Singing in the Wilderness

by Isobel Chace

  ‘Why are you in such a tizzy?’ he grinned at her. He rucked up her hair, making it stand on end, with the pleased look of a small boy. ‘It does you good to get mussed up once in a while. What are you doing for lunch?’

  She smoothed down her hair with an indignant hand, making good her escape as fast as she could. But when she shut the door behind her, she could hear him laughing at her and she found she was smiling herself. What a strange man he was! One moment working with a speed and precision that bore witness to his dedication and the next as playful as a child without a care in the world!

  ‘Oh, Stephanie, I like your hair like that!’ Gloria ran down the passage, catching up with her. ‘A half-fringe really suits you! When did you decide to have it done like that?’

  They disappeared into the cloakroom together and Stephanie made a little rush towards the nearest looking-glass before she had to answer the other English girl.

  ‘I like it!’ she exclaimed, marvelling at her reflection.

  ‘Why not?’ Gloria shrugged. ‘It makes you look softer, more approachable. I suppose you feel you can relax a bit now that it isn’t your father you’re working for. You always looked so severe and devoted to the cause! If I’d been you, I’d have chucked it long ago! I like to live my own life.’

  But if she kept it, would Cas recognise what he had inadvertently created? Would he even notice? She touched the fringe he had given her with tentative fingers, pushing it into a better shape.

  ‘I like it!’ she declared again.

  ‘Good for you,’ Gloria retorted, rapidly losing interest. ‘Talking about living you own life, where are you living now? I suppose the big man wanted your father’s apartment for himself?’

  Stephanie nodded. ‘I have a smaller place in the same building—just a room really, but it’s quite nice.’

  Gloria turned speculative eyes on to her. ‘Bit of a change for you all the same. You’ll notice the difference when you have to pay for everything yourself. I thought when we first arrived it would be fun having another English girl around, but you believe in keeping yourself to yourself, don’t you? Shall we see more of you now that you haven’t got Daddy to run home to every evening?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Well, I wish you would!’ Gloria went on. ‘There’s not much a girl can do on her own here. The Persian girls have their mothers after them if they so much as smile at a man on their way home, and their families have hysterics if they’re half an hour late, or anything like that. I’ve been downright lonely since I’ve been here.’

  ‘Oh, Gloria, I’m sorry. I never thought!’ Stephanie said quickly. ‘You should have said something before. You could at least have come home sometimes with Father and myself.’

  ‘Thanks very much! That wasn’t quite what I hand in mind! Now if your father had been more like Mr. Ruddock I might have considered it! Why do you suppose they chose an American to run things? I thought this was a strictly English contract! Though he’s dishy enough for me whatever he is! Did you ever see such a huge man, and handsome with it?’

  ‘I suppose he is,’ Stephanie said, as if she had just discovered the fact.

  ‘You don’t mean you haven’t noticed!’ Gloria expostulated. ‘Come to think of it, you might not have done. I suppose living with Daddy rather cramped your style where men are concerned?’

  ‘I’ve never thought about it,’ Stephanie answered truthfully.

  ‘You may not have thought of it before,’ Gloria observed with relish, ‘but working with him every day, you’d better wake up and think about it now! What I’d give to have your opportunities!’

  Stephanie thought rather less highly of her opportunities that afternoon when she unlocked the door of her office and began to take stock of the damage that had been done to her filing system. She cleared a space in the middle of the room and sat on the floor, putting the papers in neat piles all round her. Nothing seemed to be missing, but then nothing was in its right place either. It all seemed to be a completely meaningless bit of vandalism, and she would have dismissed it as such if it hadn’t been for the planning that must have been involved in getting hold of the keys to the files.

  Fatemeh put her head round the door quite early in the afternoon.

  ‘I’ve come to help you myself,’ she announced. ‘There’s been too much talk about this downstairs already and I don’t want to encourage it. What shall I do first?’

  Stephanie pointed out the various piles that could be safely filed away. ‘I’d rather you left the last two to me,’ she said. ‘I want to make absolutely sure that there’s nothing missing from the confidential files.’

