Far Sanctuary

by Jane Arbor

  True to Ayesha’s forecast, the high wind dropped quite suddenly. At dawn that morning Emma had lain awake, listening to its frenzied rustling of the dry fronds of the palms in the villa garden and its fretful battle with every window shutter within earshot. Then it seemed that there was one moment when it was blowing as hard as ever; the next, it did not exist.

  The relief was so exquisite that Emma fell asleep almost at once, to wake again to full morning where scarcely a flower-petal stirred. Tonight, the dusk was once more green-blue and very quiet, and beyond the patio where she had asked Ayesha to lay her solitary place at table, myriads of fireflies were executing a complicated fandango of their own.

  While she waited for Ayesha to serve the meal, she lay back in a long chair, revelling in the calm warmth of the night and recalling Pilar’s wistful pleasure in the dress she was to wear for the Ball.

  At first she had wanted red - “Stiff scarlet silk, Emma, with black slippers, don’t you think, and a real Spanish comb for my hair?” And she had sketched for Emma’s and Leonore’s approval a castanet-dancer’s full-skirted dress which she wanted to copy.

  Emma, not wanting to hurt her feelings, had been gently non-committal, suggesting they should look around first. But Leonore had spared no lash of scourging comment on her garish choice; Pilar had visibly flinched, had torn up her sketch with trembling fingers and for some days had been reluctant to discuss her dress any further, even with Emma.

  Then Emma, studiedly casual, had drawn her attention to a short dress in one of the boulevard shop-windows. It was white, froth of chiffon, its corsage touched with green and silver and supported by narrow silver straps. It was delightfully “young girl” and its demure simplicity was further emphasized by its accompanying tiny evening bag, low-heeled silver sandals and filmy stole.

  Pilar had looked at it. “Oh, it’s lovely!” There was a touch of envy in her added: “You meant it for yourself ?”

  “No. I shall wear a dress I brought out from England. I meant - for you. ’

  “For me? You really don’t want it for yourself?”

  Pilar had still hesitated. “But Leonore - Would she -?”

  “I think she’d agree it is absolutely right for you, Pilar, dear.”

  So the dress had been tried on, bought and left for one or two small alterations to be made. It had arrived at the villa while it had not been certain that Pilar would be well enough to attend the Ball. But when Emma shook it free of its tissues, Pilar had touched the fall of its skirt and traced its embroideries longingly as she put an odd question.

  “Would someone who had not seen me wearing anything like it before think I was specially pretty in this?” she asked.

  “No one could fail to think you looked pretty in it. Particularly all the handsome strangers who’ll be competing for your posy!” Emma teased her laughingly.

  It was only when Pilar had said gravely: “I was not thinking of quite a stranger -” that she realized her reply had not answered the question Pilar had asked.

  They had been interrupted then and, later, Pilar had not enlarged on what she meant. But musing over the scene as she lay on the patio, Emma was thinking that, so far as she knew, Pilar’s whole male acquaintance was confined to Mark Triton, Galatas and a few young men members of the English Club. She was more than stirred with curiosity as to the identity, among these, of the “not quite a stranger” to whom Pilar might offer her posy tomorrow night.

  Suddenly Emma sat up, alerted by the sound and the rake of headlights of a car driving in. A visitor for Leo- nore who did not know she was out? From where she sat Emma could not see the car, and she remained where she was, listening for Ayesha to answer the door and hoping that the ensuing talk in the hall would not wake Pilar.

  But whether Pilar might have waked she was not to know. For a minute or two later, the gravel beyond the patio crunched beneath footsteps and Mark Triton was at her side.

  She sprang up. “Señora de Coria -” she began. Sup posing he asked her if she knew where Leonore had gone and with whom!

  But he did not. He said easily: “Yes, I know. She is out. I met Horeb in the courtyard as I drove in. He added, gratis, that you were here. How is Pilar?”

  “Much better, I'm glad to say. But she is having an early night and she was already asleep when I came down.”

  “Good. But that leaves you to dine alone?”

