The Death of William Posters

20

The island lay like a death-mask, the tip of its black chin flashing a lighted pimple in dubious welcome to the ship that had steamed south all night from Barcelona. A few peasants and soldiers making the passage on deck watched the distended visage of the island coming out of its cavern of darkness. A soldier shivered in the November wind, spat some of his bodily warmth into the calm and indigo water, then raised his eyes to the first streak of light and turned to finish rolling his blanket. Another soldier drew off an enormous slice of bread with a razor-sharp clasp knife and sat down to eat it dry. The only noise was a heavy breathing of engines and the slop of parting water at the bows.

Frank buttoned his overcoat. On the night train from Paris a few dozen French soldiers had been singing and bawling up and down the corridors. They barged into compartments looking for seats to rest their tired and fuddled heads, and Frank had to ease one out who wanted solace on Myra’s lap. Frank gave up his seat so that she could make use of both. He had gone outside and smoked, talked as best he could to a dark-faced youth from a mining town in the Nord. The soldier pointed with staring exhausted eyes in the direction of the train: ‘Algeria! Algeria! Algeria!’ — his mock English pronunciation not quite matching the rhythm of their separate travels.

The moon showed its continents, like an X-ray plate held up to a lightbulb. He took bread and sausage from his pocket and began to eat, uncorked a bottle of cognac which he offered to the soldiers. Each took a sip in silence, as if afraid to speak before the day came, then handed it back. Frank was emerging from the debris and suffering of a prolonged battle. The nightmare of recovery left scars in, wiped scars out, scars cone-deep that almost robbed him of the desire for life — while his skin healed and gave back the possibility of it without consulting him. George had been killed, the pulp of him indistinguishable from the lip-twisted mass of his car. Myra had been unharmed in her body — the only good to come out of the ‘accident’. He could understand why George had done it, but not why he had missed, and killed himself alone. If he were determined to die he should have taken all three with him. By some failure of split-second reasoning he had bungled the job, robbed of his surveyor’s precision when he really needed it for the first and last time.

The ship never lifted the level of its silent advance, while stars and moon pushed back the limits of a cloudless sky. Myra was sleeping down in the ship. In spite of everything, and the past miscarriages, the child hung on in her body, grew and prospered beyond the danger point. And beyond that point she had decided to come with Frank, on balance to discard regret and bitterness and apathy, and to trust herself with him. It was a shade too close to be called a decision, but his persuasion worked and they were together. For how long was up to him, and up to her, as if the opening of her eyes every morning took place on the heels of a renewed consultation that would become less and less necessary, he hoped, as time went on and distances increased.

She was exhausted after their stay in Paris, and the days in Barcelona. It was hardly the time for travel, with the kid already kicking, but if you waited until it was time for anything at all you’d never shift one foot. The sound of George’s death wouldn’t leave her, a noise as if he’d tried to rend the night apart in order to see through it and beyond to a vivid daylight in which everything was clear and conspicuous — something ordered specially for him but which existed for no one at all, ever. Perhaps by trying to breach the night he’d hoped to find some reason as to why she was going away with Frank. There had to be something outside the immediate mad act of revenge and murder. His death hadn’t returned her love to the memory of him — if that was what he posthumously wanted.

They hadn’t been able to talk about it while in England, but their senses opened on the trains in France, even on the up-chucking storm-hauled boat across from Dover. Frank had a greater respect for George than if they had simply caught the bus that night and forgotten all about him. The injury, scars, and weeks of pain seemed unconnected with him, as if they’d been dealt by a dislodged boulder or a fall of lightning.

A passenger came out of the first-class lounge and stood by the rail, a tall young American of indeterminate age, well-wrapped in a grey overcoat and several folds of woollen scarf. Narrow blue jeans came down to the top of his cheap Spanish shoes. He had short, grizzled, greying hair and a rugged sort of pug-dog face that made him look like a ramrod Napoleon getting his first look at desolate St Helena. Frank had helped him carry his trunk aboard the night before, been cautioned as he took one end of it: ‘Steady up the gangway, pal. It’s full of books.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Frank said. ‘I shan’t crease myself.’

‘My name’s Shelley Jones,’ he said. ‘What’s yours?’

Frank called out a good morning: was he going to live on that island? ‘Hell, no,’ Shelley responded, cigarette held over the water. ‘I’ll stay a few days in Palma, then maybe get me a cab out to that monastery where Chopin shacked-up with George Sand. Then I’ll hump the hell out of it — to Morocco or some place. What are you doing then, in little old fascist Spain?’

‘I’m just waiting for the sun to shoot up.’ He turned to the empty sea and, seeing that a new tint had been born, stared hard to observe the exact birth of the next colour. He saw shades of dark green on the mountainslope that had jumped there while he watched the sea; and going back to the sea, other colours had spread themselves meantime on the horizon. ‘I’m travelling,’ Frank said, passing the brandy. ‘Drifting for a few months.’

‘As long as your wife likes it. What’s your work, if you don’t mind my discourtesy?’

‘I’m in a factory, but I’m taking time off.’

Careful to wipe the spout, Shelley returned the bottle: ‘I thought you weren’t the usual kind of Limey. I even told myself you were a working man.’ People were still sleeping on deck, huddled in blankets or overcoats against the sharpening wind. An old woman in black leaned against the saloon, eyes open in a wide stare as if she didn’t hear the clink of spoons and coffee cups inside. ‘Even an American recognizes me as a worker!’ Frank laughed. ‘There’s hope for me yet.’

Scorn didn’t put Shelley off: ‘I suppose in 1936 someone like you would have been in this country helping the Republic.’

‘If I’d had enough food in my belly to get here I might. There ain’t anything like that, in these days. As soon as we get enough bread and cheese in us we have to start looking for a soul. It’s a waste of time though.’

‘What do you want to look for?’

‘A world to build, maybe.’

‘Fine, pal. But you got to pull a few down first.’

‘I don’t mind starting that way.’

‘I almost know,’ Shelley said, ‘what the sailors of Odysseus must have felt, seeing an island for the first time, that had no soul because they hadn’t yet poured out there libations on its beaches. They carried their souls in wine-jars, and that was three thousand years ago.’

‘Cut the Homer,’ Frank said, ‘and tell me about yourself.’

Shelley had a gentle way of speech, for he liked to be ironic without giving offence. ‘That’s hard. History at Chicago. Then work on Madison Avenue. But I gave that up, though I was careful to save out of my fifteen thousand a year — to do a lot of travelling around. Sure, Frank, I’ve been around, but we won’t talk about that. I have a girl in Barcelona who I love-up and leave every few months — which brings me out to this neck of the woods. One day I think the poor girl won’t be here because she’s involved with the C N T — the good old C N T — getting their stuff printed and handed out.’

‘I thought that mob wasn’t operating any more,’ Frank said.

He smiled. ‘Well, you can never stop anybody. Look at the French, they’ve half a million soldiers in Algeria, and the shindig going on there is no big celebration for any man at all.’

‘You’ve been there?’

‘Ask me where I’ve never been,’ Shelley said, a jocular brush-off. ‘I go quietly. Pussyfoot. Back in the silent watches of my room — wherever it happens to be — I open my case and play patience, shuffle a lot of little books from one hand to the other, fan them out, and choose a passport. Soft-shoe-shuffling from hot spot to hot spot, after a few lessons in Cuba. In Spanish, you understand?’

‘If you’re not a nark,’ Frank grinned, ‘how do you know that I’m not?’

‘If you aren’t forthcoming, Frank, you cease to operate. Get me?’

‘As long as you get yourself, that’s all that matters.’ The water was like ink, ship turning in it. A light still flipped its beams from the outermost rock. More people were on deck, and an English voice brayed: ‘I say, what a fabulous colour the water is!’ His wife agreed, in a similar bray. Frank reached for the cognac, and told Shelley to drink until he no longer felt the cold. A heavy ball of blood on the horizon. Stars gave final signals. The beige houses of a fishing village passed between sphinx-cliffs. But the sea here wouldn’t accept warmth or colour from the sun, clung to its sombre cold. The wind bit now, and people kept back into the superstructure, feet shaken by the stubborn jolts of a donkey engine.

Frank went down the narrow companionway, out of the nagging wind. Myra was about to get her case from the cabin, but a Spanish woman lifted it for her. Frank took it, appreciating her help. ‘Do you want some coffee?’

‘Not till we land.’

‘Sleep O.K.?’

‘Very well. It was so calm.’

‘Let’s go on deck then. We’ll dock soon, and you ought to see the view first.’ She said good-bye to the Spanish woman, to kisses, laughter, and delicate touches of her stomach. Frank went up with her case.

The ship was turning, bows sliding along the eastern hills whose summits slumped above a bank of blue cloud, rounded the headland and carried them into Palma Bay. ‘I’ll be staying at the Fonda España,’ Shelley said. His face had lost the open truculence of early morning, a stern gaze was still fixed on the island. ‘Call me some time and we’ll have a drink.’

‘Let’s have one now,’ Frank said, ‘There’s some left.’ As though the hills had pushed towards them an unwanted cloud, the ship ran into a roll of mist, and instead of an all-flanking view of city and waterfront, the boat’s fog signal sent its blunted death-hoot over the bay. Shelley grinned, then grimaced, hands for once out of his pockets and pressed together on the rail as if praying. They drank until brown and yellow houses appeared near the shore.

The ship was snapped up by the grey-jawed breakwater, moved slowly towards the towered and pinnacled cathedral shooting up above the ramparts. Grey, jagged mountains to the left were like the fossilized end of some prehistoric eruption. The wind had died, vanished, leaving warmth and sunlight over the seaport and island. ‘I hope the kid in there can feel this sight,’ Frank said, holding her hand.

‘There’ll be a lot more beauty yet,’ she said.

‘Naples and Genoa,’ Shelley called. ‘Or New York. New York takes some beating.’ Rowing boats moved out of the ship’s track like shoals of small-fry confused at the descending presence of a bigger fish whose food they did not happen to be. Frank tossed the empty drink-bottle into green water, then moved their luggage to where sailors were erecting block-and-tackle for lowering the gangway. On one side of the bay were bright and fashionable suburbs; on the other were cranes and warehouses. The ship edged along, almost at a stop. The excitement of people on the quay, and those on the ship about to land, spanned the narrowing channel like electric current breaking down a condenser. Beneath his brandied and buoyant spirits Frank felt layers of tiredness clamouring for rest. He’d been up all night, unable to sleep, his brain matched to the racing engines of the ship.

The train traversed a plain of red-earthed field clouded with almond and carob trees. After half an hour a rocky terrain of olives lifted them into long tunnels, in which everyone stopped talking to wait for the sun to re-flood the wooden-benched carriages. The earthquake rifting across Myra’s life left her incapable of focusing herself on the matter within and the world in front of her eyes. Under the sudden warmth her senses rebelled, became sharp. The last months of upheaval couldn’t be put down to nothing. Things happened for a purpose. Frank’s eyes were fixed more often out of the window than on her, which she didn’t mind, but which told her there was no certainty of her continuing to live with him. She had felt at peace with George, but some turbulence in Frank was buried too deep to put her at ease. Maybe to have his baby was the best and most logical solution, enough proof of love for him ever to want. Romance, as Frank had said, is finished. And maybe he was right. Life is difficult enough without that agony piled on top as well. Love is cosmic, real love coming when you spurn the need for it. Love then released goes out to everyone else. But not on its own. One must see that it did.

She shivered. Fresh air had the scent of lemons and oranges, and a subtle odour of snow from the high face of a far-off mountain. It was the sort of air that made Frank feel hungry and ready for love, both at the same time. Myra no longer wondered why her friend had stayed so long out of England. The sea lay in a corner of the horizon, pale blue and calm, slightly darker than the descending light-grey of the mountainsides.

Frank sat in shirt sleeves to feel the new air closer to him. The train swayed downhill with such speed that at one point Myra felt afraid it would shoot over some stony bank and kill them all. Then she smiled at the fact that fear and life were reappearing. ‘Are you glad we came?’ he asked, thinking the landscape impressed her. The train slowed along the contour line, turned into the bowl of the valley through lush plants, trees and high cane, over the narrow bridge of a stream.

‘I am,’ she answered with a smile.

Joanna was on the platform, a tall woman wearing fashionable expatriate clothes. Myra had told him that she and her husband lived abroad because they were poor, and Frank now saw that there must be more than one sort of poverty. Her welcome was genuine, in that few people passed by or called on them in the winter months. Long hair swung down her back, and she had a tanned, almost swarthy face, a prominent nose, wide lips and almond eyes. Frank was introduced. She kissed Myra: ‘I was sorry to hear it all,’ she said. ‘Not that I ever liked George. But I know you’ll soon forget’ — a look at her stomach and another smile.

Frank carried the cases down the steps and into the little plaza, where a taxi was waiting. ‘Larry thought he’d put in an hour’s work, so he couldn’t run me down in the car.’ They went two miles along the valley, and away from the sea, through farms, gardens and orange groves. Joanna’s husband was an American writer, a short thin auburn man with grey darting eyes, and features as sharp as his wife’s were generous. From six every morning till one he shut himself in a whitewashed room at the back of the house, bars at the window because a donkey had stabled there before they bought the property.

