by Jane Arbor
In England, she had read an ordinary regard for a superior into his few references to Mark Triton. What, then, had soured their relations since? On the way in to Tangier, she stole a covert look or two at Guy, taking the reality of him back into her thoughts. His fair smooth hair was sunbleached, but though he had told her his thin skin did not bronze easily, in this strong light it appeared almost pasty. She was vaguely worried, too, by the tracing of shadow under his eyes and by a line of tension from nostril to jaw which was new to her memory of his clear-cut good looks. What was it about his affairs, she wondered again, that seemed to be writing its consequences in his face ?
Breaking a silence, she asked: "Do we know The Day definitely yet, darling? You see, Commander and Mrs. Marguan would rather like all the notice we can give them."
He shook his head. "Not yet. I thought we'd go and see the padre together."
"Oh - yes. And the flat? I know I've threatened you weren't to do anything about furnishing without me, but could I see it tonight?"
"I've told you - you're going to rest until I collect you to take you somewhere gay for dinner. El Minzah, maybe, or the Velasquez Roof. Time enough for the flat in the morning."
"What romantic-sounding names for restaurants! But won't you be on duty in the morning? I've had visions of having to take second place to your dashes by air between places like Rabat and Algeciras and Fez!"
"Yes, well - briefings are done ahead and on a rota, and I can certainly meet you for luncheon tomorrow at about noon. Nobody dreams of eating here till around two, and after that there's at least an hour for siesta. So the flat can certainly wait until then."
"All right." Emma smiled agreement, supposing that no man could be expected to understand how a girl about to be married could manage to fill even an empty flat with her dreams. Meanwhile on all sides there was experience to be taken at great gulps. There was naïve and unabashed delight in her exclamations over everything she saw and, later, she was to realize that her first sight of a veiled woman had spelled for her the infinitely unknowable quality of the East; her first loaded, plodding little donkey, the dignity of its age-old acceptance of Fate. Already, her own new life seemed to be opening up and the Emma Redfern of even yesterday seemed a stranger..
The pension Commander Marguan had found for her was tucked handily behind one of the principal boulevards of the European quarter of the city. Its proprietress, was a black-eyed Frenchwoman who allowed Guy to sit in the salon with Emma for a few minutes before she despatched him with the adroitness of a conjuring trick, insisting that he was not to return before eight in the evening to allow "la petite" to sleep off the effects of her day-long journey.
When Guy had gone she panted up the stairs behind Emma in order to show her to her room. "No doubt you will spend most of your time with your fiancé, mademoiselle? We shall not see you often at meals?" she asked.
"Well, it depends rather on Monsieur Trench's hours of duty," smiled Emma. "They will vary, because he is a pilot for Maritime-Air."
"Ah, well, just a little word to me as to whether you will be in or out will be enough. And Maritime-Air? - now there is a concern of proud standing in Tangier, mademoiselle! Every town and city of all Morocco linked by air to the Mediterranean ports of Europe and by a swift service between them and Tangier. And all through the vision of one man who saw the need! And though there are those who say 'El Triton', as he is called in the city, knows how to spend his wealth on all the riper pleasures, for my part, I consider a man has a right to do what he will with his own after he has put a great deal in the way of others. Par exemple, he may be a little feared, but he is revered by all who work for him. I have a young nephew who begins to learn the makings of an aeroplane and he will not hear a word spoken against El Triton. Yes, indeed, mademoiselle, your fiancé is fortunate to fly for Maritime-Air!"
For some odd reason, Emma felt reassured by this outburst of unexpected tribute to Mark Triton. For one thing, it seemed to cancel out her probably groundless fear that Guy might have cause enough for discontent to make him quit his job. For another, it seemed to vindicate her own instinctive respect for the man's quality, even when he had appeared to sum her up and dismiss her as a mere greenhorn.
