The Heat of Betrayal (6 page)

I looked around. Old Moroccan furnishings – all heavy wood. Once-luxuriant brushed velvet upholstery – now dust-ridden and showing serious signs of neglect. There was a loud 1920s railway-station clock hanging next to the reception area: a clock which counted off each passing second with an ominous click. And there was a half-starved cat on top of the reception counter, eyeing us warily: intruders, outsiders, here to disturb the soporific order of things.

As we approached the counter where the old man was asleep, Paul took the initiative, whispering ‘
Monsieur
', then raising his voice several decibels with each additional rendition of ‘
Monsieur
'. When this proved pointless I tapped the hotel bell near the open guest register. Its loud clang jolted him back to life, the shock on his face coupled with bemusement, as if he didn't know where he was. As he tried to adjust his gaze Paul said:

‘Sorry to have woken you so abruptly. But we did try . . .'

‘You have a reservation?'

‘Yes.'

‘Name?'

Paul gave him this information. The man stood up and, using the index finger on each hand, spun the register around towards him. He peered at today's page, then rifled back through several more, shaking his head, muttering to himself.

‘You have no reservation,' he finally said.

‘But I made one,' Paul said.

‘You received confirmation from us?'

‘Of course. I made it on the Internet.'

‘You have a copy of the confirmation?'

Paul looked sheepish. ‘Forgot to print it,' he whispered to me.

‘Surely if you went online,' I said, ‘you'd find it.'

‘I think I deleted it.'

I stopped myself from saying: ‘Not again.' Paul was always clearing out old mail and frequently removed essential correspondences.

‘But you still have rooms?' I asked the guy behind the desk.

‘Yes and no.'

He now picked up an ancient house phone – of the sort that seemed to belong in some movie set during the German occupation – and started speaking Arabic in a loud, fractious voice. This was something I was beginning to notice: how Arabic was often a language declaimed in a stentorian manner, making it seem aggressive, swaggering, bordering on the hostile. It reminded me that I should really resuscitate my still-reasonable, if rusty, French while here; something I'd been promising myself to do ever since leaving Montreal behind.

The desk clerk finished his conversation. Turning back to us he said:

‘My colleague, he gets the owner now.'

We had to wait ten minutes for the arrival of the man in charge. His name was Monsieur Picard. He was French, in his mid-fifties, short, fit, dressed in a crisp white shirt and tan trousers, formal, chilly; his face reflecting, I sensed, a lifetime of enforced diffidence and the dodging of emotion.

‘There seems to be a problem?' he asked, his tone borderline supercilious.

‘We booked a room, but you don't seem to have a record of it,' Paul said.

‘Do you have the confirmation?' Monsieur Picard asked.

Paul shook his head.

‘Nor do we. So a reservation mustn't have been made.'

‘But I made the reservation . . .' Paul said.

‘Clearly not.'

‘Well, you do have rooms, yes?' I asked.

‘Has not Ahmed here told you that we have just one room free?'

‘And how much does that cost?'

‘It is a room with a balcony and a sea view. And you will need it for how long?'

‘A month,' Paul said. ‘That's what we booked it for.'

Monsieur Picard pursed his lips, then turned to Ahmed. He directed him in French to scan the ledger. Ahmed thumbed through its many pages, glancing down, clucking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, seeing if they could house us for all that time. I began to wonder: did Paul actually make the reservation, or was this one of his many ‘little oversights' (as he called them) that seemed to decorate our lives? Now I was starting to feel angry with myself for not checking up on the reservation before departure. Another part of me was castigating myself for questioning him; that given the sliminess of the hotel owner and the sleepwalking style of his desk clerk, who's to say they didn't lose the reservation or were playing games to get a better price from us?

This latter scenario began to seem more plausible after the next exchange. Ahmed turned to the owner, nodding his head, saying something that sounded positive. The owner now spoke to us.