Frank and Myra had a room under gnarled wooden beams. The bed was mahogany and Spanish, a matrimonial bed hugely placed on the uneven floor. There was a wardrobe, a chair, chest of drawers and a straw mat of island make. Window and wooden shutters opened down the valley, over the smoky autumnal air of citrus trees, a trundling stream with deep banks winding between gardens and tile-roofed houses. Across the valley were the precipitous olive green slopes of the mountain range down which their train had roamed.

Myra sat on the bed: ‘We made it.’

‘Didn’t you think we would?’ He was unpacking the case.

‘I was too absorbed in travelling. I’m relieved we’re here, though. Maybe I can find myself again.’

‘You mean it’s an anti-climax? I never want to be myself again. I’m hoping that’s impossible.’

‘Perhaps you came out of England to avoid it?’

‘This place is exactly how I imagined it,’ he said, ‘with such weather. It’s not warm, but it’s sunny. This room is fine. This bed, the window, the beams, the crooked floor. There’s something heavy and good about it, a sort of dignity, untouched by machines or traffic. It’ll be O.K. for a while, but only for a rest. It’s not real life — for me.’

She took the dark ribbon from her hair, ran it through her fingers. If she and George had had similar tastes, she and Frank certainly didn’t meet in their opinions. It took time to discover such things, but how much less than it had about George! Did that mean she was wiser now, or was Frank a far simpler man? Joanna called out that coffee was ready, and they walked down without speaking.

They sat on the terrace to a breakfast of fresh rolls and cuts from a solid block of jam that Joanna had stopped the taxi to buy, coming back from town. Larry was reticent in his enquiries about their journey. Frank asked how long they’d lived there. ‘Eight years,’ Larry said, ‘and it’s not a day too long, for me. I never speak for Joanna, but I know she feels the same.’ He was puzzled when Frank didn’t readily agree that exile and solitude were wonderful. But Frank felt an uncertainty about everything while travelling, in which opinions could only be reactions — yet true enough when they managed to escape him.

Joanna smiled, touched her husband’s arm. ‘It’s wonderful living here. I couldn’t go back to London or America, ever. I’m uneasy when I move off the island, as if I might die before I see it again.’ She laughed, to prove her sentiments deep and genuine. Larry thought this unnecessary, too revealing perhaps, and grimaced — but so that she couldn’t see it. Frank guessed they must have a rather submerged sort of relationship, a passionate couple fighting each other with torpedoes and submarines, deepsea mines and harbour netting, rather than with tanks and dive-bombers, clubs and boiling oil. They’ll take a lifetime to kill each other, and call it love — which was one way of doing it. Such people were cheerful in front of others, and it was a happy breakfast out in the Majorcan sun, with hot rolls and coffee to push the dawn brandy into second place.

‘The main reason for my being on this island,’ Larry said, ‘isn’t only that I feel I’ve still got possession of my soul, but that it helps it to stay healthy as well. I can watch the seasons come and go. I can smell and see the real earth. I can see things growing on the trees. It’s quiet enough for me to think. This is life to me.’

Myra was inside talking with Joanna, both recouping the gall and breadcrumbs of two married lives. ‘I don’t need to pamper my soul,’ Frank said. ‘If it doesn’t like the life I lead it can lump it. This place would be death to me.’

‘You’re a different sort of person,’ Larry said. ‘I need a god to believe in, even if it’s only a composite of these hills, trees, Joanna, this house. I write my stories and live my life in that, framework. It’s narrowing at times, but enriching as well. I envy the way you feel. You’re the Uncomplicated Person.’

Frank took this as a compliment: ‘I’m the empty man, the man without religion. All I believe in is houses and factories, food and power-stations, bridges and coalmines and death, turning millions of things out on a machine that people can use, people who also turn out millions of things that other people can use. It’s no use harping back to poaching rights and cottage industries. We’ve got to forget all that and come to terms with cities and machines and moon landings. We’re going to become new men, whether we like it or not, and I know I’m not going to like it.’

‘You mean mankind has to lose its soul?’ Larry suggested.

‘What soul? Still, if you want to put it like that, you can. All the space that’s left by kicking out the soul is taken by a railway, a hammer, a whole landscape of industrial and material necessity. The soul is so big that you can get all these things in, and more. The bum-bailiffs march up to the soul and sling God out kicking and screaming. Then the real things of life move in, and that space that God inhabited (all his bloody mansions) is enormous. We can get so much in there.’

‘Who’s “we”?’ Larry asked.

‘People who think like me, and those who have it in their blood but don’t yet know how to think. I had to step out of factories to realize this, though I’ve always felt it, and that’s a fact.’

Larry’s sallow face had turned pale. ‘How can you live like that?’

‘I’ve been living like it all my life,’ Frank told him, lighting a brown-papered Spanish cigarette. He tapped his heart: ‘It’s rich enough inside, in here. It’s getting richer, the more I live and know.’

It was a long, convivial day. They drank a bottle of Cinzano before lunch. Frank hauled up buckets of icy water from the well to go with it. Even in the sun cold air lingered from the dawn and they sat with jerseys on, talking right up to the confines of an exhausted midnight — when he followed Myra up to bed.

In spite of the cold she was drifting into sleep, too tired to wait for Frank and a possible exchange of views on the day. Sleep was revolving far away, between two flying storms of snow and sand. Her heavy weight drifted her down, away from the sway of trains, the purring of last night’s boat, the incessant talk and the smell of cold oranges. She was beyond the clash of tree branches outside the window, her body sinking and settling, eyes forced shut into a dark world that was empty except for a spark of light that never went out, an illuminated distant life-dot recognized as the stirring inside her.

They could either rent a furnished house in Majorca, and arrange for Myra to have the baby here, or go somewhere else and not bother too much about where the baby was born. They sat in a café, looking out at the muddy square while they discussed it. Rain had been falling ten days without stop. In such a monsoon the house was small for the four of them. The continual thumping of Larry’s typewriter made it seem as if they were still on a ship. The noise penetrated Frank’s reading and drove him to walk along lanes and mule-tracks whether it rained or not. The mountains were swathed in cloths of rain, cloud-shirts, mist boiling up the valleys, clinging by grey fingernails to escarpments and treetops. Larry said it was usual weather for the time of the year. ‘December and January are better,’ he said, ‘but February and March get lousy again.’

Frank was in favour of moving. So was Myra. They set out on a boat to the mainland, wet decks and cold ironwork steaming through drizzle. Blue domes of Valencia did not shine in the distance. Harbour lights and quays stretched before the boat which edged towards tie-up, still a thrilling part of any journey for Frank. Beyond the customs sheds an orange tram passed on its way into the city.

They stood on the open deck rather than queue to get off, Myra in no condition to be pitched among bundles and boxes on a swaying gangway. Once on the quayside Frank walked into the hold of the ship and pulled out his trunk.

The road was straight and flat through dingy suburbs, their taxi dodging trams, swinging around cars and bicycles. Larry had given them addresses of cheap pensions in all the southern towns. Rain clouds hung over the city. Having once started on a journey Frank wanted to get it over as soon as possible. If Frank had been George, thought Myra, they would have stayed a few days in Valencia at such a time instead of rushing on without any thought. In fact George wouldn’t even have started the journey, and she couldn’t finally decide what she wanted most. Maybe they’d miss the train, then they’d have to stay for a while. Frank didn’t even know where the journey would end, but wherever it was, he felt a need to reach it.

With ten minutes to go he booked the trunk and bought tickets. The only place for Myra to sit was a small emergency seat near the door. The train moved almost as soon as their luggage was in, pulling away between tall buildings and wide boulevards out of the middle city. The first night they met he had seen her off on a train from Paddington — into blackness and never to be met again, lights, noise and smells different from this lit-up uneasy move together into the Spanish south. ‘Another four hundred miles, and we’ll be in Granada,’ he said.

‘I’d like to know where we’re really going,’ she said. ‘I like travelling at the moment, and wouldn’t mind if we never stopped, but where are we going right now?’

‘We’ll go to Tangier,’ he said, eyes fixed on row after row of orange trees flickering by, content again at the feel of a train under him. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Africa!’

‘Don’t think I’m worrying,’ she said, ‘but where am I going to have the baby?’ The train ran into sun, clear sky over flat fertile land spreading to mountain peaks. He took the brandy from the travelling basket: ‘Tangier’s a big town. Have it there.’

‘But no further,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to have him in a tent in the desert.’ They laughed. She leaned against the window and managed to sleep. He stood guard so that ticket collectors or people opening and closing the nearby door shouldn’t disturb her. He wondered, now that it was too late, whether they shouldn’t have stayed in Valencia.

Myra had bought a guidebook, and he read it in calmer moments, opened the map and followed station names, mountain ranges, rivers. The train slowed between weedgrown walls in a suburb of flat-roofed houses: Alicante, stayed half an hour by the large harbour. That called for another swig of brandy. He found comfortable seats for them. For some reason he had picked up Spanish quicker than Myra, wielded it fluently at stations and cafés.

The train passed along the sea edge, a blue gradient of mountains lifting from each cape on either side of the city. There were many ships in the harbour, and bathing huts along grey beach like sentry boxes put there to keep back encroaching surf. They turned inland, date palms and orange trees almost brushing the windows. Train wheels were thumping south-east — another eight hours for Granada — taking them over arid plains and within clear sight of grandiose mountains to the north, and villages propped on isolated hills, a huddle of poor houses baked in summer and frozen in winter, desolate and destitute. It was hot in the carriage, sun shining strongly through windowglass. Myra sat in her blouse, head now and again resting on her bare arms. Frank took off his jacket, walked through the carriage to bring water for Myra, and beer for himself.

Hardly anyone was speaking, and the whine of the diesel engine drowned the voices of those who were. The carriage was wrapped in the afternoon silence of the outside landscape. It was perfectly still and not a word could come from it. It lacked meaning, took on a death-like quality. The wheels were circular hammers beating on the tracks. Such a time brought momentary boredom with life, and memories came in speed and secrecy to dam up and strengthen the crumbling walls of courage. Frank stared at the beige land, not seeing it, but seeing himself.

The journey was enlivened when the train came to a bridge over a ravine. The driver stopped before it, uncertain whether it was possible to get his loaded train across. Frank looked along the track. Workmen on the upper banks of the ravine stood aside, waiting for the train to make up its mind.

‘We’ll be here all day,’ he said to Myra. ‘You should see that bridge.’ Planks formed a parapet only along part of its length, while tree-poles buttressed and reinforced its shaky girders. Frank thought he saw it sway, but knew that this was imagination, mirage, fatigue. The train inched forward, lurched, a hundred heads poking out to gauge its progress. Frank felt scared. The train stood full on the bridge, not a word spoken, only a grinding of wheels, a creak of structure.

They were over. ‘I hope there aren’t any more like that.’

Myra laughed. ‘I knew it would be all right.’ She had had this feeling, that all things would be all right, ever since leaving George, but as the afternoon spun itself slowly out it seemed that the magic weave was falling away, that the train was taking her to a stage beyond both George and Frank, not out of Frank’s love so much as into her own self where life would be lonelier and yet more solid, frightening, exhilarating and independent. The baby lulled her, and the journey went on and on.

Plains on either side seemed without limit, as if they were going into the hinterland of a newly born and endless continent. Sunlight spread yellow wings through sparse cloud, turning the arid countryside into a blood-irrigated desert. Mile after mile without house or horse. They cat-napped through the dusk, Frank wondering whether he hadn’t, at last, encountered those vast and endless spaces dreamed about with such love and longing. He’d given up everything to find this, to find Myra, to find a new brain and absence of mind by drifting anchorless or, rather, attached to the built-in anchor of himself. But these weren’t the spaces, nor these the feelings. Wherever he was going, he was some way from it yet.

When he opened his eyes and looked through the window the sun was sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, but always lower down towards the horizon, until nothing could be seen and the world was confined to a train whose wheels were spinning towards Granada.

21

They walked the streets of Granada under a clear, cold, sun-blue sky, spiritually unable to leave. ‘I feel I’ve been here before,’ she said. ‘But I never have. Not in this life, anyway. George didn’t approve of the régime to let us come this far south. These smells of oranges and flowers, and snow in the air. It’s strange.’

He didn’t know what she meant; it was new to him, but rich in its newness. ‘The Jews and Moors lived here at one time.’

‘Maybe it was that,’ she said. ‘It’s such a strong feeling. It exists right inside me.’

‘It could be that,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t believe in that.’ Such new impressions overwhelmed him still, but he was strengthened by them, no longer disorientated. Having no time to think of himself, resolution grew firmer because decisions that moved him from one place to another were less hard to make. They walked in the garden of the Generalife, between the shadows of gigantic cypresses. ‘I was with George so long,’ she said, talking through the sound of spraying water, ‘that I forgot I was Jewish. But it’s been coming back to me since I met you, for some reason. And this place has given it to me strongest of all.’

‘Where did your grandparents come from, then?’

‘From Bessarabia. I think that’s in Russia now.’

