Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

Rajab

1

The temperature had been moving upward for a week; and suddenly, the approaching summer moved into a new dimension. All night, while they had been insensibly dreaming together under a flowered sheet, the heat had been abroad, gathering its forces in other rooms to hang in dense clots from the walls; there was a white, scaly sky, diseased and enfeebled by its own heat. Frances went about her own house like a charwoman, lugging the vacuum cleaner and the washing basket, her head bowed and her hair pushed behind her ears. On Saturday the temperature was 97°. Today it is 106°. In Riyadh it is 118°. Every day it is rising. There is a leaden sky and a hot wind; the dust, blowing continuously, lends a lunar aspect to the vacant lots. You expect to see comets and portents, rabid alien life-forms scuttling at your feet.

She was wrong to think that she was sick with knowledge. While it is contained within her own head, and her own body—the memory of that metal chill, of that dizzying reel from the foot of the stairs—the knowledge can do no harm. It is not the knowledge, but the potential of knowledge, that makes her so dangerous. She is germinating a disaster; she has a communicable disease.

Therefore she says nothing. Therefore she begins each morning as if it were the first on Ghazzah Street. Therefore she declines serious conversation. Listens without hearing. Looks without seeing. Andrew had forgotten to get her a new exercise book for her diary; and she had not asked him again. Better not to write things down. Anyway, the diary’s original purpose seems to have dissolved. She couldn’t write to Clare, or to any of her correspondents, the sort of thing she had been putting in her diary recently. She imagined their replies, which seldom even acknowledged the content of her own letters: “Well, I haven’t much to tell you really. We haven’t been doing much. The weather is still very cold …” No doubt they mislaid her letters, found them tiresome, put them in a drawer where they would not nag for replies.

Jeff Pollard, shopping at the Jeddah International Market, had his Credit Suisse token removed from his neck by a religious policeman. It was only a moderate amount of gold, in truth, but in this matter, as in others, there are different rules for men and women. He should have spent the money on a watch. He could have worn a Patek Philippe, and no one would have quarreled. But in these stringent times it is not only the vigilantes who think it is in bad taste to wear your salary around your neck.

Russel has arrived back from the Yemen.

All over town people are purveying to each other rumors of sackings and redundancies. Wherever the expatriates get together they talk about their grievances, and about how badly the Saudis have treated them: fear and loathing at the St. Patrick’s Day barbecue.

It was getting too hot for the walk to Marion’s house. But Marion didn’t seem able to organize herself to come to Dunroamin. Marion’s conversation had never been rewarding, but just to be at her house was a pleasure, to sit in a room with normal daylight, and to feel, for an hour, no curiosity and no threat.

The gateboy came out of his hut when Frances rang the bell, and let her into the compound. But Marion did not answer her doorbell. Frances peered through the front window. The living room seemed strangely tidy. She went back to the gateboy, and pointed, inquiringly. He shook his head, and at the same time seemed consumed by some private joke.

So she set off home. There was a main road to negotiate, but it was midmorning, fairly quiet, and she never had trouble crossing at the lights. A boy in a Mercedes pulled up, waved her in front of him. As she stepped out from the curb, he revved his engine, the car sprang forward, and she had to leap from under its wheels. She heard the brakes applied; caught herself up, heart racing, and looked back at the driver of the car; understood that it had not been an accident. “You are my darling, madam, you are my baby …” Saw on his face laughter and contempt.

When she got home she phoned Carla. “Look,” Carla said, “it’s happened to me. Don’t take everything so personally.”

“But why?” she insisted. She felt on the verge of tears. “I just wanted to cross. I would have waited. I would have let him go by.”

Carla said tiredly, “They don’t want us on the streets. It’s just a thing they do.”

“I went around to Marion’s this morning,” she said to Andrew.

He looked at her in amazement. “Didn’t you know? Did nobody tell you? Russel’s packed her off home. He’s found out about her and Jeff.”

She stared at him, and a slow and unwelcome realization dawned on her face. “Do you mean they’ve been having an affair?” She sat down, as people do, to take in the bad news. “I didn’t realize.”

Andrew looked at her in exasperation. “Everybody else knew.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“Months.”

“I didn’t know. I was always saying how foul he was.”

“Yes, I noticed, but I thought you knew about them and you were doing that anyway. I mean, I didn’t think a consideration like that would hamper you.”

“But you never said anything! You never discussed it with me!”

“Why should I? It’s no concern of mine.”

“And all the time you thought I knew about it … do you ever wonder, Andrew, whether you’re missing things yourself?”

“I don’t think I’m missing anything that matters.”

Frances crossed the room, and picked up the telephone receiver. She didn’t dial; listened to the crackles and blips on the line. She handed him the receiver. “Listen to that.”

He listened.

“When I rang Carla I got that. I rang Turadup—”

“What for?”

“What for doesn’t matter. I’m explaining to you, it buzzes, it clicks—what do you think?”

“I think,” Andrew said, “that what you have there is a typical Third World telephone.”

“It wasn’t always like that. It’s just started happening.”

“Oh, Frances.” He looked at her in disappointment. “You’re not going to be one of those people who believes that the phones are tapped?”

“Maybe they are.”

“Yes, maybe they are, there’s a respectable body of opinion that says so. But the people who are always going on about it are the sort who—”

“Yes, I know. They’re in Phase Three. They’ve cracked up. They have blue-tinted windscreens in their cars.”

“Even if they are tapped, what have we got to hide? We don’t exchange brewing hints on the telephone.”

“That’s not the point, is it?”

“To me, the point is that there are things that might be true … but you can’t afford to believe them.” He struggled to explain it; as if she needed it explained. “Because if you believe them you’re really screwed up, you can’t function. I have to function. I mean, I only want another year, but I have to stay here at any price.” “What do you mean, at any price?”

But Andrew was thinking about the flat he was going to buy. A price, to him, was paid in money. To conversations like these, there are no sensible conclusions.

Earlier, she had talked to Eric Parsons. He had been jocular when he answered the phone to her, thinking it was social chitchat. Daphne was out and about so much that her friends often left their messages with him. This was why Frances said, “Eric, please don’t talk to me as if I had asked to borrow the Magimix.”

“What is it then, my dear?”

Soon Eric was stupefied; hearing what he did not want to hear. And how can she put it delicately—I think that maybe upstairs there is an arms cache, a hideout, a torture chamber, a mortuary? That I have exhausted my imagination on what there may not be? “I think,” she said, “that there is a conspiracy, to which I have become a party, not a willing party …”

“But of course there is.” Eric cut in on her. He sounded angry. “We shouldn’t be talking about this over the phone. You know, you were told, about the empty flat. And you were told to be careful.”

“It isn’t at all what you have been led to believe. Can I correct what I said? I don’t think there is a conspiracy. I know.”

“Let me stop you there, Frances.” She heard heavy, exasperated breathing. “Does Andrew know that you’re speaking to me?”

“No.”

“No. I thought not. Do bear in mind, my love, that for anything you do in this place, your husband is responsible. I can understand it, of course—all you women together in the flats, you’ve got to know each other, that’s nice, and you’re sure to talk amongst yourselves. What do they say, women are the same the whole world over? But you see if you involve yourself—if you are thought, Frances, to be making a nuisance of yourself, to have come into possession of any information that you shouldn’t have—then it will be Andrew who bears the brunt of any indiscretion.”

“But I think a crime has been committed.”

“Then do remember that the Saudi way with the witness of a crime is to hold the witness in jail.” Eric’s voice took on an official tone, a sort of stony rectitude. “And if you persist in interfering, against all advice, then you have to take the consequences. The Embassy and the Foreign Office can do nothing for you. They will do nothing for you. There are trading agreements at stake, there are diplomatic agreements, and those agreements are far more important than you.”

There was a pause. She said, “Won’t you even listen to me?”

“No,” Eric said; pleasantly enough, courteously enough. “I am first in the firing line, my dear, and there are some things I cannot afford to know. Once past a certain point, you see, you become an undesirable person, and then who knows what happens? Because there comes a certain point where they don’t want you here, and if you see what I mean, they don’t want you to leave either.”

“And have you ever known anyone who reached that point?”

“Oh no,” Eric said. “I wouldn’t know a person like that.”

Some days passed. She did not speak to Andrew, except about the trivial. She felt under threat; why should the threat extend to him? She said to herself, I will be careful from now on, and perhaps this will go no further. She did not believe this; either that she would be careful, or that there would be no repercussions. She had stepped into a parallel world whose existence she had suspected for so long, and she could not say, now, I lost my map, I did not mean to trespass, I will never do it again. Or, she could say it; it need not have any practical effect.

They were driving home; it was dark. Frances said, “There it is.” It was the gates she recognized; and they were open. The garden had gone. In its place was a white, foursquare, five-story office block, with three steps up to a large front door; a door of wroughtiron curlicues, and chrome-tinted toughened glass. There was a plaque on the gate: BOHKARI ESTABLISHMENT FOR TRADE AND COMMERCE.

Andrew slowed the car. He sounded puzzled. “That building’s always been there, Fran.”

“Nothing’s always been there. Don’t be silly.”

“Okay, let’s say it’s been there for months.”

“You must be wrong.”

“Look,” he said mildly, “I have an eye for a building, right? What you see there may not be a distinguished example of modern architecture, but I’m not likely to mix it up with anything else. Do me a favor.”

She didn’t answer; unclipped her seat belt so that she could turn round properly, craning her neck.

“We can go back if you like. What’s wrong?”

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong.” She felt enraged; why should he speak to her as if she were simpleminded? “When I last saw that plot there was a garden there. They had a lawn. It was the only lawn I ever saw. I told you about it. Now there’s a building. How can it have got there? How can it have got there without my noticing?”

“But we come this way twice a week.” His bewilderment was plain, she heard it in his voice. “It didn’t spring up overnight. They finished it before Christmas.”

“How could they? How could they?”

“I’ll turn round, so that you can have another look. Do a U-ey, as Jeff puts it.”

“That’s all right,” she said dully. “You needn’t.”

“I want you to be satisfied.”

He turned as soon as he could, drove slowly past the gates again. The garden had gone, and the ramshackle villa with its tin roof; the hanging lamp had gone, and the swaying light with its dappled flurry of moths’ wings. “Don’t worry,” he said, “there are places I passed in my first few weeks in Jeddah that I could swear I’ve never seen since, and yet they must be there, I know they must, it’s just that you’re coming at them from a different angle. And of course, you have to keep your eyes on the road.”

“I don’t.”

“No, but you must have lost your bearings. This town changes fast.”

Who would have believed it? That they could put up a five-story building, while your back was turned, while your attention was elsewhere? She has been looking at the external city; but the internal city is more important, the one that you construct inside your head. That is where the edifice of possibility grows, and grows without your knowledge; it is subject to no planner’s control.

They pulled up outside Dunroamin. “Fairfax is coming in a couple of days,” Andrew said. “He really is, this time. I spoke to him on the phone. He’s got his visa. I’m collecting him at the airport.” He got out, locked his door, opened the boot and pulled out a couple of the big brown bags which held their groceries. “Can I ask him over for an evening?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Will it be all right? Only you seem so distracted, Fran.”

“I want to meet him. I’ve been looking forward to it.”

She picked up one of the bags herself, holding it in her arms like a heavy child. Andrew wedged a bag against the outside wall, propping it up with his knee while he fumbled for the right key; but she pushed the metal gate with her foot, and said, “Look, it’s open.”

“Shouldn’t be,” Andrew said. “We’re supposed to keep the place secure.”

The front gate was ajar. “Perhaps Raji is just dashing in and out,” she said.

Andrew let them into the flat. As soon as he opened the door, she knew that something was wrong. Andrew switched on the light. He stood, staring at the mess, and then lowered the bags of groceries carefully to the floor. “We’ve been done over,” he said. “Okay, let’s not panic, leave everything just where it is and we’ll have a look.”

They had been burglarized before, in Africa; so often, so routinely, that Andrew was calm, summoning all the old feelings: a moderate, suitable annoyance, a measure of resignation, a calm, impervious front. But Frances felt that it was not something you got used to. She ran from room to room, sweeping each one with a glance. The wardrobe gaped open; some of their clothes had been dragged from the hangers, flung about the room. Drawers were pulled out. “Our camera’s gone,” she said.

