The Matrix (10 page)

Speaking of those things, he could be wickedly funny. He was an old man who had long known his own value and, for that matter, the precise value of everyone he had ever met. Not in monetary terms, but in respect of what they represented, or who or what they knew, or how well read they were.

I think that, on the whole, he despised me, but put up with me for Duncan’s sake. My stilted academic learning was worth nothing to him, and my knowledge of the occult was, I gradually discovered, but a tiny fragment of his own. He showed not the slightest interest in me or my experiences. I hardly blame him for that. He was, after all, more than a mere man of the world. Without leaving his little house, he had met all the best people, uncovered all the most coveted secrets.

In the evenings, there were small gatherings attended by members of Villiers’s set, who numbered a couple of dozen at most. Three or four would come each evening. None were of my age, or even close to it, and several were so advanced in years as to seem like relics of another civilization. They had rotten teeth and sagging cheeks, set off by that aloof charm the very rich retain when all else is gone. They spoke of friends in Paris or Nice, of relatives in New York, of salons in Rome.

They were all Americans or Europeans, and their conversation was conducted in a mixture of English and French, interspersed with snatches of Moroccan Arabic. There were drinks in tall glasses on the tables beside the banquettes on which they sat, and bundles of hashish cigarettes. I saw other drugs taken quite openly, swallowed or sniffed with the casualness of habituation. I had never taken drugs before. When I told Duncan this, he only smiled and offered me whatever I wanted. I began to smoke hashish and, as time passed, to experiment with the various pills and powders that people handed me.

For the most part, once the introductions had been dispensed with, Roger’s friends ignored me. I did not belong to their world. I was a brazen intruder, untried, uncouth, with nothing of interest to offer them. Duncan, though on the whole their junior, was at ease among them, and was, indeed, treated with a large measure of respect, though I could not tell on what this might be based.

My days were spent, as in Rabat, studying spoken Arabic with a young student, a timid young man with sleek hair and brown eyes named Mohammed. He was studying law at the Université Mohammed V, and knew less English than I did French. Our conversations were severely limited. I tried to discover what he knew about my host, but he was either well enough paid or sufficiently frightened to say nothing.

While I struggled with my Arabic, or the latest text that had been set for me to read, Duncan was busy visiting friends in town or at one of the small villages along the coast. He never took me with him, though he did try to make up for his absences with extra time spent reading together, or just sitting in a local café, talking about his family or mine. After a couple of weeks like this, I began to grow frustrated and angry with him.

‘What was the point of bringing me to Morocco?’ I asked one day when we were alone in the house together. ‘I don’t do anything here that I couldn’t do just as easily in Edinburgh. It’s stupid, it’s just a waste of time.’

‘Don’t call it that,’ he said. ‘I never waste time, least of all my own.’

‘It isn’t your time I’m talking about. You do what you want, see whom you want to see. All I do is sit here and read, or practise verbs with Mohammed.’

‘I told you when we started: you are here to observe and to listen.’

‘Observe what?’ I asked. ‘Listen to what? Old men grunting at one another? Old women sniffing cocaine?’

‘If I told you in advance, you would see and hear nothing. You must use your own eyes and ears.’

‘On what? All I ever meet are the old people who come here every night. They don’t even speak to me. They couldn’t care less about me.’

He smiled and shook his head.

‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘they care about you very much. And don’t you think they are worth observing, worth listening to?’

‘When we came here, you said you spent your summers with holy men, men with access to ancient wisdom. I didn’t expect to waste my time with a bunch of dried-up old socialites reminiscing about Barbara Hutton and her parties.’

His face suddenly grew serious.

‘Take care what you say,’ he warned me. ‘Take great care. And never say such a thing in front of any of them. Since you are new to such matters, you can be forgiven. But watch and listen with great attention. Some of them
are
holy people, even if they do not seem it. They have wisdom you can only dream of. Not all of them, to be sure – but it is for you to see who has mastery, and who has not.’

