The lighthearted quest, p.11
The Lighthearted Quest, page 11
part #1 of Julia Probyn Series
For employer and employed they at once became. Mme La Besse asked if she could drive a car? The car proved to be a Chrysler, a make which Julia had in fact only driven on her dash to Glentoran a couple of weeks earlier; she had beguiled the long run from Renfrew to Argyll by driving much of the way herself—this entitled her, she felt, to undertaking to drive the La Besse machine, and she hardily agreed to do so. She for her part bargained for a four-day week, in order to have time to write her articles—she had already started one on Casablanca, and how money was made in Morocco. Mme La Besse did not appear to be much impressed by journalism; indeed she gave the impression of not being easily impressed at all—“Tiens! Les petites feuilles” was her only comment. But she agreed to engage Julia to work four days a week, for a very fairly handsome sum in francs, which as Lady Tracy had foreseen would enable the girl to live practically free at her Spanish pension; and she also made no fuss about Julia’s stipulation for an occasional week off if she wanted it.
The job was a curious affair. It comprised paying the bills (some of them months old), dealing with the Spanish servants, doing the shopping for the household, and buying the flowers—Mme La Besse had a passion for flowers, and liked to have her untidy little house full of them all the time. This was a thing Julia enjoyed; it involved constant trips down to the Gran Socco, the big open-air market, where vegetables, fruit and cheeses were to be bought, and where majestic Berber women, in those huge be-tasselled straw hats, sold flowers of every kind—roses, carnations, freesias, heaths and myrtles; most charming of all one of them, in particular, delighted in concocting bright formal Victorian posies, with garden flowers and wild flowers all mixed together—Julia loved these, and always had one in her room in the hotel, but Mme La Besse preferred grander displays. No accounts were kept that Julia could see; she was given money to go shopping, and brought back the change, but her employer waved aside her neat sheets of reckonings. Nor was there a great deal of correspondence, though now and again she had to type out a few pages of reports on “l’excavation”. It became clear to Julia that what Mme La Besse wanted was less a secretary than a mother’s help, to deal with the practical affairs of life, leaving her free for more congenial occupations. Geoffrey was right, though—she was great fun.
Before the first week was out Julia to her great satisfaction was called on to drive the old lady down to “l’excavation”; she had not yet been outside the city at all, and was delighted at the chance of seeing something of the countryside. The site lay in the International Zone—in which the city of Tangier is embedded like the stone in a peach—on the coast, down beyond the airport; Julia sent the Chrysler humming along a superb road, first through suburbs, then across open country through fields either ploughed, or blue with wild Spanish iris standing two feet high, and past streams along whose banks paper-white narcissus bloomed in huge milky clumps. When they turned out towards the ocean the splendid road degenerated, till it ended as no more than a yellow sandy track; cultivation ceased, and a fragrant healthy countryside, full of wild scillas, took its place. Set among the heaths and cistuses Julia presently saw an oblong of low stone walls, of a curious tone between deep cream and pale sand, sloping gently down towards the real sand of the shore, along which the green Atlantic breakers rose and poised, to tumble and fall in a thundering confusion of foam; the noise they made was splendid on that wild sweet-smelling shore, in the strong hot sunshine.
They parked the car near a small roughly-built shed, surrounded by a little courtyard full of the spouts and bases of amphorae, tiles, and archaeological bits and pieces of all sorts; in the shed itself, Mme La Besse explained, the more valuable objects were housed, padlocked. However they did not then enter it; the old enthusiast could not wait to show the newcomer the site itself. In fact it was charming, and laid out with the utmost ingenuity. At the upper end were three large underground cisterns, still holding water—two had vaulted cemented roofs, as the Romans built them, but the third was roofed with over-sailing courses of dry stone, unmortared; this, Mme La Besse stated, was the Phoenician style for such things. Julia asked how the water reached the cisterns, and was shown some sections of stone-cut drain-pipes through which it had been led, from springs a considerable distance away, up on the higher ground inland. In the next enclosure below the cisterns—each activity, in this ancient factory, had had a compartment to itself, on most modern lines—were shallow mortared tanks for treading the grapes to make wine; Julia had once been up the Douro to see the port vintage, and noticed with amusement that these Roman or Phoenician structures were exactly like the legares in which, today, barelegged Portuguese men in flowered cotton pants tread the grapes to make port, the only difference being that in Portugal in the twentieth century the raw wine is led off through pipes, whereas here a small open channel, beautifully cemented, had led it away to an adjoining tank several feet deep. “That must hold at least eight thousand gallons,” Julia said, comparing it in her mind to farm tanks installed by the Monros up at Glentoran.
