by Isobel Chace
“Glorious!” the young men agreed eagerly.
Rupert’s eyes met hers and he grinned.
“You make a very nice pin-up for our expedition,” he drawled for her ears alone.
She flushed.
“I’m not sure it’s a role I would have chosen!” she said stiffly.
He chuckled.
“Perhaps not, but the rest of us are pleased, so don’t cavil, girl!”
She closed her mouth tightly and glared at him.
“You make me sound so—so brainless!” she objected.
His grin broadened.
“Do I?”
Felicity glanced at them and saw they were talking together. She came over immediately and sat on the other edge of Rosamund’s seat.
“You don’t mind my being a foil to your beauty, do you?” she asked pleasantly enough.
“Not at all,” Rosamund said easily. She turned her attention away from them both to the other men, almost glad of an excuse to do so. She was annoyed with herself for dressing up, for courting Rupert’s teasing. Félicité understood him so very much better with her brittle chic and her unhappy ways.
It wasn’t at all like the other two evenings she had spent at Tabarka. There was a slight tension over them all that not even the truly excellent fish could dispel. It was only when she was going to bed that Rosamund realised just what caused it. The men didn’t like Félicité either! And she would have felt sorry for the other girl, only she had the admiration of the only person she wanted, and so it didn’t seem very worth-while. It was only when she woke up for the third time during the night, still mulling over the same problem, that Rosamund came to the conclusion that she was jealous. She had so very much wanted Rupert’s admiration for herself! Though why, she simply couldn’t imagine.
It didn’t even come as very much of a surprise in that restless night, when she heard shouts outside the hotel. Dragging on her dressing-gown, she went out on to the balcony to take a look, and found Rupert already there before her.
“What’s happening?” she asked him sleepily.
He shouted something in Arabic down to someone down on the driveway in the blackness below them and then swore fluently in English.
“They let it get too hot!” he told her briefly. “One of the containers has exploded. I shall have to go and help put it out.”
“You mean it’s gone up in flames?” she asked him stupidly. It didn’t seem possible, when everyone had been nursing it so carefully all day. It didn’t seem fair! “Will it matter terribly?”
“Of course it matters!” he exclaimed crossly. “Put some clothes on yourself while I go and rout the others out.”
She obeyed him, rushing into a pair of jeans and a shirt and not stopping either to do her hair or to put on any make-up. Then, when she was ready, she didn’t know what to do, so she went downstairs to wait. She could hear the men’s various reactions to the emergency and began to worry about Jacob. He wasn’t as young as the others who could miss half a night’s sleep and still be fresh enough to do a whole day’s work in the blazing sun the following morning. Besides, it would worry him more. He worried about it all the time, and she knew he had been secretly worried about the fire risks of storing it in large quantities on the site.
When he came downstairs she thought he looked grey. She would have liked to have stopped him going out with the others, but she didn’t even try. Surprisingly it was Rupert who seemed to know how she felt.
“I’ll watch him,” he promised her. “And you can watch Félicité in the bar.” He smiled at her suddenly. “Look, I wouldn’t have made you dress,” he said, “but if this goes on for some time we’ll be getting pretty thirsty—”
“And I’m to bring you out some beer?” she asked wearily.
He nodded briskly.
“That’s the general idea.”
“But I can carry a bucket of water as well as anyone else,” she protested.
“And leave Félicité to bring out the beer?” he asked. “She couldn’t do it!”
When she went into the bar she could see what he meant, for Félicité hadn’t bothered to dress. She was clad only in a short nylon nightdress and a frothy robe to match—and her face was covered with creams and her hair was in curlers. She looked plain and rather drab, and Rosamund was shocked by the difference in her. Without her facade, the Frenchwoman looked what she was, brittle and rather hard.
“I suppose all the men are going?” she said sulkily. “I do think one of them could have stayed behind with us. Anything could happen to us here!”
“What?” Rosamund asked dryly.
Félicité subsided on to one of the square, cushioned seats.
“Oh, I don’t know! Anything!”
Irritated, Rosamund left her alone and went back into the reception hall to see the men off. She kissed Jacob warmly on the cheek and he pressed her hand tightly.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have made them bring out so much at a time,” he said anxiously.
“Nonsense!” she retorted. “It’s only one of the containers—”
“Only one so far,” he reminded her grimly.
“Then you’ll just have to save the others,” she said lightly. But she didn’t feel gay at all. She couldn’t help wondering whose was the ultimate responsibility for storing it on the site. If it was Jacob’s that would be bad enough, but if it was Rupert’s—! She caught herself up in surprise, for who was better qualified to look after himself than Rupert Harringford? She must be getting soft, she thought indignantly, and wouldn’t look at him at all as he got into the heavier of the two trucks they were taking. She wouldn’t even respond to his quick wave of the hand, she was far too busy giving the young research chemist one of her warmest smiles. He responded with a warming whistle and a pleased chuckle and she stood there in the darkness and blushed. It was quite two minutes before she had pulled herself together sufficiently to go back into the bar to Félicité.
