Sandflower

by Jane Arbor

  While he took her bags from the car, Liz looked in some dismay at the alien lines of the house. It reminded her of the desert forts she had seen on films, with its stark walls crenellated at roof level and its narrow entrance door and windows set back into the thickness of the walls. It was like no house she had ever expected to live in, and it was to be “home” to her—for how long?

  Her heart sank further when they went inside and Andrew opened the door of a shuttered living room, floored in tiles without covering and very bare of furnishing, as she understood the term. He prompted dryly, “Well, how does it measure up by Kensington standards?”

  She avoided his eyes.

  “It—it’s all right,” she hesitated, doing her best. “A bit dark though, isn’t it? And—well, rather empty of things?” (Were they such strangers that he wouldn’t understand that by “things” she meant books, personal treasures, color, flowers?)

  Apparently he did not understand. He took up her first point by going to throw back the shutters. “Dark? Well, that can soon be remedied, though I’m afraid here we’re willing to buy coolness at the price of a bit of darkness in the middle of the day.” But he rejected the rest of her criticism. “I don’t see that it lacks much—of the necessities, at any rate.” He looked about him, frowning. “A table, chairs, decent cupboards, my desk—what more do you want?”

  Liz made a little despairing gesture. “Nothing—except that it isn’t very—homey. For instance, dada—” trying to get a picture of the life she would be sharing “—don’t you need a bit more comfort whenever you’re sitting at home here, say in the evenings?”

  Not helping her, he said shortly, “I don’t ‘sit’—in the English sense—beslippered and at ease. A man doesn’t, when he lives alone. Whenever I’m here on my own, I’m usually at my desk, working. Or if anyone drops in for a drink, we go across to the hotel.”

  “Do people drop in on you?”

  “Only those who’ll take me as they find me. But don’t worry—I’ll try to cultivate a few social graces while you’re here. Meanwhile, you’d like to see your room and the rest of the premises, I daresay?”

  There was a kitchen that was clean but forlorn, as their meals were to be served from the hotel, and the two bedrooms were almost as monastically bare as the living room. It seemed that privacy as well as coolness must be achieved by closing the inevitable shutters, for there were no curtains anywhere, Liz noted. But she was pleased with her private bath and shower—a mere cupboard opening off her room, and there was novelty in the prospect of sleeping in a bed draped with a mosquito net.

  Her father left her in her room, promising to have long drinks in readiness on the tiny veranda when she had bathed and changed.

  “Bring your papers—passport, inoculation chits and so on—with you,” he told her. “I’d like to look them over because, as a visitor to French colonial territory, you must show them at the borj—the military post—as soon as possible after your arrival.”

  In that Liz saw the opening she wanted. Handing over her papers an hour or so later, she asked, “Are the regulations the same for anyone staying permanently?”

  “Rather more searching. In your case, you’ll get a visitor’s permit simply by stating the time you will be staying. We must talk about that.”

  “Yes.” Liz moistened her lips. “But supposing, dada, I wanted to stay permanently?”

  At that he lowered his reading glasses in order to regard her over them. “Supposing any such improbable thing, I should say that it was completely out of the question.”

  “Oh, dada, why?”

  “Why? Mainly, my dear Liz, because I wouldn’t trust for a moment any such capricious about-face on your part!”

  “Dada, that’s not fair!”

  “Isn’t it? Well now—have you no recollection, I wonder, of a certain stormy scene at which you chose to believe you were being banished, punished and shockingly misjudged? We patched up an uneasy truce before I left London, I know. But I’m afraid the impression remains with me that I dragged you out here, even temporarily, against your will.”

  Liz murmured uncomfortably, “In London I did think you were punishing me.”

  “My dear, for what? For being young, for not having learned how to manage money, for being even more spendthrift with your affections and your friendship than you were with your allowance?”

