Lulu in Marrakech Read online

  20

  Besides Posy’s despair, another domestic drama manifested itself, chez Sir Neil and Lady Cotter. We had been seeing a lot of the Cotters. There were slight tensions over this. I had realized that Posy Crumley didn’t much like them, but I did. I liked their utter willingness to behave like caricatures of English people abroad, complete with big sun hats, murmuring the expressions “I say” and “Jolly good.” “I say, this modern music, yes, I’m talking about Berg and Webern, it’s rubbish, no one likes to say so, but we all know it’s rubbish.”

  I thought of Posy’s attitude toward Marina Cotter as some sort of British class thing not apparent to me, though Posy was herself a perfectly upper-middle-class girl who had been to Oxford or Cambridge— I immediately forgot which when she told me and now of course couldn’t ask. These lapses of attention reflected poorly on my abilities as an observer and cost me much private shame.

  It became clear soon enough that the Cotters didn’t really like me. Maybe they just didn’t like Americans—that was bound to be part of it. But there was something personal that surprised me, since I am pretty harmless, I would have thought. To me they imputed all the faults of my nation, made explicit by assuring me I didn’t have them: “Oh, you’ve read Lytton Strachey? Really! Do you read much of our literature? That’s unusual for an American! Good for you!” And they seemed to find quite a few faults of my own, for instance with my clothes: “One day we’ll have a shopping day in Guéliz—I know it’s hard to find suitable clothing in the souk. I admire you for being so relaxed about dress.” I pretended not to notice these criticisms, but I did notice them and hoped they didn’t say things like that to Ian about me. What was wrong with my clothes?

  “I don’t know if Suma is going to work out,” said Marina Cotter one day out of the blue. We were at our library, pasting little registers in the backs of books, for checking them in and out. (This was to be on the honor system, though, as we didn’t envision having a librarian. Honor had worked well enough for the bookshelf at Tom’s Tea Cosy.) “She seems so unhappy. It would help if I could talk to her, but my French is idiotic, it’s not up to a heart-to-heart talk. Neil’s is better, he can talk to her a bit, but he has so little insight into a young Muslim woman.”

  I was curious to know what the problems were.

  “For one thing, she doesn’t seem to know a thing about children. Rose and Freddie, our grandchildren, are traumatized, of course, after their mother’s death; they need understanding and consistency. But she doesn’t really interact with them. It could be the language, of course. And she is unduly hard on Rose, makes her do this and that, and then lets Freddie get away with murder, and I can’t seem to make her understand that we treat all children the same in a Western house hold. It’s like a story: Rose is Cinderella or something, and frankly, Freddie is a bit of a little beast anyway; he doesn’t need more spoiling.”

  “But what happens?”

  “For instance, though Rose is older, she is sent to bed first and Freddie can stay up, usually till I come in and send him to bed. You can imagine how this goes down with Rose. Or if they’re playing a board game, she makes Rose clean it up and put it away. He gets first pick of things to eat—so many of our ways are unexamined till you see them done differently.”

  I had suggested that Ian, with his diplomatic manners, be the one to explain Western child-rearing practices to Suma, or at least to charm her out of her reserve, but that had been vetoed, on the grounds that she would be wary of a man. She avoided Neil Cotter very pointedly for the same reason. “She won’t even be in the same room. It’s hard to believe she went to a French lycée,” Marina said. “And she makes everything stop while she does her praying, and she always has her nose in the Koran, but I think it’s a way of getting out of helping.”

  But as events proved, Ian’s intervention wasn’t necessary anyway, because a solution was already under way.

  There was far more difference in age between Marina and me than between Suma and me, and Marina must have thought Suma and I had become friends, though we hadn’t, really. I had talked to her often, and even heard, more or less, her life story, after she had settled in and become more comfortable with the strange adults who now made up her circle of protectors. But she was always reserved. I now resolved to be nicer to Suma and make more of an effort to find out her thoughts—which is what I think Marina was hoping for. But Suma appeared to mistrust me—maybe it was my American accent.