“Let’s check the cash, that’s the first thing.”

They still had their housekeeping money. A bundle of it nested securely in its place underneath the dressing table; it had not been a convenient arrangement, lifting the furniture around every few days, but it had served its purpose. “I thought my African habits were overcautious,” Andrew said. “But seemingly not.” Casually, he heaved the dressing table back into place. “Found the rest?”

She had six five-hundred-riyal notes, crisp new purple ones, inside the Holy Koran. “Good girl,” Andrew said. “Although you never know if thieves can read, do you?”

“Are we going to get the police?”

He looked around the living room. It was obvious how the burglars had got in. They had come through the big window with its sliding panel; the length of wood that should have blocked the track lay on the carpet. It had been removed from the inside. “You forgot to put it back,” Andrew said. He saw her face. “I’m not blaming you. I know you want a breath of air sometimes. I can understand how it happened.”

“If I want air I go to the roof. I didn’t take the wood out.”

“You must have. Who else could it have been?”

“No one.”

“But look.” He held it up. “Here it is. It didn’t jump out by itself.”

“I don’t know how it happened.”

“The landlord’s not been round again, has he?”

“Not while I’ve been here. I suppose he must have keys.”

“Who else has been in?”

“Only Yasmin. Oh, and Sarsaparilla. She brought a plate of something, I gave her something back.”

“Was she in here on her own?”

“Only for a minute.”

“It’s just what they always say. Servants let thieves in. They take up with shady people on their day off, and there you are, they tell them your movements, they tell them the layout, and the next thing is you’ve been cleaned out.”

“But Sarsaparilla doesn’t go anywhere. They don’t let her out. She’s too frightened to go out.”

“Okay then,” Andrew said, indifferently. “If it wasn’t her, it must have been Yasmin. One idea is considerably less ridiculous than the other, but take your pick.”

On the desk, papers had been scattered, letters had been ripped open. Andrew moved them around gingerly, with a fingertip. “I reckon laborers must have done it, Yemenis or somebody. They think you stuff your letters home with banknotes for your old mother. Didn’t take the video, did they?”

“They’ve taken the Thamaga candlesticks. Some food has gone, out of the fridge. Just eggs and things.”

“There you are then. Not a professional job, is it?”

She shook her head. “It seems not. Unless it is in fact very professional. Professionals masquerading as blundering amateurs.”

“Still reading the detective books?” Andrew crossed the room, put his arms around her and pulled her gently toward him. He cradled her against his shoulder. She felt light and frail under his confident hands, just an assemblage of bones: and barely consoled. “It’s all right now, Fran. I don’t think they’ve got anything that’s worth much.” He held her tight, rocking her, solid and undisturbed; one of the sex war’s elite corps, one of the shock troops home on a family visit. “Listen, don’t panic, Frances, it could have been much worse.” He was comforting her, for her own carelessness in having let the thieves in; the theory about the maid, which he had worked up so carefully, had been to allow her to save face.

“I wish you could believe me,” she said. “But if you can’t you can’t. I’m just a woman after all, and unlikely to be able to keep track of my actions.”

She struggled free of him; went from room to room. She heard him pick up the phone, heard him speaking, calm and bluff and male; heard him give a little laugh. She went into the bedroom and sat down on the bed, fingering her mauled and despoiled summer frocks. They had rummaged through the drawer where she kept her makeup, looking for jewelry perhaps. Her soapstone tortoise had gone from the bedside table. What a stupid thing to take! How do burglars know, what sixth sense informs them, about the small, valueless things that you cannot bear to lose?

Andrew stood in the doorway. He had not taken offense, he understood her outburst; what’s one little squawk, when the nest has been invaded? “I’ve just talked to Eric,” he said. “He says that unless we’ve lost something important, we shouldn’t bother with the police. For a start we’d have to get all the booze out of the house. Then he says they sprinkle black fingerprint powder everywhere, and you can’t get it off the carpets. I’d have to go down to the police station, and he says I might be there all night, we’d have to get Hasan over to interpret, there are endless forms to fill in, and they never catch anybody at the end of it all.”

“And if they did …”

“Yes, that’s a thought. I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. What about your clothes? Have they taken much?”

“Most things seem to be here. I can’t be sure.”

“Shall we clean up then?”

She rose, tiredly. “We may as well. Just let’s get the stuff off the floor and back in the cupboards, and I’ll do the rest tomorrow.” She thought, I wonder if they have taken my diary?

Andrew looked at her searchingly. A serious, responsible expression took over his face; he frowned. “You look pale,” he said.

“It was a shock.”

“You must put your feet up. I’ll do the clearing up. I’ll make you some tea.”

“What about that Scotch Rickie gave us?”

“Good idea. Where is it?”

“It’s under the kitchen sink. With the cockroach spray and the bottles of bleach.”

Andrew grinned. “That’s a good place for it. Not even our thieves are interested in bottles of bleach. I’ll pour you a large one, Watson.”

“Okay, Holmes,” she said.

She remained where she was, limp, dispirited, as if the strength had run out of her limbs. Andrew, she thought, his powers of recovery … he’s a wonder. She should not resent it, should she? Then she heard his voice from the kitchen. “Oh, you bastard,” he said.

She scrambled up, hurried after him. Andrew glowered over the remains of the bottle of Scotch; smashed, it lay on the drain board.

“Oh well,” she said. “At least somebody’s had a good time tonight. If he drank it, of course. He might just have poured it away.”

She was not sure why the thought had occurred to her. They exchanged a glance; then Andrew turned quickly and made for the little bathroom where they kept their wine supplies. As soon as he opened the door a ripe heady odor from the upturned jerricans rolled past them. Almost tangible, it billowed down the passageway, and washed through the flat. “Keep back,” he said. “There’s glass all over the floor.”

There had been twenty-four bottles, in a cardboard box; even the box was ripped to shreds, and its remnants bobbed on the frothy tide from the jerricans, a scum of yeast and water and half-fermented fruit. Standing behind Andrew, she touched his elbow. “Imagine what it will do for the drains.”

But he was not going to laugh. “I wouldn’t have minded,” Andrew said. “If they’d drunk it. I wouldn’t have minded.”

“I think,” Frances said, “that we have been left a message.”

“Message? Rip off the khawwadjihs and save them from sin, is that what you mean?”

“Something like that.”

“I don’t think so,” Andrew said. “I think that all they are interested in, from the Council of Ministers to the common thieves, is just making sure that we rue the day we ever saw this bloody place.”

She looked up into his face. “I thought you said we had to stay at any price?”

“You don’t need to tell me what I said. I said I’ll see the project through. They said they wanted it done and I contracted to do it and I’m not going to be frightened off by the vagaries of my bloody imagination.” Andrew looked dangerous now—mutinous. She recognized his bull-in-china-shop face; as if he had been breathing in the alcohol, or had absorbed it through his skin. She felt afraid of him; of any impulses he might have. A few months ago, it might have made them laugh. She might have described them in her letters home, comically pitiable figures, wringing their hands in this pale pink yeasty sea. But now even above the stench of fermentation she smelled violence in the air, recognized the savage concentration with which the intruder had gone to work, smashing each bottle on the tiles, fragmenting it, and standing finally, one must suppose, with bleeding hands and feet, tidemarked with alcoholic foam.

Andrew laid his arm across her shoulders. “You know those cages,” he said, “in the terrorist trials in Italy, those glass cages they have for the defendants?”

“Yes, I’ve seen pictures of them.”

“No, you haven’t. You can’t take pictures of glass.”

“I’ve read about them.” Reports describe the cage; you believe that it is there; you see the prisoners, their foreheads laid against walls of air, their gestures cut short by invisible fetters.

“You have dozens of people crammed together month after month in those cages,” Andrew said. “The other year two terrorists had sex in the cage, and then nine months later when the trial was still going on the woman terrorist gave birth to twins.”

“Yes, I think I remember that.”

“I keep thinking about those terrorists, I suppose I must have a fellow-feeling with them. They have a kind of parody life inside those glass cages, and I feel it’s just like mine. And the months go by, and I feel I am being convicted of something.” He added calmly, “And that is what I mean, before you ask me, about the vagaries of my bloody imagination.”

She slipped away from his grasp. “I must clear up. I must clean up this mess.”

“I’ll do it. You sit down.”

She went into the living room, to the desk. Some of the drawers had been wrenched out. This had not alarmed them; they did not keep anything of importance there. “They’ve stolen our postage stamps,” she called, and Andrew’s voice came back, very practical now, very matter-of-fact:

“That’s about par for the course.”

One of the drawers had been upended on the carpet. She picked her diary out of the mess. She flicked over the leaves. It was untorn, unmarked. There were no greasy fingerprints on its pages, no smudges that had not been there before. If I were to put my life under scrutiny, she thought, this is where I would start. But she had stopped keeping the diary. The pages had been filled, the space had run out, and now it seemed that events must cease to occur. Could she find anything if she had the policeman’s aids, the magnifying glass, the test tube, the graphite powder that marked the carpets? She had laid the book against her face, as if she might find a scent of something; alien sweat, nitroglycerin, the metal smell of blood.

Daphne telephoned next day, to commiserate. “Still, you were wise not to involve the police,” she said. “They make everything ten times worse. And, as Eric said, you might have ended up in custody yourself. That’s the trouble with this place. Even if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you always feel as if you are.”

Frances said, “Can I borrow Hasan and the office car? The doctor rang me up, they want me to have some kind of tests.”

“I can recommend a gynecologist,” Daphne said swiftly.

“I don’t think that’s what I need.”

“Oh, I see. Nothing wrong, Frances, is there?”

“Probably not.” She regretted beginning the conversation. “Daphne, please don’t tell everybody. Don’t go spreading rumors that I’m ill.”

Daphne sounded startled. “Of course not. I can assure you, my dear, that whatever you chose to confide in me would go no further.”

Liar, Frances thought. “What about the car then?”

“There’s a tiny problem—it’s still at the garage, and when it comes back this man Fairfax is borrowing it. You’ll have to get Andrew to take a couple of hours off during the day.”

“That doesn’t sound a very good idea. About Fairfax, I mean. He’ll get lost. He’s never been here before. Someone should drive him around.”

“I’m not best pleased myself,” Daphne said, thinking of the batik workshop she would be forced to miss. “But Eric says he simply hasn’t the wherewithal to provide people with chauffeurs.”

“What’s Hasan for?”

“My dear, would you like to be entrusted to Hasan on your first visit to the Kingdom? That man’s only thought is to ditch you and sneak off to those smoking parlors they go to. Many’s the time I’ve been stranded—” Daphne’s voice ran on. Frances pictured her, teetering on the pavement outside the Pâtisserie Franco-Belge, a box of dissolving cream cakes balanced on her fingertips; helplessly scanning the traffic by the gold souk, while the morning sun burned, and her own ethnic trinkets seared her flesh. “Fairfax,” Daphne said, “will just have to shift for himself.”

Frances looked at her watch. Fairfax was due; dinner was cooking.

“I wonder what he will think of us?” Andrew said.

“Of you and me?”

“No, of the whole lot of us. The khawwadjihs.”

“I imagine,” Francis said, “that he’ll think we’re pathetic.”

As she set the table, she amplified the statement in her mind. The paychecks had not arrived yet. Full moon had come and gone. Alarm and despondency was the order of the day. “If only they’d be straight with us,” people said. They began to talk about “Saudi disinformation.” Companies were pulling out, writing off debts that they did not believe the government would repay. Now more than ever, the tone of expatriate conversation was callow, suspicious, a note of chronic complaint. Editorials appeared in the newspapers, alleging khawwadjih mismanagement, corruption; issuing threats.

“Having money makes people bad enough,” Frances said. “The threat of not having it seems to make them worse.”

“Don’t be such a prig,” Andrew said. “You are one of the people too.”

“I meant the Saudis. Although to be honest, the longer I am here, the more we seem to resemble them. We are both aspects of the same problem, I think.”

Everything in the flat—everything tangible—was dusted, sorted, put back to rights. So that they would have something to give Fairfax, they had borrowed some wine from Jeff Pollard. Jeff was in a bad mood over the loss of his mistress. Russel, he said, was persecuting him, and badmouthing him to the other compound dwellers, and fomenting quarrels around the swimming pool. He would have to move out, he said, and hope that Terrex Mining would give him one of their houses. “Take a case,” he said sulkily, when they called around for the wine. “I won’t be doing any entertaining.”

