Page 52 of The Last Postcard

‘You won’t find him. He’s already gone. Never sleeps much.’

I stopped. I had thought of Langham as a man of leisure. ‘Gone where?’

‘Business.’ She took a handkerchief out of her sleeve. ‘Always business.’

I wanted to ask, What business? but instead I dropped my head. I had to learn this role of the polite, disinterested cook. I had to disappear behind my apron again, to be safe. ‘Will you be wanting breakfast, mademoiselle?’

She sighed and sat back. ‘No, I couldn’t possibly. And it’s madame, not mademoiselle.’ She looked down at her hand. It was tanned, save for a pale line that encircled her wedding finger. ‘I suppose you weren’t to know that.’

I hurried back towards the house, adding another mystery to the hoard that seemed to dwell in Dar Portuna.

I was prowling the kitchen, poking into every corner, searching through the cupboards when Bouzid found me.

‘There will be six guests for dinner tonight,’ he told me in Spanish. ‘They will take an aperitif at eight, followed by dinner at eight thirty. Monsieur Langham wishes to impress upon you that his guests will be using cutlery. Not their hands.’

I gave him a polite smile. ‘Of course.’

‘Do you wish me to send out for the food?’ The man was looking at me curiously, as if trying to gather information, now that he saw me in the daylight. ‘Monsieur Hubert, the previous chef, had his own supplier. A French importer.’

‘That’ll explain why it was all so bad,’ I said. ‘It was probably half-rotten by the time it left Marseille.’ Was that a glimmer of amusement on Bouzid’s face? ‘I would prefer to buy my own supplies from the market, thank you.’

‘You mean the medina?’

‘Yes,’ I said, pouring myself a glass of water, as if that was what I had meant all along. ‘Perhaps you could point me in the right direction?’

When I turned back, I found Bouzid stony-faced. ‘If you truly wish to buy your own ingredients, it will be best if I show you. The medina can be … confusing, for foreigners.’

I watched him over the rim of the glass, wondering at his motives. I decided to be gracious. I needed every scrap of help I could get in this place.

‘Merci, Bouzid,’ I said.

‘Also, Monsieur Langham has asked me to give you this.’ He took something from the pocket of his robe. ‘He believes it might be of some help, with regard to menus.’

It was a small parcel, wrapped in brown paper. A gift from Langham? Hurriedly, I turned my back on Bouzid to open it, afraid that my face would give me away.

Inside was a book, not a new one. It was well worn, the cover bent and scratched, the gilding half rubbed from an English title.

The Gentleman’s Guide.

I frowned. Why should Langham have this, why was it so well-thumbed and studied, when he was already a gentleman? I opened the cover, searching for a name or a stamp, something that might hint at the book’s past. Instead I saw fresh ink, where someone – Langham – had written:

If you’re going to play the game, you have to learn the rules.

I snapped the book shut.

I turned back to find Bouzid studying me hard. ‘Bueno,’ I said, dropping the book into the pocket of my jacket, as if it was of no consequence. ‘I am ready when you are.’

If I had thought the streets around the Café Central were confusing, they were nothing compared to the ones Bouzid steered me down. This was the casbah, he told me, as we turned left and right and back upon ourselves until I gave up trying to keep track of our direction.

I am not too proud to say that without Bouzid, I would have been hopelessly lost. It was all I could do to keep my mouth closed. I had thought our market in Córdoba was plentiful enough, but here it seemed as if the whole countryside was laid out at the edge of the pavement. Women shaded by huge straw hats sat behind piles of tomatoes, the stones around them already littered with flesh and seeds. Aubergines groaned purple, onions hung with soil still clinging to beards. Barrows of melons, heavy as heads, engulfed us in their honey-vegetable sweetness as we passed.

Bouzid kept glancing at me. I think he was enjoying my astonishment. We came up for air in a large open space, only to plunge into yet another covered market. It was loud beneath the tin roof, packed with voices. Women in robes and headscarves were inspecting, rejecting, haggling with the sellers, who pleaded as if they were in court. There were mountains of eggs, white cheeses spread on palm leaves. The smell grew stronger until I realized we were approaching a meat market: fish and fowl, old and bloodied and new. The dirt floor grew clogged beneath our feet; a skinned sheep’s head leered down at me from a hook as if it were about to leap on to my shoulder and whisper a tale into my ear.

I’d never seen so much flesh before. Cracked skulls revealing brains, dishes heaped with lungs, tongues, guts and hearts: the ingredients of life, ready to be remade into something new.

The spectre of the meat market released us, only for another to swallow us up, one of perfumed breath and rattling chillies and shivering dried husks. I had to stop myself from plunging my fingers into a basket of rosebuds, had to resist licking my finger and touching it to a pyramid of powder the colour of the sun.

‘Down here are olives,’ Bouzid said, but I had to stop him in order to catch my breath.