  “I think of myself as Algerian and French,” she had told me once. She’d been born in France but then raised until the age of twelve in Algeria, after which her parents came back to France to escape mounting fundamentalist violence down there. Her father was retired and wanted to be a security guard, “but you would need a dog.

  “My mother wouldn’t have a dog in our small apartment, it’s forbidden where there are prayers. So he doesn’t work.”

  She had two older sisters and two brothers—an older one and the one who had not believed in her virginity. “It was Amid who watched us; my older brother was in college.”

  “Watched you? Babysat?”

  “More or less. Plus ou moins. Protected us and kept us in, or went with us when we went somewhere.”

  “As if you might lose your virginity on the way to the store?”

  “Plus ou moins. But you don’t really understand,” she said. “It’s also about what others will think. If you just come and go, and no one cares what you do, how can they be sure?”

  “The wedding-night bloody sheet?”

  “Voilà,” she said.

  I tried to imagine how she, and families like hers, negotiated the difference between the freedom and autonomy of French girls and an adolescence spied on by your brothers. The idea of your virginity being of public concern I found odious, even upsetting, though I know hers is, worldwide, the most common view, bowing to some sort of testosterone-driven instinct of men to want to know their progeny is theirs. That hardly excuses it though. Especially now with DNA tests.

  “I don’t believe in making women stay in,” she said, “but unless you have someplace you have to go, it’s just easier than fighting with your brothers or whoever. It doesn’t hurt you to tell them where you’re going.”

  I tried to imagine telling my brother whenever I went someplace; how irritating he’d find it. My conversations with Suma had all broken up like this when I couldn’t believe girls would put up with the kinds of restrictions she described, and in Paris, France, at that, and I would begin to wax indignant. I don’t think she herself believed in purdah, but it was a sort of family defensiveness—a group that didn’t like outsiders and Christians saying the things they could say privately among themselves. Yet it was a fact that there were women kept in purdah in France, here, everywhere.

  “My friend Fatima was married, and once she was married she never went out. This is in Marseilles. She has to peek out through the blinds,” Suma said.

  We soon found out that Suma’s situation at the Cotters’ was resolving by itself—that is, by herself and the Al‐Sayads’ Filipina maid, Marcia. The two girls often met to allow Rose and the Al‐Sayad little girl to play together, and apparently they talked, in what language I can’t imagine, with the result that Suma eventually proposed to Marina and Gazi that she, Suma—who had passed the bac, was Muslim, and liked office work and computers—go to the Al‐Sayads’ to work as their secretary, and Christian Marcia, who was fond of children and child care, would work for the Cotters.

  There was much discussion over several days and a sense of astonishment that these docile girls would initiate such a proposal. But it was fine with the Al‐Sayads, who had other servants to look after their kids and were happy to have an educated assistant who could type and speak Arabic and French. Marcia was delighted to be in a Christian house hold, and the Cotters were delighted to have a more experienced nanny, especially one with the legendary Filipino warmth.

  “Suma is fine, at least for the summer. I doubt she w
ill want to go with us back to Riyadh,” Gazi had laughed.

  Until this happened, Posy had been apt to go on about how Suma was being exploited by the Cotters, though Suma didn’t seem to feel injured and was evidently being included in family outings and doings, like a jeune fille au pair is supposed to be. Now Posy began to speculate on Suma’s fate at the hands of Khaled Al‐Sayad. I did wonder whether the Al‐Sayads had mistreated Marcia, but presumably if so, they wouldn’t have relinquished her so easily to tell the tale.

  21

  The tale goes, that on a certain day, Abd‐el‐Melik ben Merouane went to see Leilla, his mistress, and put various questions to her. Amongst other things, he asked her what were the qualities which women looked for in men.

  Leilla answered him: “Oh, my master, they must have cheeks like ours.” “And what besides?” said Ben Merouane. She continued: “And hairs like ours; finally they should be like to you, O prince of believers, for, surely, if a man is not strong and rich he will obtain nothing from women.”

