Sandflower

by Jane Arbor

  She looked at him suspiciously. “A job I could do? Without any training? What do you mean?”

  “That you might do a lot worse than getting down to making a home for your father. As for your nonexistent training, so long as you recognize the world of meaning between a ‘house’ and a ‘home,’ that could take you a fair way for a start.”

  “But—but naturally, while I’m here, I’m going to live with dada in Tasghala!” Liz exclaimed.

  “Quite. But I hope your lack of curiosity over everything else about the place doesn’t extend to knowing nothing of how he lives there himself?”

  “Of course I know! He has a single service chalet attached to the hotel. Or he had. He has moved now into one where there’ll be room for me.”

  “Exactly. That covers ‘house.’ Now ‘home.’ Have you any conception, I wonder, how much and for how long he has lacked that?”

  “Well—” Liz stopped, sure that Roger Yate knew the answers to his questions, equally sure that he meant to wring the details from her. She began again. “Well, he was in the army in Burma when mama died and I was four. After the war he went back to the university to get his degree in economics. Then about ten years ago he took a post as a Commercial Relations Officer in the Persian Gulf. I was at boarding school and going for the holidays to my aunts. I went to live with them altogether when I left school, and dada joined Pan-Sahara Oil as C.R.O. in Tasghala about nine months after that. The home leave he has just finished was the first he had had from here.”

  “And so...?” Roger Yate’s level tone urged.

  “And so—what? Oh—” Liz bit her lip “—you mean that since mama died, for about fifteen years dada hasn’t had a real home?”

  “Good!” For almost the first time there was no overtone of banter or criticism in her companion’s voice. He sat forward, forearms wide upon the table between them as he went on, “I didn’t know whether I could count on you to get the idea for yourself—that for all that time Andrew Shepard has been able to command quarters and service but precious little else. That for fifteen years he hasn’t known what it was to come back at the end of his day to a welcome from someone he could call his own. And as the fifties loom, that must begin to matter quite a lot.”

  “You mean that earlier it doesn’t matter so much?”

  He looked at her quizzically. “Do you think up ingenuous questions like that, or do they come naturally? Of course it matters earlier, or men wouldn’t marry at the age most of them do. But earlier there are plenty of consolations at hand.”

  “Such as?” Liz invited.

  He thrust forward a lower lip in thought. “Work that’s all absorbing. Ambition. Travel. Harmless—or otherwise—flirtation with the girls a man will never marry. The dogged, time-stealing pursuit of the woman he will—”

  “Yes, I see.” For some reason Liz felt newly snubbed, or at least that it was safer to return to the subject of her father.

  “Then if you’re right, and dada is lonely, do you think I could really be a companion to him if I decide to stay and try?”

  “I certainly do, so long as you don’t give up trying when the novelty wears off, or if you don’t imagine you aren’t being appreciated enough. You can’t hope to take the place of a wife with him, you know.”

  “No, I see that, and I will try.” A thought struck her, and she added, “Do you think dada hoped I would stay—willingly, I mean—when he decided to bring me out here?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t voice any such hope to me.”

  “Oh. You’re sure he didn’t put you on to sounding me about it, to asking me?”

  She was completely unprepared for Roger Yate’s “Tch!” of exasperation, and it made her start. He said violently, “What a grudging little wretch you are! He certainly did not, but how on earth could it matter, even if he had?”

  “It couldn’t, of course,” she agreed flatly, instead of answering his question. She had irritated him again unwittingly and she saw the futility of trying to explain her reluctance to accept the idea at third hand—from dada to Roger Yate, and from him to her. She ought to have thought of it herself! Ought to have realized how dada must need her! It was bad enough, having to take Roger Yate’s prompting, but if he were more sympathetic, he would understand her pride needed to pretend that the plan, and not only the will to try, had originated with her.

  She was bitterly ashamed that it hadn’t, and she meant to make a success of it because it hadn’t. But if she told this odious man so, no doubt he could misjudge even that. “Grudging,” indeed! And that at a point where she believed he had begun to despise her less!

