The House of the Scissors

by Isobel Chace

  Then suddenly he was beside her. His hands came down on her shoulders and he turned her round to face him.

  “Is this a race we are running?” he asked, his teeth white in the moonlight.

  “N—no. I want to get home—”

  “We are going home. But we have been to a dance together, ma petite. Aren’t you going to kiss me goodnight before you go?”

  She should have known it would come to this! “But Jacques,” she pleaded, “it’s too hot—”

  His arms closed about her, drawing her tightly against him, and his mouth came down on her own. “Come, ma belle, give a little! Have you never been asked for a kiss before?”

  She gave way to his demands, almost wishing that it did mean something to her, instead of an endless waiting for it to be over. His hands slid up her back, pulling at the tight bodice of her gold dress. There was a ripping noise and she knew that the stitches she had so painfully put into it earlier had given way. With a gesture of annoyance, she pushed him away and examined the damage with her fingers.

  “Did you have to be so rough?” she demanded crossly.

  “But Bella—” His hands fell to his side. “For you, it was not romantic after all, was it? I did not frighten you?”

  “Of course not!” Arab pulled at her dress again. “I’ve only had this dress a few days. You’d think it would hold together for longer than that! It would have done if you hadn’t tried to tear if off my back!”

  Jacques stood and stared at her. “You believe, enfin—But no, it is incredible!”

  Arab had the grace to feel guilty. “No, I don’t think! Only I liked this dress because—Oh well, never mind why! And the material has rotted and it won’t hold the stitches!”

  Jacques grinned at her tragic face. “I understand perfectly,” he said. “This Lucien admired your dress, and that is a more important event than my kisses, no? And to think that I believed you when you told me he was insufferable and not the sort of man you could like!”

  Arab strained her eyes in the darkness to see what he was thinking. “You don’t mind, do you? It’s half true!”

  “Perhaps it is a little bit true,” he agreed. “It is possible to be afraid of what attracts you. Mais, I think there is a little happiness for you there, ma belle. He is no boy for you to cut your teeth on! You would be safer with me, even when I tear the dress off your back!” Aware that he was teasing her, she attempted a laugh, but it broke dangerously towards the end and sounded, even to her own ears, more like a sob of despair. “I don’t like him!” she insisted.

  “No? Are you sure? Are you not a little cross that he does not see you as a woman? Poor little golden goddess! You will need more than a golden dress to compete with Mademoiselle Dark. She is clever, that one! With a few words you are a child in Lucien Manners’ eyes! You would do better with me!”

  Arab sighed. “Yes, I think I would,” she said. “But I can’t!”

  “Then there is nothing more but to take you home to bed!”

  The lights were still on in the hotel garden. One or two couples were taking advantage of the warmth of the night to have a last dip in the swimming pool, while an African stood by patiently waiting for them to go to bed. Jacques guided Arab through the bar to the patio beyond.

  “Goodnight,” he said very gently. “Take a little stardust to bed with you to make sure there are no nightmares.” He touched her on the nose with his forefinger. “And no worries, hein?”

  She reached up and kissed him on the mouth. “Thank you, Jacques. Thank you for taking me to the dance, and thank you for understanding.”

  He gave her a little push towards the stairs. “Au revoir, mignonne. For us both, tomorrow will be another day!”

  She nodded gravely, knowing that he would not invite her to anything again. It was a poignant realisation that saddened her. Was it always going to be the same just because she had known Lucien Manners? She wouldn’t believe it! She couldn’t believe it! She took a last look at Jacques’ sober face and ran hastily up the stairs to bed, fighting with her tears as she struggled with the key in the door. The room was as hot as when she had left it and, pulling off her dress as fast as she could, she threw herself on to the bed and wept the tears of the young and the disillusioned.

  By the time Sunday came, Arab had talked herself into a mood of quiet despair. She was sure that Sandra was right when she had described Lucien’s dance with her as a matter of duty, just as he had felt it his duty to rescue her from Sammy. If only, she thought, she had not worn those frayed jeans that day when she had gone to Mambrui, he might have gained another impression of her. But what was the use of useless regrets? It would have been worse still if she had never met him and had never heard his stories of the long ago past of the East African coast. That at least she would always have. The story of Cheng Ho would be with her for as long as she lived.

