A Foreign Country

27

There were only twelve mourners at the crematorium; a larger memorial service was planned for the autumn. François had insisted that Amelia sit beside him, with his mother’s sister on her other side. Afterwards, at his uncle’s apartment, François had introduced Amelia as ‘an old friend of the family from England’. He had later apologized for this, saying that he did not yet ‘possess the courage to tell everybody who you are’. Their decision to go to Tunis had been made that night. François explained that he was desperate to get out of Paris and Amelia could not bear the thought of leaving him so soon after they had met; when would there be another chance to be together? She had therefore contacted her assistant at Vauxhall Cross, announced that she needed time off in the wake of the funeral, and revealed that she would be in the South of France for a fortnight, using up the rest of her holiday allowance. As cover for the journey to Tunisia, she booked herself into a hotel in Nice, where she would be attending a painting course. There was a telephone call from Simon Haynes, who understood that she ‘probably deserved a break’ and an irritable email from George Truscott pointing out the ‘considerable inconvenience of abandoning the Office at twenty-four hours notice’. Otherwise her absence seemed to generate little in the way of comment.

By Friday, Amelia Levene was in Gammarth, living under the Farrell alias and staying in a package hotel located across the road from a Ramada, where François was installed for a probably needless second layer of secrecy. François himself had not questioned this strategy nor objected to the subterfuge; if anything, he seemed to relish the sense of intrigue and even joked that it might be ‘hereditary’.

For Amelia to return to Tunisia after more than thirty years was, at first, melancholy and unsettling, but as the days went by and they visited many of her old haunts, the journey became emotionally satisfying in ways that she had not anticipated. On the surface, little had changed: she remembered the whistle of darting swifts in the evening sky, the fierce dry heat and the constant chatter of men. She recalled the garden at La Marsa, long nights in the arms of her lover, so contemptuous of Jean-Marc’s wife and children, so cruel in her desire to possess him. She took François to Le Golfe, a restaurant that his father had never dared risk for fear that they would be spotted by one of his colleagues or friends. It was in Tunisia, before the pregnancy, that Amelia had begun to study Arabic, wandering the streets of the Medina on the way to class wearing a headscarf and skirt, gawping Tunisian boys clicking their tongues as she passed. She had been convinced, as all self-possessed young people are at such an age, that Amelia Weldon was different to all the other students and backpackers passing through Tunis, Mummy’s boys travelling on Daddy’s bank account. Now, more than three decades later, she felt a great nostalgia for that time, not least because she had long since ceased to be one of the most captivating girls in the city. In the second decade of the twenty-first century Amelia Levene was just another middle-aged tourist from England, a target for stallholders selling carpets and counterfeit polo shirts. It was as though the same men she had seen in 1978 were drinking the same cup of tea at the same café; identical women scrubbing identical vegetables lurked in the same alleys and tiled doorways of the Medina. The wedding baskets, pink and cream, the piles of tea and spice, they still lay unsold in the market. Nothing had changed. Yet of course it had. The young women now wore make-up and Dolce & Gabbana jeans. There were mobile phones attached to the ears of their boyfriends, and posters of Chelsea footballers on the walls of the cafés. The children that had run amok in the dust and the diesel of 1978 were now the adults who drove Amelia’s taxi to the Boudu museum, or popped François’ napkin as he sat for lunch at Dar el-Jeld.

‘I was happy here,’ she told him in an unguarded and sentimental moment, regretting it instantly, because how could she have been happy when she was about to give up her son? ‘Before what happened,’ she added, stumbling on the phrase in French. ‘I loved the freedom of my life. I loved the sense of being away from England.’

‘And yet now you work for England,’ François replied.

‘What a way to put it,’ she said, raising a glass to toast him and staring into the refraction of the crystal. ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’