Crossed Bones

by Jane Johnson

  Rob stared at him. ‘My God,’ he said at last. ‘What have I stepped into here?’

  ‘As I have said before, you should have left well alone and stayed at home.’

  ‘Well, I am here now and damned,’ Rob said grimly.

  27

  Well I am heere nowe & damned I sayde to hym, but how damned I was I did not then knowe…

  ‘I wonder who he wrote this for,’ I said at last, folding the paper and putting it aside among the debris of our breakfast things. We were sitting out on the roof terrace at a rickety old table Idriss had set up there, a huge faded parasol stuck into a concrete block keeping the worst of the mid-morning rays off my pale English skin.

  ‘It’s not a journal?’

  ‘It looks more like part of a letter. See how the photocopy shows the ragged edges all the way around? There’s no sign of a gutter, or any deformation of the words as there would be if Michael had photocopied a book. Strange. It’s on a different sort of paper to the other one too, the letter to Sir Arthur Harris, and the writing looks different, smaller and neater.’

  ‘Maybe he wrote the letter to his employer in a hurry.’

  ‘Or as a young man…’ I bit my lip. ‘So you think Robert Bolitho really came all the way to Morocco to save Catherine from slavery?’

  ‘It was certainly his intention: and he must have succeeded, or the book would never have made it back to England.’

  I sighed. ‘It’s a very romantic story. Perhaps it was a fairytale, after all.’

  Idriss made a face. ‘If he succeeded, though, I do not know why he thinks he is damned. Perhaps he married her, and she turned out to be a bad wife who made him unhappy. Perhaps she was unfaithful, or cruel, or ran away. There is more to the story than we yet know.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I replied non-committally, unwilling to confront the implications of this.

  Catherine’s journal had come to a sudden end in a rather unsatisfactory manner amid a welter of domestic detail. I read that everie daie the women of the kasbah come to the howse to sitte with mee & sew. Wee worke in silkes of everie color known to Man. I have never seene such glorious hues except in the flowers of Lady Harrys garden at Kenegy. She explained how Hasna has taut mee the makyng of the dish they calle the decorated face, whatever that might be. I read of a robe she had sewn; how she had prepared her own kohl from a substance bought in the souk, which she spelled ‘sook’; how she was learning a few words of their language. All this was fascinating information in terms of a historical document; but to me, I am ashamed to admit, it was deeply frustrating. She sounded, I thought, picking through this minutiae peppered with words I did not recognize, rather to be enjoying her time as a Salé slave, if that was indeed what she was: for teaching embroidery in a rather grand-sounding house with no more onerous duties to perform certainly did not fit my picture of the life I would have foreseen for a woman in her situation. Most annoying of all, it did not relate what had happened when Rob miraculously appeared to whisk her back to Cornwall.

  ‘It seems to me,’ Idriss pressed, ‘that your Michael holds the other part of this puzzle.’

  It seemed that way to me too, and the idea made me feel deeply uncomfortable. The photocopies had been bait: he wanted the book and he was using Rob’s letters to lure me to him. I did not want to give him the book, but I did desperately want to know the other side to the story. Even so, I was not yet prepared to face Michael.

  Instead, I asked, ‘What time do we meet your friend Khaled?’

  ‘He will meet us at two at a café near the station.’

  I looked at my watch. It was just coming up to eleven thirty. ‘And what shall we do till then?’

  ‘Let me show you the souks Catherine would have visited, and where I grew up.’

  ∗

  I put on the dark-blue djellaba he had brought me the evening before over my jeans; but the white headscarf foxed me completely: it simply couldn’t contain my abundance of hair. I tried to wear it down my back inside the robe, but whatever I did with my hair, the cloth kept slipping off my head. Eventually I ended up with it screwed up into a knot, and with my hair all over the place.

  ‘Damn!’ I grumbled furiously, and turned suddenly to find a stranger in a grey robe and a blue turban leaning up against the door jamb, watching me silently. It took me a good three seconds to realize that this exotic creature was in fact Idriss.

