The House of the Scissors

by Isobel Chace

  Arab was rather tired of Lucien’s opinions by this time. “What about Dido and Cleopatra?” she asked.

  Hilary considered the question carefully. “Cleopatra was clever,” she acknowledged after a time. “At least I think she was. Though I don’t much like Julius Caesar or Mark Antony, do you?”

  Arab had to admit that she didn’t, and that she didn’t think she could ever have been even the teeniest bit in love with either of them.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” Hilary remarked. “Dead men aren’t at all interesting. I wonder why dead women are?”

  Arab suppressed a smile. “Perhaps Lucien likes dead men too, if he’s interested in history.”

  “He lives history,” Hilary corrected her. “He makes it sound like a fairy story. We’re doing the Thousand and One Nights at the moment, and he’s telling me the real history that lies behind them. He reads one of the stories every night before I go to sleep.”

  Arab, who had not known that any history lay behind the stories, thought that Lucien couldn’t be quite as bad as she had imagined him. “There’s some music that is all about Shahrazad,” she told Hilary.

  “I’ll tell Lucien,” the child said agreeably. “He says that the stories were some filibuster! He says it’s absolutely typical of a woman to choose her tongue as a weapon to put off what’s coming to her. He says—”

  “Never mind what he says!” Arab interrupted hastily. “Don’t you ever talk to anyone else?”

  “We-ell, I talk to Ayah, but she doesn’t understand much of what I say. And now I’m talking to you!”

  Arab grinned. “So you are!” she commented. “Though it feels more like a relayed conversation with Lucien to me!”

  Hilary eyed her reproachfully. “Don’t you like talking to me?” she demanded.

  “Very much!” Arab responded promptly. “Who is Ayah?”

  Hilary shrugged her thin shoulders. “She looks after me. She looks after me at home too. She doesn’t like being here because everyone laughs at her Swahili and they pretend that they can’t understand her. She doesn’t speak English very well either.” She bounced up and down on a springy tussock of grass in the sand. “Shall we go and get the Mini-Moke now?” she cajoled.

  Arab took a careful look over the wall and was relieved to see that there was nobody in sight. “All right,” she said.

  “We’ll run!” Hilary shouted, suiting the action to the word.

  “No, we won’t!” Arab retorted sharply. “We’ll walk. And we’ll get in quietly and drive away as quickly as possible.”

  “Very cool!” Hilary chuckled. But she calmed down and walked soberly along beside Arab almost the whole way to the Mini-Moke, only breaking into a run when her excitement at actually riding in such a vehicle became too much for her.

  To Arabella’s relief, no one appeared to notice them as they slid in over the sides of the car and she started up the engine. It was just as if she had never walked through the narrow, mud-coloured streets, as though she had never been the cause of that sudden inexplicable enmity between the old man and her guide, which had ended in that terrible fight.

  She drove the car up the rutted road, rejoining the main road that led back to Malindi.

  “You’ll have to tell me where you live, you know,” she said to Hilary. “Which way do we go?”

  “Back to Malindi,” Hilary directed. “We live in an old house overlooking the port. I’ll show you. Lucien calls it the Villa Tanit, because he thinks the Carthaginians were here ages ago—long before Vasco da Gama, whose cross you can see from our windows.” Arab said nothing. She sped along the road towards Malindi, putting her foot hard down on the accelerator, amused by Hilary’s sublime joy in speed and the feel of the hot wind in her ridiculously fair hair.

  “Is Lucien fair?” she asked suddenly.

  Hilary looked surprised. “No, he has black hair. What colour do you call yours?” she added. “I mean,” she went on, in case she should be thought to be criticising her new friend, “ my hair is yellow, isn’t it? But I wouldn’t call yours brown, would you? It changes when the sun gets on it.”

  “How about auburn?” Arab suggested dryly.

  “I thought that was red,” Hilary returned, unperturbed. “I wouldn’t call your hair red! I’ll ask Lucien what colour he’d call it!”

  “I don’t suppose he’ll be interested,” Arab warned her. “There’s my hotel. Where do we go from here?”

