He went out through the glass doors on to the pavement. It was early June, nearly 6 p.m., and the air was warm, the slanting sunlight still bright. John had suggested the Café de Paris for a pre-lunch or -dinner drink, and there it was, across the street and at the second corner, on the Boulevard Bourguiba. Ingham walked on to the boulevard, and bought a Paris Herald-Tribune. The rather broad avenue had a tree-bordered, cement-paved division down its middle on which people could walk. Here were the newspaper and tobacco kiosks, the shoeshine boys. To Ingham, it looked something between a Mexico City street and a Paris street, but the French had had a hand in both Mexico City and Tunis. Snatches of shouted conversation around him gave him no clue as to meaning. He had a phrase book called Easy Arabic in one of his suitcases at the hotel. Arabic would obviously have to be memorized, because it bore no relation to anything he knew.

Ingham walked across the street to the Café de Paris. It had pavement tables, all occupied. People stared at him, perhaps because he was a new face. There were many Americans and English, and they had the expressions of people who had been here some time and were a little bored. Ingham had to stand at the bar. He ordered a Pernod, and looked at his newspaper. The place was noisy. He spotted a table and took it.

People idled along the pavement, staring at the equally blank faces in the café. Ingham watched especially the younger people, because he was on an assignment to write a film script about two young people in love, or rather three, since there was a second young man who didn’t get the girl. Ingham saw no boy and girl walking along, only single young men or pairs of boys holding hands and talking earnestly. John had told Ingham about the closeness of the boys. Homosexual relationships had no stigma here, but that had nothing to do with the script. Young people of opposite sex were often chaperoned or at least spied upon. There was a lot to learn, and Ingham’s job in the next week or so until John arrived was to keep his eyes open and absorb the atmosphere. John knew a couple of families here, and Ingham would be able to see inside a middle-class Tunisian home. The story was to have the minimum of written dialogue, but still something had to be written. Ingham had done some television writing, but he considered himself a novelist. He had some trepidations about this job. But John was confident, and the arrangements were informal. Ingham had signed nothing. Castlewood had advanced him a thousand dollars, and Ingham was scrupulously using the money only for business expenses. Quite a bit of it would go on the car he was supposed to hire for a month. He must get the car tomorrow morning, he thought, so he could begin looking around.

“Merci, non,” Ingham said to a peddler who approached him with a long-stemmed, tightly bound flower. The over-sweet scent lingered in the air. The peddler had a handful, and was pushing about among the tables yelling, “Yes-meen?” He wore a red fez and a limp, lavender jubbah so thin one could see a pair of whitish underpants.

At one table, a fat man twiddled his jasmine, holding the blossom under his nose. He seemed in a trance, his eyes almost crossed with his daydream. Was he awaiting a girl or only thinking of one? Ten minutes later, Ingham decided he was awaiting no one. The man had finished what looked like a colorless soda pop. He wore a light grey business suit. Ingham supposed he was middle-class, even a bit upper. Perhaps he made thirty or more dinars per week, sixty-three dollars or more. Ingham had been boning up on such things for a month. Bourguiba was tactfully trying to extricate his people from the reactionary bonds of their religion. He had abolished polygamy officially, and disapproved of the veil for women. As African countries went, Tunisia was the most advanced. They were trying to persuade all French businessmen to leave, but still depended to a great extent on French monetary aid.

Ingham was thirty-four, slightly over six feet tall, with light brown hair and blue eyes, and he moved rather slowly. Although he never bothered about exercise, he had a good physique with broad shoulders, long legs and strong hands. He had been born in Florida, but considered himself a New Yorker, because he had lived in New York since the age of eight. After college—the University of Pennsylvania—he had worked for a newspaper in Philadelphia and written fiction on the side, without much luck until his first book, The Power of Negative Thinking, a rather flippant and juvenile spoof of positive thinking, in which his pair of negative-thinking heroes emerged covered in glory, money and success. On the strength of this, Ingham had quit journalism, and had had two or three rocky years. His second book, The Gathering Swine, had not been so well received as the first book. Then he had married a wealthy girl, Charlotte Fleet, with whom he had been very much in love, but he had not availed himself of her money, and her wealth in fact had been a handicap. The marriage had ended after two years. Now and again, Ingham sold a television play or a short story, and he had kept going in a modest apartment in Manhattan. This year, in February, he had had a breakthrough. His book The Game of “If” had been bought for a film for $50,000. Ingham suspected it had been bought more for the crazy love story in it than for its intellectual content or message (the necessity and validity of wishful thinking), but no matter, it had been bought, and for the first time Ingham was enjoying a taste of financial security. He had declined an invitation to write the film script of The Game of “If”. He thought film scripts, even television plays, were not his forte, and The Game was a difficult book for him to think of in film terms.