  ‘Here,’ he said, taking the scarf from me. ‘Let me. With several sisters I have had some practice.’

  His fingers brushed my neck, and I couldn’t tell whether or not it was accidental; then the soft cotton followed, and moments later the fabric had been wound neatly around my head, and I was wearing the veil.

  Thus disguised, we went out into the world.

  The medina was bustling with traffic: a bizarre mix of human, animal and machine. Just as you thought you had entered a pedestrianized area, a man on a scooter would come roaring around the corner, hand pressed exigently to his horn, and everyone would flatten themselves against the narrow walls. Quite how the donkeys coped with such indignities, I had no idea, but they seemed philosophical about it, standing patiently in their traces or tethered to their posts while ever greater burdens were added to their carts or backs.

  The Moroccans in the souk did not appear to share this pacific philosophy. We passed one woman screeching in fury at a man who had just cut a length of pale-blue cotton from a bolt of fabric. It looked as if she might set about him with the bale, for her hands were flailing everywhere, and he was ducking away from her as if from a physical assault. Idriss caught me staring. ‘A disagreement about the price,’ he chuckled. ‘A classic ploy, to complain about it only when the cloth has been cut and then blame the merchant. My aunt used to do it all the time. Then she’d walk off in a fury, leaving the poor man with his head in his hands, only to return a few minutes later and graciously offer him half the price for it.’

  ‘And he’d let her take it?’ I was appalled.

  ‘Of course: he’d already quoted her twice the price he expected to get for it, so they parted satisfied.’

  I shook my head. It seemed a very stressful way of doing business, yet it summed up something about the national character: Morocco appeared to be all about social interaction, while Britain was largely about avoiding it. No one was self-conscious about showing their feelings here. I saw men kissing one another in greeting and walking together hand in hand. ‘They are good friends,’ Idriss explained, ‘and not in the euphemistic way Europeans use that phrase. Here, friendship is to be prized, and when people ask how you are they really want to know, not just hear a stock phrase which keeps them at bay.’

  I smiled. ‘So, how are you today, Idriss el-Kharkouri?’

  He stopped still there in the street and turned to look at me. ‘Before you ask me a question like that, Julia Lovat, you had better be sure you want to hear the answer.’

  Colour flooded my cheeks. I could not help myself: I looked away.

  For a while after that, we walked in near silence through the medina, passing stall after stall of produce and kitchen goods, patisseries and cafés. We turned a corner and came upon an old man with his wares spread out on a black sheet in front of him. A crowd of men had gathered to listen to his patter, their faces rapt. I craned for a better view, and one of the men turned, saw me and glared. Several of his companions followed suit, until Idriss drew me away.

  ‘Why did they stare at me like that? They seemed so hostile.’

  ‘They didn’t want a woman penetrating their male mysteries.’

  ‘What was he selling?’ I demanded angrily. ‘I want to know.’

  ‘Impotency cures, aphrodisiacs, substances for prolonging… the experience.’ He laughed. ‘La merde de la baleine.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Whale shit. Whales are reputed to have enormous… parts. It’s sympathetic magic.’

  ‘But how on earth would you gather whale shit… oh, I see. He’s a con artist.’

 
‘It’s probably some harmless clay. Anyway, he seemed to be doing a good trade. Good luck to him. Al-hamdulillah.’

  ‘Out in the open, in public, too. I thought sex was a taboo subject.’

  ‘You do have some odd ideas. The Qur’an says it is important for a man to satisfy his wife.’

  ‘It does? What an excellent religion.’

  After that, we walked in greater ease, with Idriss pointing out unusual items to me: silver hands of Fatima to ward off the evil eye, rose-water sprinklers, musk and ambergris. At one stall he bought me a small dark-blue lump of rock with an odd metallic sheen to it which the old woman wrapped carefully in a piece of torn newspaper. ‘It’s kohl,’ he explained. ‘The same as Catherine would have bought here. My sister can show you how to use it.’

  He showed me the colourful pottery made at Safi, further down the coast, and exchanged greetings with the ancient, toothless merchant. As we walked away, he told me, ‘Every Saturday I came here first thing in the morning before he set up his stall and he let me unwrap the plates.’

