We turned inland on to the road to Meknes. There was a police roadblock on the outskirts of Rabat. They were members of the French police, not the Gestapo, but even so it made Maman go very quiet and her shoulders went all stiff and crept up towards her ears. But Papa had all our papers in order and, after they’d peered at me and Annette sitting in the back of the car, they waved us on. The camouflage appeared to be working.
Maman’s shoulders relaxed again as we picked up speed. It was a bit like the road to the farm, very dusty, and we passed through quite a few settlements of various sizes where stray dogs came and barked at us as we passed in the car. All there was to look at were the scrubby trees and spiky bushes and the occasional donkey. In the distance, though, were the foothills of the mountains, like the humped backs of whales rolling along the horizon. They were faint at first, covered in a blue haze, but as the hours went by they became a bit clearer and you could start to pick out the shadows of valleys and the dark smudges of cedar forests.
The town of Meknes clamps itself on to a solitary hill that rises from the plain, looking a bit like a barnacle on a rock, and we reached it as the midday sun was beginning to make the car feel like being in the oven in our kitchen when Kenza is making bread. So we were very thankful to reach our first hotel and be able to stretch our legs.
In the room that Annette and I were to share there were two narrow beds and a washstand with a basin and a jug of water so we could splash our faces and wash our hands. It was almost lunchtime and so we went and sat at a table in the courtyard beneath some trailing vines that made it a nice cool spot. The waiter brought us our lunch, which was lots of little snacks like olives, and tapenade with khobz to spread it on to, and fried brionats, and slices of stuffed m’semmen pancakes. It was all quite delicious.
Afterwards Papa said we should all go and have a rest on our beds until the day cooled off a little and then we’d go out and explore the town. Annette fell asleep and snored a bit, while I read Lord Peter Views the Body, my next Dorothy L. Sayers book, which I got from the library before we left. Mademoiselle Dubois has now met Nina, as she comes with me to choose books sometimes, and she kindly lets us take out extra books on my ticket since she knows there are two of us reading them.
The town of Meknes felt a lot more peaceful than Casablanca. We wandered through the streets, where there were stalls with baskets of fruit and olives and some with leatherwork and Berber rugs. I stopped beside a man who was sitting in front of an easel, painting a picture of the turquoise minaret that rose like Rapunzel’s tower behind a wall covered in scrambling vines. He stopped painting and smiled at me, then asked me in French what I thought of his artwork. I told him I liked it very much, although I was mostly being polite as it just looked like a lot of rough blobs of paint really.
Then Papa, Maman and Annette arrived and he smiled even more and they got talking. His name is Gustave Reynier and he told us he likes painting scenes in Morocco because the light is so good. I looked at his painting again, which was a bit of a muddle close up, but then I stood back a little and suddenly I saw what he meant – the blobs of paint transformed themselves into the rug stall alongside the wall, a door with green shutters, and the trailing leaves of the vines. He’d managed to get the light and the shadows just right so that you could feel the heat and see the way the sunshine slanted along the pavement. I actually did like it very much then. He and Papa were getting on very well and Monsieur Reynier asked us if we’d care to join him for an aperitif at a local café. So we did and he told us stories of his painting adventures in Morocco and Algeria. He asked us where we were headed and when he heard our destination was Taza he nodded his head in approval. ‘You’ll enjoy seeing the mountains and the desert. It’s a fascinating landscape, far starker than the one around here, but beautiful in its way. Altogether a different light again.’
I wondered whether our bumping into Monsieur Reynier was part of Mr Reid’s secret plan for our trip, so I was watching carefully to see whether any brown envelopes were exchanged, but Papa just sipped his glass of pastis and chatted about Paris, which was another city that Monsieur Reynier loved. And then I remembered that I was the one who had struck up the conversation with him in the first place so I guess he was just a bit like one of Lord Peter Wimsey’s red herrings.
The next day we drove to Fez, which wasn’t nearly as long a journey as the day before, so we had more time for relaxing over breakfast under the vines in Meknes before we set off. The morning air was fresh and a pair of turtle doves were murmuring to one another in the branches of a fig tree in one corner of the courtyard, which reminded me of the ones at home in Casablanca, and of Nina and Felix of course. It made me very happy to imagine they’d drunk from the magic well and were accompanying me on this trip. I didn’t feel quite so anxious about having to be camouflage for Papa when I thought my friends were there to support me.