His midnight call to London had come through at a quarter to three. The number had taken a long time to answer. When it did, Caroline was yawning with sleep, telling him she was going to marry Tommy Drummond next Saturday. He had started to yell at her, and she had said drowsily, ‘No darling, I’m serious.’ He had bawled into the mouthpiece, ‘You must be mad!’ and she had said, ‘I’m very fond of him, and you haven’t written to me for over a month.’
‘I was in a monastery!’ he had protested. ‘I’m stuck in the middle of a revolution!’ — and she had said, ‘Oh darling, it’s too late and I’m so sleepy’ — and he had tried to plead with her, her voice fading with long-distance whines and hummings, as he fought to change her mind, to postpone it, to make her wait till he got back. And far away, beyond the bay and the barricades, she had said, ‘Neil darling, I’ve made up my mind. Really, I love Tommy.’ And so it had gone on, while Anne-Marie slept through it all, the sheet wound round her like a shroud; and all he wanted was Caroline, and in a week’s time Caroline would be stepping out in white (in white, if you please!) to be married at Holy Trinity, Brompton.
The man came up to the table and bowed: ‘Monsieur Ingleby?’ He smiled, holding out a gloved hand: a tall, pale man of about thirty, with rimless glasses, no tie, carrying a raincoat over his left arm. ‘I haven’t time for coffee,’ he added, before Neil had spoken, ‘the car’s outside.’
Neil left some money on the table and followed him into the street in a state of febrile exhilaration.
‘The weather seems to have improved for your visit,’ the man said, steering the car along the Front de Mer, ‘we’ve been having a lot of fog lately.’ He drove carefully, without hurrying. They turned up from the sea into the main shopping boulevard, past names like Windsor, Guerlain, Mercedes Benz, across a great square and into a hive of dark streets, between arcades peeling with posters, deep in garbage, where Neil saw for the first time Moslems mixing with Europeans — mostly old men with turbans like dirty bandages, shuffling between fruit stalls. This was a fringe area of European and Arab streets just below the Casbah. There were many killings here.
They were stopped by the CRS at a movable barbed wire barricade. The street beyond narrowed into a steep alley. It was very quiet. The driver flashed a plastic disc at the CRS officer who saluted, peering curiously at Neil, then ordered the barbed wire to be rolled back. The car moved forward, its engine growling softly. Steel-shuttered doors stood on either side, bolted down into the flagstones, and barred windows looked down from the swelling walls below a strip of sky far above.
The driver nosed the car along at walking pace, scraped round a corner and stopped with the window on Neil’s side opposite an iron door fitted with a Yale lock.
He pointed with his gloved hand: ‘You go through there. I’ll be waiting here with the car. You won’t be more than an hour.’ Neil tried to fight down the rising fear: ‘Where is this?’ His hand tightened round the hot upholstery.
‘You have nothing to worry about,’ said the driver, ‘just knock on the door. I’ll be waiting here.’
Neil opened the car door. A cat flicked across the street a few yards away. He stood up and closed the door, not banging it, and something moved behind one of the barred windows above. He thought, in a mad moment, of the crowds at Brand’s Hatch: woollen caps and fumes and pretty girls jumping out of Lotuses.
You should see me now, Caroline, he thought grimly, and rapped on the iron door.
It was opened by a man with a complexion like a slice of brown bread. He wore a khaki shirt and his eyes were flat and slanting. He looked at Neil, at the driver, then stepped aside. Neil followed him across a bare stone room like a cellar, up some steps and into an alley that climbed under the mouth of an arch.
The air had a thick musky taste: of charcoal and sweet ripe fruit and mutton fat, and the bitter acid taste of urine and pepper spicing and cheap black tobacco. The ground shelved upwards over sloping stones, wet and slippery, into a web of turnings and steps and tunnels under the baked mud, past miniature doors and arabesques smooth with age and sudden corners of shining white against a patch of sky.
Tiny sounds pierced the stillness: whispered voices, quick quiet movements, chimes like water dripping in a cave. A radio twanged and wailed somewhere behind the maze of walls. The alley widened and they walked on earth strewn with palm fronds. Spears of light filtered through the latticed roof, on to men in brown jellabahs sipping mint tea and chattering peacefully. Young men in khaki watched from the shadows; children peered at them, boys with shorn grey heads and girls with hair stained copper-red.
They ducked down into another tunnel where water moved in the darkness: through a door where Neil had to bend almost, double, and up four flights of stairs into a wooden room with a Coca-Cola calendar and a big dark girl behind an old-fashioned typewriter that looked like the ribcage of a dead bird.
The guide led him across
