The Game

the crowded street before belatedly realising that there were strangers looking back at her; she whipped her head- scarf across her face, gave us one last white-eyed look, and slammed the door, dislodging a few more scraps of timber and dust.

Holmes waded through the wreckage, searching for the end pieces of the balcony. I joined him, our search somewhat hindered by the determination of the carpet-seller to keep people away from his now-vulnerable wares. I found Holmes fingering a pair of iron bolts, both of them old, one bent into a sharp angle, the other sheared off. Neither showed any sign of a saw’s teeth.

“We must examine the wall above,” he told me, and raised his voice in Arabic to ask how we might gain access to the above apartment. This took forever, first to brush off the teary gratitude of the young assistant whose son we had preserved and then to find a person who could show us the relevant corkscrew stairway. And once at the top, we were halted by the custom of the land, when Holmes would have gone within an apartment housing women alone.

In the end, I suggested instead that I might be allowed to venture within. The shopkeeper’s wife had by that time appeared from their nearby house and followed us up the stairs to deliver her thanks. As soon as she understood what we were about, she added her voice to mine, begging that they grant the request of this thrice- blessed if baffling foreigner. The women within knew perhaps six words of Arabic—I wasn’t even certain what their native language was—but they gave in. With a wide smile and many appreciative noises over the squalling, snot- nosed, kohl-eyed infant one of them clutched, I crossed the two rooms to the door that now gave out onto the bazaar.

Stretched out on the floor with my head and shoulders extending into thin air, I failed to spot any obvious saw-marks, merely holes in the walls where bolts had once stood. I ignored the fearful noises of the women behind me, the heftiest of whom had thrown herself across my ankles lest I fly into space, and I shaded my eyes to squint at the building on the opposite side of the street. Something odd there: a gash in the wall beneath a window, fairly fresh. I made to stand, found I couldn’t move, and had to plead with the woman on my legs to allow me upright, which took a while. Before I left the apartment, I looked around for some heavy piece of furniture, finding a sort of divan that weighed nearly as much as I did, which I wrestled across the room to block the rickety door. Then, exchanging mutually incomprehensible pleasantries with the gabbling women and thanking them for the various sticky foodstuffs they thrust into my hand, I finally rejoined Holmes on the landing outside.

“Can we get into the apartment on the opposite side of the street?” I asked him. “There looks to be a fresh bash on the wall there.” I looked around me for some place to deposit the sweetmeats, which were oozing over my palm.

Holmes looked at the collection of unlikely shapes and colours. “What is that?”

“By the feel of it, mostly honey.”

He peeled one from my palm and popped it in his mouth, pausing briefly to consider it. “Sage flower,” my beekeeper husband pronounced. “And something else. Rather piquant.”

“Holmes, we haven’t time to hunt down the source of the pollen in those ladies’ honey,” I said firmly.

He pulled out his watch, nodded in agreement, and turned for the rickety stairs. “You’re quite right, the ship’s siren went a few minutes ago. We risk missing the launch if we delay too long.”

I hadn’t heard the siren. “Can’t we send someone to have the ship held for us?”

“I shouldn’t like to chance it. The P. & O. lines pride themselves on keeping to the rules. Perhaps fifteen minutes.”

But fifteen minutes proved too little time to find the owner of the empty apartment across the street. There was indeed a bash in the wall, and the boards that had created it—a balcony railing and four or five carved supports—were lying by themselves at the very base of that wall, across the alley from the bulk of the debris. There was no convenient length of rope or chain attached to the middle of the railing, and the marks were too myriad to be certain, but it did look as if something had torn a fresh groove into the wood in the centre of the fallen railing. It was the sort of mark that might result if a person standing at a window were to toss a hooked line at an already unsteady structure across a gap of some fifteen feet, then give it a mighty pull. On the other hand, it was also the sort of mark that might come from hanging almost anything from that same railing, and the gouge in the wall could be days old. Without a look at the room to see if the window-frame bore the marks of a rope or if the opposite wall showed where a pulley had been mounted to make one man’s strength sufficient, without even a ladder to examine the wall more closely, there could be no certainty.

