City of Palms

by Pamela Kent

  It was not so bad while they were in the bazaar, where Ayse hesitated prettily over her various purchases, inviting the man’s opinion on many of them. It was not so bad when he bought her a delicate toy of a carved ivory elephant which took her fancy—quite an inexpensive gift, but one which she declared she would keep always, and tucked delightedly away in her handbag as if it was her most treasured possession (or would be from that time forth!)—or when he followed up the gift with a slim phial of perfume, because he also presented a similar phial to Susan. But when the latter insisted on having a closer look at the mosque with the gilded cupola and slender minaret, which was the first thing one saw above the surrounding sea of palms when approaching Baghdad, Ayse naturally hadn’t very much interest, because she was completely familiar with the mosque, but Susan did think Nicholas might have shared her enthusiasm. As it was, in her eagerness to get as close as possible and see as much as she could of that mysterious building wherein she knew men knelt at all hours to pray, and she, being an Infidel—and a woman!—would never be granted admittance, she very nearly got left behind while the other two wandered on in blissful forgetfulness, or so it seemed, of her very existence.

  But lunch was the worst experience, for it was then that Ayse made her unsophisticated attempt to find out all that she could about Dr. Arnwood from himself, and Susan felt strongly that the two of them would have been far happier alone, and that she was merely an intrusive third.

  But on the way home, after having tea with Nicholas and then being collected once more by Raoul’s chauffeur, Ayse’s expressed delight in what she described as a perfect day touched Susan so much that she was ashamed of having felt left out. And perhaps if Raoul—or someone else!—had spent the day with them as well, she wouldn’t have felt left out at all. For three was an awkward number...

  “You told me that your Dr. Arnwood was nice,” Ayse murmured a little dreamily, sharing the back seat of the car with Susan, “but you did not tell me how nice!” She looked suddenly sideways at her English companion, a rather curious expression on her face. “It was he who sent you his love? Who wrote in your book?” she demanded.

  Susan felt it was necessary to reassure her instantly.

  “He sent me his love because he has known me from a child, or almost, and he wrote in my book to give me confidence when I left England. He is not in love with me, Ayse,” she said, very distinctly.

  “No?” But the sudden doubt in Ayse’s face died slowly.

  “And I am not in love with him. We are just excellent friends.”

  “I see.”

  Ayse lay back against the seat and obviously turned this over in her mind.

  “I do understand it,” she confessed, at last, “because you are so very attractive, and it seems to me that most men must admire you—particularly dark men, because you are so fair. Fair like a flower.” She looked sideways again at Susan with interest. “The light and the dark, they attract, you know,” she murmured. “It is a sort of magnetism.”

  “Then you must have exercised your personal magnetism on Nick,” Susan told her, smiling at her, “for he is dark enough, and although you have dark eyes, your skin and hair are fair. And I noticed that he finds it quite impossible to stop looking at you all the time he is with you.”

  Ayse flushed brilliantly.

  “Do you think it is possible we might become friends? My brother has invited him to stay with us, you know.”

  “Yes, I do know.” Susan sobered suddenly, recalling the night when she had learned this piece of intelligence. “But is that what you really wish to be?” she asked, more slowly. “A friend of Nick’s?”

  Ayse clutched at her large white handbag in which the carved ivory elephant and the phial of perfume were reposing.

  “No,” she admitted, and then blushed almost painfully because of the revelation she had made. “No,” she repeated.

  Susan reached out and squeezed the hand that rested on the gold clasp of, the handbag.

  “Good!” she exclaimed. “For somehow I don’t think Nick is anxious to have you for a friend, either. We must get some of those lovely materials you have bought made up for you before he arrives, and then he can see you at your enchanting best.”

  “And you, too,” Ayse responded eagerly. “That green gauze you bought will look quite delicious if it is carefully made up. My maid Lashti can copy any model in my wardrobe in a very short space of time, or any model in a fashion magazine. All that you have to do is to choose, and Lashti will not disappoint you.”

  “But you will require her to work for you,” Susan demurred.

  “There is no hurry for any of my materials to be made up. I have plenty of clothes, whereas you—”

  “If you hadn’t helped me out with that lovely dress I would have been rather stuck by now,” Susan admitted wryly.

  “And as it is, you look wonderful in it,” Ayse told her, softly. “But you must have the green made up. It is important that you, too, should look, as you would say, at your enchanting best!”

  Susan looked at her for an explanation.

  “Important? Why?”

  Ayse smiled in the curious, enigmatic fashion she sometimes permitted to mask her thoughts.

  “Because I say that it is important. Because it is important!”

  But when their car swept into the green of the oasis, and Raoul appeared in the courtyard to help them alight, the thought flashed through Susan’s mind that whoever she was to impress by dressing up it certainly was not Raoul. Not in this new, strange, unapproachable mood of his.

  He barely looked at her, although he was meticulously polite as he handed her from the car. For the past two days he had treated her in the same fashion, as if she was indeed a companion to his sister whom he acknowledged, and wished to treat with respect, but was hardly aware of. As if he considered that the fact that he was paying her a generous salary was more than enough to make up for any lack of attention on his part.

