‘We’d given you up for dead,’ she said, her lips forming a smile. ‘Some of us before others.’
‘I don’t owe you money too, do I?’
She snorted. ‘Well, I never did expect to get it back.’ Her eyes settled on Norton, lingering at the bottom of the stairs. ‘But what have you brought us?’
‘A compatriot of yours,’ Sam said, enjoying Norton’s expression. ‘This is Ellis Norton, he’s here with Interpress, fresh off the boat.’
‘How dreadful for you.’ The woman smiled at Norton with all her teeth. A great many of them were gold. ‘I’ll bet you wanted Rome.’
Norton flushed, extending a hand. ‘I’m determined to make the best of it, Mrs …?’
Sam winced and leaned over the bar to call Roger from the back room.
The woman was staring Norton down. ‘Mrs Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s Captain. Captain Elizabeth Lowe.’
‘Bet used to have a ship,’ Sam murmured over his shoulder.
Norton seemed at a loss, before clapping a hand to his jacket pocket. ‘Ah, perhaps a drink?’
‘Now, young man,’ Bet said, biting off the end of the cigar, ‘you are speaking our language.’
Roger appeared, limping and gruff as always, and got them a round of beers. He’d grown even hairier since Sam had last seen him. No one really knew how the Welshman had ended up in Tangier, running a hole in the wall. There were a dozen stories about him. Someone said he’d been in a secret desert task force during the war, and couldn’t bring himself to go back to Swansea with all the blood on his hands. Others said he’d been in the Merchant Navy, and had gone AWOL one night only to wake up in the casbah two weeks later with the keys to a bar in his pocket.
And you, Sam asked himself, draining the glass of beer, what great story can you tell? A dropout, begging from his parents? The writing case sat beside him, bringing back a memory of the letter; a first chapter of something new. Perhaps not, he thought.
The bar soon began to fill up with regulars, many of whom had been coming for so long they’d worn the grooves of their arses into the bench. Sam knew better than to try and sit in their places. Bet sat at her table, next to the record player, nearest to the bar. Next to her sat Dr Halligan who taught at the American school and usually had a few college students in tow – undergrads who’d lost the sheen of home. Giles from the British Embassy, sipping his Benedictine; Kline from – nobody knew where Kline was from. Germany, perhaps. Or Switzerland. Anyway, he had something to do with shipping, and was perpetually murmuring to Bet about tide times and anchorage. Wizened Derek Bluff and his glamorous wife Lina. Sam couldn’t help but blush when she leaned in to kiss him on both cheeks, filling his nose with powder and perfume. Roger once told him that Lina was a White Russian who had been a spy, and that Bluff was the British Service man who had unmasked her one fateful night in Gibraltar, only to fall unaccountably in love.
Sam exchanged pleasantries with them, brushing off questions about his writing, about where he had been. He wasn’t sure why he’d stopped coming to The Hold. He’d begun to feel as if it was a strange hinterland, a twilight zone between the denouement of a story and a coda that never came. Everyone there had a past; a wild, dangerous, murky past, yet now they lingered, the crescendo behind them. He felt so blank in comparison. High school, college, summer work, bumming around England and France and Spain. In Connecticut, that made him adventurous, but here …
He glanced over at Norton, who was holding forth to Giles about his golf handicap. Sighing, he called to Roger for another couple of beers.
Over at her table, Bet was peering down at a map that Kline had spread before her, and was marking things in pencil, talking softly. When he appeared, they both looked up abruptly.
‘Here,’ he said, passing her the beer. ‘Am I interrupting?’
‘No, no.’ Kline folded the map away. ‘I am picking only Bet’s knowledge. Please.’ He vacated his seat, indicating Sam should take it.
He did, and took a sip of the lukewarm beer. In the background, one of Halligan’s students was trying to replace the jazz record with David Bowie. Sam glanced over at Bet. He’d never been able to guess her age. Anywhere from fifty-five to seventy-five. It was impossible to tell.