  ‘You loved the pottery so much?’

  He grinned. ‘No: some of them came wrapped in sheets torn out of old comic books – bandes dessinées – which my father wouldn’t let me have at home. He was a very strict man, my father: only the Qur’an was considered suitable reading material for a boy of six. He certainly wouldn’t have approved of the decadent adventures of Rodeo Rick or Pif or Asterix and Obelix. I used to sit at the back of the stall, lost in all these marvellous fragments of story, while my brothers chanted out their verses at home.’

  On the Rue des Consuls we found the ubiquitous carpet-sellers, their Aladdin’s caves hung with fabulous lanterns and gorgeous colour. I watched one of the merchants flourishing rugs at a pair of tourists who had foolishly stopped to admire the display and were now helplessly trapped. No one had tried to sell me anything. At first I had thought this was because of the forbidding presence of Idriss, though I soon realized it had more to do with the robe and hijab I wore, enabling me to move camouflaged and untargeted through the bazaar. Feeling smug, I watched the two Europeans – she in her expensively cut dress and Prada sandals, he, slightly paunchy in chinos and blue seersucker shirt – wriggle like hooked fish under the carpet-seller’s assiduous attentions. Now another man had joined in, flinging carpets dramatically to the floor in front of them. At least a dozen carpets had thus been unfurled: how could they possibly refuse to buy after such a display? One of the carpets came down on top of the woman’s foot, and I saw her jump back and steady herself on her husband’s arm, her face turned up to him in an expression of dismay.

  It was Anna.

  Or rather it wasn’t. It was Anna and Michael, joined together like some symbiotic, two-headed creature, rearing away from attack. Michael had his arm around her, possessive and protective, although he looked just as powerless as she did to ward off the relentless sales pitch.

  For a moment I couldn’t breathe. Then, instinctively, I caught Idriss’s arm, my fingers closing on his hard biceps. ‘Quickly, we have to go quickly!’

  I turned and dragged him away, past the wrought-iron-sellers and the goatskin lamp stalls, until we were out of the medina and by the side of the ring road with traffic roaring past.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  I must have looked as if I was about to faint, for he took me by the elbow and ushered me along the road and into an open doorway, which seemed to lead to an unattended reception area for a tiny hotel. Idriss marched to a door at the back, opened it and shouted a name. Seconds later a young man in jeans and a Manchester United shirt appeared, and the pair embraced.

  ‘This is one of my other brothers, Sadiq,’ Idriss said, grinning. ‘And this is Julia Lovat. She needs tea, plenty of sugar: see what you can do.’

  Sadiq gazed at me, awestruck, said something unintelligible to Idriss and promptly disappeared.

  ‘He says you have eyes like Lady Diana,’ Idriss told me, steering me around the corner to a dimly lit area of sofas and low tables.

  I snorted. ‘How ridiculous. He just means they’re blue.’

  He regarded me solemnly for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s your Englishness. It is very… exotic.’

  Exotic: that was how I thought of him. It was disorientating to realize that the converse might be true. ‘Such shameless flattery.’ I wagged a finger at him. ‘You should be selling snake oil and whale shit alongside that old charlatan in the bazaar.’

  His eyes gleamed. ‘Another string to my bow.’

  Sadiq came with a tray of tea things. I watched Idriss pour out the golden liquid from a deliberately showy height, so that it crashed into the little glass like a miniature waterfall, and then drank it down without complaining about the diabetes-inducing quantity of sugar it contained.

  ‘Now tell me why you ran away.’ I must have looked as uncomfortable as I felt, for he paused. ‘Oh, I am an idiot. Of course – you saw Michael.’

  I bent my head. ‘Yes.’

  He frowned. ‘But I was keeping watch for him – I cannot believe I missed him.’

  ‘He was in one of the carpet-sellers’ booths.’

  ‘There was someone, a couple… the woman was small, dark, very chic.’

  ‘That was Anna. His wife.’ I watched my hands, held loosely in my lap, begin to tremble and told myself the sugar must be having its effect.

