The Lighthearted Quest (36 page)

The Spanish foreman rose stiffly out of the shadows by the shed at the site, and helped to carry her effects up onto the headland. By night it was a strange, out-of-this-world place: the waning moon cast strong shadows from those fantastic rocks onto the white sand, making it hard to recognise the now familiar way up, and on the further slope they had considerable difficulty in finding the right grave—Julia finally stood and
shouted “Professor Carnforth,” till he emerged and led them to the spot. He then went off; the old foreman crept into a neighbouring tomb, and Julia proceeded to arrange her effects in the one just vacated by the Professor. It amused her to wedge her cup and thermos into one of the coffin niches, opening like oven-mouths along the walls; indeed the tomb was altogether the strangest sleeping-place imaginable. The light from her torch, propped on the floor, showed the outlines of the sloping slabs of the roof and the dressed stones of the walls through the pale stucco, clean and fresh in the upper part of the small chamber as when it was put on nearly two thousand years before, while in their dark niches along the sides the Phoenician dead lay quiet all round her. She put her pillow at the head of the Professor's sleeping-bag, still comfortably warm from his tenancy, and then went and sat outside to smoke a last cigarette. It was perfectly still, and not in the least cold; a faint rumble of snoring indicated old Fernando's resting-place, but otherwise, except for the distant roar of the Atlantic on the sand-bar, there was not a sound; below her the lagoon gleamed like dull metal between its dark shores. Hullo, there were lights on the
Finetta,
whose white shape just showed away to her left; the port-holes were not lit up, but small lights moved about her decks, as from torches or lanterns. How tricky the moonlight was!—Julia would have sworn that the yacht was lying closer inshore than yesterday, but in that deceptive illumination it was impossible to be sure. Promising herself to look out often during the night, in case Mr. Smith was up to some funny-business, she turned in, snuggling down in the Professor's flea-bag among corpses nearly two thousand years old.

She had not meant to sleep, but she did. She was awakened by a small noise quite close by; cocking an ear, she decided that it was at the entrance to the tomb. Silently, a little frightened, she groped for her torch, turned it towards the doorway, and switched on The sharp white light revealed a
figure in Berber dress, on all fours at the foot of the short flight of steps; but it was an English voice that ejaculated sharply—“Good God! Who's that?” Under the hood the face was that of Colin, now without his Low beard.

“It's Julia,” said Julia calmly, lowering the blinding light a little. “Don't you think you might come in and have a talk, Colin, since you
are
here? I've been looking for you for a long time.”

“I know you have, and a nice mess-up you've made of things,” the young man growled. “Anyhow, what the devil are you doing here at this time of night?”

“Guarding this tomb from marauding Berbers, like you,” said Julia, with a giggle.

Perhaps it was the slow gurgling sound of Julia's giggle, an infectious source of amusement from his earliest childhood, that caused Colin to relax his hostile attitude—anyhow he crawled further in, sat down with his back against the wall, and said—“Why guarding?”

“Tomb's half-excavated—probably that coffin behind your head is full of gold jewellery.”

Colin grunted.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “I thought you'd still be in hospital.”

“Not too bad—poor face a bit the worse for wear.”

“Let's see.” Julia turned the torch onto her forehead.

“Golly, that's big,” the young man said, leaning across and fingering the long line of plaster—the intimacy of the gesture, and the simplicity with which he made it, carried Julia straight back to Glentoran, and the long happy days there, with Colin, always Colin, as her inseparable and dearest companion. “Will it show permanently?” he asked—like everyone else, Julia reflected.

“'Fraid so. But I don't much mind.”

“I
hated
having to go off and leave you on the ground like that,” he said unexpectedly. “I didn't even know if you were
dead or not. But we simply had to get away at once. Who was that Yank who stood guard over you?”

‘Oh, a
frightfully
nice creature called Steve Keller—I mean, I never saw him keeping guard, but he was the only Yank about, so it must have been him.”

“How
nice? Nice enough to marry?” Again Colin Monro's words were unexpected, and his eyes were fixed on her face, in the rather dim glow from the torch, now lying on the earthen floor.