  —Sheik Nefzaoui, The Perfumed Garden

  These days, also colored in ways I have merely touched on by the long, drawn-out aftermath of the explosion— investigations, reports, assessments, papers—coincided with the visit of Ian’s father, Lord Drumm. Posy was excited. This person, well-known in England, had a reputation, apparently, for thunder and mischief, which she hoped to experience or see. From Ian’s apprehensiveness, I thought it might be true that we were in for an upheaval—or was it just that Posy and I, like long-term prisoners, were thrilled by the arrival of anybody new? Nancy Rutgers and her David had left, and we expected a new artist, a French paint er, whose works were fiercely scorned by the Crumleys. Nancy left a blank, because she was always opinionated on bookish subjects or art and could argue vigorously for or against any particular work. “Gone with the Wind is a great masterpiece,” she might say, and give her reasons, and would always prevail, because Robin, Posy, and Ian wouldn’t have read it. One of our fiercest arguments concerned her pronouncement “The Islamic world is backward because it has no art.”

  Robin Crumley said, “They have poets,” as if poets were a precondition for civilization and sufficient unto themselves.

  “But all those poets lived five hundred years ago.”

  “So did Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton,” said Robin.

  “Homer lived five thousand years ago, not five hundred,” said Posy, closing the matter, though we wrangled on.

  Ian clearly dreaded his father’s visit but in another way was really into it. For the first time since I had come, he took to hanging around the kitchen, talking to Miryam, who ran it, I suppose about menus. I’d been so rebuffed by Miryam I no longer tried to venture into a discussion about poulet muhammara, or lentils versus tabbouleh, or which lamb dish should be served, but of course Miryam had to listen to Ian and I sometimes gave him my views. I was wounded but not surprised when he once said, “Dearest Lu, don’t worry about the food, the menus—these people love doing it and they are really competent.”

  We went to a restaurant one night to listen to the wild music of a group that played there so Ian could decide whether to hire them for his banquet. He wondered if he should find a belly dancer. Apparently this was not a common Moroccan dance form, but he had fond memories of it. I soon realized this must be because it was associated with a family time, before the divorce of his parents.

  “He took Ralph and me—oh, and Mother was there too. We went to see a belly dancer, when I was about eight; we were in Beirut. Of course I’ve never forgotten it! He was a passionate Arabophile in those days. He might get a kick out of remembering that. We’ll look for a nice fat one—a sweaty, wriggly, real one.”

  “It’s a fad among wives in England to take belly dancing lessons,” Posy said. We had seen the costumes in the souk, spangly bras and low-rise shimmering skirts, bringing the vision of a nation of tourist ladies covertly undulating in the privacy of their homes.

  “Don’t think of it, Lu,” he said, smiling, though I found it a somewhat wounding caution.

  “You have to be fat,” he added. “I’m sure you’ll like him,” he said grimly, thinking of his father again.

  When I saw Ian’s father, I had the impression I knew him already; he looked exactly like an Ingres portrait I’d often seen in the Louvre, of a nineteenth-century person named Bertin, a short, stocky man in a waistcoat and watch chain, strangely small hands ranged on his knees and a confident, cynical, wily expression—a twentieth-century face, unlike the usual faintly period faces surmounted by strange locks of hair you see in old portraits. I’ve heard the Ingres described as depicting “the triumph of the bourgeoisie.” Bertin was a publisher, which I had understood Ian’s father to be, but it turned out he was in hotels and freeway restaurants, a triumph of the bourgeoisie.

  Ian was the second son of Lord Drumm’s first wife, who got dumped along the way, with the usual repercussions for the children of first marriages, technically in the loop but removed from their father and made to listen to many recitations of his weak points: bad temper, imperious and controlling nature, coldness, etc. None of these qualities was noticeable during the visit.

  After university, Ian, like his older brother, had gone to work for their father, but it didn’t suit Ian. His brother has risen to vice president of the thriving empire. Ian was staked to another start in life, made conservative investments and bought property in Morocco, a place he’d been taken on vacation as a child by his father. It was an irony that now he ran his villa like a hotel and was even building a small, ritzy guest house in the Atlas Mountains. Lots of people have had worse starts, but there was friction, and I supposed Ian had good reasons to dread his father’s visit. It was almost endearing to see his nervous concern.