  Idriss reached across the table and tilted my chin up. ‘Julia, I think you had better tell me your story – all of it. It strikes me that there is a lot more to it than the possession of an antique book.’

  And so, staring fixedly at the table top, I let it all spill out. My friendship with Anna, my furtive relationship with her husband, my terrors of being discovered, my fear that he would leave me, the way it had shaped the last seven years of my life – a long catalogue of betrayal and moral cowardice. Not once did I raise my head to look him in the eye; I could not. For, suddenly, I realized that it mattered desperately what Idriss thought of me. How and when had that happened? And this first realization was immediately followed by the sickening certainty that by telling him I would ensure that henceforth he would regard me with disgust.

  When at last I had finished spewing out my confession, silence fell between us like a thick glass screen. When an eternity of several seconds had elapsed, I risked a glance upwards, but he was not looking at me. His gaze, cool and distant, was fixed on the coloured glass of the window behind me, as if he wished himself out in the hot, clean sea air beyond, rather than here in the stifling gloom with a woman who had betrayed everyone of importance in her life, and in the process had lost everything, including her self-respect. What must he think of me, this man whose life was so simple and straightforward? He had so little, by the standards of the culture that had raised me; but in all the ways that mattered, he had so much.

  ‘I am horribly ashamed of myself,’ I said quietly into the stiff silence.

  His gaze came back to me slowly. Was I imagining it, or was there cold disdain in those dark eyes now?

  ‘We must go,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Khaled will be waiting for us.’

  He said nothing else to me for the rest of the afternoon.

  The café was on the Rue de Baghdad, just behind the central railway station. Khaled turned out to be a rotund little man in his middle fifties with a smooth, unlined face and twinkling, curious eyes. He wore a white gandoura and, incongruously, a green baseball cap bearing the letters ASS across its crown. He caught my hands and shook them warmly. As my eyes strayed back to the cap he laughed delightedly.

  ‘You like my hat? It is my favourite,’ he said in excellent, barely accented English. ‘I wear it particularly for surprising my American students, who find it hilarious. Stands for Association Sportive de Salé. C’est rigolant, non?’

  Idriss managed a thin smile, while I nodded, grateful for this break in the tension.

  ‘As I said on the telephone, Julia has a book she wants to show you for your opin
ion,’ Idriss started, as if wishing to complete the task as quickly as possible. He switched to Arabic, talking fast, and Khaled’s expression changed to one of shock. A paranoid part of me imagined Idriss telling him that the woman opposite him, looking so innocent in her hijab, was in fact an adulterous infidel, a creature of no morals who had by dubious means come by a treasure she did not merit; that they should relieve her of the book and send her back to the world she came from, where such behaviour was commonplace. I felt my cheeks flushing anew.

  ‘May I see it?’ the professor asked at last.

  Idriss sat back, his expression closed and remote, and lit up a cigarette.

  I reached into my handbag, extricated The Needle-Woman’s Glorie and passed it to him. At the sight of it, Khaled’s eyes grew round and intent. He spread a paper napkin across the melamine table, as if decades of spilled coffee, sugar and ash could by osmosis insinuate their way into its covers to desecrate its contents, and laid Catherine’s book down with the reverence of a man handling a religious relic. His fingers brushed the calfskin, caressed the blind bands on the spine. Then, with infinite care, he opened it and began to read.

  ‘Incroyable.’ The four syllables came separately, the r rolled dramatically.

  ‘Is it real?’ I asked.

  I had sat like a mouse for the best part of two and a half hours, avoiding Idriss’s gaze, instead drinking an unpalatably strong coffee and focusing on the professor turning the pages and tilting the book this way and that. At one point he had produced a magnifying glass, at another a small dictionary. He had tutted and hummed and taken his baseball cap off and scratched his head, revealing an unfortunate comb-over, muttered to himself in Arabic, and then in French, and said something to Idriss that he did not translate for my benefit. He had laughed and flicked back a few pages, as if searching for a reference, before reading on. Now he met my concerned look with a vast grin.