‘Remind me, how long have you been in Tangier, Bet?’ he asked in the end, raising his voice over the start of the Bowie record, with its trumpets and squelchy notes. She looked at him steadily, and in the dimness of the bar, in the pungent cloud of cigar smoke, the voice from the record player seemed to be coming out of her blue eyes, singing of dead-end streets.
‘Long time,’ she said, tapping the cigar into the tray.
‘But how long?’ he pressed. ‘What year?’
She frowned at him. Information was a currency, in Tangier.
‘1951, or thereabouts,’ she said eventually. ‘After I was demobbed from the Wrens and nearly went out of my mind with boredom in Plymouth. A girlfriend got a job on a pleasure boat here, serving drinks, said I should join her.’ Bet puffed on her cigar. ‘It was the International Zone then. Anyone and everyone came here. You couldn’t move for embassies and freight companies, French, Spanish, American, Dutch, Italian, it didn’t matter. I wanted to sail so it worked for me.’ She showed a few gold teeth. ‘All those charts and radar plotting during the war, I could’ve sailed from here to Gib with my eyes closed. Fat lot of good it did. No one willing to hire a female pilot, in those days. But eventually I met … a person who ran an import-export concern.’ She slid a glance at Sam. ‘They gave me a job. Said I was the best they’d ever seen. We worked together for years after that.’
Sam smiled, trying not to let his disappointment show, but Bet caught it anyway. She laughed, blew out smoke. ‘Not what you wanted to hear?’
‘Yes, I did,’ he hurried. ‘It’s just, I found something the other day, from the late 1920s …’
As the bar grew more crowded, he found himself telling her about his trade with Abdelhamid, about the Hermes and the old writing case, the calendar in it and the letter he’d written, which – he was sure – had been taken at the café.
‘There was an old man,’ he said, over the sound of a few young Moroccan guys calling greetings to Roger from the stairs. ‘He was watching me in the mirror.’
Unlike Norton, Bet didn’t roll her eyes. She only frowned. ‘Old man,’ she repeated. ‘How old? What did he look like?’
‘Hard to say. Seventy, maybe? He was wearing dark glasses, big ones, and an old-fashioned hat. Western clothes, a suit, I think.’
Bet tapped her empty glass on the table. ‘Done something you shouldn’t have, Sam?’
The ease with which she asked it shocked him. Another reminder I’m not from her world, he thought.
‘No. I’ve not been doing anything. Apart from smoking kif.’
She snorted. ‘Well then. You’ll just have to wait until you see him again, won’t you?’
‘Yeah.’ A moment later, Sam dug into his pocket, pulling out the piece of leather. ‘Listen, I don’t suppose you know what—’
Before he could finish, Norton stepped up to the table. He held a sticky glass, and the scent of Benedictine, herby and boozy, hung around him.
‘Captain Lowe,’ he said, pulling up one of the stools, ‘I’ve just been hearing the most marvellous stories from Giles. He said you were a smuggler ! Is that true?’
Norton’s necktie was loosened, his face flushed. At another time, Sam might have said that he was drunk, but just the day before he’d seen the man dispatch three double whiskies, and barely blink. Perhaps the heat was getting to him. He glanced over at Bet. Everyone knew the rumours about her, but there was something uncouth about saying it aloud, to her face. He shifted in his seat, but she only laughed.
‘All ancient history.’ She put out the cigar. Without it, she seemed smaller, older. She gave Norton a little smile. ‘How about another drink, dear boy?’
‘Of course.’ He was on his feet. ‘Beer was it? Back in a tick.’
/> Sam watched him move towards the bar, belching out a loud ‘excuse me’ to the Moroccan guys. He looked back to find Bet’s eyes fixed on Norton.
‘Hmm,’ she murmured, before levering herself to her feet. ‘I must have a word with Giles. Bring my drink over when it arrives, Sammy, there’s a love.’ Her eyes fell on the scrap of leather that lay forgotten on the table. ‘Where d’you get that old thing?’
‘This—’ He stared at her, before grabbing it up. ‘You know what this is?’
She gave him a pitying look. ‘You young people. I will admit though, most places use paper these days.’
‘Bet, what is this?’
