City of Palms

by Pamela Kent

  “I’ve got to face your brother yet,” she reminded her, “and he may not wish me to stay! After seeing me arrive with Nicholas he may be waiting to present me with, a week’s wages in lieu of notice and tell me to go back to Baghdad without delay.”

  But Ayse shook her head, not quite understanding what was meant by a week’s wages in lieu of notice, but curiously certain of one thing.

  “I don’t think he will ask you to go. He may even apologize to you—but I am not certain of that. But, if it is at all possible—if you can find it in your heart to forgive him—you will stay?” she pleaded.

  “I’ll think about it,” Susan promised, with a sigh in the words—for she was not at all certain what was going to happen to her if she did have to go back to Baghdad—“and if your brother isn’t just waiting to have me thrown out, as he told me he threw out Carlton!”

  “Oh, he would not do that,” Ayse assured her. “He has too much respect for your father.” This secretly amused Susan, who was afraid, however, that Ayse would not have understood her amusement. “And there is one thing,” she added, rather diffidently, “that I would like to ask you to do, if you don’t mind. Would you please not let Raoul know that Nicholas is not your old friend Nicholas—the one who wrote that little bit in your book?”

  But Susan’s eyebrows puckered.

  “But, if I don’t explain about that...”

  “All you need say is that both you and your father know Nicholas—which is true, isn’t it?—and that he asked for a lift last night, and that you couldn’t see any reason for refusing the lift because you didn’t know about—me! Which is also true, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Susan agreed, but she was not altogether happy about agreeing to even such a slight deception, which definitely was a deception.

  But she saw nothing of Raoul for the rest of that day, and she had only caught a glimpse of him this morning because, having got up early to enjoy the coolness, she had stepped out on to her balcony at the very moment he started to mount his horse, and the spectacle of his horsemanship had held her enthralled. Watching him, she forgot that she almost loathed him, and could do nothing but admire.

  But now he was back, and she had got to go down and perhaps face him, and all at once she knew that that required a certain amount of courage. She couldn’t tell why, but it did. He hadn’t the power to intimidate her, as he obviously intimidated his sister, but there was something about him that was a little ... Well, she had the feeling that if he really lost his temper—if it slipped temporarily from his control, as it seemed to have done the other night—he could be almost withering. Frightening to one who wasn’t really as bold, although she had had to fend for herself quite a lot, as she sometimes liked to think she was.

  When she went out into the patio where breakfast had been served the previous morning, Ayse was waiting for her. She looked with a kind of shy pleasure at Susan, and once again the latter thought what an unusually beautiful girl she was, and how greatly her slenderness was enhanced by the well-fitting jodhpurs and the cream silk blouse she was still wearing. The blouse was cut on the pattern of an open-necked shirt, and the long, graceful column of her throat was revealed, tanned delicately to the hue of pale honey. Her arms were bare also, and an exquisite little toy of a diamond-studded wrist-watch called attention to the patrician smallness of her left-wrist.

  She looked up from a letter she had been reading, and her expression gave away the fact that she was eager to confide a piece of news.

  “This,” she waved the expensive paper, “is from Madame Dupont. Isn’t it exciting to think she’s back? She’ll be coming over here to see us, and I’ll be able to introduce you, and—”

  “You forget,” Susan interrupted her, with a little smile, “that since you will have to introduce me I haven’t the least idea who this Madame Dupont is. Is she a particular friend of yours?”

  “Jacqueline?” Ayse looked as if she was temporarily uncertain how to answer that. “Well, of course, I admire her tremendously—everyone must who comes in contact with her, because she’s so beautiful, and has only recently been widowed, and one naturally sympathizes with her very deeply. But as to whether or not she is my particular friend...”

  “Your brother’s, perhaps?” Susan suggested, and then was shocked because of the implication of what she had said.

  But, considerably to her surprise, Ayse didn’t convey the impression that she saw anything wrong even in the implication.

