He stood up, smiling uncertainly. It was the first time he had heard her speak English: correctly, but with a marked French accent, as though defying the infectious drawl of her husband’s tongue. ‘Can I give you a lift anywhere?’ he asked.
‘No, I am going just to the American Embassy. Thank you.’
Murray held his hand to his eyes, squinting down the hot sleepy street, thinking of some excuse to delay her. Lunch was over, cafes closed for the siesta, and it was too early for a respectable drink; only the dark air-conditioned clip-joints down the main street were open, and he did not want to risk a refusal.
‘Yesterday I did not realise,’ she said suddenly, ‘that you are the Mister Wilde who taught at Huế University. Faculté des Lettres, je crois?’
‘That’s right. Do you know Huế?’
‘Bien sûr! Or perhaps I should say I used to know it — before they destroyed it. It was the most beautiful city in the Orient. It was a crime what they did!’ Her voice had risen to an unexpected note of passion, subsiding at once into neutrality: ‘You were there when it happened, weren’t you? It must have been very disagreeable.’
But Murray said nothing, and there was a heavy pause. He suddenly had no wish to talk more about Huế: it was too painful for preliminary small-talk. For several seconds they stood facing each other in the silent shade of the temple. ‘How long are you staying in Vientiane?’ he said at last, a little desperately, remembering Le Bar des Amis — quiet and cool at this hour, the fans still working by courtesy of the Thai cable across the river.
‘My husband’s stationed most of the time in Vietnam. We’ve been here for four months, but we go back next week.’
‘You live in Saigon?’
‘The Americans give us a house there. It’s not very amusing, but at least it’s better than this village. I hope we’ll be sent some day to Hong Kong.’ She gave a small despairing shrug: ‘Mais on ne sait jamais.’
‘Come and have a drink at the hotel. Something to remind you of France,’ he added, with forced enthusiasm; and for the fraction of a second she hesitated.
‘No, I must go to the Embassy. Thank you.’
He watched her longingly out of sight, her body moving elusively under the loose Chinese tunic — wondering how long it had been since he’d had a girl like that? Perhaps never. He had not even asked her where she came from.
It was stifling inside the jeep and Murray’s hands left wet marks as he unfolded the French roadmap, Croquis Routier de L’Indo-Chine, which he had bought second-hand that morning from a local bookshop. There seemed to be no up-to-date maps of the country: the Americans inhabited a land made up, it seemed, not of towns and villages, but of numbered grid references, drop zones and radio-compass bearings. He had also found one sketchy map of Vientiane — a largely useless document marking only ‘friendly’ embassies, the Post Office and the USIS library. But it did show the road out to the airport — and, even more important, where it joined the long-neglected Route Nationale Treize, now Highway Thirteen, up to Luang Prabang.
It was for this road that Murray Wilde now headed — first checking the exact time and mileage, writing both down in his notebook. He avoided passing the American Embassy, in case he ran into Luke who would almost certainly want to know where he was going. Instead he made a detour round the deserted Morning Market, past the guards at the Pathet Lao vegetable garden, up the broad dusty avenue towards the Monument des Morts — an impressive imitation of the Arc de Triomphe, plastered with lavish gold-leaf and still unfinished after ten years, straddling a road that had ceased to exist, commemorating the dead of wars that had not yet happened.
It was impossible to drive through it because of some innovations that had been started inside on a row of golden Buddhas. Murray had to mount the muddy track round the side, driving on past the embassies of Laos. Solid stone residences set back in luxuriant grounds where the French colons had once held court were now peopled by random groups of international squatters. Weary, womenless men, dried up by the heat, their livers in disrepair, their political alignments warped by the daily task of fighting the Laotian telephone service, enraged by the gay corruption of the Lao leaders, and by the maddening problem of countering rumours of battles, both past and impending, with the reality of a largely non-existent army whose few indolent officers spent most of their time smuggling gold and drugs.
Only the Americans, in their hermetically sealed hygienic compound, with its own plumbing, water-purification plant and closed-circuit television, lived in happy expectation of Laos surviving the twentieth century. They, after all, had something to offer — not only rice and blackboards and comics, but also a dam. The High Dam of Nam Ngum.
About a mile beyond the Monument he passed a forlorn signpost marked, RN 5. HANOI 579 Kms; and a few hundred yards on came another, almost equally futile: RN 13. LUANG PRABANG 224 Kms. From here the road began to deteriorate rapidly — a humped deep-rutted track raised slightly above the level of the rice paddies where water buffalo wallowed up to their necks and wattle-roofed huts squatted on their stilts, their doors crammed with naked children who waved and howled with pleasure as he passed. But Murray scarcely noticed them; his eyes were on the details of the road, noticing now the modern steel telegraph poles on one side, carrying just a single wire.
After another couple of miles he came up behind an elephant that filled the whole road, with two small boys