  Well, he should eat his “grudging” in time. And all the other criticisms he might have up his sleeve! She would “take” Tasghala, if only because he seemed convinced she couldn't. She had never felt so challenged, so—so goaded in her life!

  When he did not press her to enlarge on her last remark, she hunched a shoulder toward him and looked absorbedly out of the cabin window.

  The high cloud above which they had been flying was thinning and wisping as the aircraft began to lose height, and below now, behind, and as far ahead as Liz could see, lay the incredible face of the desert, so like, and yet so unlike, anything she had imagined it would be.

  For there was the sand—mile upon endless mile of it. But there was by no means the plain, the ebbtide flatness she had expected to see. Nor was the sand the color it should be. Here it was white; there, pinkish; black shadowed in the long ribbings, piling and humping into stone-gray dunes in the middle distance and, astonishingly, into a range of blue mountains on the farthest horizon.

  At the sight Liz turned back impulsively to her companion. But he had left his seat to cross the aisle to the young mother with the baby. He was talking to her in French, they were laughing together, and then the baby was taken from its basket for his inspection.

  On returning to Liz he commented, “I suppose it could be asking for trouble, bringing an unacclimatized baby of three months into the desert. But there you are—madame claims she has been separated for ‘too long’ from her husband, who is a meteorologist for Pan-Sahara Oil, and I daresay there’s only a thin line between foolhardiness and courage after all—” He broke off and took the seat beside Liz, following her eyes toward the distant mountains.

  She said wonderingly, “I hadn’t expected mountains, or even hills. I thought it would all be flat!”

  He laughed. “So much for an expensive education! Actually, I think you’re not alone in envisaging the Sahara as a kind of mammoth beach. But, as you see, there are long escarpments of dunes, and mountains of up to eight thousand feet. Those—” he nodded ahead “—are the Hoggar, hundreds of miles south. We’ve nothing on that scale near Tasghala, which ought, by the way, soon to be in sight. Yes, there—”

  With scant ceremony he took Liz’s head between his hands, turned it in the desired direction. At first she saw nothing, but then through the haze, caught her first sight of Tasghala as a white, flat-roofed island, ringed by palms. Beyond the palms the desert rolled away on either side of a stony track that ribboned across it. “The road to the oil site,” Roger Yate told her, and pointed out a dark huddle to the east of it.

  “A Tuareg encampment, that,” he said. “The name means ‘Forgotten of God.’ They are called the nomad Blue Men of the desert, from the deep blue robes the men wear. It’s the males who go veiled to the eyes, by the way; their women don’t. Their staple diet is dates and camel’s milk, and they count their wealth in the number of camels they own. They are unpredictable wanderers—that lot, for instance, may be here today and gone with the wind tomorrow. And as they expect ill luck if they sleep beneath a roof, you can imagine the diplomacy that’s called for to get them into hospital.”

  Liz asked in surprise, “You have them as patients, then?”

  His deep brows lifted. “Of course. What do you think? That medicine and nursing out here can stop short of a racial line, or what?”

  “I
suppose I hadn’t thought,” she admitted, and wished she hadn’t put herself in the wrong again with her question. But he had returned to his own seat without further interest, and while they were fastening their safety belts in readiness for landing, she was grateful that she would soon be free of his critical carping.

  But he was to have a parting tilt at her ignorance of the desert. As they filed from the passenger cabin she found the wide-brimmed straw hat she was carrying filched from her hand and jammed unbecomingly on her head. “For pity’s sake, be your age,” he muttered. “At least heat stroke is one thing you needn’t get!”

  She saw what he meant as soon as she stepped down onto the blistering tarmac and felt the glare coming off the shadeless airstrip like the breath-catching shock of a too hot bath. Her hat was certainly a “must,” and so were the sunglasses which she took hastily from her bag.

  Adjusting them, she scanned the veranda of the reception hall in search of her father, but could not pick him out from the knot of people awaiting the straggle of passengers from the plane. She saw other reunions taking place—the French airman pounced upon by a buxom girl in jeans, the father of the baby clearly torn between greeting his wife and admiring his son. But she and Roger Yate had gone through the casually conducted formalities of arrival before Andrew Shepard appeared.