  At the kindness that had replaced the mild censure in his tone Liz felt her eyelids prick. Fearing she might burst into desolate tears, she fell back on the truculence of “How was I to know what for? But what else could I think when you were criticizing everything about me in London? Even the aunts noticed it!”

  “I meant your aunts to notice it. In fact, I’m asking you to believe that I ended the arrangement with them solely because I felt that, however good their intentions, they were being much too indulgent toward you. But as you made no secret of the fact that you thought me brutal, I daresay you’ll appreciate that I’m a bit wary of this sudden change of heart?”

  “I—I’ve had time to think since. And now I am here, I don’t particularly want to go back.”

  “And you can rest assured,” he said crisply, “that you won’t go back, except with some concrete plan for your future. I’m even prepared for your returning to Kensington, so long as you take up any useful training you like as soon as you get there. I won’t have you drift as you were doing, but neither did I ever envisage your making a permanency of your time here. I meant it as a breathing space for you, a taking of bearings for both of us, and I certainly would not do you the injustice of keeping you in a place like Tasghala for good.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “Surely that’s obvious? Its climate, its alien background, its appalling social limitations—”

  “It’s your background,” Liz reminded him.

  “It’s the background of work that I chose and happen to love. I have no right to impose it on you, Liz, until you’ve had the chance to choose work for yourself which you can love.”

  “But—but I think I have chosen! You see, I’d really like to stay here with you. Make a home for you. Oh, dada, if only we knew each other better, I shouldn’t need to explain! Now I’m nearly grown up, you’d realize you ought to let me do what I can do to fill mama’s place for you. You’d want me to. And we shouldn’t have to argue about it, because it would seem the most natural thing in the world.”

  For a moment she could believe the only word to describe his expression was “rewarded,” and she felt newly ashamed that she had been blind to his need for so long. But then he was shaking his head at her. “No, Liz,” he said. “I agree that in England it would be natural for us to share a home and a background until you went off—as you will one day—to make one of your own. But to keep you out here, much as I should love to do so, would be such a waste of opportunity for you that it would be mere selfishness on my part if I did.”

  “What sort of opportunities would it waste?”

  “For instance, the chance you’d have, as a student at something, to move in a circle of people with similar interests to your own.”

  “You didn’t like the people I did move with in London!”

  “Then let’s say the chance of meeting enough of all sorts to enable you to learn to sift the lightweights and the fainthearts from the rest. It seemed to me there was a preponderance of both in the set I found you in. And you can take it from me, Liz—” laying a hand over hers “—that the narrow world of a Sahara outpost simply isn’t suitable for a girl of your inexperience with time on her hands.”

  Touched by his concern for her, but dogged in pursuit of her aim, Liz said, “If I were trying to look after you, I shouldn’t have time on my hands. And I can’t see that it would be any worse for me than for—well, that girl on the airfield, Beth Carlyon. Isn’t she young and inexperienced too?”

  Andrew smiled. “All right—I’ll give you Beth’s youth and innocence. But beyond that, she is acclimatized by having been
born in Nigeria and brought up in Tamanrasset, which is just another Tasghala. She already has roots in the Sahara and will put down more when she marries Yate. The difference between you and her is that you don’t need to anchor yourself here for any man’s sake, and particularly not for mine. No, Liz. It was a loyal impulse on your part. But I can’t believe you’ve looked at it from all sides, and you’ll probably come to thank me for crushing it in the bud.”

  Depressed beyond words at the deadlock, Liz said nothing. Fleetingly she considered telling him that the original impulse hadn’t been hers at all. But once again her pride needed to believe it had been, and if he wouldn’t hear of it anyway, what was the point?

  He had risen and was holding out a hand to her. “Now I’m going to take you over to the hotel to show you off to Monsieur and Madame Simon, the managers. We’ll celebrate your arrival with a rather special dinner tonight, and we’ll talk about all this again tomorrow, I promise.”