  Fatemeh nodded. She was a pretty girl, intelligent, with a bright perky way of speaking that disguised her essentially placid good nature. It had taken a lot of persuasion for her family to allow her to work for a foreign company and she was always met at the door by one of the maids of the house who, as closely veiled in a chador as her young mistress, escorted her to and from her home daily.

  ‘Do you know why it happened?’ the Persian girl asked as she settled to her task. ‘Has it to do with your father?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stephanie admitted. ‘If my father had wanted any of these letters, he only had to ask, or he could have got it himself. Why all this?’

  Fatemeh smiled across at her. ‘I like your father, which is why I haven’t told anyone else, but he was here yesterday afternoon, I saw him myself.’

  ‘You saw him? But what did he say?’

  Fatemeh shrugged. ‘I said I was sorry he was leaving and he said he was too. Naturally, I didn’t ask him what he was doing in his own daughter’s office.’ The Persian girl lowered her eyes and blushed. ‘He did say that it was all a misunderstanding that he had to go back to England, but that he would be back soon enough. He said I was a good girl and I was to look after you until he came back to Isfahan. He was afraid Mr. Ruddock got ideas about you!’

  ‘And what are you supposed to do if he does?’ Stephanie asked dryly.

  ‘I can always be there if you need me. He is intimidating, this Mr. Ruddock, don’t you think? He is so large!’

  ‘Gloria doesn’t seem to think so!’

  Fatemeh laughed. ‘Gloria doesn’t have to work for him!’ She pursed up her lips thoughtfully. ‘You must not let Gloria make you do things you would rather not. She is English like yourself, but not at all the same. I would not take her home to meet my family.’

  Touched by her obvious concern, Stephanie made a small movement of protest. ‘Gloria is all right. I think she’s a bit lonely.’

  ‘If she is, it is not for lack of company. She knows many men in the city, but few women. My brother knows her.’ Stephanie went on resolutely sorting out the papers in front of her. She would have liked to have asked Fatemeh what else she knew about Gloria, but she didn’t think she ought to encourage her to gossip. That was the hardest part of being the boss’s secretary, she was always inhibited when she was talking to the other girls in the office.

  She picked up a new pile of letters and rested them on her knee, riffling through them to get them into some kind of order before she carefully checked the date of each one in turn. It was only then she realised that there were letters there that she had never seen before. Yet on each one was her father’s initials followed by her own as the ostensible typist of the letter. She began to look at them more closely, putting the ones she knew nothing about in a separate pile on their own. Only when she had collected them all together did she begin to read through them, intrigued to find out what they were all about. And then she wished she hadn’t. They were mainly letters her father had written to the suppliers of most of the telecommunications equipment they had been waiting for. The only difference was that in these letters the whole order had been cancelled and in terms which had called forth an irate reply and threats to sue for breach of contract.

  Stephanie hid the letters under her skirt without any idea as to what she was going to do with them. She went on
sorting the rest of the papers automatically and in silence, hardly acknowledging Fatemeh’s delight in their progress at all.

  ‘Are you tired, Stephanie?’ the Persian girl asked her. ‘Shall I go now? We can finish it tomorrow, yes?’

  ‘Yes, good idea,’ Stephanie agreed. She thanked the other girl as warmly as she could, swallowing down her relief in being left alone, and yet afraid to have no further excuse not to come to some decision about the letters she had found.

  Yet when she was alone she went on sitting on the floor, doing nothing at all but trying to blink back the tears that suddenly afflicted her. She didn’t even notice when the door opened again and Cas came in.

  ‘Stephanie, I told you to get something done about that lift!’ He came nearer, reaching down and swinging her up on to her feet. ‘What’s happened now, little one? Whatever it is, it isn’t worth crying over, is it? Have you got a handkerchief?’ He gave her a resigned look as she shook her head. ‘Of course not! What woman ever has? You’d better use mine, and then when you’ve dried out you can tell me all about it.’

