Tremor

  Matthew pressed in the jeton. ‘ May I speak to M. Edouard de Blaye.’

  ‘Who may I ask is calling?’

  ‘Matthew Morris.’

  ‘A moment, sir.’

  Matthew fingered another jeton.

  A heavier voice. ‘This is de Blaye. Who is speaking?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir, it was your son I was calling. He will know my name. Matthew Morris.’

  ‘Unfortunately my son is not here. He is in St Moritz, skiing.’

  Matthew swore under his breath. Of course he should have made sure before he left England. But it had all been decided in such a hurry …

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have troubled you. I knew Edouard, your son, when I was living in Paris, and he pressed me to come and stay with him in Taroudant if I were ever in this country.’

  ‘Where are you speaking from?’

  ‘Agadir. The Hotel Saada.’

  ‘Oh. Unfortunate. He will be here I expect next month. Will you still be here then?’

  ‘I can’t manage more than two weeks. How is Edouard? Please give him my regards. We were great friends in Paris and he told me about the lovely house you have here.’

  They talked for a few moments, and Matthew put in another jeton. Then the Baron said: ‘ Do you have a car?’

  ‘Er – yes.’

  ‘It’s only an hour’s drive from Agadir. My wife is in Normandy, so I am almost alone at present. Perhaps you would care to have lunch with me one day?’

  ‘I shall be delighted. And honoured.’

  ‘Good. When would suit you?’

  ‘Almost any day.’

  ‘Let me see, I have business in Rabat on Friday. Tomorrow? Is that too soon?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Good. Come about twelve. In time for a swim before lunch.’

  ‘Thank you. You’re very kind.’

  They were about to ring off when Matthew said: ‘ Baron.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Might I bring a lady?’

  ‘Naturally. It will be my pleasure.’

  As soon as he had hung up Matthew went to the concierge and obtained the name and number of the car company. There was only one, it seemed. And when he rang them they said most of their cars were already rented out but he could have a Renault Four. He settled for that.

  IV

  After about an hour he went down to the beach again. The three Frenchwomen were lying in the garden in the shade of a great palm tree, gasping like newly landed fish. They had not changed, and dark patches marked the canvas chairs they sat in. On the beach Mlle Deschamps had not moved. Her book lay face down in the sand. The yellow dog had returned.

  He carefully pushed the dog away. She lifted her glasses to see who it was.

  ‘Sorry. I disturb you.’

  ‘It’s not important.’

  He squatted down in the sand beside her.

  ‘D’you mind if I stay?’

  ‘Not at all. But I am going in in a moment.’

  He ran the fine sand through his fingers. ‘I have hired a car. It will be delivered tomorrow morning at nine.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘One of the problems of air travel,’ he said, ‘is that one is more or less lifted up and deposited from place to place and sees nothing of the country in between. You say you have been here once before. Did you come to know much of it then?’

  ‘No. A lot of it was in – a lot of my time was in the desert.’

  ‘Are you an actress?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think I have seen you in some film.’

  She smiled. ‘Possible. But I do not think it likely. And you, monsieur?’

  ‘I? Oh, by profession I’m a writer. An author, you know.’

  There were few advantages, Matthew found, to the trade he had worked at, but it did sometimes impress people. Much depended on the people: booksellers and booksellers’ assistants, for instance, almost always assumed an expression of frozen contempt – partly defensive, no doubt, because they had never heard his name and partly because they knew instantly that they had no copies of his books in their shops. But some ordinary people took note, especially if they were Celts or French or German.

  Difficult to say what impression if any the information had made on Mlle Nadine Deschamps.

  ‘Only three published yet,’ he added, the hint of apology in his tone being totally assumed, since at his age even two was a good track record, especially if one didn’t know the sales figures.

  ‘My compliments. Are any of them in French?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘It will come,’ she said.

  There was a pause.

