‘Who? How do you know?’ Morgan said. We were still in the plain, but the rain had stopped. You could see the hills better now, and they were a pale grimy red, the colour of the earth round about us. Behind them, I thought I could see floating shapes, covered with snow.
‘It wasn’t terribly difficult,’ Johnson said. ‘Oppenheim booked for the flight, and so did Pymm’s clever thug who speaks – did you spot? – Canadian French. The carpet-bugger at Essaouira who interrogated us about Kingsley’s. Our much-loved friend the café waiter at Marrakesh.’
‘His name is Chahid,’ said my mother. ‘There is a very old car.’
I wondered how she knew that the name of the third man was Chahid, and then was ashamed to have forgotten the sidecar ride to the souks, and the bruise. Morgan had remembered. His face was grim, but he didn’t say anything. He was peering where my mother’s needle was pointing.
My mother was right. Between the road and a wide pebbly river bed pouring with thick ochre water stood a scarlet Lancia I remembered from Asni, its bonnet up and two anxious figures leaning under it, wearing impeccable boiler suits over their cashmeres.
Morgan instinctively slowed. ‘Keep going,’ Johnson said briskly. And in the same tone of voice, ‘Oliver? Let us keep this conversation polite. I’m in the Land Rover behind you. Tell someone the Lancia’s stuck at the river by the Ait-Ourir bridge. Where is everybody?’
I recognised the walkie-talkie in his fist from the chase through the souks. There was a crackle. Then Oliver’s voice said, ‘Who’s driving?’ It sounded aggressive.
‘Morgan,’ Johnson said. ‘The two Helmann ladies are here. Let’s get on with it.’ We waited. My mother drew up yarn from her ball and it hopped up and tight-skated ostentatiously round the gear lever. Morgan swore.
‘Right,’ said the voice of Oliver. From aggressive, it had become merely grim. ‘The good news is that Oppenheim has landed at Ouarzazate, was met by a car, and is travelling north. Pymm’s chap also landed, hired a car and is following. They’ve passed the hotel at Tifoultout. So either they take the route to Taroudant when they come to it, or the rendezvous is on the road we are on. The junction’s only 16 miles out, and Rita’s left someone to watch it. Your drawings, I’m told, were spot on, and the Fax chap at Ouarzazate thinks you should take up portrait painting.’
‘And the bad news?’ Johnson said. The road had become distinctly steeper and instead of a plain, the horizon was bounded by caked red ridges sliced and moulded by wet, and patched with emerald barley. The lower slopes were candy coloured with flowers. Moisture hung in the air.
Oliver said, ‘The col is open, but the road is horrendous. Rita got over the pass fifteen minutes ago, but it needed chains. The radio vans are in position, and so are the check points for the rally, but none of the vintages is within two hours of the crest. Jay, the snows are coming down with the rain. They’ve had a collapse in one village already, and the road is smothered in water and mud. I don’t know if the old cars will get over, or you. I think you should leave it to me.’
Johnson said, ‘Where is the Sunbeam? And Kingsley?’
There was a torrid pause. Then Oliver said, ‘The Sunbeam is into the hairpins after Touama, going well, and high on brotherly love: he’s stopped three times to give help to buddies. So he’s slow but not all that slow: he’s made no effort to hang back and wait for Sir Robert. Kingsley is in a support jeep at the tail end of the rally, and being equally helpful and considerate. He’s passed the hotel at Ait-Ourir, and the Ourika and Imguer turn-offs, so the rendezvous isn’t there. His car has a dun hood, and painted with secours in yellow. If it’s stopped, you may have to pass it.’
‘OK. Warn me if you can. What’s it like south of the col?’
‘Better,’ said Oliver. ‘Oppenheim will be making reasonable time. If he’s turning off west to Taroudant, he’s nothing to worry about.’
‘And if he isn’t? If he’s coming north on this road, where’s the meeting?’ Johnson said.
And Oliver said, ‘I don’t bloody know, and I’m not sure if I can find out. If Kingsley keeps coming south, there’s only Taddert ahead, and the vertical bends to the col. And if it’s over the col, he may not even make it; the road may be swamped by that time. Jay, this is lethal.’
‘You amaze me,’ said Johnson; and cut Oliver off.
No one spoke as we climbed. About us now were vistas of red hills of varying sizes, some with walled and fortified villages made of hill coloured vermilion clay. They plastered the inclines in long, smooth rectangles, defining ridges and perpetrating sudden verticals of tower or mosque. It came to me that some of these buildings were kasbahs – crow’s nests, robber fortresses – with Ramon Navarro in them, and black satin sheets, and my mother was being whipped straight past them.
