The House of the Scissors

by Isobel Chace

  “Does he indeed?” Arab said indignantly. “It’s just the sort of conceited thing he would say!”

  Hilary, equally enraged, stared at her, two large tears forming in her eyes. “He isn’t conceited! He’s famous!” Arab stared back, breathing as hard as if she had been running, but slowly she forced herself to relax. “I know he is, poppet,” she conceded. “Jill has seen him on television.”

  “Have you?” Hilary asked Jill, somewhat mollified.

  “Once or twice,” Jill agreed.

  “There!” said Hilary. “I told you he was famous!”

  Sammy refused to go back with them to the National Sea Park. He had other things to do with his time, he told them, rather than look at a whole lot of fish! Hilary immediately began to tell him all about the various corals he would be missing, but Sammy refused abruptly to make any change in his plans.

  “If we spent our time sight-seeing, we’d never get through the collection at all!” he grunted. “Someone has to do some work!”

  Recognising the signs that Sammy preferred to be left alone, Arab and Jill neatly sidetracked Hilary into deciding which vehicle she wanted to go in, laughing at her when she decided that she wanted Arab to drive the Mini-Moke because it made more wind.

  The glass-bottomed boat was a decided success with them all. A whole new world opened up before them, a world of parrot fishes, dressed in a myriad colours; striped zebra fish; pipe fish with their incredibly long snouts; and the ridiculous puffer fish who blow themselves up like a balloon at the first hint of intruders. They spent a long time watching the parrot fish nibbling at the coral, which was almost as fascinating as the fish themselves. Hilary, who had been taken out goggling in the Park by Lucien, was able to point out the various kinds of coral, the stag’s head, the brain, and the potato types, the last one growing in great mounds, amongst which the fish hid and disported themselves.

  “Isn’t it terrific?” Hilary said, her face shining with excitement.

  Arab nodded. “I didn’t know there were places in the world like this,” she confided. “I can’t bear the thought of going home in a couple of weeks!”

  Hilary nodded her head wisely. “You’ve fallen in love with Africa. Lucien said you would. He did, when he first came here, and that’s why he lives here now. Mummy came first, when she married Daddy. I was born here, so naturally I prefer it.”

  “Naturally,” Jill drawled. “I can see mine is a minority opinion, but personally I can’t wait to get back to England!”

  Arab chuckled. “That’s because you want to get back to your husband!” she accused her.

  “Could be,” Jill admitted. “But I think I really mean it. I like those changeable days and the bustle of the streets of London—”

  “But you haven’t got anything like this!” Hilary claimed, horrified.

  Jill smiled lazily. “This is holiday stuff!”

  Hilary frowned. “But the ruined cities aren’t, and Lucien says they’re work. They’re his work, at least. He writes about them.”

  “What ruined cities?” Jill murmured.

  “Old Mombasa, bits of Malindi, Lamu, Pate, Siyu, Oja, or Kipini it’s called now, and even Kilifi. Lucien writes about them all.”

  “What about Gedi?” Arab asked.

  Hilary tried to look mysterious. “Nobody knows about Gedi,” she said. “It’s very romantic. You’d better get Lucien to tell you all about it, though, because I don’t know very much. Didn’t he say he’d take you to see it?”

  Arab nodded. “I expect he’s forgotten, though,” she told herself more than the child.

  “He never forgets!” Hilary assured her. “And if he has, I’ll remind him,” she offered handsomely. “He always goes peculiar when Aunt Sandra is around. I don’t like her.”

  Arab felt she ought to protest at this simple statement, but the words died on her lips. She didn’t like Sandra Dark either.

  “Come on, poppet,” she said instead. “We’ll take you home.”

  “There’s no we about it!” Jill exclaimed. “You can take me back to the hotel first, thank you very much. I’ve had enough sea and sun for one day. Besides, I want to write home!”

  Arab and Hilary chuckled. “I think you must be in love,” Hilary said flatly. “People always want to be on their own when they’re in love.”

  “And how would you know that, honey?” Jill asked her.