She was searching through her handbag for something. ‘It’s a cloakroom tag, from the Continental. I’d recognize that old tomcat design anywhere. The manager used to write me the most obscene love notes on the hotel stationery. “Elizabetta, Pirate Queen”, he called me – where are you going?’
He had grabbed the writing case and was pushing his way towards the stairs, the tag clutched in his hand, not caring whose feet he stepped on. As he reached the doorway, Norton turned from the bar, his hands full of drinks, eyes fixed sharply on Bet. A second later, he saw Sam and his expression changed, melting into a wide smile. ‘Hey!’ he yelled.
But Sam couldn’t think about Norton now, he couldn’t think about anything except Bet’s words: Cloakroom tag, Continental. Thanks to the case, he had written, truly written for the first time in months. And now, here was something else, a clue to the mystery. It might lead to a second chapter, and that chapter might lead to a third … This could finally be what he had been searching for through the streets of London and Paris and Barcelona, across the beaches of Málaga and the Strait of Gibraltar: a story, one that would make him want to write and write and never stop.
Bloodhound
Take three quarters of a pony of French vermouth and the same of Italian vermouth. Add a jigger of dry English gin. Crush two or three ripe strawberries in your hand, and shake until truly muddled.
It was the silence that woke me, abrupt and strange. Groggily, I moved my hand, expecting to find one of the inn’s cats whirring and kneading my legs. Instead, I found metal and wood resting in my lap. The knife.
I opened my eyes. Before me was a grime-encrusted windscreen and through it I saw the sky pink with dawn, like blood beneath the skin. Day would be breaking in Córdoba too, illuminating the mess of the night I had left behind; the stains on Elena’s rug, the Señor’s eyes, weighted down by coins. In a rush, it all came back: my flight into the feria, the darkness and the knife in my hand, my escape from Córdoba in this van, driven by an old man heading south, with his cargo of empty wine casks.
I had told him that I lived near Ronda – a name I pulled from my memory – and that my purse had been stolen during the feria and with it my bus fare home. He knew I was lying. He knew it from my bruised nose and shaking hands, from my strange, jumbled attire. But he had eyed my chest and laughed and said he would be happy to help a nice girl like me.
As soon as I had shut the door, he’d tried to take his payment, his hands pushing at my legs, groping my chest. But I had been ready and shoved him back, saying I was a good Catholic girl. He’d laughed again, as if at some great joke, and might have continued had I not taken the knife from my waistband and showed it to him. He left off then, and was sour as he started the engine and drove into the night. Still, from the glances he cast my way, I knew he had not given up on the idea.
I blinked hard, trying to see where and why we had stopped. My mouth felt dry and sour, limbs stiff and aching from the long drive. As I sat up, I caught movement in the van’s mirror: my own reflection. A girl was staring back at me, her hair a tangled mess, a bruise seeping across her cheeks from a swollen nose. I touched it, and she winced.
I was about to lean forwards, rub at my eyes and push at my hair when I saw something else in the mirror behind me. A man was emerging from a shed. I slumped down, pretending to sleep, and watched through lowered eyes as he stared at the van, scratching at his crotch through a pair of overalls. Only when he moved away, when a door squealed open, did I open my eyes again and look around.
We were parked outside a shack, wooden-walled and tin-roofed and covered in advertisements for oil and shellac and cigarettes. The driver of the van was inside the shack, then, with the man in overalls. Cold fear and nausea washed through me. One old man I could handle, but two …
Stowing the knife in my belt, I opened the door as quietly as I could. Beyond the gasoline pumps I could see no other buildings; there would be no one to hear if I screamed. Instead, the land rolled away into greyness. In the distance were the smudges of mountains. I had no idea where I was.
I slipped to the ground. Out here, I could hear the murmur of the men’s voices, could smell gasoline and cigarette smoke and road dust on the dawn air. I crawled around the back of the van, and peered out.
