by Jane Arbor
Janine drew a long, shuddering breath, but Gerhard Meyer’s hand was quick and sure on her arm, steadying her. And as Andrew made to follow Beth, Liz ran after him and caught him in the hall as Beth went out through the front door of the hotel.
“Dada,” Liz whispered, “that was good of you! I’m sure it was just what she needed—to be made to feel important again, and wanted!”
“Well, don’t we all—in the moment of finding we’re not half as important as we thought? Much easier to be humble when we know we’re loved, Liz. Anyway, I had an idea it would be worth trying to see what a well-chosen dinner and a bit of harmless flattery might do for her rather warped sense of values. As Janine said, she’ll blush over all this one day. But not yet. She has some wound-licking to do first, and that she must do for herself. But tell Janine, will you, that I’ll bring her home around midnight? Will you be going on there with Chris and the others when the party breaks up here?”
“Y-yes, I suppose so...” Liz hesitated.
Andrew laughed. “Will you, I wonder? Or have you other fish to fry? Look, young Liz, don’t you owe me a bit of explanation?”
“You mean—about Roger? That he told Janine...? But he’s never said anything to me, you must believe that. He did kiss me that night at the ahal. But that didn’t mean anything—you both said so. And I was determined not to let it, when otherwise he didn’t even seem to like me much!”
“Well, shall I go all heavy parent and demand what his intentions are?”
“Dada, you’re laughing at me! Don’t you see that I—I’m so much in love with him myself that it isn’t very funny?”
Andrew tilted her chin. “Only laughing with you, pet, if you’re happy. But I might have helped with your side of it, if you had told me a bit earlier. And this you do owe me—he didn’t take advantage of your desert holdup to make love to you, did he?”
“No! But we talked, and I felt we were better friends than we had ever been before. I was very happy.”
“Yes, I thought you seemed rather exaltée on the drive back.”
“But not for more than an hour or two afterward. Not after Beth had exploded her suspicions about Janine all over me, and I believed her—” Liz broke off, her eyes widening. “Oh, dada, do you think that when Chris and I were on the phone last night, he knew Beth was wrong, because by then Roger had told him he—he liked me? Chris said they had had ‘quite a chat’!”
Andrew spread his hands in mock bewilderment. “My love, why ask me? Why not Chris? Or better still, someone who happens to be right behind you at this minute?”
“Oh!” Liz swung around, her cheeks flaming.
She heard Andrew sigh. “As I said, I don’t seem to be in on this act. But somehow it looks as if I might be going to get it both ways after all. ” Then he hurried after Beth, and Roger was there, very close to her, his hands seeking hers.
Roger said bluntly, “I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to be alone with you. Will you come?”
Knowing that she would, Liz demurred, “Come? Where? We can’t run out on Chris.”
“On the contrary, we go with his blessing, though I gather you’ve some explaining to do to him. He asked me to say that he thinks you might have told him.”
“I like that! He could have told me!”
“Told you what?”
“Nothing.” Liz knew she had blushed again. “I’d better go and see Chris now.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort. We’ll join up at Janine’s later. Fremyet, by the way, has tactfully detached himself from this rather domestic crisis, so Meyer and I will see Chris back to hospital. Meanwhile, we’re wasting good time. Shall we go?”
The warm night air touched their faces gently as they went outside in time to hear a car door slam in the darkness. A moment later Andrew’s Land Rover sped away down the hotel driveway, with Beth’s tiny figure very erect in the passenger seat.
Roger commented dryly, “That was tactful of Andrew, I must say. I thought we’d adjourn to your roof garden. I’ve a sort of kindliness for it, ever since I hooked you back from that suicidal plunge you tried to make over the parapet. And that’s an odd Chinese tradition, if you like.”
“Which Chinese tradition?” The smile they shared told quite plainly that they both knew they were talking for talking’s sake, keeping a more precious experience at bay for a little while.
“The one that says that if you save someone from suicide, you must make yourself responsible for them for the rest of their life.”
“I’ve never heard of it! And I wasn’t committing suicide. I was just especially mad at Beth.”
“You gave the impression of being even more mad with me!”
“What about you? You were furious with me, and you were always taking her part against me.”
“Yes. Fool that I was, I thought she had to be defended against that robust fighting spirit of yours.” Flippancy had gone from Roger’s tone. “I believed far too implicitly in her innocence and in the sort of goodwill that her outburst tonight showed she never had toward anyone—not even for Janine, who loves her enough in all conscience. And to think that I told you I considered she was immature! Why, she’s already ages old in the art of looking after Beth Carlyon, no matter what else goes under. And you knew it, where I didn’t. How come?”
Liz said vaguely, “Just one of those things. We struck yellow sparks off each other the first time we met.” With more honesty she added, “And that’s not quite true, either. We were both—jealous.”
At that his hand tightened around hers. But she hurried on. “What about Beth and Janine, do you think? If Beth carries out her threat to go to England, she’s going to break Janine’s heart.”