  Hilary wrinkled her nose in acute distaste. “Aunt Sandra is always telling me to go away and she says she’s in love. Not that you’re as bad as she is!” she added hastily. “She doesn’t write letters. She always wants to have Lucien to herself, though, and I like to be with him too.”

  Jill and Arab exchanged glances. “What about Lucien?” Jill asked, with a mischievous look at Arab. “Does he want to be alone with Sandra?”

  “Sometimes,” Hilary admitted reluctantly. “But mostly he says she interferes with his work. He doesn’t allow anyone to do that, because it’s very important.”

  “I see,” said Jill.

  The glass-bottomed boat landed them back on the beach and they thanked the man who ran it, Arab pushing a large tip into his vast black hand. He saluted them with a beaming smile, helping each one of them tenderly ashore.

  “The little memsahib has enjoyed herself?” he teased Hilary. “She would like to go again, yes? The bwana will bring her soon! And the other memsahibs too!”

  “Not me!” Jill disclaimed. “I expect the other memsahib will be as eager as Hilary, though!”

  The African laughed, his eyes glinting with humour as he looked at Arab.

  “Will she come to see the fish, or the bwana?” he asked slyly.

  Arab’s cheeks flamed. She rushed up the beach after Jill, more than a little angry with the other girl.

  “I wish you’d shut up implying that I have a yen for Lucien!” she berated her, making sure that Hilary’s attention was otherwise involved. “Because I haven’t!”

  But Jill only laughed. “Are you sure? Not even a tiny one?”

  “I don’t even like him!” Arab protested.

  “So you say! It’s funny, but I just can’t seem to get that fact through my head!”

  “You haven’t tried!” Arab accused her, angrier than ever.

  “Not very hard,” Jill admitted. “I’m just wondering why you should mind so much.”

  “I don’t!”

  “Then don’t try and pick a quarrel with me,” Jill advised, still smiling. “It wasn’t my joke, honey, so why don’t you tell him?” She jerked her head in the direction of the boat. “Okay, I believe you!” she capitulated suddenly. “You don’t like him! But why make such a song and dance about it?”

  “Because everyone expects me to like him!” Arab sighed. “And I don’t.”

  “So you’ve said,” Jill pointed out. “Only, honey, I don’t know why I should think it’s my place to advise you—only, well, don’t tell him that you don’t like him when you’re all het up. He might not believe you, and he could make rings round you any time he chose! You may not be as young as he pretends you are, but you’re not in the same class as Sandra Dark. It might be as well to remember that!”

  Arab was very quiet as she drove Jill back to the hotel. Hilary, however, was pleased to have the back seat all to herself because it meant she could bob back and forth from one side to the other, until Arab told her to sit still, when she subsided sulkily almost on to the floor, ignoring her elders for the rest of the way to the hotel.

  When Jill got out and disappeared into the hotel, she climbed into the front seat beside Arab, giving her an uncertain grin.

  “I didn’t upset your driving, did I?” she said by way of apology.

  “No, but it isn’t a very safe thing to do,” Arab told her. “Supposing the Mini-Moke turned over? You might get badly hurt.”

  “You might too!” Hilary said, going very white. “I won’t do it again.”

  “That’s all right, then,” Arab smiled at her.

  Hi
lary scowled thoughtfully. “I wish you were my aunt,” she announced. “Aunt Sandra never takes me anywhere!”

  “Perhaps she likes doing different sorts of things,” Arab suggested. “Things that you wouldn’t enjoy doing at all.”

  “She does. She likes shopping,” Hilary muttered. “Dull shopping—like looking in shop windows at a whole lot of things nobody could possibly want!”

  “I do that too!” Arab said apologetically.

  “But not all the time,” Hilary argued. “Must we go home already?” she added, stretching her sun-tanned limbs with an almost feline sense of enjoyment of her own physical well-being.

  “We ought to,” Arab began.

  “I want to go to Mambrui again. Lucien says I should have shown you the pillar tomb there. Please, Arab, do let’s just go there and back, and then go home?”

  Arab hesitated for only a second. “Do you think they’ll recognise us?” she asked, painfully aware of the outcome of her last visit there.