I saw she wasn’t watching her knitting, but her fingers zapped through her needles, and her sock continued to grow like a print-out. We drove alongside the dark netted green of a royal game forest from which, impetuously, something bolted as we approached. Morgan braked. It was a boar. I waited for Johnson to speak, but he didn’t. Soon, we came to the first of the infinite succession of loops by which the road to Ouarzazate climbs up to the snowline. The large behind of a navy Bugatti loomed ahead of us, and we began to pass beautiful cars.
On our way to look for the
Dolly,
Sullivan had treated me to a monologue about vintage cars, beginning with the first he had ever rebuilt and proceeding with a list of all he and his fellow officers had ever owned or aspired to. I had received further exposure at Asni. I concluded that vintage car ralliers were like Seb and Gerry, a mixture of macho competitive handymen and dedicated collectors with their own brand of drop-dead chic humour. In between driving up mountains, they navigated with buckets over their heads to their co-drivers’ orders. On the High Atlas before us were a dozen nutters and a few million pounds’ worth of vehicles, plus Sir Robert Kingsley on his way to a quiet business meeting with someone.
The metalled carriageway of the Tichka, engineered by the French, is less than two lanes in width, joined by a jagged fringe of potholed tarmac to a broken hard shoulder. From Marrakesh, the distance is seventy miles to the crest, of which the last twenty-mile stretch contains frequent blind and precipitous turns of 180 degrees, alternating in sequences of two or three clusters of S bends. No one had mentioned this to me when we set out.
To begin with, the climb seemed merely difficult because of the traffic. The bends were not unduly steep, and allowed Morgan to weave his way among the vans, the lorries, the cars in varying degrees of repair and the twice-daily CTM bus service, none of which had been deterred by the weather and all of which, as they passed up and down, gave passionate attention if not very much room to the labouring vintages. Once, we had to crawl behind a sad Ford HE 14/40 two-seater on the end of a tow-rope until safely flagged past, and once we met a girl with a herd of red plushy cows which took a long time to pass, allowing Morgan to exercise his libido as well as his Arabic. Then he had to shut up his window because Oliver’s voice spoke to us again. It sounded tentative.
‘JJ? Oppenheim’s passed the Taroudant junction. He’s coming north on P31, your road. Time to the col, about an hour and three-quarters. If he doesn’t divert, Oppenheim will get to the top about the same time as Sir Robert. There’s nothing there. A Berber hamlet. A lot of snow. A bunch of tourist stalls selling fossils and amethyst. They’re going to meet at Taddert, or south of the col.’
I looked at the map in Johnson’s hand. Taddert was five and a half thousand feet up, and fourteen miles short of the col on our side. And a lot of zigzags away. ‘In a tent?’ Johnson said.
‘I don’t see how,’ said Oliver, clearly in the grip of anxiety.
‘No. Neither do I. Keep trying,’ said Johnson, and lurched to one side, swearing, as Morgan avoided running over a bullock.
That proved to be the start of a livestock problem. The carriageways of the High Atlas are put to excellent use by hill-farming and amenable Berbers in robes and shorty green wellies who drive sheep, goats, cows, mules and donkeys along the water canals at the verge and occasionally straight over the road, in the process of descending from road-bend to road-bend as on a convenient ladder. We had two fairly abrupt halts, followed by a close encounter with a long vehicle coming round a bend like a lariat. After that, Johnson took to saying, ‘The camber on the next one is wrong.’ And once, ‘There’s a passing place just ahead, but the shoulder tends to be broken.’ I remembered that the film company were based at Ouarzazate, and he must have driven there on other visits. I thought Morgan looked a bit worn, and was thankful to see that the two of them had taken to talking. They weren’t joshing, but they were talking all right.
We passed, to its patent annoyance, a noisy Riley and then a rumbling Alvis whose camshaft drive met with the disapproval of both Morgan and Johnson. A sign, looming up on our right, said col tizi-n-tichka: ouvert, and added something about chains on our tyres. There was an argument about that, which I didn’t listen to. My mother apparently did. At the next decent passing place, she said ‘Stop!’