“I think she’ll climb down about going. I admit I’m having to do some double takes about her, but, my latest assessment is that she may be shrewd enough to know that one about, ‘In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’ In short, if it’s marriage she’s after, she knows the competition in England might prove too fierce. Less scope in the Sahara, maybe, but for the eligible men there are a lot fewer candidates.”
“She’s still going to make Janine unhappy, even if she stays.”
“Ah, but how long will she be allowed to get away with it? Somehow I don’t see friend Meyer standing much nonsense from Beth where Janine is concerned. No, I imagine she’s met her match there.”
“I don’t know. I hope so. But somehow—” Liz shivered suddenly “—Beth is so subtle. She manages to give you the impression that she’s stroking you with one hand while scratching you with the nails of the other! I think the only time she scratched with both was when she told me about you and Janine. Then she was too beside herself to pretend to stroke.”
“When she told you...? Do you mean she brought that story to you before she produced it in public tonight?”
“Yes. Soon after I got home yesterday morning, she asked me to meet her at the Miramar, and she told me then.”
“But you couldn’t have believed her! I realize my taking Janine out as I did without explanation looked odd. But nobody in their senses could possibly put that interpretation on it!”
“Perhaps I wasn’t quite in my senses,” Liz admitted shyly. “I’d been so happy overnight when you told me you’d never been in love with Beth. I know it shouldn’t have said anything to me, but I wanted to let it. And when we talked afterward about the woman you hoped to marry, I told myself that of course it didn’t mean me, but that perhaps it needn’t mean anyone else especially!”
“My dear goose, short of telling you so in words of one syllable, I did mean you—who else? Thank goodness, anyway, you weren’t so obtuse tonight when I caught your eye across that room! You understood then, didn’t you?”
“Y-yes. But you hadn’t said anything I could cling to. And when I heard Beth’s story, everything you had said seemed to point to your having meant Janine—”
“And I suppose it was Janine I kissed awake in time to see the sunrise?”
“Oh! But you’d said—” Liz dimpled “—that that kiss was only an alarm clock!”
“That was by way of retreat when you looked so shocked and embarrassed. If you had responded with so much as a flick of an eyelash, I warn you I mightn’t have been responsible for the consequences. As it was, you made it almost easy to keep my vow.”
“What vow?”
“That I wouldn’t use our enforced isolation as an excuse for making love to you. I argued that I should be breaking an unwritten contract with you if I tried to turn a professional journey into a love scene you hadn’t bargained for and couldn’t very well escape. Besides, I’d already had an earlier experience of kissing you uninvited, and if we weren’t rescued quickly, I didn’t look forward to spending an indefinite period with you in that kind of high dudgeon!”
“Oh, dear—and yet if you had kissed me as you did that—that other time, I wouldn’t have answered for the consequences, either!”
“Well, you see why I didn’t. But I couldn’t resist the little peck that waked you, and I was promising myself the rest—” Roger broke off as they halted at the foot of the iron ladder leading up to the roof garden. “Up you go,” he urged. “And carefully, mind! For I warn you, if you sprain an ankle this time, you’ll go limping to look for another doctor. I categorically refuse to be hampered by professional ethics yet again!”
Liz worked that out as she climbed the ladder. When he joined her she turned within the circle of the arm he put around her.
“What do you mean? The night I sprained my ankle wasn’t long after that row over Beth that we had up here!”
“What of it? I still had every intention of telling you I loved you that night. I asked you to choose between dancing or walking with me—remember? I could have worked it in, whichever you chose! And then what happened? You basely turned into a patient with a sprained ankle that I had to attend. So that, for the time being, had to be that. But before we parted, I did try to promise, hoping you would take the hint, that there’d be other nights and other sunrises I would ask you to share with me.”
“You knew—even then?”
“My love, long before then!”
“That night was the first time, for me—”
But his lips had taken hers, forcing them to flower beneath his own in a passion at first reluctant and then taking fire from his. For a space of time she did not want to measure she was conscious of nothing but his nearness, of his eager mouth and of the strong, demanding hands that caressed her. Then, sure in the knowledge that it was an ecstasy they would share again, she allowed curiosity to stir once more.
“In the desert, if you did want me to know, why didn’t you tell me as soon as we got back? Before I heard Beth’s story about Janine!”
“Ah, that—” He fingered an inward turning petal of hair on her temple. “I’m afraid there was another of my best-laid schemes that didn’t fetch up where I intended. There was your sprained ankle, and before that was out of the way, you seemed to be all tied up with Soper—”
“I was never tied up with Chris—like that!”
“And Andrew and I didn’t come upon you locked in his arms right below this very spot?” Roger’s thumb jerked expressively over the parapet.
“But I told dada that didn’t mean anything!”
“Leaving me to find out from Chris Soper one heck of a lot later—not till yesterday, in fact—that he had wanted to kiss you, but you weren’t having any?”
