of doing it, but you cannot just accomplish it, because the black cloth is wound around the head. The head strains back; and then she is pushed away with all the visitor’s ungirlish strength, sent flying against the wall. Her neck snaps backward, her head hits the tiles, two long strides and the visitor has crossed the hall, and while she is recovering herself is already out of the front door, and out of the gate, and onto Ghazzah Street.
Frances stood up shakily. Surprisingly, she felt no pain; no evidence of the encounter, except the chilly bar of flesh in the palm of her hand, where she had touched the metal of the gun’s barrel. She held her hand open for a moment, the fingers splayed to rid herself of the invisible stigmata. Cure this, doctor. Take my pain away.
1
The temperature had been moving upward for a week; and suddenly, the approaching summer moved into a new dimension. All night, while they had been insensibly dreaming together under a flowered sheet, the heat had been abroad, gathering its forces in other rooms to hang in dense clots from the walls; there was a white, scaly sky, diseased and enfeebled by its own heat. Frances went about her own house like a charwoman, lugging the vacuum cleaner and the washing basket, her head bowed and her hair pushed behind her ears. On Saturday the temperature was 97°. Today it is 106°. In Riyadh it is 118°. Every day it is rising. There is a leaden sky and a hot wind; the dust, blowing continuously, lends a lunar aspect to the vacant lots. You expect to see comets and portents, rabid alien life-forms scuttling at your feet.
She was wrong to think that she was sick with knowledge. While it is contained within her own head, and her own body—the memory of that metal chill, of that dizzying reel from the foot of the stairs—the knowledge can do no harm. It is not the knowledge, but the potential of knowledge, that makes her so dangerous. She is germinating a disaster; she has a communicable disease.
Therefore she says nothing. Therefore she begins each morning as if it were the first on Ghazzah Street. Therefore she declines serious conversation. Listens without hearing. Looks without seeing. Andrew had forgotten to get her a new exercise book for her diary; and she had not asked him again. Better not to write things down. Anyway, the diary’s original purpose seems to have dissolved. She couldn’t write to Clare, or to any of her correspondents, the sort of thing she had been putting in her diary recently. She imagined their replies, which seldom even acknowledged the content of her own letters: “Well, I haven’t much to tell you really. We haven’t been doing much. The weather is still very cold …” No doubt they mislaid her letters, found them tiresome, put them in a drawer where they would not nag for replies.
Jeff Pollard, shopping at the Jeddah International Market, had his Credit Suisse token removed from his neck by a religious policeman. It was only a moderate amount of gold, in truth, but in this matter, as in others, there are different rules for men and women. He should have spent the money on a watch. He could have worn a Patek Philippe, and no one would have quarreled. But in these stringent times it is not only the vigilantes who think it is in bad taste to wear your salary around your neck.
Russel has arrived back from the Yemen.
All over town people are purveying to each other rumors of sackings and redundancies. Wherever the expatriates get together they talk about their grievances, and about how badly the Saudis have treated them: fear and loathing at the St. Patrick’s Day barbecue.
It was getting too hot for the walk to Marion’s house. But Marion didn’t seem able to organize herself to come to Dunroamin. Marion’s conversation had never been rewarding, but just to be at her house was a pleasure, to sit in a room with normal daylight, and to feel, for an hour, no curiosity and no threat.
The gateboy came out of his hut when Frances rang the bell, and let her into the compound. But Marion did not answer her doorbell. Frances peered through the front window. The living room seemed strangely tidy. She went back to the gateboy, and pointed, inquiringly. He shook his head, and at the same time seemed consumed by some private joke.
So she set off home. There was a main road to negotiate, but it was midmorning, fairly quiet, and she never had trouble crossing at the lights. A boy in a Mercedes pulled up, waved her in front of him. As she stepped out from the curb, he revved his engine, the car sprang forward, and she had to leap from under its wheels. She heard the brakes applied; caught herself up, heart racing, and looked back at the driver of the car; understood that it had not been an accident. “You are my darling, madam, you are my baby …” Saw on his face laughter and contempt.
When she got home she phoned Carla. “Look,” Carla said, “it’s happened to me. Don’t take everything so personally.”
“But why?” she insisted. She felt on the verge of tears. “I just wanted to cross. I would have waited. I would have let him go by.”
Carla said tiredly, “They don’t want us on the streets. It’s just a thing they do.”
“I went around to Marion’s this morning,” she said to Andrew.
He looked at her in amazement. “Didn’t you know? Did nobody tell you? Russel’s packed her off home. He’s found out about her and Jeff.”
She stared at him, and a slow and unwelcome realization dawned on her face. “Do you mean they’ve been having an affair?” She sat down, as people do, to take in the bad news. “I didn’t realize.”
Andrew looked at her in exasperation. “Everybody else knew.”
“How long has it been going on?”
“Months.”
“I didn’t know. I was always saying how foul he was.”
“Yes, I noticed, but I thought you knew about them and you were doing that anyway. I mean, I didn’t think a consideration like that would hamper you.”
“But you never said anything! You never discussed it with me!”
“Why should I? It’s no concern of mine.”
“And all the time you thought I knew about it … do you ever wonder, Andrew, whether you’re missing things yourself?”
“I don’t think I’m missing anything that matters.”