  But the promise, through no fault of Andrew’s, was destined to be broken. When Liz woke to the strangeness of her surroundings the next morning, she was struck first by the brooding silence of the house and then by the fact that the sun was high, although Andrew had told her he always rose very early. On the days when he was going out to the oil site he made coffee for himself instead Of waiting for petit dejeuner to be served from the hotel, and as he had proposed Liz should go with him that morning, she had expected he would call her soon after first light.

  He had said it was safe to open her window overnight so long as she did not linger outside her mosquito net after doing so. But she had not been able to resist standing for a little while, looking out at her first Sahara night, marveling at the warm, breathless air which had replaced the searing heat and the nagging wind which had got up before sundown. As much of the sky as she could see had been a dark navy blue pricked with stars, and when the first warning “ping” of a mosquito had sent her scuttling to the refuge of her net she had begun to experience a strange lift to her spirits which had lasted her until she slept.

  This morning, too, with the sun, not yet cruel, striking across the tiled floor, it was easy to feel cheerful, even pleasurably excited. She found she had forgotten to wind her watch and she lay for a while debating whether the clear light made the hour seem later than it was, or whether her father had indeed overslept. But then something about the silence—or was it a sound that had broken the silence—brought her upright, straining her ears and then reaching for her slippers and wrapper.

  Across the hall her father’s door was shut and there was no answer to her knock. She knocked again more insistently, called “Dada?” then turned the handle and looked inside.

  At what she saw the back of her hand went swiftly across her mouth, stifling the whimper of fear that rose and bubbled in her throat. For between the open door of his bathroom and his bed Andrew lay face downward, his body contorted by long shudders, his pajama jacket soaked with sweat.

  “Dada!” As Liz ran to him she saw the scatter of red capsules on the floor and read the connection between the empty bottle near one outflung hand and the open cupboard next to his shaving mirror. He had been taken ill, had gone to fetch a remedy and had collapsed on the way back!

  Kneeling by him and snatching up the bottle to read its label, she felt a connection click into place in her mind.

  Quinine? Malaria ... She did not know what snippet of knowledge told her they were linked, for an old letter from the Persian Gulf had merely said laconically that Andrew had just had “another go of malaria. Stiffer than the last, but nothing to worry about.” That was all. Nothing of the symptoms nor the aftermath, nothing about the cure. But, all the same, Liz knew instinctively that this prostrated ague she was watching so helplessly was a stage in malaria, no less.

  Somehow he must be got back to bed, and at once. But how was she to manage it alone? Torn between trying and going to fetch help, she laid a hand on his shoulder and spoke to him again.

  At her touch he turned his head and twisted his blue lips into a leer intended for a smile. “Sorry, Liz,” he muttered. “No warning this time. Always had one before—Don’t be too scared of me. This part doesn’t last long. But better get—”

  Another shudder cut him short, but when Liz put her strong young arms about him he was able to help her to struggle with him toward the bed. There she piled the light covers over him, ran to fetch those from her own bed, then bent to whisper that she was going to the hotel for Monsieur or Madame Simon now, but she would be right back.

  When she reached the hotel she realized that it was indeed earlier than she had thought. For the only person in the vestibule was a man wielding a mop who only looked puzzledly at her in reply to her muddled, breathless “The manager! Oh—I mean le gerant! Monsieur or Madame Simon—anyone! Quick!” But while she stood momentarily nonplussed the door of an office opened and the manageress came out.

  Liz ran to her, grateful to remember from their last night’s meeting that Madame Simon spoke and understood English quite well. She listened, nodding with concern, and murmured, “Ah, the poor one—he suffers!” when Liz had babbled her story, and then raised her voice in a melodious yodel that brought her husband running.

  Between them Liz began to feel slightly reassured. Malaria was a wicked thing. It recurred, and the fever mounted over a period of days. But mademoiselle must believe that much could be done for it, and would be for Monsieur Shepard. Meanwhile, the first importance was to call the doctor, was it not?

