proof of this (the details were locked in Monsieur de Hoag's private safe) but he found the idea odious and used it to justify the adulteries in his dreams.
After Christmas the rains began, great torrential showers. Claude left Tangier to spend the winter with friends in Kenya, and a few weeks later Monsieur de Hoag set off for Sao Paulo to inspect his holdings there. Jean, alone with the servants in the old villa, wandered from room to room at night. Water slashed upon the roof, mud slid down the Mountain. Tangier was wet and dark, its cafe s were dreary, full of Moroccans shrouded in hoods that gave off an odor of mildewed wool.
Somehow he got through the winter, consoled by the Hawkins', the Beaumonts, Inigo, Vanessa Bolton, Robin Scott. And then, in spring, Tangier became his mistress-he fell in love with the city once again.
He lavished love upon it as before he'd lavished love on Claude. Its arches, its gardens, its whiteness enchanted him, filled him with tenderness, compelled him to explore. Flowers were bursting out, blossoms on the bougainvillea, lace on the jacaranda trees. He walked the Boulevard, strode through the Socco, discovered the markets, the souks, found places where men beat copper, worked leather, fashioned clay, spun wool. He spent hours in the medina, listening for music that erupted in sudden bursts from shadowed doors. He visited the spice shops, priced ambergris, tasted olives, almonds, dates, then prowled the junk stores looking for Berber jewelry, pausing by fountains to watch women washing clothes. He breathed the rankness of the medina, the dust of the Casbah walls. The beaches, white, untouched, glowed like platinum in the sun. On golden Sundays he sat on Avenue d'Espagne watching the waves thunder against the jetties in the bay. This was a city, he thought, made for lovers, a city built for passion, for long kisses and secret trysts. Its faint putrescence, its architectural decay provided shelter for his lust.
And then Claude came back from Kenya, tanned, aglow. The house was alive again. She worked her garden, cut flowers, placed them everywhere in bowls. She seemed to smile at him more often, and even Monsieur de Hoag was less hard with him than before.
He'd been foolish, he thought, to have dreamed of loving her. Tangier was a city so palpable with romance that it had forced him to invent a lover lest the brilliant setting go to waste.
He decided to concentrate on tennis, in the hope that the discipline of vigorous exercise would clear her from his mind. He began to get up early, run down the Mountain to improve his wind. He played an hour before breakfast with a trainer, and after work returned and played again till dusk. He picked up matches with Spanish businessmen and young, aggressive Moroccans. His game improved. He won a tournament. His body tanned. He became lean and hard.
One afternoon when he returned from the courts Claude stopped him in the hall. She wanted to take up tennis, she said, and asked him if he'd help. He told her that of course he would, and so, with Monsieur de Hoag's approval, they went together to the little tennis shop on Rue Goya and he watched as she was outfitted with a racket, shoes, and clothes.
She was awkward at first, broke her swing at the wrist, but he coached her until she could play a decent game. He ran her about the court, fed her backhands, slices, forehands, serves, and when he noticed an error in her form he crossed to her side of the net, stood behind her, placed his hand beside hers on the racket, and slowly moved her through the strokes.
It was then that his adoration was revived. Her body became demystified. He became accustomed to touching her, seeing her bare arms and legs, looking at her face beaded with perspiration, thinking of her as a woman, warm, alive. His dreams of the autumn, formal ballets played out against sun-dappled seascapes, gave way quite suddenly to moist fantasies of flesh, thrashing limbs, grasping hands, sucking tongues and mouths.
He felt then that they shared a physical attraction, all the more powerful because it was unspoken and taboo. He'd catch her watching him, and sometimes, when he stood behind her pressed against her back, he'd feel her spine tremble where they touched as if her body, heated by exercise, was crying out. He knew then that he only had to wait, that sometime soon, at the proper moment, when they were alone or in public unobserved, he had only to let his hand linger a moment too long and she would not be able to resist.
But when? When might he do it? When might he seize her, kiss her, caress her, cause her to moan and heave? How would they become lovers?
It would not be easy, for Tangier was small. The people of the town liked nothing better than to spy upon their neighbors and unravel their affairs. So the tennis court became a stage where they enacted an erotic dance. They used the public game to disguise their private play. Each rally held a hidden meaning, each exchange of shots was a coupling in code. A soft service became a caress. A smash was an aggressive thrust. Sometimes he'd toy with her, feed her soft seductive lobs, and then, when she was near the net, he'd send a passing shot hurtling by her side. They'd smile at each other as if to acknowledge the meaning of the play. They were tennis lovers. Their courtship was the game. With swishing rackets they flirted hour after hour, vigorously twitching each other's lust.
Afterward, on the club terrace, drinking beer in sweat-soaked clothes, Jean would recognize the glint of desire in her eyes, but he said nothing, determined she should make the first advance.
She did, finally, on a hot May afternoon. Monsieur de Hoag was in Geneva on a business trip. Jean had left the office early to join Claude on the courts at noon. They played hard, the heat was terrific, and afterward Claude suggested they take a drive.
It was a cloudless, windy day of violent waves on the Atlantic shore. She chose a deserted little bay between Cap Spartel and Robinson Plage. They parked on the cliffs, climbed down to the beach, and without a word started to undress. Finally, standing bare, they turned to one another and stared. There was a pause as they ached and tensed, the sort of pause, it seemed to Jean, that must always occur before a passionate event. Then she came to him, circled his waist, pressed her cheek against his shoulder. He felt her shudder as he wrapped her in his arms.
They made love in a cranny in the cliffs, searing, thrusting, violent. Then, pulled apart, they lay on their backs in the sand, chests heaving, listening to the surf. Jean wanted to speak, but all his thoughts were chaotic. He was conscious only that their act had been momentous, and that by it everything in his life was now, irrevocably, changed.
They made love again. This time she rode him. He gazed up at her, her face held high, her turquoise eyes upon the sea reflecting back the sun. She rode and rode, never looking down. Waves smashed against the sand. He felt that they were joined.
Afterward they swam, then licked the salt off each other's cheeks.
At the house that night she led him to her suite. The weeks of tennis had built up such a backlog of desire that it took them until dawn to use it up. They were savage with each other, devouring, excessive. He ravished her, again and again, and she provoked him further with demands. Finally, when they were finished, Jean felt they'd pushed to the limits of their polarity. He was proud of his manhood, and falling off to sleep he was conscious that his sense of it had been enlarged.
When Monsieur de Hoag came back and they could no longer be alone, they'd brush against each other in the villa halls. Their hands would touch fleetingly as they'd seat themselves for dinner. Over breakfast in the mornings they could hardly bear the stress.
After a few days Claude could stand it no longer. She suddenly stopped playing tennis in the middle of a match. They got into her car and drove madly down the coast. In Asilah, in a Portuguese hotel, they made love on a stained old mattress while dry thunder rumbled in the sky.
Tangier embraced them. Something tragic about the city, Jean thought, provided resonance for their affair. He thought of himself as a man living in a decaying temple; he prayed at an altar of erotic love while a storm raged outside.
Through May and June Monsieur de Hoag was constantly away, on a series of brief business trips to Zurich, Monaco, and Rome. On one of these occasions Jean and Claude were invited together to Barclay's house, a strange, irrelevant dinner, Jean thought, where Claude's father had acted like a fool. Apropos of nothing the General turned to the Governor and began complaining about his phone. Jean, embarrassed, looking around, confronted Omar Salah glaring at him with hate.
Afterward he told Claude, then asked if she thought Salah suspected their affair.
'It wasn't Salah who was watching you,' she said with a scornful laugh. 'It was Barclay. He couldn't tear his eyes away.'
'But why?'