John Castlewood’s idea for Trio was simpler and more visual. The young man who didn’t get the girl married someone else, but wreaked vengeance on his successful rival in a most horrible way, first seducing his wife, then ruining the husband’s business, then seeing that the husband was murdered. Such things could scarcely happen in America, Ingham supposed, but this was in Tunisia. John Castlewood had enthusiasm, and he knew Tunisia. And John had known Ingham and had invited him to try the script. They had a producer named Miles Gallust. Ingham thought that if he felt he wasn’t getting anywhere, wasn’t capable, he would tell John, give back the thousand dollars, and John could find someone else. John had done two good films on small budgets, and the first, The Grievance, had had the better success. That had been set in Mexico. The second had been about Texas oil-riggers, and Ingham had forgotten the title. John was twenty-six, full of energy and the kind of faith that went with not knowing much about the world as yet, or so Ingham thought. Ingham felt that John had a future better, more than likely, than his own would be. Ingham was at an age when he knew his potentialities and limitations. John Castlewood did not know his as yet, and perhaps was not the type ever to think about them or recognize them, which might be all to the good.

Ingham paid his bill, and went back to his hotel room for a jacket. He was getting hungry. He glanced again at the two letters in the box marked I—J, and at the empty cubbyhole under his hanging key. “Vingt-six, s’il vous plaît,” he said, and took the key.

Again taking John’s advice, Ingham went to the Restaurant du Paradis in the rue du Paradis, which was between his hotel and the Café de Paris. Later, he wandered around the town, and had a couple of café expr’s standing at counters in caf’s where there were no tourists. The patrons were all men in these places. The barman understood his French, but Ingham did not hear anyone else speaking French.

He had thought to write a letter to Ina when he got back to his hotel, but he felt too tired, or perhaps uninspired. He went to bed and read some of a William Golding novel that he had brought from America. Before he fell asleep, he thought of the girl who had flirted with him—mildly—in the Café de Paris. She had been blonde, a trifle chubby, but very attractive. Ingham had thought she might be German (the man with her could have been anything), and he had felt pleased when he heard her talking French with the man as they went out. Vanity, Ingham thought. He should be thinking about Ina. She was certainly thinking about him. At any rate, Tunisia was going to be a splendid place not to think anymore about Lotte. Thank God, he had almost stopped. It had been a year and six months since his divorce, but sometimes to Ingham it seemed like only six months, or even two.

2

The next morning, when there was again no letter for him, it occurred to Ingham that John and Ina might have written to him at the Hotel du Golfe in Hammamet, where John had suggested he should stay. Ingham had not yet made a reservation there, and he supposed he should for the 5th or 6th of June. John had said, “Look around Tunis for a few days. The characters are going to live in Tunis. . . . I don’t think you’d like to work there. It’ll be hot, and you can’t swim unless you go to Sidi Bou Said. We’ll work in Hammamet. Terrific beach for an afternoon swim, and no city noises. . . .”

After a whole day of walking and driving about Tunis, enduring also the long closure of everything except restaurants from noon or twelve-thirty until four, Ingham was ready to go to Hammamet tomorrow. But he thought as soon as he got to Hammamet, he would reproach himself for not having seen enough of Tunis, so he decided to stay on two more days. On one of those days, he drove to Sidi Bou Said, sixteen kilometers away, had a swim and took lunch at a rather chic hotel, as there were no independent restaurants. It was a very clean town of chalk-white houses and bright-blue shutters and doors.