‘Arabia,’ he smiled, ‘it doesn’t seem much different, does it? We’re in a bit of Arabia now. When the Jews left here they went to North Africa and Turkey. Maybe some ended up in Bessarabia.’

‘Why not?’ she said.

‘Myra of Bessarabia,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘I never thought we’d be in Granada.’

Her eyes filled with tears. ‘What is it, love? Tell me what it is?’ A group of Germans armed with guidebooks, plans, cameras and measuring tapes trod gutterally past, pinkfaced and coatless, stepping over hosepipes with exaggerated care. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know why.’

He embraced her by a tall tailored hedge: ‘I’m full of love for you. Everything will be all right. The baby will come, and we’ll be happy with it.’

‘It’s not even that,’ she said. ‘It’s not that at all. It’s more than that.’

‘You’ll be all right. Don’t cry.’

But Myra felt a desolation of the soul, was a young girl again thinking of beautiful things, locked in an ancient world passed on to her from an exclusive state that only women can inhabit, and that men catch (if ever) in rare moments when they are happy. It was a sensation carried from one woman to another by some dying goddess who never quite died. To Myra it became a self-induced ivy-dream of queens and princesses in whom the beauty of physical mating was admitted to become the finality and further beginning of childbirth. It was a world they kept unjealously because of a divine right that seemed to flower in the alleyways and upper streets of the Albaicin. A parapet had guided her eyes directly across at the blood-coloured towers of the Alhambra buttressed by great snowbanks of the Sierra Nevada — where it also flowered. This desolation went through a procession of images towards something it could never quite reach, a dream containing all the animal realities of the earth. She saw in other women her perfect counterparts infused with the orgiastic motions of which childbirth was the last great cry and connected to the delicate inborn tendernesses in herself. She felt the force of living and was glad to be alive, a positive sensation for the first time which had nothing to do with Frank. The time was close when she could live in as complete a way as she would ever know, for this was the end of her life so far, the phosphorescent deadness that would give place to a new and unique person. It pointed the rebirth towards a life that would be hers only.

He looked out at the white midnight roofs of Granada, steam-breath clouding the glass which he rubbed clear. The city was sleeping at last, and smelled of snow. Noise still came from the hotel kitchen, Andaluz voices subdued and rapid, the clash of plates, a door banging as he got in bed and tried to sleep. He wanted to show her eyes beautiful landscapes, feed her heart with more tenderness and pity than it already possessed, fill her body with more sensations than it had ever known. But this was turning against himself. It was impossible because the end had been reached, not the end of love, but the beginning of something else in which the sort of love he had always known about and felt as fully as anyone was to be discarded as a fraud and a trick, the stone tied around a corpse to make it sink. To cut it loose would enable a man and woman to live in equality, with regard and respect for each other’s purpose in the world. Mutual destruction had to cease.

Copulating cats roared like lions in the night. Myra was sleeping, curled in her nightdress. At dawn an inquisitorial roll of bells came loud and dissonant over luminous rooftops. In the street a ripped poster waved like a frantic hand. Leaves fell thick as copper snow over an autumn square. He had lived through a hundred seasons in one year. Hump-backed clouds looked like disappointed pilgrims returning from some mountain shrine, glad to be back over streets and houses. If you like a city, he thought, it protects you; if you don’t like it, it drives you away. I like this one, but still I’m going. He did not know what he would be doing a week from now. He did not remember what he dreamed last night. If he did not want to wake up, the dream had been good; if he had been glad to wake up, it had been a nightmare. He was uncertain about it.

A fine rain fell as the train pulled along the ascending valley. Olive trees gridded the hillsides. Wet towns and villages in the distance were like wooden uneven nailheads hammered into the earth. The train was crowded and smoky, full of luggage, food hampers, people in black and grey, silent children. A man came in out of the rain, from one station, wearing dressing-gown and slippers, smoking a cigar and carrying two suitcases, alighting at a town twenty miles further on.

‘I like Spain,’ Frank said. ‘I like the people. They don’t seem to let things bother them.’

‘I felt that ever since I stepped over the border.’

‘I really think I’ll feel at home wherever I am,’ he said.

‘As long as you’re moving, on wheels,’ she joked. In the afternoon the train was descending, into clearer sky and sunlight. Ronda showed through a gap in the mountains, a far-off patch of towers and houses perched beyond the immediate circle of hills like an imagined dream in a saint’s vision. Then it was cut from view, and the rugged scenery reminded Myra of the engravings in an edition of Byron resting in the glass case among George’s books. She wondered whether she’d ever see them again, the first real question since setting out. She saw the titles, and the rich binding, the house, then the village, the edge of tall corn clipped near its summer roots, a brief run of pictures left to flower in her at a later time. How far would the thread that held her stretch before it snapped, while the new thread thickened into a rope?

Tunnels took them into gorges — romantic for those that passed by in trains but not for people who lived roundabout, he thought. Barren limestone slopes sent swollen streams curving from tightly packed villages built in impossible hill positions. Why had it been Frank? she wondered, who had come into her life only a few months ago like a man with pick and mattock and hewn her out of it so savagely? Perhaps it was all so futile and unnecessary, and she’d have been better off staying where she was: the unlanced lake, calm and stagnant under an English sky.

She looked forward to getting off the train. Beyond the window by a bleak-looking stream, a sinewy weather-beaten woman stood outside a house, pegging sheets onto a clothes-line, steadying them from the wind to watch the slow progress of the train. Her life must be hard and lonely, Myra thought, but less so than my own which never stops moving. Bent low in the saddle a man on horseback raced half a mile and beat them to the next bridge, then stood grinning, hat in hand, before sauntering back to his red-roofed and isolated house.

Rolling hills and flat marshland drew them to the sea. Cattle browsed at sky-reflecting pools, between cork and carob trees. Across the bay lay the enormous slouching rock of Gibraltar. ‘We’ll get over the straits tomorrow,’ Frank said.

‘Tangier will have to be our last stop.’ She leaned back, pale, all life drained out. ‘I can’t go any further.’

‘You won’t,’ he said, concerned at the deathlike marks of fatigue, and wondering now why he had brought her so far.

‘I love you,’ she said, ‘but we must stop in Tangier.’

‘It’s nothing to do with love,’ he said gently. ‘We’ll find a house there, and you can rest for three or four months.’

‘I’m so tired,’ she said, no complaint but a fact that wrenched his heart. At the hotel their room had a map of damp marks down the wall, and stank of fumigation powder, so he argued bluntly with the receptionist and made him find them another. Myra bathed, then ate soup, omelette, oranges. She was asleep before he left the room. Her dark hair, grown long in travelling, fell over the pillow away from her cool exhausted face. He touched her forehead. She didn’t hear the door close.

He walked over the bridge, a cold breeze swelling in from the sea. Across the few miles of water Gibraltar lay like a long bank of burning coal. He ate at Arturo’s (recommended by Larry), then sat outside a harbour café to drink coffee and smoke at a bitter full-tasting cigar.

He too was exhausted, in all things nearing the rock-bottom of his heart, touching the extremities, as if the end of some journey within himself was in sight. He had reached the limit of his concern for Myra. He loved, had no fear of that, but as a man and a human being, not as an adventurer, and so all inner directions were spent — or those were that he chose to consider. Whatever occurred within himself, in the rich mineral coal lump of his brain, he would always, being a strong character, decide what was going to happen to him.

Sitting on the harbour front was like being at the world’s edge, and the only way he could move was on, across the world. To understand people, go into the desert, and do not come out until you understand yourself. Not to know this meant that the inner journey was suspended, and that could never be, though you kept it in its place by a richer surface life, so that it helped, not dragged you down as it had so far done. Thirty years had taught him nothing except that life was good but limited (the innerlife anyway that the society he’d been, brought up in told him existed) — limited in everything, depth, space, decision, strength. The soul was a load of bollocks; the heart was a useful depth gauge in the machine shops of social life; the mind was good for thinking, building, helping; the hands were right for making and doing. He felt at the forward point of the world. Death was nothing to write home about, to dwell on, think of. The shell went through you, the tank trundled over you, the hydrogen bomb flashed you up, old age put you to sleep — as long as you were doing something when any of this happened, lifting, helping, firing a gun.

The only fear and cowardice in life was idleness, inactivity — either sitting still or doing work that nobody wanted or would benefit from. Hell wasn’t other people; it was the inability to work, to act, to do. Hell was having nothing to live for, a pit he’d steered away from without realizing how close he had been to it. Heart and soul, they were fetters that the new man of the world took to a blacksmith and had chopped away. The new man of the world must work and live as if he weren’t going to be alive the next day. This would make him more careful and tender to others, not less.

It was a new way to live, and even now, he was trying it, the first kick-off started the day he left the Nottingham world of moribund William Posters. Let’s face it. I’ve got no love left in me — not of the kind I should have. It’s being burned out of everyone else as well, by the oxyacetylene glare of tube-light and telly-fire. We must love more people than just each other. The old idea of love is sliding away from the fingertips of the new man, like a thousand-coloured ferry boat heading for the open sea.

They steamed in late morning through a zone of green water towards mid-channel blue. Land seemed to be all around, cloud obscuring the mouth of the Mediterranean, and the mouth of the Atlantic, mixing Gibraltar with African peaks above Ceuta and Tetuan. Huge liners and tankers drifted by as if hardly moving, then vanished or were mere dots when Frank looked again from the saloon window. They headed by the white houses of Tarifa, hugging the Spanish shore, with Cape Trafalgar dim and shifty in the distance. The Moroccan side was rocky and sheer, a sandy beach now and again visible as if someone had dropped a white handkerchief from the mountaintop above. It was peaceful at sea, the tilt and gentle pitch of the boat resting both of them after the night’s deep sleep.

They went under the archway up the cobbled street, into the narrow lane of the Moorish town. The porter led them to the hotel off the Socco Chico. They entered by a small door from a side street and ascended the washed steps. Myra found it good to talk to the French proprietress after so long in Spain, felt civilized again with the edge on Frank’s Spanish which now sounded as rough and uncouth as north of England dialect. The woman was interested in Myra’s pregnancy, which meant a five-minute chat every time they went in or out.

The hotel was a second-floor flat, which seemed to go along the whole length of the street, making it little more than an endless corridor of small rooms. At first there were so many women’s voices coming from them that Frank wondered if they hadn’t stumbled into a brothel, but since he heard no sounds of men he had to conclude differently — though in Tangier you could never be sure. In the next room was a Frenchwoman with two small dogs, and often through the paper-thin walls came the sound of clanking bowls and swilling water, great lip-smacking kisses, and the sliding of the dogs’ paws on the tiled floor.

Their room was the largest in the hotel, the bed a rough frame nailed together, with bedding neatly and skilfully laid on top. There were two old basket chairs, and a small table for books, cigarettes, matches, tangerines and make-up. A sink in one corner had no plug, and one had to keep the faucet pressed to get water — as on a ship. Frank shaped a plug out of a cork, rather, he said, than give up washing. There were two huge coat pegs on the blue wall, and a small piece of Moroccan artisanry for matting on the floor. A single window looked onto a dim alley-street, so that even in daytime they needed the light on. The hotel was on its last legs, and so was more expensive than many others.

They lay at night listening to Moorish music that came from café radios and permeated the whole building, Frank feeling as if he were in the chill-middle of Arabia. Myra warmed him, her belly a stove, kisses still tasting of spice from Moslem food eaten on their day’s wanderings through the winding alleyways of the medina, or of mint and sugar from the innumerable glasses of tea drunk before coming to bed. Frank had bought a spirit stove and cooked-up his own brand of Arab tea at night and morning. They lived in the room a fortnight, and revelled in the refurbishing powers of retreat, a calm hideout in a medieval walled town.

They were strangers there and knew no one, walked up the steep Rue des Siaghines and into, the flower-filled market at the top that smelled of mimosa and cloves. They went on into the new town, along the boulevards and among modern blocks of flats, then got a bus through the suburb of the Dradeb. They climbed up to a point overlooking the straits, with Spain a definite coast only thirteen miles away. A mule track led along the clifftops to Cape Spartel, the shoulder of Africa where Hercules was said to have shaped millstones in his solitary wave-bashed cave. The track climbed above the sea, up then down, from one headland to another, a violent Atlantic wind spitting at the prominent arbutus-horn of Africa. Jebel Kebir was forested, and they turned up into its shelter, a subtle mixture of juniper and eucalyptus smells, laurel and cedar and pine, a moving sky that drew their eyes during rest, as if up there a blacksmith were reshaping clouds that a storm had raged out from its own belly, the wind moving leaves and branches in an inspired concord of smells and shapes.

They made love under the trees (‘He should find his way out without too much bother when the time comes,’ Frank joked on the way back), gently going into her, as if savouring it because a farewell was imminent. Flames from all her limbs leapt to the middle of her as if to greet the guest that slid so ceremoniously in, an unexpected climax far in front of his own. They hadn’t come to her so easily of late, Myra believing that the enlarging animal processes of pregnancy held them back, compensating by the almost visionary light it threw on what was happening to her. Frank lived on the extremity of this influence, the man whom she loved and who, in his own way, looked after her well, out of his own sort of love. But during this mechanism of change he was the person closest to her, and what she dreaded most was the emerging fact that he would soon be removed from this intimate nearness. In calmer moments she realized that this was bound to happen when a child was born, a thought which toned off the sharper edges of her vision. Yet an uneasiness lingered through her dreams, dreams which, since pregnant, she could never remember.

