The Forgiven (14 page)

“Never,” David insisted, shaking his head like a pissed-off schoolboy. “You don’t pay someone because of an accident.”

Richard made sure the doors were closed and he also made sure Hamid kept everyone else away. David was sweating again, and he adamantly refused to put on a costume.

“I’m not putting on a costume until we have this sorted.”

“Fair enough. Let’s sort it, then.”

“I’m not paying him.”

“Did you meet him?”

David shook his head.

“You should meet him. He’s a grieving father, for God’s sake. I called Benihadd. He says it’s the custom here. You don’t have to do it, but if you don’t, it could make things so much more awkward.”

David looked at him coldly. So it was a setup, he thought wildly. It felt to him that moving walls were closing in on him, squeezing him tighter and tighter. The Arabs just wanted money out of you. It was a squeeze. Their grief and annoyance were always exaggerated.

“I don’t even know how much he wants,” Richard admitted, walking around the room in his slippers. “It might just be a thousand euros or something.”

“Or a fuck of a lot more.”

“We could just ask him, couldn’t we?”

“It’s blackmail,” David said. “It’s blackmail pure and simple.”

Richard was gentle with him, because he agreed with it. But so what if it was? So what if it was blackmail? What was the word for
blackmail
in their language—did they even have one?

“You seem very equanimous about it,” David remarked, his face suddenly twitching. “What if it was a thousand euros? It’s not nothing. Anyway, it’s the principle of the thing,
plus
a thousand euros.”

“If it was a thousand, it wouldn’t be very much.”

“What are they going to do otherwise?” David sneered. “Lynch me? They do have an army here, don’t they?”

“I wasn’t thinking about them lynching you. I was thinking about them
not going away
.”

“Oh, your precious weekend, of course! We mustn’t forget that. So
we’ll have a nice weekend in the country while they screw me out of a thousand euros?”

“I think it’s better than the alternative, don’t you?”

The heat between them had quickly risen and Richard felt his face go hot and red. David looked like a plump, sullen toad on his leather chair, his legs wide apart, his Thomas Pink shirt wrecked by the heat and perspiration. He stared around him with an alert, knowing desperation. Squeezed, he was being squeezed, and there was no one to defend him but himself. He hated the way white people gave in to blackmail in places like this. The Muslims had the upper hand and they used it mercilessly, but the cowardly whites beaten down by decades of guilt and political correctness couldn’t admit how ruthlessly they were being dealt with. What did they think, that villagers in the Sahara living in shit thought like themselves? It beggared belief.

There was deep inside David a core of the officer class, the colonial officer class to which his grandfathers on both sides had belonged. There were many more men like him than one assumed, largely because they were so careful to conceal their opinions in moments of stress. But when he felt threatened, he lost his reserve and his disguise. He became supercilious and defiant, and he relished the breaking of the contemporary taboos, which in any case had never seemed to him convincing. He thought political correctness was an invention of spineless Americans wallowing in their racial hellhole. It was just that the British had adopted it with an even sillier intensity. It was guilt for its own sake, and it changed nothing. And now Richard.

He sat back with seething sarcasm.

“And what are the alternatives, Dicky? Do they practice castration out here? Or do the police come and screw you as well? Have we thought of contacting the consulate in Casablanca? What about your contacts in the Ministry of the Interior?”

“My contacts? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. The consulate won’t help you. They think of this place as the far side of the moon.
We do want to cut down on the red tape. You could be far worse off going that route.”

David looked at his nails, as people do when they are on the passive offensive. “I could take that risk. You see, you feel guilty and threatened because you live here. I feel nothing of the sort. I don’t owe Moroccans anything. I’m not French.”

“David, I dare say you aren’t really thinking about your own interests. Or Jo’s. If we call the consulate, there would have to be a thorough, I mean
thorough
, look at this whole thing. It would be under the microscope. I don’t think you’d want that.”

“I …”

“No, no, David, I don’t think you would.”