There had been no room free at the Golfe when Ingham had telephoned the day before, but the manager had suggested another hotel in Hammamet. Ingham went to the other hotel, which he found too Hollywood in atmosphere, and at last put himself up at a hotel called La Reine de Hammamet. All the hotels had beaches on the Gulf of Hammamet, but were set back fifty yards or more from the water. The Reine had a large main building, gardens of lime and lemon and bougainvillea, and also fifteen or twenty bungalows of varying sizes, each given privacy by the leaves of citrus trees. The bungalows had kitchens, but Ingham was not in the mood to start housekeeping, so he took a room in the main building with a view on the sea. He immediately went down for a swim.

There were not many people on the beach at this hour, though the sun was still above the horizon. Ingham saw a couple of empty beach chairs. He didn’t know if one had to rent them or not, but he assumed they belonged to the hotel, so he took one. He put on his sunglasses—another thought of John Castlewood, who had made him a present of these—and pulled a paperback out of his robe pocket. After fifteen minutes, he was asleep, or at least in a doze. My God, he thought, my God, it’s quiet and beautiful and warm. . . .

“Hello! Good evening!—You an American?”

The loud voice startled Ingham like a gunshot, and he sat up in his chair. “Yes.”

“Excuse me interrupting your reading. I’m an American, too. From Connecticut.” He was a man of fifty or so, grayish-haired, balding, with a slight bulge at his waistline, and with an enviable tan. He was not very tall.

“New York here,” Ingham said. “I hope I haven’t taken your chair.”

“Ha-ha! No! But the boys’ll be collecting them in another half-hour or so. Have to put ’em away, or they wouldn’t be here tomorrow morning!”

Lonely, Ingham thought. Or had he a wife just as chummy? But one could be lonely with that, too. The man was looking out at the sea, standing only two yards from Ingham.

“My name’s Adams. Francis J. Adams.” He said it as if he were proud of it.

“Mine’s Howard Ingham.”

“What do you think of Tunisia?” Adams asked with his friendly smile that bulged his brown cheeks.

“Very attractive. Hammamet, anyway.”

“I think so. Best to have a car to get around in. Sousse and Djerba, places like that. Got a car?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Good. Well—” He was backing, taking his leave. “Drop in and see me some time. My bungalow’s just up the slope there. Number ten. Any of the boys can tell you which is mine. Just ask for Adams. Come in and have a drink some evening. Bring your wife, if you have one.”

“Thanks very much,” Ingham said. “No, I’m alone.”

Adams nodded, and waved. “See you again.”

Ingham sat on another five minutes, then got up. He took a shower in his room, then went downstairs to the bar. It was a large bar with red Persian carpeting that covered the floor. A middle-aged couple were speaking French. Another table of three was British. There were only seven or eight people in the room, a few of them watching television in the corner.

A man came from the television set to the British table and said in a voice without excitement, “The Israelis have blasted a dozen airports.”

“Where?”

“Egypt. Or maybe Jordan. The Arabs are going to be a pushover.”

“That news came through in French?” asked another of the Englishmen.

Ingham stood at the bar. The war was on apparently. Tunisia was quite a distance from the fighting. Ingham hoped it wouldn’t interfere with work plans. But the Tunisians were Arabs, and there was going to be some anti-Western emotion, he knew, if the Arabs lost, and of course they would lose. He must get a Paris paper tomorrow.

Ingham avoided the beach for the next couple of days, and took some drives into the country. The Israelis were mopping up the Arabs, and twenty-five airbases had been destroyed on Monday, the day the war broke out. A Paris paper reported a few cars with Western license plates overturned in a street in Tunis, and also the windows of the U.S.I.S. library broken on the Boulevard Bourguiba. Ingham did not go to Tunis. He went to the town of Naboul, north-east of Hammamet, and to Bir Bou Rekba inland, and to a few other tiny towns, dusty and poor, whose names he could not remember easily. He ran into a market morning at one, and walked about among camels, pottery, baubles and pins, cotton clothing and straw mats, all spread out on coarse sheets on the ground. People jostled him, which Ingham did not like. The Arabs didn’t mind human contact, and on the contrary needed it, Ingham had read. That was everywhere apparent in the souk. The jewelry in the market was shoddy, but inspired Ingham to go to a good shop and buy a silver pin for ma, a flat triangle which fastened with a circle. They came in all sizes. Since the box was so small for posting, Ingham bought also an embroidered red vest for her—a man’s garment, but so fancy, it would look very feminine in America. He posted them the afternoon of the same day, after much time-killing, waiting for the post office in Hammamet to open at 4 p.m. The post office was open only one hour in the afternoon, according to a sign outside.