  “Straight on,” Hilary told her. “You go past the shops. I’ll tell you when to turn off.” She leaned forward, concentrating on the road ahead. “You go round by the harbour. We can stop and look at the boats; if you like.”

  “Another time,” Arab suggested. “Let’s get you home first today. Your people may have missed you and be worried.”

  “Lucien never worries. Only he might get angry if he thinks I’ve gone out with you without asking first. It’s something to do with being a girl, because he wouldn’t care if I were grown up. He says women live on trouble and it’s no good trying to keep them out of it because they love it really—”

  “What about your mother?” Arab asked indignantly.

  Hilary laughed tolerantly. “She’s always in trouble! Lucien says that one of these days she’ll be murdered in her bed and it will serve her right for poking her nose in where it’s not wanted! He says dead people are much better in that respect.”

  Arab felt a burning sense of injustice on behalf of Mrs. Dark. She was quite certain that she wasn’t going to like Lucien at all!

  “How horrid of him!” she exclaimed.

  Hilary’s look rebuked her. “Lucien is never horrid,” she said awfully. “We love him very much! My mother wouldn’t be an anthropologist if it weren’t for him! He—he’s one in a million!”

  “He must be!” Arab said.

  Hilary’s eyes shone with tears. “He is! He is! You’ll see!”

  A little shaken by the strength of her young friend’s devotion to the unknown Lucien, Arab diplomatically changed the subject by pointing out Vasco da Gama’s cross. “We must be near your home now,” she said.

  “It isn’t my home. Lucien is only living there for a couple of years. I’m staying with him for a few months.” She recovered her spirits suddenly, pointing up a narrow drive, edged with flowering shrubs. “It’s up there! And oh, look, Lucien is in the garden!”

  Hardly waiting for Arab to bring the Mini-Moke to a stop beside the large, glossy car that was already standing in the drive, Hilary jumped out with an excited cry, making a rush towards the man who had turned towards them at the sound of the tyres crunching on the pebbled surface of the drive.

  Arab had the impression of a tall man, black-haired and strong-looking, whose unsmiling gaze disconcerted her and made her bitterly conscious of her ragged clothes. She got reluctantly out of the Mini-Moke, stooping to re-tie the thong of one of her sandals to give herself time to recover her usual self-confidence and for the colour to subside out of her cheeks.

  “Well, Hilary?” the man prompted the little girl.

  “This is a friend of mine,” Hilary said in a curious, off-hand manner. “She’s come to have tea with us.” Arab stood up, summoning up a smile. “I hope you don’t mind, Mr. Dark—”

  “My name is Lucien Manners,” he interrupted her abruptly.

  The name was familiar, though in what context Arab couldn’t remember. “I’m sorry,” she apologised. “I thought Hilary must be your daughter, or—or—”

  Mr. Manners came to her rescue with an easy manner that was at odds with his faintly satanic appearance. “Hilary is my niece. My sister is a widow and obliged to earn her own living, which she does reasonably successfully most of the time. At the moment she is working in Ethiopia, so Hilary is staying with me.”

  “Oh,” Arab murmured. “Hilary said her mother is an anthropologist. I thought you didn’t approve—” She stopped, looking as embarrassed as she felt. “It was nothing that Hilary said!” she ended positively.

&nbs
p; “I think it must have been,” Mr. Manners contradicted her. “Unless you’ve been talking to other members of my family as well?”

  Arab went scarlet. “No, of course not!” she protested.

  Hilary turned a cartwheel on the dry, sparse lawn. “She says I can go with her tomorrow and watch her work!” she announced.

  Her uncle frowned. “It’s usual to introduce your friends when you bring them home,” he told her tautly. His eyes flickered over Arab, his expression giving away little of what he was thinking. “Where did my niece find you?”

  “She was at Mambrui,” Hilary supplied, keeping a watchful eye on her uncle’s face. “I met her there and I asked her to bring me home.”

  For an instant Mr. Manners’s face lightened. “Did you show her the pillar tomb there?”

