The girl smiled cynically. ‘Where I come from that would be rather difficult for the average woman.’
He looked at her curiously. ‘You still haven’t said where you do come from?’
But she refused to be drawn, and continued to pump him for over an hour about his own affairs, until, at last, the car drew up on the same lay-by that he had used on the previous day. Two Civil Guards were still on duty and they could easily follow the track of the Lambretta’s wheels from where it had skidded on the dust to the deep scar where brakes had been applied too late as it leapt down the slope.
The women were preparing food, but welcomed him with a respect which made him blush with embarrassment, and, as his companion, nothing was good enough for Miss Turquoise. Working with the skill of a professional diplomat she seated him in a corner of the flat ground outside the house and boiled black coffee whilst she gossiped with the women indoors. And then, before leaving, she took him to a bedroom where the child’s mother was lying, her face now serene and with her hands clasped together under her chin, a crucifix between her breasts and with candles burning on wooden boxes by her side. It was quite pathetic, and he was glad to leave.
As they motored downhill to the next valley and back towards the extinct volcano of Atalaya, Miss Turquoise was unusually silent. For ten minutes they walked round the lip of the crater as the sun began to dip below the skyline, and then, in the brief twilight, sipped a glass of local wine at the ramshackle café nearby before returning towards Las Palmas and dinner on the outskirts of the city.
She peeled her last peach shortly before ten o’clock and as his ship was due to sail three hours later he decided to bring matters to a head with shock tactics. ‘Time to go, I’m leaving Las Palmas in just over two hours. All good things come to an end.’
‘I know,’ she nodded agreeably. ‘You arranged passage on Viera y Clavijo this afternoon and Miguel told me that arrangements have been made to remove your luggage at midnight. Your bill has been paid and you expect to go direct to the ship. You see,’ she added quietly, ‘I have begun to take quite an interest in you.’
‘We-ll.’ His voice was very soft. ‘And what have I done to earn such a compliment?’
Grant had never felt at ease with this assignment. Not from the beginning when Miss Sidders had first outlined a project which seemed outrageously melodramatic. But he had seldom been more taken aback than when she smiled straight into his eyes. ‘I too am sailing tonight. So we shall go to the Sahara together. I decided to change my plans when I heard that you were leaving the islands.’
‘And why?’
‘Because,’ she said quietly, ‘I ask myself why an American surgeon wishes to visit Mauretania or the Sahara. These are not tourist places. Then again I ask myself why you leave Gran Canaria so soon after meeting me. It is not flattering.’
‘So?’
‘So.’ She mocked. ‘There must be some very good reason behind all this and I wonder if you are running away from something.’
It was the opening he needed. ‘I am.’ There was no hesitation in his voice, and his mind was racing far ahead of his words as he leaned forward and spun an off-the-cuff story which would have deceived women more shrewd than even Miss Turquoise. He was forty-two. For years he had been content to make money and be conventional, but now he realized that life and adventure were passing him by and he wanted to get away from the orderliness of Western-style living. He had enough money to live well without touching much of his capital, and even if he did eat into it from time to time it would last him for at least another twenty years.
His decision to sail for Africa had been an impulsive gesture due chiefly to the fact that the girl had seen him for what he was, an uninteresting creature with no experience of real living at all.
She laughed aloud. ‘Poor Dr. Gunten. You are much too complicated. No man can run away either from himself or his destiny, and you ought to know that.’
‘But he can look for his destiny,’ said Grant slowly. ‘He can try to make up for the lost years.’
‘Doing what?’ Her voice was suddenly curt.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Africa is full of new countries. Some of them need help. New universities are being formed. There might, perhaps, be a place in one of them. I could hold down a Chair of Surgery.’
‘Be a professor, you mean?’
He nodded. ‘Why not?’
‘And that would be your destiny! Working at the same job but deceiving yourself into thinking it was exciting because you were cutting black people instead of white.’
‘I could do some hunting in my off-time,’ he added defensively. ‘I am a good shot. There is still big game in some parts of Africa. And it would be exciting to study races which have never been exposed to Western influences, people who still live under traditional taboos.’
‘Everyone lives under taboos,’ she said. ‘Spain is full of them and from what I have read there are as many social taboos in America or London as in wildest Africa.’
‘Well, in any case,’ continued Grant defiantly, ‘I want to get away from organized society and I hope to find some sort of job in Africa.’
‘Any kind of job?’
He knew that this was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. ‘Yes. Anything which offers new experiences and a chance to do some surgery. I’ve given up everything in the States, sold house, land and car. The only things I’ve kept are my instruments, a portable X-ray apparatus, some books and drugs which might be of use in a new country where supplies are short.’
She outlined a design on the tablecloth with a delicately manicured nail. ‘And you brought these things to Gran Canaria?’
‘Shipped them,’ said Grant briefly. ‘They haven’t even been unpacked.’
‘But you don’t know where you will settle down to use them?’
‘No idea,’ he admitted. ‘I’m waiting for destiny to tell me.’