The green hills of Tangier in winter were drenched and heavy. On walking back skyscraper blocks appeared white and pink between olive groves. It was enchanting and new, a fitting scenery in which to change gear and come back to life. Myra puzzled him by her unwillingness or inability to show more of what was going on in her own mind. She drifted uncomplaining, almost happily, enjoying new sights, physical love, the sensual effects of food and travel. He could put it down to pregnancy, but he knew better, wondered instead whether she didn’t resent all that had happened to her since they met, blame him for some unwanted foreign upheaval that his appearance had caused. A sharp pride prevented him asking anything, and he thought maybe she hardly knew herself yet.

At the Place de France a rainstorm burst on them, a leaden throwdown of water that seemed to be trying to stamp all animal life back into the asphalt. The gutters burst, overflowed, and water drove in sheets along the roadway, traffic fighting against it and hardly able to see, trees by the French consulate buckling before the wind. They sat in a café till the storm was spent, watching through the windows, the air heavy with smoke and coffee steam. He ordered brandy, and tea for Myra. ‘We just made it. What an end to the day.’

‘It’s only four o’clock.’

‘Tired?’

‘A bit. I feel good after our walk. I like Tangier, which is just as well, I suppose.’

‘It is, since we’ll be here for a while.’ Yet he hoped not, thought not, but finally couldn’t say. It was hard, if not impossible to stop moving when movement was the only thing that at the moment seemed to be keeping him alive.

22

In youth Shelley had been tender at the lungs, and though that passing phase seemed only to have made him tougher in the end than the average person, he still paid them the homage of maximum protection. Thin and raddled after a week in the whorehouses of Palma, he followed his luggage down the gangplank, his grey overcoat well-buttoned against the damaging wet winds of a Catalonian winter. He looked forward to pouring himself a shot of hot cognac in one of the wilder bars of Barcelona, sliding it in to his favourite toast of ‘Hemingway, I hate you!’

His luggage would stay in the consigna until he found a hotel. Fatigue focused his eyes on the fading labels of his oldest trunk. Since pressing the ejector seat of his job on Madison Avenue he had travelled to many places, and a flaking discoloured label could bring back to him the smell of many a hotel hall from those early days, humidity and mothballs and the fruity reek of an Amazonian forest as he opened the window and wondered once more why the hell he’d stopped in this particular place, parrot-cries and dilapidated streets mouldering into the vast area of shimmering river. Craving the impossible, an ambitious decadent shaped and fired by the fevers of desk-dreams, he took a long time to re-cross the boundary into reality. He’d envisaged a heaven somewhere, a small collapsing corporate state in a back corner of South America whose economy was on the crash — that razor’s edge of heaven between a fabulous exchange rate for dollar-tourists, and a revolutionary upheaval from within — a matter of a few weeks perhaps in which the local currency stood at a thousand pesos to the dollar, with full board at the Grand Hotel Esplendido for ten cents, and the having of some worthy bourgeois beauty for as little as five. He’d never found it, quite, and the search died hard.

He’d wandered around the first two years, an exponent of positive negativism in his desire to forget the past and create his future by recording it as a travel book. These were his own phrases, wicked, sardonic and empty. Not empty, he thought. Emptiness is when you’re full of something that can’t be put to use, or that you cannot define. That’s not me. It was, but not now. The mud and destitution of La Paz, and a proletarian riot in which a police baton had smashed onto his head, had been the blinding light of his Damascus that made him ‘the man at the door with the gun’. He looked old before his time, but with a freshness and naïvety that suggested he might not be able to take advantage of it. He travelled over frontiers, forbidden pamphlets in the false bottom of his trunk when moving legally; panniers of dynamite filched from the copper mines of the Andes when crossing by unfenced jungle towards some hide-out of co-revolutionaries never expecting him but always glad of his loot delivered after enormous risks that they would never take.

South America was a big place, but not, eventually, big enough. Cuba came and went. His favourite books were those works on guerilla warfare, by Mao Tse Tung, Ngoyen Giap, and Che Guevara — authors who for him had taken their places in world literature even before Shakespeare and Tolstoy. Shelley lived by the principles of guerilla warfare. The enduring Maxim of Sun Tzu: ‘Uproar in the East, strike in the West’ was the basis of exercises which combined intellect and imagination whenever there was time to kill before catching boat or train. Walking the streets he staged uprisings in that particular town; on the train he laid ambushes in the passing terrain; pacing the beach he planned clandestine landings. ‘Life is war, but guerilla war, not the old artificial war that the world’s lived with up to now. One of the deepest instincts of Man is to conquer by stealth, to create an uproar at one point while striking with deadly effect at another.’ His one unalterable dream was to see Madison Avenue and its thousand commerces erupt into smoke and flame.

A wall of noise roared by his face like cold sandpaper: trams and buses, taxis and handwheeled carts. After a journey of brandy and sweat and sleeplessness, his legs were moving once more, a surge of life backing into him. Barcelona was noisy, good to get to in the early morning. He’d rather go a roundabout way to a city simply to reach it in the morning. To arrive in the afternoon was a corroding experience: twilight savaged you like an octopus in slow motion, made you wish you were anywhere else but on earth. It was all right once darkness fell, for Man had lights to show as proof of his victory over the dark.

A coastal sun brewed warmth between wet clouds. Shelley smoked a cigarette, walked with his portable typewriter on one hand, and a straw travelling-basket on the other. Even the taxi drivers and hotel touts clammering at the dock hadn’t broken his good temper:

‘Barcelona, here I come,

Right back where I started from.…’

and he’d find a hotel along the Boqueria, sleep until lunch time, and look up Maricarmen in afternoon.

At the Columbus Statue he turned up the maindrag of the Rambla. None of the hotels along the Boqueria had vacant rooms, which was strange at this time of the year. At the fourth hotel, up steps and along a corridor, he stopped at the counter: ‘Buenos dias! Hay habitation para dos o tres dias?’

The duena said she had a room vacant, and asked if he’d be needing meals. Shelley told her he would be eating out, as he was a tourist and wanted to see the sights. Two men were by his side. One pulled a huge steel-and-Technicolor badge from his pocket and said he’d like to see his passport. Shelley gave it to the man, who walked away with it to the other end of the hall, leaving his friend on guard in case anyone tried to run. When they didn’t ask where he’d come from Shelley realized they’d followed him from the dock, a couple of detectives in hats and gaberdines who might have stepped but of some Hollywood B picture if they hadn’t been so underfed.

Shelley acted on the principle that caution was unnecessary in a fascist country. Where the guilty were taken with the innocent everyone was guilty and it was up to you to bluff your way out of it if caught. The man came back and asked if he had any other means of identification. Shelley gave him an old carte de séjour which he had collected in the south of France.

He played the tourist: it’s no use getting annoyed. They want to check up. That’s their job. Maybe they’re looking for anarchists, bomb-throwers whose activities are just as likely to endanger tourists like me as anyone else. He was told to come to the police station, and to bring his typewriter and travelling bag.

They walked through the streets. When stunned by the baton in La Paz he had thought, on waking up in a nearby café: ‘Shall I phone the U S consulate, and complain?’ No, he told himself, and later felt that to be the most important decision of his life. They assured him it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes. Shelley talked like a rubberneck, though his good Spanish betrayed him, asked in which direction was the cathedral and the Tibidabo, said that Barcelona was a fine city and that there was none so fine in South America — glad that his passport had recently been changed and that other evidence of Spanish visits wasn’t on the present one.

The police station was a barracks, armed guards at the entrance. They climbed two flights of stairs and walked along a corridor, uniformed and plainclothes men inside little offices smoking, talking, or hovering over typewriters. With so many stairs and corridors he saw that a criminal would have a tough time trying to get out. They went into an office. Shelley was asked to sit down, which he did willingly, feeling tireder than ever. They took his passport and French identity card, and left him there alone.

It was a small room, with a coloured portrait of General Franco on one wall, and a plan of Barcelona opposite. The only desk held a typewriter, blotting pad, trough of pens and some paperclips. Glued to another wall were photographs of criminals whom they had not yet succeeded in capturing.

Shelley, engrossed in the city plan, was trying to bring a complex of street battles into one unified action. A convent had been sacked and fortified, thoroughfares blocked and certain houses sandbagged, but no central command had yet been set up, though underground leaders were at last moving in because, according to news from the rest of Spain, the revolt had a chance of becoming decisive. He was itching for a pencil with which to make squares and circles on the map.

The detectives came back with an elderly white-haired man wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, a kindly person who looked like a philosophic cobbler caught in the wrong job. He said that Shelley’s passport was forged. Shelley replied that it was issued in London, and properly visaed by the Spanish consul in Gibraltar, so how could it be? The elderly man lifted his typewriter from the floor and asked him to open it. Shelley did so, and was about to show him how it worked, when the old man nodded thoughtfully and told him to close it.

‘Why are you in Spain?’ asked a detective.

‘Because I like the country. I like the people.’

‘You sound like a communist.’

‘I’m a tourist. There are lots of art treasures here.’

‘But why did you come on a forged passport?’

He said they should check with the American consulate, finding it unfair to mention this, but impossible not to because it would be the reaction of the ordinary American traveller. The old man said the passport was obviously forged because the stamp wasn’t pressed far enough into the photograph.

‘Have you any money?’ the detective asked. Shelley reached for his back pocket, but the detective said that he didn’t want to see it. He asked where he got his income. Shelley said he had money invested on Wall Street, which impressed them. ‘I have share certificates on me to prove it,’ he said, but the detective wasn’t interested in them, either, asked instead to see the contents of his travelling basket. Shelley took out a bottle of wine and a bottle of brandy. He offered them a drink, which was refused. There was a Blue Guide to Spain, a book of poetry, and a bundle of decomposing sandwiches. ‘Put it back,’ the old man said.

All three went out of the room, this time leaving a man on guard at the door. Shelley went back to the plan of Barcelona. The insurrectionary forces tended to concentrate west of the maindrag, fortifying the lanes between there and the Rond San Antonio. Some streets to the east were also in their possession, and workers from the northern suburbs were moving in. But Government troops were gathering under the hill of Montjuich and preparing to clear the city centre. Which was fine, because workers from the factories of Sans were already filtering behind the hill of Montjuich for an attack in the rear as soon as the army made a move. ‘Uproar in the East, strike in the West.’ It couldn’t fail. Badalona and other suburbs were mobilizing their workers. The uprising in Madrid had failed, but Valencia was in insurrectionist hands. Street names were being changed, and paving stones put back. Workers’ representatives were talking to the sailors at Cartagena. Malaga had gone completely over to the rebels, and was already being strafed by American Sabre-jets. Russia had protested, and Chinese technicians had started flying in from Peking.…

They’d been gone half an hour, and it seemed that the man at the door kept observing Shelley for any sign of nervousness or guilt. ‘Kafka, I love you,’ he thought, taking several drinks at the bottle of brandy and thinking that if they didn’t come back soon he’d be either dead drunk or asleep.

In the meantime the guns had opened up from Montjuich, and soldiers of the loyal garrison were coming down the hill with flamethrowers. Agitators were talking to them through loudspeakers, and one had already gone over to them. A woman with a red bandera had blown another to pieces with a handgrenade and a whole street was burning.

Bad news came, that Valencia had surrendered. The sailors at Cartagena had scuttled their ships. Malaga alone remained, and the whole fascist spite had been turned (as usual) against it. Shelley wondered whether there were a map of Spain in the desk on which to plan a guerilla campaign in the mountains, so that the insurgents could withdraw and carry on resistance from there.

‘It’s a beautiful city, Barcelona,’ one of the plainclothes men remarked pleasantly, handing him his passport. He apologized for having detained him, but said that many people were going around with forged papers. Shelley smiled, understood that he had his work to do. The policeman thought he should be more angry than he was, so apologized again, and this time Shelley didn’t look too pleased, a gruff response that blew away all suspicion from the policeman’s narrow and infantile mind.

The policeman took him back to the street. They shook hands, and he pointed the direction to his hotel. Shelley walked in the sunshine, feeling no malice towards any man or being, as he called a taxi and ordered it to the docks, where he would get out his luggage and head for Tangier. To contact Maricarmen would put her in danger as well. He’d shuttle through Valencia and Granada without delay in case any other autonomous Gestapo unit pulled him in for no reason and decided this time to keep him. He was puzzled and disturbed. Why should they arrest me? I’m guilty, after all. These bastards usually get the wrong ones, though. It’s not cricket, as that swish piece from London said when I laid her in Malaga.

A week later he was in Tangier, at a café in the Place de France thinking about his next excursion south. A date had been fixed, lorry and supplies assembling, but he wanted another head and pair of hands. A face came in from the rain which he knew, and he called out the name that belonged to it.