  But for Ayse, as he helped her from the car, he had a special kind of smile. Susan had seen it before, softening his eyes and the hard outline of his lips, when he looked at his sister. And she smiled back as if she was always delighted to see him.

  “Have a good day?” he asked, as he indicated the parcels in the back of the car and instructed the chauffeur to collect them.

  “Perfect, thanks.”

  His smile grew quizzical.

  “Do you think Dr. Arnwood found it perfect, too?” he enquired, as his long index finger lightly touched her cheek.

  “I don’t know.” She flushed in her revealing fashion. “But he was most kind. And he is coming to stay with us at the end of the week.”

  “Then some time between now and the end of his visit we may find out whether today was perfect from his point of view, also,” he remarked, and then turned and looked deliberately at Susan. “Do you agree with me, Miss Maldon?”

  In the last few days he had reverted to the formal mode of address and, although she couldn’t say so, the fact that he had done so hurt her acutely.

  “Y-yes,” she answered, not properly understanding with what she was expected to agree, and hardly knowing how she answered in any case.

  Ayse looked at her with sudden, unmistakable sympathy.

  “It is too bad, Raoul,” she chided him, “that you call Susan Miss Maldon. She is so much our friend nowadays that I wish you would not do so.”

  “Miss Maldon, I feel sure, wouldn’t agree with you,” Raoul answered rather curtly. “Susan is a familiarity that should not be permitted to an employer.” His face looked harsh and haughty suddenly. “And we must not forget that Miss Maldon came here to do a job of work. It is up to you to say whether she is doing it satisfactorily.”

  “Why, Raoul!” Ayse looked shocked and almost dismayed. “I love having Susan here. I can’t imagine what it would be like if she were not here.”

  Raoul made a faint shrugging movement with his excellent shoulders and turned away. Susan felt as if something
had lacerated her by cutting unexpectedly into her flesh, and she felt far more dismayed than Ayse could possibly be.

  Was he suggesting, she wondered, that she was not satisfactory?

  Was he implying that she should be turned away from Zor Oasis?

  Her hands, clutching her own parcel of green gauze, went suddenly cold.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BUT that night, just before she went upstairs to bed, he waylaid her in the hall as she was about to follow Ayse.

  The evening had dragged itself out in an almost painfully leaded fashion so far as Susan was concerned, and she had half made up her mind that the best thing she could do was ask to be released from her present position and go back home to England. Although it would disappoint her father, and the thought of going back to a life that would seem narrower and emptier than ever after the colorful variety of the past few weeks was something she shrank from, it seemed the only sensible thing to do. She obviously hadn’t proved a great success, or Raoul wouldn’t have spoken to her like that, and the fact that she had fallen in love with him would only in the end make things utterly impossible for herself.

  But, in the meantime, the thought of leaving him was like a knife-thrust in her heart.

  And then, just as she reached the staircase, his voice called to her imperatively from behind. “Susan!”

  She turned. She was looking a little defeated, and her shoulders drooped, and for the first time the dark eyes watching her softened in a miraculous kind of way.

  “Susan,” he repeated, and moved until he stood so close to her that the skirt of her gown brushed against him. “Susan”—unless she imagined it there was something faintly imploring in those strange dark eyes—“I want to apologize for what I said this afternoon, when you arrived back from Baghdad! It was inexcusable, but I must ask you, please, to overlook it, and believe that Ayse would be most unhappy without you.” Susan was so taken aback that for a few moments the sudden exquisite relief she experienced was given away by her eyes, and instantly he held out his hand. She put hers into it, and he gripped it tightly.

  “I’m a brute, Susan—a most unpleasant person, as you must already have found out.” His lips twisted wryly. “The devil takes possession of me sometimes, and then I’m not really at all nice to know. There are occasions when I feel a wicked desire to hurt, and I wanted to hurt you this afternoon.”

  “But why?” she asked, bewildered, while he still retained possession of her fingers.

  “Don’t ask me why.” He looked down at those slim, white, and rather flower-like fingers, lying in his brown clasp, and for an instant his expression baffled her altogether. “But if you can overlook it, and I promise never to be quite as impossible again, can’t we go back to where we were before”—his heavily-lashed eyelids lifted, and he looked straight into her eyes—“before I forgot my promise to your father!”

  “Oh!” Susan was experiencing so much relief that she was feeling a little light-headed, and she was prepared to concede him the sun, moon, and stars just then. “I—I thought that perhaps I—I really had failed to give satisfaction!...”

  “Satisfaction?” He looked almost shocked. “But there is no reason why you should give satisfaction to anyone. I mean—” He looked down again at her hand. “Please say that we are friends once more,” he requested simply.

  Susan’s heart raced within her, and all her pulses seemed to be behaving eccentrically.

  “I should be happy to think that we are friends once more,” she told him breathlessly.

  He smiled at her, a hint of audacity at the corners of the smile.

  “And I really am forgiven?—For everything?”

  “For—everything?” And then she colored furiously. “We said we would forget it,” she reminded him, more stiffly.

