It was the sand. Not the healthy pebble sand of a salt-washed beach, but a creeping silver-grey grit — a cloying fibrous substance which was not quite wet, not quite dry, not quite sticky — somewhere between mercury and powdered glass. It rubbed and itched and ate its way into everything, piling up under the windows like a fine layer of ash; collected round the tops of her bottles and jars in the bathroom, clung to the bottom of the bath and the seat of the lavatory, clogged the spray of the shower, and worked its way into the fabric of the towels, the folds of her clothes, the roots of her hair, under her arms and between her legs and toes, into her eyes and mouth and ears.
On the sixth day she was appalled to find a rash beginning round her groin, where the edge of her pants chafed against the top of her thighs. She rubbed on cream, but by the eighth day the rash had spread and become inflamed, until it was uncomfortable to walk. That evening she gave up wearing pants at all, but the rash persisted, and she was now thinking of asking Shiva Steiner if there was an English doctor in town.
Her inbred sense of what was right and proper excluded all possibility of venereal complaints; and the thought that she should get stricken with some horrid little affliction so far from home, so utterly far from friends — and at the one time in her life when she must appear at her most glamorous and unsullied — filled her with humiliation and panic. She pressed her breasts against the stiff gritty sheet and wept.
Her discomfort, as well as her growing fear of humiliation, was increased by the state of her stomach, a condition which deteriorated during the day in equal proportion to that of the plumbing in the Steiner mansion. By mid-afternoon — either because of the storm or through some decrepit malfunction of the city’s water supply — the gold-plated taps ran to a dribble, coughed and dried up. The green onyx lavatory refused to flush.
She made the best of things by damping down both the bathroom and the bedroom with Guerlain’s ‘Chamade’, using the best part of a bottle before Steiner called her on the house phone to ask if she would like to go to a party at the British Embassy. He was not going himself, but his chauffeur would drive her there and wait for her.
She accepted only in the hope of meeting an English doctor. She dressed casually, not taking her customary care over her make-up, swallowed ten milligrams of Valium, and went downstairs feeling drained and feeble.
It was a twenty-minute drive to the city, through the scrambling rush hour traffic of American limousines and donkeys and bicycles, and occasionally the lurching shape of a camel.
Apart from the seafront, which she had seen on a trip into town on her second day, it was an undistinguished city, remarkable only for the ugliness and speed with which it was being developed. She noticed a great many supermarkets, some only half built; shops packed with colour televisions, hi-fi equipment and cassette players; and numerous modern dress shops, several of them full of obscene life-size plastic models, naked and bald.
And everywhere the Ruler’s eyes followed her from large coloured posters.
The Embassy was in a quiet residential quarter on the other side of the city: a modest stone building behind a large garden. There were about two dozen guests in a brightly lit room with a chandelier and Annigoni’s portrait of the Queen. She knew at once that she was in for a heavy evening.
An English footman, looking like an actor, offered her the choice of a sherry or gin and tonic. She asked if he had any vodka, and he said he would look.
She was introduced to the Ambassador, a worried-looking man who seemed to be frowning even when he was smiling. He, in turn, introduced his wife, who was as tall as himself, and larger, with a lot of pale yellow hair and an unhealthy bluish complexion that might have been caused by drink, or just the climate.
The footman had found Sarah a vodka, and the three of them talked about England, the English theatre, and the prospect of the National Theatre coming to Mamounia. It was all very smooth and leisurely and trite, and struck Sarah as being just the kind of conversation the British Ambassador and his wife were supposed to have with visiting compatriots. Only later did it occur to her that not once had either of them asked her a direct question about herself — about what she was doing in Mamounia, how long she was staying, or what she thought of the place.
The Ambassador circulated, leaving Sarah to chat with his wife from whom she learned that their last post had been Buenos Aires — ‘which was heaven compared to this — the climate, anyway’ — this being the only opinion that Sarah heard the woman express. She managed to secure a second vodka and then broached the subject of the British doctor, but was dismayed to learn that there was none; the resident Embassy staff had the choice of a Swiss or an American — ‘both of them good,’ said the Ambassador’s wife, ‘but horribly expensive. It isn’t anything serious, I hope?’
‘Upset tummy, that’s all, Mrs Braintree.’ At this stage, she was not going to confide her other complaint to a stranger.
‘Oh, I’ve got just the thing!’ the woman cried, and hurried Sarah upstairs and led her through the connubial bedroom into a bathroom, where she closed the door and began sorting through bottles in a medicine chest. ‘All runny, are you? Or can’t keep anything down?’ She turned and was smiling down at Sarah with a square-toothed grin.
Sarah, who had always been embarrassed