  CHAPTER IV

  ‘Now, what’s it all about?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she sobbed. ‘Absolutely nothing! Nothing I can tell you about anyway. You’re the last person I can tell!’

  ‘I hadn’t realised I was such an ogre!’ He put his arms right round her and buried her head in his chest. Accustomed as she was to being as tall, or very nearly so, as the men she knew, it had a strange effect on Stephanie to find herself cradled like a child against him. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she warned him. ‘It makes it worse!’ But far from letting her go, he only held her the tighter, an odd smile playing round his lips. ‘In what way worse?’ he asked her. His hands caressed her back, tracing the line of her spine with gentle fingers.

  ‘Don’t!’ she repeated.

  ‘Why not?’

  She felt quite weak at the knees, with all thought of the letters forgotten. Where were all her fine resolutions now? All she wanted was to be closer still to him, to have his lips claim hers once again, and to hold him tightly against her while he kissed her.

  ‘I haven’t finished work yet,’ she said foolishly.

  ‘Oh yes, you have, my dear! You finish when I tell you to, or are you going to make a habit of arguing with your boss? I shouldn’t advise it. I have ways of dealing with recalcitrant secretaries.’

  ‘Have you?’ She couldn’t think of anything he might do that she wouldn’t welcome with open arms. She gave him a distracted look, wiping her damp face with the back of her hand.

  ‘I like the fringe,’ he commented, a distinct twinkle in his blue eyes. ‘I wondered if you’d keep it.’

  ‘It just happened to fall over my face. It isn’t very practical for the office.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ He pushed her hair into better shape, giving his full concentration to the task. ‘It wants to be a little shorter. Have you a pair of scissors?’

  ‘You’re not going to cut it!’ She took a step away from him, catching up her handbag from the desk and clutching it to her. ‘You might do it all wrong!’

  He eased the bag out of her clasp, amused by her reaction. What else do you keep in your purse?’ he asked her. ‘A tissue wouldn’t come amiss. You’ve blotched your eye-shadow when you were crying about nothing.’

  ‘Oh, do I look awful?’ She tried to take her bag back so that she could take a look at herself in the mirror inside, but he held on to it, opening it carefully and searching for the scissors. He found them with a triumphant look at her and snapped the bag shut again.

  ‘You look cute!’ he assured her. He turned her round to face him with an air of purpose from which there seemed to be no mistake. ‘Look up, honey, or I may cut your eyelashes off by mistake!’

  She did so, determined to tell him what she thought of men who looked uninvited into ladies’ handbags, but, when it came to it, she never said a word. It wouldn’t have made any difference if she had, she told herself. He would have gone his own way just the same.

  ‘I’m not the only one to find you intimidating!’ she burst out. ‘Fatemeh does too.’

  ‘Do I know Fatemeh?’

  She nodded, only to be rewarded by a swift tug at her hair, forcing her face upwards again. ‘She runs the typing pool. She came up to help me with this.’ She waved her hand in the direction of the piles of papers still awaiting filing.

  He pulled her hair down over her eyes and snipped away without answering. ‘There!’ he said at last, examining the results with a pleased smile. ‘Since when did you find me intimidating?’

  ‘From the first moment I met you!’

  ‘Is that what it was? I thought you rather liked being swept off your feet.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t!’ she denied.

  The expression in his eyes openly mocked her. ‘Is Madam pleased with her new style?’ He put his head on one side and considered her appearance. ‘It’ll do, I think. It suits you, and it’s short enough now for you not to have to peer through it like an overgrown Yorkshire terrier.’

  ‘Do you mind! What do you know about Yorkshires anyway?’

  He looked at her solemnly. ‘We have dogs in America too,’ he said.

  She flushed, feeling foolish. ‘I know that! But I can’t see you with a dog somehow. It wouldn’t fit in with your way of life.’

  ‘True, but I may change my mind any time now. There was a time when I thought all men who worked abroad should live alone, but now I’m not so sure. What do you think about that?’

  Stephanie pulled the glass out of her bag and studied herself for a long moment before replying. She looked completely different! Less the perfect secretary and more—More what? More like a girl who wanted to please, she thought, and was not very sure how to go about it. She looked—there was no doubt about it!—very much more like herself!