It was stuffy in the bar. The stale fumes of cigarettes had not yet dissipated, for the windows were all hermetically sealed, and the sickly smell of old beer pervaded the corners.
“Why don’t you go back to bed?” she asked Félicité.
The French girl drummed her fingers on one of the low tables in front of her.
“And let you collect all the honours?”
Rosamund stared at her blankly.
“Honours? What for?” she asked indignantly.
“For having all the right Girl Guide instincts, I suppose,” she said ungraciously. “I can’t tell you how I loathe virtue in the middle of the night!”
Rosamund chuckled. She threw herself down on to one of the seats and stretched up her hands behind her head.
“I’m afraid neither of us looks particularly glamorous roused from our beds in the middle of the night!” she sighed. “But then the men didn’t look much either, did they? Unshaven and in a very odd assortment of clothes.”
Félicité gave a kind of gasp and then laughed.
“I do believe you’re trying to cheer me up!” she exclaimed awkwardly. “It was a kind thought, but I’d really rather you didn’t! I’m quite aware that you can take it and I can’t. But don’t think I shan’t learn! Next time I shall choose the battlefield more carefully.” She rose slowly to her feet. “Meanwhile I shall take your advice and go back to bed.”
Rosamund watched her go in silence. She didn’t think anything she could say would help the situation. Félicité didn’t bother to hide her meaning in the usual subtleties, and she rather admired her for it. They didn’t like each other and they never would, but once or twice they had come quite near to it.
She heard Muhammed in the reception hall and went to ask him if he would put a crate of beer into the light truck. He looked at her disbelievingly.
“Did Monsieur ’Aringford arrange this?” he asked incredulously.
Rosamund nodded, hiding her smile.
“Then it is better that I come too,” he said firmly, and noth
ing she could say would dissuade him.
She went round to the garage and backed the truck out while he brought the crate out of the ice-box. He pushed it into the back and slammed the doors, climbing up beside her, sitting tautly on his seat with his eyes staring out at the road ahead of them, hypnotised by the pool of yellow light in front of them. Rosamund ignored him completely and set the truck slowly down the steep driveway. She was more than a little nervous of the drive ahead of them herself.
CHAPTER NINE
THE narrow ribbon of the road was hard to distinguish at night. The edges merged into the darkness and there was no handy white line down the centre to guide her. Rosamund could have wished for better headlights, but even then it would have been hard to distinguish the odd patch of mud that still lay across the road.
Muhammed wriggled unhappily in his seat, wiping his wet hands on his trousers in a quick, nervous movement.
“It is a long way,” he said at last.
Rosamund nodded briefly. She too thought it seemed further than it had by daylight. She peered anxiously about her, trying to find a familiar landmark, but there was nothing very much to see. She had recognised the bridge they had had to cross, but after that it had all looked very much the same. One hill looked just like another and there had been no sign of the village where they had to turn off the main road for the site.
“Have you been to the site before?” she asked Muhammed.
“No, never. I have never before been out of Tabarka,” he told her.
She wondered if that could be true, and thought that it might be. He would meet all kinds of people at the hotel, and perhaps it was that that had given him that gloss of authority, or perhaps it was just natural to him, part of his heritage from his ancient land that was so young as a modern state.
When they came to a small collection of buildings she sighed with relief. Now all she had to do was find the school and then she would know where she had to turn off. The first time she went up the hill they shot past it and were out in the open again almost before she was aware. She turned the truck laboriously in the middle of the empty road and came down the hill again more slowly. The entrance seemed very narrow and was darker than ever, sheltered by the thick foliage of the forestry trees. Rosamund crept forward, feeling her way more by memory than by what she could see. She could feel the core of panic settling inside her and took a deep breath, swallowing hard to dispel it. She had driven on worse roads, she kept telling herself. The roads in Tunisia were miraculously good—miles and miles of beautifully made-up surfaces. It was only the sudden rains that had torn them up in patches, reducing them to chaos. She had driven on worse roads, on much worse roads! But the panic refused to subside and her fingers felt stiff against the wheel. She glanced across at Muhammed and saw him sitting tense beside her. If only he would relax a little!
“Is it much further, madame?” he asked her hoarsely.
“Not very far,” she replied tersely.
“I have illness to my stomach!”
She glanced at him again, uneasy now instead of being irritated.
“It really isn’t very far now,” she assured him.
He tried to smile and slumped back in his seat. She braked sharply to avoid a black shadow across the track and apologised in English. Muhammed no longer cared very much what she did.
She braked again as they came to a curve in the road and changed down to a lower gear. A crazy orange light lit up the sky in front of them, and she came to a stop, awed by the sight of it.
“Could that be the fire?” she asked breathlessly.
Muhammed roused himself to look and his eyes grew round with fear, his sickness forgotten.
“It is not a good place for a woman,” he said at last. “We would do better to go back to the hotel.”
Rosamund shook her head.