I said nothing more after that, but I started to watch Villiers and his guests more closely. The more I observed, the more I grew aware of gradations of difference between them. Some seemed to be peripheral to whatever was really going on, others to be part of an inner circle whose secrets were privy only to one another. Before long, I noticed that the centre of this circle was not, as I might at first have thought, Villiers himself, but a Frenchman, introduced to me as the Comte d’Hervilly. I now began to watch the count more closely than the others, to listen when he was talking. Generally, he spoke in French, distinctly enough to allow me to grasp part of what he said.

He was a man in his late sixties, yet by no means weakened with age. Well dressed and elegant almost to the point of affectation, he nevertheless seemed unaware or uncaring of his own physical refinement. I never saw him wear the same suit of clothes twice, yet the changes he made in cut or colour were always subtle. He would wear a flower in his buttonhole, a white or a red rose, and it would stay fresh from the beginning to the end of a long, sultry evening.

One evening, on the point of making his departure, he came across to me and asked me to join him for lunch on the following day.

‘You have been much neglected,’ he said. ‘It is time we remedied that. Come to me at one o’clock. Duncan will tell you where to find my house. But be sure to come alone.’

Later that night, I heard what I took to be feet just outside my room. Thinking it might be Duncan, I went to the door and opened it. There was no one on the landing, but I thought I heard someone creeping away towards the stairs. Duncan had mentioned that there were burglars working in the medina, that residents were taking greater care than usual. I slipped out after the intruder.

When I reached the turn of the corridor, I was able to see down through a latticed window straight onto the courtyard, round which the house was built. The moon was almost directly overhead, its light slick on the little fishpond in the centre of the
sahn.
I looked down, knowing this to be the only way out of the house. After the darkness in my room, the light was almost dazzling. It fell crookedly across a floor of wet tiles, blue and white rectangles laid in an intricate geometric pattern that seemed to move. As I watched, I saw a figure emerge from the house door. It was dressed in a dark-coloured jellaba, black or dark brown, with the wide hood drawn up over its head.

I opened my mouth to shout, to challenge the figure below, but my throat was dry, and words would not come. For some reason, I felt terribly afraid. I continued standing there, my lips open, my tongue wooden, watching as the hooded figure stopped, then turned and looked upwards in my direction. If it had a face, it was locked in deep shadow. I ducked aside, hiding behind the wall for several heartbeats. When I summoned the courage to look again, the courtyard was empty. A fish moved in the pool and grew still. The wet tiles lay cold in the moonlight. There was no sign that feet had passed across them moments earlier.

I said nothing the next morning about the supposed intruder, and no one said a word over breakfast about a burglary. I knew next to nothing about Villiers and his household: furtive as the hooded man’s behaviour had seemed, he may very well have been involved in some business that Villiers would prefer to have kept quiet.

After my morning lesson with Mohammed, I headed on foot for the exclusive Marshan quarter on its hill overlooking the sea. D’Hervilly’s villa was set behind tall white walls, heavy with scented jasmine. A green gate opened to reveal a stepped courtyard, pools and trees. I was led through cool shuttered rooms to a roof terrace covered in potted flowers and shrubs. D’Hervilly was seated at a table laid for lunch. Glass and silver caught the high Mediterranean light. My host was dressed in white, and his silver hair seemed part of the setting. Beyond him, I could see the city tumbling chaotically to the harbour, and the blue sea behind, flecked with gold and studded with red- and white-sailed boats.

‘Sit down, Mr Macleod. Please make yourself at home. I am glad to have this opportunity to talk with you alone. Take off that wretched hat, the umbrella will give us more than enough shade.’

We dined on bream fresh from the harbour, washed down with a bottle of Oustalet, the best of the local white wines. The sweet was a mint soufflé, and there were chocolates from Debauve & Gallais in Paris. D’Hervilly said that his cook was reputed to be the finest in Tangier, and that the king had once tried to steal him from him. He was not boasting, it was a mere statement of fact, as normal to him as being able to read or write.

We sat afterwards in a shaded room hung with carpets, drinking coffee.

‘This house is built on the most ancient site in Tangier,’ d’Hervilly said.

