Memoirs of a Private Man (30 page)

Jean opened the map. There was Rabat, but that was on the coast and at least a hundred miles away.

We drove on. Our road was not leading towards the city, but we got slowly nearer. As we approached the entire city faded away.

Then ahead of us we saw the roadblock. We would have welcomed the thought that this too was a mirage. But no such luck. A tree trunk stretched across the road, supported at each end by a heap of sandbags. There were six armed men guarding it. I was not sufficiently versed in such things as to know whether the guns they carried were Kalashnikov AK47s, but they looked newer and in better order than the men who held them.

We stopped at the barrier. One of the men, who wore a sort of armband of office, strolled across and peered in at the lowered window.A stream of Berber being listened to without comprehension, he switched to a stream of guttural French. Never before had I regretted my total lack of ability to learn other languages. What the hell use would my mathematical talents ever be to me except to add up bridge scores or understand tax tables? During the war in spare hours I had relentlessly taught myself to read French. But speak it? The requisite words tumbled together in my brain but refused to come out.

At length I mentioned Fez. My wife and I wished only to drive to Fez. We were on holiday. We were driving to Fez.

Another flood of French. I shrugged helplessly and repeated what I had already said. Then another man strolled across. He was heavier, older, wore a sort of khaki tunic which had probably belonged to someone else. He had a look at Jean. He appraised her carefully. She smiled at him. He smiled back.

‘
Américaine?
' he asked.

‘Non,' I replied. ‘
Anglais.
'

He tried again.

‘
Allemand?
'

‘
Non
,' I said. ‘
Anglais.
'

‘
Ah!
' he exclaimed, as if I had never before mentioned the word. ‘
Anglais! Entendu.
'

He conferred with the younger man. A couple more of the other men came up. The younger man indicated that we must get out of the car. Reluctantly we did so, and they looked at Jean's legs as they were briefly exposed. They searched the car, but it was perfunctory. Then they opened the two bags, leafed through a few things, drifted off and allowed us to close them. The older man grinned again through his beard, called an order, and two men went to lift the barrier just far enough to allow the passage of the car.

‘
Avancez!
'

We beamed gratefully and got back into the car. I looked at Jean to see she was all right, then pressed the starter button. Nothing. I tried again. The engine turned over once reluctantly like an old man turning over in bed. I tried a third time. Nothing. The Berbers were watching us with considerable interest.

I lowered the window again. ‘
La batterie! C'est fini! Cassé! Vide!
'

The bearded man blinked and passed the message on to his friends. They all began to laugh. Even the two holding the barrier laughed. They hurled advice at us; at least I hope it was advice.

The leader put his head in the window, bringing with it the strong smell of goat.

‘
Kaput?
'

‘ Yes!
Oui! Ja! C'est morte
.'

He gabbled something that I did not understand, but if I read his eloquent gestures aright he was suggesting I might like a push.

We would very much like a push.

Three men with rifles dangling came to the back of the car. I put the car in second gear. We lurched forward in a great spasm of forward propulsion, the engine fired, and we were off. The soldiers cheered – or jeered – it was impossible to say which, but as the little Ford gathered momentum a couple of soldiers discharged their rifles. But it was only a salute, into the desert air.

It took an extra day to reach Fez. Then we traversed the Moyen Atlas Mountains and stopped for the night at a little town called Beni Mellal which was even more ‘undeveloped' than Fez, and it lacked Fez's wonderful interest and charm. After dark the streets were feebly lit and almost empty. Tall men in long flowing black djellabas moved here and there, casting shadows twice their length, and yellow dogs crawled in the gutters looking for scraps. A ghostly little town, out of another world.

Jean was tired after the heat of the day and after supper went to bed. I said I would look around a bit, but in the end, oppressed by the dark, was content to drift into the bar.

A man in a shiny brown suit, a sallow-skinned Latin with sleek black hair, smiled at me and spoke in a flood of French. I succeeded in conveying to him that I did not understand.

‘
Anglais?
' he said. ‘
Eh bien. Je ne parle pas l'anglais. Mais regardez! Je suis Anglais aussi
.'

He fumbled in an inner pocket and took out a passport. Its stiff blue case was unmistakable. I hardly needed to see the gold lettering or read the words ‘Her Britannic Majesty'. He opened it and showed me the photograph of himself. His name was Carlo Vianelli and he had been born in Malta, a British citizen. Even so, though of course he spoke Italian and French, he knew virtually no English. He was what in those days was known as a commercial traveller – later a rep – and covered the whole of Morocco selling and taking orders for one single commodity.

‘
Le soutien-gorge
,' he explained, and then translated. ‘The brassiere.'

Later I was to observe these items of feminine underwear hanging in rich profusion in every other market stall, and in a startling array of materials and sizes. However out of favour the brassiere might be in France, in Morocco M. Vianelli was on to a good thing.

The car was now limping along. Every time I switched off the engine I had to leave the car on a slope so that momentum would start the engine. In the villages it was not quite so difficult because there were always a half-dozen boys somewhere around who with shouts of delight would give us a shove.

In this condition we reached Marrakech, and, after a day there during which the battery was put on charge, we essayed the enormous massif of the Atlas Mountains. It was soon clear that the battery was in terminal decline. The direction indicators now failed, and it would clearly be fatal if we were sometime to be overtaken by the dark. It was a great relief when, after eight hours' driving, we reached Agadir.

Agadir is not at all like the other Moroccan towns, being a Europeanized seaside resort built around one of the finest beaches in the world. When we first saw it, it was all freshly rebuilt or still rebuilding after the momentous earthquake of 1960, when over 12,000 people died, and within a few seconds the entire town could as well have been struck by an atomic bomb.