A shock passed through Frank because the voice that called his name out loud was only half recognized by memory. Shelley set a briefcase down on their table, stood tall beside it, wrapped in the same long overcoat and cumbrous grey scarf. Frank knew him, in spite of the crew-cut and heavily-rimmed glasses that made him look like so many other Americans. ‘And what the hell are you doing in this godforsaken Bidonville?’ Shelley asked.

‘If you’ll sit down and have a drink, I might tell you.’ There were handshakes: ‘I got swacked on your brandy, remember?’ Shelley said, and called the waiter, who seemed to know him well, and came over immediately from another table. He ordered two double cognacs, and more tea for Myra.

‘We ended up here,’ Frank said. ‘After Granada it was the end of the line. We’ve got to hole up for a few months.’

‘It’s a good place,’ Shelley said with a high-powered laugh, ‘but it’s not the end of the line. I know a few places after this, and I don’t mean Casablanca.’

‘What about your girl friend in Barcelona?’ Myra asked. ‘Is she here too?’

‘Hell, no. She works up there, and I do my work down here. Now and again we have a date. I had to pull out quick.’

‘What sort of work?’ Frank asked. Shelley leaned back with a music-hall avuncular look from such contemporary shoulders. ‘Just wouldn’t you like to know? Oh boy, just wouldn’t you?’

‘Maybe I would at that,’ Frank said.

Shelley asked where they were staying. Frank told him: ‘But we can’t bed in that fleapit for ever. We’re looking for a house or flat.’

‘Since independence you can pick up apartments cheap. But a furnished place isn’t so easy.’ The rain eased off, settled to a steady civilized downpour. Traffic livened the dusk, and beggars held out their hands again. Vendors toted hats, flowers, peanuts, purses, wooden puppets. The café lighting served as blinds, rain and dusk neutralizing everything. Myra felt out of time and place, Shelley telling of a flat he knew with four rooms, kitchen, bath and maid’s bathroom not far from the Boulevard Pasteur. ‘Belongs to a Frenchman who tears off six months of every year in Marseilles. I know the agent, a lawyer. Lets for around thirty thousand.’

‘That’s about five quid a week,’ Frank said. ‘We could manage that.’

Shelley took a large diary from his briefcase: ‘Meet me here, nine-thirty, tomorrow morning?’

‘All right,’ Frank said. ‘Why do you need such a big diary in a place like this? Are you in business, or something?’

‘How you bug me, Frank! Sure I’m a business man, but don’t ask me what I sell. It’s too specialized.’

‘Forget it,’ Frank said. ‘And if you can’t forget it, drop dead. I don’t mind if you run a brothel.’

‘Tell me he’s broadminded, Myra,’ Shelley said, beckoning for another tray of drinks.

The agent took them through a palatial entrance and up on a fine lift, four floors high in a modern block to show off the central heating and garbage disposal point. Myra had stayed in bed, so Frank was to decide. The furniture was ornate and heavy, but sparse enough not to be intimidating. Windows looked over the town towards Tetuan. Frank went back to the lawyer’s office with Shelley, signed the six-month contract and paid two months of it. They’d move in that afternoon, and Shelley suggested that since it was only ten maybe they could have breakfast and talk.

Frank agreed. The way he said ‘talk’ made it sound mysterious, but that was Shelley’s way. Cutting up through the streets Frank said the only thing wrong with Tangier was the number of beggars, to which Shelley replied that though they were poor they might be happier than he imagined.

‘Whoever gave you the idea that me poor can be happy?’ Frank retorted, not sure how serious Shelley was being.

‘Who is happy then? The rich?’

‘Nobody’s happy,’ Frank said. ‘There’s no such thing as happiness except when you’re doing work for yourself that at the same time is helping other people.’

‘You don’t want much,’ Shelley laughed, ‘except the Millennium maybe.’ They turned a corner and went into a teashop-patisserie.

Shelley ordered coffee and croissants: ‘It’s no use giving money to beggars. They get to know you and hound you to death. It does no good. Things have to get worse before they get better. If all these people didn’t like being poor they’d get up and change it.’

‘Who are you preaching to?’ Frank demanded. ‘They might want help in getting started. And what are we doing except sitting here and spreading the butter on thick?’ Shelley slapped him on the shoulder with a conspiratorial laugh: ‘One thing at a time, Frank.’

‘What thing?’ Frank wanted to know.

‘Maybe I’ll tell you,’ Shelley said, ‘though there’s a catch in it, unless you want to pull out now and not listen further. You’re all right to help, and you’re the sort of man we want on this job.’

‘I’m listening,’ Frank said. ‘Let me know what I might want to pull out of, first.’

‘Can you drive? You have a licence? I didn’t ask you that. I want to know whether you can make with the clutch on rough roads and open ground. I take it you’ve been in the army, that you can fire a gun, read a map, throw a bomb? Don’t get excited. All I asked was can you drive? Sure, sure, you’ve got all the right answers, except that your sweet wife is pregnant and waiting for a new little Frank to pop out in beautiful Tangier. Stop telling me, man.’

‘Belt up, and get on with it, you clever bastard, and spill those fags. I forgot to get some this morning. Black Spanish ones, not those Yank coffin nails.’ Shelley’s hand shook slightly at the light, as if imitating shell-shock he might one day get, his laugh grating Frank’s nerves, then telling how he’d been drumming around Morocco and Algeria a year or so, and that he’d done all manner of work, not for money, you get me? For principles, though he’d taken some beigebacks now and again for stamp money to supplement his ill-gotten savings from Mad Avenue, New York City.

Frank was learning nothing from this insane spiel, didn’t like jokes or smokescreens. Shelley asked if he was partial to the violent life and Frank said he could manage it if it came his way, or if he walked into it.

‘Or drove into it?’ Shelley supposed he’d heard of the war of independence in Algeria, and Frank said he’d supposed right, but what was he getting at? ‘The fact,’ Shelley went on, ‘that the F L N are losing. They’re desperate for certain things, and that means everything: rifles, shells, men, printed matter — such as maps and guerilla manuals in Arabic printed you-know-where. I’m going down in a fortnight, and want a co-driver to play a banjo by my side, strum that wheel when I’m knocked up from the shakes of the rocky trail. It’ll take a few days to reach that rendezvous point (the way I have to frigging well go) and most of the time the humps are far from smooth.’

Frank felt himself getting the shakes, too. Shelley wanted to know if the job was accepted and Frank said yes after a bare minute of packed thought that he’d sort out when it was too late to back down from — not that he could imagine wanting to, all change being good as long as you never for a second thought it might be bad. And wasn’t this something he’d wanted all his life but considered to be nothing more than an impossible vision? To get out of his spiralled airtight shell and carry violence to the enemy camp instead of letting it run amok and cause destruction in his own? His anguish had been in abeyance during the year of life-change, but on drifting into Africa the bare bones of his own construction had sharpened again, surfaced.

Shelley said that no frontiers were marked where they would go. The real border between Morocco and Algeria was sealed by the Monice line, a great electrified fence running from the sea to the desert edge that not even a gnat could flutter over without getting its stones scorched. Apart from that there were six million mines patterned around, everyone counted by the F L N! So they’d set off in a lorry loaded with crates of guns and ammunition, bales of printed matter, to a point south of this mined and electrified frontier in the wilderness of Adam and the Holy Bible where they’d wait for a truck to reach them from the other side, then switch loads and head back north. The half dozen recruits they’d take would stay there, be lifted into the Khabylie or Monts des Ksour as reinforcements to carry on the good fight.

Frank asked why he’d been chosen when Tangier was full of bums and loafers only too glad of a few thousand francs. ‘Let’s say it’s for old times’ sake,’ Shelley said, ‘in honour of brandy on the Majorcan boat — and because a bum would be no good on this kind of job.’

‘Aren’t there enough Moroccans jumping for a chance?’

‘Sure. Except that they want to stay in Algeria. The others, well, I shan’t say they can’t be trusted, but there are good markets even inside Morocco for gear like this. Ever heard of dissident tribesmen? The Rif mountains? Abd el Krim? Untimely cravings for autonomy waiting to be supplied with guns by Hi-jackings Incorporated? It’s just that those (no names, what?) who shell this stuff out want it to get there for the purpose intended. I’m an old hand at it. And they trust me to find the right assistants.’

‘You mean it’s dangerous?’

‘If it isn’t you won’t go?’

‘I like to know things.’

‘Do you see any shell-holes in me, any craters in my skull?’

Frank asked when they started, and Shelley, never having imagined it would be so easy to inveigle him into the job, mentioned a big garage on the outskirts of town. ‘At seven a.m. on the 18th — which leaves you two weeks to set up a little love nest in the Frenchman’s apartment and get Myra a good servant to wait on her while you’re away. I know a fatima who’s out of a job, a jolly, middle-aged, veiled woman who won’t let Myra lift a finger.’

Frank did not know how to tell her. A few days after moving into the new flat he said he was going on a motor trip with Shelley, to deliver some stuff to a friend of his who lived in a Kasbah beyond the Atlas Mountains. It would be interesting to see the country down there, so they’d be taking off in ten days, and be away that length of time. He’d like her to come with them, but didn’t see that it’d be all that wise, with less than a couple of months to go before the baby was expected.

‘It’s a good chance of seeing the country,’ she said, ‘but try not to be away too long.’

The flat was large, airy and sedate, scrupulously respectable, a place he’d never lived in before. The standard was similar to the house of Myra and George, almost the sort of place they would have chosen if they’d come out here together. He grinned at the sight of it, wouldn’t have known what to think if he hadn’t been going away so soon and if it hadn’t, after all, been in a foreign country.

‘Ten days,’ he said, ‘and no longer. Miriam will look after you. I’ll give her a bonus so’s she can buy stuff for her family.’

Shelley called one morning and took him to a bookshop near the Fez market. Rain pummelled the town, as if the Atlantic were filtering through its gutters. Ships’ hooters sounded from the mist-blocked straits. ‘This is bad for the roads,’ Shelley said in the taxi, ‘but as long as we can get over the Big Atlas in one piece we’ll be O.K.’

Frank looked at the titles while Shelley went through to the back. The only books in English were dirty books, and when Frank opened one which set off with a bang on the first page, a tight-trousered Moroccan youth in dark glasses tapped his elbow and beckoned him to the back room.

A man sat at a table, facing Shelley. He was well-built, yet his face seemed frail, with open and delicate features, spectacles and receding grey hair. There was a notice board on one wall, a map of Africa on another, with Tangier a flea-dot on the very edge. ‘I’ll speak English,’ the man said — as if he could have spoken Swahili just as well, ‘for the benefit of our friend’ — meaning Frank. ‘All I want to know, because Mr Jones has vouched for you and I take his opinion sincerely, is whether you want the money paid to you in Tangier, or on a bank in Gibraltar.’

Frank couldn’t speak. ‘I’m sorry,’ the man said, ‘but I absolutely refuse to pay you in dollars.’

He held his rage back: ‘I don’t want money for this work.’

‘The last person who said that turned out to be a spy.’

Shelley stood up angrily: ‘I didn’t bring the spy along. Look, Frank, don’t play hard to get. The reality is always a little sordid. Just go along with it. It’s a hell of a lot smoother that way.’

Frank understood, not being without his rock-bottom sense of realism, saying that if a condition of his being allowed to go was to accept money, then he preferred payment when he came back. It wasn’t his habit to get paid until after the work was done. ‘They don’t do that where I come from.’

‘You’re not there any more,’ Shelley said.

‘Part of me is, or I wouldn’t be doing this job. I’m not in it for kicks and I’m not out for money. We can talk about that when we get back, otherwise I don’t go.’ They discussed it now, in French, and then in Arabic when they thought Frank was getting the gist of it. He wasn’t, stayed out front looking at the books until Shelley came to say that stalemate had broken by their giving in. Frank was surprised that an issue had been made of it at all. ‘That’s how they are,’ Shelley said. ‘Everybody has to learn.’

Frank spent an hour in the American library, went in for a few minutes out of the rain. He picked up a volume of Arab stories and read one, about how a stream had reached the edge of the desert and was in danger of being sucked away completely by the sand. The stream knew that its destiny was to cross the desert but it didn’t know how. A voice said that the wind got across safely enough, so why couldn’t a river? ‘Let yourself be absorbed by the wind, and the wind will get you across.’ But the river didn’t want to lose its individuality. ‘You won’t lose it,’ said the voice, ‘because the wind will absorb all your moisture, carry you over the desert, let you fall like rain, and then you’ll be a river once more.’ ‘But I shall be a different river,’ said the river. ‘You’ll be different after any experience,’ argued the voice, ‘and that is all to the good. But if you stay here trying uselessly to get across you’ll end up as a salty quagmire. If you let the wind carry you over the desert you’ll then know what your true identity is.’

Frank liked the tale, wondered why he’d had to come as far as Tangier for the accident of reading it. Going south, he’d see the desert, but not roam far into it. The slow days were beating down his spirit, and he wanted to set off, though at the same time aching at the thought of having to leave Myra at such a point in their lives.