“Nine thousand,” said Mme La Besse proudly—“Consett said at least nine thousand.”
Two Berber labourers in straw hats were busily engaged in shovelling sand out of the bottom of this receptacle and throwing it up over the side; Mme La Besse shouted greetings to them in Arabic, and they shouted back, happy and friendly. The sand kept on blowing in, Mme La Besse explained; that must have been bad for the Phoenician wine, make it salty, Julia observed, which made the old lady laugh and shake.
Next they inspected what Mme La Besse declared to be the huilerie, the oil-mill, where olives were crushed before their oil was pressed out; Julia was rather unconvinced by this, since there was little to be seen but a large block of stone surrounded by a shallow circular trench or gutter, mortared as usual. However the fish-pits, which they visited next, were extremely convincing. A range of deep tanks, each some ten feet long by six feet broad, and seven or eight deep, ran round three sides of another enclosure, all lined with beautifully fine close mortar; for fish, whether swimming alive, pickling in brine, or steeping in oil they looked just the thing, indeed it was hard to think of a purpose unconnected with fish to which such structures could be put. Julia—perfectly ignorant of Roman, let alone Phoenician remains—regarded everything she was shown with a fresh and slightly sceptical eye; she listened, also a little sceptically, to the old archaeologist’s eager attributions. The little temple in the middle of the whole lay-out, with its small elegant pillars, she was prepared to accept, and could even pay a happy tribute to a civilisation which insisted on the equivalent of a chapel built into the heart of its factories. But she felt less sure about three long enclosures lying towards the lower, seaward end of the rectangle of buildings, which Mme La Besse declared to have been warehouses for the finished products before they were shipped away—one for wine, one for oil, and one for the pickled fish.
“But how do you know that that is what they were for?” Julia asked in her usual slow tones, gazing at her employer from behind her immense dark sun-glasses.
“For what else should they be? And if you had seen the number of shards of broken amphorae that we cleared out of them, you would have thought the same! Oil and wine were certainly transported in amphorae; how they sent the fish we don’t know—possibly in rush baskets lined with the leaves of palmettes.”
“What are palmettes?” Julia asked.
“Oh, this plant from which the Moors make the crin vegetal with which they stuff their mattresses—this countryside is full of it, you will see them when we have lunch,” said Mme La Besse, rather irritably. She hustled Julia down to look at the baths at the lower end; these too were perfectly convincing. Julia had seen the like in England, when dragged by Geoffrey to observe Roman remains. Hot baths, cold baths, stone steps leading down into both; the tile-vaulted chambers of the hypocaust, where fires were kindled below the sudarium, the sweating-room, immediately above; neat herring-bone tiling floored most of these rooms, and here and there a fragment of gay frescoes, orange and white, still clung to the walls.
Julia surveyed all this with approval; if the place had really been a factory, these dispositions for the workers’ comfort were admirable. “Fine; pit-head baths,” she said—and then had to translate and explain to Mme La Besse about the English arrangements for coal-miners to wash before they went home from their work. But in spite of her lingering scepticism she was charmed by the idea of such a factory, functioning more than two thousand years ago. Standing there, fingering the curious pock-markings in the beautiful rough golden stone of the wall, for a little while she let her imagination run—an unusual thing with her, picturing those long-ago labourers toiling in the fish-pits or carrying laden amphorae down to the triremes or quinqueremes anchored at the mouth of the small river which ran out just below the site into a bay sheltered by a projecting headland, sweating under the strong sun, as she was sweating merely from walking about. Here, where fragrant scents from the healthy uplands filled the warm air, and the surf thundered on the sands below, there was no suggestion of dark Satanic mills; if one had to be a factory-hand, better to have been a Phoenician one, she thought. And vast earthenware jars full of flowery aromatic wine like that which she drank nightly—free of charge, since it was vinho de mesa—at the Espagnola was an amusing counterpart to the tractors and saloon cars which she had watched being decanted from the Vidago onto this very coast—amusing, and somehow nicer, as honest wine is nicer than any piece of machinery.