Fairfax was late. Frances turned the oven down, hoped for the best. She poured herself a glass of wine, and went to sit with Andrew. “Do you think,” she said, “that there is any chance of us going to live on the Terrex compound?”

“You want to follow Jeff about? It will start another rumor.”

“It’s not that. But Daphne did say that she would inquire.”

“I’ll talk to Eric. I could make out a case that you were especially miserable, after the burglary and everything.”

That burglar, she thought, may prove to be my friend. I shall pretend to a hopeless neurosis, about the sliding doors; I shall say I can’t settle, I shall say I can’t sleep at night; I will take all the burden of weakness on myself, the little woman: and in that way I will extricate us, I will get us out of here.

She got up to see to the food. It was nine o’clock. The gatebell rang. Soon she heard Andrew in the hall, saying, “You made it,” Fairfax saying, “Got hopelessly lost,” Andrew saying, “I should have come for you.”

Fairfax stood in the doorway. He was young; he was a tall man, very tall and quite insubstantial. He had a transparent pallor, because he had come from England, and because he had come from England so recently, he had a transparent smile. Fairfax had dark red hair, unfashionably long, as fine as cobwebs, very straight: and guileless eyes. He wore a lightweight gray suit, the uniform of the traveling executive, and held something behind his back. He offered his other hand to Andrew. “I know we’ve met five times today,” he said. “But it’s the local custom, isn’t it?”

Andrew shook his hand. “How do you do?”

“Worse,” Fairfax said. “Much worse than when we parted at two o’clock. Since then I’ve suffered death by a thousand cuts. I shall become a cautionary tale in our company newsletter. He went out there to sell air-conditioning, and returned with scars on his soul.”

“Yes, I know,” Andrew said. “You must have been taken to meet the Minister. Come in, you’ll need a drink. This is Frances.”

Fairfax looked down at her. From behind his back he took a bouquet of white roses, and proffered it, diffidently.

Frances wiped her hands on her apron. “Roses in Jeddah,” she said. “Oh, Fairfax, these must have cost you the earth.”

Fairfax’s eyes opened wide, as if he were reliving the purchase. “I said to the man in the shop, surely you’re joking? He wasn’t. Never mind. Don’t you ever bring her flowers?”

“Oh, Andrew can’t afford to. He’s saving up for a posh flat in London.”

“That’s marvelous,” Fairfax said. “Get somewhere nice, and then I’ll come and stay with you when I’m down that way, I can’t stand hotels.” He seemed sure of his welcome; but Frances puzzled him. He gazed down at her. “I feel as if I know you from somewhere.”

Frances touched his elbow, drawing him into the room. “Sit down, Fairfax.”

Andrew said, “He’s called Adam. You mustn’t talk to him as if he were the butler.”

She was not surprised by his name. It seemed to suit him. Fairfax had an air of being impressed by the separate qualities of each moment, the air of one to whom the world was new, and unpredictable. He might be thirty perhaps, but it seemed that she had decided to think of the men around her as children; even though Eric said that they were accountable for her, and responsible for her thoughts.

“I shall still call you Fairfax,” she said. “You see, although we don’t know each other, I’ve been expecting you. Hasn’t Andrew explained?”

“We’ve been too busy talking shop,” Andrew said.

“Well, explain now. Excuse me, I must put the flowers in water.”

She went into the kitchen. She stood by the fridge and smiled, doing nothing, letting a moment pass. When she came back Fairfax had folded his spectacular height into a chair. He looked avian, but not predatory, both vulnerable and sharp: the best kind of salesman.

“As we never have flowers,” she said, “I haven’t a vase. You must drink up the contents of this carafe between you, and then I can put the flowers in it. The rest of the wine can come straight from the bottles. You must watch the sediment, Fairfax. This wine was made by Jeff Pollard.”

“Oh, Jeff,” Fairfax said. “What a man! Everybody’s talking about some poor girl he had an affair with, aren’t they? It’s beyond imagination. At least, it’s beyond mine. Do you know that poem? ‘Why have such scores of lovely gifted girls / Married impossible men?’ It’s just the same with affairs, isn’t it?”

“You shouldn’t waste your sympathy on Marion Smallbone,” Andrew said. “She wasn’t lovely. Or gifted.”

“Oh, but comparatively,” Fairfax insisted; he sat forward in his chair, and locked his long fingers together. “She must have been too good for Pollard. I’ve seen better things than Jeff in the Reptile House.”

“How does the rest of the poem go?” Frances said.

“Oh, it talks about idle men, illiterate men, dirty and sly, about men you have to make excuses for to casual passersby. Intolerable men, full of self-pity. But then the man who wrote it, he wonders if they can really be so bad after all, whether he overvalues women.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.” Fairfax thought about it, seeming surprised. “Perhaps I do.”

“You would never last the pace in Jeddah. This is no place for men who like women.”

“We’re not all like the Saudis,” Andrew said.

“No, but you seem to collaborate with them.” She had not known she thought it, until she heard it pop out of her mouth. “I had a letter from Marion, did you read it, Andrew? She’s taken the children back to her mother, who is elderly and has a small flat in Nottingham. Russel’s divorcing her, and she’s going to live on social security. The origin of the romance,” she explained to Fairfax, “was that he used to go round and unblock her lavatory. Oh well, I mustn’t get bitter about it. There’s probably no hope for people like that, separately or together. Do you know many poems, Fairfax?”

“I know a lot for an air-conditioning expert.”

“Why did you get lost? I sent you a map. Didn’t Andrew give it to you?”

“Yes, but I’m afraid I just can’t make any sense of this place. The traffic signs kept sending me places that I didn’t want to go.”

“You ignore them,” Andrew said.

“Do you? Is that right?”

“I used to be good at maps,” Frances said. “They were my living. I must be losing my touch.”

She went out, to bring the food to the table. The meat had dried out, and the vegetables were soggy, but Fairfax ate quite happily, his jacket slung over the back of his chair; he complimented her on her cooking. Andrew thought he was a groveler; you could see that by his expression. You could see that he wondered why a man who was in air-conditioning should have pretensions to charm. But Frances paid attention to her guest. In his presence she breathed more easily. The tension eased from her shoulders; Jeff’s wine was sweet, syrupy, harmless, quite unlike his usual acid brew. It was soothing, like warm black currant juice, and yet it had a certain potency; she felt languid, as if she would sleep well, and wake up somewhere better. She put her elbow on the table, and rested her cheek on her open hand. “I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”

Fairfax looked modest about it, putting back a strand of his featherlike hair. “People always say I’m a breath of fresh air. But that is our trade joke. We only have one. We are a somber lot, in air-conditioning.”

Then Fairfax talked about his work; about the central air-conditioning plant for Andrew’s building. A sort of ersatz reverence took him over, a weightless gravity; he looked like a schoolboy who had been given the task of imitating, in a pantomime, a governor of the Bank of England. Andrew was impressed, in spite of himself. He sat over the cheese and coffee, and pictured his building finished, its fountains of fire, its indoor forests deep and lush, its model of the solar system, its iceberg walls; he reached forward, his eyes blank and inward-looking, and refilled Fairfax’s glass; he breathed the silent, circulating air that Fairfax would create—dust-free, perfumed, Alpine. Fairfax broke off. “Are we boring you?” he said to Frances. “We could talk about this in the morning.”

“That’s all right.”

“I bet I know what they were saying, those blokes on the plane. Around our office I’m regarded as the resident imbecile.”

“I’m regarded as the errand boy,” Andrew said. He opened another bottle of wine. “Ribena, Fairfax?” He said, “This isn’t like Jeff’s wine. He must have stolen it from somebody.”

“Anyway, I’m only here at all because the chap who should have come is more incompetent still. He filled in the form for his visa, and where it said RELIGION he put LATTER-DAY SAINT. The Saudis thought it was some kind of piss-take, I suppose. Now he’ll never get in. You’re supposed to put CHRISTIAN, is that right?”

“Yes. They’re not interested in any finer distinctions,” Andrew said. “They ban atheists as well.”

“They told me all sorts of stories about this place before I came. ‘You’ll like it, Fairfax,’ they said. ‘It’s just like the Arabian Nights.’”

“And now you’re here?”

His smile died. He put down his glass, briefly. “You must be mad to live here, Andrew. I haven’t felt safe for a single minute.”

“The Saudis seem very tense just now. They’re trying to keep out news from abroad. I bought a copy of The Times this morning, and when I held it up it had holes in it.”

“It was like a paper doily,” Frances said. “What’s bothering you, Fairfax? What’s bothering you specifically?”

Fairfax ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know … I keep accusing myself of racialism or something. I don’t know what’s worrying me, I suppose it isn’t anything rational. The men on the streets, in those white thobes and headdresses … I can’t keep my eyes off them. They’re like some obscene tribe of nuns. Like thuggish nuns.”

“Oh, you’re like us,” Andrew said, “you’ve got too much imagination. But we’re on edge at the moment, it isn’t always as bad as this. Or if it is … you get used to it.”

She took the coffee cups out to the kitchen. You never get used to it, she wanted to say, if you think you have got used to it that is the beginning of disaster; and she felt again, as she stacked the dishes, as she ran the tap, that cold bar of metal across her hand, and felt the Visitor’s fist against her shoulder, fending her off, spinning her away from him. He could quite easily have knocked her unconscious, one blow would have done it; she had never been so conscious before of her physical frailty, it had never really mattered. Her flesh shrank when she thought of it—the Visitor’s strength, and her own thin skin and snappable bones.

And here she is, getting a little dinner together, listening to men talk about thermostats. What else is there to be done? Dunroamin was very quiet; in four days she had not seen Yasmin or Samira, not even a glimpse. Until Fairfax came—if you did not count the phone call from Daphne—she had spoken to no one since the burglary. How could she begin, now, to unravel her thought processes for Andrew? How would she explain to him the hierarchy of suspicions, the discrete tiers of insight, the violent shock of fantasy confirmed? “I watched it go up, the Visitor … I thought to myself, Saudi women don’t move like that … then, no, I did not hide, I did not go inside and lock the door and double-lock the door, I waited for the Visitor, and I did a thing of unbelievable foolishness, of such horrible and frightening implications …” No, she can’t tell him this.

Perhaps, she thought suddenly, I could tell Fairfax. Fairfax is not part of any of this. In three or four days’ time he will take a plane, and disembark in London. Perhaps he could carry a message for me, like a message in a bottle, from me to the real world.

At once she discounted the idea. She pictured her guest’s face: dawning incomprehension. But while it lasted, the notion had offered a few seconds’ hope; and that was not to be despised.

“And this is my wife,” Fairfax said. He passed the photograph to Frances, and she held it under the lamp. “Judy is a giantess. Those are our three giant daughters, the eldest is five. Judy only married me so that she could wear high heels on her wedding day, instead of shuffling up the aisle in gym shoes with her knees bent.”

“Do you travel around much?”

“Oh yes. I go here and there. You see, the firm has moved to Cumbernauld, and we hardly sell much to the locals. I went to Kowloon. Of course, you know that.”

“Does Judy mind?”

“She always gets me back.” Fairfax’s conversation had become a little rambling; a hiatus between each thought, and the odd line of poetry. So she was asking him short, simple questions. He drained his glass, and said, “Strong stuff, this, Andrew. Not what I thought.”

Andrew had fallen asleep, sprawled on the sofa, his head flopped back against a cushion. Fairfax leaned across and touched his shoulder. “Andrew, what shall I do, I’m drunk.”

Andrew sat upright, as if in slow motion, shaking his head. An hour or two seemed to pass. “I think Jeff has conned us,” he said at last. “His last batch of wine only made you throw up.” He surveyed Fairfax—whose gray eyes had developed a blazing concentration, though they were focused on nothing at all. “I say,” Andrew said admiringly, “you are drunk.” He seemed to pull his thoughts together. “Fran, can you stagger into the kitchen and make us some black coffee?”