  This time she donned shocking pink sailcloth trousers, with wide bell-bottoms that flapped satisfactorily about her ankles. With them she wore a crisp white cotton shirt and a coral necklace she had bought in one of the Indian shops near the harbour. She had some pretty, rather fragile sandals that completed the outfit.

  Even Jill thought she looked nice. Her eyebrows shot up meaningly when she came in to breakfast to find Arab already seated at their table.

  “You look good enough to eat, honey, you really do!” she drawled as she sat down. “Surely this isn’t to impress Jacques, is it?”

  Arab shook her head. “I’m going out with Hilary and—and Lucien,” she reminded her.

  “So you are! How nice for you! At least Lucien will look after you!”

  “I don’t need looking after!” Arab retorted. “I’m old enough to look after myself!”

  “Okay, if you say so. I’m going to spend the day by the pool, counting the hours until we go home. This lotus-eating existence begins to get rather boring after a while.”

  Arab was shocked by such a programme. “But there are heaps of things to do!” she insisted. “I’ve wanted to go to Gedi for simply ages! And you could go down to Mombasa—”

  “Spare me that in this heat!” Jill pleaded.

  “But it doesn’t feel half so hot if you do something!” Arab expostulated.

  Jill grinned. “You have a way of making me feel positively middle-aged,” she complained. Her eyes met Arab’s fleetingly. “Let’s hope today is everything you want it to be, hon, and a whole lot more! But leave me in peace to get through the day my own way as best I may. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Arab agreed. She shrugged her shoulders, laughing. “You’re slipping, Jill! Here I am, going out with Lucien for the whole day, and you haven’t uttered a single dark warning of the horrors that await me!”

  “Oh, Hilary will make an adequate chaperone for anyone,” Jill returned. “Besides, I have a feeling that Lucien won’t allow you to get into any trouble. You’ll have your work cut out there if you want to make much of an impression!”

  Arab blinked. “You’ve met Sandra Dark?”

  Jill nodded, “That’s right, love. Enough said!”

  “Hilary doesn’t like her,” Arab volunteered.

  “I shouldn’t think many females do,” Jill answered. “I can’t say I found her very likeable myself, but successful! Even Jean-Pierre was hoping to get a dance with her!” She frowned thoughtfully. “I’m surprised that anyone like Lucien Manners should get caught up in her toils, but I expect she presents a different face to him than she does to lesser fry like ourselves.”

  Arab helped herself to some more coffee. “I wonder if truly selfish people can make others happy?”

  Jill shrugged. “Never thought about it,” she said.

  They had almost finished eating when Hilary came into the dining room in search of Arab. She came and stood beside Arab’s chair, stealing a lump of sugar from the bowl in the centre of the table.

  “Lucien is outside in the car,” she announced. “He sent me to get you. Haven’t you finished breakfast yet?”
<
br />   “It is Sunday,” Jill pointed out.

  Hilary grinned. “Ayah can’t tell one day from another,” she said. “At least she says she can’t! She knows when her day off is, though. The only difference on Sundays is that I have breakfast with Lucien. Usually he’s already had his by the time I come downstairs. He says as you get older you tend to have breakfast earlier and earlier!”

  He would! Arab surveyed the breakfast table with a feeling of displeasure. It wasn’t very late, but she knew that he would see it as another straw in the wind that she was more suited to Hilary’s company than his own. She stood up so quickly that she almost knocked her chair over backwards. Hilary rescued it for her, staring at her with surprise.

  “Are you cross about something?” she asked her.

  Arab forced a smile. “Of course not. Can you wait a minute while I run upstairs and get my bag?”

  Hilary nodded. “I’ll finish that piece of toast while you’re gone—that is, if you don’t want it?”

  “No, you go ahead.”

  “Good,” said Hillary. “I like cold toast. It’s nice and chewy.”