  ‘I don’t think anyone should live alone,’ she said.

  ‘And Iran is hardly the back of beyond these days,’ he added, watching her closely.

  ‘But you may not be here very long,’ she objected. ‘They may send you somewhere else and bring my father back to finish here.’

  He took the mirror from her. ‘No, they won’t do that. Was that what all the tears were about, Stephanie? Were you missing your father?’

  ‘Not really.’ She was too honest to pretend about a thing like that. The memory of the letters she had found gave her a nasty jolt, though, and she wondered yet again what to do about them. ‘Cas, how important is all this equipment to the project? Can we manage without it?’

  ‘Not a hope. They’re laying the cables now between the Russian border and the eastern part of the country, and the stocks are running low. Still, it isn’t the only trouble we’re having. Some of the nomads don’t care for the way the wires sing when the wind gets into them. They think they’re voices from another world and want them taken away. Sooner or later we may have to sort something out about that.’ He grinned. ‘If I go on tour, shall I take you with me?’

  Her breath caught in her middle and her eyes were wide with excitement. ‘Would you? Could you? I’d love to go anywhere!’

  ‘It would mean roughing it,’ he warned her. ‘You like to have everything in apple-pie order, don’t forget, and camping isn’t always like that.’

  ‘I should think it’s more necessary than ever in difficult conditions,’ she retorted. ‘If everything is put away properly fewer things get lost. It stands to reason!’

  ‘So it does!’ he teased her. ‘You haven’t said what you think of your new hair-style.’

  ‘Haven’t I?’ She averted her face, blushing a little. ‘I like it. I didn’t know you were a hairdresser as well as everything else.’

  His smile grew wider. ‘I wanted to change your style right from the start!’ He looked up as there was a knock at the door. ‘Come in!’ He was not smiling now. On the contrary, he looked downright grim.

  The door opened a few inches to admit the most beautiful girl Stephanie had ever se
en. She crossed the room with sinuous grace, her feet completely silent, with eyes only for Cas. Voluptuous was the adjective that first came to mind, with a fantastic, curvaceous figure that bordered dangerously on being overweight, but so far was just teetering on the brink of a description that Stephanie knew without being told would reduce the figure’s owner to hysterical despair.

  ‘Meet Amber,’ he invited Stephanie laconically.

  Stephanie shot him a bewildered glance. ‘Amber?’

  ‘My professional name,’ the girl put in with a complacent smile. ‘I’m a singer.’

  ‘She dances too,’ Cas added.

  ‘The two go together,’ Amber retorted. ‘You may see me anywhere in the Middle East. I am very much in demand!’

  ‘Yes, but what is your real name?’ Stephanie asked. Amber shrugged her magnificent shoulders. ‘It’s too long ago for me to remember. Amber is more me. My other name didn’t suit me at all.’ She managed to drag her eyes away from Cas’s face and stared with surprise first at Stephanie and then at the little pile of hair on the floor. ‘What strange things one does in offices nowadays!’

  ‘We had a burglar,’ Stephanie muttered.

  ‘So I see. What else was taken besides pieces of your hair?’

  ‘Oh, that!’ Stephanie raised a muted laugh. ‘That was Cas—Mr. Ruddock, I mean. He was giving me a haircut.’

  ‘And you allowed him to? The result might have been quite—odd, don’t you think? He has never to my knowledge cut a girl’s hair before!’

  ‘There’s a first time for everything,’ Cas put in. ‘Did you want something, Amber?’

  ‘You, darling, what else? But now I’m here I’d like to hear all about this burglar of yours. Is this the only office he broke into?’

  ‘So far as we know,’ Cas answered her. ‘It’s a storm in a teacup. Stephanie makes too much of it. It hasn’t done her temper any good to have to spend the afternoon clearing things up in here.’ He put an easy arm around Amber’s waist and led her towards the door. ‘What do you do when I don’t feed you? Does the management allow you to starve when you sing and dance so nicely for them?’