  “Yes.” The unbidden thought raced into Emma’s mind that it would be pleasant to ask him to join her. Pleasanter still, if he suggested that he should....

  But when he merely nodded a reply she played for time with: “I'm so sorry. But Señora de Coria hadn’t mentioned that-”

  “- That she was expecting me? Nor was she, as it happens. And as she is not in and you are without a dinner- companion, what about your fulfilling an engagement which is overdue?”

  “An - engagement?”

  “Yes. Don’t you remember that when we were lunching at El Minzah I suggested you ought not to judge the medina on one sinister encounter with it? But perhaps you have put that right since?”

  Emma did remember - and also the discord with which they had parted, owing to the shabby lie she had resorted to for Pilar’s sake. Blushing at the memory, she said: “Yes, you told me that I owed the Moorish quarter the justice of getting to know it better. But I haven’t ventured there again.”

  “I should hope not - alone,” he said sharply. “At the time, I meant to imply that I should enjoy showing you an aspect of it which I love. But I may not have made that invitation clear?”

  “Our talk about it was interrupted. You were called to the telephone, I think."

  “Yes.” His head went up in a gesture of thought familiar to her. But she did not suppose he was recalling that, after his return to the table, they had not talked together again.

  He said: “Well, I meant you to understand that I was offering my services as escort, and - rather belatedly - I’m offering them again. Will you dine with me and an elderly Moorish friend of mine who has a small, delightful house in the Kasbah? We could drive there now.”

  Emma caught her breath, longing to accept. But she was forced to demur: “I can't leave Pilar -”

  “Why not? She is asleep, you say? And Ayesha is there?”

  “Yes, but -” She stopped. From his slight frown, she saw that he did not consider Pilar’s possible need of her to be a very real excuse. And in fact she had offered it because she could hardly share with him the more telling one that if she accepted, Leonore could wilfully misjudge the facts. You did not reveal to a man that you knew how narrowly jealous of her rights the woman he loved could be....

  While she hesitated he waited, holding her look. And when she fell back on the age-old femininity of: “I’m not dressed -” he dismissed that at once.

  “Neither am I,” he pointed out. “There’s no need for formality at all. So get a cloak if you need one and, if you like, tell Ayesha that you won’t be late. I’ll wait for you in the car.”

  Emma said nothing more. As she went to speak to Ayesha and to confirm that there was no sound from Pilar’s room, she knew that she was not obeying his dictation so much as she was yielding to a sudden sweep of heady recklessness which was quite foreign to her.

  She would have to deal later with explaining Pilar that she had not been able to refuse Mark's invitation without discourtesy. Later - with any jaundiced comments from Leonore. Later - with a stark honestv which warned already that she was inviting an undefined sweet danger by snatching at any promise the evening had for her. But for the moment she would snatch -

  As they drove towards the Moorish quarter, Mark told her that their host, Mulay Kassem, was a Shereef - one who could trace a remote descendancy from Mohammed. He had studied in England for a time and had had a distinguished career as a lawyer. But on his retirement he had reverted to the customs, food and dress of his own people in the house where he lived among them.

  “He is a widower now,” Mark said. “If he we
re not, you would probably find yourself dining with his women folk while we and any other men dined apart from you. As he now keeps only a couple of houseboys, he will entertain us together and, as a concession to you, not strictly according to Moorish custom, seated cross-legged and helping oneself from the common dish in the middle of the table. But you must prepare for the courtesy of discarding your own shoes for soft babouches before you enter the house. They are usually provided for expected guests at the entrance.”

  It occurred to Emma that as Mark’s invitation to her must have been made on impulse, the Shereef Kassem could not possibly be expecting her. But Mark was pre-paring to park the car and she lost the opportunity to say so.

  He had driven in to the Kasbah by the Bab Haha gate, but proposed that they should walk the rest of the way to their host’s house. This led them through ways as narrow and dark as those Emma had once fled from in unreasoning terror. But she had been alone then. Now the shadows had lost their menace and wherever the “streets" climbed or fell by uneven cobbled steps, too wide for one stride, too narrow for two, Mark beckoned her hand into his and patiently matched his pace to hers.