  A doctor—yes, of course. And before she returned to dada. Liz began, “What—?” then stopped, guessing she knew the answer.

  As she had expected, Monsieur Simon said, “Dr. Yate, the clever English one, you would like to call him?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Unless—is there any other English doctor in Tasghala?”

  “No other, mademoiselle. An Egyptian, a German, two French surgeons at the hospital, apart from Dr. Yate. Besides, he and your father are friends, mademoiselle. It wouldn’t be right to call in anyone else. Will you telephone or shall I?”

  “You, please. I don’t know how to get a connection on a French telephone, I’m afraid.”

  But very soon after he was through and talking into the receiver. He handed it over to her.

  “Dr. Yate understands the urgency and will come at once,” he told her. “But he says, ‘I would rather speak to mademoiselle herself, if she is there.’ So I say you are here, and that I telephone for you only because you find our telephones strange. To that he replies, ‘Tch! She can talk into one, I suppose?’ And I say, ‘Of course, doctor.’ You can manage, mademoiselle?”

  “Yes, and thank you.” It was no time, Liz felt, to mind that other man’s intolerance. She said quietly, “Dr. Yate? Liz Shepard speaking.”

  “Good. I’ll come straight over, but I’d like a few facts from you,” he said crisply. “How long is it since you found your father in the bad shape Simon describes?”

  “Just about as long as it took me to get him back to bed and to run to the hotel for help—about five minutes, not much more.”

  “And that was the first sign you had of his being taken ill?”

  “Yes, of course. If I’d heard anything in the night I’d have gone to him, wouldn’t I?”

  Roger Yate ignored the irritation of her retort. “I meant rather, had he complained of feeling out of sorts overnight?”

  “No, and he was planning to take me over to the oil site today. But from the little he managed to say I gathered he knew what was wrong and had expected some warning. And when I saw the quinine tablets all over the floor, I knew it was an attack of malaria.”

  There was a tiny pause. Then, “My dear girl, d’you mind leaving the diagnosis to me?” As Liz froze with chagrin at his tone he went on, “Meanwhile, listen. I’ll be with you in about a quarter of an hour from now. So go straight back to Andrew and wait for me. There probably aren’t enough blankets in the bungalow, so get half a dozen light, woolly ones from Madam
e Simon. Ask for help in taking the sheets from his bed; then wrap him and cover him with blankets only. By the time you get back to him he may be too hot rather than too cold. But pile on the blankets all the same. Is that clear?”

  “Quite, thank you.” Liz could not resist adding, “I can take instructions given in plain English—I’m not quite a moron, you know. Besides, I do happen to have passed my St. John’s Home Nursing while I was at school.”

  “You don’t say? Good for you. Well, go to it then, and let’s see what you’re made of.” The line went dead and Liz hung up not knowing whether she had wrung some reluctant praise from him or not.

  Kindly Madame Simon returned to the bungalow with her, and between them they had just wrapped Andrew in blankets when Roger Yate arrived. Madame Simon left then, saying she would come back, and Liz waited within call while the examination of Andrew was made.

  Roger Yate came out to her. “Yes, it’s malaria,” he said. “His first bout since he has been in Tasghala, as I happen to know. Usually the patient has a warning that one is coming on. But this one, he says, hit him only about half an hour before you found him, which means that the ‘cold stage’ of about an hour’s duration is only just passing off. Next, the hot stage—” He paused to glance at Liz. “Or do you know all this?”

  She flushed. “No, of course not. Please go on.”

  “Well, there are alarmingly high temperatures at this stage—anything up to a hundred and five degrees. But it is a stage and it does pass. And nowadays we have drugs that will cope, even better than quinine. I’ve already given him an intravenous injection, which will help a lot. That and the blanket treatment will bring down the fever within a matter of hours. But he tells me this is tertian malaria—that is, he has always had to expect renewed attacks at the third and fifth or sixth days to come. So I’d better arrange to take him into hospital without delay.”