  In a matter of minutes Arab was ready to go. Rather to her surprise, Hilary put her hand in hers as they walked out of the heavy studded doors of the hotel into the formal, sweet-smelling garden outside. Lucien, in white trousers and a white shirt which set off his dark good looks, got languidly out of the front seat of his estate car and held the door for them to get in.

  “Can I sit in the front too?” Hilary asked him.

  He shook his head with decision. “It’s too hot to all crowd together,” he answered.

  “I don’t mind,” Arab put in. It might be a good thing, she thought, to have Hilary as a barrier between them, or at least between her jumpy nerves and the source of her discomfort.

  “But I do,” Lucien returned. “Hop in, Hilary!”

  The child climbed into the back seat, making a face at Arab over her shoulder. “Mummy lets me sit in the front!”

  “Which goes to show you have a daft woman for a mother!” Lucien teased her.

  Hilary giggled. “It would be a strange thing if I had a daft man for a mother!”

  “Strange indeed!” Lucien agreed with a smile. “But probably not so daft!” His amused eyes slid on to Arab’s face. “Wouldn’t you agree?” he mocked her.

  Arabella refused to be drawn. “I don’t know Mrs. Dark, so how can I say?” she answered gently.

  His smile made her tingle with an unnamed and rather frightening emotion. “But you would allow her to sit in the front too, wouldn’t you?” he pressed her.

  “If she wanted to,” Arab agreed. “I don’t feel that I have to force my will on everyone around me all the time.”

  His smile died and was replaced by a fierce frown. “Meaning that I do?”

  She opened her eyes wide, looking innocent. “Do you always take remarks personally?” she asked him.

  “Touché,” he muttered. “But if I weren’t in such a good humour, you wouldn’t escape so easily! As it is, I’ll allow you to have the last word—this time!”

  “But you haven’t!” she pointed out.

  He laughed out loud at this sally. “I think you had the last winning shot!” he told her. “I concede you the point!”

  She was inordinately pleased. She couldn’t remember that she had ever got the better of him before. Her satisfaction was spoiled though by the knowledge that he was amused by the pleasure she had got from besting him. He might even have allowed her to win, she thought suspiciously. It was just the kind of patronising thing he would do!

  “No, I didn’t hold back,” he said suddenly. “You did it all by yourself, so there’s no need to look like that!” Nettled by his easy reading of her mind, she smiled at him, feeling more at ease than she had with him before. “Was I crowing? I didn’t mean to,” she said.

  “I don’t suppose you did. You’re a nice child, Arab.”

  She took a deep breath. “I suppose it would be useless to point out that I’m not a child?” she hazarded.

  He looked surprised. “I didn’t mean to disparage you,” he apologised. “I suppose it’s because you’re so much younger than either Sandra or Ruth—”

  “How old is Sandra?” Arab asked, guiltily aware that Sandra would be furious if she ever heard that Arab had sought to know her age.

  “I don’t know exactly. She must be about thirty-five. She’s a year or two older than my sister, I believe.” Arab digested this in silence. Thirty-five would be the lowest that she would put it at, and that made Sandra older than Lucien. She wrinkled her nose in distaste.

  “Are you talking about Aunt Sandra?” Hilary demanded from the back. “She’s thirty-eight.”

  “And how do you know that, young woman?” Lucien asked furiously.

  “It’s in her passport,” Hilary answered. She sensed she was on dangerous ground, for she went on immediately, “I didn’t pry, Lucien, I promise you I didn’t! She was asking me to admire the photograph she had had taken for her new passport, and it was there!”

  Arab giggled, unable to stop herself.

  “Well?” Lucien threatened.

  “Vanity goes before a fall,” she drawled.

  “Very witty!” he crushed her. “My God, you’re both as bad as one another! I suppose you don’t like Sandra either?”

  “N-no,” she admitted.

  “Well, let me tell you, she’s a good deal better natured than you are. She doesn’t dislike you and she doesn’t hold it against Hilary that she needles her at every opportunity—”

  “She isn’t aware that we exist!” Arab insisted.