On the fourth day at the Reine, he wrote to John Castlewood. John lived on West Fifty-third Street in Manhattan.

June 8, 19—

Please tell Ina to write me a line. I’ve written to her. Sort of lonely here with no word from home. Or maybe as you said the mail is fantastically slow. . . .

And so he trailed off, and felt a little more lonely after he had written it than before. He was checking with the Golfe every day, sometimes twice a day. No letter or cable had come. Ingham drove to the post office to mail his letter, because he wasn’t sure it would get off today, if he left it to the hotel. Various clerks had given him three different times for mail arrival, and he assumed they would be equally vague as to collection.

Ingham went down to the beach around six o’clock. The beach was approached via a patch of jungle-like palm trees which grew, however, out of the inevitable sand. There was a footworn path which he followed. A few metal poles, perhaps from an abandoned children’s playground, stuck up out of the sand and were encrusted near the top with small white snails fastened tightly like barnacles. The metal was so hot, he could barely touch it. He walked on, daydreaming about his novel, and he had brought his notebook and pen. There was really nothing more he could do on Trio until John got here.

He went into the water, swam out until he felt slightly tired, then turned back. The water was shallow quite far out. There was smooth sand underfoot, which farther inshore became rocky, then sand again, until he stood upon the beach. He wiped his face on his terry-cloth robe, as he had forgotten to bring a towel. Then he sat down with his notebook. His book was about a man with a double life, a man unaware of the amorality of the way he lived, and therefore he was mentally deranged, or unbalanced, to say the least. Ingham did not like to admit this, but he had to. In his book, he had no intention of justifying his hero Dennison. He was simply a young man (twenty when the book began) who married and led a happy family life, and became a director in a bank at thirty. He expropriated funds from the bank when he could, by forgery mainly, and he was as free with giving and lending as he was in stealing. He invested some of the money with a view to his family’s future, but he gave away two-thirds of it (also usually under false names) to people who needed it and to men who were trying to start their own businesses.

As often happened, Ingham’s ruminations made him doze within twenty minutes, and after writing only twelve lines of notes, he was half asleep when the voice of the American woke him like a repeated dream:

“Hello, there! Haven’t seen you for a couple of days.”

Ingham sat up. “Good afternoon.” He knew what was coming, and he knew he would go, this evening, to have a drink at Adams’s bungalow.

“How long’re you here for?” Adams asked.

“I don’t quite know.” Ingham had stood up and was putting on his robe. “Maybe another three weeks. I have a friend coming.”

“Oh. Another American?”

“Yes.” Ingham looked at the spear Adams was carrying, a sort of dart five feet long without apparent means of projection.

“I’m on my way back to my bungalow. Want to come along and have a cooling drink?”

Ingham at once thought of Coca-Cola. “All right. Thank you. What do you do with that spear?”

“Oh, I aim at fish and never catch them.” A chuckle. “Actually sometimes I snare up shells I couldn’t reach if I were just swimming. You know, in water six or eight feet deep.”

The sand became hot inland, but still bearable. Ingham was carrying his beach shoes. Adams had none.

“Here we are,” said Adams suddenly, and turned on to a paved but gritty walk which led to his blue-and-white bungalow. The bungalow’s roof was domed for coolness, in Arabian style.

Ingham glanced over his shoulder at a building he had not noticed before, a service building of some sort where several adolescent boys, waiters and clean-up boys of the hotel, he supposed, leaned against the wall chatting.

“Not much, but it’s home just now,” said Adams, opening his door with a key he had fished from somewhere in the top of his swimming trunks.

The inside of the bungalow was cool, the shutters closed, and it seemed dark after the sunlight. Adams evidently had an air-conditioner. He turned on a light.

“Sit ye down. What can I get you? A Scotch? Beer? Coke?”

“A Coke, thanks.”

