the contents!
Ever devoted,
Letty
In September of ’61 Letty had a son, whom they named Thor, and two years later a daughter, Christine.
Letty settled well into her new life as Mrs Lee Burford. Lee’s friends, most of whom she knew at least by sight already, accepted her, and the arrival of two children made everything more assured. Hannah stayed on, accepting the changes with scarcely the lifting of an Irish eyebrow. Henry and Jessie Hayward were the only two to look askance and to ask Lee privately when his wife was not there what exactly Letty’s antecedents were. But the old man said it wa
s all Ann’s own damn silly fault, and drove over to meet his new grandchildren.
Ann continued to write, but the letters became more infrequent. There did not seem any hint at all that she was not happy in her new life or regretted her decision. When her father died she was trekking in North Borneo and word could not be got to her in time. So she wrote but did not come. As the years passed it became a Christmas letter, part of it Roneoed so that all her family should be able to read it at the same time. There was always a separate one for Letty, but only topped and tailed with affectionate messages.
Lee continued to practise law until he was seventy, and then for another five years went to the office three days a week as a consultant. He played more golf in his days off, and enjoyed his wife and children and his evenings at home.
Letty’s only worry was for her son, Leon, who remained a drop-out and preached flower power until well into his twenties. He came to stay with them for a day or so every six months and looked with unconcealed contempt on the luxury and wastefulness of their life. Then when he was twenty-four he turned up one day and told them he was going to England, where he was to work for an Anglo-American company prospecting for new oilfields in the North Sea. Lee concealed his surprise and Letty her gratification until the weekend was past. It was clear that over the past year or so his views, unnoticed by them, had been gradually shifting, and that making love not war was no longer foremost in his mind.
Making love on a more permanent basis may have had more influence on his decision, for six months later he married a girl called Rachel Wightman, a pretty Jewess from Philadelphia whose common sense and stability impressed itself on both the older people the first time they met her.
Thor – not so called after the god of thunder but because he had been born on a Thursday – was a healthy, engaging boy and a joy to both his parents; Christine was more tetchy but early on showed she had inherited her mother’s good looks and elegance. On his seventieth birthday Lee, after an evening out to celebrate, found himself sitting in front of the fire opposite Letty planning the schooling of their children.
‘I’m looking forward to the next decade,’ he said. ‘It will be expensive but real fun – and it’s the sort of fun I’ve never had before. Much of the snobbery has gone these days, but I’d still like Thor to go to one of the good schools like St Paul’s or Groton – because it helps when you get to Harvard.’
‘I wish you would let me do without Hannah. Now both children are at school there’s little or nothing for her to do during the day that I cannot do. I think Hannah would not mind, as her own husband has not been well.’
‘You have your painting and your pottery. Hannah will tell us if she wants to leave.’
‘Still better,’ Letty said, ignoring him. ‘Keep Hannah on and allow me to go out to work. I am a good cook – you know; I am trained as a nurse. There is work enough, I’m sure, even if only part-time.’
‘Certainly not,’ Lee said. And then after a pause: ‘ You know I’ve settled money on you if I should suddenly drop off the branch.’
‘I neither know nor care!’
‘Well, I’ve been figuring all the angles. When I’m eighty Thor will be seventeen and Christine fifteen. Of course I might not achieve that age.’ He went on before she could interrupt: ‘Or I might live years after that. Golf keeps me fit, and you and the children keep me young. If, or when, as I say, I cease to be, there should be money enough. If it should run short, with inflation and things, that would be the time for you to look for work. Not now, not in the immediate future while I am still around to take care of you.’
Letty was aware of the fact that if she had had some professional skill he might not have minded. It was natural for many wives to work. But her skills were domestic. So.
‘You do not mind staying home a bit longer?’ he asked.
‘Of course I don’t mind staying home.’
‘You do not think it a chore?’
‘No, I do not.’ Letty was aware that he was watching her, and gave a slight smile.
‘It is not too much of a chore living with me?’
‘No, I find much comfort in it.’
Both children were asleep and nothing stirred in the house.
He said: ‘Letty, would you look on it as a chore if I asked you to come to bed with me right now?’
She was serious, thinking of it. Then she said: ‘No, Lee, I would not consider it anything of a chore at all.’