Frances stirred herself from the depth of her armchair. She did as he told her; and yet making for the kitchen she didn’t stagger, but seemed to float. She felt warm, and pleased with everything she saw; she acted without planning to act, spoke without calculation. She drifted a hand to her eyes, as if to dispel a mist. What did Jeff put in his wine? There must be a secret.

Andrew was standing in the doorway. “Fairfax must stay,” he said. “He’s not fit to drive.”

“Are you not fit to drive him?”

“Not remotely. And even if I were, I don’t want to be stopped by the police with someone in that state in my passenger seat.”

She didn’t comprehend. “Why should the police stop you?” she asked gently.

“For any reason.”

“Oh, for any reason. Yes, I see. For just existing, you mean.”

She seemed to have lost direction. She had ajar of instant coffee in her hand, and seemed to have forgotten what she was doing with it. She looked at the cups and saucers as if she had never seen them before. “Husband, please, can you take over?”

Andrew took the coffee jar from her limp hands. “You don’t usually get like this,” he said.

“I seem to be having an evening off from my life.”

“I thought for a little while that you were having an evening off from our marriage.”

“Oh, Andrew, are you jealous of Fairfax?”

“Yes,” Andrew said.

“But he’s a joy. He’s a delight.”

“For an air-conditioning expert.”

“Yes, for that.”

“Fairfax can sleep on the sofa,” he said. “In fact, he is sleeping on the sofa already.” He didn’t wait for his coffee. She heard him slam the bathroom door and run the taps. She took a cup of coffee into the living room, tiptoeing.

He was right; Fairfax was asleep. He looked as if he had slipped, suddenly and silently, into another dimension; ten years had vanished, and his precision, his expertise; he looked vacant, vulnerable, as if all his life were to come. She put down the coffee cup on the floor, and went to find a blanket. When she came back Fairfax had not moved; she had never seen anyone sleep so profoundly, so totally. She covered him with the blanket. His body had a velvet, animal warmth, which perhaps it never possessed in Cumbernauld.

But the night would get colder. It was already two o’clock. She knelt by the sofa for a moment, her eyes closed, her forehead resting on the padded arm. A flurry of eidetic images rushed behind her eyelids: walls, staircases, open doors. “In a courtyard is a tree on which there are fruits whose color is red.” A grassy lawn, a sunny day, with a light breeze blowing; she cupped her hands, and the fruit fell into them. The image darkened; gave way to the meaningless flickers and streaks, the white noise of sleep, a static crackle from the universe of her neurons. She drifted for a second or two, in a starless waste. Then she woke, roused herself, and went slowly toward the bedroom, feeling her way with a hand on the wall, as if she had suddenly become blind.

2

Her own sleep was not total, not profound. She heard a noise, and thought it was the front door opening; knew it couldn’t be, turned her face into the pillow, slept again. A slow cinema unrolled itself: her soapstone tortoise, grown to life-size, grown to giant-size, and set as a public monument before the oily sea. Herself a tiny figure squinting into the sun, at the stony reptile’s feet; younger than her real self, years younger. And all her friends and family, all the people she had known, people she had not thought of in years, everyone gathering to be in the picture; then a shout, and a click, and the descent of darkness, a break in the film.

The shout had broken into her dreams. But it was further than her dreams, outside the purlieu of her imagination. It was not in her head, but in the room, in the passage, in the street. She sat up, scrabbled in the twisted sheets, fumbled for the alarm clock. Little green figures, glowing in a room still dark; it was only three o’clock. She thought she had slept for hours, but her head had hardly touched the pillow. She shuddered. She had become a connoisseur of insomnia, and three was the hour she could not love. The warm, healthy body runs at its lowest ebb then. Death certificates are prepared; night nurses usher the bereaved from public wards.

She leaned over her husband’s naked body. His skin felt cool and damp. “Get dressed. Something is wrong.” Her fingers skittered over the bedside table, where the soapstone tortoise used to bask and doze. She snapped on the bedside light, saw Andrew’s eyelids flicker; he yawned.

“Funny,” he said sleepily. “I heard a noise. Thought it was morning.”

“Get dressed.” She pulled a kaftan out of the wardrobe and dropped it over her head. She felt the burglar’s fingers upon it, as she felt them on all her clothes. She shook: with the sudden cold, with fatigue, with an expectation of disaster. “Did you remember to lock the front door?”

“No.” Andrew sat up. He stumbled out of bed. He reached for his jeans, started to pull them on, slow, fumbling, looking for his shoes. She was ready to go. But her nerve had failed. She was going to wait for him. “No one could come in,” Andrew said. “Unless they broke in.”

“They broke in before.”

Leaving the bedroom door open, she put on all the lights as she went: the passage, the empty bedroom. But there was no intruder. The living room was empty. Fairfax’s blanket, rucked up and cast aside, had slid to the floor. The front door was wide open.

Andrew stepped out into the hall. He turned on the lights to the stairwell; then they saw Fairfax. He clutched the banister at the foot of the stairs; he looked upward once, over his shoulder, and stumbled drunkenly toward them, half crouching, in silence. He gripped the doorframe, sliding from it as though his hands were slippery; he took a step over the threshold, and huddled against the wall. Andrew slammed the door. She took Fairfax’s arm. His whole weight threatened to collapse onto her shoulders, and through the thin cotton she noticed how cold his clutching fingers were. Andrew draped Fairfax’s other arm across his shoulder. Between them, they maneuvered him into the flat, and let him slide onto the sofa. He seemed only semiconscious, stupefied, in shock. Frances took his face in her hands. “What’s happened to you? Fairfax, where did you go?”

“Nothing happened,” he said. His head dropped. She felt unable to support its weight; she could not get him to look at her, to focus his attention even for a second. “Wanted air. Going to be sick.”

“That’s quite obvious,” Andrew said.

“No, no,” Fairfax insisted. “Was going to be sick. Went for a walk. Went for a bit of air. Couldn’t get out of the main door. Went up to the roof.”

He was deathly white, his skin clammy; hardly able to sit upright. “Did you meet someone?” Frances said.

“Who could he meet?” Andrew asked, yawning. “Look, Fran, don’t badger him, leave him alone. He just went walkabout, that’s all. Let him go back to sleep, he’ll sleep it off.”

“He’s in a state of shock. Look, Andrew, look at him.”

“He’s drunk, Fran. We should have been more careful, we’ve got used to this stuff, we don’t realize …” As if to prove Andrew right, Fairfax slid down a little onto the sofa. His head dropped back, his eyelids fluttered and closed. “He can’t keep awake,” Andrew said. His own fright—and he had been frightened, by the open door—had turned to sleepy truculence. “I have to be up at six, myself. I have to get into Turadup—”

“Oh, sod Turadup,” Frances said. “Fairfax, wake up, tell us.” He did open his eyes, for an instant; he looked at her warily, directly. She saw pain and fear. But he said nothing.

“He’s not really all that drunk,” she said. “Not anymore. He’s just made a decision, I think.” She turned away, distraught. “He’s not going to tell us.”

“Do you want me to go up to the roof?” Andrew asked.

“No. No, please, I don’t want you to do that.”

“Okay. So let’s sort it out in the morning.”

“We ought to stay with him.”

“He isn’t going anywhere.”

“But he looks so ill.”

Fairfax was sleeping properly now. He couldn’t be pretending; the drink had struck him down. Again that peculiar emptiness invaded his face, as if whatever he lived through could be nullified, erased. Andrew said, more kindly, “Frances, come to bed. Let’s get a couple of hours’ sleep. He’s not going to tell us anything till the morning. If he did, it wouldn’t be coherent, would it?”

“No, I suppose not.” She tried to calm herself. “Andrew—” she took his outstretched hand—“you know the burglary?”

“What now? Something else vanished?”

All week they had been missing things; small, inconsequential items. With each discovery the business looked more random, more purposeless.

“I meant to tell you, but I only just realized this morning. They took our photographs. All the photographs of Africa, those pictures from our wedding … they were in that big brown envelope in the desk drawer, I meant to get around to doing something with them … they’ve all gone.”

“For God’s sake, why? That’s just stupid.” Andrew was angry; but he recovered himself. He put an arm around her, helping her along toward the bedroom. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “But they’re no use to anybody, are they? Why would they take those?”

“To upset us,” she said. “To make us unhappy.”

She lay down on the bed still dressed, on top of the sheet, her legs bent awkwardly, too tired even to arrange her body into a more comfortable position. Her head ached, a throbbing pain. He was right, the photographs were of no value. And she should not think of them now.

But when she closed her eyes they flickered behind her closed lids, blurred colored images, and she tried to fix them, before they slipped away: the only witness to their travels, the only testimony to their joint life. Andrew and Frances outside the DC’s office, marriage certificate held out for the camera. Groups of friends at a restaurant table, the New Stanley Hotel, Nairobi, 1978. Andrew frowning into the sun, Cairo Airport, 1979. Frances in Bulawayo. Andrew in the Mall in Gaborone. Our house, our dogs, the man who did our garden: alive only in errant fallible memory, that private mirror, which distorts more and more as the years go by.

I must sleep, she thought. She allowed the muscles of her face to fall, relax. Nobody knows how they look when they are sleeping. Would her face take on that same defenseless emptiness? It might as well. For who was she, when she was unobserved? The loss of the photographs had achieved its object, it had disturbed and shaken her. She felt as if their past had been wiped out behind them.

The alarm rang as usual at six o’clock. She was awake at once. Andrew stirred. He groaned softly. “Oh Christ, it isn’t morning?” Barefoot in her creased kaftan, she went down the passage into the living room.

Fairfax had gone. She pressed her lips together; her heart thudded painfully, and she put a hand to her ribs, and rubbed the spot where it beat—a vague, distracted gesture, as if she were offering consolation to someone else, to a frightened elderly woman.

And yet it seemed that he had made an orderly retreat. He had taken his jacket and tie, and picked up his car keys. His blanket lay draped over one arm of the sofa. She picked it up and folded it. Last night’s cup of black coffee was on the floor where she had placed it, untouched. He might have stayed for breakfast, she thought. He might have told us what the fuss was about. Perhaps the night’s events were illusory; perhaps, waking, he could not remember what had frightened him. It was a strangely lightless morning, the sun not visible or even in prospect: a hot morning, silent. Other cups of coffee, which she had poured for herself and Andrew, lay in other rooms: waiting for her to collect them up and pour them away.

The building, at eight A.M., seemed to have crept closer to the earth. There was no one on the roof, and nothing to see; but scraps of wastepaper skittered across the parapet, borne on a low, keening wind. The air felt gritty, sulfurous; a soupy lemon-brown dust haze hung over Ghazzah Street and obscured the view below her. The vacant lot had now become a building site. She could make out the figures of the laborers, moving slowly, scarves bound across their noses and mouths. In that bruise-colored light, hovering among the trenches and foundations, they looked like the natives of some razed city of the ancient world.

She went downstairs, and rang Yasmin’s doorbell. I could have a pleasant chat, she thought; see how the land lies. But there was no answer. It was part of the unprecedented silence of the last few days. She stood waiting, rang again. Perhaps she was being watched through the spyhole? But it had become second nature to think that.

Back in her own apartment, she picked up the phone. She thought of telephoning Yasmin, or Samira; if they were avoiding her, she would like to know why. But instead she rang the Sarabia Hotel. The desk clerk had a public voice, American singsong, the common currency of airport check-in desks, hire-car agencies, fast-food joints: untrained to listen, but pitched to please.

“You don’t have the room number, madam?” he said, slightly shocked. Reluctantly, he said, “Just one moment.”

Fairfax might of course be sitting in a traffic jam somewhere. He might be at the Turadup office. He might be back in his room, catching up on his sleep. She wanted to speak to him. I should have persisted, last night, she thought. I should have dragged it out of him.

The clerk was back on the line: still more politely incredulous. “You don’t have the room number, madam?”

“No. But you have it. If you will take the trouble to look.”

A pause: then, “I am trying for you.” Another pause, quite a short one this time. Then “No answer.”

“Please let it ring.”

“No answer, madam.”

“Okay. Thanks. I’ll try again later.”

“Okay, madam. Have a nice day.”

She rang Andrew, but he was at the site. She rang Eric Parsons, but the clerk who answered the phone said that he was at the Ministry. She asked if anyone knew where Fairfax was; but no one seemed able to help.