  He stopped before an exquisitely carved Moorish door, flush to the blue-washed walls of an unprepossessing alley. Its arch barely cleared Emma’s head, but when he opened it for her and she stooped to pass through she gasped in delight at the scene within.

  The door gave on to a patio, floored with mosaic tiles and open to the sky. Centred in the paving was a playing fountain; the moon had risen and the tossing fountain drops were stars and amethysts by its light. On a second side of the square patio was a giant fig tree on a towering wall beyond which the slim grace of a minaret pointed a finger towards the sky. On the other two sides, sugar- stick columns supported arches of delicate plaster tracery, leading to a covered cloister beyond. For Emma the scene was her dream of the perfect East; a moment of beauty caught for ever.

  Mark rang the bell of a door at the angle of the cloister, and while they waited he indicated the row of assorted babouches to Emma.

  “I told you,” he said, smiling down at her, “that Cinderella must choose her slippers!” He took a pair himself and offered his stooped shoulder for Emma to hold on to while she removed her sandals and slipped her feet into a yellow embroidered pair which fitted perfectly and went with her yellow flowered dress.

  They were announced to their host in a room hung with traditional wool tapestries and carpeted with handmade rugs. Its ceiling was formed by a series of mounting arches of painted wooden mosaics, fitted to make a different pattern at the apex of each arch. Along one side of the room ran a low padded bench to which Emma sup posed the table would be drawn up when a meal was taken in the Moorish way. But tonight a table was laid for dinner, Europeanwise, in the middle of the room, and Emma, glancing at its silver and sparkling glass, saw that it was laid for three.

  Her first thought was that as she could not have been expected, someone else must be dining. But Mark had not mentioned anyone, and there was a sudden cold turn to the realization that it was probably Leonore whom Mulay Gassem had really invited as his second guest.

  He was a very tall, eagle-nosed man with a pointed beard and fine eyes. He wore the djellaba, the traditional one-piece hooded gown common to both men and women, and at first Emma attributed her impression that she had seen him before to the fact that he appeared to have stepped straight out of the Arabian Nights. But after a word or two with Mark in Arabic, he greeted her in perfect English by saying: “And you and I, Miss Red- fern - do you recall, I wonder, that we have already met?”

  Emma smiled: “Why, yes, of course! You apologized for brushing past my chair on the roof-terrace at the Velasquez. That was my very first night in Tangier!” Once, such a memory of Guy would have evoked a stab of pain. But none came now. Whatever she had believed was love for Guy had passed as quickly as his feeling for her. And to think that she might have married him for less - far less - than love!

  Presently, they dined by the soft light of the hanging Moorish lanterns and were served by a houseboy whose smile matched Ayesha’s for sheer ingenuous charm.

  The first course was cous-cous, the dish of the country made from long-steamed semolina of wheat tips mixed with spices and chopped meat, of which Emma had heard but had never tasted. And though she was daunted by the piled plateful served to her, she enjoyed it immensely. It was followed by pastella - tender chicken covered in layers of feathery pastry - the tradition of which, her host told her, the Moors had brought back from Andalusia when they were driven from Spain. But he puzzled her by adding: “The pastella is considered the aristocrat of our Moorish dishes, taking even longer to prepare than cous-cous, which takes hours. But when Mark told me that he wanted a real Moorish evening for you, I knew, that both cous-cous and pastella it must be.” That looked to Emma as if she had indeed been expected. But how could Mark have asked her for that particular evening - or have wanted to - if Leonore had been at the villa when he called?

  For dessert, there were tiny honey cakes and mandarins, followed by coffee in shell-fine cups. The talk throughout the meal was of Moorish customs and sidelights on history which kept Emma as entranced as afterwards she was delighted with Mulay Kassem’s collection of embroideries, mosaics and silver, centuries old.

  At last Mark rose, regretting that they must go. But he added: “Before we leave, may I show Emma Tangier from your rooftop, Mulay? When we come down we need not disturb you again if Haroun can show us out.”