On the other side of the road was a slope. If I could make it that far, I might be able to get out of sight. But the distance between the shack and the road’s edge seemed impossible. Everything else was still and silent; even if I crept, they would surely hear my footsteps …
A bark of laughter, a cough and the shifting of furniture made my decision. I took off. Four paces, five, and the door clattered open behind me. At any moment, I thought I’d hear someone pursuing, feel someone grab at my shoulder, but there was the edge of the road, and the slope beyond. Throwing myself over it, I lost my footing and fell, tumbling over and over down a steep slope, until my shoulder collided with something hard and I slid to a stop, the knife clattering from my grip.
For long moments I didn’t move, the wind knocked out of me, dust filling my mouth. Grey shapes loomed all around, pale and twisted. Olive trees.
There was a yell from the top of the slope. The driver – shouting that I was a puta and that they’d find me. A handful of stones came raining down amongst the trees. I didn’t make a sound, not even when one of them caught me on the leg. Finally, he swore to himself and hurried back towards the shack. I didn’t wait around to see whether he’d return.
It makes no difference what I did or said to get myself away from that place. Just as it matters not at all whether the men I eventually persuaded to pick me up by the roadside were carrying tomatoes or grapes or eggs on the back of their van. What matters is that it happened, that they took me as far as their destination.
Gibraltar.
I had heard of the place from Ifrahim’s tales; a rock in the ocean, a great lion rearing and turned to stone. The first time I saw it, I thought it was a trick of the afternoon heat. But we drew closer and I knew that it was real: a mountain at the edge of the sea.
And the sea … I had never seen it before. Can you imagine that? The only water I knew was that of the Guadalquivir river, sluggish and brown and clogged with reeds and run-off from the city. I had seen pictures of the sea, on postcards painted in garish blues, but I didn’t think they were real, just as lips are never truly carmine.
I was wrong. As we emerged from the foothills, I heard a cry above the truck and looked up. A great white bird had built her nest at the top of a pole. Elegantly, she stepped from the edge and opened her wings. I followed the path of her flight, her legs trailing, and suddenly my eyes were flooded with blue.
It hit me like flash powder: vast blue, potent blue. Even now, I find the sensation hard to describe. If colour were a taste, the sky would be powdered sugar, but the sea – that would be molasses.
I never believed in love at first sight. Fascination, yes, lust, certainly. I saw those things many times at the inn. But the moment I saw the sea, I was lost. It was love, and I never wanted to stop looking. Even today, I gaze upon it every morning like a new lover.
But of course, on that day it soon dropped from my view, replaced by a rail track and shabby houses and the start of a town. I fidgeted, wanting to keep it in my sight.
‘What’s the matter, sister?’ I remember one of
the men taunting. ‘Lice biting?’
I didn’t care. I didn’t want to think about anything except the sea. Finally, the van began to slow, Gibraltar looming monstrous beyond a sandy wasteland and a fence, guarded by …
Sentry huts, men in uniform, guns at their hips. They were stopping every person who tried to cross, men with mules and wagons, women on foot, even children.
‘What’s this?’ I croaked, my throat thick with road dust.
‘Border,’ one of the sunburned men in the back yawned. ‘They’re checking papers.’
Papers. I had none. But worse than that: what if the news from Córdoba had arrived ahead of me? What if the soldiers had been ordered to keep watch for a young woman of my description? The driver released the brake on the van, and it began to roll forwards.
‘Gracias,’ I gabbled, and the next thing I knew I was jumping from the back of the van. I landed badly, half-sprawling in the grit on my knee. I got up immediately and began to walk without looking back, though the men behind me called out, ‘Sister!’
I didn’t know where I was going. I just wanted to be away from the soldiers and the uniforms, and their sharp eyes. And so, I made for the sea, for my new love, washing at the edge of the beach like the brightest silk coverlet ever sewn.
The sand beneath my boots made me start but it did not slow me down. When I reached the shallows, I dipped my hands and brought them to my face. The water was fierce, it stung my sunburned skin and bruised nose and it burned my tongue. It made my eyes stream, as if the salt in my body wanted to greet its long-lost cousin.
When I straightened, I found that I could barely stand, could barely keep my eyes open in the heat. It was exhaustion that made me lie down in a strip of shade, concealed between two fishing boats. There, surrounded by the strange mineral reek of drying seaweed and crusted barnacles, I slept.
An Echo of Scandal Page 7
