14

It was Friday, July 28th, before they got back to Hammamet. They had visited the city of Medinine and the island of Djerba. They had roughed it in a small town with no hotel, sleeping in a room above a restaurant where they had eaten. Ingham, like Jensen, had shaved every other day. In Metouia, an ancient town near Gabes where they stopped for coffee one afternoon, Jensen found a boy of about fourteen whom he liked, and went off with him, after asking Ingham if he minded waiting a few minutes. Jensen was back after only ten minutes, smiling, carrying a woollen mat with a black and red pattern. Jensen said the boy had taken him to his house, in no room of which had there been any privacy. Jensen had made him accept five hundred millimes, and the boy had stolen the mat behind his mother’s back, in order to give Jensen something. The boy said his mother had woven it, but did not receive five hundred millimes from the shopkeeper to whom she sold her mats. ‘He’s a nice boy. I’m sure he’ll give the money to his mother,’ Jensen said. The story lingered in Jensen’s mind, pleasantly. What had the mother thought of Jensen’s coming home with her son, or did it happen a couple of times a day ? And what did it matter if it did?

When Ingham returned to his bungalow, the neat blue and white cleanliness seemed to have a personality of its own, to be on guard, and to hold something unhappy. Absurd, Ingham thought. He simply hadn’t seen anything comfortable for five solid days. But the distaste for the bungalow persisted. There were four or five letters, only two of which interested him: a contract by his agent for a Norwegian edition of The Game of ‘If’, and a letter from Reggie Muldaven, a friend in New York. Reggie was a free-lance journalist, married, with a small daughter, and he was working on a novel. He asked Ingham how long he was going to be in Tunisia, and what was he doing there since Castlewood’s suicide? How is Ina} I haven’t seen her in a month or so, and I only said hello in a restaurant that time … Reggie knew Ina pretty well, however, well enough to have rung her and talked with her. Ingham was sure Reggie was being diplomatic in saying nothing more about her. Ingham felt sure that people like Reggie would have heard about John’s relationship with Ina. People always wanted to know the reasons for a suicide, and kept asking questions until they found out.

Ingham unpacked, showered and shaved. He moved slowly, thinking of other things. He was to pick up Jensen at eight o’clock, and they were going to have dinner in the hotel dining-room. It was now six-thirty.

He remembered the letter he owed to Ina, and when he had dressed, he sat down and began it in longhand, not that he was in the mood, but because he did not want it hanging over his head any longer.