The weather turned. Troy cheated Alliss of his breakfast à deux and hung out the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign until almost noon. When he emerged the clouds had cleared, the wind had dropped and there were the makings of a tolerable day.
He rode a rattling red tram down the Rue Georges Picot. He loved trams. They’d been gone from the streets of London ten years or more. He missed them. The tram stopped at the upraised hand of a gendarme in the Place des Martyrs. Troy got off and walked back up the Georges Picot, a cobblestoned street of tiny shops, open to the street, topped by rusting iron balconies, selling everything, silk and sandals included. Corny though it was, Said Hussein was right, East encountered West in its bit of everything. The sense of a black market, of an illicit trade, hung about the place for all its legality. Not so much Kipling as Masefield, thought Troy. What could be more fitting to the sense of place than that Quinquireme of Nineveh, bound for sunny Palestine in the precise beating metre of Masefield? Ivory, apes and peacocks; sandalwood, cedar and wine. Lemons out, Citroëns in – citron, Citroën. In this bazaar the twain did indeed meet. Young men in sharp suits like Hussein’s moved quickly up and down, almost oblivious to the bustle. Troy all but expected one of them to come up to him and offer to sell him what was left of the British Empire. A man in half and half – baggy pants, the frayed jacket of a discarded blue suit, topped off by a traditional kaffiyeh headdress – laboured under the burden of a huge block of melting ice wrapped in sacking and precariously perched upon his back. And a man with no concession to several thousand years of cultural crossing, in full Arab dress, herded sheep between the tramlines.
Troy looked from the shepherd to the shops, gazing, he thought, at the future – symbolised on the wall of a food shop, where a bunch of ripening bananas hung between signs advertising Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Slurping the world level. Once all the world was wilderness; one day it would all be cola.
He stared a moment too long. A hand pulled him sharply backwards and a donkey saddled with wooden crates of oranges blundered forward and missed him by fractions of an inch. Troy turned to see who had pulled him clear, and found himself facing three women. Mother, daughter and granddaughter, it seemed. The mother wore black from head to foot. All he could see of her were dark eyes above the veil. The daughter, a woman of thirty-something, was dressed conservatively western, rather like a French woman of modest means ten or twelve years ago might have done – a longish skirt, a sleeveless blouse. But the granddaughter wore the uniform of ubiquitous youth, the teenage costume that could be found on the streets of London or New York, or it seemed, Beirut – T-shirt, blue jeans and sneakers. Which had saved him from going under the hoof of a determined donkey? The mother was the nearest. It had, he concluded, been her. He thanked her politely in French.
The granddaughter replied.
‘Ce n’est rien, Monsieur. Ma grandmère ne parle pas le français.’
They vanished after the donkey. Walking abreast down the cobbled street, leaving Troy thinking that he had seen colonialism in miniature, history compressed into half a century of a single family.