‘And can I?’
‘No, Piers, you can’t – neither of you can. It would be dreadfully rude. You’ll just have to stick it out.’
‘It will be a very short ceremony,’ soothed Mark Audley, who had come to break the news. ‘Er – it’s my fault, I’m afraid. After Miss Edith’s interjection, I left a bit out of His Highness’s speech this morning. I’ve got to put it in this evening.’
‘Oh do tell us! Was it something rude?’
‘(Alice, be quiet.) Oh, in that case, Mr Audley . . .’
‘I say, I do wish you’d all call me Mark.’
‘All right, Mark. Will the speech be long?’
Mr Audley laughed and ruffled Piers’ hair. ‘No – quite short – I promise you.’
The packing was done, the sun was beginning, under the mercy of Allah, perceptibly to decline.
They sat in the shadowy room, where red-gold light struck through the windows, in silence; very tired; half unwilling to leave this place that was a fairy tale, half longing to feel about them again the dear familiarities of home.
Half-past four. Here was Mark, accompanied by three servants, who took up the luggage and bore it away, silently as ghosts, along the long, sun-pierced corridor, down the winding staircase, out into the great market square where the booths glowed, and as they followed once again there broke out soft clapping.
The Great Gate stood wide, and beyond it the desert stared past Qu’aid in endless pale waves, and beside the gate were the twelve doctors, sheltered from the declining sun by a billowing purple canopy held aloft by six servants, and beside them – Piers gasped with delight – the Emir mounted on his white camel.
‘Gosh! I believe he’s going to ride with us. Oh, hurrah!’
‘Piers.’
Mark had come to the side of the great kneeling beast, and was consulting a sheet of paper. A small crowd had collected and was watching every movement of the visitors.
‘This concerns the people of Qu’aid,’ Mr Audley said, after some sentences in Arabic which produced a ripple of laughter and nodding heads. ‘Your Emir desires me to say to you what I – er – omitted to say this morning: it is this. Slater’s Law’ – here he turned and bowed to Juliet, standing beside him – ‘is a law which injures no one. Marie Curie, daughter of Poland, to whom the world owes, with her husband, the discovery of radium, did not receive the honour that the University of Qu’aid has bestowed upon Miss Slater and radium has not been entirely beneficial to Man. But about Slater’s Law there is an aura both of pure knowledge and innocent magic belonging to an earlier world. Slater’s Law does not kill. All that can be said about its destructive powers’ – and here he looked towards the Westerners and slyly smiled – ‘is that it has destroyed, once and for ever, one of your sayings. Never again will any inhabitant of this most unhappy planet be able to say with enjoyable astonishment, “What a coincidence!”’
The faint clapping began again. Clemence noticed, with mixed feeling, that one of the servants was assisting Piers to mount the Emir’s camel. The little boy settled himself, his face suggesting in glory the setting sun, in front of the rider, whose fierce features were smiling.
‘His Highness begs that you will allow your son to ride with him,’ Mr Audley said hastily. ‘It is a great treat always for his own sons.’
‘Of course – how very kind. Please thank His Highness.’
And now – oh dear – the old doctors had somehow got hold of Juliet and were talking to her. If ever I get out of this place, I’ll never stir from Wanby again, Clemence promised herself.
But they were moving at last. The doctors were making stiff ceremonial bows, the camel had jerked itself to its feet in three awkwardly graceful movements, the Rolls was bumping towards them. Somehow they were all safely inside, and Mark had climbed in with them, and the luggage was being stowed in the boot, and the Great Gate of Qu’aid was slowly shutting away the grey-rose and green-shaded booths and its smiling citizens.
Edith’s sharp voice began: ‘Mr Audley – Mark – it was funny. Some of the servants didn’t behave like servants at all. Their manners were bad.’
(And so are yours, my daughter. Must be taken in hand, and soon. )
‘Not really funny, Miss Edith. Some of those “servants” were the Emir’s relations – cousins or nephews.’
‘Oh, ravvy,’ from Alice.
‘There has been intense curiosity in Miss Slater and indeed in all your family,’ Mark Audley said to Frank. ‘But of course, to show it, especially towards the ladies of the party, would have been gravely discourteous. Barbaric. Unheard of. Western,’ he ended smoothly. ‘So, some of the younger ones, wild young men used to having their own way, had themselves dressed as servants, and waited on you.’
He shrugged. The car here ran into a stifling, stinging, miniature sandstorm, tinged scarlet by the falling sun, and the women wrapped their heads in scarves. The camel with its burden loped easily alongside, white and wraith-like in the haze. Piers was invisible, having huddled into the breast of the Emir’s voluminous robes.