  Hilary looked her up and down, her eyes very serious. “I don’t think so. Those trousers aren’t a bit like the jeans you were wearing the other day. Anyway, they won’t do anything to us. It wasn’t you they were angry with. They were angry with the boy who took you inside the shrine without telling you to take off your shoes. They know that lots of tourists don’t understand these things.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Hilary gulped with laughter. “You’re afraid!” she accused her.

  “I think I’d feel happier if we had someone with us,” Arab confessed. “Oh well, on your head be it—”

  “It’ll be all right,” Hilary confirmed eagerly. “We won’t be going right in to Mambrui. The pillar tomb is on the outskirts. It’s very interesting. Lucien says that it was still standing at the end of the war, but since then it’s fallen down. In a way that’s better, because you can go right up to it and look at it.”

  “Okay, pet, we’ll go!”

  Having committed herself, Arab was as keen to make the trip as Hilary was. She drove out along the north road and across the river with a feeling of exhilaration that she was going to see something that Lucien thought important. She thought it would be a clue to the people of the coast, who everyone told her were quite different from those of the hinterland. Their long contact with the Arabs, who came sweeping down the coast on the monsoon winds in their dhows, had brought more than their Islamic faith’ with them; they had brought the whole flower of their civilisation, which had sent down firm roots in its new African environment. Other strangers had followed, adding their different flavours to the basic brew, but it had remained true to its first character, with a fierce loyalty to the values that had arrived on the winds as long ago as the eleventh century, at a time when William of Normandy was busy conquering England.

  Hilary chatted happily by Arab’s side. There were other pillar tombs, she told her. There were two actually in Malindi. But the one at Mambrui was, in Lucien’s opinion, the most interesting.

  Even broken and lying on its side, the pillar was a thing to wonder at. When it had been upright, it had reached some twenty-seven feet into the sky. Now, the top part had toppled over and lay at the foot of its one-time support. Still intact, in the upper portion of the pillar, were a number of delicate porcelain bowls, half-buried in the muddy concrete substance of which the pillar had been built.

  “What are they for?” Arab asked Hilary.

  The child shrugged thin shoulders. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “They’re Chinese bowls of the late Ming dynasty,” she added. “They’re pretty, aren’t they?”

  “Are you sure?” Arab demanded.

  “Of course I am.” Hilary wrinkled her nose with displeasure that anyone should cast doubt on her veracity. “Lucien said so!”

  Hilary danced into the sitting room ahead of Arab, unperturbed that Lucien and Sandra Dark were sitting closely together on the long leather sofa.

  “We went to Mambrui again,” she announced. “Arab doesn’t believe that those bowls are Chinese. You tell her, Lucien.”

  Arab wished that she hadn’t come in. Sandra’s lipstick was smudged and she was almost sure it was because Lucien had been kissing her. A tight knot of dismay grew within her and, if she could have done so, she would have gone out again as quietly as she had come in, and gone away, back to the hotel and the loneliness of her room.

  Lucien stood up, his eyes noting the unnatural colour in Arab’s cheeks.

  “Wasn’t it rather brave of you to dare Mambrui again?” he asked her.

  She swallowed, hoping to disperse the knot in her stomach, but it refused to go. “Hilary said she didn’t think they’d recognise us,” she managed.

  “And did they?” His eyes mocked her, assessing her cotton bell-bottomed trousers with the same frankness with which he had condemned her frayed jeans.

  “No, they didn’t,” Hilary put in. “We had a super afternoon. I wish you’d been with us!”

  “It looks to me as though you’ve got sunburned,” Sandra observed from the sofa. “I hope you don’t smart all night, or you won’t want to go out with—Arab, isn’t it?”

  “Arabella Burnett,” Arab answered quickly, enunciating very clearly.

  Lucien looked amused. “Only her friends are allowed to call her Arab,” he explained to Sandra in a deadpan voice.

  Sandra was prepared to be tolerant. “These silly names that one’s family give one do tend to stick. May I call you Arabella?”

