Sandflower

by Jane Arbor

  “ ‘Everyone’ presumably,” he made a quotation of the first word, “except Beth herself. Considering she and I have never considered marrying, she can hardly believe it, can she?”

  “N-no, I suppose not.” Just in time Liz resisted her chance of revenge. She could have said, “But it’s Beth who has spread the story around, encouraged it.” That would have been the plain truth. Yet something in her code forbade Liz to stoop to the pettiness of it. Besides, Roger’s point-blank denial of the engagement was sweet enough hearing to enable her to be generous.

  He went on, “You don’t sound too sure of it. You’ve evidently listened to the gossip, while Beth kept her own counsel. But I’m rather surprised you were never tempted to sound her about it. Or to sound me.”

  “You? I shouldn’t have dreamed of asking you!”

  “Why not?” His tone held bland, genuine inquiry.

  “Because—well, because it wasn’t any business of mine!”

  “But it was the business of the tittle-tattlers at the club and the hotel and the hospital?” he pursued relentlessly.

  At that Liz rebelled. “That’s not fair!” she protested. “You ought to know that in a community the size of Tasghala, people will talk. But mostly it’s only a human kind of interest in one’s fellows. There’s nothing evil about it, and in your case it was well-wishing as much as anything. ‘All the world loves a lover’—that kind of thing. You—you ought to be grateful, not mad!”

  “All right, all right! Calm down. I’m not, anyway, so much mad as curious to know how my relationship with Beth could have been construed into a love affair. I suppose you’ve heard how it began—how Janine Carlyon and she came to Tasghala?”

  “Yes. Beth was crippled from polio, and you—”

  “And I cured her? Yes, I realize that’s how the popular story goes. But it’s not altogether true. I had theories about polio that I wanted to try out, and Beth was my guinea pig. That is true. But there were a lot of other factors involved. For one, though Beth looks appealingly fragile, she is really as physically tough as they come—”

  You’re telling me she’s tough, Liz thought with grim irony.

  “—And there was always, bless her, Janine’s implicit faith that whatever I did for Beth was right. And that, I think—” now he seemed to be talking to himself rather than to Liz “—was my lodestar all along, realizing that, come hell and high water, I couldn’t fail Janine. Well, I didn’t, and Beth is her own charming evidence that she is cured. And there’s no reason, except one, why she shouldn’t marry tomorrow.”

  “Except one reason? Which one?”

  “An overriding one. She isn’t ready to take being married. She’s too young.”

  “She’s the same age as I am,” Liz pointed out. “Aren’t I ready for marriage, either?”

  “I told you—you’ve grown up in the past few months, either because of, or in spite of circumstances, I don’t quite know. But I think I do know about Beth. I’ve known her longer, and if you insist on the popular story, what she is now is partly what I’ve helped to make her. And I can see that as yet she’s in the wrong mold for making a success of marriage. She still believes that to attract a man and to keep him, she must defer to him, agree with him, flatter him and soak up his personality as if she were a blotting pad!”

  “I thought that’s what men are supposed to like.”

  “Well, it isn’t. Believe that and practice it, and see where it’ll get you with any man who isn’t a worm,” he threw at her roughly. “No man wants to look at his wife and always see his own reflection, or have his every opinion played back to him on a wifely tape recorder.”

  “What about ‘I intend to be master in my own house’?” quoted Liz. “Most men say that at some time or another.”

  “That’s different. It sounds pretty arrogant, I know. But it goes deeper. Being ‘master’ covers everything from wanting to work for a wife to having a fight for her if necessary. That’s a fundamental male need. It’s a man’s refusal to be a yes-man. But he doesn’t want a yes-woman, either. And two vital people don’t sacrifice a jot of their equality and deep dependence on each other, just because they’d rather ride out a storm together than sit pretty in a doldrum of meek agreement!”

  Liz said a little shakily, “Your metaphors are a bit mixed. Reflections and storms, and tape recorders and doldrums...”