  Hilary shook her head, her eyes still on his face, “No, there wasn’t time.” She sat down hard on the lawn and began to laugh. “I rescued her, as a matter of fact! She might have been murdered if I hadn’t! She didn’t know what to do, did you?” She lapsed into giggles of sheer joy. “She’s called Arab and she doesn’t know enough to take her shoes off when she goes into a holy place! There was a fight—”

  Lucien Manners glared at his niece. “There was a what?”

  “Was that what was wrong?” Arab put in. “I never thought of that!”

  Hilary wriggled her hand into her uncle’s. “Imagine being called Arab and not knowing that!” she crowed. “Lucien, did you ever—”

  Mr. Manners permitted himself a faint smile of amusement. “No,” he agreed gravely. “I never did!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “MAY I share the joke?” Arabella demanded, very much on her dignity.

  “But it’s obvious!” Hilary giggled at her. “Every Arab knows enough to take his shoes off when he goes on holy ground, but you didn’t!”

  “It’s the kind of thing that appeals to her juvenile sense of humour,” Mr. Manners added, a smile pulling at the corners of his lips.

  Arab bit her lip, her eyes dancing. “Juvenile, Mr. Manners?” Her own laughter overwhelmed her and she giggled happily, unaware that she looked very little older than Hilary in her jeans and cotton shirt.

  “You can laugh now,” he drawled, “but such an escapade could have had very unpleasant results! The people of Mambrui are the most conservative along the coast, except for the people of Lamu. You could have been in serious trouble.”

  “I thought I was,” Arab admitted, remembering how quickly the fight had begun and her own helplessness in the face of the old man’s wrath. “I was stupid, I suppose.”

  “Very stupid!” he quelled her.

  “But I didn’t mean any harm—”

  “Tell that to them! You’re not now in the High Street of your home town, Miss—Miss Arab. If you don’t mean any harm, find out about the local customs before you go round upsetting innocent people. This is a peculiarly masculine society,” he added with a glint of amusement that was lost on Arab, “which veils its women and expects them to behave themselves. Your gamin charm and revealing dress will probably get you into more trouble, not less, as you fondly imagine!”

  Arab’s eyes fell to her feet. She supposed she had deserved such strictures, though she didn’t like him any the more for delivering them. “Yes, Mr. Manners,” she said meekly.

  “How old are you, for heaven’s sake?”

  Her eyes shot up to meet his. “I don’t see that that’s any business of yours!” she said defiantly.

  He sighed, making no attempt to hide his impatience. “You were certainly well named! You look like a street arab in that get-up—”

  “You’ve already referred to my gamin charm,” she reminded him. “Well, I don’t think you’re well named at all. I don’t feel called upon to tell you what I think of the way you dress and conduct yourself, though I could, quite easily, especially when you tell Hilary that girls are more trouble than boys!”

  “So they are!”

  Arab lifted her chin belligerently. “Not to me, they’re not!”

  To her surprise he laughed. “I’ll bet!” he grinned. “I apologise, Miss Arab, you’re older than I thought.”

  “My name is Arabella Burnett. Only my friends call me Arab.”

  “I see,” he said. “Well, Miss Burnett, would you rather have tea inside or out?”

  “Inside, Lucien! Let’s go inside. I want to show Arab my things and my new dress. She’ll know what to do about the hem.”

  Mr. Manners looked frankly doubtful about Arab’s knowledge of such matters, but he allowed himself to be persuaded into the house with a good grace, telling his niece to go into the kitchen and tell the cook that they were ready for their tea.

  The house was beautiful. Enormous, brass-studded cedarwood doors guarded the cool, oriental-looking rooms inside. Persian carpets covered the tiled floors, giving a touch of luxury to the plain, whitewashed walls. Intricately carved furniture stood around in formal groups, vying for attention with the soft leather sofas and chairs. But it was the ceilings that brought a gasp from Arab’s lips. They were gorgeous! They were as delicately carved as lace, patterned with geometric signs and Islamic symbols, most of them white and clean-looking, but here and there a touch of colour had been added in green, scarlet, or bright blue.