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, slowly, “there was a time when I thought that Raoul ... Madame Dupont’s husband was so many years older than she is, and almost always an invalid, and she is so gay and sparkling, that it didn’t seem quite fair. Also she is, of course, in love with Raoul.”

  “I see.” There was something so naked about this statement that Susan didn’t like it. It made her feel so acutely uncomfortable that she helped herself to far more jam than she needed for her roll. “And now that she is free, they will, perhaps, marry?”

  “I don’t know.” Ayse stared at her thoughtfully for a moment, and then helped herself to an exquisitely golden nectarine and started to prepare it with delicate fingers. “That is something they will decide themselves, and at a time when Monsieur Dupont has been dead a little longer.” It sounded quaint to Susan, but Ayse continued: “So far he has been dead just a very few months, and Jacqueline has been travelling in Europe to recover herself from the shock. She was in Paris for a short time while we were there, but I did not know she would be back so soon.”

  “Who is coming back very soon?” a quiet but incisive voice enquired from the shadows beneath the colonnade behind them, and Susan almost started as Raoul Mehmet Bey moved with a kind of sinuous grace towards them.

  He took a seat at the table and looked deliberately at the English girl. He still wore his kufiyya, and beneath it his face looked dark, handsome, and distinctly foreign. Susan realized, with a faint feeling of shock, that if she had seen him dressed like this in the beginning she would never have thought for a moment that he had any claim to European blood at all. He looked not so much like an Arab or a Turk, specifically, but like someone whose rightful heritage was the desert, and the only desert. She couldn’t for one instant, just then, imagine him walking the streets of Paris or New York, or wearing conventional evening dress, such as she had seen him in on the night of her arrival. That man with the burnished air that waved slightly, wearing the superbly-fitting dinner-jacket, was someone who had no real kinship with this man—this man, who still, however, had the disconcerting eyes.

  In fact, they were even more disconcerting under the kufiyya.

  “Well, Miss Maldon,” he enquired, “do you know who this someone is who is coming to visit us so soon?”

  But Ayse answered for her.

  “It is Madame Dupont, Raoul. She is back at the Villa of Stars, and I have received a note from her this morning.”

  He took it, and read it through, briefly. Then he laid it down and acted upon her example by selecting a nectarine for himself from the high-piled dish on the table. But his long fingers didn’t waste any time preparing the fruit. He simply bit into it with his hard white teeth.

  “In that case we must ask her for a week-end,” he said. “We must ask others, too, and make sure that Miss Maldon is not dull now that she finds herself here in the midst of the desert!”

  There was no doubt about it, his eyes were not only deliberately mocking Susan, but attempting to disconcert her, and she felt instant resentment rise in her, as well as a thin, cold anger.

  Ayse, after a hasty glance at both their faces, remembered suddenly that she had something very important to attend to, and she gathered up her morning’s mail and departed from the patio, leaving the two at the table in joint possession of the quietude and the peace, the sound of the fountain spraying into the marble basin, and the cooing of some white fantail pigeons that strutted at their feet.

  “Well, Miss Maldon?” Mehmet Bey selected anothe
r nectarine, and bit into it as before. “What is it you feel you would like to say to me?”

  Susan’s eyes widened a little as she stared back at him. She was no longer in the least afraid of him, but she was icily indignant.

  “I am waiting for you to apologize, that’s all,” she said.

  He smiled, and one eyebrow ascended in the derisive fashion which she decided quite definitely there and then she disliked thoroughly.

  “What for?” he asked.

  “For being so appallingly rude to me on the night I arrived here!”

  “Was I appallingly rude?” The leisureliness of his voice, and his look, which she felt was deliberate, incensed her so much that the color rose in a hot tide to her cheeks. “I simply recall telling you rather forcibly that I objected to your coming here accompanied by your friend Carlton. I meant that. I don’t take back anything I said to you about him, and since you must have known that Ayse is ready to follow him to the ends of the earth if permission is granted to her to do so, the fact that you did allow him to accompany you—and in one of my own cars!—must be my excuse for feeling strongly tempted to send you back to Baghdad there and then!”

