City of Palms

by Pamela Kent

  Although, of course, as she told herself, she could always leave...

  When she went down the steps of the hotel to the car, the muezzin was making the call to prayer. The rosy glow of sunset lay over the whole of Baghdad, with its palm gardens and its sluggishly flowing river, although overhead in the deep cerulean sky there were already a few stars. The car—huge and cream-colored and extremely luxurious, with a liveried chauffeur at the wheel—slid away from the front of the hotel, and; Susan felt small and somehow lost in the back.

  She felt so lost, and so conscious that the one human being who really belonged to her was left behind in the hotel, that she even knew a sensation bordering on pleasure when someone stopped the car in a narrow lane, and Nicholas Carlton slid on to the back seat beside her.

  “It’s all right,” he said, smiling at her—and his shrewd look told him that she welcomed his presence just then—“the chauffeur knows me, and I’m cadging a lift to the oasis. I’ve decided to spend a few days with the friend I told you about. He’s one of those fellows who’ve become interested in a study of Islam and its ways, and he lives like a recluse. But I find him refreshing sometimes—I’m a bit interested in the mysticism of Islam myself.”

  But his eyes didn’t look at all the eyes of a mystic, and Susan couldn’t be certain that he wasn’t indulging in a gentle form of mockery. But she said, relieved to have someone to talk to on the journey:

  “Then it was very sensible of you to cadge a lift, as you call it. And it’s such a huge car that I felt like a pea in a drum on my own.”

  He laughed softly.

  “Poor little Susan! Feeling nervous?”

  “No.” But she was. And she quickly resented his calling her Susan. “Not in the least, Mr. Carlton.”

  “The name’s Nick,” he told her. “All my friends call me Nick.”

  She decided not to remind him that they were hardly yet acquaintances.

  He offered her a cigarette from quite an expensive-looking case, and then for a time there was silence between them. And then he said suddenly:

  “Don’t let Mehmet Bey treat you as if you were some sort of domestic attachment to the household. And don’t let him treat you as he does his sister.”

  “Do you know how he treats his sister?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he answered, and although the light was fading fast she saw that his face went dark with an extraordinary kind of anger—an anger that swept up over it in a dark red wave and made it almost ugly for a few moments. “Yes,” he repeated, “I do,” and tossed his half-smoked cigarette out of the window.

  It was a much longer drive than Susan had been prepared for, and there were moments before the moon rose when she was heartily glad that there was someone on the seat beside her. She had never before known such blackness as that which had swept down over the open face of the desert on all sides of her, and had it not been for their powerful headlights, which cut through it like a knife, it was a blackness she would have found almost terrifying.

  And by the time the moon rose, like a lamp appearing suddenly above the rim of the world, they had plunged into a wilderness of palms, and the moonlight did nothing more than silver the fronds as they drooped above them. The road was white as it stretched ahead, and on either side there were indigo shadows in which, occasionally, an animal made a wild, scuttering movement, or a burnoused figure showed up for an instant. But otherwise it was a lonely, lost world of motionless, whispering palms.

  When they swept through a pair of enormous gates on to a kind of drive, and gleaming white buildings showed up in front of them, Susan was taken completely by surprise. The headlights played on flaming growth, like hibiscus, covering a sharp angle of one of the outer walls, and slender white pillars supporting a balcony were smothered by another kind of vivid-hued plant. In the sudden silence, as the car, came to rest, she caught the sound of water falling—or such was her impression—into a marble basin, and on the sweet coldness of the desert night the .scent of flowers was carried to her.

  Nick Carlton smiled at her quite unhurriedly, and made a leisurely descent from the car.

  “I’ll be seeing you,” he said. “The village isn’t far from here.”

  And then he vanished as if he had never been, swallowed up by the shadows.

  A great door swung wide, and a flood of golden light poured out to embrace Susan. A white-robed figure held open the car door for her, and another extracted her luggage from the trunk.

  Inside, in the mellow golden light, she stood in the middle of a glorious silk Bokhara carpet and looked about her as if she was certain now that she had trespassed into a world wherein she had no rights at all. She felt lost, and forlorn, and afraid, staring at silk curtains swaying gently in a slight current of air, and at the space beyond that was filled with comfortable couches and armchairs, the floor gleaming and tessellated and strewn thickly with rugs like jewels cast down carelessly on a sea of marble.

  And then, without any previous warning of footsteps, she heard a voice addressing her coldly and furiously from behind.

  “So you brought your friend Nicholas with you, did you, Miss Maldon? I imagined it was a friend in England who described you as his ‘sweet Sue,’ but now things are a little more clear!”

  When she spun round to confront him, Susan had been so much taken by surprise that she looked quite white and startled. He was the same man with whom she had travelled in the aircraft from Paris, but she felt that she was really seeing him for the first time. He was wearing a white dinner-jacket so beautifully tailored that under ordinary circumstances its perfection would have filled her with admiration, and his hair formed a kind of rich, burnished wave above one strikingly dark eyebrow. His skin was superbly bronzed, and his features almost too perfect, but his eyes were dark pools of utter fury in which the tawny gold lights leapt frighteningly up and down.

