Free Lulu in Marrakech by Diane Johnson

or we are, or how foreign, there would be no way he would be friendly with—well, our womenfolk.” He smiled, but it did cause me to wonder whether Ian had not absorbed some of the Muslim sense of the opposite sex (Posy and me) as being volatile and frail. Posy said later that I had blushed at Ian’s reprimand, but my true emotion was not remorse but chagrin.
    I n the days that followed, the aftermath took much of Ian’s time, with delegations of police and government officials coming to the house or convoking Ian to the prefecture almost daily. What ever I’d known of him in Kosovo—that he was there to do good works and had a caring, charitable side—I hadn’t before observed his uniformly excellent manners and consideration to everyone. Besides running his industrial park, I had learned that he did various good works; gave money to local schools, literacy projects, and public works; and was a hero to his valet. Anyway, though I say “managed,” Ian micromanaged—he would troubleshoot a burst pipe or meet a need for more chairs; he obviously enjoyed his little empire and felt it to be a contribution to this beautiful and poor country. Of course I thought this bleeding-heart side of him was a strong point.
    He was polite to the investigators and to his servants, attentive to his guests—but especially to Posy, whom he did seem to regard as delicate, though she was a strapping English woman, and handed her up and down the stairs if he was anywhere near her with a sort of reverent anxiety her husband didn’t show. (Though Robin Crumley was absentminded, he didn’t seem indifferent to her; it was more that he seemed to remember her and their coming baby suddenly, from time to time, and snap into a solicitous mode. But not very often.) “Ian is very attractive,” she once remarked in a somewhat wistful tone. “He was Robin’s student when Robin was a young don at Oxford; that’s how we know him.”
    There was a mechanism for my getting mail from people who would be writing me, my parents and siblings, my carefully maintained magazine subscriptions, etc., addressed to my real self, care of an address in Rabat. In Rabat, letters were opened, retyped to Lulu Sawyer, and sent to me at Ian’s, with the names of the senders disguised if necessary. The path of my replies was the same in reverse. In writing my parents in California, I had found myself saying things I didn’t know I felt, about Ian and Morocco: I loved it here, I might have met The One. Partly that was what they wanted to hear, but it was true too, as much as ever one can be sure that something is true.
    O ne day, circling the ruins, Ian rescued a very young kitten, a creature of maybe six weeks old, with its eyes stuck shut from infection, at the site of the fire, not huddled in a bush as a prudent kitten should, but standing blindly in the middle of the road, hoping for the best. It was gallant; it would stumble around and purr when you held it. When we got home, we bathed its eyes and got some antibiotics from the vet. We decided to hold off naming it—him—till we were sure he would live, like people in the olden days with their children. I found Ian’s way with it touching. “Good chap,” he told it when it ate a little bit. Some people seem to disapprove of kindness to animals, as if it distracts from kindness to people; others feel there’s nothing much to do for people, since they are so hopeless, and we should concentrate on animals. I don’t see that one rules out the other—anyway, I found this yet another reaffirmation of Ian’s excellent character. My love for him increased. So did my resolve to be better at dissembling for my job.
    “I wonder what does the Prophet say,” Robin Crumley had said at dinner that night, which we ate inside in the dining room, “about stray cats, for example, and animal creation generally?” His tone held in check a note of rising aversion to cats, or to the Prophet.
    “Very little, I would