  He waved the quibble aside. “As long as the idea gets across—so what? The point is—as yet Beth gives the impression that she hasn’t so much as an opinion in her own right. She asks advice. She pays lip service. She leans. And, I must say, contrives to do all of them prettily. Whereas the woman I marry won’t do any of them, prettily or otherwise, unless she really wants help, or needs to lean.”

  He wasn’t going to marry Beth! And nothing in his choice of phrase told that he was in love with anyone else, either. “It’s on the lap of the gods.” “The woman I marry”—they were mere generalizations, weren’t they? There wasn’t anyone special. And though there was no future in trying to make an equation of—“He doesn’t love Beth Carlyon; therefore there’s a chance for Liz Shepard”—it was a wild surmise that took Liz to the brink of a brittle, precarious excitement.

  It couldn’t, she knew, survive tomorrow’s cold reason, and Roger could destroy it for her tonight with a word or a phrase that told the truth—that he had never given her a romantic thought, even when he had once kissed her. She was almost praying, “Let me keep my dream for a little, little while!” when she saw that he was looking at his watch, and realized they were back on the prosaic once more.

  He said, “Five hours or so to daybreak. Long enough to ‘kip down’ for a while. You can’t wash, I’m afraid. No more water. Could you manage a catlick with shaving cream?”

  “Thanks, but I’ve some cleansing cream and tissues. Where do I ‘kip down,’ though?”

  “On the backseat. You can’t stretch out fully, but you may be able to sleep. You can get under this when you’re ready.” And he produced a mohair rug.

  “What about you?”

  “Don’t bother about me. For Mrs. Grundy’s purposes of reference, I’m as good as not here. I’m going for a walk, anyway. You’re not afraid to be left?”

  “Of course not. What could happen to me?”

  He smiled and lightly touched her cheek. “Nothing ever, I hope, that you don’t invite or go out to meet halfway. And tonight, nothing until rescue or daybreak, whichever happens first. Settle in now, and sweet dreams to you. I’m taking the flashlight.”

  She was grateful he seemed to appreciate she would prefer to make her scrappy toilet in private. When it was done, she lay down, pulled the rug up to her chin and “listened” to the infinite silence of the desert about her.

  She did not want to sleep. She wanted to lie there, hugging her thoughts and savoring the relief from her long, needless jealousy of Beth. But presently her eyelids drooped, her head found a comfortable position and she was asleep from sheer, healthy weariness.

  She knew when Roger returned. By then she had unconsciously thrown back the rug, and she felt it being tucked around her shoulders again. She stirred and murmured, but he did not answer, and after that she was only dimly aware of his shape, upright in the driver’s seat, whenever she half woke and dozed again.

  Startled by something—a noise, a touch—she roused fully at last to discern his silhouette standing at the open door nearest her head. She swung her feet to the floor, knuckled her eyes childishly and smiled at him.

  “Oh, dear, I was sound asleep!” she said.

  He smiled back. “I know. I spoke to you—no answer. I loosened your cocoon—no effect. In the end I was driven to the Sleeping Beauty technique. That worked.”

  Liz stared. “The...? You—kissed me? That was what I felt?”

  He nodded. “Butterfly variety only. Not worth reporting to Mrs. Grundy, but to be recommended as an alarm clock. I thought we might share the sunrise. It’s just coming up.”

&
nbsp; In order to hide the color which she knew was staining her cheeks, Liz turned her back on him and fumbled at the straps of her pattens. “Yes, I’d like to,” she said in a muffled voice.

  Outside the car they faced the east, waiting. The cool night wind had dropped to a whisper, but there was another sound, thin but insistent, not unlike the continuous high thrumming of telegraph wires.

  Liz threw back her head to listen. Roger watched her. “You hear it? I wondered if you would,” he said.

  “It’s queer. It goes on and on. What is it?”

  “Another desert phenomenon—the singing of the sands. It’s a trick of the wind at work a long way off. It’s so nearly supersonic that not everyone can hear it. Beth can’t, for one. Janine can sometimes. I’ve always been able to.”

