by Isobel Chace
“This is it, miss,” the driver told her cheerfully. “Shall I take the baggage straight in?”
Rosamund thanked him. She got out of the car and looked about her, at the yellow, dusty street and at the lime-white houses with their iron grilles over the windows. A couple of cats—Egyptian cats, she noticed with a sense of excitement, with long, slinky bodies and neat little heads—came haughtily down the road and paused to stare at her with hostile eyes.
“Who feeds you?” she asked them. “Or do you feed off the rubbish?”
But at the sound of her voice they were off, up the hill like two streaks of lightning. Rosamund straightened her shoulders and followed the chauffeur into the house.
The hall was small with stone stairs that led straight up into the sitting-room upstairs. On the right was a door that led into the cloakroom and through that into the patio. Rosamund glanced out into the small open courtyard with interest. Pots of flowers stood neatly round the walls and a table and a couple of chairs had been placed under the stairs in the one bit of shelter. Opposite was the kitchen and opening out of the remaining wall was the dining-room.
“Bit of all right, eh, miss?” the chauffeur said, glancing into all the rooms. “This one ’ere’s a bit like a tunnel, but all right for eating in.”
She followed him into the dining-room and saw that the ceiling had got a curved, tunnel-like effect, exaggerated by the length and narrowness of the room.
“It’s like a tomb,” she said bleakly.
He flung open a door that led out into a small unmade garden.
“Bit of sun, that’s all it needs!” he said brightly. “That’s made all the difference!”
It was certainly very much more pleasant with the sun streaming in through the shuttered door, but Rosamund preferred the rest of the house, and the courtyard she loved.
“Well, if that’s everything I’d better be going,” the driver said reluctantly.
Rosamund hesitated.
“I’d offer you a cup of tea,” she said, “but I don’t know what we have yet.”
He sketched her a vague salute.
“Not to worry, miss, I’ll be getting something back at the office.” He strode out of the front door, shutting it behind him with a scraping sound on the marble floor. For better or for worse Rosamund had come to Rupert Harringford’s house.
She felt very much alone when he had gone. The kitchen was dark, and when she turned on the light she saw that it was also very ill-equipped. Three gas jets, one of which was so arranged so that it could never be used, was all that there was in the way of cooking facilities, and the china and cutlery looked to be equally scanty. To produce the elaborate meals that she had firmly decided that Rupert Harringford would demand and expect would be quite impossible.
Feeling rather daunted, she went up the marble-tiled staircase that led straight into the sitting-room. It was long, like the dining-room beneath it, but was lit at one end by an enormous window overlooking the most beautiful view Rosamund had ever seen. From it she could see Carthage, easily recognisable by the White Fathers’ Cathedral and Seminary and on to La Goulette, where the French, still smouldering with triumph after the success of the Suez Canal, had cut a channel into the present Port of Tunis to the benefit of no one in particular as it was far too small for any but the most mundane of Mediterranean shipping. On the other side of the Bay were a range of mountains, towering upwards in fantastic shapes and colours, falling into a purple sea below. Rosamund stood and gazed at it for minutes. Rupert Harringford seemed a very small price to pay for such splendour, she thought, and felt a little more kindly towards him. At least he had given her all this and for that she would make every effort to be grateful.
Putting her gratitude into something more concrete was as difficult as she had thought it would be. The maid arrived halfway through the afternoon, with a baby tucked under one arm, and with her veil fluttering around her. When Rosamund answered the door to her she could see two dark brown eyes peering out over the hand she held across her nose and mouth.
“Asslama,” she muttered shyly, and went straight into the courtyard without a single backward glance. With quick movements she divested herself of her veil and settled the baby in the sunshine to play, while she went into the kitchen to make tea, which she later produced, green and very sweet, and served it in little glasses.
It wasn’t easy to explain to her what she wanted done. By dint of pantomime Rosamund told her to make up the beds and to prepare the vegetables for the evening meal, and hopefully left her to it. When she next saw her, she was veiled again and preparing to depart, a mysterious little white bundle disappearing rapidly down the hill.
It wasn’t easy either turning the rather tough piece of nameless meat that she found in the refrigerator into a kind of stew. She couldn’t find any sort of browning agent amongst the stores and the flour had been nibbled at by mice. Smothering a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, she set all the traps she could find, more than half hoping that she wouldn’t actually catch anything but that they would just go away. By the time her stepfather came in she was hot and tired and practically at the end of her tether.
“It’s quite impossible to cook anything without an oven and without any tools!” she greeted him. “There isn’t even a sharp knife to cut up the meat with, let alone a table to cut it up on!”
Jacob smiled at her vaguely.
“I don’t suppose it matters, dear,” he said indifferently. “I came out on the little train,” he added proudly. “There was a whole flock of pink flamingo feeding in that rather smelly shallow water that runs along beside the canal.”
“But, Jacob—”
Her stepfather patted her awkwardly on the arm.
“You’ll soon have things as you like them,” he assured her. “It’s a question of getting used to things. I believe the Arab women do almost everything on the floor.”