  He said: ‘I mentioned Taroudant. Have you been?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I am going tomorrow. My friend’s father, the Baron de Blaye, has a winter house there. It’s no distance. Perhaps sixty kilometres. I shall be going for lunch. I’m told they have a pool.’

  Nadine took her book up and shook the sand off it. Then she put it, together with her sun cream and a pochette, into a larger beach bag. It was a fine green canvas bag decorated with red poppies.

  He said: ‘Would you come with me?’

  Chapter Five

  I

  Jean Tournelle, also known as Johnny Carpenter, also known as John Frazier, also known as Frère Jacques, parked in the shade of a date palm, then walked the few yards down the Rue Beni Mellal to the home of his father. This street, round-cobbled and not easy for motor cars, was just on the edge of the French Quarter, the line here being not so distinctly drawn as in Fez or Marrakech. The sun glared down on the white walls. In an hour the narrow street would be mainly in shadow: this was midday. Canned Arab music came in a mournful monotone from the café on the corner. In the carpet shop next door two men crouched under an awning stitching slippers. A yellow mongrel dog, apparent brother of the one on the beach, scratched in the dust.

  Colonel Tournelle, as he was universally known, lived in a pleasant villa at the end of the street where it turned into the Rue Cambon. The villa was square and white with a barely cambered French tile roof, and the entrance hall looked through into a small palm-treed garden with a lily-pond and a fountain. Ever since he left the Army Gaston Tournelle had done well for himself.

  In 1923 he had married Fiona Carpenter in Paris, where she had found herself stranded when the dancing company she was with folded up. Tournelle was then in the Army, a good-looking corporal, who shortly after his marriage was sent to Morocco with his regiment to garrison the area round Rabat and Casablanca. A few years later he was seriously wounded in a skirmish with the Riffs, and in 1938 applied for his discharge. During the war he was in the Army commissariat in Casablanca, but at the end of it had never returned to France. Settled in Agadir, he contrived to make a handsome living in the black market. As a quartermaster sergeant, which he had been for the later part of his military life, he knew all the problems of supply and demand, had excellent contacts, and knew how to negotiate his way round the law. He had never been in trouble with the authorities and had never been so greedy as to involve himself in organized crime. (It was rumoured that he had recently made a fat profit from the devaluation of the dirham.)

  Johnny had been born in Casablanca in 1924, and had spent his first ten formative years in barracks and then on the streets of Agadir. In 1934 his mother, tired finally beyond endurance by her husband’s string of girlfriends, had returned to her parents in Wolverhampton, taking her only child with her, and Johnny had changed his name and become a British subject.

  But he had never lost touch with his father.

  He was in trouble in England in his late teens, put on probation for stealing a motor bike, given a day’s imprisonment for breaking into a shop, then four months for a repeat offence. His mother blamed it all on Gaston’s influence.

  But that was the lot. After that he turned over a new leaf, or became cleverer. The police had interviewed him repeatedly whenever a break-in occurred in the neighb
ourhood, but he had always had a cast-iron alibi. For years he had worked as a motor mechanic in one of the big firms, but had lived at home, never married.

  He knocked on the white-painted Moorish door, and it was answered, as he had half-expected, by Maria Jerval. Unlike the rest of his women, Maria had stuck and refused to be discouraged, and made herself useful to Gaston and finally indispensable. She was a squat woman in her late thirties, the nubile figure which had first attracted Gaston long since gone, but still with good eyes and a fair skin for one with such lank bootblack hair. A half-caste, she refused to speak any English, but now had a firm grasp of the household, not to mention the two girls she had borne him. Gaston should have married her – and now could – but he and Johnny conspired to silence in the matter of Fiona’s death six years ago.

  ‘Oh, it is you,’ she said.

  She did not like Johnny. She did not like it that he was Gaston’s only son. She resented his visits, which she felt were a reminder to Gaston of her own inadequacies in presenting him only with girl children.

  ‘Maria,’ Johnny said with false heartiness. ‘How are you?’

  He stooped to kiss her, but she turned her cheek.