He woke at four o’clock, more disturbed than he’d imagined, birds of prey and an insomniac beast worrying him all night. He had coffee and bread in the kitchen to a low murmur of sleepless people out of the Emsallah district on one side, and a roistering noise from a couple of cabaret places on the other. A boat-hooter sounded in the port, a low, dreadful gut-mover indicating a funnel and row of lights about to set off for another land, which caught at his stomach like an ancestral voice, tugged at his journeyman legs. But it’s not so bad, he thought, because I’m moving as well, in another direction, but moving just the same. It’s harder for those said good-bye to, for Myra who’s got to stay among all the indications of what our life’s been like. I only want to live properly with her; to work hard by the day, until life is so absorbing that it jets by. Yet his return was only ten days away, and there was no use trying to wring three months of sentiment out of it.

He did not know how to say good-bye. He stood in the dark bedroom. He had never said good-bye to anyone he was in love with. The thought of leaving her turned him to salt, to ice. He stood there, her face hardly visible, trying to tell himself he wasn’t in love with her, that to be so would mean a defeat for all he had lately surmised and stood for. But he was leaving too much, felt as if about to drop from the last grip of the lifesaving rope end. He blamed such thoughts on the morning, when the brain was clear and ruthless, showing in true light one’s bravery and apprehension.

She felt his presence by the bed. ‘Are you going?’

He waited a moment: ‘I don’t have to. Nobody’s dragging me. If only they were.’

‘You’re saying this for my sake,’ she said, opening her eyes. ‘I’ll see you quite soon.’

‘I’m a fool,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to leave you both.’

She sat up. ‘I know. But don’t make it too difficult. I know how much you want to go.’

‘I love you,’ he said. ‘My roots are in you.’ You did love me, she thought. You’re incapable of love. You’ve wanted to be free of it for so long that now you’ve made it, you’ve won. ‘Just take care,’ she said, ‘that’s all.’

‘I’m running guns to the Algerians,’ he said.

‘I know. I’m glad. But Miriam already told me.’ She hoped that Shelley knew there was no danger in taking him from her at such a time.

‘If we can burst that frontier we’ll be O.K. I’ll be careful. I’m cool enough’ — feeling at last that there was no limit to what he could do. ‘I’ve come full circle, going off on a thing like this. I feel as if I left the factory only yesterday, got paid up, clocked-out, and took a plane down. There’s a natural connection between that work and what I’m going to do. My muscles feel it, and my head as well. It’s not much perhaps, but it means everything to me. I used to dream of being able to do something, but I’m not doing anything. I see that now. I’m just being myself. I’ve learned to be myself. I want to prove it finally though. Then I’ll come back. You’ll be all right. I know you’ll look after yourself.’

‘I’ve got Miriam and a few friends. You make it sound more final now. Do you think you won’t come back?’

‘No. I’ll come back. This is just dawn talk.’ But the tears bled out of her. Desolation would rend her bones and close her eyes, but there was no one to tell, Frank least of all. He roared her name, unfragmented syllables thrown out by his exploding heart. He felt it emptying, knelt by the bed, his hand under the clothes, smoothing her breasts, her enlarging belly. ‘He’ll be there when you come back,’ she said, her throat hardening into firmness, ‘but not if you come back too late.’

‘I’ve got so much to look forward to. That sort of thing used to frighten me, but not now. It’ll be an easy trip. Shelley’s been there before, and swears it’s a piece of cake. It’s just the fact of leaving you for any time at all that creases me.’

It was cruel and weird, this voluntary wilful parting. He kissed her and left, casually, as if coming back in ten minutes with fresh bread for their breakfast.

She lay still, the door slamming through her, feeling that he’d never open it again. If he weren’t back in two weeks she would take a plane to London, go to the house in Buckinghamshire and wait for her baby which, by time scheme but not physical possibility of touch, could have been George’s. After that, she would carve out her own life as Frank was carving out his, in action and not love. If he survived his crossing of the desert he would know where to find her. In that sense they belonged to each other and she would always wait for him.

The blue light of dawn clawed at her belly. She had a baby, and love must die. The universe was taking it back. Where the claws of love had rested the flesh was rotten. Frank knows this, and is acting it out in the only way possible, by leaving me. Will God allow the world to be proletarianized in this way? He’s emptied me of love, but I feel better than I’ve ever felt in my life. To live out a great emptiness is to fulfil yourself completely. I can’t put into words what has happened.

23

A wet Atlantic wind lurched in from the chopping sea, and all the clouds, ragged and green, looked as if they’d decided to come south and make a party of it. ‘One big downpour,’ Shelley said, ‘and every dip of the road between here and the desert will be a lake. In which case we won’t get through this side of a month.’ He decided on the coast road, rather than risk the mountains beyond Tetuan. Egrets stared into pools by the open roadside, their reflections like question marks upside down. ‘If you hadn’t looked so much like a working man, our friend at the bookshop wouldn’t have smelled two rats. Especially when you wouldn’t take his gelt,’ he went on, continuing an earlier argument.

An anaemic forest spread out from the road. ‘He can stuff his gelt where it belongs,’ Frank said. ‘What do I want money for? I don’t care if my job isn’t pensionable.’

The word H I E L O was written plain and big along the side of their covered lorry. Ice it is, Frank thought, but bugger-all whisky to go with it. He’d brought nothing except two cartons of cigarettes and some money, and couldn’t imagine a more perfect way to depart. Shelley was at the wheel, and Frank took the spare seat, a closed map on his knee. Four Moslems lay on bales and boxes behind, smoked and talked, well-built, thuggish men of about forty wearing khaki trousers and battledress under blanket-like burnouses. Another six would flag them at a crossroads beyond Fez.

A squad of police manned a roadblock at the next junction, a zone of short steel spikes laid out like a carpet. ‘You’d better make with the Arabic, or we’ll have to use those guns on these bastards.’

Shelley pulled in: ‘Keep quiet.’

Frank saw himself back in Tangier by midday, either laughing about their misadventure in Myra’s arms, or cursing his luck behind bars, with Myra trudging up to the Kasbah jail with a billy-tin of rice and mutton, kif-fags and tea.

The Moroccans in the back were motioned outside, not a word said, rifle spouts and law-faces moving around the lorry. Shelley’s hand stretched from the cab. The officer looked at his papers, saluted as if a bee had flown out from them and stung him, and waved them on. The Moroccans climbed back, and Shelley manoeuvred the lorry through a gap in the spikes.

‘What was on those papers?’ Frank asked as they turned up into the olive-grown hills. ‘Khrushchev’s signature?’

‘The Prophet himself signed it,’ Shelley laughed, ‘then Mao Tse Tung. Don’t think we’re the only lorry on Route Twenty-One. Not that there are many. As always, the north fares better, because you can always find ships to put stuff down along that coast. You’d be shocked if you knew how many Englishmen were making a fortune on that run, with their little ships from Gibraltar. Trust the Limeys with their little ships.’

In the afternoon, under a lead-coloured sky, the lorry roared its guts beyond Meknès and up into the Middle Atlas. Snow soon piled on either side of the road, curving and twisting to seven thousand feet. ‘This is nothing,’ Shelley said — though no one complained, ‘you’ll be crying out for water in a few days and having your nuts scorched off.’

‘I’d have brought a keg of brandy if I’d known,’ Frank said. ‘You mean to say they’re fighting a desperate civil war over there for country like this? Don’t blow your top, commissar. I’m making a joke. I know it’s rich country for all that. The Yorkshire Moors are rich, as well, snowed-up or not. Still, the desert is healthy, for hermits and scorpions. At least I could have brought my skis though, if I’d known about this.’

Peaks and rolling flanks were bolsters of snow, a vast rumpled skybed that someone had left in a hurry. The sight and smell of snow when they pulled-up for a legstretch made him almost lightheaded. Moroccan shepherds huddled their flocks into rough shelters. Frank was salaamed when he gave one a cigarette. A knife wind scraped along the drifts, dusted the road that had been cleared by ploughs a few days before. A bus, its top piled with bales and suitcases, passed at a speed even Shelley shook his head at. Veiled women and Old Testament faces of impassive men gazed from inside.

The snow made Frank feel spiritually clean. He’d never seen so much of it, nor been so high among mountains, nor so many miles from any churning sea. This last fact impressed him most, and he wondered whether the moon got this far inland. Certainly the sun did. A bleak thumbprint showed for a minute from a mountain shoulder. A Peugeot cruised by, a French family up from some holiday oasis, woman driving, crewcut head of a man leaning out with a ciné camera aimed at the sheepfold and forest of high cedars humped and laden with snow. Snow took the sense of density out of a forest, made it seem more accessible in that it widened the space between trunks. Larch trees and ilex patched the cedars, hard to pick out unless one had the trained eyes of Shelley. ‘I expected a desert and I got Siberia,’ Frank said, glad of his cap, overcoat and heavy boots.

By nightfall they were over the Middle Atlas, and ready to bed down near Midelt. In spite of bitter cold the Moroccans slept in the lorry, guarding in turn the stuff they were moving south. A fire in the hotel yard huddled them in talk except for the blackest hour of the night. Frank and Shelley drank Pernod at the kerosene-lit bar inside. Frank asked why there was so much unemployment in Tangier and Morocco. It didn’t puzzle him, yet he wanted to know.

‘Since the French pulled out of Morocco the industry has collapsed. Also, a developing country needs a statistical system to measure its progress and potential, otherwise, it doesn’t move. You can’t do anything until you get one. When Tangier became part of Morocco, forty banks closed in one day. And when money stops circulating, the economy stops running — what little there was.’

‘People can work, even without money,’ Frank said, ‘until things get properly organized. It’s better than no working at all.’

Shelley smoked a pipe on long hours of driving, and lit up now. ‘They’d work for food, if there was any to hand out. They’re primitive enough for that. And they’re good workers, in spite of what a Frenchman might tell you. But there’s no surplus flour to pay them with — unless it’s a handout from Uncle Sam.’

‘Maybe it’s a case of them having the wrong sort of government.’

‘Some people in the big cities are trying to alter it, but it’s hard. Most Moroccans are tribal and primitive — let’s face it — and they don’t want things to change.’

‘It’s the towns that matter,’ Frank said. ‘Sling me some more of that water. This stuff’s punching holes in my stomach.’

‘The Chinese Revolution began with the peasants. Same in Cuba and Vietnam. Algeria as well. You’re old-fashioned, still harping on 1917. I don’t have much faith, Frank, in the modern masses, as too many individuals are called. The only magnanimous action of modern times was a passive and unconscious one — that they allowed the hydrogen bomb to get cooked up. Which is where we come in. Guerilla wars are the only possible ones from now on.’

‘You talk as if capitalism is finished,’ Frank said. ‘It’s not that easy. I wish it was.’

Shelley laughed: the idealist with practical solutions. ‘Capitalism is a luxury liner washed up on an island: the people already there swarm down to the shore and loot it, to rebuild their own boats with its help — almost from nothing.’

‘Have you ever tried to make a nut and bolt?’ Frank asked, fed-up with his flippant images.

‘No, but I’ve known many people who can make them. They’re a dime a dozen. I’m getting stoned. I’ve got to sleep. Allow me to flip off to my pad like a cross-eyed penguin.’

Through the rock-rock-rocky mountains and the pure-and-driven snow, balancing on bootlace roads with the smell of pine cones and nostril-burning frost to clear the head, Frank became as adept at such turnings as Shelley, as if they’d been on the trek for weeks. Stapled by front bend and backmirror hairpin, the new land blinded him to past or future. Trees hammered the sky over them like a circus tent in which only thoughts and sensations of the present could perform. In spite of plenty to eat and smoke and a shower last night at Midelt, he already felt as if he were living rough, a tramp with a purpose, sharpened by driving and fatigued by lack of past or future.

The country was cold (even at midday), stony, laced with iron trees, vast. The world is small until you come to the wilderness, he thought, then you see how big it is. Beyond the desert there was jungle, land still unexplored, unsurveyed, unconquered.

They followed a narrow river hemmed in by sheer rock, going under a tunnel at one place. The first palm trees appeared, stuck like Worn-out mops along the water-edge, thickening to a belt of green on either side. Luxuriant green snaked between barriers of red-coloured rocky pinnacles, the narrow wedge of a valley opening towards blue sky. Under high sedate palms grew orange, lemon, pomegranate trees, flourishing by the knife-glint of irrigation ditches cutting out from the main bountiful stream.

Seen from above it was a pattern of glass fragments, crystal strips scattered in green chaos, yet made orderly and precise by the water rations delivered to each plot or field. Nothing had come about by accident, only by labour and brain, time and patience, a battle for increase against the nearby desert — so marvelled at by Frank that he once misjudged the acute switch of a curve and almost shot the whole of them down towards it.

They stopped for a meal of cold beans and mutton, bread and mint tea. Filling watercans and loading them on the lorry, he tried to imagine what Myra might be doing at this moment, saw her dimly in the flat wearing her maternity dress, reading and relaxing on the Frenchman’s grand divan, abstracted and distant from him, as he was from her, certainly. He loved her like that, hoped to be back with her soon, to be there when the baby was born. He heard its cries already, brought to the nearby stream as an antidote to the desert.