Richard went to the drinks cabinet and snapped it open angrily. Give the toad a stiff drink and force him round. He had a few ancestors in the East India Company as well. Most of them were into watercolors, archaeology, and Eastern religion. It didn’t necessarily make you into a hard-ass.

He didn’t bother asking what David wanted. He just made up a hugely alcoholic gin and tonic, no ice. He rattled it about to mix it and controlled the outburst of rage that was fast approaching. Suddenly he remembered an incident from school thirty-five years earlier. It was a funny incident, but it seemed less funny now. One Parents’ Day at Ardingly College, one of the boys started throwing mice off a rooftop at the parents and masters assembled below. Each mouse was equipped with a little parachute decorated with a swastika. Naturally, the parachutes didn’t work. The mice hurtled to their deaths and were squashed against the flagstones with the swastika parachutes draped over them. The rumor was, it was David Henniger. He was caned for it, wasn’t he? Richard tried to remember. But was David announcing his love of swastikas or—much more likely—vilifying the masters and parents as swastika types? Richard turned and offered the toad his booze.

The toad’s greedy eyes mellowed at once.

“Cheers, guv’nor,” he growled and grabbed the glass gratefully. He took a swig straightaway.

Richard walked to the windows. There was a puzzle before them. How would they unlock it? It was a puzzle of diplomacy, of tact. He had made his point about David’s not wanting a real investigation. So he
was
hiding something. The father of Driss could not know that, however. Or did he know it? “The men of the desert know everything,” Hamid said once, like a quote out of
Lawrence of Arabia
. But they didn’t, really. They were just efficient pessimists, and therefore astute readers of human nature. They always assumed the worst, and that made them correct nine times out of ten. Their pessimism, however, was not like David’s. David was someone who believed that the past was superior to the present, and that was a different sort of pessimist. It was not the entire past that was superior, of course; it was mostly just the British nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The Moroccans, on the other hand, believed as Hamid did when he quoted the famous proverb “The past is gone, what is hoped for is absent and there is only the hour in which you are.” Richard sat down next to him and clacked his glass.

“Sláinte,” he murmured, offering the Celtic toast.

“Bums up.”

They drank morosely. Candles were being lit one by one in the grounds of the
ksour
, like a sky coming alight at night. David looked at his watch. He was thinking about his wife.

“I think,” Richard said more conspiratorially, “that we should go down and talk to the old crow. Perhaps we can work something out. I’ve been here for a while, let me tell you, and that’s how one works things out here. No rages and fits. No self-righteous finger wagging. It doesn’t work. It’s always best to listen to what they want. Usually they just want something and they’ll tell you. When you give it to them, you can forget everything.”

David continued drinking with surly swigs.

“Once they sense how weak we are, they’ll go for broke. Since they’ve got nothing.”

“It doesn’t always work like that.”

“I’m glad you’ve agreed, then,” Richard concluded tersely. “We might be both pleasantly surprised.”

“Pleasantly?” David said as he tipped his glass empty.

Richard wanted to berate him, to get it off his chest. If he had been honest all along, they could have called the consulate and left it at that. But the arrogant shit had lied and kept something to himself, and consequently Abdellah, the mourning father, had the upper hand. One is the author of one’s own misfortunes, he wanted to say loudly. But David wouldn’t listen.

“I mean,” Richard corrected himself, “that it might not be as bad as we think.”

“I know when I’m being robbed,” David thought.

“You’re not being robbed,” Richard would have replied. “You’re being spared.”

David stared at the ice cube at the bottom of his glass. He knew it was his fault and he kept his silence. If only he could be transported back to Putney by a devious machine of the future, with a single flick of a switch.