Her room was small, rather sparsely furnished in the French manner and cool behind its window shutters closed against the sun. Opened, they gave on to a tiny balcony, just big enough for a chair and an iron table, which overlooked the pension's walled but somewhat parched garden. After Emma had bathed and changed, she sat out on the balcony for a long time, listening to all the unfamiliar sounds about her and drinking in the evening's incredible warmth which mellowed but did not lessen even when the long shadows fell. When Guy called for her at eight, it was already much darker than it would be in England in July; people were still thronging the brilliantly lighted shops and almost every table of every pavement café was occupied. They stopped for aperitifs at the Café de Paris, and in the hour they spent on the terrace watching the passing crowds it seemed to Emma that she had seen a cross-section of the whole world of East and West go by.
Before they left to go for dinner at the Hotel Velasquez, the last light had faded and the sky had turned to a dark sapphire pricked with stars. Yet by Tangier custom it was still early for dining and they were taking their coffee before all the tables on the roof terrace had filled up. The view from the terrace was over the magnificent sweep of the Bay, and Guy was peering into the darkness, trying to identify for Emma the winking lights on the distant coast of Spain, when one of two other guests passing their table accidentally kicked her chair.
"Usted perdone, señorita -” She looked up into the calm face of an elderly Moroccan in a gown of fine white wool and wearing a white fez. She bowed and smiled her acceptance of his apology, and as he moved on her eyes were drawn to his companion. It was Mark Triton, and she saw his glance recognize her and rest momentarily on Guy before Guy turned back to her.
He was in time to see the other two thread their way to the far end of the terrace and take their places at a table. His face shadowed. "Well," he said with a shrug, "at least you can see that at Velasquez I've brought you to mix with the aristocrats! Unusual, though, for Triton to be dining 'stag'. Lately, it has always been La de Coria that he has been dancing attendance on!"
His tone was so sour that Emma was moved to protest. "I didn't know you could be waspish, Guy," she said. "What has gone wrong for you at Maritime-Air?"
He tilted the bottle of wine they had not quite finished, drained it into his glass and drank without pause. ''Gone wrong?" he repeated. "Well, you're going to have to know sometime. So why not now?"
A chill ran along Emma's nerves. "Yes, of course - "
"And when you do, maybe 'waspish' won't be strong enough." He paused, staring at her, his eyes glinting. "Look, Emma, here's the rough of it - thanks to your knight-errant of this afternoon, dear friend Triton, you and I aren't going to be able to marry as we planned!"
"Not marry?" Momentarily, it was as if all the promise and the hope which had propped her world for four months had been snatched away. Then her reason told her that no despot of an employer could come between her and Guy so easily, and she managed a tremulous laugh. "I don't understand,'' she began. "Even Mark Triton couldn't possibly forbid—"
"I didn't suggest he could," Guy cut in. "He has just made it impossible for the present, that's all. Listen - a few weeks ago I blotted my copybook by not turning up to carry out an early morning rota-call to take a crate down to Rabat-”
"Oh, Guy - you were late, as you often are?"
"I wasn't late. I didn't show up at all. I'd been on a party and I overslept. Another pilot did the flight to Rabat, and the next thing I knew I'd been grounded and put on to counter-jumping and clerk's stuff in the city office, with a savage cut in my pay."
"But - but was it your first offence! It sounds terribly unjust! All the same, though," declared Emma, on a sigh of relief, "it doesn't affect us as you've suggested, surely? We sha
ll just have to go slow on our spending, manage to economize-”
Guy's mouth twisted. "It's worse than that," he said. "I shouldn't care for you to have an idea of what the going is like for an unattached in a place like Tangier. But you can take it from me that it's pretty fierce, with the temptation to spend all he's got -”
"And some he hasn't? Guy, are you telling me you're in debt?"
He inclined his head. "Pretty deep. And we can't go ahead with getting married straight away because - this you're not going to like - I've had to let the flat go."
Too hurt herself to spare him, Emma protested: "But how could you go on thinking of yourself as unattached when you were engaged to me?"
"Engaged, yes - to a girl the best part of a thousand miles away! You should have married me when I wanted you to, in England!"