  They went into the dark little vestibule that led through to the garden and the pool and a mass of nasturtiums. One of her daughters put her head round a door and then was gone.

  ‘You have lost weight,’ he exclaimed, knowing it would please her. ‘Is my father here?’

  Her eyes strayed to the case he carried. ‘No.’

  ‘He will be back soon?’

  ‘I have just been to visit him,’ she said. The wide sleeve fell back from her arm as she brushed her hair back. Eight bracelets jangled. ‘He is in hospital.’

  Johnny felt a lurch of apprehension. ‘When? What is wrong? My father never ailed nothing!’

  ‘His heart. He was taken ill on Wednesday. He is in a unit. What do they call it? Cardiac.’

  They went through to a larger room beyond, which had a floor of olive-green herringbone tiles and soft woven rugs on the walls. One of the daughters brought in mint tea in an ornate Moorish silver teapot. Johnny felt he could have done with something stronger.

  Maria became slightly less hostile as she poured the tea and they talked. The absence of Gaston made it easier between them. Gaston, she said, had been taken with acute pain on Friday night; the doctor had diagnosed a coronary; Gaston had been taken away and was recovering slowly but was still on the danger list.

  ‘I’ll go see him,’ Johnny said.

  ‘Not yet. The doctors said he must not be disturbed. I was allowed only to sit five minutes …’

  ‘His only son.’

  ‘Tomorrow or the day after, perhaps. You are here for some time?’

  ‘A week maybe.’

  ‘You gave us no warning.’

  ‘I made up my mind quite sudden. I thought: I’ll surprise them.’

  Maria’s eyes strayed again to the suitcase at Johnny’s feet. ‘He will be in no fit state to transact business, if that was your thought.’

  ‘Business? Who says business? I’m just here for a holiday, like. But I always want to see the old man. Always ask his advice about things.’

  ‘You are not to worry him … Where are you staying?’

  ‘The Saada.’

  ‘Expensive.’ Maria pursed her lips. ‘So you are doing well?’

  ‘Well enough.’ Johnny had no intention of confiding in his common-law stepmother. He was shaken up, thrown right off balance by the news. He had reckoned confidently on his father’s help; it had been a part of his scheme all along; Gaston would have known exactly the safest way to launder the money. Also, Johnny needed a new passport. He had two with him, but both of them had little trailing connections with the past. He needed something absolutely new. He had no intention whatever of staying in Morocco longer than absolutely necessary. Morocco was too near London. And, who knew which of his pertinacious friends, particularly Mr Artemis, might not sniff out the French link, and bribe a sight of the lists of air passengers leaving for France yesterday? Even the police might sus him out. The sooner he left for somewhere like South America the safer he would feel.

  But now …

  After a few minutes he made an excuse and left, walked back over the cobbles, squeezed past a donkey whose panniers were so stuffed with sisal hemp that it almost filled the street, reached his car, put his suitcase carefully on the passenger’s seat and drove off, scattering a group of Arab children who were playing with a rag ball.

  What now? Go back to the hotel and ring the hospital from there? Maybe tomorrow the old man would be sitting up and speaking, able at least to give advice, names to look up who would help in this emergency. Johnny had not kept up with his school-friends. With his confidence in his father it had not entered his head that he would need to. How old was his father? About seventy? But he had looked so tough, as if his years in the Army had pickled him into an enduring mahogany. Black, close-growing hair, hardly tinged with grey, coarse, weathered skin, thin, hooked nose, black, wary eyes: the eternal corporal. Johnny could not imagine him between white sheets, a drip feed or whatever, dials attached to wires on his chest.

  Johnny remembered the secret safe behind the panel in the wall of his father’s bathroom. Doubtful if Maria knew of its existence; if she did she certainly never saw it opened. It would have taken comfortably the contents of the little suitcase. Twenty per cent for Gaston; that would have been expected; a fair deal. But now where was the safest hiding place for the next two or three days? Nothing in the bedroom of his hotel. No doubt the hotel had a safe for ‘valuables’. But the case was a bit too large not to invite curiosity. Or he could carry it around with him wherever he went. This too would be conspicuous; but if the case never left his side there could be no opportunity for prying servants to pick the flimsy locks. Moroccan servants, he knew, were not all that reliable.