‘I have good news. We do have that room available for the entire period you desire. The other good news is that it is the best room in the house – a mini-suite with a balcony that faces the Atlantic. The price is seven hundred dirhams per night.'

Paul's face fell. Immediately the adding machine in my brain was whirring away: 700 dirhams was about $80, double the price Paul told me he had negotiated.

‘But the room I booked cost three-fifty,' Paul said.

‘You have no record of this offer, do you?' Monsieur Picard said. ‘As we too have no record of this reservation and are trying to accommodate you . . .'

‘I booked a room for a month at three hundred and fifty dirhams,' Paul said, angry, stressed.

‘
Monsieur
, if there is no proof, all we have is words. And words—'

‘What are you, a fucking philosopher?' Paul hissed.

I put a stabilising hand on my husband's left forearm.

‘He didn't mean that,' I told Monsieur Picard. ‘We are both exhausted and—'

‘I did fucking mean that. This guy is playing with us.'

Monsieur Picard smiled thinly.

‘You act as if you are doing me a service by staying here. By all means find another hotel – and one of this quality and cleanliness that can offer you a suite of this size for a month. The door is there.
Bonne chance
.'

He turned and started heading up the stairs.

‘Could we see the suite, please?' I shouted after him.

‘As you wish.'

I started following him upstairs. Paul lingered by the reception desk, fuming, sullen.

‘You coming up?' I asked.

‘Looks like you're the one in charge now.'

‘Fine.'

I continued up the stairs. As we reached the first landing Monsieur Picard turned to me and said:

‘Your husband does not seem to be a happy man.'

‘And what business is that of yours?' I asked.

The sharpness of my tone startled him.

‘I meant no offence,' he said.

‘Yes, you did.'

The upstairs corridors were narrow, but reasonably well painted, with ceramic blue tiles surrounding the door frames. We walked up a set of stairs barely wide enough to accommodate a modest-sized person.

‘Splendid isolation,' Picard said as we reached a wooden door carved with lattices. He opened it.

‘
Après vous, madame
.'

I walked inside. Picard turned on a light on a side table. My first thought was:
Oh God, this is small
. We were in a narrow sitting area with carved wooden tables, a heavily brocaded red sofa and a small armchair. The entire area couldn't have been more than around ten square feet. Tiny slits of light from the blue wooden shutters caught the dust in the air. Sensing my disappointment, Picard said:

‘It gets better.'

He opened a connecting door and we were now in a high-vaulted room, augmented by wooden beams, the centrepiece of which was a king-sized bed with huge round cushions propping up the carved wooden headboard, upholstered in faded red velvet. Everything here was heavy dark wood and maroon: the bedspread, the large desk with a matching carved chair, the large chest of drawers, the sultan-like armchair with a matching footrest. Stone walls. The bathroom was acceptable and clean, with a shower stall enhanced by an intricate painted design. I turned on the knobs and discovered there was reasonable water pressure. When I returned to the bedroom area I was taken aback. Picard had opened all the shutters, allowing light to flood in. This darkened enclave was suddenly awash with crystalline sun. I followed onto the balcony; out into a day that was still white hot, incandescent.

The balcony itself wasn't substantial, perhaps ten feet long by three feet wide, but its prospect was ravishing. Turn right and you peered directly over the walled fortress that was Essaouira. The absolute wild originality of the place – its medieval bunkers, its spindly laneways, its visual and human density – was laid out in front of me with a near-cartographic clarity from this haughty outlook.

Then, when you turned left, the entire spread of the Atlantic enveloped the eye.

Is there anything more balming than the sight of water? Especially this body of water, linking us to home?

There were two folded deck chairs on the balcony and a small table. I quickly envisaged Paul here, his sketchbooks and pencils and charcoals spread out in front of him, engaged with the sky, the sea, the jagged rooftops, the strange scenic concoction laid out directly beneath us. I would be in the next chair, hunched over a French grammar book, fresh from a language lesson I'd had that morning, working my way through the complexities of the subjunctive case.