IV
The Air France plane AF 1061 from Casablanca to Libreville on Monday the 7th of March, 1960, carried among its passengers one Henri Delaware. Had anyone taken the trouble to look at the photograph in his passport with a suspicious scrutiny they would have remarked that he looked younger in real life. But no one was that interested. In the chaos following the earthquake, people simply registered a name and address and took whatever means was available to leave the country. Most of the non-Moroccan survivors were flying to Paris or London or Hamburg or New York. Planes were crowded and places on them difficult to get. Almost all the civilized world had mustered its resources to help. No one was specially interested in a single young man who happened to want to fly off with a few businessmen and hardened travellers to Gabon.
In Casablanca Matthew had fitted himself out with underwear, shirts, shoes, a couple of new suits, a watch, a wallet and a pair of dark glasses. He stayed only two days in Libreville, during which he discovered there was a Thursday evening flight to Nairobi. From there he flew to Johannesburg, and a week later was in Cape Town. He stayed at the Mount Nelson Hotel, and proceeded to take stock. Until this point he had felt himself obliged to keep on the move lest his deception should be spotted. Now, it seemed, he was safe – or temporarily safe. At least safe to choose for himself.
Already he partly regretted his decision. He had had a varied career but had never ventured onto the wrong side of the law. (If one excepted one occasion when he had gone down the fire escape of a smart French hotel and left without paying his bill.) This, this impersonation of a man who was either dead or never existed, accompanied by his seizure of a small suitcase stuffed with stolen money, was out of his class. It put him among the serious felons, and he didn’t like it.
But the money was there, in his hands. Three times he spread it out on his bed and counted it. It was staggering. He could live for ten years – maybe much longer – out of it. Dollars, pounds, francs, Deutschmarks. He doubted the good sense of what he had done – there must be pitfalls that he didn’t yet know of – but even if he had not been suffering from a sort of shell-shock at the time, combined with his awful unbelieving grief over Nadine, even then, if he had been stone-cold sober and totally in his right mind, would he have chosen otherwise? Would the temptation not have been too great? He had always been short of money. He had always wanted the things money could buy. Could he have resisted the sight of it piled on the bed and the knowledge that the person from whom he had taken it was dead, and anyway had no right to it in the first place?
He looked at himself in the mirror and said aloud: ‘I can ring England tonight, say I’d lost my memory; my passport and belongings are buried in the ruins of the Hôtel Saada – can you come out?’
His mother would come, establish his identity, they would apply for a replacement passport, return to England together. And the money? It would go back to the merchant bank from which it had been stolen.
A grey area here? The police would be suspicious. He had travelled out all the way to Agadir on the same day as one of the robbers. How to prove that he had not been implicated in the robbery itself? The police would want to know what he knew of the identity of the other criminals. They would go on asking and asking questions. They would keep on calling on him, trying a new angle, a new approach.
But suppose he went back and still did not return the money? So far no one had bothered to open the case when he came through customs, but it was a risk each time. It would be in character for some fellow at Heathrow to question what he ca
rried.
And if he got through? Put the money in a safe deposit, help himself when he needed a bit. There would still be questions, even if not from the police. How justify to his mother and stepfather, and indeed Rona, a gradual affluence? A perilous and worrying business. Say his second novel had brought him in much more than expected? It could hardly account for his buying an Aston Martin.
If he stayed here, who would question anything?
But he would be officially dead. Rona would be sad – she would not grieve, he was certain, in the way he was grieving about Nadine – but she would be sad. Then there was his mother. She was the main stumbling block. She had never shown him much affection after the children of her second marriage came along; but he knew she loved him in her critical but generous way. She would grieve. She would be the only one really upset by his death. But if he had been five years older she could well have lost him in the war.
And, when he eventually reappeared, would she not be all the more delighted to welcome him back?
At this stage it was never in his mind that he would not return to England at some later date, claiming loss of memory over a much more prolonged period, whatever it was, two years, five years, whatever he felt like making it. His mother would be all the more delighted to see him. Rona might have remarried – if so, good luck to her. But after he had wandered about the world for a while, after he had spent some of the money. In a few years, while he was living in Cape Town or Sydney or Rio, he would suddenly remember who he was, remember his real name, remember his past and make himself known.
In the second week in Cape Town he spent some time in the public library, reading up in encyclopaedias about the district he had come from in French-speaking Canada. He learned that Chicoutimi, on the River Saguenay, was a thriving little town exporting great quantities of timber and was the seat of a Roman Catholic bishop. Tadoussac, at the mouth of the river, was the oldest trading port in Canada. These and other facts he stored away in his memory in case of need. It was to be his excuse, if found wanting in information about it, that he had left in childhood.