  “I don’t know what you mean!” she said, and withdrew from him as if she feared some sort of actual violence from him.

  “Don’t you?” His lips curled. “And you don’t know, either, I suppose, that Nicholas Carlton is the very last person I would welcome here at this time? That the last time he came here I had him thrown out!”

  “No,” she said, and looked suddenly very pale indeed. “No. I—didn’t know!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  IT was two mornings later, and Susan was standing on the balcony outside her room and looking down into the courtyard which it overlooked. It was not a courtyard in the ordinary sense of the word—such as she would have understood it in England—for there was a fountain playing in the middle of it, and lemon trees and oleander bushes were set in openings in a black and white marble pavement. The lemon trees were heavy with fruit, and their leaves were rich and green and glossy, and shimmered in the sunshine of a very new day. Beyond the high walls that enclosed the courtyard there was a large open space, and beyond the open space a sea of palm trees. The sunlight danced over their graceful trunks and the pointed arches of their fronds, and beneath them spread a thick carpet of brilliantly green lucerne.

  To Susan, leaning on her balcony, the palm trees were like the cupolas of a city rising towards the incredibly blue sky. When she lifted her face to the sky, she was amazed because there were no clouds—not even a light and gossamer one—and although it was so early in the morning, the depth and quality of the blueness were intense.

  But as yet it was still cool enough to be considered fresh, and there was the scent of the oleanders moving gently in the lightest of breezes. Susan inhaled the perfume, thought that it was amazing that such a place as this should exist in the heart of barren desert, and then lifted her head quickly as a couple of riders flashed into view from the green heart of the palm grove.

  Susan’s admiration for horses had always been great, although she had never owned one, or even bestridden one, herself, and of the two that had suddenly appeared in the middle of the open space one was a beautiful chestnut stallion, while the other was a sleek and p
erfect grey.

  The grey had Ayse on its back, and even at such a distance Susan could tell that she rode superbly, and that her cream-colored jodhpurs and white silk blouse were as perfect as the other clothes she wore. Her hair flamed redder than ever as she tore towards the stables where the grooms were waiting, and behind her her brother made an even more impressive picture, for he wore a kufiyya that floated out behind him, and the ropelike igal that enclosed it was entwined like silver thread that flashed in the sunshine.

  Otherwise he wore European riding-kit like his sister, and, apart from his head-dress, the fact that he was not wholly European was given away by the magnificent manner in which he sat and managed his mount. For Susan had seen him when he started off in the rosy flush of sunrise, and then even the grooms had kept well out of the way of those trampling hooves and those wicked, rolling eyes of the chestnut. The ears had been laid flat back against the sides of the animal’s head, and this had heightened the snaky look of the Arab about it. Although it was not an Arab, as she was later to find out. It was of the South Iranian breed, and a magnificent but unpredictable creature.

  Ayse came through the low doorway set in the courtyard wall, and Susan withdrew from her balcony because she had no desire to be seen observing her. Later she would go down and join her, and they would share a breakfast of coffee and rolls in a corner of a cool patio where another fountain played, and starry jasmine flowers entwined themselves about the marble pillars which supported the colonnades.

  She might even meet Mehmet Bey, if he felt disposed to join them—which, Ayse had informed her, he sometimes did—although since the night of her arrival she had not actually come face to face with him.

  Susan bit her lip as she thought of that night of her arrival, and she knew she would never forgive him for his method of welcoming her. Even now she was undecided as to what she ought to do, although Ayse had come to her the following morning and sat on her bed in the over-luxurious room where she had passed a sleepless night, and begged her not to do anything impulsive.

  She had been a little astonished because Ayse was so concerned, and apparently wanted her very badly to stay now that she had arrived. She had worn a housecoat of Chinese blue satin that made her exquisite heart-shaped face look paler than ever, and the rich masses of her flame-colored hair had surprised Susan because, released from the knot in which she normally wore them on the nape of her neck, they had tumbled past her shoulders and hung like a cloak about her.

  “You don’t understand,” she had said, very gently, not even expressing surprise that Susan had turned out to be a fellow-passenger on the air journey from Paris. “You arrived here at our house with a man my brother dislikes for very strong personal reasons, and he was unable to conceal his annoyance. If he said more to you than he should—well, cannot I beg you to overlook it?”

  “But”—Susan made a helpless gesture—“I know hardly anything at all about Nicholas Carlton, and your brother accused me of—well, he inferred that he was an old friend! Which is quite, quite absurd! Just because he saw the name Nick in a book of mine—”

  “Then you are really acquainted with a Nicholas?”

  “Yes, but he is an old friend of my father’s. He is a doctor, a Harley Street specialist, and years and years older than I am. At least—” She felt suddenly that she had to be honest, with herself as well as everyone else, and although Nick Arnwood had known her from her cradle (or so it seemed to her) he couldn’t actually be much more than in his late thirties, and in modern days that was no age at all. Certainly not for a man.

  “Yes?” Ayse interposed softly.