West and south from the last village of their trip, dusk-clouds higher than the highest reddening escarpment were banked up tall and rugged with pink fire, as if part of a wall enclosing the whole world in whose middle he seemed to be standing. Transfixed, he stood alone, a clank of buckets and gabble of women at the well behind.

The light at dusk was of a half-clear quality that made him doubt the power of his eyes, rub them and wonder whether he needed glasses. But wind and dust was the breath of evening desert in midwinter. He expected to feel particles of snow against his skin but got grit and sand, differing temperatures striated one within the other. The sharp line of spectacularly jagged cloud seemed like real wall from this village of gardens and date groves, goat-bells and camel-grunts. They would head towards it at night, as if darkness were the only way to get through safely, no meaning left of its terror. They would come back that way, return under its mounds and hillocks — if it were still there.

Smoking, shuffling his boots on a boulder, he turned to see whether this same red wall surrounded everything. Since it rarely rained, why were such big clouds gathering? All he could see was a deeper fallen night, a corrugated ceiling to the spreading darkness, with land the same non-colour. He returned to his more livid views of the Hamada du Guir, but they had gone, red wall vanished — though perhaps only the deepening night concealed it. The nearness of the desert made him feel like a machine rather than a man, its capacity well-marked and he his own toolsetter for it. He walked back into the village, finding his way in darkness over-stones, and rubbish.

All number plates had been taken from the lorry, and they had given up their passports to the village agent. Frank felt glad as he handed his over, as if the last of all labels had been unpinned from his back, though remembering how impressed he had been on receiving it.

The road soon worsened, headlights bucking at rocks and sliding gravel. They drew back as if shaking a fist at the sky, then dipped. The lorry rocked, like a lifeboat in a storm disregarding what other boats flee from. Bringing his head forward from the seat Frank looked out at lights and dust, the occasional bush, desert rose, or rockhump Sliding out of vision like an escaping footpad who had had second thoughts. They moved slowly south in the bitter night cold of an empty three-thousand foot plateau, yet it seemed that the way was a strip of land only a few feet wide, and that they would pitch into nearby oblivion should the lorry, on one of its two-wheeled tilts, slip right over and roll, roll, roll.

‘This is the safer route,’ Shelley explained. ‘We’re bypassing a Moroccan post where the officer isn’t so sympathetic to the Algerians, believe it or not. He’d hold us up a few hours, which would throw us into daylight and get us seen by one of the flying napalm wagons. So we’ll go this way — because any rational man would think it’s suicide. The French don’t look much where we’re going.’

‘What about these lights?’ Frank said. ‘They’ve had me worried all the way from the village. We can be seen for miles. Or don’t we bother about that sort of risk?’

‘We’re a long way from the border yet,’ Shelley laughed. ‘I’ll clip them off when the time comes.’

Frank hung on when the sway took him unawares, thinking that a man could get seasick this way. But no one did. Ten of them were packed in behind, all smoking shit-fags, except Shelley who smoked his in a pipe, sucked away as if it were whisky in the bowl. Frank couldn’t imagine what lay ahead in the way of landscape or human events. He was spinning out the rope of his life behind. It dragged along the ground, and only when it touched hard rock did it disturb him. In front was space; untouched, spiritual and corporeal territory, darkness for a sharpening mind to enter and fill up on. Unable to consider the past, he tried feeding on the future, but shied back from it because nothing was there. Only idleness has a future. Work, fatigue, dust and grit imposed the prison-minutes of passing time on him. He had to think on the present, dwell on it with the great concentration that can only be employed by a man who has no future. ‘These are the times when I’d like to read,’ he said. ‘At least you can see something in daytime.’

‘Recite a piece of poetry, then,’ Shelley laughed, ‘or a passage from the Bible. Isn’t that what the English do when they’re in a tight spot? If we can’t rub the boredom out of our lives we’re no use as people.’

Frank smiled, in response to a grin he didn’t see but knew had happened. Those clearcut platitudinous teeth of Shelley’s will be the ruin of him, he thought, like the third match in the trenches. Three grins, and a mortar bomb’s got them all.

By night and in secret they crept nearer to the border. ‘It’s no use looking for it on that map,’ Shelley said, maintaining the air of uncertainty. ‘According to mine we’re in Algeria already, so take over while I hand out the medal ribbons, will you?’

Lights off, towards dawn they stuck in an unexpected pool of sand. ‘You bloody night-owl,’ Frank said. ‘I thought you knew the way a bit better than this.’

‘You can’t stop mistakes. What sort of a holiday do you think gun-running is?’

‘I always thought it was a man in a turban,’ Frank said, ‘picking off Beau Geste with a silver-handled blunderbuss and then getting signed up for Hollywood.’

Shelley rubbed his greying, close-cropped head. ‘No, it’s just getting jammed in a patch of lousy no-good sand when you’re not expecting it, and at me most god-awful time.’

Everyone worked, with rakes, planks and shovels. Rubber burned from wheels uselessly spinning, and the futile grind of the motor seemed to broadcast its trouble across the blackness. Shelley tried again, but every attempt to get it out by engine-power dug the wheels further in. He raged at the unexpected: ‘We’ll have to race for that ravine now, to drop in safe before dawn.’

The fire they were playing with was beginning to burn their fingers. Frank wanted to get at the wind and throttle it — in spite of the fact that, as Shelley said, it would obliterate their tracks. Its erratic moaning made him sweat. The sky was an owl’s eye they were crawling around in. Stuck fast in the sand, the whole dawn world of the wilderness was hooting softly over them — until totally drowned by a raving lorry engine like a massive dum-dum drill dividing his life with the maximum pain and clumsiness.

Four planks were under the tyres, sand spaded clear. They were a team of horses and, all their goods scattered as if to start a market where one had never been before, the wheels gripped and climbed along the wood. Frank felt like cheering. The sand was grey grit, bone dry, and once off the planks they were in it again. The pool had turned into a lake, a morass of dust. This was the raw, real sweat of life, plagued by a burning cold wind and empty stomachs, tindermouths opening from the extreme backbone of life, trials and hazards before dawn where everything is impregnated with the total discouragement of universal past happenings. If the spirit can recognize this feeling and laugh at it, boot it down and go back to hope and work, then the book is closed and the trek without print or maps can begin.

Frank pushed, lifted, heaved with all his strength. He lay on his back shovelling sand from the oily stinking undergut of the lorry, with danger of it subsiding, pressing him down into suffocation and death. ‘I’ve done some rum work in my time,’ he said to the uncomprehending Moroccan working the same seam nearby, ‘shifted all sorts o’ rammel, but this lot takes the bleddy cake, mate.’

Shelley knelt by, a half-knowing glance at the overall situation. Frank was becoming an unknown man to him: the broadening of his accent back to a deeper Midland Limey made him intimidating, a stranger, lying there at his ferocious and vital work. But the mood passed when the lorry was clear again.

Frank lit a cigarette. While working he had forgotten the wind. Now it was back in his ears, functional at least in that it dried his sweat, stiffened the dishrags of his clothes. He saw himself in the oblong mirror of the lorry as he climbed in, conscious of his increasing strength. His short hair was grey from ash and sand, face pallid showing a wide grin with even teeth, arms apart as he heaved himself in, ready for the death-grip of whatever might get at him. But in his face and frame, subtlety was on the march, infiltrating, penetrating, ignoring his parapets, swarming into the desert of himself.

Dawn was breaking, free-associating ink spreading into daylight: black, blue, green and red. The land was uneven to the east, but still fairly level. Shelley drove, and the lorry went like a rhinoceros in panic. They held on, wishing long life to their bones. Some rocks were hit as if the lorry would split in two, send guns flying, bullets spitting and grenades coughing over humps and hollows. Was it like this on the moon? Even the grey dust in saucers of earth looked cosmic in the spreading light. Yesterday had no connection with this.

One case of rifles had been given out. ‘If any point of doubtful return exists on the trip,’ Shelley said, ‘this is it.’ French planes flew from airfields at Colomb Bechar, eighty miles east, and patrols operated now and again from Meridja. F L N scouts in the area would warn of any approaching danger. But nothing would be seen if all went as it normally did, quietly. The only people met would be those of the F L N waiting to come for the supplies.

24

‘We stay here all day,’ Shelley said when they reached the ravine, ‘and tonight trundle fifteen dark miles east and hope to meet up with the boys coming to get the stuff.’ It was easily said, and to move your finger a few inches here and there on an empty map. The ravine was a narrow cutting in a country of many similar concealments. They covered the lorry with cloths, sand and thornbush to make it invisible from the air, and from land unless someone stumbled right into the hiding place. ‘If that happens,’ Shelley grinned, ‘he’ll never see mom or pop again.’

Out of the twelve, six were continually deployed among clefts and boulders surrounding the ravine. Warning signals would not only bring the rest up to reinforce them, but a further system of ankle-trips set out by Shelley with great skill and patience ensured all twelve firing at once without any voice being heard — though this was elaborate precaution rather than seriously intended defence. However, Frank couldn’t see how a more skilful ambush could have been set, a perfect trap in the middle of nowhere. It was a combination of guard and ambush, a magnetized web of defence known in the Chinese manual as the ‘spider layout’. Of the two Brens, Frank manned one, and a Moroccan held the other. The rest had rifles and grenades.

Frank was flattened beside a rock, an enfiladed view of the plain matched to the Moroccans strung around to the right whom he knew to be there but could not see. The half conscious workings of his brain were muzzled by the uncannily sharp alertness with which his eyes registered the landscape they were to watch. He felt like a boat out in this grey and beige wilderness, rocky plateau in front, ravine behind. The sun burned, his ears still filled with the sound of the engine racing as, towards the last dawn, its tyres had spun to escape the rut they’d sunk into, as his own mind and body had formerly and likewise crazed him in the thousand useless revolutions of his own spirit. The land turned a dim red, then purple, the horizon shimmering, a line beyond which the remains of a man’s soul might find final rest, or the ways and means of change that he had always deserved.

The last time he’d held a loaded Bren was on an army range eleven years ago, and not hoping to kill anyone. To wait was theatrical, because waiting meant thought, a continual monologue of destruction and fulfilment. I’m waiting in case the French show up, when I’d give a lot for it to be the British, because they are the ones I should be doing my nut against. Each to his own, and the rest will look after itself. If Kenya was still on I’d make my way there — or somewhere else if I get safe out of this. The past wouldn’t come to him, and he didn’t know whether to be glad or not. It seemed good that it wouldn’t, that it skulked beyond some horizon he’d left behind. His grey eyes glazed the rocks and dips for signs of life. Nothing. Even William Posters blended with the landscape, ghost of the bleak steppe toting a gun, on a level of equality with those who would persecute and prosecute. He hadn’t thought of him for months, in any case — William Posters, that soul-anchor stuck in your craw, those dim jerking pictures flickering on the screen behind your eyes when closed, working bewildering renegade rebel magic on the sentimental layers of your caked heart asking for pity and understanding as he flitted, half butterfly, half oil-rag, between the changing shadows of the past. He had lost his cap, dismantled his face, outspanned his forever nebulous cause, and walked over the bottomless cliff towards which you — Frank — had been leading him, not quite without knowing it, from the days of consciousness, whenever that was.

Bill Posters, thank God, had died at last in the ruins of Radford-Stalingrad. Frank had seen it, or pictured it as if he had: poor Bill sitting by the wall eating his bread, having given his persecutors the ten-minute slip, relaxed and rested at this small victory, smiling to himself at the peace, and at the good taste of bread, thinking so devoutly how good-looking was that gorgonzola moon above chimney pots he hadn’t noticed weren’t smoking any more. O Bill, you go off the boil for ten minutes, and the game is up! A crane starts working and smashes an ironball down against the wall he’s leaning against (men on night-work because they can’t clear this slum-land quick enough) and William Posters is crushed to death under the slabs and bricks, beams and fireplaces. Undernourished and hunted, he never stood a chance. They found him dead after digging him out, and nobody recognized him as the William Posters whose legendary name had been on so many walls for a hundred years. So he died, unidentified. He hoped he’d died, but who could tell? Such unknown great men sometimes become ghosts and haunt you long enough for it to last the rest of your life. Unless of course you had a hand in their killing. That would be treachery, but what the hell — you not only had to live but you had to survive as well.

He spat the brandy taste out, a strange stillness, no man visible. He was alone, facing a wind hundreds of miles across. It brought no panic, didn’t frighten him. Bravery was something he’d never thought about, like so much else. Overcoming the pain of sun and thirst brought back memories that were sweetened by solitude. Three hours were three days, three months, three years, three decades. He no longer felt a new man. The old man who had gone through his tether and was about to become the new man, perhaps. That was more like it, the old man doing violence to himself and others without knowing it, but the new man knowing it, already committing violence against nature by wanting to overpower the wild stallion of nature that must be held down, gelded, hobbled, and put to use. He remembered the factory vividly, more so than the layout at home, than wife, kids, or furniture. The factory was a permanent set-up in the back rooms of his brain, the violence and rationality of machinery, its benevolence when kept full-tilt at its proper use.