  “Well, I certainly can,” Liz said, glad that she could, since Beth couldn’t. It made the menace of Beth dwindle just a little more.

  But now below the horizon they were watching there was a lightness which widened and rayed out, shedding a slow radiance across the sands. Then the tip of the sun itself crept above the line of the horizon. At first it was the merest rim to a total eclipse, then a half-circle, then a whole ball, brassy already and surrounded by none of the soft mistiness of an English summer dawn.

  Presently Liz felt Roger’s arm across her shoulders, directing her to watch the darkness still above and behind them. They watched while it turned very slowly to gray, to violet, to rose and finally broke up into puffball cloudlets, pink tinged and delicate against the fugitive blue of a sky that in an hour or two would be colorless with heat. The inevitable wind of the open desert began its busy scurrying; the sun swung higher, and it was morning.

  “There’s this to be said for the desert,” Roger broke the silence. “While you’re alone with it, it does more than dwarf all your other problems—it simply blots them out. It may be a false serenity, but it’s a singularly pleasant one while it lasts. Out here, couldn’t you almost delude yourself that you have no past, no future; just the now you are living at the moment?”

  Liz said, “Yes, I think I could.” He had forgotten to remove his lightly encircling arm, making of her particular “Now” a sweet isolation. But some need to cross her fingers against hoping too much made her continue. “Always supposing, of course, that the Now is nicer than the rest.”

  “Not necessarily. It need only be an experience that’s set apart, cut off from the rest. Probably one shouldn’t ask more of it than that it should be a kind of interlude without too much reality.”

  “And would you say this is that kind of a Now?”

  He looked at her, his eyebrows puckering. “Isn’t it? The whole thing began as a strictly professional trip that I intended should culminate well before midnight in the best dinner for you and Andrew and myself that the club could lay on at that hour. And now look at us! Stranded, even unwashed, miles from our nearest hope of a meal, and sharing a dawn for all the world as if...”

  “As if?” Liz threw into his pause.

  “Well, rather like a couple of sweethearts enjoying their first sunrise together. If that isn’t a situation cut way off from reality, what is?”

  “What is?” Liz echoed flatly. She felt as if a frail thread she had been holding had snapped. She took the step or two away that forced his hand to drop from her shoulder. And the next moment she saw she had lost his attention. He stood alert, head thrown back, arms akimbo.

  He turned back to her. “D’you hear that?”

  “The sands singing?”

  “No. A car in the distance. More than one, I think. Listen—”

  At first it was a mere will-o’-the-wisp of sound, not unlike the hum of the sands, but much lower in pitch and varying. As they listened it became the unmistakable broken rhythm of car engines responding to half-trodden accelerators and constantly changed gears, as the drivers charged good and bad surfaces at reckless speed. Roger was right. At least two cars were coming toward them from the direction of Tasghala.

  He relaxed and looked at Liz. “Well, that’s that. We’re about to be returned to circulation. Our unsought Now is over, in fact. Are you glad?”

  Liz drew a long breath. “No,” she said.

  “Oddly enough, neither am I!” His glance plunged directly into hers before he went along the track to meet the approaching cars.

  While she luxuriated in the hot bath she had promised herself all the way home, Liz was thinking that it must be one of the inevitables of being in love:—this depths-to-heights soaring of one’s spirits at a word. Hers had been near zero before Roger’s admission that he, too, hadn’t wanted their adventure to end. And she knew she would have been content with that memory for a long time, even without the chance discovery she had made just after he had trudged away to disappear over a little bluff a hundred yards away.

  She herself had turned back to the car and, seeing that sand was being blown into the open trunk, had gone to close it.

  But, hand on flap, she had paused, staring. For there at the back of the recess was something so unexpected that she could not believe her eyes until she reached in and dragged it forward across the open flap. Then she knew she recognized it, and her finger had traced its rough shape while her mind fumbled for a reason as to how and why it should be there.

  For it was the flat piece of rock that had been her platform on the night of the ahal. There was the scratched circle around the outline of her feet and Roger’s, and there were the symbols that purported to link their names together. And it was here, in Roger’s car, when originally it had lain miles away on the face of the desert!