THEY WENT DOWN INTO THE PARTY TOGETHER. DANCING
had broken out with horrifying sincerity in the library. Richard had given orders about this, but the French contingent was drunk and they didn’t see why not. They had some Joe Dassin on the turntable and were doing the twist to “Bip-Bip.” Half the guests were in costume, sashed and hatted, and the gin fizz at the outside bar had run dry. Champagne and orange juice was being mustered, and the small triangular mint sandwiches over which he and Dally had pored for a day were making their appearance alongside bowls of beet leaf salad. The fire-eaters from Taza had arrived and were sitting glumly by themselves
with their apparatus, waiting for instructions. Richard went up to them and shook their hands with the smattering of Berber words he had learned. They bowed and touched their chests. The outdoor sofas that night were draped with goatskins and piled with sequined cushions, and large monochrome tribal carpets connected them. David walked over their geometrical eyes carefully, as if squishing them underfoot. He hoped it was taboo, that the
jinns
would get pissed off. He hated all this ethnic pretense and affectation. One could treat people decently without aping them, without rolling out their carpets everywhere. He himself treated all races at St. Ann’s, and the Hippocratic oath made multiculturalism come alive, for once. But there were no grounds for aesthetic surrender. When we saw western knickknacks in their houses, we laughed at them, didn’t we? Dismal kitsch, we said to ourselves. This was no different.

Yet Richard seemed at ease with it. He was a bit of an orientalist snob, obviously, even if you conceded that most of it came from his insufferable boyfriend, who, they said, liked the servants on the side. But then gays always came to North Africa. It was an Edwardian tradition. David’s own grandfather Edwin had done so, to great scandal. Had they all followed Oscar Wilde to Algiers? “Because they could,” he thought. “Because they had the power.” The braziers licked against dark air, which somehow was not at all dark. A boy staggered past with a crate of ice piled with apricots, with stiff leaves still attached to the fruit. One always looked up, searching for the moon.

As they walked side by side, David wondered if Richard despised him, because it certainly seemed that way. He was used to it. People nearly always thought David was something he wasn’t. A man driven by rage and curmudgeon emotion. But then England was now a country dominated, he felt, by childish propaganda and feel-good campaigns designed to facilitate a harmony that never arrived in quite the form that the engineers hoped. There was little room for people who just thought what they thought, and said so, even if what they thought
could not be summarized in slogans or even in books. Many of his colleagues were Muslims. Internally, his dialogue with them was comical and rich and largely tolerant. It was not murderous except when he felt them siding with their
ummah
after an outrage committed by their own, for a bomb on a train did not make him any closer to them, but he saw no reason to feel apologetic for that and they did not reproach him. There was decency between them of a sort. A decency that was mutually enjoyable on odd occasions, as when he congratulated Dr. Mutaba on a perfectly performed ear operation on one of his old ladies. As for his own image as the roly-poly Tory with his boozy red nose, it was a stock figure to which he was not attached and, moreover, one was in good company and it didn’t really matter. It wasn’t bad to have a streak of the late Evelyn Waugh in one’s veins. It was a facade, a diversion, and an excuse for others not to look closer. No human being is that simple or that repulsive. A man sets himself up as a cartoon, but it is always for a reason that will become apparent down the road. As he walked through the heat, he felt himself distancing himself from what might happen to him shortly. He would now be free to drink himself to death, at least. His image as a curmudgeon might actually be useful if the Arabs got unpleasant, and, besides, it was just what liberals liked to think about others. Dogmatic as always. But then liberals never understood anything about anything deep down, because they didn’t really understand cruelty and power except through being in opposition to them. Their body language revealed them. It was easy to oppose those things when you yourself didn’t have to use them. But when you did …, the tables turned with the speed of a knife being tossed into the air, and being disgusted and opposed and indignant didn’t cut it anymore. Any fool could feel those things.

They weren’t wise enough, he thought smugly as they sweated between the restored houses alone with the sound of their sandals crunching white-hot dirt. They thought everything in the world was like them, driven by ideas. How stupid can you get? Power in the racial
sense was merely
how many of you there are
. That was simple enough, no? Everyone on earth seemed to understand that except white liberals. It wasn’t a simple or coarse rejection of others. Because he didn’t hate others; he was simply indifferent to them or regarded them as rivals. There was a vast difference between those two emotions. And they
were
rivals. Human beings are always rivals. He remembered a comment made by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes about Hispanic illegal immigration into the United States. It was, the great man had observed mildly and approvingly, “chromosomatic imperialism.” So there you had it in black and white.