  “Ah, yes, we will forget it!” But he watched her walk towards the stairs, lightly trailing the skirt of the gauzy grey gown on the gleaming floor, with a look in his eyes that would certainly have puzzled her—and perhaps even disturbed her—had she seen it. “Good night, Susan—little one!”

  With a hand on the ornamental hand-rail Susan looked down at him, and before she breathed her own good night she did think there was something strange about his expression, just as the softness of his voice had surprised her. It was not that sinister, silken softness that she had heard once before, but a gentle, caressing softness that played further havoc with her apparently quite uncontrollable emotions, and there was something gentle in his face, too. It looked out of his eyes as they gazed up at her, and quite transformed the usual hard set of his mouth.

  “Do you feel like giving Ferida another chance tomorrow morning?” he called, before she reached the head of the stairs.

  She turned and smiled down at him eagerly.

  “I’d love to.”

  “Good. And this time she won’t throw you,” he promised.

  He watched her hurry away along a dimly lighted gallery, and then turned and walked out into the patio. He smoked cigarette after cigarette while he listened to the music of the fountain, and while the stars paled gradually. Susan, upstairs in her room, found that she was too excited to sleep.

  The next few days were amongst the pleasantest she had spent in Zor Oasis. Raoul had ceased to mock her—save in a very friendly fashion—and into his attitude there had crept, and remained, that hint of gentleness which had so altered his expression on the night he had apologized to her for his behavior of the afternoon. There was even something protective in his attitude, especially when she was once more up on Ferida, and if the little mare showed the slightest sign of misbehaving herself his hand was out and grasping her reins, and whether she liked the close proximity of Said or not Susan found herself ranged alongside the powerful stallion, with Raoul near enough to snatch her out of her saddle if the desire to do so overtook him, or he considered it necessary.

  Ayse looked on with an almost smugly self-satisfied expression on her face which puzzled Susan, and sometimes she sat and studied her brother’s face while he in his turn watched every changing expression that came and went in the English girl’s demure, downbent features, while she employed herself with needlework or improved her knowledge of French, and felt faintly surprised at what she saw. It was not in Raoul’s nature to give away very much, but his sister had known him from infancy, and to her he was like a book she had the power to translate. But, having completed her translation, she merely looked more smugly self-satisfied than ever, and insisted on Lashti hastening her work on the green gauze gown she was making for Susan.

  On the night of Nicholas Arnwood’s arrival, to stay for as long as he pleased in Zor Oasis, the dress was finished, and Susan wore it when she went down to dinner. It had a very full skirt, and the close-fitting bodice was sewn with tight little clusters of crystal beads that looked like dew-drops sparkling in the rays of light. Susan was so pleased with it that she hardly knew how to thank Lashti, and when she entered the big main salon where they always congregated before dinner she was conscious of the men’s eyes turning upon her immediately. And in spite of the fact that Nick was merely her old friend she realized that he was looking at her in admiration, but the expression in Raoul’s eyes she found it impossible to read.

  Ayse, when she also made something of an entrance a few minutes later, was looking nothing short of entrancing in heavy white slipper satin, cut on classic lines, with rubies blazing in her ears, and a collar of the same stones about her slender throat. Susan could almost feel the leap of the visitor’s pulses as he let his eyes rest on her, and even her brother smiled approval.

  Afterwards, as was customary, they took their coffee in the patio, and while the shadows deepened and the stars grew brighter, and the golden sickle of a young moon sailed into view above the high surrounding walls of the patio, Susan was acutely conscious of the dinner-jacketed forms of the two men seated one on either side of her. The tender light of the young moon touched the sleek heads of both of them, but although they were both phys
ically attractive she knew that Nick could not even begin to compare with the sheer masculine perfection of Raoul Mehmet Bey.

  She was conscious of him, and the mere foot or so of space that separated her from him, that her whole body trembled a little in secret, and when she accepted her coffee cup from his hands she was afraid that he would become aware that her hand was very far from steady.

  Presently Ayse returned to the main salon to switch on the radio, and Nick didn’t even make a pretext to follow her. He simply stood up and melted into the shadows which had engulfed her, and Susan felt suddenly anxious lest Mehmet Bey should look upon this deliberate pursuit of his sister as a trifle too obvious. But all he said, as he carefully lighted himself another cigarette, was:

  “Your friend, Dr. Arnwood, is a man who never deceives himself, and he doesn’t appear to believe in camouflage. Would you say that he was rather more than interested in Ayse?”

  Susan stole a look at his dark profile, decided that it was about as revealing as the profile of the Sphinx, as he stared at the tip of his cigarette, and answered cautiously:

  “He does seem to be interested. But, then, she’s so lovely. Do you—do you mind?”

  He looked round at her with one eyebrow raised, and a faint gleam of white teeth that surprised her.

  “Would it matter very much if I did, do you think?”

  “But you objected so strongly to Nick Carlton!”

  “Naturally. Anyone would object to Nick Carlton, but Arnwood is rather different. He wouldn’t be interested in a fortune, for one thing, and I don’t think in a general way women make much of an appeal to him. Also, I must admit I like him.”