CHAPTER 6
The white Simca drop-head was out in front, shrieking round the steep camber of the Corniche, past the sun-baked rocks on which the Arab bidonvilles grew: a rash of mud and corrugated-iron huts climbing up the raw earth to where the twelve-storey tenement blocks stood against the sky like mouth organs turned on end.
The car belonged to Anne-Marie; she was driving, with Neil beside her and Van Loon up in the casual seat buffeted by the hot salt wind. Lieutenant Morin and Pip were following in a red Austin Healey. Louis Rebot had had to leave them after lunch, taking — to Van Loon’s dismay — Annette with him into the Cité de l’Université behind the barricades.
Van Loon now sat with his meerschaum jammed between his teeth, glowering out at the lines of Army trucks rattling up the Corniche towards the city. Anne-Marie cheered and waved at them, and most of the troops waved back. It was not clear whether they were Guérin’s latest recruits from the dissident reservist battalions, or reinforcements belonging to General Metz. Probably many of the troops were not even sure themselves. They sat in tight rows facing inwards, craning their heads round to catch a glimpse of the pretty girls speeding past towards the beach.
Neil leant over and shouted to Anne-Marie above the slipstream, ‘Shouldn’t you be back behind the barricades too?’
She flashed her teeth at him, hair swirling across her face: ‘We have time to enjoy ourselves first, don’t worry!’ Time to finish her game of bowls, Neil thought: with the white sands curving into the horizon and the oiled guns coming up the road under the palms.
The Casino de la Plage was at the end of a private beach protected by barbed wire to keep the Arabs out. It looked like a Georgian mansion done up by Oliver Messel for the Shah of Persia, surrounded by a screen of bleached palms. There was a dance hall, a restaurant and gaming rooms and a terraced bar built out of bamboo poles where waiters in Mexican-style shirts shook up genuine mint juleps and daiquiris in frosted glasses at up to nine Nouveaux-Francs a time. Paths of coconut matting ran out across the scorching sands to the sea edge.
At this hour the place was quiet. The thé dansant did not begin for another hour. Neil and Van Loon hired bathing trunks and joined the other two under a sunshade on the sands. Anne-Marie wore strips of white bikini which showed up her dark body until Neil had to look away almost in pain. Pip lay provocatively on her front with her feet in the air, smoking Philip Morrises which she offered to no one while Lieutenant Carlos Morin, a polished muscular brown, rested his head on her splendid buttocks and read a back number of L’Equipe. He had brought a transistor radio with him which later in the afternoon played a pirate broadcast by General Guérin: long and metaphysical, promising France a renaissance of dignity and self-respect. It finished with Le Chant des Africains, followed by the thundering drumbeat of the Marseillaise. The sea was warm and calm and they swam and raced each other down the sands, while Van Loon sat like some Nordic seer, sucking his meerschaum and casting looks of haunted desire in the direction of Anne-Marie and Pip.
Neil swam out beyond the barbed wire barricade and called Anne-Marie after him; together they walked along the edge of the breaking sea, their bare feet pressing the spongy brown sand into pools of whiteness. The beach here was deserted. They came to a line of black rocks that ran out to sea, sheltering the sands from the scum of the city harbour. There was an abandoned pillbox higher up the rocks, its concrete wall scrawled with the words ‘Vive Le Front Arabe!’
Anne-Marie stopped: ‘Come on, let’s get away from here! The Moslems come to this part of the beach sometimes.’ She took his arm and they started back towards the barbed wire.
He looked down at her body: at the swelling breasts and deep fold in the rounded belly, and her long thighs streaked with threads of salt. He put his arm round her, and her skin felt like hot silk in the sun. His emotions were confused, blunted by the heat and wine and events of the morning. His moral indignation at the slaughter he had seen earlier was beginning to ebb away. He found he could not judge these people by civilized standards. They were cruel and physical, they killed their fellow beings as a farmer kills rabbits. But they were friendly and attractive, and their simple passion for life was infectious. They believed only in the sun and health and the beauty of their own bodies. He wondered what would happen now if he kissed Anne-Marie.
They sat down on the wet sand with the surf curling round them, and she told him that she was an only child and that her father had been killed in Indo-China. Her mother had gone to France until the crisis was over, and Anne-Marie lived with her stepfather in a flat that was now behind the barricades. She was a student in her second year at the university, studying economics and political theory.
He looked at her, sitting there in the slanting sun with her knees drawn up under her chin and the sea-foam clinging to her toes and the edges of her bikini. Studying for Tripos Part One, he thought: Right-wing Revolutionary Theory: practice, terrorism and murder.
She did not discuss her love life and he did not ask her. She had been to France once, for a summer, to Paris and Tours, and for a weekend