  “This house used to belong to the Sultan of Zanzibar,” Mr. Manners told her. “I don’t think he ever lived here himself. It was falling down when I first saw it, as you can see by the rooms at the back that I haven’t bothered about. I’ll show you later on, if you’re interested?”

  “Oh, yes, please!” Arab begged him.

  Lucien Manners gave her a sardonic look. “You might like to see the women’s quarters. So unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!”

  “I thought there was a Sultana,” Arab said defensively.

  “Oh, there was!” he agreed. “But she was hardly ever lonely, shall we say?” His expression mocked her. “It must have been a rather dull life for them. I told you this is a masculine-orientated society.”

  Arab sat down quickly on one of the sofas. “You approve of it, though, don’t you?” she accused him.

  “In some ways,” he answered. “I think both sexes are happier when they have a definite role in society.”

  “Even if the women are bored stiff?”

  “I didn’t say that,” he said seriously. “Women are lucky to have their creativity built in, as it were, so why envy men when they use theirs on the environment and so on?”

  “Do I?” Arab asked, considering the point. “Having babies hardly seems a full-time job.”

  He smiled lazily. “Perhaps not, but it remains the main function of women, even in modern times.”

  Arab stirred restively. “Do you have to be so patronising about it?” she demanded.

  He was startled. “Am I patronising? I didn’t mean to be. I was trying to explain why the women had their own quarters in houses like these. Not nearly enough study has been put into the old ruined cities of the East African coast. I expect you’ve heard of Zimbabwe in Rhodesia? Well we have our own mysteries here as well. Have you ever heard of Gedi?”

  She shook her head. It seemed Hilary was right and the only women he was interested in were dead ones. “Should I have done?” she temporised.

  “Not unless you’re interested in that sort of thing.” He paused, his dark face flushing slightly. “I’ll take you to Gedi with Hilary next Sunday. It will be good for your education.”

  Arab opened her eyes wide, tempted to refuse such an off-hand invitation. “Thank you,” she said.

  He looked at her with distaste, his eyes coming to rest on the frayed bottoms of her trousers. “Hilary needs a few friends,” he muttered.

  Well, that put her in her place, Arab reflected wryly. Her mouth twitched with amusement as her eyes met his. “It’s all right, Mr. Manners, I won’t come in my jeans,” she reassured him. “I’ll wear a skirt just for you, as Hilary tells me that you prefer women to wear—”<
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  “Hilary seems to have told you a great deal in a remarkably short time,” he commented.

  Arab sensed that for the moment she had the advantage of him. “She did. Everything you say seems to make a great impression on her. I’ve heard all about your favourite women, and how you’re expecting your sister to be murdered in her bed and that it will be no more than she deserves, and how the women won’t leave you alone!”

  Mr. Manners’ expression didn’t alter. “All that?” Arab wished that she had kept quiet. She was saved from having to answer, however, by Hilary’s jubilant return from the kitchen. “I’ve told him to bring both cakes, the chocolate one and the other one, so that Arab can have a choice,” she announced. “If I bring my dress down now, would you look at the hem?” she went on anxiously. “Lucien says it won’t do as it is.”

  “Yes, of course,” Arab said immediately. “Why don’t you put it on so that I can see what needs doing to it?”

  “All right,” Hilary agreed. “I shan’t be a sec. You’ll have to talk to Lucien till I get back.”

  She departed at a run, whistling a tune that had a strong African lilt to it, loud enough for it to be heard throughout the house.

  “Do you mind?” Mr. Manners asked Arab.

  “Why should I?” she challenged him. “I do know about clothes, you know.”

  He didn’t answer. Arab knew he didn’t believe her and she was unexpectedly chagrined to discover that she cared what he thought. The silence between them grew and grew until she thought that if he didn’t break it she would have to and she would be bound to say something silly and make things even worse. She sat back on the cool leather sofa and crossed her legs in front of her, fingering one of the earth stains that disfigured the front of her cotton shirt.

  “I’m a model,” she said, her voice sounding high and strained.