  “He is an old friend, but he isn’t all that old. Not forty yet. But we know one another so well that it’s perfectly all right for him to call me sweet Sue, and send me his love, and that sort of thing, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m afraid,” Ayse admitted, her large eyes rather sad but otherwise inscrutable, “I don’t. In our way of life we don’t talk about such things as love before a man offers marriage ... Or we don’t normally do so,” her delicate skin highlighted suddenly by a touch of color. “It isn’t correct, you understand? Not even in France, amongst my mother’s people.”

  “And when a man does offer marriage in your way of life,” Susan heard herself enquiring with a dryness she couldn’t suppress, “is love included in the offer?”

  Ayse’s color burned on her cheeks like a carnation flush.

  “It can be part of the bargain, but it is not necessary.”

  Susan felt her heart rush out to her suddenly, remembering what she had been told about her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and put a hand almost tentatively on her arm—a hand that expressed sympathy. “I’m afraid I’m not being awfully tactful, am I?”

  Ayse looked as if she suffered a sudden constriction in her throat, and she bent her head a little and pleated the skirt of her housecoat with long white fingers that were tinted like the heart of a rose where the perfect nails began.

  “So you know,” she said, “you know about—Nicholas Carlton.”

  “Know about him?” Susan looked perplexed. “I don’t know anything about him except—” And then she stopped. All at once she thought she did know. “You mean that he was the reason why , you—why you were sent to Paris?”

  Ayse smiled bitterly.

  “I’ve told you that it is not the custom, according to the way I have been brought up, to think about such things as love when there is no possibility of marriage!”

  “I—see...” Susan said slowly, and suddenly she felt quite horrified. “Then no wonder your brother...”

  “There was a certain amount of justification for the anger you aroused in him on the night of your arrival, but I do not think he should have spoken to you in the way he did.” Ayse spoke gravely. “My maid reported that you looked very shocked and upset, and I would have come to you and done my best to make you feel better, only I was forbidden to do so.”

  “Your brother’s commands?” Susan enquired, almost shaking with anger when she recalled the way in which she had been spoken to that night, and in particular the hostile eyes that had accused her without any sort of hesitation or enquiry beforehand.

  “In this house, which is my brother’s house, Raoul’s word is law,” Ayse said simply. “It will be law for me until I acquire a husband.”

  Susan looked at her for a moment in shocked fascination, and then she scrambled quickly out of bed and into a dressing-gown. It couldn’t even begin to compare with the expensive perfection of the other girl’s housecoat, but it was pale pink, and rather filmy, and in it, with her rumpled fair curls and her deep blue eyes, she looked like a pink china figurine.

  “What are you going to do?” Ayse asked, looking anxious. “You aren’t going to remain annoyed with Raoul?”

  “Annoyed with him?” Susan looked at her as if she was bereft of words. “All this is beyond me—your attitude to your brother! The way you live, as if you were something inferior to him! And I understand that you have enough money to do as you please?”

  “You mean—marry without my brother’s consent?”

  The horror in Ayse’s voice and look was almost acute.

  “Well, no—no, I don’t think I mean anything like that.” Susan went and sat beside her on the bed, anxious to give her comfort, but violently disturbed because she hadn’t yet made up her mind what she was going to do, and it seemed impossible to think of going on living beneath the roof of an employer who had already treated her outrageously. Not even giving her a chance to defend herself before he had summoned a servant and ordered her to be taken away up to her room! “And, in any case, Nicholas Carlton is not the sort of man who could make a girl like you happy.” She didn’t know why she knew this without any shadow of doubt, but she did know it. “And the last thing he should have done was come back here for the obvious purpose of seeing you as a result of making use of me!”

  “Yes, I agree,” Ayse said miserably. She buried her
face in her hands for a moment. “But I was unhappy, desperately unhappy in Paris without him, and now that I am back—if I could only see him sometimes...” looking wistfully at Susan.

  But Susan, no more than a couple of years older, shook her head.

  “That would never do. You would antagonize your brother past all bearing, and he would simply send you away again in the end. Besides, Nicholas Carlton isn’t any good to you.”

  “You are so sure of that?”

  “Quite sure,” remembering the light-blue eyes that had roved over herself with admiration, and convinced that the big attraction where Ayse was concerned was the money she possessed. No doubt pretty girls stood at the value of two a penny in the life of Nicholas Carlton, but a fortune derived from oil was hardly likely to come his way more than once in a lifetime. “You must forget him. You must make other friends.”

  “There is no one I wish to make a particular friend of—except Nicholas,” Ayse confessed pathetically.

  Susan gave her hand a little convulsive squeeze. “You will. There are heaps of men in the world, especially for someone as beautiful as you are!”

  Ayse smiled at her gratefully.

  “And you will not think of leaving?” she asked. “You will forget that Raoul has a very bad temper, and is not quite like the men of your race, and stay on here? Because he can be very pleasant when he wishes, and I—I do want you to stay! I think you are very kind and understanding, and I have no real women friends.”

  But Susan, although touched, still looked at her undecidedly.