‘How do wild young men let off steam, then?’ Hugh demanded, as they emerged from the pallid cloud. ‘It’s a marvellously beautiful place, of course, but pretty boring, I imagine, stuck here year in and year out.’
‘Camel-racing, gambling, hunting, mild drugs.’ (A nudge from Hugh.) ‘And of course they are always free at any time to leave Qu’aid.’
‘Well, why don’t they? I would,’ said Edith.
‘Because it would be for ever,’ Mark Audley answered, after a pause. ‘The law is: if you leave (unless of course you are a student) you may never return.’
The camel reluctantly ceased its long, swift pacing, rearing its sneering head back on the long, scarlet leather rein. Then it began, at a word from the Emir, slowly to kneel.
The Rolls slid to a stop on the road covered with sand from the recent storm, and Emma noticed how their shadows ran grotesquely away from them, dark on the pallor. Glancing behind her, she saw, against the setting sun, at a distance of perhaps half a mile, a number of soldiers mounted on white camels.
The Emir said, in English, lifting his right hand: ‘Goodbye. May delights and good fortune go with you.’
Piers, disentangling himself from the protective draperies, paused to bestow a jerky bow, then raced towards the car and climbed in next to the driver. The Emir spoke in Arabic to Mark Audley, who replied. The camel rose; the hawkish face smiled above them for a moment. Then the great beast raced off into the red light, past the escort, and the Emir and his bodyguards vanished behind the dunes.
‘Oh, are you coming on, Mark? Goody.’
This, of course, came from Alice.
‘At His Highness’s express wish, and at my request.’
‘As far as that ghastly El Oued?’
‘Yes. I shall see you safe aboard the Oil Plane.’
This was a very smart machine, nicknamed thus by the men of business who flew into El Oued.
Suddenly it was night, with soft eerie shadows in a cool wind. Edith let down the windows.
Juliet was seated beside Frank, her head turned to watch the soft pallor and the shapelessness going by; sometimes a gap between dunes revealed the Great Place itself, the endlessness, looking in at this moving dot, under a rising moon that had deepened in colour from water silver to a glowing gold.
Juliet’s expression, Frank thought, was more serene than he had ever seen it, yet her face also looked noticeably older. He wondered what she felt about it all – the immense honour, the strangeness and the beauty.
Probably he would never know.
‘When do we camp? I’m starving,’ said Piers.
‘In an hour – we’ll go to bed early, then we can start at dawn.’
It seemed a long time before the black tents were up, the fire lit, and the servant, a smiling person, was boiling water, opening tins, and stealing glances at the girls – which Alice with flirtatiousness, Edith with indifference, and Emma with childish
friendliness, returned.
33
Next day, when they had been driving along that familiar road for some hours, and were entering a region of low rock-strewn hills, Juliet suddenly exclaimed, ‘Oh please slow down,’ and pointed.
On a rocky ridge high above the nearest dune, the last outcrop of the vanishing heights, an ibex was standing, looking down at them. Its great curved horns glowed amber-white against the blue of the sky. Its large proud innocent eyes surveyed, without fear, the intruders below. For perhaps a moment it stood, then turned and sprang lightly over the rise of the rock, away into the desert.
Frank motioned the driver on.
‘That was Qu’aid saying goodbye,’ said Emma at last.
‘And good riddance, judging by his expression,’ said Hugh.
‘Kind of scornful, like the camels,’ Piers added.
‘Oh no, Piers, not scornful,’ said Emma. ‘I don’t know what he was saying, but I felt it was something.’
‘“Instead”, perhaps,’ her father said.
‘“Instead”?’
‘It’s from a poem by Auden. “Clear, unscalable, ahead/Rise the Mountains of Instead.”’
‘That’s the way you’ve brought us up, isn’t it, Daddy?’ Emma said, in a moment.
‘Tried to, darling.’
If he had a favourite among his horde of children, it was she.
‘Oh,’ Alice sighed suddenly. ‘Won’t it be lovely to be home.’
‘You ought to apologize to Mark for that,’ said Clemence. ‘It’s his country.’
‘But I share your feelings, Miss Alice,’ Mark said, fervently.
Him and his Miss Alice! thought Clemence. She turned to Juliet.
‘Decided what you’re going to do with your millions yet?’
‘I hadn’t thought – I was thinking about Hrothgar, wondering if he’s been all right.’
‘So long as no one teases him,’ said Edith, who had, from her chosen study of Anglo-Saxon literature, named the interesting bird.