These meditations were only possible because the foreman who directed the labourers had come up to ask some directions of Mme La Besse, but they were soon interrupted; he went away, and the eager old lady led the way down to where most of the actual digging was taking place, in front of the seaward wall of the site. Here five or six more Berbers, in headgear which varied from ragged turbans to torn straw hats, were clearing away the soil to lay bare curious stone slabs, some of them grooved, and several small stone boxes or tanks sunk in the ground, with one sloping side, which reminded Julia of nothing so much as the fitted wash-tubs in the laundry at Glentoran; the men greeted Mme La Besse with gleeful pleasure, and she chatted to them, with a word for each—clearly she was a general favourite. The excavated soil, to Julia’s astonishment, was wheeled away in barrows to be riddled at some hundred yards’ distance before being tipped onto the foreshore—no hope therefore, as even her ignorance recognised, of being able to know with any exactitude where any particular object, revealed in the wire sieve, had come from. Had Geoffrey seen this extraordinary proceeding, she wondered?—however, she said nothing.
Mme La Besse was worried about those small stone tanks or boxes, and asked Julia if she had any idea what they could have been used for? Julia mentioned the laundry wash-tubs—“If you dug along behind them you might find a spout or something that led the water into them,” she said; she had already been shown parts of the underground system of stone channels through which water had been brought by gravity from the cisterns at its upper end down to every part of the site, and had admired its ingenuity. Mme La Besse was delighted with the laundry idea; she whipped a mason’s trowel out of her belt and began to dig herself, and called up a Berber to help. Julia looked on, wishing that she had a trowel or spade with which to dig too, while Mme La Besse, on her knees, continued to speculate aloud as to whether this could have been a laundry or wash-house.
“I know!” Julia exclaimed suddenly.
“What do you know?” asked the old lady, squatting back on her heels and wiping her perspiring face with an earthy hand.
“Won’t this have been the place where they gutted the fish? Right down here near the shore, you see, and keep the pickling chamber clean. London fishmongers always clean fish in sort of sinks, with running water—you can see them in the backs of the shops.”
Mme La Besse was even more delighted with this second suggestion; she stood up to pat Julia on the shoulder, and said that she was une fille très intelligente, then shouted to the foreman to come over and discuss this new idea. Presently she abandoned the foreman, and led Julia off again—“You must see all” she said, “and then we will have lunch.”
There was not much more to see. Out on the open space, as yet undug, between the lowest wall and the sea lay several large blocks of that pock-marked limestone, placed there till either their use or their original positions could be established; one or two had large phalluses carved in relief on the sides, definitely proving, Mme La Besse thought, that they were Phoenician in origin. Julia, her hair spectacular in the sun, and in her huge dark glasses looking like a peculiarly vacant film-star, said in her slow tones—
“Couldn’t they be Mithraic, and Roman?”
The old woman cocked her head sharply at the young one.
“I thought you were so ignorant!” she said.
“Oh, well, everyone knows about Mithras now, since that place in the City was being dug up,” said Julia blithely.
“Tiens! Yes, well, it is possible that these are Mithraic—but I think not.”
They lunched near the shed, sitting on the last fringe of the heathy slope where it fell away to the shore, and Mme La Besse showed Julia some low bushy dumps of palm-leaves which she said were the palmettes from which crin végétal was made. Julia was hungry, though the lunch was not very good; she made a mental note that if she was going to come to the site often she would organise the picnic food herself. However, there was a bottle of the good red Moroccan wine which helped down the rather dry sandwiches and the lump of hard Moroccan cheese.