“No—I refused him yesterday.” As she spoke Julia felt about among the pile of provisions beside the sleeping-bag for the bottle of wine.

“What about a little drink?” she said, holding it out. “I've got eats too, if you'd like some. Frankly, I'm hungry.”

“Greedy, you mean!—you always were greedy, Julia. Yes, we might as well have a mouthful—I'm pretty peckish, too. But I mustn't stay long.”

Julia produced buttered rolls and slices of her favourite raw ham; the wine they drank from her cup, in turns. It was a happy little meal, eaten in those highly peculiar surroundings; the past came flooding back—other meals they had eaten together, in caves along a Highland shore, or in ruined houses to get out of the wind when out after black-game in January: “Do you remember?” they said to each other. Julia had a curious feeling that Colin was perhaps clinging to the past to avoid the difficulties of the present; but at last he asked—“How has that new salmon-pool on the Toran worked out, that we made just before I came away? Did the logs hold?”

“Oh yes, and the gravel piled up against them splendidly; Uncle John got no end of fish there the last two years.” She paused and then said—“You know he's dead?”

“Of course I know—I see the papers,” he said, half sulkily.

“Well,
can
you come home, Colin? That's what I've been trying to
get
near enough to you to ask for the last two months!
Someone's got to run it—you can't let Glentoran just go down the drain, and you know Aunt Ellen simply isn't able.”

“Why can't Edina do it?”

“Because she's earning £1,500 a year, and they need that money—she makes your mother an allowance!”

“Fifteen hundred! Good God! What at?”

“Advertising. And her screw's going up to £2000 this summer, with any luck.”

Colin whistled at the figure.

“Two thousand a year for
advertising!”
he said. “Edina always was a great apostle of the phoney.”

“That's not fair—she isn't,” said Julia hotly. “You're just being a jealous beast, Colin, as you often—not always—were. Anyhow,
can
you come home?” she persisted.

Colin began to jerk his thumb in and out.

“I'm simply not sure,” he said. “In the ordinary way this job would have gone on for quite a time, but you've managed to stir up so much dust that we may have to chuck it.”

“Whatever dust have I stirred up?”

“What haven't you, you mean! First diddling old Bathyadis into spilling the beans to you—though I gather that was mostly St John's fault, silly old man; he really is too old for this job now, only he's so damned good with the Arabs. But what was much worse was your goings-on in Casa and Marrakesh. Affaires Indigènes aren't
quite
blind, and when two foreigners start displaying so much interest in the camionnette, they naturally did a bit of checking-up on their own account.”

“Did they tie in Monsieur Smith with Herr Nussbaumer from Martin at the garage?” Julia asked, beginning to gurgle again.

“Goodness,
that
was how you found out, was it?” he asked, startled. “But how did you get onto the name of Smith?”

“Seeing the
Finetta
in the lagoon here, when we were digging—so I went in and asked Lloyd's man what name she was registered in.”

“You infernal diggers!” he growled. “But I still don't see how you traced the car.”

Julia explained about Moshe, and the capture of his notebook—“but it cost 20,000 francs to get the number of the camionnette out of Martin. I hope Affaires Indigènes got it for less.”

“You bet they got it for nothing! But Julia, don't you see that your Jew tailer will have tipped off the lot he was working for that you'd got his book? So you can bet they kept an eye on you both in Casablanca and Marrakesh, and knew you'd gone to the Bureau in both places.”

“I see that all right, but—so what?”

“So a bomb, silly! Try to mop us up before we could be hauled in and spill what we knew about
them,
as they knew we damn well would, of course, if we got into trouble ourselves.”

“But Colin”—Julia was trying, not very successfully, to keep all this straight. “Is what you and ‘Smith' are doing legal or illegal?” she asked bluntly.

“Illegal here, of course, but perfectly legal in Paris, because—“ he broke off.

“But how—?” Julia was beginning, but he interrupted her.

“Leave all that, would you mind? Forget I said it.”