“But how could I have told you that? Can’t you hear my publishing it? ‘I’m not in love with Chris. I never have been’?”
Roger growled, “Very funny! You could still have made it a darned sight easier for me to find out you weren’t. But you were asking why I didn’t pounce on you the minute we got back, and the answer is that I planned, as I told you, to take you and Andrew out to dinner that night, and afterward to drop Andrew. But things didn’t pan out like that. And anyway, when you told me you were actually contemplating feting Chris, that was the outside edge!”
“Yes, you were odd about that. You called it ‘quixotic.’ ”
“Well, as I saw it, wasn’t it? Look—you had been jilted for another girl, as I believed. Yet you didn’t stop at the generosity of sending the chap back to her, and you were even ready to wave him goodbye with a party. Have your party, by all means, but I was hanged if I’d cooperate. That was my reaction.”
“But you came after all?”
“Only after I had persuaded Soper into playing host, so that I needn’t gatecrash you after turning down your invitation. For all I knew, you might have thrown me out, and I’d put in too much groundwork to risk it. Do you realize, young woman, that this is my first sortie in your direction that has gone according to plan? After I’d had the whole thing out with Soper yesterday, I meant to get you alone tonight for long enough to ask you to marry me.”
“So you went to Chris and asked him whether he had really jilted me?”
“Yes, but in no mild spirit of inquiry. It was fortunate he was handicapped, because it forced me to keep the interview civilized. He convinced me that at least I shouldn’t be third best for you, and we were quite chummy at parting.”
“So that’s why he knew you weren’t in love with Janine! If only he had told me—”
“I’d have had something to say to him if he had! Do you think I needed a proxy! I wasn’t to know that, in the stress of her own affair, Janine was going to tell a roomful of people that I was in love with you. At a guess, you didn’t bargain for Beth reporting you, either?”
“Of course I didn’t. I didn’t mean you ever to know. But ‘third best’? You mean—Chris, and Robin Clare in London? Oh, Roger—Chris and I were only friends, and I’ve known for a long time that losing Robin didn’t hurt to last.”
“But nobody would have thought you weren’t convinced you were mortally wounded, the day we flew out together! Do you realize that I fell in love with you that day? You were about as defenseless, and yet as defiantly gallant, as a spitting kitten. At first I thought, ‘The young idiot—imagining she can fight the Sahara!’ And then, ‘Heavens, if she put her mind to it, I believe she might win!’ And then, ‘Why, I’d actually like to see her do it. I must—’ And on that, my Liz, I think I gathered you to my heart, knowing I could never let you go.”
“If only I had known then!”
“You weren’t ready to know then, about me or about yourself. And after the ahal fiasco, I had to face that I was never likely to convince you of it. That night was the real ‘low’ of my despair of you, I think.”
Liz murmured, “It was a ‘low’ for me, too. I was so bewildered by the whole thing, and so hurt that you dared to kiss me like that when I thought you were in love with Beth. But I was still more bewildered—a bit happy, too, though—when I found you had cared enough to keep our stone. That I simply didn’t understand!”
Roger laughed. “I suspected you’d seen it and wondered what you made of it. I had made a special trip out to fetch it before the Tuareg struck that camp. I told Tin Akeloui that I wanted to keep it all my life, and I think he approved the romantic sentiment.”
Liz caught her breath and sighed. “It was like that over the piece of rose de sable you gave me. I meant to remember you by that all my life.”
“Well, they’ll be our first household gods, won’t they? Our ‘Roger loves Liz’ stone and our sandflower?”
“The stone can be. Not the rose de sable. Roger—it’s broken! When it happened, it almost broke my heart, too. It—it was all I had of you, all I ever hoped to have. And when I saw it there on the floor, still glittering but in fragments, I could hardly bear it. Beth had said you couldn’t possibly have valued it, or you wouldn’t have given it to me. And yet she broke it.”
“Beth broke it? Tell me—”
Liz told him. But when she saw his mouth set in anger at the shabby little incident she almost regretted the telling. Beth had so little power to hurt her now!
She b
egged, “Don’t blame her too much, Roger. I did at the time. But perhaps she did love you, if she could be so jealous of me.”
“I doubt it. Love might need to defend itself, but it would do so impulsively, not with that thought-out planning. And I believed she needed protection, that she was—young!” He squared his shoulders as if to throw off an ugly garment that he had worn too long, and then offered Liz the invitation of his arms once more.
“Don’t go on regretting it, sweetheart. It wasn’t important, as you couldn’t know what it meant to me to give it to you. We’ll find another sandflower together one day. And now, kiss me—”
Again the leaping surge of their need of each other swept them into a place where only the electric touch of hands and lips and the broken sweet nonsense of lovers mattered. Warm and sure in their belonging, they were unaware that the Sahara night had deepened and chilled about them.
For them, the desert air would always be gentle, its timeless sands always in flower.
THE END