  She had continued to stare at it while a tingling excitement made cotton wool of her knees and a pounding hammer of her heart. She knew Roger had not taken it away on the night of the ahal. So he must have gone in search of it again on some later visit to the first Tuareg camp. But she knew now that it didn’t tell the truth even about Beth and him. So what possible interest could it have for him, unless...?

  She had longed for time to savor that speculation, to make a crazy addition sum of it with this morning’s “Sleeping Beauty” kiss and even with the bruising violence of that other kiss, which at the time she had taken for insult. But there had been no time. The cars Roger had gone to meet were thudding nearer, and a minute later they had topped the bluff.

  Roger was standing up in a jeep, apparently directing the driver where to stop short of the stretch of fechfech; Andrew was waving from the Land Rover that followed. And as Liz had waited, a speck in the deepening blue of the sky had become the shape of a helicopter, which came in to hover and dip in acknowledgment that the search was at an end before it circled the scene once and made off on its return journey to Tasghala.

  While the other two men had got to work with the digging gear they took from the back of the jeep, Liz and her father had compared notes. Andrew’s own alarm and inquiries had just about coincided with the gardien’s radio message to the military borj, reporting that Roger’s car had not yet returned. And though, as Roger had suggested, the authorities had advised against manning a search until daylight, they had readily agreed to supply an escorting jeep and the helicopter.

  While Liz told her own story—with some omissions—she made a curious discovery. A few minutes earlier, as she closed the trunk, she’d thought she couldn’t wait to be alone with Roger and to get him to tell her why “their” stone came to be where it was. But since then she had realized she could wait. She could even enjoy waiting and behaving with him and with everyone else as if none of this bubbling hope was going on inside her. In fact she could bear just to hug the warm promise of it for quite a long time if necessary.

  So she hadn’t minded at all when it was arranged that she should return with Andrew in the Land Rover while Roger drove alone and stopped at the desert borj to radio directions for the hospital cases to be fetched from the Tuareg camp. Arrived there, he had waved them on their way with a salute for Andrew and a “thumbs up” and an oddly crooked smi
le for Liz. Wondering what lay for her behind that smile had been very sweet. But she could wait to know...

  Now, after ordering her a huge breakfast as soon as she had bathed, Andrew left for the oil site, and she had the day before her. It was the first free one since the onset of the dengue epidemic, and she certainly wasn’t going to waste it in catching up on last night’s missed sleep. There was far too much to enjoy, even if most of it was still a secret she shared with no one!

  She was out of the bath and toweling vigorously when the telephone rang. Now who—It might be Chris. Or Janine. Beth possibly, though she hoped not. Or—Roger? Bathrobe flying, mules pattering, she ran to pick up the receiver.

  It was Beth. A strange Beth, the light tinkle of her voice deepened, and sounding either near to tears or incoherent with some emotion at which Liz could not guess.

  Beth said, “Liz? Oh, thank goodness you’re there. Listen—I must see you. And don’t say you can’t manage it, because I must!”

  Liz hesitated. She found she had a new generosity toward the Beth whose pride had needed to foster the story of her impending engagement, and she was not eager to witness the other girl’s loss of face when the myth was exploded. Doubting her own ability to hide what she knew, she temporized, “Well, I don’t know. I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

  “But when you have?” Beth urged. “You won’t be going to the hospital because of last night. Yes, yes,” she said irritably, “I know about that. Roger called. Oh, no, not me. Maman, of course! That’s what I want to tell you about. Liz, please—I simply must talk to someone!”

  “You sound awfully upset, I must say. But why should you think I can help? If it’s something about—well, to do with you and Roger—wouldn’t Mrs. Carlyon understand a good deal better than I could?”

  “Maman—She’s the very last person—” Beth’s short laugh was mirthless. “Look, Liz, you must see me, or—or I won’t be responsible! They’re going to be sorry anyway, but they’ll be a lot sorrier if—”