  He wished now that he had taken the other course of flying first to Switzerland and banking it there. The strictest secrecy, he knew, was preserved. But in his career Johnny had never even met a Swiss banker. You couldn’t just go into a bank without an introduction and ask them to take care of hot money for you for an indefinite period.

  As he turned into the Boulevard Mohammed V the sun went in, and he saw that the haze had turned into dark opaque cloud. A storm perhaps. It would help to clear the air. The sea, glimpsed between the hotels and the other buildings, was the colour of a soup tureen. Half a dozen yachts seemed planted immovably, immobilized like boats in a Dufy painting. Only a tanker, sending out a little black dribble of smoke, was perceptibly stealing towards the harbour.

  The gates of the hotel; drive up between the praetorian guard of umbrella pines. A taxi was at the door, two people getting out. He parked his little Renault under the trees and followed the porter, who was carrying in luggage. The new arrivals were at the reception desk, as clearly American as their luggage. The man, much the older, was tall and good-looking and well-dressed, but unsuitably for a holiday town. Grizzled grey hair, clean skin, good-toned voice as if he were used to employing it in public. The woman was about thirty, small and slim, in a thin, long, flowered frock that disguised her figure. She was pretty, good eyes, good fair-browny hair, and spoke in an undertone as if the last thing she would have thought of was employing her voice in public.

  ‘Burford,’ he was saying. ‘And Mrs Heinz. It was two single rooms with a sea view.’

  ‘Of course, monsieur,’ said the receptionist. ‘Rooms thirty-four and thirty-five. Ahmed will show you. Your luggage will follow. May I please have your passports.’

  II

  They had spent three nights in Paris. They were to have three nights in Agadir, three in Cairo and three in London on the way home.

  The last few months had seen a slow process of affiliation. Early on in those months he had acknowledged to himself that he no longer disliked her; but it was long after that before he admitted that she attracted him physically. Of co
urse there’d been the ‘feeling’, the sensation that she was provocatively female, but he had half resented its effect on him. In the end he came no longer to resent it. He thought about her a lot when she was absent, and found himself watching her when she was present.

  Not that she came more often – it was two evenings only a week, with bridge sometimes to follow. And she would cycle home, or be given a lift and walk up for her cycle next day. He kissed her goodnight frequently now, but more often than not she turned her cheek. It was all very friendly but very impersonal. She kept at a distance and kept him at a distance. She did in the end accept his invitation to lunch in Boston at Locke-Ober’s, and that was a great success. Her voice, with its foreign undertones, was rather husky, and when she laughed it was not a musical sound. But she had a quick brain – not at all like Ann’s, but acute and sometimes humorous.

  Another letter from Ann confirmed her contentment in her new life and showed no hint that she might return. Indeed, he had raised it in a previous letter but she had not replied to that at all.

  He suggested to Letty that she should give up her work in the restaurant and cook for him six evenings a week, but she made excuses about having committed herself to the proprietress and not wanting to let her down.

  He still missed Ann very much, but he was growing accustomed to becoming more his own man. As a single man, he was invited to make up the numbers at several places where they had not been accustomed to go. He began to enjoy women’s company more for itself. But warily. The only woman with whom it seemed safe not to be wary was Letty Heinz. She was easy-natured, good-tempered, willing to be a friend, but not much more.

  He began to cut his lunch in the city each day, and took to walking distances instead of taking a cab. He felt he could lose ten or twelve pounds, get rid of some of the flabbiness of middle age. He began monthly visits to the dentist, having his teeth, which weren’t in bad condition, cleaned up and renovated. He ordered two new suits. He left the barber who had cut his hair for twenty years and went to a fashionable one who let it grow a bit longer and made something of it without getting too way out.