Around noon, Andrew called at the Turadup office to see if there was any mail. Hasan was manning the reception desk, overflowing a typist’s chair, legs stretched out before him; he was turning over the pages of a book of “Peanuts” cartoons.

“Hello, Mr. Andrew,” he said, getting up. “You want to drink coffee?”

“No thanks, I’m in a rush.”

“No mail for you today, but one telephone message.” He pushed it to Andrew across the desk.

“I can’t read this,” Andrew said. “Who’s it from?” He handed back the Arabic scrawl.

“Message from Mr. Adam.”

“Good, I wondered where he’d got to.” Hasan said nothing. “Come on then, what does it say? I’m only an ignorant khawwadjih, Hasan.”

Hasan read it out, his voice expressionless. “He says, I go up to your roof last night and saw two men with box and down the stairs carrying a person who is dead. I am advise you to leave that place.”

Andrew reached out and snatched back the piece of paper. He stared down at it, the loops and squiggles that defied comprehension. “Did you take this message?”

“No, not me.”

“Who then?”

Hasan shrugged. He seemed to think it might be any passerby.

“Well, it can’t be the bloody tea boy, Hasan, because he can’t write, can he?”

“Perhaps,” Hasan said, “he goes to school?”

“I want to know who took this message, and what time it came in.” Andrew slammed it down on the desk. “I want to talk to whoever took this message, Hasan, and I want to talk to that person now.”

But even as he said this, even as he enacted the part of a furious man, a man horribly alarmed, he understood that he would never find out who had taken the message, or when. It was an unwanted message, as unwanted by him as by anyone else who received it; and just as suddenly he understood that the clerk had done him a favor, had offered him a warning.

“I think,” Hasan said, “that it is a joke.” He spoke carefully, and his voice was full of foreboding. “It is not a very funny joke, but best thing is that you know about it. You want to drink coffee now?”

“You took this message yourself,” Andrew said.

Calmly Hasan held out his hand for it, a creased yellow palm. He rested his eyes on Andrew’s face; they seemed to express sympathy. “Now I put it in the trash,” he said. “You give it me, sir.”

Andrew glanced at it once more. Then he crumpled it up and dropped it into the clerk’s open hand.

“You were having a party last night?” Hasan suggested.

“A party of sorts.”

“Too much mineral water,” Hasan said.

At half past one Frances made herself some coffee. She sat down with her cassette tape and her phrase book. She felt she was making little progress with her Arabic; and perhaps she would not make any this morning either, but it seemed the best thing she could do was to pass the time, to pretend that nothing was wrong and this was her first morning on Ghazzah Street. She opened the book: Lesson Thirty.

Her businessman had worked through twenty-nine lessons. His passage had not been entirely smooth; at various times he had been owed money, he had fallen ill. He had experienced the usual exasperations and delays: “The driver does not know this quarter. He is holding the map the wrong way up.” But on the whole his ventures had prospered: “I have met all the representatives of all the companies. I have made an appointment with the secretary to the Minister. He will sign the contract tomorrow afternoon.”

And now it is time for him to leave; taking with him, presumably, the antique chest he bought in the souk, at the price of such linguistic turmoil. “He prepares his luggage. He closes up the house. He takes a taxi to the airport.”

So Mr. Smith is going home, she thinks. He will see his wife and children again, he will land on his native soil. It is all so simple for him. “He gives his passport to the Security Services. He receives his stamp for exit. He gets on a bus with the other passengers. The bus takes them to the plane.”

Time dripped by. Frances sipped her coffee. She bent her head over her book. She did not switch the tape on; she felt too weak for any unnecessary effort. The wind tossed the leaves on Dunroamin’s tree, turning up their pallid undersides; dust caked the windows, blown into patterns of mountain peaks, into a shifting geology that lived and died in seconds. Footsteps walked overhead.

Mr. Smith has made it then. He is getting out for good. “He has said a sorrowful goodbye to the new friends he has made. The passengers dismount the bus. His luggage has been carried to the plane. The passengers ascend the aircraft steps.”

And in a few moments he will be airborne. There is nothing to detain him. He has settled his affairs, he has honored his commitments. No one wants to keep him here; no one would have a reason to. His passport has been stamped for him: EXIT VISA ONLY.

Now: she can try to persuade Andrew to break his contract. If she could convince him—about the rifleman, about the crate, about the Visitor—if she could persuade him, they could go together, go now, go as soon as it could be arranged. I know, she will say, that I am not offering you a watertight case, a tidy plot, that there is much, almost everything really, still to learn; but let us go, Andrew, before we learn it. They cannot cut and run; they must go through the formalities, or they will not be allowed to leave. What they cannot do is go without attracting attention. You cannot slip out of the Kingdom. You go with permission, or not at all; your intentions must be advertised. Anyone who is interested can find out what you mean to do.

Or she can go alone. Pleading sickness, giving sickness as her excuse, she can apply for an exit visa, and see what happens; see if anyone cares enough to try to stop her. If she has the knowledge, she should bear the consequences of it; but the world does not work like that. Consequences are random here, no more discriminating than a burst of automatic fire; and yet they cut down the future. Consequences are what you get, not what you deserve.

And now the plane is taxiing down the runway. She enters into Mr. Smith’s feelings; he is happy and relieved. “The passengers fasten their seat belts. Their journey will last five hours.”

She heard Andrew’s key in the door. Something was wrong; he never came home so early.

She threw the book aside and went to meet him. He stood in the doorway as Fairfax had done, a few hours earlier; his face was gray. “Fairfax,” he said. “Dead. There’s been an accident.”

Hours passed. She made them some food: “Because,” she said, “we must eat something.” She was not sure which meal of the day it was supposed to be. It was almost dark; soon, perhaps, they would be calling evening prayers. Their mouths were dry; they pushed the food around their plates. Their eyes met, and she gathered the dishes toward her, and took them away into the kitchen without a word.

“What was he saying?” she asked: out loud for the third time. The conversation had a dazed, hypnotized quality, as if they were compelled to repeat the same formula again and again until it lost all meaning. “What was he trying to say?” She looked up. “Andrew, is there anything you are keeping from me?”

He shook his head slowly. He did not ask her the same question. He had not told her about the telephone message.

“Because you mustn’t have any idea that you can spare me.”

“I can’t spare you, Fran, or I would have spared you this.”

“Tell me everything again. Tell me where it happened.”

“It was on the ring road. It was between the Petrola plant and the airport. You must know it, you must remember, where you see the petrol storage tanks … the road crosses the wadi. There’s an embankment, and it falls away ten or fifteen feet. The body was down there on the sand. The car had plowed through the fence. It’s only chicken wire. People have made holes in it, anyway, cutting through to get on to the freeway, trying to save a bit of time. It’s a shocking stretch of road. Everybody says so. There’s no center divide. There aren’t any lights …”

“But he didn’t go at night, did he? Last night he was here, with us. What time was the body found?”

“I don’t know, Fran. Nobody can get the story straight. I’m only telling you what the police told Eric Parsons, and God knows that was little enough. They reckon the car came off the road at speed, he was thrown out, his skull was fractured … I don’t know. If there was another car involved they aren’t prepared to say. It was just after one o’clock that Eric got a call.”

“So they’re saying it happened sometime during the morning, in broad daylight? He lay there on the sand ten feet down from the road and died of a fractured skull and nobody helped him and nobody stopped?”

“They won’t. They won’t stop. You know that.”

“He must have been making for the airport. Mustn’t he?”

“Eric wants to know why. He was supposed to be here for another three days.”

“So what did you tell Eric? Did you tell him about last night?”

Andrew shook his head. “How could I? I can’t make sense of what happened last night.”

“I don’t know if it makes any better sense to you now. I mean I don’t know whether … I’m not sure how to say this … whether you think that there is any chance at all that it wasn’t an accident?”

For a while neither of them spoke. Then Frances said, “No one saw him. We don’t know what time he left here. I said that he was here with us last night, but he could have gone before dawn, for all we know. We don’t know if he made it back to his hotel, do we? Someone could have stopped him as he left here, before he got around the corner.”

“Someone …” Andrew said. “The elusive someone. Who are these people?”

People who lurk on the street corner with a rifle. People who walk overhead, who go up and down, veiled, armed. People who lay claim to packing cases. Who knows what people? Who presumes to inquire? It’s their country, isn’t it?

“They could have killed him,” she said, “and dumped him from one car and run his own car off the road. It could have happened at any time. Think about it. No one saw him or heard from him after we went back to bed at four o’clock this morning.”

Andrew looked up at her, cornered, in pain. “Actually they did. I mean, it can’t be what you say, because he rang in to the office.”

“When? What time?”

“Sometime during the morning. Early, I think.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, nothing really. It’s not what he said. It’s just the fact that he rang.”

“Who took the message? Can’t you find out what he said?”

“Not really. It was very garbled.”

“Who did he speak to?”

“Just the tea boy.”

Frances telephoned the Sarabia Hotel. It was the same desk clerk: or another with the same voice. “What time did Mr. Fairfax check out?” she asked.

The receiver was laid aside; she heard muttering in the background. The voice came back, wearily polite: “One moment, madam.” A minute passed; he was back. “Mr. Fairfax did not check out, madam.”

“But what time did he leave?”

A pause. A muttered consultation. “Madam, you are still there? We did not see him go. If you would like to give me the name of your company, we will send you on the bill.”

They sat opposite each other, in curiously formal poses, heads bowed, hands on their knees, observing another silence. Then Frances said, “The car, you know … there’s been a problem with the steering. I suppose that might have been it.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I don’t think I shall ever believe that this was just pure chance.”

“He was frightened. We know that. I mean he was frightened before last night, maybe last night had nothing to do with it. He said himself, it wasn’t rational. He’d decided to get out, he was making for the airport, he was driving at a fair speed—”

“Yes, I know. But what was he driving away from?”

The telephone startled them. Andrew had been about to speak; he broke off. “Who will that be?” He reached for it. Her fists clenched in her lap. She tried to uncurl them. I have to be calm, she said to herself. I have to ask the right questions, very rigorous and unavoidable questions, before the answers slip away and vanish forever. Oh, hello Eric,” Andrew said. He sounded calm. “Yes, I have. Well, naturally she is.”

Eric spoke. Andrew listened. Andrew said, “We feel that we are responsible for Fairfax. As much as anyone is.”

She got up, crossed the room and huddled at his side, listening in to the call. Eric said, “ … some kind of certificate from the police, without which nothing. Unfortunately his passport seems to be missing—”

She took the phone from Andrew. “Eric, listen to me. Where are Fairfax’s things?”

Eric took a moment to understand this. It seemed, when he answered, that he had already taken on the accents of the police file, of the coroner’s court. “You mean his personal effects, Frances?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean. Not just his passport, but his clothes, his suitcase, his toothbrush—do you see what I’m getting at, Eric?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Were they with him in the car, or back at the hotel? The hotel says he never checked out.”

“You phoned them?”

“Yes, why not?”

“Because I don’t want you to interfere, that’s why not. Please give me Andrew.”

“No. Do listen please. We have to find out about his clothes.”

“Oh yes, I see … sorry, my dear, I didn’t mean to snap at you. I suppose you think they ought to be returned to the widow. The Embassy has telephoned her, of course.” Eric sounded sorrowful now; he had convicted himself of insensitivity. Clearly he thought this concentration on the clothes, the suitcase, the personal effects, it was some feminine angle on mourning, some piece of etiquette he had forgotten. “The fact is, Frances, we don’t know. I mean, we presume they were in the car with him. That would seem to make sense. I know that he appears to have departed on impulse, but surely he’d stay to pack?”

“Then have the police recovered the stuff? From the roadside? Or from the car?”

“They haven’t said.” Eric was bemused. “They do deny all knowledge of the passport, but then they deny all knowledge of practically anything.”

“You’d better ask them.”

“But Frances, you’ve no idea, have you? You’ve no idea what I’m up against? Look, I have been dealing with these people for years. I have been dealing with these people since you were a little lamb in your school blazer. They don’t tell you anything. That is their habit. That is their policy.”

“Have the police asked questions about the car? The steering?”

