Читать книгу Eight Months on Ghazzah Street - Hilary Mantel - Страница 14

Safar

1

The man on the plane – Fairfax’s colleague – had been quite wrong. There was a map of Jeddah. Andrew brought it home. ‘Now I can begin to make sense of it,’ Frances said.

She spread out the map on the dining-room table. Five minutes later she looked up, disappointed. ‘It’s useless. It’s too old. The shape of the coastline is different now. This road appears to end in the sea. And look where they’ve put Jeddah Shops. They’re five blocks out.’ She traced the length of Medina Road. ‘How old would you say these flats are?’

‘Five years.’

‘On this map we’re a vacant lot.’

‘Sorry,’ Andrew said. ‘Only trying to help. Thought bad maps were better than no maps.’

‘That’s not so.’ She picked up her pen and wrote on the map ‘CARTOGRAPHY BY KAFKA’. ‘We don’t exist,’ she said.

Pollard called her on the new telephone. ‘Daphne Parsons will come for you with a driver on Tuesday morning,’ he said, ‘and take you to the souk.’

‘Oh, will she?’

‘Ten o’clock.’

‘Well…thank you for arranging that for me.’ Though I could hardly claim, she thought, that I was doing something else. Everyone knows what my life is like; I’m at their disposal.

‘That’s okay,’ Pollard said. ‘Any time. Tumble-drier all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Happy with it?’

‘Yes.’

There was a pause. He said, ‘Is there anything else you want?’

‘Yes, let me see…how about some flock wallpaper for the bathroom? And a half-tester bed?’

‘Joking, are you?’ Pollard said. She got rid of him. Only later she realized, with a kind of sick shame that she knew was unwarranted, that he might have been making her a sexual proposition.