  “She even suggested that you had more style than I had given you credit for,” Lucien went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “Why else would anyone employ you as a model?”

  “How kind of her!” Arab exclaimed sarcastically.

  Lucien glared at her. “It was kind of her,” he said. “She knows what she’s talking about, as your Mr. Silk would be the first to realise if she had followed her first instincts and had asked him for a job.”

  “She wouldn’t have got one!” Arab exclaimed.

  “Think again, Arab! Sandra has had more experience at showing clothes than you’ve had hot meals!”

  “Then what stopped her asking Sammy for a job?” she demanded.

  “Your friend Jill, if you must know. Sandra overheard her telling the young Frenchmen at the dance that Mr. Silk had only allowed you to come because another girl fell ill at the last moment—”

  “Jill said that?” Arab’s eyes filled with angry tears. “I don’t believe it!”

  Lucien gave her an impatient look. “Jill offered to look after you if you came,” he went on. “You’re very young and inexperienced to be in a strange country on your own. It seems that your employers thought you too young and would be only too glad to have a good excuse to pack you back to home and safety.” His impatience gave way to sardonic amusement. “Are you going to cry and prove their point?”

  “No,” she sniffed. “I never cry!”

  He laughed, thereby proving once and for all that he was completely heartless and unbearable.

  “Too much of a tomboy?” he teased her.

  Arab struggled silently with the lump in her throat. After a few minutes she sniffed again. Lucien silently proffered his handkerchief and she accepted it with dignity, blowing her nose hard and long.

  “It isn’t that,” she said. “It’s only that I’m quite a good model and I thought they really wanted me! I photograph nicely, but not so well that I detract from the clothes. It was quite a leg up, getting this job with Sammy.”

  Lucien took his handkerchief back and pocketed it calmly. “I don’t find myself looking at the clothes when you’re inside them,” he remarked.

  Arab gasped and choked. “But—”

  He shook his head at her. “Nor Sammy either,” he added dryly.

  Her cheeks flamed. “But Sandra—I mean Miss Dark—would dominate any picture
!”

  “I think you make too much of her,’ Lucien suggested. “She isn’t half as bad, or half as anything else, as you think you know.”

  “I—isn’t she?” Arab said uncertainly.

  “No, she is not. She is just a rather lonely woman with too much time on her hands. She would be better off if she had taken up some profession, instead of dabbling in fashion shops in Nairobi, and other such ventures.”

  Arab stayed very, quiet, turning over in her mind the incredible fact that Lucien had actually paid her a compliment. That it had been back-handed, she was prepared to overlook, because she was fairly sure that it would be the only one she would ever get from him. But for a moment it had sounded as though he didn’t always see her as a ragamuffin after all. And that was something wonderful to her, it was balm to her bruised spirits.

  “I don’t mind really that they didn’t want me much,” she said, sitting back in her seat with a dreamy expression on her face. “It’s nice that I came, though. I’d never have heard about Cheng Ho in England!”

  Lucien’s sidelong glance was as sardonic as ever. “Africa’s got you pretty badly, hasn’t it?” he said.

  She nodded, suddenly tense and aware of that familiar knot of anxiety inside her whenever she talked to him. “I shall hate to go home! I can’t bear to think about it! Supposing I never come back?”

  He put a hand on hers in her lap, in a sympathetic gesture she never would have expected from him.

  “If you want a thing badly enough, it always happens!” he said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “ARAB, don’t dawdle!”

  “But I want to see everything. Besides, I’m not dawdling! I wish you wouldn’t address me as though I were ten years old!”

  Lucien’s eyes glinted with humour. “All right, my rare, long-legged bird, my little street arab, but may we start to look at the actual site?”

  “Oh yes, I suppose so.” She glanced at him, veiling her eyes with her long lashes in case he should guess how disturbing she found him. “May I just look at these?”

  “It will be more interesting when we’ve seen the houses that they came out of,” Hilary put in, standing on one leg and looking bored. “They aren’t very interesting, are they?”