“Oh, look now.” Eric had forgotten his embarrassment; he was coldly hostile. “Don’t try to lay this at my door. The car had been fixed. I have the receipt, Frances, the receipt for the repairs. It’s here in my petty-cash drawer. I have my hand on it now. I’ll keep it for you, shall I? Andrew can drive you down. You can come in right now and inspect it.”

“For the record,” she said wearily, “I don’t think the faulty steering killed Fairfax. If I did, Eric, it would almost be a relief. That’s not what I think. I can’t prove what I think, but what would be the point? I tried to talk to you before, but you wouldn’t listen. You’re too thick to take in what I tell you, aren’t you? You’re too thick and too terrified.”

Andrew took the receiver out of her hand. She turned away, collapsed into her chair, not listening anymore. Eric’s voice ran on for a while. Then Andrew said, “Okay. Yes, I think she’ll insist on that. Call me when you find out where. Goodbye.”

He put the phone down. “Well, I’ll never work for Turadup again. After that outburst.”

“You do understand, don’t you? We can’t trace his movements, or know if he was taken away by force, unless we know whether he packed his things up. If he didn’t—then it was sudden. Or he didn’t even go back to the hotel. We do need to find them.”

Andrew sounded weary, resigned; much as Eric had, before she antagonized him. “If you can take away a man, sweetie, you can take away his suitcase. If you can abduct a businessman, you can abduct his spare drip-dry suit.”

Frances didn’t reply. She felt too tired to think about it anymore. Life is not like detective stories. There is a wider scope for interpretation. The answers to all the questions that beset you are not in facts, which are the greatest illusion of all, but in your own heart, in your own habits, in your limitations, in your fear. She sees the vehicle spin out of control; she sees the panic-stricken driver. Then she sees, alternatively, the felon, the corpse, the car door swung open, the body slithering down the embankment: then she sees, in either case, the skid, the slide, the smashed bone, the spilled petrol, the sand, the sun, the sickening flux of human blood … the story is what you make it. In either case, the young man is dead.

She said to Andrew, “I don’t know, but I feel you are arguing against yourself.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps I am,” he said without emotion. “You have always been better than me at getting hold of the unthinkable.”

“Can’t we go now? Do we have to stay till July?”

He considered. “I think it would be better to do everything calmly. Make our agreed exit. Don’t you?”

Perhaps that was Fairfax’s mistake. His exit had not been agreed. She remembered what Mrs. Parsons had said, months ago, on their first trip to the souk: “It isn’t the roads in town that are dangerous, it’s the roads out.”

Very soon Daphne Parsons was on the telephone. “Imagine,” she said, “what a peculiar thing to do, to take off like that! He planned to leave the car—my car—at the airport! Just dump it there! Of course, I did think when I met him, what a very strange young man. He did seem to be rather … erratic. Is that the word I want? Frances dear, you must be terribly upset. I know you had him over for supper, and you must feel that you got to know him a little. I hope it doesn’t make your medical condition any worse?”

Then it was Rickie Zussman who called: with statistics. “Carla said you sounded rattled when she spoke to you. She says you’re trying to make something of it. Believe me, Frannie, this is just the way it goes. You shouldn’t see any malfeasance here. One in six accidents in the Kingdom involve fatalities. Though Christ knows,” he added, “I feel sorry for the guy.”

Then it was Eric again. “Andrew thought you would want to see the body, Frances, and I don’t suppose it is in my power to keep you away. Someone has to identify it, and we have been trying to find out where it was taken. We have been given various pieces of information, all of them inconsistent, and none of them necessarily accurate.”

“But someone must know.”

“I agree.”

“There is no chance, is there …” She could not continue.

“That it’s some kind of mistake? I think that would be too much to hope for. But I know you don’t believe what you’re told, Frances. I know you won’t take my word for anything.”

She checked the time. They arranged to meet; they would bring their own car, and Eric would collect Hasan, to interpret for them. It would be a long evening, Eric said, even if their first efforts were crowned with success.

She wandered about the flat, dazed, sticky; the air-conditioners did not seem to be working properly. She felt desperately hungry now, weak with hunger, and yet she felt that it would be almost indecent to sit down and eat. At some point she washed, and changed her clothes to go out.

After sunset prayers the young Saudi men go out to visit restaurants and meet up with their friends; they divert themselves at funfairs, which they call Luna Parks. Tonight the neon-lit spokes of the Great Wheels shone between the walls of the mosques. The city had taken on its nightmare life: a green moon, a vitiating heat.

They drove: the freeways, the highways, the roads off the map; the unknown quarters, the alien districts, streets and buildings they had never seen before. Eyes on the road, hour after hour, breathing in the dust and the diesel fumes, their clothes sticking to their flesh, their throats clogged with apprehension, and their minds still numb with shock. Between the concrete pillars of the overpasses, darkness blossomed into darkness, each manmade wilderness as empty of association as the surface of the moon. And their every second thought was of mortality; you could die here, your figure fleeing before the screaming cars, running till you dropped and expiring without a sound, like the sacrificial victims who are buried in bridges. Then you would haunt the freeways, your dead compass swinging, searching for home; until the city expanded, by its usual laws, and they built over your ghost.

Hasan argued with the porters at hospital gates. Eric Parsons stood by their car, in the evening’s stupefying heat, and wrung his hands; she had never seen anyone do it before. “I need papers,” he said. “I need signatures. I need death certificates. I need copies for the airline. I need copies for the Embassy.” He spun slowly on his heel, beseeching. “Tell the man, Hasan. Convey it to him somehow. Tell him I have it from the police that the body is here.”

“He says,” Hasan reported, “not this hospital, Mr. Eric.”

“Will nobody help us? Has nobody any sense? I have formalities to complete. Have you told him that?”

Now it was ten o’clock, and the evening lay behind them, an ordeal by which they would be marked. “When I get out of here in July,” Andrew whispered to her, “I’m not coming back.”

She looked sideways at him; thought of Mr. Smith, of his confident approach to the security guards, his visas in his hand. “Hush,” she said. She nodded toward Eric, who circled aimlessly in the dust, a few yards from their parked car. “We’ll talk about that tomorrow. Here comes Hasan again. He looks as if he has something to tell us.”

Andrew got out of the car. Hasan said, “I think we have found the place. But we cannot go in.”

“Why not?”

“He says the man who has the key is praying.”

“What, at this time?”

“You must come tomorrow.”

“But we have been driving for hours,” Eric said. He seemed on the verge of weeping; all his experience had not prepared him for tonight. “Tell him we have a lady with us. Tell him we must identify the body.”

“He says you cannot do it,” Hasan said. “To identify, you need four Muslim men. Christian men will not do.”

“And Christian women?” Frances spoke from the passenger seat. Eric leaned down, to the open window. “I suppose,” he said vengefully, “that now you think he was murdered? I suppose you think this fiasco is part of some conspiracy?”

“No. I know a fiasco when I see one. I’ve been around the world enough.”

Eric wiped his hand across his forehead. “It’s always been the same, whenever an expat has died. Whenever there has been even a suggestion of violence, they just close ranks. The one thing they don’t like is people asking questions. The one thing they don’t like is a body on their hands.” He took out his handkerchief, already soaked with sweat, and dabbed at his face. “They always think we will blame them for something.”

Unwillingly, she felt sorry for him. He had issued all the right warnings, from the beginning, and she had not heeded him. Don’t interfere, don’t speculate; she had done everything he had warned her against. And now an example had been made; but not of her.

Andrew said, “Just try again, Hasan. Tell them we don’t believe the man is praying. Tell them we want to go into the mortuary. Tell them we don’t want to identify, we just want to see. Okay?”

Hasan nodded. He trailed again across the hospital forecourt, and talked to the men behind the barrier. He was back within minutes, hitching at his clothing, patting at the little round skullcap he wore: his face impassive. “It is true the man is not praying. They are saying that to make you go away.”

“Tell them we won’t go,” Andrew said.

“They say we must go home again and wait until morning. Then they promise the man will come with the key.”

“Ins’allah?” Frances said.

“Ins’allah,” Hasan agreed.

“I don’t believe this,” Andrew said.

But he got back into the car. You cannot really argue with hospital porters. They carry guns.

They said goodnight and began the long drive back across the city. The day’s dust coated the rubbish skips, and the municipal greenery, with its raw sewage dressing, that wilted on the center divides. It lay thick on the emerald plastic grass that the restaurants laid out before their doors, the emerald grass that their headlights turned to black.

“What were you going to say to me,” Frances asked, “earlier this evening, before Eric called us the first time? I thought you were going to tell me something?”

Andrew looked at her warily, from the tail of his eye. Road signs swam through their headlights: AL KOURNAICH, JEDDAH CENTRAL, JEDDAH ISLAMIC PORT. STOP! YOU ARE FAST BUT DANGER IS FASTER! “I love you,” he said. “I don’t want you to be frightened. I wish I had never brought you here.”

“That is not what you were going to say.” She turned her head and stared out of her window, into passing cars; realizing, from the response of their occupants, from the winks and nods and leers, that she must have developed the habit of keeping her gaze lowered, of censoring her vision. She said, “Let’s go to the hotel. We might find out something if we persist. Somebody must have seen him leave.”

Andrew did not reply; but he turned the car at the first opportunity. She looked at his face, for his expression of “I shall have no peace till I do this”; but he was not wearing it.

In the foyer of the Sarabia Hotel, a fountain, impossibly blue, tinkled into a marble basin; tropical flowers, made of silk, bloomed in brass tubs. A waiter carried a tray: silver tray, crystal glasses, drinks the color of crushed strawberries. The air was icy and the sweat dried on their skins.

The desk clerk was a small dark round-faced man of some mongrel Near Eastern provenance. He gave them a respectful greeting; or he gave it to Andrew, averting his eyes from Frances with a lofty civility. She put her hands up, scooping her sticky hair from the back of her neck. The clerk’s eyes flickered over her, like some mechanical scanner, noting the slight rise of her breasts, and she saw on his face for an instant a cruel suppressed avidity, a destructive infantine greed. She dropped her eyes.

Andrew put his hands on the reception desk. “May I see the manager?”

She admired him: commanding size, cool voice, overbearing courtesy.

The clerk said, “He is praying.”

“At this time?”

The clerk said, “I regret.”

“Then I should like to see the undermanager.”

The clerk said, smiling, “He is in Kuwait.”

Andrew drew back. He folded his arms. “So who’s running the hotel?”

“Perhaps I can help you?”

And Andrew said, with a fine show of racism, “I doubt it, Ali.”

They looked around the lobby. Laundered thobes strolled to and fro, and smoked cigarettes; glass-fronted lifts carried the patrons to their suites, like prophets assumed to heaven. Frances said, “Do you usually talk like that?”

Andrew said, “I want to be Jeff Pollard when I grow up.”

The clerk fussed with some papers and forms; he seemed unwilling to leave them alone. “You have some complaints?” he asked.

“You had a guest, a Mr. Fairfax.”

The clerk looked interested. “Excuse me,” he said, “we have no guest of that name.”

“He isn’t here now.”

“No. He has left.”

“He has a suitcase somewhere. Things that belong to him.”

“You have papers to collect them?”

“We are friends of his.” Andrew corrected himself: “We were friends of his.”

“It is impossible,” the clerk said, “because we have no guest of that name.”

Andrew ignored this. “Did the police come and take his things away?”

The clerk shrugged. “I did not see them, sir.”

“But if the police had been here you would have heard. You would know all about it.”

“Excuse me, sir, but I think there is a mistake. Perhaps your friend is at some other hotel?”

“No, my friend is dead.”

“Perhaps he is staying at the Nova Park?”

A voice called to them from across the foyer. “Andrew! What are you doing in this neck of the woods?”

Andrew turned sharply. “Raji, it’s you. Come over here, would you?”

Raji slid across the tundra of polished marble, hands outstretched; the light from the chandeliers split and shattered in the diamond of his tiepin. “What, dining out?” he inquired. His eyes passed over her crumpled cotton smock, Andrew’s bush-shirt darkly patched with sweat. “No, I see you are making some inquiry.”

“I want to get hold of the manager. It’s about some things a friend of ours may have left behind.”

Raji took out his wallet. He opened it, and let his plump fingers hover; he selected a note, and handed it to the clerk as if it were a cloakroom ticket. He spoke; the clerk made a little gesture, as if to say “Why did you not ask me before?” He vanished.