Rosamund smiled at him, her affection for him welling up within her.
“They must have different muscles in their legs,” she joked, giving the meat a last venomous look. “But before we do anything else you must have a look at ‘the view!’ ”
Eagerly she pulled her stepfather up the stairs, but the view meant very little to him. He sank into the nearest chair, grimacing at its hardness, and took a deep breath of relief.
“I really believe I can feel a slight breeze,” he said. Rosamund laughed and nodded. It was certainly very much cooler at Sidi-Bou-Said.
Rupert Harringford ate the stew in silence. He had brought a bottle of wine home with him and Rosamund thought it made the meat taste worse than ever.
“It isn’t easy to cook it slowly enough on that stove,” she said defensively as he pushed yet another piece of meat towards the edge of his plate.
“I expect you’ll get the hang of it in a few days,” he replied calmly. “Yamina seemed to turn out an amazing variety of stuff on it.”
Rosamund swallowed down her dislike for him.
“Yamina?” she asked.
“That’s the name of the maid. You must get her to show you some of the Arab dishes. Some of them are pretty tasty.” Rosamund looked down at her plate to hide the anger in her eyes.
“I think I shall be mastering a few European dishes first!" she said stubbornly.
He pushed his plate a few inches away from him and lit a cigarette.
“Just as you like,” he agreed cheerfully. “We’ll arrange something about the housekeeping money tomorrow and let you know how much you can spend.”
Rosamund’s eyes went straight to her stepfather. Never, for as long as she could remember, had he ever shown the slightest interest in how much she spent on his food. He had always handed all the money over to her and left it to her to pay for their necessities and to haggle over the rent. But now he was smiling and nodding at Rupert Harringford.
“We’ll let you know tomorrow,” he echoed happily. “It will be so much easier for you to have a weekly budget.”
&nb
sp; It was Rupert Harringford who worked out the figures, though, and it was Rupert Harringford who handed her over a bundle of green notes in the morning with a neat list of what he thought everything ought to cost her.
“Let me know if you can’t make it go round,” he told her. “Some foods are rather expensive here, but the vegetables are good and cheap. I’ve been practically living on fruit before you got here—oranges and that. Think you can manage?”
Rosamund accepted the money with a burning feeling of injustice. She glanced down at his suggested prices and was still further annoyed not to be able to think of anything to add to it. “Does the milk come to the door?” she asked.
“Shouldn’t think so, but all the souks stock it. They charge rather heavily on the bottles, so don’t forget to take them back with you!”
She was glad when he had gone and she had the house to herself again. For a long time she did nothing at all but gaze out of the window at the view, willing herself not to care what Rupert Harringford said or did or thought. Then with a guilty feeling of pleasure, she tore his list into neat little pieces and threw them away into the waste-paper basket.
Yamina proved to be a willing worker. As soon as the two men had left the house she and Rosamund cleaned the house from top to bottom and washed everything from the curtains to some shirts that Rosamund found lying in the bottom of Rupert’s wardrobe, where he obviously always left his laundry. His room, she noticed, was as tidy as though he never went in it, even his bed was neat and still tucked in. She made it for him and hurried back into Jacob’s and her own part of the house. It wasn’t nearly so tidy, but it did give a greater feeling of comfort.
It was long after lunchtime when Yamina swathed herself into her veil and departed. Rosamund collected the bundle of, notes that Rupert had given her and walked with her down the narrow street towards the shops, but they were all closed and shuttered, the silver padlocks glinting gaily against the bright blue paint.
“You won’t find anything open now,” a passing man told her cheerfully in French. “Everything shuts on Friday afternoons here.”
“But why?” she asked him desperately.
He gave a little shrug of his shoulders.
“For the prayer,” he explained. “They’ll be open again about half-past six or seven.”
But that would be far too late for dinner that evening! And he had told her, Rosamund remembered with a feeling that was very nearly panic. Right at the bottom of his neat little list had been the warning: The Moslem holy day is Friday. Don’t forget that all the shops will close at twelve midday.
It wasn’t his fault that she had completely forgotten it was Friday.
CHAPTER TWO
ROSAMUND thought she would never forget how the street looked at that moment. A triangular sign with the picture of a man shovelling earth warned that someone was working on it, but there was no one there now. Earlier someone had been chipping at the surface of the new stones to give the cars purchase as they climbed the steep hill, but now even he was gone, leaving his chisel and mallet in a little heap on the gutter. The only sign of life was an old man sitting on the ceramic tiled seat, his loose robe falling in folds at his feet, and the younger man who had spoken to her and who was now halfway down the hill.
The old man looked up and nodded at her.
“Anglaise?” he asked with a knowing tilt to his head.
“Oui,” she answered briefly.
“The souks are shut now,” he told her unnecessarily.
“So I see,” she said wryly.
His face wrinkled into a smile.
“Did you want to buy much?”