In another hour they were sitting in the shadow of the car and drinking scalding tea. The hills were low blue shades on the horizon; the black, ill-made road ran ahead through featureless flatness. Juliet said suddenly, staring out across its monotony:
‘I’ll be glad to be home.’
‘Will you? Will you really, in spite of it all being so beautiful and strange here?’ Frank asked, turning to her.
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘That’s why I said “no” when he asked me.’
‘Asked you? Who did? What?’ exclaimed Edith.
‘The old doctor. Not the one who got uptight about me getting the award. The one what – who – showed me into the chair.’
‘Well I never,’ cooed Alice. ‘I saw him rabbiting on, and I hoped he wasn’t cursing you.’
‘And he was asking you to stay on at Qu’aid?’ Clemence marvelled.
‘Oh yes, Mrs Pennecuick,’ Mark Audley put in. ‘I translated for him. “We, the doctors of the University of Qu’aid, invite you to remain here, within the university, as a doctor, to add to its honour and the richness of the learning—’
‘I bet that nearly choked him,’ from Edith.
‘It’s the formula they use when they invite anyone to join the faculty. About every fifty years or so,’ Mark said.
‘Wow!’ exclaimed Emma. ‘That’s better.’
Juliet had taken out a crumpled piece of paper from an old notecase in her jacket pocket, and was inspecting it in a detached manner.
‘Is that the cheque?’ Hugh asked respectfully, and she nodded.
‘I’ll buy you all super presents, anyway,’ she said at last, and put the cheque away.
But Frank was not satisfied.
‘But why didn’t you accept?’ He leant forward, looking earnestly into the tired, sallow face from which all trace of youth had faded. ‘I should have thought—’
‘Oh, I couldn’t. You’re my family, like.’
She looked round on the listening circle of faces and slowly smiled. ‘I couldn’t leave you all now – you, and my animals. Oh no. I couldn’t stay there. I told him so. Straight.’
And now time began to rush by like a rising wind; with Alice married to a rich, silly, likeable man thrice divorced; with Edith practising feminism and journalism, living with her small daughter in a cottage in Watford; with Emma a nurse; with Hugh finding a spiritual home in the City; with Piers working steadily through Hayleybury and Cambridge towards Medicine; and with Josh, unexpectedly, showing a talent for the piano that blossomed into modest but gratifying success. And Clemence and Frank were so occupied, with pain and joy in their children, with the ever-increasing growth, all over the world, of the AIEG, that their hair whitened and their bodies grew feebler without their taking much notice.
Juliet had settled into an early middle age, going about her daily routine of tending and observing the animals, that were replaced, as the years took them away, by others equally well cared for.
She smoked. She read: unusual books about mysteries at sea, and travel in the few remaining lonely places of the Earth. The oak tree beside her door, the ‘green castle’ beneath which old Hrothgar lay buried, was her reception salon, and there, in the months of summer, came grey-haired Edmund to sit opposite her (the little woman in the big cane chair who looked seventy but was in fact not yet fifty) and grumble to her about contemporary poetry; and here a bent, tired Arthur Robinson timidly brought his pert grandchildren. Her books of reference and her table were dusted meticulously, but never used; she worked no more.
Arthur once remarked to Edmund, after one of these visits, that whenever they saw Juliet nowadays she was lying back in that chair. And she had taken to employing a daily help.
‘Burnt out at last,’ was the glum answer, and Arthur, being on the whole a cheerful and contented man, changed the subject.
One summer morning of celestial beauty, her dog Young Robert, second successor to the first Robert, was heard barking urgently outside the door of her house. It was nearly breakfast-time; Clemence put aside the newspaper which she was reading in bed while awaiting her tray, got up with some difficulty, and went slowly to the open window.
‘Robert – what is it, boy?’
More anxious barking and whining.
Clemence and Frank got there just as her eyes slowly opened. The yellowish face looked up at them from her narrow bed, and then the familiar ugly little hand crept out from beneath the coverlet towards them, and Frank clasped it, and held it fast in his own. The dog whined.
‘Sorry – so tired. I can’t get up,’ she whispered. ‘You can’t imagine how tired I am . . .’
The whisper died away, and her eyes closed again. But her lips moved, and bending down to the worn, withered face, Frank thought that the words he just caught, as her breathing stopped, were: ‘Love to all.’
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Copyright © The Beneficiaries of the Estate of Stella Gibbons 2016
Lines from ‘Autumn Song’ by W.H. Auden, here, copyright © 1936 W.H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd
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