“I was trying to avoid that,” Andrew said. “I was trying to employ terror. Here, Raji, let me reimburse you.”

“It is nothing,” Raji said. “Put your money away. It helps, excuse me Frances, if you speak their bloody lingo.”

The manager soon appeared: could he be of any service? His English was impeccable, his mustache clipped, his nails finely manicured; he was the essence of Levantine courtesy, and he kept his eyes from the woman as if she wore an aura of barbed wire. Raji took charge. “The name of your friend?” he asked. Andrew told him. Raji took the manager’s arm and drew him aside.

They held some muttered conversation. A few moments passed. The manager darted a look over his shoulder; he shook his head.

Raji turned back to them. He looked worried. “I understand it is a police matter.”

“Yes. There has been an accident.”

With a little bow in their general direction, the manager melted away.

“My friends,” Raji said, “leave it alone. I advise you from a sincere heart. Once you are embroiled with those fellows then all sorts of misunderstanding may begin to occur.”

“Okay, Raji.” Andrew was downcast. “Thanks. At least they don’t deny all knowledge of him. Did he tell you, have the police been here, and taken his things away?”

“That is possible. But better if you do not press it.”

“We need to know,” Frances said.

Raji looked at her sorrowfully. “My dear Frances, you need not think there is some conspiracy. Because people act as if they have something to hide does not mean that they really do. That is the first thing you must learn about living in the Kingdom. The puzzles are, how shall I put it, more apparent than real.”

“It’s soothing to think so.”

Andrew said, “I feel—Frances feels—that it must be possible to sort out what has really happened.”

“Oh, in a logical world,” Raji said. “But the Kingdom is not a logical world, and besides”—he smiled—“logic is not an ornament for young ladies.”

Frances walked away, and gazed into the fountain’s basin, through the blue rippling water to the mosaic tiles. “Are you meeting someone, Raji?” Andrew asked.

“Yes, I am here to take dinner with my dear friend Zulfikar, he is an old school pal of mine. We have a little notion to open a restaurant of our own. Maybe a rather special one—sherry in your consommé, rum in your chocolate mousse, vin in your coq—oh, it must come to Jeddah. Don’t you think?”

“It sounds a bit risky. Are you really going to try it?”

Raji showed his very white teeth. “I am in the business of pushing out the frontiers of the possible. When we are open you will come as my guests, you will enjoy it. There is no profit without risk, you know. At least, that is what my friend and I were told, when we were at business school in Miami.”

They went back out to their car. Its trapped air was stifling; they moved into the stream of evening traffic. “It will be cooler when we get going,” Andrew said. But they had hardly moved a hundred yards from the hotel entrance when a snarl-up and a traffic policeman brought them to a halt. “We should have stayed and had a drink,” Andrew said. “Lowered the tone a bit.”

The drivers around them put their fists on their car horns. Frances put her head out of the window to try to see the cause of the delay. A pickup truck was slewed across the intersection ahead, one side bashed in; a curtained limousine disgorged a Saudi gentleman with a pointed, hennaed beard, and a long-suffering expression. Three young Filipino men in jeans and white T-shirts stood mutely by the truck, and a traffic policeman, gun on hip, ripped their documents out of their hands.

“I hope they’re carrying plenty of ready cash,” Andrew said. “Or we’ll be here all night.”

They were in a lineup of cars, five abreast; she turned her head, and said, “Look, that’s Abdul Nasr.”

Andrew looked. “So it is. That’s not his own car he’s driving.”

“I haven’t seen him for weeks.”

Andrew had returned his attention to the scene ahead; she returned hers to the next car, and their neighbor’s bronze unyielding profile. Abdul Nasr took one hand from the wheel and fitted a cigarette between his lips. The man in the passenger seat leaned across and lit it for him. She caught a momentary glimpse of his face, and she knew him at once, even though she had seen him greasy and bareheaded, and he now wore an immaculate white ghutra. She remembered his lugubrious features, and the blank expression in his eyes when she had tried to deter him from knocking on the door of the empty flat. What was it the landlord had said? “I want you to know this Egyptian.”

The backseat of the car also had an occupant; a woman, veiled, and so far shrunken into the dark velour upholstery that until she moved Frances had hardly registered her existence. As the Egyptian subsided into the passenger seat, hidden by Abdul Nasr, the woman hitched herself forward in the seat, as if to speak; she put a hand to her face, holding a square of something white, and for just a second, she raised her veil. How provident she was, on this stifling evening, thunder hanging in the air; Frances envied her for a moment, feeling the cold sting of the cologne tissue against burning skin. As the black cloth fell back into place, she recognized the woman; it was Yasmin.

She said nothing; she did not know what to say. Her mind revolved the possibilities. They drove; the policeman waved them on.

On Mecca Road, still miles from home, they were stopped at a roadblock; but their documents were not checked. Another policeman pressed his face to the windscreen, and then withdrew it. His colleagues flung up the boots of the cars ahead. “What are they looking for?”

“Drugs,” Andrew said. “Or weapons. Maybe a nice consignment of Kalashnikovs up from the Yemen?”

She said fearfully, “Who wants them?”

“Me,” Andrew said. “I could use some violence.”

They drove; behind them, the heart-churning cacophony of sirens, trailing across the bridges and the junctions and the highways in the sky.

When they got into the flat the phone was ringing. She picked it up. It was Eric. “You finally made it home,” he said.

“Yes, we got stopped at a roadblock. The police are everywhere. It was like this at Christmas, remember?”

Eric grunted. “More on that later. First of all, would you tell Andrew to get down to the site by seven o’clock tomorrow? Jeff says the Indians are having one of their mutinies. They’ve got a list of hard questions about their baggage allowances and they want to put them to a high authority.”

“I think Andrew hoped he might catch up on his sleep.”

“Look, we have a contract to fulfill. It won’t help anybody if work comes to a halt.”

“Okay, I’ll tell him.”

“I’m going to the airport first thing. I have to talk to the airline about sending the body home.”

“What body? We haven’t got a body yet.”

“We’ll find it. Meet me at the hospital at ten o’clock. Oh, and one more thing.” What she heard in Eric’s voice, what she realized she had been hearing, was not his usual monotone urbanity, not even the night’s deep fatigue: but a sort of numbness, like shell shock. “There’s a strong rumor that someone tried to kill your next-door neighbor a couple of hours ago. There’s been a shooting at the Sarabia Hotel. So do me a favor. Keep your heads down. Just remember that whatever happens it’s got nothing to do with you.”

3

Next morning dawn did not arrive. The dust, in a dirty brown cloud, blotted out the early sun; bowed figures, subfusc and gagged, groped their way down Ghazzah Street beyond the wall. “I will be back soon,” Andrew promised her. “I must drop by at the site and then I’ll get hold of Eric and we’ll go back to the hospital.” He kissed her. She huddled into the doorway. He coughed as he made his way to the car, the dust peppering his face.

At nine o’clock yesterday’s wind began to blow, out of yesterday’s yellow sky, and plastered the mountain ranges against the windows. It did not blow the dust away; there was an endless supply of it, a continent of dust. She looked out and watched it shifting, banking up. The street cats swarmed over the wall, looking for shelter, and dragged themselves before the glass. She watched them: scared cats, starving, alive with vermin, their faces battered, their broken limbs set crooked, their fur eaten away. She felt she could no longer live with doing nothing for these cats. Slow tears leaked out of her eyes.

When the telephone rang she almost did not answer it. But it might be Eric, with a message about the hospital; or Andrew, to say the Indians had delayed him. It was Daphne Parsons.

“Yes?” Frances said. “What did you want?”

Daphne sounded hurt. “Only to tell you the news. You’ve heard about Raji?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I know Eric phoned you, but more’s come out since then. Apparently he was having dinner at the Sarabia Hotel with some bigwig, a major in the security forces, and as they were leaving, as they were on the steps, somebody took a shot at him out of a car.”

“And?”

“They got the major. He was hit in the shoulder, he’s going to be all right. Raji wasn’t hurt, but I bet it shook him up a bit. Don’t you know anything about it? I thought you would know. Shall I come over there?”

“How do you know they were aiming at Raji? Maybe it was this major they were after.” She put the question; it was idle, academic. Perhaps it was not the time for it, but she felt almost entertained.

“Well, I’m not entirely sure.” Daphne had taken offense. “I’m only giving you the story as it was told to me. Perhaps there’s more to it. Perhaps it’s just the fact that Raji has so many enemies. It’s what he stands for, isn’t it?”

“And what do you think he stands for?”

“Oh,” Daphne said vaguely, “progress, all that.”

There was a low, distant rumble of thunder, as she put the phone down on Daphne. Yesterday’s newspaper had exhorted Muslims all over the Kingdom to join the Isteska, or rain-prayer; the King himself recommended it. Soon those prayers will be answered. She let herself out and crossed the hall.

There was no answer when she rang Yasmin’s doorbell, but then she had not expected it. She rang again; she put her finger on the buzzer and left it there. There seemed no occasion for politeness anymore.

After a moment or two, Shams opened the door. Her head and shoulders were swathed in a dark cloth, and her face itself looked dark and strained. Unsmiling, she held the door open only so far as she needed; her eyes passed over Frances, and then she spoke. “Gone away,” she said. “Everybody gone. Finished.”

When the phone rang again it was Rickie Zussman. “You heard about your neighbor? Jesus, Frannie, what a week for you! This guy they shot was some kind of arms dealer or something, he might have been from Iraq, and Raji was doing some go-between business. Or at least, they’ve found an arms cache somewhere, I don’t know. They say this guy was shot in the stomach, that he’s in intensive care. Raji was lucky, eh?”

And then Jeff Pollard: “Did you hear about Raji? They say some pro-Iranian group took a shot at him while he was out with some business crony. They say they’ve been after him for months, waiting for an opportunity. Did you ever see anybody hanging around the flats? Anyway, they missed Raji and got the other guy. They say he was dead on arrival.”

In daylight, she could see that the hospital was some kind of government institution; a collection of long low huts, widely spaced, within a perimeter fence. The gateman raised the barrier for them, and they parked the car in a featureless compound, marked out by low concrete blocks. Eric was there already, sitting in his car, with Hasan in the passenger seat and his windows wound up tightly to keep out the dust. It swirled and hissed about his ankles as he got out to meet them, a nest of corroding serpents shaped by the hot wind.

He took her arm, oddly formal, hesitant. “Frances? Did you sleep well?”

“I don’t want to talk about Raji,” she said. “Let’s just do this first.”

“Well,” Eric said, “there’s no connection, is there? Yes, you’re quite right, let’s do this. But you know about the wife, don’t you? Raji’s wife? I’ll tell you later.”

Andrew said, “Did you go to the airport? How did you get on?”

“Oh, it will be okay, the airline will fix it,” Eric said vaguely. His eyes seemed unfocused. “They’ve done it before. People have accidents. But do you know, Andrew,” he shook his head, “I never thought I should land in the middle of a situation like this. When I have been so careful. When everyone has been so careful. When Turadup’s reputation has always stood so high.”

“Fairfax was careless,” Frances said. “Dying like that. He could jeopardize the contract, couldn’t he?”

“Don’t jump on me,” Eric said. He seemed almost cowed. The morning had changed him. “I know you’re not a fool, Frances. I never thought you were.” He took out his handkerchief, crisp and folded; dabbed at his lip, as if he might find blood there. “I just thought that you were rather—pressed upon by your environment, if I can put it like that. I thought from the beginning that you were one of those people who should never have come here.”

“Yes, I know. You accused me of exercising my imagination, didn’t you? Are you trying to tell me that I have been right about something?”

“Come on,” Andrew said. “Let’s not waste time.”

In the tiny office of the man in charge of the mortuary, there were four or five hangers-on whose function was uncertain; perhaps they were his cousins, or merely his cronies. Eric and Andrew seemed to take it for granted that these men should be there, leaning on the walls, reading the newspapers, smoking and chattering. They stood in the doorway, keeping Frances blocked from view with their shoulders, and waiting for some attention to come their way.