In any case, the ship’s siren sounded again, impatiently, declaring its intention to leave without us. We grabbed up our few purchases, which had been preserved and guarded by the carpet-seller (grandfather to the half-naked child), accepted a small rolled carpet thrust into Holmes’ hands as a token of gratitude, and trotted away.

The launch was idling at the pier, held there almost bodily by our friend the carpet-seller’s son-in-law. The child in his arms seemed remarkably pleased to see us, considering the fright we’d caused it, and the man himself was nearly in tears again by the time we’d been pulled on board the boat and out of his grasp. We waved patiently as the boat pulled away, then turned to deliver our apologies to our huffy companions.

Thomas Goodheart was there, and his mother. Both watched us from behind dark glasses, their faces in the shade of their topees. I gave a surreptitious glance at his hands as I sat, but they were no more red than the rest of him; certainly they bore no signs of rope-burn.

Mrs Goodheart spoke first. “My, you two look like you’ve been in a riot. What on earth have you been up to?”

I looked down at my filthy skirt and torn blouse, glanced sideways at the state of Holmes’ pale suit, and looked up with a rueful smile. “Being a tourist in places such as this, it’s an arduous business, isn’t it?”

Chapter Six

Aden’s gulf opened into the Arabian Sea, and for days, the watery expanse in all directions was broken only by the passing of the occasional ship and the island of Socotra, well to the south two days out of Aden. The life of our floating village went on, the aristocrats of the high decks intruded on regularly by voices rising from the lower, now that the heat had driven the population out-of-doors at all hours, with dancing on the decks long into the night, under the glare of arc lights. For some days, the taps had run with phosphorescence, adding an exotic touch to one’s toilette, bathing in cool blue flame. Holmes befriended a lascar in the depths, I approached the final scenes of The Mahabharata, Sunny received three marriage proposals, and her brother remained as he had been before, supercilious and aloof as he read his Marxist tracts. Certainly he gave no sign of having tried and failed to murder us in the Aden bazaar. He did not even make reference to his drunken indiscretions on the night of the fancy-dress ball, except once when he approached me to beg my pardon if he had said anything he shouldn’t while in his cups. Something about the apology made me suspect that it was delivered at his mother’s command, but I told him merely that he had done nothing to offend, and that I was sorry champagne gave him a head-ache.

On the Thursday evening, precisely two weeks after we had struggled with our bags through a snow-clotted Kentish railway station, we stood in the ship’s bow and watched a cloud of flying-fish flicking and splashing magically from the indigo-tinted water. The sun’s setting turned the sky to a thousand shades of glory, and gave us the sensation of cool. I breathed in, and for the first time in many days the air bore an indefinable promise of solid land, far-distant traces of smoke and dust and vegetation that the olfactory organs can only perceive when they have been long without. We went to bed surrounded by nothing but the heave and swell of open sea, and woke in the morning with the Western Ghats rising blue-grey into the haze of the horizon. As the brutal sun travelled overhead, the land drew us ever nearer, until by the afternoon passengers crowded the rails to see the city of Bombay approach.

When we were close enough to pick out the peculiar architecture of the yacht club, my heart began to quail: Land was a solid, pulsating, cacophonous, and even from this distance, malodorous wall of people, and the water was not much less heavily populated, by boats of all shapes and sizes. Perhaps we could just wait on board for a few hours, or days, until they all went away. But we were being met, it seemed, by shipping agents who would nurse us and our luggage through customs, and here, as elsewhere, company pride would undoubtedly demand that each man fight to ensure that his client be early through the process. I shook my head and went down to my suffocating cabin to assemble my last-minute things, to be startled five minutes later when the great engines fell