She explained in detail what she had been hoping to buy, a little surprised by the blueness of his eyes behind his round glasses. She had always supposed that all Arabs would be dark, and here was one who was very much fairer than Rupert Harringford. At the thought of his name she winced uncomfortably and added aloud that she ought to be buying butter as well.
The old man got silently to his feet and went over to one of the padlocked doors, unlocking it with a flick of his hand.
“My son, Mustapha, will give you the things,” he said gruffly.
The son was much darker than the father and wasn’t very pleased at having his siesta interrupted, but he made up her order for her, wrapping the articles in thick grey paper that was somehow transformed into something that would hold anything from sugar to eggs.
“Is that all?” he asked at last.
She nodded gravely, pleasantly aware of the sensation of relief that had flooded over her.
“I’m very grateful to you,” she said.
For the first time the young man smiled.
“It was no trouble, but it is better to remember that you will never find any of us open on a Friday afternoon!”
“Much better!” she agreed fervently. She counted out the money he asked for and made her escape with her heavily laden basket back into the sunlit street. At least now, she thought, she would never have to admit to Rupert Harringford that she had been so stupid.
A couple of women getting water at the well stared at her as she passed and she smiled at them. Shyly they smiled back and went off down the street with a great clatter of tins and a lot of self-conscious laughter.
It was lonely back in the house by herself. She prepared the evening meal with elaborate care and put away the stores where the mice couldn’t possibly raid them, and then there seemed to be nothing very much to do.
The owner of the house had turned one of the smaller bedrooms into a bathroom, heating the water with a cylinder of butane gas, similar to the one down in the kitchen. Rosamund opened up the screw and lit the pilot light, but it fluttered and died and she came to the reluctant conclusion that the cylinder was empty. She wondered if Rupert would find it out for himself that the cylinder was empty. She wondered if Rupert would find it out for himself, for nothing would induce her to tell him about it, or whether she was supposed to cope with that as well.
When Jacob came in, hot and tired, she mentioned it to him and he promised to do something about it.
“I expect it comes from one of the local shops,” he said with unexpected efficiency. “I’ve seen them standing in the entrances. What colour is it?”
Rosamund tried to remember.
“I think it’s grey. It has a name written on it somewhere.”
Jacob’s enthusiasm waned.
“Oh,” he said in disappointed tones, “the ones I’ve seen are blue.” He sat heavily into the only easy chair in the house and smiled up at her as she brought him his customary evening drink. “It’s nice to be settled somewhere again, isn’t it?” he said. “Harringford’s a very easy fellow to work with.”
Rosamund smiled at him with affection.
“I’m glad.” She wrinkled her nose slightly. “Perhaps it’s only women that he doesn’t care for,” she added.
Jacob grinned.
“They mostly seem to like him well enough,” he told her. “He has all the typists falling over themselves to do his work.”
Rosamund’s distaste increased.
“I can just imagine it!” she agreed indignantly.
Her stepfather chuckled.
“I shouldn’t have thought you’d be the one to object to that sort of thing,” he said indulgently. “You have much the same sort of attraction yourself! It’s the plain blokes, like myself, who have to do all their own work!”
Rosamund was saved from having to answer by the appearance of Rupert himself. She wondered how he managed to climb the stairs so silently, and almost persuaded herself that he wore rubber-soled shoes for the very purpose of startling her by his sudden entrances. He said good evening gravely to them both and then gave Rosamund an amused glance.
“I hear you were caught out with the shops,” he teased her. “You were lucky to find Mustapha at home.”
Rosamund’s hand shook so that she almost spilt her drink.
“How do you know?” she asked him re
sentfully.
He laughed.
“You can’t hope to keep anything secret here,” he said affably. “Everybody always knows everyone else’s business.”
Rosamund lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. The two men began to talk about their work, and she was vaguely aware that they were discussing some new formula that she had never heard about before, but she was used to that. A large part of Jacob’s work was trying to find new uses for the “waste” products of the oil company, and sometimes the new uses became almost as important as the old. Kerosene, for example, when everyone had despaired of selling it in profitable quantities, had suddenly become one of the main fuels for aeroplanes.
Jacob became excited about his new idea, pounding his knee with his hand and with his lips twitching madly.
“I should like to try out—”
Rupert cast Rosamund’s lovely figure a significant look.
“We ought to leave our shop talk at the office,” he cut in abruptly.
Rosamund looked surprised. As far as she knew Jacob had always discussed his work in front of her. He knew that she didn’t know enough about it to learn very much from his technical jargon and that anyway she wouldn’t talk about anything that was still on the secret list to outsiders.
“If I’m in the way I’ll go down to the kitchen and start the dinner,” she said, allowing her hurt to show. It was obviously where Rupert thought she belonged, she thought angrily. He made no move to stop her going and she ran lightly down the stairs, blinking back the tears that had come unbidden into her eyes. It was silly to allow him to hurt her, she told herself angrily. Sillier still to show him that she cared, but it was going to be impossible if everyone had to be careful of what they said all the time merely because he was such a stickler for the letter of the law!