It was a while before the man in charge extricated himself, came out from behind his untidy desk, and held some conversation with Hasan. He was desultory, and scratched his head, and he seemed to say, though she could not follow any of his Arabic, that he did not know if what they wanted could be done. Then at last it seemed that Hasan uttered certain unspecified threats, which he indicated came from the khawwadjihs, and which he only translated; and at this the little man, who was jaundiced and paunchy, became agitated, and gave vent to a stream of invective, and a series of operatic gestures; his cronies put down their newspapers, and stood up straighter around the walls, and looked vaguely interested and alert. Hasan said, “He tells you this body cannot be released until he has the paperwork. He tells you he has been brought two bodies this morning and that is enough. But,” Hasan added surprisingly, “he says he can do what you ask.”

They followed him out of his office, and through a corridor. Two hospital trolleys were parked at an angle, their wheels askew, and on them were bundled the two burdensome corpses to which the man had referred: white sheets covered them entirely, knotted casually above their heads. They turned into a long cold room that was itself like a corridor, with walls of steel, and a blue-burning striplight overhead. The man made a fussy gesture, to hurry them on; then briefly slid open the mortuary drawer, and showed them Fairfax’s dead face. There was no error, no mistake in identity, and for all the inexpert eye could tell, he had died just as the police had given out. The head seemed twisted on the spinal column, the face was clamped, jaundiced, marked by a trickle of black blood; the expression was meaningless.

They went outside. A security guard with a rifle lounged against Eric’s car, and as they came toward it he shifted unwillingly, his eyes moving above the bandanna he wore. “It is a quarantine hospital,” Hasan explained. “That is why the guards. The man says he will fix up the body to send it to its home, he says he is the best for doing that in the whole of the Kingdom.”

“So that is what he was doing,” Frances said. “Boasting.”

She thought of the two corpses in their knotted sheets. She had passed them with scarcely a look; they were not her affair. She felt cold, and strange, and speechless, and removed from what was happening about her. Once again Eric put his hand on her arm; perhaps he wondered if she might faint, or hoped she might, or do something else to discredit herself. But no, he was trying to get her attention; and she realized that he had been talking to Andrew, that he had begun some narration whose beginning she would never hear. “ … with so much going on,” Eric said, “we will never sort out the facts from the rumors, even if it were our affair, and I only tell you because you are the neighbors, you are in some sense caught up in it.”

“Is Yasmin dead?” she said.

Eric turned to her, surprised. “Oh, no, thank God, nothing like that. Didn’t you hear me, weren’t you listening? She tried to leave the country. They stopped her at the airport. I was there this morning and I saw it with my own eyes, that’s how I know, and Hasan here, he caught the drift … She had a ticket for Amman, but they think she was trying to pick up a connection from there to Tehran. The security men weren’t happy, she—well, obviously she didn’t have permission to travel from her husband. And the next thing was the police turned up, and took her away.”

“With your own eyes,” Frances said. “You saw it with your own eyes. Some people’s eyes are better than others, aren’t they? They have higher status. They believe what they see.”

She leaned against their car, under the scrutiny of the armed guard, and she felt the slow heat move in the metal at her back, like a sulky fire. I shall never see Yasmin again, she thought. The woman’s end was part of the woman’s world; information was received at second hand, by courtesy, through the mouth of one of the city’s male keepers. “Did you know her?” she said. “I mean, did you recognize her?”

“Yes. They pulled off her veil.”

“And then what happened?”

“They took her away.”

“I wish I had been there.” Frances raised a hand and pushed her hair from her forehead. “I wish I had come with you to the airport. Then I would have seen it myself.”

“Don’t you believe me?”

Andrew said softly, “You have no choice.”

“What will happen to her?”

“God knows,” Eric said. “Shouldn’t think we ever will. People disappear in this place, don’t they? I expect they’ll want to keep her until they find out the ramifications of it. I shouldn’t think her government will raise a fuss, if the Saudis tell them that she was mixed up in a plot to kill her husband.” He said, musingly, “Daphne always said that they didn’t get on. Seems a bit extreme, wouldn’t you say? Most of Jeddah would be dead, wouldn’t it, if we all went in for violence against our spouse?”

“I don’t think you quite understand,” Frances said. “It wasn’t personal. Or not only a personal thing. It was a matter of ideals.”

“I don’t see that.”

“He wasn’t just a man, he wasn’t just her husband. It was what he represented.”

Eric said, mystified, not hostile, “Was it some feminist thing?”

“You might say that.”

“Or was it religious?”

“Partly.” She shifted away from the car and straightened up. She took a cotton scarf out of her pocket and slowly shook it out. “My hair is full of dust, I should have done this before.” She folded the scarf into a triangle and flipped it over her head, knotting it firmly at the nape of her neck. Her eyes appeared larger, her features drawn. “Who knows?” she said. “Perhaps she just wanted to kill someone. Perhaps she just wanted to see them bleed.”

Eric looked down at her. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I have to concede it’s quite possible that there have been certain comings and goings at your place. But if the police should come bothering you, of course you know nothing.”

“Yes, I’ve grasped the point. I know the drill.” She thought, if I had been there, if I had gone to the airport with Eric, there would have been nothing I could have done for her. I could not have helped her. Now I have to think of my own life. What she had heard from Eric did not surprise her. The possibilities in the air of Dunroamin—those wraiths of violence and despair—had taken on flesh at last. She would never know more than she knew now; would never know, for instance, the name of the man who had been crated up alive. What had he done? What had he known? Someone—a torturer, perhaps—would find out the whole of it. But what’s one body, more or less? Life is cheap enough. Islam hurries to inter the dead; but the story is not over. Allah has something reserved for corpses, whose nervous system, we must presume, remains intact; predicated on one’s misdeeds in life, it is known to the writers of the religious columns as “torment in the grave.”

Eric said, “I think we’d better have you out of those flats today. It could be unpleasant. Go home and pack. You can stay with us tonight.”

Andrew took her arm, and led her to their car. Her face stung, her lips were raw; the sky had darkened over the huts behind them. Eric glanced up, apprehensive. “Let’s try to make it home before the rain,” he said.

But within minutes, the storm broke. The sky split open, and sickly lightning glimmered over the high-rise blocks; before they were uptown, the streets were a foot deep in water. Andrew drove. “Don’t talk to me,” he said. “If we have to stop we’re finished, we’ll never get started again.” The landscape emptied of moving life; cars, abandoned, were slewed across their path. The wind tore up saplings and the urban currents carried them along, as if they were making for the sea; the wind lifted the workmen’s shelters from the building sites, and bore them away and smashed them to matchsticks against the habitations of the living. On Tahlia Street a billboard bearing the King’s portrait had its center punched out by the violence of the gale, leaving only the royal headcloth and a fringe of beard to oversee the flooded highway. At the airport the lights went out. Planes overshot the runways.

They didn’t leave Dunroamin that day. The roads were impassable; the city was not built for floods. They slept; falling on to their bed together, not touching, dropping through layers of fatigue into a willed annihilation; when they woke, groping in darkness, hungry, disorientated, the storm was over. Their throats ached; the air inside the flat was clammy and chilled.

“I want to phone Shabana,” she said. “But I don’t know her number. My address book is missing.”

“The burglars,” Andrew suggested.

“Probably.” They spoke grudgingly; simple words, simple thoughts. She did not know Shabana’s full name. Her husband (she thought of everyone now in the past tense) had been called Mohammad. In a Muslim country, you cannot trace one unknown Mohammad. And besides, Jeddah has no telephone directory.

She telephoned Samira’s flat, but there was no reply: number unobtainable.

The next morning the police came. She stood with her door open and watched them. If they had wanted secrecy, they should have come in the night. They ignored her. Perhaps they did not even notice that she was there; perhaps their religion had trained them so well.

They carried boxes down the stairs; they were the boxes that, some weeks before, the painters had carried up. But some evidence of the “beautification” remained; the tiles looked down from the walls, each with its hostile eye and single scarlet tear.

At ten o’clock a limousine drew up outside the open gate, plowing and splashing through Ghazzah Street’s mud and standing pools. A Yemeni driver got out, a man she did not know.

The door opposite opened a crack, and Shams looked out, peeping up and down the hallway. She saw Frances, and drew back; and then after a few moments the door opened wider, and Raji came out, very pale, in his dark business suit, his features puffy. Frances thought, he is an old man. He was carrying an airline bag; he did not look at her, yet he spoke; his words quite casual, as if they had met just an hour before, but his tone empty and drugged. “They say I should take a holiday, Frances. They say I should go out of the Kingdom. They tell me the airport is back to normal, except for the passengers stranded from yesterday.” He gave the ghost of a chuckle at the passengers’ discomfiture; as if he were a man above the normal laws.

“Where are you going?” she asked him, from the doorway.

He did not reply, but marched out of the front door: out of her life. Shams followed him, her arms laden with baggage, darting a last look at Frances from under her beetle brows; and then finally came mother-in-law, vast, crumpled, yellow, her sari trailing in the thick wet dirt that had blown under the front door. She did not acknowledge Frances, but kept her eyes straight ahead; and in her arms, aged but still muscular arms, she held the child Selim. He slept against her shoulder, not caring where he was taken; and she carried him just as Frances, coming through the hall on the night of the burglary, had carried her bag of groceries.

Frances checked her watch. The police had gone, and in half an hour Andrew would be home. Their cases were in the hall; they were to go to Eric and Daphne. Though I hardly see why we should move out, she thought; it is all over now.

She went upstairs. There was an unaccustomed shaft of daylight on the landing; the front doors of the two upper flats were wide open, just as the police had left them. More than boxes had been taken away; and perhaps they had been in the night after all, while she and Andrew slept.

She went first into Abdul Nasr’s flat. There was the familiar smell of goatflesh, of onions and herbs, of chemical air-freshener and baby powder, of the expensive scent that Samira wore; but the air-conditioners had been turned off, and this smell had now a thick and tangible quality, as if it were a tapestry with which the walls had been draped. The people had been removed: Samira with her snug denims and gracious manners, Abdul Nasr with his dictator’s eyes, and the displaced servant, smelling of fear, holding up her tattooed arm. Fat’ma was gone; and the child Samira carried. The model ship sailed gaily on. The Tree of Life flourished on the fringed rug. Samira’s chandelier, from Top Furniture of Palestine Road, reflected the clogged and still yellowish light. She walked through the bedrooms, the kitchen; a few pots and pans were left about, curiously dirty and cracked and old, like the kind of thing that slovenly people leave behind them when they move house.

She crossed the landing, letting the door swing shut behind her. It would lock itself; whoever had keys could unlock it again. She walked into the empty flat; who was to stop her? And there was little to see. She examined its tufted oatmeal carpet, its plain cream painted walls. It had been furnished by Turadup, she saw, for notional tenants; for lovers, gunmen, for all tastes and all requirements. Daphne must have chosen that pink lampshade, she thought; I recognize it. She recognized, too, the many armchairs, the tweed upholstery, the pale curtains with their open weave. There was nothing she did not recognize, for it might have been her own home: not a mirror image of it, but the thing itself.

When she emerged on to the landing and closed that door behind her, she was in near-darkness; it was just as it had always been. She went up the half flight to the roof She looked around her. What was it but an innocent square of asphalt, where washing lines hung, and litter accumulated, blown up by the recent high winds? The vacant lot was deserted; the workmen’s huts had been carried away, and water filled the deep trench that the mechanical diggers had gouged out by the side of the road. It would be some days before the dislocated city recovered itself, and building work began again. The air, which had freshened after the storm, now had its familiar twice-breathed fetor.

She hung over the parapet, looking down on to the balcony of the empty flat. It was from this angle that she had seen the wooden crate, and she wondered again who its occupant had been; strange country, strange Kingdom, where unaccountable corpses can blight your daily life. Possibly she had passed, at the mortuary, so close that they might have. touched. That is guesswork, she thought. There has been too much of that. She put her face into the branches of the tree, into the still sodden leaves; and she thought that it might have grown since she had looked at it last. All this time it had been as inert, as falsely promising, as a plastic tree. She feared that it might have been dying invisibly, from the inside out, from a helpless contagion: like a tree of knowledge. But the rain had come, and already, as Samira had forecast, it was putting out fresh green shoots.

She turned away, averting her face from the damage on Ghazzah Street. Scraping her sandaled feet through the mud, she went through the door from the roof to the stairs; she swung it closed behind her, and, from the inside, drew across the bolt.