Free Alexandra Singer by Tea at the Grand Tazi Page A

city was like being in a time warp, filled with scores of old
cafés, relics from the days when Tangier had played a more significant international role. Tangier was still holding on to it’s former charms, reminding her of a beguiling, but ageing
beauty who had now grown a little long in the tooth. She erased her memories and fought her way back to the present.
    “We got so very lost in Tangier, didn’t we Martin?” She was saying. Her husband didn’t reply; he was too busy snuffling over his food. Maia watched him; Martin Bambage
and his wife resembled each other, a couple who over the years had grown to look the same. They had the same wide jaw, the flaccid face and sagging skin, the thick, glutinous lips. Rupert saw her
watching Martin and he caught her eye. He evidently thought himself a superior being, and his dislike of the couple was obvious. Lucy Bambage was desperate to talk, so Maia enquired about their
journey and health, but she soon discovered that questions asked innocently served only to encourage another unwelcome monologue.
    Maia attempted to change the subject. “How did you find the souk?”
    “The place was revolting! So many awful, shuffling people, and then there were the children, always following, begging, so disgusting. We got ourselves lost and went into a shop and
Martin, can you believe it, left me alone!”
    She could believe very well. Martin looked up from his plate; he was a man with a face like an angry toad. His eyes protruded and a vast inane smile filled the entire lower half of his face. His
arms were too long for his body, and looked strangely out of place. Lucy Bambage continued, breathlessly, keen to empty it all out onto somebody sufficiently unwitting to listen to her. Rupert
rolled his eyes again. She wondered why Rupert stayed with these people if he disliked them.
    “And then there was the smell. Putrid, just putrid. All the boys were shouting at me in French, but I could barely understand anything. The last time I studied French was at St
Alban’s secondary, and that was many years ago.”
    “What exactly did the boys say to you, Mrs. Bambage?”
    “Call me Lucy. They shouted something like balene , balene . They kept repeating it and running after me and they just would not leave me alone. It was awful. Do you speak
French? If you have been granted a job here, I certainly hope so.”
    Maia could only smile at her comment. She spoke in that proprietary manner that is so typical of tourists who come to feel that they own a slice of the places they are visiting. She made it
sound as if Maia was a privileged impostor.
    “I’m afraid that I can’t actually tell you what the boys were saying to you. I seem to have forgotten that word.”
    “Saying to me? They were calling me something? How can you forget a simple word like that? You said you spoke French!”
    The two women stared at one another with a mutual suspicion that neither yet had the grounds to voice.
    “Obviously I don’t speak French quite as well as I thought I did.”
    Rupert was smiling at her again, one that the redoubtable Lucy Bambage did not miss.
    Maia stood up. “I’m going to the bar. Let me buy you a drink. What would you like?”
    “Well, my dear I’ll have a brandy.”
    “ Quelle surprise,” said Maia for absolutely no reason at all, and for the first time in the brief interchange, Lucy Bambage looked somewhat discomfited. As Maia walked to the
bar, her voice did not recede, but remained excruciatingly loud. Maia decided that she needed a vodka.
    “But you said she could speak French!” she was saying.
    Maia allowed herself a small smile. From the bar she watched these people; their false influence, the accumulation of their manners, which were not so scrupulous as to appear innate. So quickly
she had been drawn into their group, and then just as quickly she was cast out. Lucy Bambage was continuing her monologue.
    “I didn’t listen to them really. I was just trying to