"And you should never have let me come out here, only to tell me that you can't marry me now!"
Their long stare at each other was hot with resentment. Then Emma crumpled into sudden pity for him, caught in a situation that she supposed, she couldn't hope to understand. She laid a hand over his on the table-top and asked, more quietly: "Why did you let me come just yet? A few months more wouldn't have made so much difference to what we're ultimately going to mean to each other. I could have kept my job and gone on saving, instead of being just an extra worry to you while you get straight."?
"And what sort of an opinion would you have had of me if I'd had to write all this, I wonder?"
"Oh, Guy, as if it would have made any difference! Besides, Uncle Edward and Aunt Ella are going to be awfully shocked. I could have explained things, to them better in England, I think. And there, are Commander and Mrs. Marguan, too - "
Guy said: "Darling, don't drag in trivial red herrings, please. Weddings have been put off before now. But if you must know, I let you come partly because I found it too difficult to write what I had to ask you - whether, in fact your uncle might be able to help?"
Emma flinched with distaste. "Guy, no! They are retired people, living on life-insurances, things like that. I couldn't possibly ask them."
"All right. Forget it," he shrugged. "I daresay I'll get by-”
"We'll get by," she corrected, smiling at him. "I've got some money, but I can't just sit around. I'll have to get a job, too."
"With practically no Spanish, only schoolgirl French and no Arabic at all? In almost any job in Tangier you'd need the lot. No - it's a hurdle taken to have told you, and I daresay things will work out."
"Well, you'll be reinstated as a pilot in time, won't you?" Emma asked.
"Always supposing I want reinstatement in Triton's good time. It could be, though, that he's not altogether the demi-god his name implies and that when he decides to call the tune I mayn't be so ready to dance - "
At that, Emma saw that the small boy in Guy needed to bluff for pride's sake. So, though from the day's earlier misgivings she seemed to have come to the very edge of an abyss, of insecurity, she did not demur when Guy suggested they should go somewhere and dance. From the cosmopolitan luxury of the Velasquez, she could guess that the evening must cost more than they ought to afford. But it was Guy’s gesture of welcome to her and she must not cheat him of it. Besides, they still had each other, hadn’t they? And tomorrow they would go into strict committee on ways and means....
Dancing together, she and Guy were always in accord and it was easy not to broach their problem again that night. It did not flood in again until she was alone in the neat strangeness of her room and then, tired as she was, she heard for the first time the thin, high dawn-call of the muezzin from the minaret in the Old Town before she slept.
It proved more difficult than she expected to pin down Guy to a frank discussion of their finances and prospects. He promised to incur no more debts at all, but he was vague about the steps he was taking to repay those he already had. When Emma suggested they should make a list and allot an amount regularly from his pay he begged her not to “pester” him, and hurt her by refusing to agree. That they were a responsibility she had a right to share.
Nor would he agree to her seeking a job, and indeed Emma herself saw the futility of doing so while he had only a smattering of the many languages in everyday use in Tangier. And by the time she might be able to take an office or shop post, Guy claimed that he should be “in the clear”.
One of her hardest tasks of those first days was to write home to England with unshadowed confidence. She dreaded her uncle’s judgment on Guy’s lack of candour with her, but her first loyalty was to Guy, after all. She was not satisfied with the resulting letter. But at least it did not conceal the bare truth and there was no need to tone down her delight and fascination with Tangier. She could afford to be less frank with Commander and Mrs. Marguan, to whom she wrote only that there had been a hitch in the arrangements for her wedding, but that she' would write again before very long.
Meanwhile, she saw Guy every day. At first, she was puzzled by the long hours he seemed to have free to spend with her. But this, he explained, was because office hours were different from those in England. He was at work before was up in the morning, he said, and so could lunch and swim with her throughout the long siesta of the afternoon. Occasionally, too, they met in the morning for coffee or for tall glasses of mint tea, the aromatic flavour of which Emma was quickly growing to like. In the evenings, they would either dine at her pension for economy’s sake, or they would visit a cafe whose displayed prices she would have studied during the day. Guy grumbled a good deal about such cutting of their coat according to their cloth. But she told him laughingly that she was well used to it and that it did make treats the sweeter when they happened.