Rooted there for three days while a new battery was at last procured, we had ample time to observe the scars and to hear the stories of people who had undergone the nightmare of the earthquake yet somehow survived.

It was a very suitable subject for a novel, and I decided that when the novel I was then writing was finished, I would write this.

When that time came, however, I was put off by a disinclination to write a novel about a number of disparate people, whose separate stories come together only because of how they are affected by the earthquake – their lives terminated or their problems otherwise resolved. Thornton Wilder in his
Bridge of San Luis Rey
had used this form to great effect. But I tend to write the sort of novels I like to read, and such composite stories have never greatly appealed to me. So I shelved it, and it was only some years later that I finally used the idea. Of course I went back to Agadir twice more then, and
Tremor
was published in 1995.

Some years before this I had been with Jean to Saas Fee with our children, and after a jolly week there we left them to their skiing and flew to Beirut. I can't remember for certain, but I think my idea was to combine winter and summer in one holiday.

But soon after reaching the Lebanon I went down with a particularly nasty flu bug and spent a couple of days in bed. (Unusual for me on a holiday.) After dinner on the second night Jean came upstairs, eyes glinting.

‘ I've met some very nice people downstairs – three of them – and they've asked me out for a drink. D'you mind if I go?'

‘Are they English?'

‘ One is. But they're all very respectable.'

(Herewith a typical example of my iron discipline. Can't deprive my loved ones of their simple pleasures. What had I to offer her, stuffed shakily in bed?)

‘ Have a care. Don't forget we're in the Middle East.'

‘ I will.'

Later I was to learn that they went out in two cars on the inland road towards the mountains and stopped at a little hotel, where they had more drinks and agreeable conversation. Then the first couple left to go home, and after a suitable interval the other man said he would drive Jean back to Beirut.

On the way back he stopped in a lay-by and became amorous. Having no success, he suggested that they might both get out and ‘ lie down' among the palm trees.

‘ I'm married,' she said.

‘He would never know.'

‘I would.'

After a few more words, he attacked her. She pushed him away, and he knocked her glasses off and hit her in the face. After a short but bitter struggle he found her as strong as he was, so he pushed her out of the car and drove off. She was able to locate her glasses in the dark and was faced with a seven-mile walk home.

She tried to flag down the occasional car, and at the third attempt was terribly lucky in finding two French people who drove her back to the hotel.

I did not hear the full account of what had happened until about a month later, but the long scratch down her forearm could not be minimized, nor the bruise on her cheek, though powder hid most of this. And the following morning she went out to get the side-piece of her glasses straightened.

When she came back, she said: ‘Races are on this afternoon.'

‘What races?'

‘The races you said you would like to go to.' She looked at me. ‘You wouldn't … ?'

‘Not wouldn't. Couldn't.'

‘D'you think I could go?'

‘It's mainly a male pastime in this part of the world. D'you feel up to it?'

‘Oh, yes. And it would be daylight. Pretty safe.'

When she returned, she was looking pleased. ‘I won £21!'

‘Were there many women there?'

‘No, I think I was the only one on her own. But everyone was very courteous.'

She paused a moment. ‘A good-looking young sheikh spoke to me. He invited me to go round tomorrow morning to see his stable of Arab horses. I refused.'

‘Oh? Why?'

‘I said my husband wouldn't like it.'

‘You surprise me.'

Including the novel published last year,
Bella Poldark
, I have written, I think, forty-six books – forty-three of them novels, one book of short stories,
The Japanese Girl
; the others were
Poldark
'
s Cornwall
and
The Spanish Armadas
, an illustrated history of the Anglo-Spanish war of the sixteenth century. Of the forty-three novels, only sixteen have been historical, the twelve
Poldark
novels, and
Cordelia, The Forgotten Story, The Grove of Eagles
and
The Ugly Sister
. Yet it is for the
Poldarks
that I have become best known.

There are historians of repute – and of course critics – who, while just admitting to the validity of the modern novel (which must be ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity', or, at least, experience so recalled), consider the historical novel, in anyone's hands, a spurious art form per se, because it imposes the writer's usually ignorant, possibly warped, probably over-romantic, over-coloured view upon a past time, that it presents history in a – to them – unconfirmed or unhistorical way. But a lot of this is true of any novel, either modern or historical. Any writer, any good writer, takes a set of events and imposes his own view on them. If there is no personal view there is no art. As Cézanne said of his paintings: ‘I have not tried to reproduce nature, I have represented it.' And that is what any good writer does. And if he is good enough he creates a world of his own which the reader comes to inhabit and finds it comparable with life rather than identical with it.

And if one is to downgrade the historical novel, what is one to make of such trivia as
War and Peace, Vanity Fair
and
Wuthering Heights
, all historical novels in their time?

Historical novels as such divide easily into three classes. First, there are those which use actual historical personages as the chief characters of the books, such as Robert Graves'
I, Claudius
, and Helen Waddell's
Peter Abelard
. Second, there are those in which historical personages are substantial figures in the story but have as their main characters fictitious persons – very often, as it were, standing beside the historical characters. Such are Rose Macaulay's
They Were Defeated
and my own
The Grove of Eagles
. Third, there are those which use entirely, or almost entirely, fictitious characters set in a recreated historical time. Such are Stevenson's
The Black Arrow
, or H. F. M. Prescott's
The Man on a Donkey
, or the
Poldarks
.

There has been a tendency in critical circles over the last halfcentury to rate these categories in descending importance. The novel featuring solely historical characters is rated higher than the novels in which historical characters play only a part; and the novel in which historical characters play a part is rated higher than those in which all the characters are fictional.

This is pretentious nonsense. Every type and quality of historical novel from fine to awful has been produced in all three categories. In any case you only have to regard the first three novels mentioned above and consider in what category they belong.