  “Dada!”

  “Liz!” When they had kissed, and while he was greeting Roger Yate, Liz was able to look at him, measuring him by a new yardstick—by the other man’s suggestion that he was lonely, that he needed her.

  Previously he had just been “dada”—someone who came and went at long intervals and whom she had known, she realized now, only inadequately through the cold comfort of letters. And in London, on his last leave, he had been not even so much “dada” as the critical parent, scrutinizing her too closely, finding rather a lot of faults.

  She had resented that, been openly mutinous when the fiat went forth that she was to join him in the Sahara. But she had had to obey and, looking at him now, she was suddenly and fiercely glad that she had been given no choice. For he looked different here, in this cruelly revealing light. In London, clothes had disguised the spareness of the flesh on his bones, and she was shocked to notice how the receding iron-gray hair added to his middle age. Somehow now, he was—what was the word?—vulnerable, as open to hurt and misjudgment as she felt herself to be. The thought steeled her resolve to find out what he needed of the daughter she had never been to him yet.

  Meanwhile, he was inquiring about the flight, thanking Roger Yate for escorting her, offering him a lift into Tasghala in his Land Rover.

  But the other man said, “Thanks, I hadn’t laid on any transport as it happens. But Janine Carlyon said she was expecting some things she had ordered to come in on today’s plane, so she offered to pick me up, as she would be meeting it. I don’t see her around yet. But I’d better wait for a while, in case she shows up.”

  “Yes, of course,” agreed Andrew. “However, we’ll be seeing you for a sundowner one evening. As soon as Liz here gets her bearings, she’ll be looking for a welcome party, I take it.”

  “I daresay, and if you’ll call me, I’ll be along if I’m free.” Sketching a salute between them, Roger Yate strode away.

  When he had gone Andrew took Liz and her luggage across to the Land Rover, asking her to wait while he checked on some incoming consignments himself. “You’ve yet to appreciate the scope of a C.R.O.’s function!” he told her wryly. “I’m expected to track down and buy at the right price anything from an oil trepan to a tap washer, from a wheel for a ten-tonner to a shaving mirror. This lot, for instance, should be a mixed bag of cricket gear and insecticides, and I wouldn’t know which the men on the site are going to welcome most!”

  Returning after about a quarter of an hour, he took the driving seat beside Liz, telling her that they would be in the town center within a quarter of an hour. “I suppose Yate has already gone?” he asked. “Or didn’t you see him leave? With Mrs. Carlyon, I mean?”

  Liz said, “Yes, I saw him go. A girl in a car—” she checked and frowned. “Mrs. Carlyon, though? This girl couldn’t have been!”

  “No?” queried her father. “I thought he said Janine, but maybe he didn’t.”

  “He certainly said Janine,” Liz confirmed. “But this was a girl, dada. Too young, I’d say, to be ‘Mrs.’ Anybody. Around my age, in fact.” She stopped short of her further impression—of the other girl’s elfin figure, of the enviable honey-bronze of her skin against her white shirt and shorts; of her dark head, bare to the heat without apparent reprimand from Roger Yate; of the fact that she had clinched what had looked like an argument over who should drive by laughing up into his face and taking the driving seat.

  Andrew commented dryly, “Well, Janine Carlyon isn’t exactly in her dotage, though she is hardly a girl. To solve the mystery, what was the car like? Not in its first youth? Open? A yellowish gray?”

  Liz nodded. “Yes, all that. And broadly banded across the hood in green. Like yours, and those jeeps around the airfield. What is the idea, by the way?”

  “It’s recommended for all vehicles out here, as a precaution against their being lost in the desert. Yellow and green are the colors that show up best, if a search has to be made by air. However, to our mystery—the car was Mrs. Carlyon’s, but the girl would have been her daughter, Beth.”

  “Beth! Elizabeth, you mean? My name?” Liz did not know why she felt affronted. Only that she did.

