When the minibus drew up outside the offices of Chaharbagh Tours Hafiz said it was important for everyone to come inside. He led the way, through the downstairs office and up to the upstairs office. Tea was served. Hafiz handed round a basket of sweets, wrapped pieces of candy locally manufactured, very curious taste, he said. Several men in light-weight suits, the principals of Chaharbagh Tours, drank tea also. When the French professor complained that the tour was not satisfactory, the men smiled, denying that they understood either French or English, and in no way betraying that they could recognize any difference when the professor changed from one language to the other. It was likely, Normanton guessed, that they were fluent in both.
‘Shall you continue after lunch?’ he asked Iris Smith. ‘The Vank Church, an Armenian museum? There’s also the Theological School, which really is the most beautiful of all. No tour is complete without that.’
‘You’ve been on the tour before?’
‘I’ve walked about. I’ve got to know Isfahan.’
‘Then why –’
‘It’s something to do. Tours are always rewarding. For a start, there are the other people on them.’
‘I shall rest this afternoon.’
‘The Theological School is easy to find. It’s not far from the Shah Abbas Hotel.’
‘Are you staying there?’
‘Yes.’
She was curious about him. He could see it in her eyes, for she’d taken off her dark glasses. Yet he couldn’t believe that he presented as puzzling an exterior as she did herself.
‘I’ve heard it’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘The hotel.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘I think everything in Isfahan is beautiful.’
‘Are you staying here for long?’
‘Until tomorrow morning, the five o’clock bus back to Teheran. I came last night.’
‘From London?’
‘Yes.’
The tea-party came to an end. The men in the light-weight suits bowed. Hafiz told the American girls that he was looking forward to seeing them in the afternoon, at two o’clock. In the evening, if they were doing nothing else, they might meet again. He smiled at everyone else. They would continue to have a happy tour, he promised, at two o’clock. He would be honoured to give them the informations they desired.
Normanton said goodbye to Iris Smith. He wouldn’t, he said, be on the afternoon tour either. The people of a morning tour, he did not add, were never amusing in the afternoon: it wouldn’t be funny if the Frenchman with the moving camera got left behind again; the professor’s testiness and Hafiz’s pidgin English might easily become wearisome as the day wore on.
He advised her again not to miss the Theological School. There was a tourist bazaar beside it, with boutiques, where she might find a dress. But prices would be higher there. She shook her head: she liked collecting bargains.
He walked to the Shah Abbas. He forgot about Iris Smith.
She took a mild sleeping-pill and slept on her bed in the Old Atlantic. When she awoke it was a quarter to seven.
The room was almost dark because she’d pulled over the curtains. She’d taken off her pink dress and hung it up. She lay in her petticoat, staring sleepily at a ceiling she couldn’t see. For a few moments before she’d slept her eyes had traversed its network of cracks and flaking paint. There’d been enough light then, even though the curtains had been drawn.
She slipped from the bed and crossed to the window. It was twilight outside, a light that seemed more than ordinarily different from the bright sunshine of the afternoon. Last night, at midnight when she’d arrived, it had been sharply different too: as black as pitch, totally silent in Isfahan.
It wasn’t silent now. The blue taxis raced their motors as they paused in a traffic-jam outside the Old Atlantic. Tourists chattered in different languages. Bunches of children, returning from afternoon school, called out to one another on the pavements. Policemen blew their traffic whistles.
Neon lights were winking in the twilight, and in the far distance she could see the massive illuminated dome of the Theological School, a fat blue jewel that dominated everything.
She washed herself and dressed, opening a suitcase to find a black-and-white dress her mother had made her and a black frilled shawl that went with it. She rubbed the dust from her high-heeled sandals with a Kleenex tissue. It would be nicer to wear a different pair of shoes, more suitable for the evening, but that would mean more unpacking and anyway who was there to notice? She took some medicine because for months she’d had a nagging little cough, which usually came on in the evenings. It was always the same: whenever she returned to England she got a cough.
In his room he read that the Shah was in Moscow, negotiating a deal with the Russians. He closed his eyes, letting the newspaper fall on to the carpet.
At seven o’clock he would go downstairs and sit in the bar and watch the tourist parties. They knew him in the bar now. As soon as he entered one of the barmen would raise a finger and nod. A moment later he would receive his vodka lime, with crushed ice. ‘You have good day, sir?’ the barman would say to him, whichever barman it was.
Since the Chaharbagh tour of the morning he had eaten a chicken sandwich and walked, he estimated, ten miles. Exhausted, he had had a bath, delighting in the flow of warm water over his body, becoming drowsy until the water cooled and began to chill him. He’d stretched himself on his bed and then had slowly dressed, in a different linen suit.
His room in the Shah Abbas Hotel was enormous, with a balcony and blown-up photographs of domes and minarets, and a double bed as big as a night-club dance-floor. Ever since he’d first seen it he’d kept thinking that his bed was as big as a dance-floor. The room itself was large enough for a quite substantial family to live in.