  One of the first things we did was take Lord Drumm—Geoff (“Do call me Geoff, Lulu”)—to see the site of the fire. Why dead embers should have fascination I don’t know, but I have heard that people went to see the ruins after 9/ll in the same spirit, hoping somehow to feel the impact of a mighty event they suspect has not really touched them enough. As we had seen several times, the factory was completely destroyed, and a question remained about the cause.

  “The insurance was ruinous, but it was insured, at least. It remains to be seen if they’ll pay,” Ian was saying to his father. Whether insurance would pay or not would depend on the nature of the explosion—an act of terrorism would not be covered, falling into the same category as an act of God, or, I suppose, Allah. Negligence would also rule out payment of the claim. Ian didn’t think the fire was an act of terrorism, but Rashid did, talking to Posy and me.

  “Moroccans are like chickens, we cover with shit every branch we roost on.” He was speaking French, so it didn’t sound as strong a way of speaking to two strange ladies as it does in English: “Nous emmer‐dons nos nids.”

  Ian’s father reproved him for being in the factory-leasing line. “Was it wise to lease to these people? They don’t have the same business ethics we do. That’s a nice site, lovely view—you’d have done better to stick with the hotel idea.”

  “Too isolated for a hotel,” said Ian defensively. “Originally there were to have been better roads up here, but the ministry stiffed me there.”

  If Ian deferred to his father, it was interesting to see how Lord Drumm in turn deferred to Robin Crumley, talking to him, or, more noticeably, listening to him, which he didn’t appear to do to anyone else. It made one aware of Robin’s stature in England, and this pleased Posy, as if she needed reminding that her hero retained his fame even if, pale and blinking in the strong Moroccan sun, he had lost some glamour in her own eyes.

  “What do you say, Crumley, about the schools’ bill? It sounds like bringing back the eleven-plus to me. Is that a good thing?”

  “I was a lad who benefited from the eleven-plus,” Robin said. “People forget about the boys that were saved by it. What was nonsense about it was its inflexibility, not taking into account the late bloomer
s.”

  “Hmm. I was a late bloomer, Ian also.” Ian looked surprised at this, either that his father thought him a late bloomer or that he had bloomed. For me, seeing Ian in this family context was endearing, or at least revealing, a strong man disconcerted by his father. Ian’s mother lived in Cannes. I wondered if I’d ever meet her. Normally I don’t daydream, but it did cross my mind to wonder if Ian had mentioned me to his father as someone he might marry.

  With all the preplanning, the banquet went off without a hitch, the epitome of sultry orientalist glamour. All the torchères on the patio were lit, and also on the paths in the garden. Low glass lanterns with candles in them flickered under bushes, servants stole silently around with trays, and the musicians crouched in the driveway waiting for their cue to come in with the wild music. The air was perfumed with cumin and coriander, the characteristic smell of the whole country. This was a theatrical side of Ian (if not the advice of some interior decorator; I would later find out it was Nancy’s friend, David) that I hadn’t guessed at. The atmosphere of per for mance was enhanced by a troupe of drummers and dancers, who throbbed and spun at high volume. They seemed almost unendurably loud, so I was reassured my ears hadn’t been damaged by my teenage disco years after all. The thirty guests, French, English , and Moroccan, were dressed to the teeth in silk and jewels.

  Lord Drumm—Geoff—stayed only two days. On one of them, the Cotters had a dinner for him, with several Moroccan dignitaries—the honorary British consul in Marrakech, the ubiquitous Colonel Barka, us, the Crumleys, and a French diplomat, M. de Fruiteville, who sat on Marina’s left. Ian’s father was on her right, and I was next to him. Though heretofore I hadn’t had any extended conversations with Ian’s father, now I could not avoid it. Almost immediately, he turned to me and said, “This president of yours is a fine fellow!” The intonation of his voice, exactly neutral, with not a trace of positive inflection or of sarcasm, left me uncertain of what I ought to say—for I was never going to quarrel with Ian’s father.