The Storyteller of Casablanca (26)

I didn’t really mind, though. I thought it would be nice to see Miss Ellis and that I’d like to meet Madame Bénatar and thank her for helping us and Felix’s family to get our Permis de Séjour so we could get out of A?n Chok and come to live in nicer places. Mr Stafford Reid is American, so I was looking forward to asking him where the best place might be to buy a farm over there. Olivier is a drip, so I wasn’t going to bother talking to him.

Anyway, all the plans finally came together and the Dinner Party was last night.

Handing round the little bowls of roasted almonds and a tray of tiny bakoula pies made by Kenza (which everyone loved) gave me the chance to say hello to everyone and make up my mind who I’d like to talk to. As I’d suspected, Olivier’s parents are just as dull as him, so after I’d handed them their snacks I moved on pretty quickly, leaving them to Annette. Madame Bénatar was lovely, with an extremely kind smile. Her teeth are a little crooked and that made me think of Felix. She studied in France and was the very first woman in Morocco to become a lawyer. She spends her time helping refugees like us, especially people who are having a very difficult time because of the war and the way the Nazis are treating Jews. I think I might be a lawyer in America, although I’ll probably only be able to do it some of the time as I’ll still need to look after the animals on the farm.

Then I moved on to chat to Miss Ellis and Mr Stafford Reid. Miss Ellis introduced me as her protégée and explained that we share a passion for the books of Dorothy L. Sayers. It turns out Mr Reid (who is very handsome) is a fan of Lord Peter Wimsey too, so we had a very good chat about The Five Red Herrings, which we are reading in my English lessons at the moment. There are six suspects in the case of the murder of a Scottish artist: one is the culprit and the others are the five red herrings. Mr Stafford Reid asked who I thought the murderer might turn out to be and why, and he listened very carefully to my reasoning – although he didn’t give away whodunnit of course.

After that, Maman said that dinner would be ready and I could go off to my room to read my book.

I decided I’d sit on the stairs for a while, just where they curve so you can’t be seen from below, and listen to the conversation in the dining room a bit more as some of it was turning out to be pretty interesting after all.

And then two very interesting things happened while I was sitting there.

The first was that Annette came out to powder her nose and Olivier followed her. He grabbed her in the hallway and I was about to shout at him to let her go when I realised she was actually grabbing him right back. They had quite a long kiss, a bit like Deanna Durbin and Robert Stack in First Love, and then Annette smoothed her hair down and went back into the dining room. Olivier waited a minute or two and had a good look at himself in the hall mirror, then he went back in too.

The conversation in the dining room carried on and a lot of it was about the war, of course. It always is these days. The Afrika Korps have brought very powerful tanks called Panzers to fight the British in the desert and have pretty much managed to drive them back out of Libya to Egypt. Judging by the excited tone of the Radio Maroc news reporters and the more serious tone of the BBC ones, this probably really has been happening. It’s quite frightening to think about the Germans becoming more powerful and taking over everywhere, so I decided to stop thinking about that and imagined how I would tease Annette about kissing Olivier instead. I was just thinking I might go up to bed and read another chapter of The Five Red Herrings, when the second very interesting thing happened.

Miss Ellis emerged from the dining room to powder her nose. Just after that, Mr Stafford Reid appeared too. This in itself was an interesting development and for a moment I wondered if they were going to kiss each other as well. But instead they just stood quite close together and talked quietly. I had to very carefully lean my head against the banisters to be able to hear what they were saying.

First of all, Mr Reid said, ‘You’re right, Dorothy, Guillaume is the perfect man for the trip.’ I listened even harder at that because Guillaume is Papa. Then Miss Ellis said, ‘Yes, but travelling on his own might create suspicion.’ And Mr Reid nodded and said, ‘But not if it’s a family holiday to the mountains.’ Miss Ellis replied, ‘Do you think Delphine would agree to such an undertaking?’ (Delphine is Maman’s name). And Mr Reid said, ‘She wouldn’t need to know it’s anything other than a family trip. Guillaume will be able to persuade her, I’m sure.’

Then Miss Ellis said, ‘Do you think it will be safe for the girls?’ and Mr Reid said, ‘I think it will be safe because of the girls. They’ll be the perfect camouflage. A family outing to explore a little more of Morocco – what could be more innocent?’

I had my forehead pressed so hard against the banisters by that point that they left red dents in my skin. But then Mr Reid and Miss Ellis went back into the dining room, where the conversation seemed to become a bit more boring again. I suppose people had drunk a great deal of the good wine by that stage of the proceedings. They were all laughing a lot. I stayed sitting on the stairs for a while longer but no one else came out and so in the end I went quietly up to my room. I hung my dress up carefully in the wardrobe, as Maman had instructed me to do, and then I lay on my bed for quite a long time just thinking about everything. I didn’t even read my book. I wondered about those brown envelopes that Papa had been passing to Miss Ellis and the list of places and numbers I’d seen and I had a feeling that somehow this plan for a trip to the mountains was linked to them, although I couldn’t work out how exactly.