  “And why didn’t you do so?” she asked, trying to subdue the slight shake in her voice.

  He looked her over casually, but she knew that he took in every detail of her pale blue linen dress—not the same depth of blueness as her eyes, but sufficiently blue to make the most of them—with its wide white puritan collar, and narrow belt, and then his look became inscrutable.

  “How is the bump on your head, Miss Maldon?” he asked, amazing her by changing the subject.

  “Better,” she replied, not quite knowing what she was saying. “I mean, it went down the next day.” And then she moistened her lips. “Mehmet Bey, I must make it clear to you that, although my father did say something to me about the reason why you took your sister away to Paris recently after all, I had to know something since I was to act as a kind of watch-dog over her movements in future!”—with an almost venomous look at him “I had no idea at all that she even knew Nicholas Carlton, or that he knew her. I gave him a lift out to the oasis because he said he was proposing to stay with a friend for a few days, and so far as I know he has already gone back to Baghdad.”

  “Not he!” Mehmet Bey assured her, bitterly. “His friend is the type—slightly less desirable than himself who will permit him to hang on and share the lack of amenities in his rather rude dwelling for as long as he can put up with them. And with you here as well as Ayse, that might be more or less indefinitely.”

  “Then would you prefer me to go away again,” she asked. “Obviously I don’t seem to be a very happy choice for your sister, and I can contact my father straight away. At least,” she added, wondering how she was going to contact him, “I can write him...”

  “After he’s brought you all the way out here from England for a specific purpose?”

  She suddenly felt rather helpless.

  “That’s true,” she admitted. “And he did pay my fare, and I’m not quite sure how I’m going to repay it, if ...” She bit hard at her lower lip as if she was even a little dismayed. “But I can’t expect you to pay me a salary when I’m likely to cause you inconvenience—when you even disapprove of me because of what I did the other night!” She looked up at him as if a great deal of the fight had abruptly gone out of her, and there was nothing but anxious concern in her eyes. “It wouldn’t be reasonable, so, of course, I’ll have to go!”

  “Will you?”—looking hard at her.

  “Yes, of course.” She played with a silver fruit knife beside her plate. “I’m sorry about your sister Ayse—but, of course, you couldn’t allow her to marry a man like Carlton. It would be unthinkable!”

  “And yet you permit him to call you sweet Sue!”

  “I don’t, I—” And then she remembered the promise she had allowed his sister to extract from her, and she decided to try to twist her words. “Sometimes things are not quite what they seem ... And”—with a ghost of a smile playing suddenly round her lips—“I could have been reading a book that wasn’t really intended for me, you know.”

  “You could,” he agreed, “but that—in the light of subsequent events—would be, as they say, stretching the long arm of coincidence too far? Also your name is Susan, isn’t it? And I know that your father calls you Sue.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.” He examined her as if he was trying to find an explanation for his next few words. “He’s very fond of you, you know. He was most anxious to get you out here.”

  “Was he?” She looked suddenly wistful. “Poor Daddy!”

  “I don’t think you have any cause to pity him,” he remarked, taking a handsome gold cigarette-case from his pocket and offering it to her. He recommended her to leave the Turkish cigarettes alone, because they would be too strong for her, and then held a lighter to the end of the Virginian she selected. “Tell me,” he said, with a harsh note creeping into his voice, “are there many young women of your age and your type in England who have to fend for themselves’? To pay their own fares when they travel anywhere?”

  The flame of the lighter seemed to cause gold sparks to fly off her lashes, and her blue eyes were astonished as they looked into his.

  “Quite a number,” she answered. “A very large number. Why? Don’t you approve?”