‘Not bad, is it?' Picard said, his voice more diplomatic since I'd tackled him a few minutes earlier.

‘It will do.'

I stepped back inside. Never negotiate a price when facing a peerless view. Picard joined me.

‘I saw the email that my husband received from you,' I said.

‘He never received anything directly from me.'

‘From your reservations person then.'

‘Madame, we have no record—'

‘But I saw it. I know that you agreed a price of three hundred and fifty dirhams for a room with a balcony and a sea view.'

‘It was not this suite. And as this suite is the only room we have left—'

‘Be smart here.'

‘You think I am stupid?' he asked, the tone shifting back into superciliousness.

‘I'm beginning to think that I should contact the person running my accounting firm back in the States and get her to find the email and send it over. Then I can find the local tourism authority and report you for price gouging.'

‘Now I must ask you to leave.'

‘A pity. Not a bad room – and you could have had us here for a month. But your call, sir.'

With that I turned and headed for the door. When I was halfway out he said:

‘I can accept six hundred per day.'

Without looking back at him I said: ‘Four hundred.'

‘Five fifty.'

‘Five hundred – breakfast and laundry included.'

‘You expect us to wash your clothes every day?'

‘Twice a week. We have little in the way of clothes.'

Silence. His thumb was rubbing up against his forefinger, always a surefire sign of anxiety.

‘And you will be here for the entire month?' he asked.

‘I can show you our return tickets.'

‘For this price I will need payment in full in advance.'

Now it was my turn to feel as if the tables had turned a bit. But looking around the suite, the hard radiant blue of that North African sky clarifying everything, I decided that a decision was in order. Throw in breakfast and laundry and the reduction of 200 dirhams per night, and I had saved us $1,000 overall. I also sensed that Picard would be relatively civilised from this moment on.

‘All right, sir,' I said. ‘You have a deal . . . but I want written confirmation of our agreed price before I hand over my credit card.'

A small, tight pursing of his lips.

‘
Très bien, madame
.'

‘By the way, you wouldn't know anybody who might want to give me a daily French lesson? I've decided I'd like to improve my fluency in your language.'

‘I'm certain I can find someone.'

We filed back downstairs. Picard went behind the desk. On a piece of hotel stationary he scribbled the length of our stay and the 500-dirhams-per-night rate. Signing it he handed it to me. I turned over my Visa card, and watched him process the agreed payment. Business done, we shook hands. Then I found Paul, sitting at a table near the hotel entrance, sipping mint tea, staring out at the alley beyond the picture window.

‘Can you please have our bags sent upstairs?' I asked Picard.

‘
Très bien, madame
.'

He signalled to the man at the front desk to take up our luggage.

Paul was now on his feet, incredulous.

‘Don't tell me we're staying,' he said.

‘Come see the suite.'

Then I turned and headed back upstairs. After a moment Paul was right behind me. We reached the next floor, then walked down the narrow corridor and up the final set of tiny stairs. When we reached the suite I walked straight through the two rooms and out onto the balcony. Standing outside, the sun full frontal on my face, the blue contours of the rooftops mirroring the bleached azure of the sky, the choppy waters of the Atlantic luminous with reflected light, I wanted to marvel at this exceptional vista. Marvel that I was here on the eastern lip of North Africa, high above a medieval enclave, about to spend a full month immersed in such an alien, but (I could tell already) strangely compelling corner of this planet. What a privilege to escape the humdrum and be here. I owed all this to the man in the other room; a man with whom I so wanted things to go right.

I felt Paul's hands on my shoulders.

‘This view is wondrous,' he whispered.

‘And the suite?'

‘Couldn't be better.'

‘So you're staying?'

He spun me around and kissed me deeply. Feeling his body so close to mine, his hands sliding up my T-shirt and caressing my back, his penis thickening against my thigh, I had a strong charge of desire; of wanting to obliterate the fatigue, the anger, the doubt, through the wonder of losing myself in him.