Because of the wind they hardly spoke to each other. Neil wished again that he could have a shave and some breakfast — at least one coffee and a glass of Fernet Branca. The wind battered him, making his face raw and dry. Anne-Marie walked in front of him, her head and shoulders bent forward, the bag swinging against her hip. It gave her a heavy, slouching appearance; and he thought of her running down the sands, strong and brown, smiling with white teeth, hair swirling. She was not the same girl any more.
The car — the Simca convertible in which they had gone down to the Casino de la Plage — was parked off the road on the edge of a maize field sprinkled with poppies. It was empty, with the black hood closed. She unlocked the door on the driving side and let him in beside her. Her movements were deliberate and unhurried.
He sat back in the bucket-seat and she switched on the ignition. Above the grunt of the engine he said, ‘Anne-Marie, I want to get one thing clear — about what happened yesterday with General Guérin.’
She said nothing, swinging the wheel over, and they screeched round in a tight circle into the empty lane leading back towards the city.
‘Do you think I betrayed General Guérin?’ he said, raising his voice against the whine of the car.
‘No, I don’t think you betrayed anybody.’ Her voice was quite calm: ‘General Guérin and Colonel Le Hir were arrested — that’s all.’
‘I was with them. It was because I was in the car that the CRS knew it was Guérin.’
‘I know.’ Her profile was rigid, her sun-filled eyes on the road.
‘Do the others think I betrayed Guérin?’ Neil shouted, as the car began to lurch from side to side, buffeted by the wind. She did not answer. The road raced towards them, curving into a roundabout, and she braked violently, dust rising like steam, the car howling into the turn, out on to a wide road between the tobacco fields.
Neil clutched at his knees, peering through the brown-caked windshield, his heart thumping hard. He turned to her again: ‘Anne-Marie, listen!’ Her face remained immobile, watching the road. ‘I must talk to you before we go any further. Does the Secret Army think I betrayed Guérin?’
She made a sudden movement with her hand. The windshield-washers spurted, dribbled down, the glass and the wipers swept the dust aside in a clean arc. The road ahead was empty, the sky blue with brown drifts of dust swooping and spiralling in the wind like ghosts.
‘Anne-Marie, listen! Slow down, will you! I have to talk to you! What have you come here for? How did you find me?’
‘I went to the hotel last night. I told you, I left a letter asking you to meet me. You weren’t there.’
‘How did you know I was at the airport?’
She turned with a quick look of triumph in her eyes: ‘Where else would you be? You were trying to get away.’
‘I was frightened,’ he said, in a hoarse voice that was lost in the scream of the slip stream. The car slowed and turned on to a track like the one up to the farm yesterday. Neil felt a nasty sinking in his stomach: ‘Where are we going? This isn’t the way along the coast. We’re supposed to be making for the frontier!’
She made no reply, steering the car up the bumpy track towards a line of trees, with the mountains beyond.
‘Anne-Marie, this isn’t the right way!’
‘We can’t take the main roads. There are too many patrols out — we wouldn’t get through. I’m taking you a special way I know.’
He knotted his fingers together, watching the track bump towards them, trying to remember how far it was to the frontier. They were coming into a village, chalk-white with bulging walls, patched up with newspaper and straw and tin cans under roofs of sagging corrugated iron. Two French soldiers sat in a jeep on the roadside. She accelerated, her hand down on the horn; and as they flashed past them, Neil had a glimpse of one of the soldiers shouting and waving towards the village.
They passed a mosque with a mud wall crumbled like biscuit. A bald dog limped across the road in front of them, cowering against the broken pavement as they roared past.
There was only the one street. Halfway down they passed a café with a single table outside the door and a row of scrawny, dry-brown Moslems squatting barefoot in the dust, doing nothing.
As the Simca drove by, one of them leapt up and drew a finger across his throat, teeth bared. Anne-Marie saw him and shrugged. Neil remembered that she had made just the same gesture on that first morning when he had asked her what happened to the barbouzes.
‘Those are Moslems!’ he blurted out, stupidly.
‘It’s only a small village,’ she said, ‘afterwards, behind the trees, we get on to the road to the frontier.’
They were almost out of the village now, and the road narrowed between stone walls, winding into the trees ahead. Two Moslems in jellabahs sat on the wall staring at them.
‘How far is it to the frontier?’ said Neil.
‘Two hundred and eighty kilometres.’
He looked at the petrol gauge. It was showing a quarter empty. He said nervously, ‘Are we going to have any difficulty getting petrol outside the city?’
Without turning her head she replied, ‘We don’t need any petrol.’
He stared at her: ‘But we’ve got a hundred and eighty kilometres to go!’
She said nothing. They were driving under the trees now: tall eucalyptuses with silver-green leaves bending, falling gracefully like a girl’s hair, tossed and parted