“If that’s the blaze they’re trying to put out, they’ll be needing something cool inside them to keep them going, and we have the beer!”
Muhammed was unimpressed. He sniffed dispiritedly, but there was nothing he could do to prevent her going on, and he knew it. He knew she was afraid, as afraid as he was, but she was stubborn too and this he could admire even in his despair.
It was even more difficult to see now, for the light of the fire was considerably greater than that of her feeble headlights. Rosamund tried to shield her eyes from it, but it was always there, dazzling in its intensity. It was with relief that she finally drew up beside the other trucks and flung open the door beside her to let herself out.
The smell of burning oil greeted her, revolting and sick-making. She had expected the heat, she had even expected the noise, but the smell defeated her, and she stood for a long moment, gasping for breath and hoping the ghastly feeling of nausea would leave her before she was quite overcome. Muhammed opened up the back of the truck and pulled out the crate of beer. She watched him staggering up the slope with it and forced herself to follow him.
“You’d better let me help you,” she gasped at him. “You’ll never carry it all that way by yourself.”
Muhammed looked at her doubtfully, but he allowed her to take one edge of the crate and between them they managed to drag it to the top of the slope, where they paused and tried to catch their breath in the reeking air.
Below them they could see the fire plainly now. Only one of the tanks had caught, the flames shooting up into the sky, belching forth an evil black smoke that was loaded with the smell of burning oil. The men had fixed up the fire-hoses, pumping the water straight out of the sea. They trained the jets of water on to the other tanks to keep the fire from spreading, while a few of them tried desperately to put out the fire from the one burning tank.
Rosamund looked from one man to another, hoping to recognise Rupert. Her stepfather she could see at once, talking to the Tunisian foreman and gesticulating wildly with his hands as he tried to explain what he wanted done. His French was still not very good and he had no Arabic at all. She smiled briefly at the sight of him, but her eyes went on seeking, a little impatiently, for a taller, younger figure who would probably also be bossing someone around.
But when she did finally see him he was doing nothing of the kind. He was standing, grasping one of the hoses and playing the water on a nearby tank of the petroleum waste product. She could see his muscles taking the strain of the force of the water, and she couldn’t help thinking that he made a very fine picture against that terrible black and orange backdrop.
Leaving the beer with Muhammed, who had no ambition to go any nearer to the fire, she ran down the slope, gasping as she did so, for the filthy black fumes seemed to be everywhere, clogging up her lungs and making her brain sluggish and her eyes water.
She was halfway there when she came to a full stop, aware of some difference in the flaming tank. Very slowly it broke apart and the remainder of the burning fuel belched out on to the sand and, in a slow-moving sheet of flame, began to travel towards one of the groups of men, isolating them behind the other tanks and completely cutting them off from the main party. With a cry that was half a sob she ran towards them, and Rupert saw her moving out of the corner of his eye.
“Here, take this!” he shouted to her.
Obediently she held out her hands and he thrust the hose into them, without even glancing at her.
“Hold it steady!” he said impatiently. She tried to, but the force of the water was such that she could barely hold it at all. He gave the hose a push, directing the flow on to the narrowing path between the men and safety. “Hold it like that! On me! Do you understand?”
She couldn’t say yes. She just stood and held the hose wondering for how long she would be able to. The muscles in her arms and across her back ached abominably. Stubbornly she set her teeth, stood with her feet well apart and shut her eyes. All she could think of was the pain and the difficulty she had in breathing. And the heat! The dreadful heat of that liquid mass as it stretched its way across the sands.
“I can’t hold it ver
y much longer!” she said out loud to herself. She opened her eyes again in time to see Rupert disappearing behind the tanks with the path to safety behind him getting narrower all the time. Hold it steady, he had said, but she could see for herself that the jet of water wasn’t doing very much good from the distance she was standing. She began systematically to advance, sweeping the edges of the path with the full force of the water.
It seemed a long time before the first man came running out to safety. He met the full blast of her hose and staggered. Hastily she moved it away from him and he came running on. But the incident had upset her and she could feel her arms shaking badly as she tried to control the hose.
One by one the men came out, scarcely visible in the great clouds of steam that rose up from the burning oil. It seemed never-ending, but there, at last, she recognised Rupert’s figure and knew that her job was done. She could drop the hose now if she wanted to and it wouldn’t matter. But she couldn’t. Her fingers seemed to be frozen to the nozzle and the muscles of her arms had set into that position. Desperately she tried to alter her position, but she was too tired, and almost in tears.
She scarcely noticed Rupert striding up the hill towards her. He pulled the hose away from her and threw it down on the ground. She could see the water channelling a bed for itself in the loose sand and somehow couldn’t bring herself to look away from it to Rupert.
“Little fool!” he said gruffly. “Why didn’t you leave it to the men?”
He gave her a little push up the hill and she found she was crying. The tears coursed down her cheeks and she was so tired she could hardly stand up.
“Pour one out for me,” he called after her. “I could do with something really cool!”