The day would drag on — that was as far as he wanted to see ahead, teeth locked like the fixed bolt of his machine-gun. A headache rolled vibrations of the parched wilderness through him, but a grid of clarity before his eyes drew in memories that his brain tried to reject because he hadn’t been able to control them, none at all except the one that had landed him here. His heart beat like a flower bomb fixed in the culvert of his own life’s iron road, waiting for some long predestined train or convoy to come along. His body lay upon the stillness, stones hot against his fingers.

He had lived most of his life on the assumption that whatever he wanted was unattainable. That bastard, William Posters, had to die, even if Frank had to snuff it with him, leap that cliff with his ten-ton immortal shadow still gripping his back. Posters was too English for this world. He laughed to himself, could afford to out here where it only bounced back in his face. That sponge-man who’d gobbled up his life and fantasy didn’t mean a thing any more, that telly-rat and dope-peddler who hammered the nails into hands and brain to stop you moving, whispered that since something in life was unattainable you had to stop reaching for it, that it was better to rot among the slums and ruins of a played-out way of life, persecuted and prosecuted, flitting from wall to shadow whither your own demons pursued you in an ever narrowing maze with misery and failure at the middle. It was about time that crane-ball stunned him into the wickedest oblivion of all — oblivion deserved.

Even in his own pure dreams Frank had felt something in life he might never get, though mulling now in clear daylight, there’d been no reason why he shouldn’t. He didn’t know at all what it was. Maybe it wasn’t attainable in this life (and that was that) but would form the unearned reward of lives coming after him. Perhaps that also was for the birds, for the desert hawk circling and cawing above. But if he led his life to the greatest extent of which he was capable and disregarded this premonition of dreams, then he would break beyond this horizon wall, sensed all his life, whether it was of brick or cloud or ultimately nothing at all.

His dreams and thoughts were ancient and similar: to dissect them would be like chucking a fag into the latrines and pissing it to bits; nothing gained. All he wanted to do was fire a single shot, finish off the shite-hawk or corpse-gosling that went on circling their hideaway.

He pressed a stone-edge onto a scorpion, and the insect’s tail, animating like an aerial gone mad, hovered and twisted for the suicide stab. It came. Frank watched it turn grey, and the tiny ants patrolling for it. In half an hour exactly it had gone, his private desert clock wherein six of them made a three-hour guard period. William Posters, his body swinging over that cliff and down through space, wouldn’t leave him alone, that snivelling muffle-capped man on the eternal run who’d never had a Bren at his shoulder, and whose fall was followed by the wide-winged bird swooping along the ravine for a quick look and to drop its napalm shit.

A plane flew over at midday, a Mystère jet playing west and south from Colomb Bechar. Frank was edging towards his second round of guard when the hollow, continual boom of its approach rolled like a barrel along the stony earth. When the noise leapt into the sky, he flattened. Shelley had told them there would be no danger. Only the slow ones mattered, and a battle was splintering around the Monts des Ksour, north-east of Colomb, so maybe they were chewing away up there. Head down, Frank felt the sound go over, stayed a half minute before latching himself to his Bren, his fingers on it before the Moroccan took his away and slid back to the ravine.

More sweat piled out than if he’d been walking, certainly not less than when shovelling sand from under the chassis of the stranded lorry. The sun was no longer overhead, and he waited for its decline so that they could move through the cold and more preferable night. Having controlled his body for so many hours between the sun and stones, in perfect stillness and silence, he felt that he had become harder, craftier, and more subtle as a soldier than any who might belong to a national and conscript army.

If only the long day would fall and break its back, get killed like that finished and shared-put scorpion. He poured water on the back of his hand and licked it off. He hadn’t eaten, not even in the ravine, felt no hunger left in him. He fed on eighteen months of thought, chewed through and thrown aside like the rammel of sucked-out bones, like the oil-rag Bill Posters didn’t get a smell of. But he was dead now, like the past. Bill Posters my vanishing brother, my colossus amigo turning to stone and sinking in quicksand, the multiple dream-deaths that a hero deserves; maybe caught by swarming napalm in the final barbaric ritual of Promethean fire, or edged out by old age after a lifetime of work and wisdom. Who is to say, and who is to care? There was nothing left except the brown paper of himself filling up out of the fertile desert.

That shite-hawk spun into twins now. An aeroplane, birds, the sun — only the sky had life. The twelve men were dead until they got up and walked, moved, or fired a shot. In the ravine Shelley had sat huddled in a shallow cave, Arab music playing low on a transistor small as his hand, saying to Frank that this was always the worst day of the trip, when he felt cut off from mankind and needed proof that the world hadn’t been obliterated. Frank smiled. He didn’t need proof. If it had been obliterated he would have felt it without any proof.

‘Not me,’ Shelley said. ‘I want to know when to get up and shout for joy.’ He looked thin and tense, though no one could call him worried because he was incapable of it.

The sun was on its way down. Frank rubbed his eyes, scraped grit from the corners with his fingernail. Once in Tangier, after a night’s booze-up with Shelley on straight red plonk, black specks had jumped before his eyes all next day, as if the midges of summer had taken over the winter air. At the worst it was like walking near a dead paperfire when the wind played on it — specks of all shapes that he actually believed were there and tried to brush away. Shelley laughed that it was his liver acting up because of too much wine.

At five o’clock he wondered if it wasn’t happening again, this time the result of rough water heaved up from village wells on the way down. The weakening sun played against him, and he tried to press the dots away, but they hovered to the west, clear cut on the horizon. He didn’t think his eyes could betray him at such a time. There were, after all, other men still on the earth. He jerked his foot, a thin piece of string reaching down into the ravine.

The specks had vanished. Shelley was by his side. ‘You’ll see them again. They may not hit this spot. I can’t understand it. They’re coming from Morocco, but they’re bound to be French, one of their patrols sprung as a surprise. But why Morocco? There’s the rub, Frank. Look, see them again?’ The second Bren had been moved to form a more solid front, to perfect the spider. Shelley used his glasses. ‘I make six.’ Frank remembered the manual: if there are more, retreat. If there are less and you can win, attack. He wondered on the state of his gun — which had seemed all right when he’d taken it to pieces, but who could tell? ‘If they pass a good distance on either side,’ Shelley said, ‘it’s their lucky day.’

We’re a web, Frank thought. He had said nothing while Shelley talked. Flies always come into a web, just as rats can never resist a trap, even when they can’t see it, even in the middle of a plain like this when they could easily miss it. Noiselessly, almost without movement, Shelley was somewhere else. He checked the signal string around his ankle. His breath was shallow, forceless, as if he had no lungs and his windpipe opened on the empty air of the desert, a nothing-pump of sun-stroke and gut-ache. It would take them an hour to get here. From behind them a white light flickered once. If the plane had spotted us, he thought, they’ll fan out and make a web of their own, a war of spiders. Still far off, they came in line, as if to cut across their front, in which case there’d be no contact. He steeled himself not to drink water. Gravel chafed his boots but he wouldn’t move to empty them. Shelley was back: ‘If we pull off this ambush, we retreat the way we came. There’ll be no time to spare.’

‘What about the lorry, the crates of stuff?’

‘The others will come for it during the night. They know our stopping places. We’ve done all we can.’

‘Or will have,’ Frank said.

At dusk the six men came towards the high rocky flank of the ravine. Waiting: they were moving towards his gun like one end of a micrometer being wound in in slow motion, to meet the other end which was him. They were drawn by thousandths of an inch, a boon speed to his precision patience. He eased in the trigger at a few hundred yards. They were ambling along as if ready for a night’s camp and a meal, two of them laughing. They were well-spaced, called for a wider, chancier arc of fire than Frank would have thought ideal for an ambush now that they were face to face, but enfilading rifles enveloped the first and last man as they stumbled under the wall of bullets. The kick at his shoulder was the joy of life.

The gun worked: greased, set, and aimed, half a magazine blew out of its spout towards their feet. He was human in that he had acted without thought; inhuman in that he hadn’t felt terror while waiting. They were eaten up, tossed into death. It all seemed so quick and thoughtless, silent and pantomimic under the canopy of noise that was terrifying after the long wait. The day seemed to have begun only now, and it was dusk.

One of Shelley’s Moroccans was killed stone dead. There was no dust. It was too quick for confusion, a silent horror film you couldn’t wind back, noise tacked on later when remembered. He was afraid of such first-time success. The Moroccans smashed open the air, hurling grenades as they moved over like panthers, approached firing into the bodies, taking less than no chances, as if they hadn’t had their money’s worth and wanted a full scale battle. A cold wind blew, shattering Frank’s bones. He glanced at the scattered bodies, and lit a cigarette. He felt more empty than safe, more sure of himself than sorry for them, his feet riveted.

It was quiet before complete darkness, an anticlimax of boredom and irritation, everyone sullen, hating to speak. Shelley had collected the soldiers’ papers: ‘They’ve all got German names, except the officer. Maybe they were Alsatians. Maybe. The French are demoralized, but they’re winning. It often happens. It breeds viciousness, and lack of caution — but they’ve got too much stuff and too many men.’

Frank set up the Bren on a rock, trained it on the lorry: ‘We’d better head south-east, then work north to Monts des Ksour. You said there was fighting there.’

Shelley took this suggestion as a joke, post-action madness, he’d expected even from Frank, but which would quickly pass. He gave orders to unload the lorry: ‘We leave the equipment here. There’ll be quite a heap of it with the stuff they’re bringing in from the dead. The Moroccans are heading east on foot to link up with the F L N tonight, who’ll send a truck for this. We’ve got to make tracks for Tangier and report back. Our work’s done for this trip.’

Frank felt anything but mad, saw Shelley as only wanting to skedaddle now from the consequences of his skill, and leave the dump of arms to take its chance with whoever might be first to reach the spot, soon to be clearly marked by weaving and hungry birds. ‘We’re fifteen miles short. The only sure way of getting this across is to drive it as soon as it’s dark.’

‘It’s all taken care of. They know we’re here.’

‘We can’t be sure of that,’ Frank said. ‘Whichever way we go, it’s dangerous. That patrol came from where we didn’t expect it. It’s death to go back that way.’

‘And death to push on.’

‘So we push on. Get them boxes up. I’m delivering this stuff — and myself. They need anyone they can get.’

Shelley looked into the Bren, opening towards him, a grey fossilized toothless mouth that struck in neither east nor west but straight at unresisting points of the body. The Moroccans stopped work, understood, and waited. ‘Listen, you lunatic bastard, if you want to go into Algeria, then hit the trail with them. I’ve been there before, and it’s no Thanksgiving. I’m heading back for Tangier. There are other loads to be brought down.’

‘Not to this place,’ Frank said. ‘Not after this ambush. I want that lorry, and I’m not going without the stuff. You’re coming with me as well. I can’t speak to these others — yet — unless you interpret.’

‘Why are you doing this?’ Shelley’s eyes diminished, his face skeletal from sand and work, thirst and the unexpected situation they had dropped into.

‘There aren’t any more “whys” in my life,’ Frank said calmly. He couldn’t go back; every footfall or turn of the wheel made it more impossible. The bullets from the Bren had stitched a row of foolproof locks across the door of the past.

‘It’s crazy thinking; it’s suicide. We’re all finished unless we go back. The French have half a dozen patrols beamed on us. You’re ignoring the rules, Frank. We’ll end up like those poor bastards, with even less reason in it. It won’t work.’

‘It will,’ he argued. ‘If it doesn’t, it will still work. That’s how I think. If you do something, it works, whether you fail or not. In any case, you say we’ll draw French patrols on us. Well, the Algerians in the Monts des Ksour are having a hard time according to the agent at the last village, so it’s possible that what is sent against us might relieve them a bit. It’s no more dangerous for us than for them. We’re mobile. We’ve got good chances. This country’s broken enough to hide us. We’ve got as good a chance of surviving as any others of the F L N. If the uproar is to the north, we’re free and mobile and can strike from the south. I’m learning quick. We’ll pick up others. We’ll be the surprise party.’

‘I still think it’s suicide. It’s a hard deal.’ But he was changing his mind, wanting only the final nail in the argument.

‘We’ll get through. Hump that stuff and get everybody in, or I’ll let fly so much lead that even the shite-hawks won’t know where to find you.’

Out of the desert, into the desert. The loaded unlit truck stumbled from the ravine without lights but going steadily in one direction. Frank felt that the desert was the only place where he would find something. People might say he’d had everything: job, wife, children. What more was there? He wanted to go into the desert to find out. What there was was the wanting to go into the desert. Only in the desert did one learn. He had learned all that there was to learn outside the desert. Something in him was going to be reconstituted, and he, by his own effort and actions, had put himself into the position to achieve it. His life had to be filled from the fountains of his own desert, the cruel ash of his own heart. The ovenwinds would send him grey.

The desert was the unknown that was being made known again. His empty soul was explaining itself, beginning to feel once more. He’d thought it could never have been filled. Now he knew it couldn’t help being filled. There was too much to go into it. Each unexplored sand dune hid a regularly flashing light: living-dead-living-dead-living-dead. His mind had been empty for a purpose; its false fullness had created this emptiness in an act of creation.