  “I certainly do not approve:” He snapped shut the lighter and slid it back into the pocket of his silk shirt. “And as for your getting in touch with your father, you will do nothing about that until you receive permission from me, do you understand, Miss Maldon? I gave your father to understand that you would be safe here in this house, and I don’t break my word! I never under any circumstances allow a given word to be broken!”

  “I see...” she said.

  “And so you stay here. Is that quite clear?”

  “Y-yes,” she answered, and thought to herself that Ayse was right—Raoul certainly was master in his own house! And he was obviously capable of ordering more than one woman’s life for her, even when it so happened that she was not his sister.

  The following morning she again watched from her balcony when he and Ayse set off for their morning ride, only this time, when they returned, she was standing in the low doorway to the courtyard when they dismounted.

  Raoul looked up and caught sight of her, in her cool whiteness, with her fair curls gleaming against the shadows behind her, and instantly a rather odd look flashed into his eyes and he beckoned her to come nearer.

  “Do you ride, Miss Maldon?” he asked.

  Susan met the queer gleam in his eyes with an uneasy feeling like apprehension, while at the same time, out of the corners of her eyes, she followed the movements of the grooms and the foam-flecked mounts that were being led away.

  “No,” she admitted, “I don’t.”

  His eyes ran over her quite openly, assessing her weight, and various potentialities, she felt sure.

  “Then you must learn,” he said. A tiny smile lit the dark depths between his thick eyelashes. “You must certainly learn, Miss Maldon. You can’t share our lives and miss the finest experience in the world, can she, Ayse?”—as his sister joined them. “It would be unthinkable!”

  But Ayse whose nature was so much gentler than his, smiled understanding at Susan.

  “I think we should give Miss Maldon time to accustom herself to new surroundings before we insist on her doing anything,” she answered.

  “Do you?” He lit a cigarette and continued to regard Susan as if she interested him. His eyes narrowed, and under that half-mocking, half-intent scrutiny the English girl felt as if she was blushing all over. “There is not very much of you, Miss Maldon,” he said, “and what little there is might easily be blown away by a strong puff of wind, but you look to me as if you would have a good seat in a saddle, and your hands are small but well-shaped, and perhaps there is more strength in your wrists than one would imagine. I’ve a little bay mare which
could carry you beautifully. Are you willing to put her to the test tomorrow morning?”

  “I—” Susan began, searching feverishly in her mind for some excuse to delay riding lessons until she was at least a little more used to the spirited type of horseflesh they seemed to breed in Zor Oasis. And then all at once it occurred to her that he was deliberately challenging her, and her small chin sprang quickly and defensively into the air. “I don’t mind,” she replied, and thought that amusement rippled all over his face.

  “Splendid!” he exclaimed, and as they walked the paths of the courtyard to the patio where breakfast awaited them, he stooped suddenly above a rosebush and plucked her a half-opened, crimson rose. A diamond-bright drop from the spraying fountain rested in the heart of it, and as he handed it over Susan felt the drop splash coolly and refreshingly on to her fingers. “There!” Mehmet Bey said softly. “You couldn’t do better than that in England, could you?”

  Susan looked at him with sudden, intense curiosity.

  “Do you know England?” she asked.

  “I spent a couple of years at Oxford studying law,” he answered. “I also discovered that I like England, and that English gardens are highly productive of this sort of thing”—flicking the rose gently with the tip of a very long and very brown index finger, and then looking deliberately into her face.

  Susan felt herself coloring ridiculously for no reason at all—apart from the fact that his eyes always confused her.

  She spent part of the morning unpacking the remainder of her things, which she had hesitated to unpack the day before because she was by no means certain that she would remain where she was. Raoul Mehmet Bey might issue his orders, but that was no reason—or so she told herself why she should carry them out. And as she put away her rather limited supply of personal possessions in the lavish wardrobe and drawer space that had been provided for them, she told herself that it was because of Ayse that she had made up her mind to stay.