“Oh, very well.” She reflected for a moment while she got out a cigarette, and handed her case to Colin, who took one eagerly. “More wine?”—she held out the bottle again. As they drank in turns—

“You don't half do yourself well, Julia!” the young man said, with an impish grin. “Still the same old greedy-gub, luckily for me! But tell me, why are you mixed up in this archaeological racket?”

“My dear Colin, I had to
live
while I was hanging about after you, so tiresomely elusive!—so I took a job as secretary to an archaeologist.”

“Oh, the old La Besse. Well I must say she has a
toupet,
to make you come and sleep in her tombs!”

“She didn't—I offered. But come to that, Colin, what are
you
doing, creeping into our tombs in fancy dress?”

“You mind your own business!” he grumbled, with a return to his familiar youthful surliness when in a difficulty. Julia had smoothed this over a hundred times; now she poured him out a cup of coffee, and as he drank—

“I bet I know!” she said gleefully. “You've got masses of velvet trunks full of Astridite hidden in tombs on this slope, all ready to go on board the yacht, and you just happened to hit the wrong tomb. What sucks for you!”

“Julia, I shall slap you in a minute!”

“No, no—don't slap Julia, fresh from the jaws of death! But aren't I right?”

“Damn you, yes, as a matter of fact. I remember I never thought you as stupid as everyone else did, even as a child,” he said reflectively—“you always had a way of hopping onto things. Remember the time you spotted the rifle of those deer-poachers, and got Andy Mac to take the contact-breaker out of the distributor of their car, so they couldn't get away?” He laughed and thumped her knee.

“Yes, of course. So you
have
got some stuff here? What a joke!”

“Well, we had to bring the last lot here—we've had to pass up young Bathyadis, with all this fuss. His place is almost certainly being watched.” The young man explained how Mr. St John had managed to get word to them down in the South, through trustworthy Arab channels, that Julia was not only on their track, but had also met young Bathyadis; but this information reached them too late to prevent the despatch of a camel-convoy to Casablanca with two-thirds of the fruits of that period of digging.

“Oh, that was the caravan we met in the Djebelet,” Julia interrupted blithely. “So handy—a trunk fell off and burst.”

“I know it did,” the young man said wryly. “You've had the devil's own luck, all along, Julia.”

“Well, you silly, it's all your own fault. Why couldn't you at least answer letters, and all those ads? Then no one would have come chasing you.”

“In our show we aren't supposed to give our whereabouts away,” Colin said, rather pompously.

“And what may ‘Our show' be? One of these Protean forms of the Secret Service, I suppose, since the Bank of England backs you up.”

“Julia, you are a devil! What do you know about the Bank of England?”

“Oh, one has one's contacts,” said Julia, airing her favourite tease-phrase. “Never mind, I'll forget that too if you want me to,” she added hastily, as he seized her wrist with some violence. “Ow! Don't hurt me, Colin—that's your old nasty trick. Anyhow, how do you get the trunks aboard through all those reed-beds?”

“In the dinghy. There's a good firm track on the east of this ridge that a jeep can come up, and we man-handle the stuff up and into the tombs one night, and get it on board the next.”

“And where do you take it when it's on board?”

“Out to sea, where we meet a boat, and trans-ship. But you'd better forget that, too,” he said hurriedly.

“Oh, I'll forget anything you like. Who sails the
Finetta
on these jaunts?”

“Me.
I'm the master now,” Colin said, with rather touching pride. “Isn't she a lovely boat, Julia? Very different to the poor old
Thomasina!
Do you remember how you piled her up on Gigha?”

“I
didn't!
You were steering!” said Julia indignantly. “At least, you were holding my arm.”

At that, laughing, the young man leant over and held her arm again. “Oh Julia, what fun we've had!”

“Yes, heavenly fun—and please God we'll have more, Colin dear.”

At that he edged up the tomb, wriggled in beside her, and sliding an arm round her waist rubbed his cheek against hers, confidingly.

“It's good to see you,” he said. “Such a long time away. Julia—“ he stopped.