‘Roman?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

‘No, before that. Before the Carthaginians, before the Phoenicians. It may be as old as the second millennium BC. The first inhabitants of Tangier built a temple here. There are still some remains – I will show them to you before you leave. But you must promise to speak of it to no one. Its existence has only ever been revealed to a few people. The archaeologists would go crazy if they knew of it; there would be compulsory purchase orders, God knows what. I would certainly lose this house.’

‘Is that why you bought it? To have the temple.’

He nodded once.

‘Of course. Houses are very ordinary things, even ones as beautiful as this. But such temples are a rarity. They are an opportunity to touch the past, to come face to face with ancient wisdom, not as we would like it to have been, but as it truly was. Duncan tells me you have spent time with the Fraternity of the Old Path. What do you think of them? You may be frank with me.’

I told him what I thought, and he listened, smiling, but without condescension.

‘Yes,’ he said when I came to an end. ‘You are perfectly right. They understand the need for ancient wisdom, but they do not know how to come by it. And if they found real knowledge, they would have no idea what to do with it. You are extremely fortunate to have met Duncan. He is not like them, he belongs in a different league entirely. I hope you understand that.’

‘Yes, I do,’ I said, meaning it. ‘I owe everything to him.’

‘By the time he has finished, you will owe him much more than you can possibly imagine. I knew his father. And my father and his grandfather were close friends. Did he tell you that?’

I shook my head. Three generations, on one side at least. It was quite remarkable.

‘He tells me many things,’ d’Hervilly continued. ‘For example, he says that you are unhappy here.’

I shifted in my chair, embarrassed, not knowing what exactly Duncan had told him. I repeated a little of what I had said to Duncan, somewhat watered down.

‘You are not entirely wrong. Some of Villiers’s friends are quite superficial. But we endure them for reasons you could not yet understand. Nonetheless, I advise you to stay with Duncan at all costs. His journey here has just begun. You will be changed by the time it finishes. I assure you. I know he has great plans for you. Very great plans.’

We talked after that of what I had read and what I planned still to read, and to Duncan’s advice d’Hervilly added some suggestions of his own. He had spent time with Jewish rabbis in nearby Chechaouene, a Rifian town some one hundred kilometres south-east of Tangier. The Jews there – now all vanished, mostly to Israel – had been the descendants of refugees from the Spanish Inquisition and spoke an early form of Castilian long extinct in Spain itself. From them, d’Hervilly had acquired information long thought lost, the key to innumerable Kabbalistic texts.

‘When you are ready,’ he said, ‘Duncan will send you back to me. I shall introduce you to matters of which even he is ignorant. It will not be next year, it may not be for another ten. But rest assured that the time will come. Now,’ he glanced at a small clock near the door, ‘let me show you our little temple.’

It was no more than a tiny, low-ceilinged chamber, cut from solid rock, and located beneath the floor of d’Hervilly’s cellar. Although the house itself was cool, the moment I stepped down the ladder into the temple, I felt as if a very ancient and inhuman cold had entered me.

D’Hervilly switched on an overhead lamp that shed a cheerless yellow light on the bare rock. The cold seemed to deepen, to penetrate more sharply beneath the skin. On one wall, a tall figure had been carved in the rock, a ram bearing a solar disc between its horns. At its feet, a man stood over the prostrate figure of a victim. On the floor, directly underneath the carving, stood a rough block of stone, perhaps a piece of the same rock that had been quarried to create the temple.

As I stood there shivering, I felt wave after wave of depression pass over me. I remembered Catriona’s death as though it had just been yesterday. As time passed, the little room filled with other, darker sensations, ugly and uncompromising, as though, in the deepest antiquity, fear and loathing and brutality had been laid down there for all time. Then, underneath all that, I became aware of another sensation, a conviction that I was in the presence of something wholly evil, something darker and older than the earth itself.

I turned to see d’Hervilly watching me intently.

‘You feel it?’ he asked.

‘It’s . . . horrible,’ I said. I felt as though I wanted to be sick.