Hammond Innes - The Strange Land

Then I remembered the oilskin bag. The answer to some, at any rate, of the things that were puzzling me might lie in the documents he’d salvaged. It’s not a very nice thing to go prying into another man’s papers, but in this case, I felt it was justified. I got up and began searching through the bedclothes. But I couldn’t find it and I was afraid of waking him.

I didn’t persist in the search. It was very cold in the room. North African hotels, with their bare, plaster walls and tiled floors are designed for the summer heat. Also I was tired. It could wait till morning. There was no point in trying to work it out for myself. When he was rested, he’d be able to explain the whole thing. I lay back again and switched off the light, pulling the blankets up round me. The moonlight cast the pattern of the window in a long, sloping rectangle on the opposite wall. I yawned and closed my eyes and was instantly asleep.

But it was only my body that was tired and probably this accounts for the fact that I awoke with such startling suddenness at the sound of movement in the room. The moonlight showed me a figure stooped over the couch at the foot of the bed. ‘Who’s that?’ I called out.

The figure started up. It was one of the Arab hotel boys. I switched on the light. ‘What are you doing in here?’ I asked him in Spanish. ‘I didn’t send for you.’

‘No, senor.’ He looked scared and his rather too thick lips trembled slightly. He looked as though he had negro blood in him; so many of them did who came from the south. ‘The patrone sent me to collect the clothes that are wet.’ He held up some of Kavan’s sodden garments. ‘They are to be made dry.’

‘Why didn’t you knock and switch on the light?’

‘I do not wish to disturb you, senor.’ He said it quickly as though it were something he had expected to have to say, and then added, ‘May I take them please?’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘And you can take my jacket. That needs drying, too.’ I got out of bed and emptied the pockets. Then I ran through Kavan’s things. I thought he might have his wallet in one of the pockets of his windbreaker, but there was nothing but a jack-knife, an old briar, matches — the usual odds and ends of a man sailing a boat. ‘Thank the patrone for me, will you?’ The boy nodded and scurried out of the room. The door closed with a slam.

‘Who was that? What is it?’

I turned quickly towards the bed and saw that Kavan was sitting bolt upright, a startled look on his face. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It was one of the hotel boys. He came for your wet things.’

Relief showed on his face and his head sank back against the pillows. ‘I thought I was back on the boat,’ he murmured. Though he was utterly exhausted, his mind still controlled his body, forcing it to react to unusual sounds, as though he were still at the yacht’s helm. I thought of how it must have been at night out there in the Atlantic after Wade had gone overboard, and I crossed over to the window to draw the curtains and shut out the moonlight.

As I pulled the curtains, I glanced down into the street below. A movement caught my eyes. There was somebody standing down there in the shadow of a doorway on the opposite side of the street, standing quite still, staring up at the window. I could see the pale circle of a face, nothing more. And then the figure moved, walking quickly away, keeping to the shadows of the buildings. It was a European girl and where an alley entered the street, she crossed a patch of moonlight.

It was Kavan’s wife.

She was in the shadows again now, walking quickly. I watched her until she turned at the end of the street, up towards the Boulevard Pasteur. I could have been mistaken, of course. But I knew I wasn’t — the suede jacket and the crumpled skirt, the way she walked, the shape of the face with its high, bony forehead as she had stared up at me from the shadows. What had she wanted? She hadn’t come into the hotel. She hadn’t asked to see him. The natural thing …

‘What is it? What are you staring at?’

I swung away from the window and saw that his eyes were watching me, and there was the same fearful-ness in them that I had seen in his wife’s eyes when she asked me who I was. ‘I’ve just seen your wife,’ I said. ‘She was out there, looking up at the hotel.’

‘My wife?’

‘The girl who was on the beach.’

He stared at me. ‘How do you know she is my wife?’ For the first time I noticed the trace of a foreign accent.

‘She told me,’ I said.

He started to get out of bed then, but I stopped him. ‘She’s gone now.’ And then I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were Kavan down there on the beach? Surely you must have guessed who I was?’

‘How should I? Besides — ‘ He hesitated and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It is not the moment to say who I am.’

‘Because of the police?’ I asked. ‘And then, when you saw your wife …’ I hesitated, wondering how best to put it. ‘She loves you,’ I said. ‘Surely you must know that? Somehow she got out of Czechoslovakia and came here to meet you, and when you saw her you turned your back on her. Surely you could have — ‘

His eyes suddenly blazed at me. ‘For Christ’s sake, stop it!’ he cried out. ‘Stop it! Do you hear? How do I know they don’t arrange for her to come here to Tangier? They may be watching her, trying to follow me. They are there in the background always.’ The words tumbled wildly out of his mouth, and then he steadied himself and pushed his hands up over his face and through his hair. ‘I have not seen Karen for more than four years.’ His voice was gentle, but with a note of bitterness in it. ‘And then suddenly we meet…’ He stared at me. ‘Do you think I like to have to turn my back on her?’ He shrugged his shoulders angrily. ‘I have had too much of this — during the German occupation and after, when the Russians walk in. You don’t understand. You were born British. You don’t understand what it is to be a middle-European — always to be escaping from something, always to go in fear — the knock on the door, the unopened envelope, the glance of a stranger in the street — to have people checking on you, spying on you, coming between you and your work, never to be trusted or to trust anybody. God! If only I’d been born British.’ There were tears of anger and frustration in his eyes and he lay back, exhausted.

‘Why did you leave England then?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t you become naturalised?’

‘Naturalised!’ He laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound, for there was a note of hysteria in it. ‘How can I become naturalised when they…’ He closed his mouth abruptly, his eyes suddenly watchful. ‘Don’t ask me any more questions,’ he said. ‘You want a doctor for your Mission. All right, you have one. I am here. But don’t ask me any questions. I don’t want any questions.’ His voice shook with the violence of his feeling.

I stood for a moment staring at him. I didn’t like it. I knew too little about the man. I’d been prepared for a failure. What else could I expect of a qualified doctor who was willing to come out to North Africa and bury himself in a village in the Atlas? But I hadn’t been prepared for this.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I won’t ask any more questions.’ And then to ease the tension between us I asked him if he’d like some food.

‘No. No, thank you. A little cognac. That’s all.’

I got some dry clothes from my suitcase, put them on and went down to the Cypriot cafe at the corner. When I returned I found he had been sick. His face was ghastly white and he was sweating and shivering. I poured him a little cognac, added some water and handed it to him. His hands were trembling uncontrollably as he took the tumbler from me. ‘Shall I get a doctor?’ I asked.