They had stomped their feet carefully on the bare tiles outside the door. Adams walked briskly and squeakily across the tile floor into a short hall that led to a kitchen.

Ingham looked around. It looked like home, indeed. There were seashells, books, stacks of papers, a writing-table that was obviously much used, with ink bottles, pens, a stamp box, a pencil sharpener, an open dictionary. A Reader’s Digest. Also a Bible. Was Adams a writer? The dictionary was English-Russian, neatly covered in brown paper. Was Adams a spy? Ingham smiled at the thought. Above the desk hung a framed photograph of an American country house that looked like New England, a white farmhouse surrounded at a generous distance by a three-railed white fence. There were elm trees, a collie, but no person in the picture.

Ingham turned as Adams entered with a small tray.

Adams had a Scotch and soda. “You a teetotaller?” he asked, smiling his paunchy little smile.

“No, I just felt like a Coke. How long’ve you been here?”

“A year,” Adams said, beaming, bouncing on his toes.

Adams had high arches, high insteps and rather small feet. There was something disgusting about Adams’s feet, and having looked at them once, Ingham did not look again.

“Your wife isn’t here?” Ingham asked. He had seen a woman’s photograph on the chest of drawers behind Adams, a woman in her forties, sedately smiling, sedately dressed.

“My wife died five years ago. Cancer.”

“Oh.—What do you do to pass the time here?”

“I don’t feel too lonely. I keep busy.” Again the squirrel-like smile. “Once in a while someone interesting turns up at the hotel, we make acquaintances, they go on somewhere else. I consider myself an unofficial ambassador for America. I spread goodwill—I hope—and the American way of life. Our way of life.”

What the hell did that mean, Ingham wondered, the Vietnam War springing at once to his mind. “How do you mean?”

“I have my ways.—But tell me about yourself, Mr. Ingham. Sit down somewhere. You’re here on vacation?”

Ingham sat down in a large scooped leather chair that creaked. Adams sat on the sofa. “I’m a writer,” Ingham said. “I’m waiting for an American friend who wants to do a film here. He’s going to be cameraman and director. The producer is in New York. It’s all rather informal.”

“Interesting! A film on what subject?”

“A story about young people in Tunisia. John Castlewood—the cameraman—knows Tunisia quite well. He lived a few months here with a family in Tunis.”

“So you’re a film writer.” Adams was putting on a colorful short-sleeved shirt.

“No, just a writer. Fiction. But my friend John wanted me to do his film with him.” Ingham detested the conversation.

“What books have you written?”

Ingham stood up. He knew more questions were coming, so he said, “Four. One of them was The Game of “If”. You probably haven’t heard of it.” Adams hadn’t, so Ingham said, “Another book was called The Gathering Swine. Not so successful.”

“The Gadarene Swine?” Adams asked, as Ingham had thought he would.

“Gathering,” Ingham said. “I meant it to sound like Gadarene, you see.” His face felt warm with a kind of shame, or boredom.

“You make enough to live on?”

“Yes, with television work now and then in New York.” He thought suddenly of Ina, and the thought caused a throb in his body, making Ina strangely more real than she had been since he got to Europe, or Africa. He could see Ina in her office in New York now. It would be noonish. She would be reaching for a pencil, or a sheet of typewriter paper. If she had a lunch date, she would be a little late for it.

“You’re probably famous and I don’t realize it,” Adams said, smiling. “I don’t read much fiction. Now and then, something that’s condensed. Like in the Reader’s Digest, you know. If you’ve got one of your books here, I’d like to read it.”

Ingham smiled. “Sorry. I don’t travel with them.”

“When’s your friend due?” Adams stood up. “Can’t I freshen that? How about a Scotch now?”

Ingham agreed to the Scotch. “He’s due Tuesday.” Ingham caught a glimpse of his own face in a mirror on the wall. His face was pink from the sun and starting to tan. His mouth looked severe and a little grumpy. A sudden loud voice, shouting in Arabic just outside the shuttered windows, made him flinch, but he continued staring at himself. This is what Adams saw, he thought, what the Arabs saw, an ordinary American face with blue eyes that looked too sharply at everything, above a mouth not exactly friendly. Three creases undulated across his forehead, and the beginnings of wrinkles showed under his eyes. Maybe not a very friendly face, but it was impossible to change one’s expression without being phony. Lotte had done a little damage. The best he could do, Ingham thought out of nowhere, the proper thing was to be neutral, neither chummy nor standoffish. Play it cool.

