A Foreign Country

32

François Malot finished his dinner, paid the bill in cash and made his way to the entertainment lounge on the upper level of the ship. He wanted to meet a woman and yet he did not want to meet a woman. It was a strange split in his mood, a confusion of desires. He felt a need to be outside himself, to engage with a stranger, yet he did not want to become involved in the tiring and complicated rituals of seduction. In any event, what were the chances of meeting a girl on a ship like this? A ferry halfway across the Mediterranean was not the same as a nightclub in Paris or Reims. He would be better off waiting until Marseille and buying a girl, if he could get away with it. He couldn’t have risked a prostitute in Tunisia, not with the laws as strict as they were, but a couple of times at the Ramada he had been so starved of sexual contact that he had booked himself in for a massage in the therapy centre, just to feel a woman’s hands on his skin. It wasn’t the same when Amelia did it, rubbing suntan lotion on to his back beside the pool. That wasn’t what François had wanted. That sort of behaviour confused him.

He had been seated at the bar in the lounge for about ten minutes when he became aware of a man standing beside him, trying to attract the attention of the barmaid. François recognized him as the passenger he had seen in the restaurant reading a copy of Time magazine. They had nodded at one another and François had felt his gaze once or twice as he ate his pasta. He assumed, by the man’s pale complexion and slightly unkempt appearance, that he was British. The collars of his shirt had lost their stiffness, he was sporting at least a day of stubble and his shoes were brown and scuffed. Before he knew it, he had caught the man’s eye again and they were making conversation.

‘Impossible to get a drink round here.’

François shrugged. Though he understood English, he was in no mood to stagger through a stilted conversation with a stranger. Besides, he loathed the British assumption that all foreigners could be spoken to in English. The stranger seemed to detect his reluctance and said: ‘Vous êtes français?’

‘Oui,’ François replied. ‘Vous le parlez?’

It transpired that the man’s name was Stephen Uniacke and that he spoke excellent French. At first, François was slightly worried that he might be gay, but early in the conversation Stephen vouchsafed that he was ‘happily married’ and was making his way back from Tunisia after spending a week at a hotel in Hammamet.

‘How did you find it down there?’

‘Package tourism distilled to its essence,’ Stephen replied. ‘Kids on inflatable sausage rides, fish-and-chip shops, sunburned Anglo-Saxons everywhere you look. I might as well have stayed in Reading.’

The barmaid eventually came over. François had reached the bottom of a gin and tonic. He wasn’t surprised when Stephen offered to buy him another one and felt that he could not refuse.

‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’

‘My pleasure. Are you travelling on your own?’

Perhaps he was gay. Perhaps Stephen Uniacke took holidays in Hammamet because he liked picking up boys on the beach.

‘I am,’ François replied, wondering whether he would be obliged to tell Amelia’s story all over again. He was bored even of thinking about it.

‘And you live in Marseille?’

‘Paris.’

The deliberate brevity of his answer seemed to convince the Englishman that he should change the subject. He had settled at a stool alongside and now cast his eyes around the room, perhaps while thinking of something to say.

‘This place looks like it was decorated by Grace Jones with a hangover.’

It was a very good description, very apt. François laughed and looked across the lounge. A man of about fifty was squeezed into a disc jockey booth with a pair of headphones clamped to his scalp. He was trying to entice a group of over-excited Marseillaise housewives on to the dance floor, but so far only a young boy of about ten seemed interested. One of the housewives had looked at François once or twice, but she was fat and lower class and he had paid her no attention. The lighting design was retro-purple, a disco ball spinning blurred stars around the lounge. The DJ started playing ‘Let Me Entertain You’ and Stephen mock-coughed into his drink.

‘Oh Christ.’

‘What is it?’

‘On behalf of my countrymen, can I just apologize for Robbie Williams?’

François laughed again. It felt good to be engaged in a normal conversation with somebody who was bright and funny. Amelia was all those things, but their time together had been different, more like a series of interviews or business meetings in which they were working one another out. One evening in Tunis, when Amelia had gone to bed, François had felt like going out and had taken a taxi to a club in La Marsa. But the local nightlife had not been to his satisfaction. He had sat alone at the edge of a dance floor watching Tunis’s smug, idle young rich trying to seduce Muslim girls who would surely never sleep with them. Sex in Islam was the ultimate sin for a woman before marriage. The boys wore big watches and preened their hair with vats of gel. One of the girls, wearing too much eyeliner, had flirted with François, and he had thought about approaching her for a dance. But you never knew who might be watching; he never knew what he could or could not risk. The Tunisian men all looked slightly overweight and sported sinister moustaches. One of them might have been her boyfriend or brother. He had felt sorry for the girl and wondered what would become of her.

‘How did you find the food in Tunisia?’ Stephen was asking.

He could tell that the Englishman was struggling for conversation, but this was a subject about which François was enthused. He replied that he had enjoyed an evening with his mother at an open-air fish restaurant in La Goulette, but that they had both been disappointed by the couscous at an undeservedly famous Tunisian restaurant in Sidi Bou-Said.

‘I had a disastrous time with the food,’ Stephen revealed. ‘Ordered “merguez” in one place thinking it was fish, but ended up with a sausage. Tried to play it safe the next night by ordering “tajine”, but that turned out to be some kind of omelette. Hadn’t been within a thousand miles of Morocco. You said your mother lives in Tunis?’

Now François was trapped. He would have to say something about Amelia or it would seem rude.

‘It’s a long story.’

Stephen looked at his drink, looked at the disco ball, looked at François. ‘I’ve got all night.’

So he told him. The whole thing. The murder in Egypt. Trying to contact Amelia through the adoption agency. Their reunion in Paris. Then he described the week they had spent together in Gammarth. It was like telling a favourite anecdote; he embellished certain elements, skipped over the parts that no longer interested him, tried to depict Amelia in the best possible light. Stephen, as François had anticipated, was by turns appalled at the tragedy in Sharm-el-Sheikh and delighted that mother and son had been brought together so quickly in its aftermath. Yet François soon began to tire of his sympathy and questions. By eleven o’clock he had reached the bottom of a second drink, the one he had been obliged to buy for Stephen in thanks for the first, and wanted desperately to be free of him so that he could return to his cabin. It was just a question of finding a way to escape. Thankfully, a woman on the opposite side of the bar had been staring at them for some time. At first, François could not tell with whom she was flirting. She was an attractive, if severe woman in her late thirties; he had seen her on the ship in the afternoon, reading a newspaper in the lobby. Usually, he would have assumed that any available woman on board would have preferred his company to that of the Englishman, yet increasingly she seemed to be directing her attention towards Stephen.

‘Looks like someone likes you,’ he said, flicking his eyes in her direction.

‘Who?’ It appeared that Stephen had not even noticed the woman.

‘Across the bar. The lady with the dyed blonde hair. You want me to invite her over?’

Stephen looked across, startled. François noted a flush of embarrassment in his cheeks as he caught her eye. She looked away.

‘I think she’ll almost certainly be more interested in you,’ Stephen replied.

It was a flattering observation but it was also the opportunity François had been waiting for. His glass was empty. There was a long day ahead. He had every excuse to leave.

‘No,’ he said, rising from his stool. ‘I will leave you to her.’ He shook the Englishman’s hand. ‘It was interesting to meet you. I enjoyed our conversation very much. Perhaps we will see one another again in the morning.’

‘I hope so,’ Stephen replied, and with that the two men parted.