found it too tough you just drifted off.’
‘But here they care?’
‘They try to keep you comfortable. The thing is it’s not a very comfortable place. Still,’ he said, recollecting himself, ‘the money’s the thing.’
Frances pushed back the sheets, swung her legs out of bed. ‘One thing that seems rather odd…last night when we arrived I saw those big front doors, I thought there’d be a shared hallway, but you brought me in through a side door, straight into our kitchen. I’ve found that side door, but where’s our front door? How do I get into the hall?’
‘You don’t, at the moment. The front door’s been blocked off. Pollard says there was this Arab couple living here before, quite well-off, the woman was related to our Minister, and they were staying here while they had a villa built, they were just married, you see. The husband was very strictly religious, and he had the doorway bricked up.’
‘What, you mean he bricked her up inside it?’
‘No. Twit.’
‘I thought you meant like a nun in the Dark Ages. So she could pray all day.’
‘They don’t pray all day,’ Andrew said, ‘just the statutory five times, dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and at night.’ He was full of information; wide-awake, which she couldn’t claim for herself. ‘It’s amazing, you know. Everything stops. The shops shut. People stop work. You’re just stuck there.’
‘This doorway, Andrew…’
‘Yes, he bricked it up so that she couldn’t go out into the hall, where she might run into one of the male neighbours, you see, or a tradesman. She could go out of the side door, in her veil of course, and just round the side of the building by the wall, and then her driver would pull into that little alleyway, and she’d step straight out of the side gate and into the car. And the cars have these curtains on the back windows, did you notice last night?’
‘I didn’t notice anything last night. You’re not teasing me?’
‘No, it’s true. They have curtains, so once she’s inside the car she can put her veil back.’
‘How eminently sensible.’ She looked down at her bare white knees, at her bare feet on the new beige carpet. Andrew had made love to her last night. She remembered nothing about it.
‘It must be hot,’ Andrew said, ‘under those veils.’ He put his empty coffee mug down on the dressing-table. ‘Oh, there’s yoghurt,’ he said, ‘if you feel like yoghurt for breakfast. There’s cornflakes. Must go, I’m late.’
‘Will you ring me?’
‘No phone. Next week, ins’allah.’ He paused in the doorway. ‘I hate it when I hear myself say that, but everybody says it. If God wills this, and if God wills that. It seems so defeatist. I love you, Fran.’
‘Yes.’ She looked up to meet his eyes. What has God to do with the telephone company, she wondered. Andrew had gone. She heard a door slam and his key turn in the lock. For a second she was frozen with surprise. He had locked her in.
It’s just habit, she said to herself; he’d been living here alone. Somewhere, lying around, there would be a bunch of keys for her own use. Not that she would be going out this morning. There didn’t seem much to do in the flat, but she must unpack. On her first morning in her first house in Zambia, she had scrubbed a floor in the steamy heat. At eleven o’clock the neighbours came calling, to take her shopping list away with them and do it, and to issue dinner invitations, and ask if she wanted a kitten to keep snakes away; and then in the afternoon a procession of young men had come up the path, looking for work.
She sipped her coffee, listening to the distant hum of traffic. When she had finished it she sat for a long time, looking into the cup. In the end, with a small sigh, she put it down on the teak laminated bedside cabinet. Then she took a Kleenex from the box by the bed, and wiped up the ring it had made. She sat for a little longer, with the crumpled tissue in her hand. Later she would remember quite clearly these first few minutes alone on Ghazzah Street, these tired, half-automatic actions; how her first, her original response to Jeddah had been boredom, inertia, a disinclination to move from the bed or look out of the window to see what was going on outside. With hindsight she would think, if I had known then what I know now, I would have moved, I would have looked, I would have noticed everything and written it down; and my response would not have been boredom, but fear.
2
When Andrew Shore went to Jeddah he was thirty-three years old: a heavy, deliberate young man, bearded, with a professional expatriate’s workaday suntan, and untidy clothes with many evident pockets; rather like the popular image of a war photographer. He had a flat blue eye, and a sceptical expression, and a capacity for sitting out any situation; this latter attribute had stood him in good stead in his professional life. In Africa it was always counter-productive to lose your temper. It made the local people laugh at you, and gave you high blood pressure. If you wanted to get anything done, the best way was to pretend that you were not interested in doing it at all; that you would, in fact, be happy to sit under this tree all day, and perhaps drink a can of beer. If you put pressure on people they cracked very quickly; then they pretended that what you were asking for was impossible, and that anyway there was no petrol, and that the labourers had injured their backs, and that they were urgently called away now because their grandmother had died in another town. It was better to leave people loopholes, and assume a studied casualness, and then, sometimes, things got done. Or not.
When he arrived in Jeddah, Eric Parsons said to him, ‘We’ll have to take you and introduce you to the Deputy Minister. It’s only a formality.’ When they arrived at the Deputy Minister’s office suite Andrew looked around and wondered why the Ministry thought it needed a new building; but he did not say anything, because the new building was his livelihood. They were shown in, and served mint tea, very sweet, in small glasses. The Deputy Minister had waved them each to a chair without looking at them, and now he continued not to look, but to turn over papers on his desk, and to talk on his special gold and onyx telephone; he conversed loudly in Arabic with men who came in and out.
‘This is Mr Shore,’ Parsons said after they had been there for some time unheeded. ‘I told you about him, do you remember, he’s going to be in charge of the new building. He’s very anxious to set his targets and keep everything on schedule.’
The Deputy Minister did not reply, but picked up his Cartier pen and signed a few papers, with an air at once listless and grim. A Yemeni boy came in with a tray, and served cardamom coffee. Ten minutes passed; the coffee boy stood at the Deputy Minister’s elbow, and when the Deputy Minister had taken three or four refills, he shook his cup to indicate that he wanted no more. The coffee boy collected his tray and went out, and the Deputy Minister reached for his telephone again, and grunted into it, then put it down and stared deliberately out of the window. One hand absently stroked his blotting pad, which was bound in dark green leather and embossed with the crossed scimitars and single palm tree of the House of Saud.
Then very slowly, his dark eyes, rather full like plums, but rather jaundiced like Victoria plums, travelled around the room, and came to rest for the briefest moment on the two men; and he nodded, almost imperceptibly. Parsons seemed to take this as some sort of signal. He rose, with a smooth air of accomplishment, and for just a second gripped Andrew Shore by the elbow; the bland smile he gave the Deputy Minister was quite at odds with the near-painful pressure of his finger and thumb. By the time they reached the office door the Deputy