‘Then let me be your destiny.’ She prepared to go. ‘We shall sail together in less than two hours and that is a good enough start, don’t you think!’
On the way back to the city she painted a picture which would have surprised almost anyone, even with the knowledge of Africa which he had acquired working for United Nations Forces during the late fifties, but always leaving as an unmentioned blank everything which might have killed his enthusiasm.
Her family had ruled a group of oases in the interior for centuries, and right on until Spain had established a colony on the bulge of Africa opposite the Canaries. But Spain had never succeeded in establishing more than a nominal authority over tribal families in the deep interior or in controlling tribesmen whose first allegiance was to family and oasis. After more than a century of fighting against the Spanish Legionnaires a few thriving desert communities had survived, each centred on its own wells along the frontier of Spanish Sahara and what had now become the new territory called Mauretania.
Strictly speaking her uncle’s ground overlapped the arbitrary new frontier between the two countries, but the oases proper were on Spanish territory and could be reached only by camel or aircraft.
She was her uncle’s right hand, and since she had been given a good education abroad he depended upon her judgement in everything which mattered. Above all he wanted to create a proper medical service, because until now everyone had had to rely upon herbal remedies passed down through the generations and which seldom did much good. She had promised her uncle that if ever she found a doctor cut out for work in the interior she would ask him to join them. He would have to start with almost nothing, learn Arabic and local dialects, eat strange food and live the life of the people he was trying to help.
Arabic! Fortunately, thought Grant, that at least remained a secret. No one in the area knew that he had learned enough to understand the drift of conversation or to fend for himself if necessary. It was a weapon which might become important.
She had been leaning towards him, talking eagerly as they approached the city, but when the car
cut into lighted streets she sat back formally in her own corner. ‘I have been talking too much. But have I made you wish to come to my country?’
‘Sure.’ His voice was brusque enough to be almost rude, and his thoughts were again racing ahead. How long would it be before someone recognized his picture in tomorrow’s paper and knew that Grant was still alive? ‘How long to our first port?’ he asked.
She smiled. ‘Just over two days to Villa Cisneros.’
‘And you disembark there?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I go to Guerra. It is near Mauretania and there is a desert road inland toward iron-mines. So I travel by jeep for almost a hundred miles but leave it at my camp, and one of my men then takes it back to Guerra or Port Etienne.’
‘How long?’ Asked Grant.
She smiled. ‘Fifteen days or so if one moves fast.’
At the hotel he checked that his baggage had been removed to the ship while Miss Turquoise packed and organized her suitcases into the car.
Half an hour later they boarded the most uncomfortable vessel he had ever known. Launched in 1904 at Dundee, Scotland, the Viera y Clavijo had a permanent list to port. The so-called first-class cabins were ill-ventilated cubby-holes with two hard bunks and a washbasin which rarely worked. The dining-room was dingy and bleak, with fixed chairs and tables, well-battered cutlery and a smell drifting in from galleys where flies covered food and beetles crawled along every shelf.
There were no other first-class passengers and only a dozen private soldiers in the care of a sergeant, all of whom travelled second class and fed apart. Miss Turquoise and he were in adjacent rooms within the same alley on the top deck and neither door could be locked.
There was a pungent stench of turpentine and polish, the gleam of varnished wood under dim electric light and the whine of an electric fan when he finally said ‘Good night’, kissing her hand with lingering meaning as she paused beside his door.
‘Well?’ Her eyes were teasing but her muscles remained taut with tension.
‘Not well at all,’ he smiled. ‘You are the most bewitching woman I have ever met, but when I try to run away from temptation you follow me to make life more difficult than ever.’
‘Perhaps that is part of your destiny. But if it is any help I have known no man in the way you mean. Her eyes twinkled and she smiled. ‘The taboos of my tribe say I must remain a virgin until I marry.’ She hesitated and her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Or until I am engaged—as they say in other countries—to be married.’
She stepped back into her cabin and as the door closed almost in his face he felt that it was for the best. He had played it that way because he had guessed that she expected it. And he had to admit that if she had given him any encouragement he would have tumbled into bed as happily as he had with Jacqueline. But this Berber woman had smouldering depths to her character which could spell danger.
As he turned towards his cabin she suddenly opened her own door and peered out at him through a gap less than six inches wide. ‘Señor.’
He hesitated. ‘Yes.’
‘I have just remembered something. A gypsy in Malaga once told me that I would marry a man from across the water. He would be much older than myself and very strong. One day he would save my life and one day I would die saving his. Do you think you could be the man?’
He saw that her smile was forced and that her staring brown eyes were uneasy. ‘No,’ he said gently. ‘And I don’t believe that anyone, gitana or gajo, can read the future.’
A weird bond of affinity seemed suddenly to have sprung up between them and Grant moved restlessly as he sensed that she was still afraid.
‘We feel that someone will die.’ He remembered Miss Sidders and the Admiral. These words or something like them had meant little in Paris or London at the time but now, standing beside this Berber witch outside these wretched cabins, they suddenly became important.
‘Good night, señorita,’ he whispered. ‘And sleep well.’