It was a nice spot, if we had wanted the scenery. Below the road, a slate-blue river had made its appearance, heavily populated by Berber women washing cress or scrubbing brilliant garments, undisturbed by a horizon full of roaring machinery. Dots on the slopes rising behind them were children with bundles of fuel and fodder. On the riverbank, the leafless grey branches of walnut trees flapped with cerise and green silks; and ragged patches of clothes were spread over carpets of tulips. Kettles steamed above small brush-wood fires and when Morgan switched off the engine, you could hear women’s chatter and laughter.
Far from mentioning chains, my mother merely wished to get down from the Rover. After the briefest bachelor hesitancy. Morgan and Johnson hoisted her out of the passenger seat. I didn’t help. I knew she had a bladder the size of a football, and whatever it was, it wasn’t what they were thinking. In the event, she merely heel-toddled straight down the hillside, carrying one of Morgan’s aluminium canteens, and climbed it again ten minutes later with a bundle under one arm and the canteen full of unhygienic mint tea. The women who pushed her uphill remained for a moment, giggling and nudging each other, and then went back, their robes full of Gauloises.
‘Doris?’ said Morgan. ‘You have a cassette on how to speak Berber?’
‘You live in London, you communicate,’ said my mother, pouring liquid into tin mugs from Morgan’s unshackled haversack . ‘Mint tea is better than whisky. Five bends up, there has been a bad avalanche: watch out for boulders. And hear this: them high buildings are kasbahs.’
She hadn’t missed them. I looked at the bundle she had laid carefully down and wondered if she had fixed herself harem pants and a rug. Then I realised that what she had brought was Berber clothing, half-dry and authentic. Morgan said, ‘Doris: if we get out of this, I’m going to build you a kasbah.’
‘In Ealing?’ said my mother.
‘In Ealing,’ he said, handing her his empty mug and seizing the wheel. He didn’t roar into the climb because there was a line of donkeys before us, all with filled double-panniers, and a bus approaching. The driver shouted something as he passed, and Morgan waved as he crawled. A loaded donkey travels at five miles an hour. We were still behind them when we got to the avalanche, before which was a short line of traffic, including the Bugatti, a Chrysler and what Morgan said was a Darl’ Mat Peugeot with smoke or steam coming from under its silver bonnet. They had stopped because the road was full of robed men tugging at boulders and sweeping up stones which might inconvenience little hooves. Above was the scar where the boulders had fallen, and beyond it an older gash containing the remains of two handsome villas, one with a tiled roof whose front edge drooped like an envelope over nothing.
Morgan, who had used the wait to go visiting, lifted himself back into the Land Rover with the gossip. ‘Happened last year, the old landslide. Seventy million dirhams’ worth of holiday house built by Saudis and battered out of the way by the mountain. They say we’ll have to watch for slides from now on; mud on the road and holes in the tarmac. The Ford’s terminally out: big end gone. The Frazer-Nash has had a chain failure but the Alvis is ok : shifted a nut from somewhere else to the camshaft drive.’
‘It was,’ Johnson said.
‘Yes, it was. The Sunbeam, you’ll be sorry to hear, is still in good nick and swallowing S bends. If I interpret that rightly, Tom and Jerry have got marching orders: they’ve no quarrel with me, they aren’t worried about Wendy or Doris, and they’re clearly not hanging about to nurse Kingsley or Oppenheim. Kingsley’s service jeep is still ahead, going well and handing out swigs of whisky and sparking plugs from a tinny like caramels. The Bentley’s changed a couple of wheels and that’s radiator hose trouble in the Peugeot. Also, someone in front went short of lock at one of the hairpins and needs to patch up their steering linkage. There’s a Berber market over the hill with spare parts. Well, bits of wire and metal and rubber. I reckon they’re going to have one or two clients. That’s my news. And that’s Oliver.’
The radio crackled. The procession in front of us started to move, the car wheels scrabbling in mounds of red mud. The Chrysler went into the lead, and Morgan passed the Bugatti and the Peugeot and sat behind it, slithering up round the bend past which the downcoming traffic had halted. The mud thinned beyond, and the road looped up and round the next turning. Far across the valley, a waterfall hung like a strip of grey satin. Oliver’s voice said, ‘Are you all right? There’s been a fall where you’re heading.’
‘We knew,’ Johnson said. ‘Doris had a tip from the Berbers. Who’s in the lead?’
‘The Sunbeam,’ said Oliver. ‘Nearly up to the radio van and within twenty minutes of the summit. Tail-end Charlie’s the Lancia: had to change its head gasket. I’m going to move up off the road: a Harley passing six times is getting obvious.’
Johnson whisked off his glasses. I didn’t know why, but it obviously made him feel better. He said, ‘You bloody fool: I told you—’