He turned as Adams came in with his drink.

“What do you think about the war?” Adams asked, smiling as usual. “The Israelis have got it won.”

“Can you get the news? By radio?” Ingham was interested. He must buy a transistor, he thought.

“I can get Paris, London, Marseilles, Voice of America, practically anything,” Adams said, gesturing towards a door, which presumably led to a bedroom. “Just scattered reports now, but the Arabs are finished.”

“Since America is pro-Israel, I suppose there’ll be some anti-American demonstrations?”

“A few, no doubt,” said Adams, as cheerfully as if he were talking about flowers pushing up in a garden. “A pity the Arabs can’t see a yard in front of their noses.”

Ingham smiled. “I thought you might well be pro-Arab.”

“Why?”

“Living here. Liking them, I thought.” On the other hand, he read the Reader’s Digest, which was always anti-Communist. On the other hand, what was the other hand?

“I like the Arabs. I like all peoples. I think the Arabs ought to do more with their own land. What’s done is done, the creation of Israel, right or wrong. The Arabs ought to do more with their own desert and stop complaining. Too many Arabs sit around doing nothing.”

That was true, Ingham thought, but since Adams read the Reader’s Digest, he suspected anything he said, and thought about it twice. “Have you a car? Do you think the Arabs will turn it over?”

Adams chuckled comfortably. “Not here. My car’s the black Cadillac convertible under the trees. Tunisia is pro-Arab, of course, but Bourguiba isn’t going to allow much trouble. He can’t afford it.”

Adams talked about his farm in Connecticut, and about his business in Hartford. He had had a soft drinks bottling plant. Adams obviously enjoyed reminiscing. His had been a happy marriage. He had a daughter who lived in Tulsa. Her husband was a brilliant engineer, Adams said. Ingham thought, I’m afraid to fall in love with Ina. I’m afraid to fall in love with anyone since Lotte. It was so obvious, he wondered why he hadn’t realized it before, months ago. Why should it come to him now, while talking with this ordinary little man from Connecticut? Or had he said he originally came from Indiana?

Ingham said good-bye, with a vague promise to meet Adams in the bar next day around eight o’clock, just before dinner. Adams said he sometimes took dinner at the hotel, rather than cook. As he walked back to the main building of the hotel, Ingham thought about Ina. It wasn’t bad, maybe even wise, he thought, the way he felt about her. He was not out of his mind about her. He cared for her and she was important to him. He had taken his film contract for The Game of “If” to show her before he signed it, her approval being just as important to him as his agent’s. (In fact, Ina knew all about film contracts, but emotionally as well he had wanted her approval.) She was intelligent, pretty, and physically attractive to him. She was dependable and unneurotic. She had her own work, and she wasn’t a bore or a drag—as Lotte had been, out of bed, he had to admit. Ina had some talent for playwriting. She’d have been better than him for this job, in fact, and Ingham wondered why John hadn’t suggested her doing the script instead of him? Or maybe he had, and Ina hadn’t been able to get away from New York. John and Ina had known each other a little longer than Ingham had known either of them. Ina might not mention it to him, if John had asked her to write “Trio,” Ingham thought.

Suddenly, Ingham felt happier. If there wasn’t a letter from John when he got to the hotel, if there was none tomorrow, and if John didn’t come on the 13th, Ingham felt he could take it in his stride. Maybe he was acquiring the African tempo. Don’t be anxious. Let the days pass. He realized that Francis J. Adams had been curiously stimulating. The Reader’s Digest condensations! The American way of life! Adams was so plainly content with himself, with everything. It was fabulous, in these times. An Arab boy had brought fresh bath towels while Ingham had been there, and Adams had talked with him in Arabic. The boy seemed to like Adams. Ingham tried to imagine having lived in the hotel for a year. Was Adams some kind of American agent? No, he was much too na’ve. Or could that be part of his cover? One never knew these days, did one? Ingham didn’t know what to make of Adams.