On one such evening, when Emma had waited at their rendezvous for much longer than usual, she decided to go to call for him at the block of flats nearby, where he rented a single room. But at the portera’s booth, the woman told her he was not in, though she could wait in the hall, if she wished.
Slightly puzzled but not worried, Emma waited. People came and went and the self-propelled lift clanked many journeys up and down. But Guy did not come, and while Emma hesitated between returning to their rendezvous and staying where she was, the portera emerged from her booth, locked it and came over to her.
By dint of their combined Spanish and English and some sign language, Emma understood that the woman had to go to attend to her baby in the basement. But this message which had come some time ago for Señor Trench — would Emma give it to him if he came in?
Emma took the proffered paper, only to return it with a shake of her head. “It is in Spanish. I do not understand, señora" she said before she remembered that she could have passed on the paper, intact, to Guy.
But the woman was already saying: “Of course, it is as I have written it myself when, it came by telephone. Perdón, Señorita. In English it says” — she frowned over a slow translation — “that Señor Trench must offer himself at the airport to take an aeroplane to Marseilles at twenty hours tonight—”
“To fly to Marseilles tonight!” Emma almost snatched the paperback, only to see that the portera had not added the source of the message when she had taken it down. Emma tapped it urgently. “The telephone message — it came from Maritime-Air?”
The woman shrugged. “I do not remember. I was busy. I believed it was enough to write what I have written there. Orders of the same sort have been left for Señor Trench before.”
“Yes. Yes, I see. And of course from Maritime-Air -” Emma was thinking aloud and in English as she glanced at her watch and realized the tall implication of what she read there.
Guy was being recalled to flying duty already. Probably on an urgent emergency which must have arisen after he had left the city office of Maritime-Air for the night, or he would have been contacted there. It could mean reinstatement for him! But — he must report out at the airport, before eight o’clock, and it was already past seven!
If he failed this time, even through no fault of his own, w
hat would mean that for him - for them both? And where was he, if, when she raced back to their rendezvous, he was not already there?
The portera had moved away towards the basement stairs when Emma ran after her and plucked at her sleeve. “Noticias importantes," she pleaded, tapping the paper again. “Do you know, señora, where Señor Trench might be? Any shop, a barber’s, perhaps, or a tobacconist’s, where he calls often and where I could hope to find him?”
The woman shook her head. “I do not know, señorita."
“Nowhere?”
The woman hesitated. Then she allowed, reluctantly: "Nowhere like that. But my brother, who is, a kitchen man at the café-bar La Casa del Sol, tells me he sees the Señor there often - every night or during the day.”
“But-” Emma stopped. No time to argue that the café in question could not have seen Guy lately as he had never taken her to it. “Thank you, señora. Where is La Casa del Sol?”
“It is in the medina - within the Kasbah, you understand? Difficult to tell you exactly. If you wish to go there, señorita, a taxi-”
“Yes, yes, I will take one.” Thrusting the message, for Guy into her bag, Emma spoke over her shoulder, already on her way. Outside the block she hailed one of the small runabout taxis and directed the driver first to her rendezvous with Guy and, when he was still not there, to the Casa del Sol.
The short dusk was falling as the taxi sped through the crowded streets towards the labyrinth of the medina, the Moorish Old Town piled about the fortress within a fortress, the Kasbah. It crossed the Grand Socco, where Guy had taken" Emma on a market morning and where she had been glad to have him with her among the milling press of people about the stalls and booths selling everything from brassware, baskets and flowers to kohl, many shades of henna and sad-eyed live chickens and ducks. Beyond the Grand Socco it plunged into narrower streets and still narrower, where the only lighting came from open shop doorways and garish hanging signs.