“What impression does the site make on you?” Mme La Besse asked.
“Fascinating! And so much has been done; I suppose to begin with—well, what was there to see?”
“Nothing!—except for a few fallen pillars among the cistuses.”
“Extraordinary,” said Julia. “What fun you must have had.”
The old lady was pleased with these rather moderate tributes, and developed her theories while she masticated the withered sandwiches. The archaeological sites in England to which Geoffrey Consett had sometimes borne Julia in his little car had all been completely excavated, determined, and written up—she had not realised the part that speculation and intelligent interpretation has to play in archaeology. Now she did, and in her casual way she sympathised with her employer’s problems; she was really rather moved when the old lady said—
“You like it out here? You will come often? I see that you have intuition, good ideas; you could be a great help to me in the excavation. This notion of cleaning the fish outside the walls—it is formidable!”
Julia asked nothing better than to spend as much time as possible out in this delicious place, thunderously musical with surf along the shore, sweet with wild scents—she said as much, and Mme La Besse patted her hand.
But while they lunched something else held her attention. When Mme La Besse had left the site to eat the Berber labourers also knocked off work; they went out onto the dry white sand of the upper shore and there knelt down with their faces towards Gibraltar—which also happened to be towards Mecca, more or less—and recited their midday prayers, bowing their foreheads to the ground, before they started to eat. Julia remembered what Paddy Lynch had said about a Moslem’s faith, and how irreligious they considered Christians—well, there you were. If she were a Catholic she might have said the Angelus, and so might Mme La Besse. Was she a Catholic? Julia felt too lazy to ask—she drank another glass of wine and then, poking her head into the shade of a palmette plant, while her body relaxed in the sun, she fell into a doze.
Chapter 7
Julia waited rather impatiently during the next few days for the promised letter from Paddy Lynch, which was to report the results of his “snooping” about Colin; she was busy with her work, she wrote away at her Casablanca article, but she had quite sufficient time to wonder why he didn’t write, and to ponder uncomfortably over the episode up in the Kasbah. When at last Paddy’s letter did come it was profoundly unsatisfactory.
“No go,” he wrote. “I’m frightfully sorry—I did all I could. Johnny Bingham knows nothing, I’m sure of that—so it wouldn’t have been any good your using those eyes of yours on him! Tony Panoukian certainly does know something, I can see, but he is keeping utterly mum about it. I was very much surprised, really. Your cousin must be on some tremendously hush job, because Tony will usually tell me anything I want to know. They’ve got his account all right—I got that, quick like the fox, from a clerk before I tackled the high-ups.”
Julia thought Mr. Lynch’s letter over carefully, sitting in her room at the Espagnola. She was thoroughly intrigued by this whole series of dead ends—a dead end at the Bank of England, two dead ends in Casablanca, that closed door (than which no end could be deader) in the Kasbah. What could be going on? She had said up at Glentoran, she remembered a little ruefully, that detection would be a frolic—but it wasn’t really much of a frolic to be thwarted at every turn, and find out nothing, delicious as it was to be in Tangier in the sun among flowers, and much as she was enjoying her days out at “l’excavation”, searching for thresholds and floor-levels, digging herself with the trowel she had bought at Kent’s Emporium, and writing up reports for the old lady.
Time was marching on, and she was getting nowhere. She remembered that Lady Tracy had also expressed a fondness for detection—from her chair; and that afternoon she chartered a taxi by the hour (Spanish-speakers can do this in Tangier) and went up to the house on the cliff.
Lady Tracy was out on the roof—which was flat and festooned with lines of washing—sitting in a deckchair and screaming jests over the low parapet at the Moorish occupants of some rather hovel-like little houses down on the slopes below. The cliffs here were, so to speak, in two tiers: first an upper cliff, then a talus of scree overgrown with grass, now full of grazing goats and those small houses dotted about; then a second vertical fall to the blue water, crashing ceaselessly against the yellow line of rocks.