  “If you like,” Arab said.

  Hilary gave her aunt an impatient look and turned back to Lucien. “You tell her!” she commanded him. “She doesn’t believe me that those bowls are Chinese of the late Ming dynasty. But they are, aren’t they?”

  “They are,” Lucien agreed.

  “I told you so!” Hilary gloated. “I knew they were Chinese!”

  “Does it matter?” Sandra asked, looking bored.

  Arab longed to put an end to the conversation, but she couldn’t think of any way of leaving as soon as she had come. She sat down on the arm of one of the leather chairs, her long legs stuck out in front of her.

  “How did they get here?” she asked, pretending an interest in the buckle of her belt that she was far from feeling.

  Lucien’s face lit with a burning enthusiasm that completely obliterated his former mockery. “They came here long before us Europeans,” he said. “There’s a fine description of their ships, or junks, in a poem written by Chin Chhu-Fei, in 1178. One can imagine them coming into these ports and selling their wares, just as they’re trying to do again today. ‘The ships that sail the southern seas and southward are like houses. When their sails are spread they are like great clouds in the sky...’ ”

  Arab’s imagination was caught. “Were they as big as that?”

  “They must have been pretty big,” Lucien answered. “They had a long way to come.”

  “And they brought the porcelain bowls with them?”

  He nodded. “The local people incorporated them into the walls of their houses, probably to keep away evil spirits. They still do in some of the local houses along the coast. Some of the best examples are in Lamu. Lamu bowls, dug out of their ancient houses, are very valuable. One might almost say they’re collectors’ pieces.’

  “Are there any at Gedi?” Hilary asked him, wriggling her body into the limited space between him and Sandra Dark.

  “Not the very best examples,” he answered.

  Arab jumped hastily to her feet before Hilary took it into her head to remind her uncle that he had offered to take them to Gedi the following Sunday.

  “I must go back,” she stammered. “Jill will be wondering where I’ve got to.”

  “She won’t have finished her letter,” Hilary said flatly. She gave another wriggle, forcing her aunt to give way and to shift farther down the sofa. Arab thought that Sandra could sometimes be forgiven for wanting to slap her young niece. With difficulty, she repressed a smile.

  Lucien stood up more
slowly, hauling Hilary on to her feet beside him. “Won’t you have something to drink before you go?” he asked.

  Arab shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, thank you.” She swallowed. “Please sit down, I can see myself out.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Lucien retorted. “You might steal my best Lamu bowl on your way out!”

  Arab started guiltily, bringing on herself another half-mocking smile of amusement from Lucien. She walked ahead of him into the hall, pushing her hair back behind her ears with anxious fingers.

  “Do I take it that Hilary was trying to remind me that I’m taking you both to Gedi on Sunday?” his deep voice drawled behind her.

  “She—she doesn’t understand that you might have other commitments,” she said defensively.

  He lifted his eyebrows in enquiry. “Have I?”

  “I thought—I mean—It doesn’t matter,” she said finally. “I quite understand.”

  “It’s more than I do,” he taunted her.

  She could have cried with sheer frustration. “You’ll want to have Miss Dark to yourself. You don’t have to invite me, Mr. Manners. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t, because I have other things to do—”

  “Oh?” His voice was bleak and ice cold. “Forgive me, Miss Burnett, but I thought you had already accepted my invitation. Did I misunderstand you?”

  Arab blinked, hoping the tears that threatened to afflict her would go away.

  “But you’d rather take Miss Dark—”

  “Nothing would induce me to take Sandra on a picnic to Gedi,” Lucien assured her brutally. “She would be bored stiff as soon as we hit the dirt track. Sandra believes in being comfortable at all times.”

  Arab blinked again. “Then—then somewhere else?” she suggested.

  Lucien’s hand closed round her elbow and he steered her with deliberation towards her Mini-Moke.

  “Don’t be silly, Arab! Sandra and I are quite capable of making our own arrangements without any help from you. If you want to know, she’s spending the week-end down at Mombasa with some friends. Now, do you want to go to Gedi on Sunday, or not?”