He gently closed her door and turned to his own room. More unpacking. More delay. Now it seemed that weeks might pass before he could reach the oases. Almost anything could happen. Yet there was no other sensible way of handling things. He opened an overnight case and turned out his clothes. He could hear the girl moving. As he loosened his shoes he heard her slip out of her cabin and open his door.
‘Señor.’
‘Yes?’
‘I am very frightened. Please let me come in. We can talk, and later, when I feel better, perhaps we can sleep.’
Chapter Eleven – ‘So smooth and so warm’
Grant knew his own weaknesses better even than the psychiatrists who had vetted him before his final appointment to ADSAD.
Essentially a man of action he was also dedicated to Justice, and a philosopher fascinated by the age-old conflict between Good and Evil. But once convinced of the essential wisdom and purpose behind a mission he was capable of being utterly ruthless when success depended on no half-measures.
He had developed a blind spot which protected him from regret and had rarely known a qualm of conscience after even the more brutal experiences of his career. He revelled in taking on a man of his own weight and could honestly say that he had never been afraid once the shooting had begun.
At his best he could rise to an occasion better than most men, and in spite of the fact that he despised ‘going into training’ his stamina was outstanding.
On the other hand he turned naturally towards good food and wine, to quality clothes and hand-made shoes, to period furniture and collector’s pieces as naturally as he did to service life or lone-wolfing it in dangerous places. But none of that affected his machine-like efficiency, or his instinct for making the right decision at the right time. Not even his almost primitive interest in beautiful women had ever seriously twisted his obsession with duty as he saw it.
But more than anything in the world he loathed inactivity, especially aboard small ships, where a claustrophobic hatred for confinement could make him almost go berserk with monotony. And he had long ago learned that once this manic-depression developed, only some burst of excitement or the thrill of a new experience could snap him back to normality.
Already Viera y Clavijo had got him down, and he was in no mood for hysterical women when Miss Turquoise arrived at his cabin. The girl was trembling, her hair tumbling over her eyes. Her arms were folded over her breasts, and although she was still fully dressed the pale green of her clothes reminded him of death, reflections of light played on her neck and a splash of redness seemed to shimmer against her throat. The throb of ship’s engines was quivering her flesh, and in the half-light beside the door shadows played around her features to cast her face into the ugliness of a mask.
‘What has happened to us?’ she whispered. ‘You changed when I told you about the fortune-teller. You believed me! Your eyes showed that you knew our destiny lay together.’
Grant forced himself to be reasonable. ‘Look. We are both tired. This will all have been forgotten by tomorrow.’
She shook her head and closed the door behind her, leaning against the brown woodwork and staring as though seeing him for the first time. ‘I have met men like you before. Not often, but once or twice. They had the same rock-hard jaw with cold eyes like dawn on the desert. And, like you, their eyes could suddenly warm and make women want to die for them. They were often cruel. But they were all leaders with nothing below the skin but whipcord or steel. You are the first,’ she added slowly, ‘to have the same kind of strength in your spirit. And you do have the Gift.’
Her panic was almost infectious. ‘We feel that someone will die.’ Miss Sidders’ words from way back in London stabbed imagination and he cursed his Celtic ancestry with its West Highland superstitions.
‘Listen,’ she whispered. ‘You attracted me from the beginning. And I was afraid because it had happened before with another man and ended badly. So I tried to tell myself that you were nothing. But now I know differently.’ Sh
e stubbed out her cigarette against the chipped washbasin and stood beside him, her arms still folded across her chest. ‘I believe that the gitana’s words will come true. But first I shall be your woman and you shall be my man, and sometimes we shall be happy. Though we shall always be a little afraid of the future.’
He sat down on the side of the bunk and gently pulled her on to his knees. ‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Death itself is nothing. But we will be afraid of how I shall die.’
Her quiet confidence was shattering. ‘Gypsies are liars,’ said Grant abruptly. ‘This future-telling business doesn’t make sense.’ But one part of him knew that it might. His own childhood in Scotland had been surrounded by proof of it.
‘Señor.’ The girl’s voice was anxious. ‘What happened just now? You looked very far away.’
There was a clang of bells in the engine-room and a shrill scream from the hooter as the ship listed even more to port and then thrust forward at full steam. ‘It was nothing,’ he muttered. ‘I was thinking of the past.’
She slipped an arm around his neck and curled close against his jacket. ‘And of gypsies?’
‘Yes.’ This future-seeing business was no good to anyone. He hated people who tried to dabble in the supernatural.
She wriggled more tightly against him and a finger beat restlessly against his thighs. ‘You want me very much.’ It was a statement and not a question. ‘But my uncle wants something much more important and much more difficult. He would sell his soul to father a child. Especially a boy who could be heir. I’ve watched him trying for as long as I can remember. No girl is safe. And when other people have a baby he can sometimes go crazy with anger. Why can he not succeed in the most important thing of life when beggars or slaves get children every year?’ She looked steadily at Grant. ‘Could you help him? They say that modern medicines can do almost anything.’
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