  Her father threw her an amused glance. “So what? When we christened you, we couldn’t buy you a copyright in ‘Elizabeth,’ you know! Besides, there’s no likely danger of you and Beth Carlyon getting yourselves confused. You’re not in the slightest alike, and she is the gentlest little thing. She has only just learned to drive, by the way. So I daresay Janine let her come out to the airfield for Yate, knowing Beth would want him particularly to see how she could handle the car.”

  “Why ‘him particularly’?” asked Liz, her tone blunt.

  “Oh well—just an idea, in view of the bond there is obviously between them—”

  “What sort of bond?”

  “As a layman, I think I’d hesitate to say,” Andrew allowed. “Because how can one know how, when or why one doctor-patient link becomes something closer, when another doesn’t? A small place like Tasghala is bound to have its theories, and the crabbiest of us adore a romance. But of these two it’s probably only safe to call Beth Carlyon Roger Yate’s ‘dearest achievement’ until, or if, they write ‘Finis’ or ‘Happy Ever After’ across the story.”

  Looking straight ahead, Liz echoed, “His ‘achievement’? What do you mean?”

  What but the mildest interest could the answer have for her? But while she waited for it, she found she was trying quite hard not to care about sharing her name with a “gentle little thing” who was pretty, petite, appealing and—something Liz Shepard was never likely to be!—in high favor, if nothing more, with Roger Yate.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Andrew did not REPLY while he swung out and around a slow-moving line of traffic at the approach to the town. Then he said, “I meant that Beth, as the entirely healthy girl she is now, is a complete medical triumph for Yate. It was before my time in Tasghala, but two years ago, when Janine—Mrs. Carlyon, that is—brought her here from Tamanrasset, she came on a stretcher, paralyzed after polio.”

  “Just a minute, dada—Janine Carlyon is Beth’s mother?”

  “No, stepmother. There’s probably only about fifteen years between them. She is French and a widow, but Beth’s parents were both English. Her father, who was prospecting for uranium in the Hoggar range, was killed when a helicopter crashed. That left Janine without funds, and with Beth sick on her hands she came north to Tasghala to take a job, teaching domestic science in the school here. Meanwhile Beth was still a hospital case and likely to be so indefinitely when she came under Roger Yate’s care. But he refused to accept that she was incurable, and insisted that
he would get her on her feet again, given time and Janine’s faithful cooperation.

  “Well, he got that, and he did cure Beth. Partly by orthodox methods, partly by his own prescription of daily baths of packed, hot sand! By the time I arrived here the child was as bonny as you are, Liz. Less robust, I suppose, but she is by no means an invalid, and you can appreciate their gratitude—hers and Janine’s—to Roger Yate. Janine thinks the world of him, Beth has made him her hero, and for him she is still very much his protégée. And as they are frequently seen together, you can understand how our local gossips have agreed that something will come of it one day?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Liz nodded, wondering why the little story should make her feel she was standing in the dark beyond a lighted window, looking in at a taken-for-granted coziness she was not being asked to share. She felt sharply irritated with herself. What was the matter with her? She had enough imagination and sympathy to appreciate the triumph of Beth Carlyon’s cure, so why couldn’t she be as generously glad as dada seemed to be about the rest?

  “Does Beth do anything now?” she asked. “I mean, has she a job?”

  Andrew shook his head. “No. I doubt, anyway, whether Yate would agree that she would be strong enough to take one.”

  So, Liz reflected, Beth wasn’t any more “functional” or worthily employed than she was herself. That made two of them ... Or did it? In Roger Yate’s eyes Liz Sheppard was willfully spineless, whereas Beth Carlyon must be protected—

  At that point, however, honesty brought Liz up with a mental jerk. What on earth was making her so waspish about a girl she had not even met? As for Roger Yate, surely her pride was above caring whether he approved of her or not?

  Meanwhile, Andrew told her, they had not much farther to go, and a few minutes later he turned in at a stone gateway overhung by dusty foliage, drawing up at a small sandstone bungalow in the grounds of the hotel.