  The old Moor inclined his head. “But of course. Do so. You know the way up, and Haroun will wait below until you come down.”

  On an impulse she could not define, Emma said quickly: “Won’t you come with us, Shereef Kassem?”

  But he refused with a gentle: “If you will excuse me, my dear -? I am of an age which must leave rooftops to those who can climb easily to them. Besides, we say that the view from the Kasbah by moonlight is for those who have not seen it before, for those who would see it once again before they die - and for those in love. And though you are one of these, child, for the moment I count myself fortunate that I am not -” And bowing over her fingers he gave her the lovely parting of: “May Allah take you by his hand,” before the boy came to show them out.

  They went up to the flat roof by an unlighted stone stair which mounted from a corner of the patio between narrow walls. At the top, the roof was of three differing levels and Mark led the way to a breast-high parapet on which they could lean to look out over the moonlit city.

  Immediately below and around them cavernous alleys ran between buildings with other levels of roof, the daytime squalor of which by night had become an artist’s dream of plane and sharply-etched shadow. To the right of where they stood was the minaret to be seen from the patio; beyond and below it the Old Town stepped down to the harbour and the great sweep of the Bay towards Cape Malabata; above it, in the distance, old town and new merged towards the wooded hillsides where the villas looked inward to pine and cork trees and outward to the sea. The moon, riding high now, shimmered a wide path across the water, lessening and dimming the paths cast by the rival lights of port and esplanade and turning the few coasters at anchor in the Bay to ghostly silhouettes set upon dark glass.

  Emma, entranced, murmured at last: “It’s quite unbelievably lovely. I hope I’m going to remember it all my life -” She was grateful that Mark’s silence since they had come to the parapet had left her alone to the enchantment of the moment. And yet without him nothing of it, would have been the same for her, have meant as much -

  The implication of that was as blinding as an actual light flashed across the eyes. For she knew now what it was which had given the experience its immeasurable importance to her senses. It was the thing which had the power to colour and round every moment shared with just one person in the world. It was - love.

  At no invitation from him and still less at the bidding of her own will, she had fallen in love with the man at her side. With Mark Triton,
who must have known many women but who had chosen one.... Who had been kind and impersonally helpful always, but whose love was irrevocably headed another way, even while everything about him was making an assault on emotions which, she realized now, she had never used in loving Guy.

  A less kind Fate would have let her marry Guy without loving him as selflessly as, even at this moment of revelation, she loved Mark. For instance, not until she had been cured of Guy had she been able to dismiss jealousy of a happy future for him in which she would have no part. But though she wanted Mark, ached for him, and her longing to yield utterly to him was a pain almost physically bruising, she could love him without the surrender he would never be likely to ask of her.

  For, however dimly, she saw that at least one sweet reward of loving without thought of self was wonder that it had happened, that the loved one actually lived and breathed on the same earth. Mark Triton could be a yard away, in the next room, across a city, on the far side of the world - and she would always be glad of the mere hazard of time and place which had crossed her path with his and had given her new values in love. And if he looked for his own happiness with Leonore de Coria, she must try to want that for him too...

  But as she stirred in distaste at the thought of Leonore’s calculated disloyalty to him, her arm brushed his on the parapet, and as if he thought she had called his attention, he said: “Well, I think you’ll remember your pleasure in it, if only because you fulfil one of Mulay Kassem’s conditions, don’t you?”

  “One of -?” Staring straight ahead, she added in a low voice: “Yes, of course. I am ‘one of those who have not seen it before’. That is what you mean?”

  There was a moment of silence. Then: “What else could I have meant?” he asked.

  “And what about you?”

  “I?” He shrugged. “I am merely your self-appointed guide for the evening. Mulay’s conditions didn’t necessarily cover me.”

  “No,” she agreed dully. She knew that - and yet had been betrayed into her own provocative question because she hungered for him to enlarge upon the impulse at which he had chosen to be alone with her and to share with her an experience which he claimed to value greatly. And what had she done? Simply invited him to hurt her with the indifference of his reply!