Desert Doctor

by Winspear, Violet

  For some people it can get to be a drug and they follow the sport, living and eating it.”

  “I think I’d like to try it,” she said.

  “I’d like to teach you.” He filtered sand through his fingers, then rolled over on his stomach and rested his face on his crossed arms.

  She glanced down the lean length of his body to the pale band round his ankle. She asked him how it felt.

  “Aches a bit, but I can take it.” He shot her a grin, a damp lance of hair pointing down to his left eyebrow. “Glad you’re here at Mazagan with me?”

  She nodded. He was fun to be with, but how could she tell him to lay off the romance without hurting his feelings? She hadn’t realized how raw it could make you feel to be snubbed by someone you loved — and she was beginning to believe that Brooke did love her… in his casual way.

  “I’m reading your mind,” he drawled, “and I promise not to make love to you. I’ll only flirt. That’s permissible, isn’t it?”

  “To stop you flirting would be like trying to change the colour of your eyes,” she laughed. “They’re cat-green with the sun in them, do you know that?”

  “I purr, too, when I’m stroked,” he grinned. He sat up, reached for his slacks and took out a pack of cigarettes and a match-folder with the name of their hotel stamped on it, then tossed into Madeline’s lap a bar of nut and sultana chocolate.

  “Thank you — Tiger.” She lay back on her poncho wrap and nibbled chocolate. The sun was growing warmer every second and several other bathers had invaded the beach. A coloured playball bounced near Brooke and he deliberately let a blonde teenager in calypso pants run up to him to collect it.

  She skimmed an admiring glance over him. “Want to play ?”

  she asked ingenuously.

  “I’ve got a playmate, honey.” He quirked a grin at her through his cigarette smoke, then made her day by giving her a wink.

  She ran back to her friends. Girlish giggles floated on the air, and Madeline flicked a silver paper pellet at Brooke.

  “Leave those kittens alone,” she murmured.

  “Jealous — I hope?” He slanted her a look. “You look like a teenager yourself with chocolate on your mouth and sand in your hair !”

  They returned to the hotel in a while, and after Madeline had given her hair a good brush and put on a white cotton shift with a sunflower on the left hip, she joined Amalia and Brooke on the breakfast terrace. That glowing swim had made her hungry and she had aubergines cooked with fish. Amalia was going driving with the Harringtons in about an hour’s time. She added smilingly, “I’m sure you two can find your own amusements.”

  “I’m going to hire a gig and show Madeline around the place,” Brooke said, biting into a wedge of toast spread with lemon marmalade. “We’ll lunch out.”

  Amalia’s glance flickered over her nephew’s face. She nodded to herself, as though she saw something there that pleased her.

  Madeline sipped her orange juice. She knew what Amalia wanted to come of this holiday, and there was a relaxed air about Brooke in his tropic worsted that suggested he was confident of giving his aunt what she hoped for. Madeline shielded the sudden tremor of her lips behind her napkin….

  Was everyone to have their heart’s desire but she?

  Having collected a straw jackaroo hat and matching bag she left the hotel with Brooke. Fringed, horse-drawn gigs awaited hire along the harbour, a busy curve filled with native activity, sea-going craft of every type, and overhung by cliffs where white and pastel houses nestled in the vivid foliage of their gardens. Mazagan, now called El Jadida by the Moroccans, had been built from the dreams of Portuguese adventurers, and many of their ancient fortifications still survived. These crenellated battlements gave to this picturesque port a somewhat Spanish flavour, despite the long plage of pearly sand faced by luxury hotels, casinos, and bathing-huts.

  Their gig clopped its way through the streets, where European tourists in fashionable summer wear mingled with white-robed Moors. Modern shops rubbed shoulders with cafes arabes, and they passed some pleasant public gardens, and saw many people riding bicycles.

  The air was breezy and invigorating, and when they left the busy streets behind, at a word from Brooke, their native driver flicked the haunches of his horse and the gig dashed along a coastal road at quite a pace. Silver-blue waves rippled to the pale sands, and Brooke suddenly clicked his fingers. “Let’s go as far as Azzemour,” he suggested. “We’ll lunch where we aren’t likely to run into Lilane Annderson and her chatter.

  Then we’ll explore — okay?”

  She agreed that Azzemour was a good idea.

  He tapped the driver’s shoulder and told him to take them there, then lounged and slipped a casual arm along the back of the rather worn leather seat. The fringed canopy danced, a chain of blue beads about the horse’s neck played a jingle, and

  Brooke whistled a tune. Madeline glanced at him, smiling irresistibly. He was gay as a boy, and his answering smile showing teeth as white as his silk open-necked shirt.

  “The cruising idea of the Harringtons’ — you really want to go?” he asked.

  She almost said no, then realized that if Amalia went she would be left entirely alone in Mazagan with Brooke. A new, tender Brooke, looking at her with eyes that beckoned her in out of the coldness of being alone.

  “I — I think we might as well go,” she said. “Mrs. Harrington was telling us last night that they’re making stops along the Spanish coast and also at Tangier. It should be fun.”

  “Anything you say, sweetheart.” He was gently mocking, as if aware that she was a little afraid of being left alone with

  him.

  She glanced to her other side, where the Atlantic surged, and wondered why it was that she had to love Victor. Was it love? Might it not be an infatuation that would gradually flicker and die as the days piled up and she didn’t see his haughty, sun-bitten face, nor hear that deep Latin voice with mocking inflections in it when he spoke to her? His work and his devotion to his patients had always impressed her. He was different from anyone else she had ever known … and he was indifferent to her. These factors could have combined to build a fantasy she mistook for love … love for a man was surely kinder than this harsh ache deep inside her?

  Azzemour turned out to be a riverside town with narrow streets paved from river-bed stones. Ancient, meandering walls

  ran here and there, and they discovered a harbour restaurant called The Caliban and advertising les fruits de mer.

  They studied large menus while three musicians wrung some strange, not unattractive music out of a little guitar with two strings, a zither, and a flute. “Let’s be madly extravagant,”

  Brooke said, “and have black diamonds.”

  He meant caviar, of course, straight from Coria del Rio, they were assured by their waiter when he brought the little silver pot of tiny, glistening roes and a rack of toast. With it they had half a carafe of white Moroccan wine. It ruffled the lips, but went down cool with their wedges of buttered toast spread with caviar and a squeeze of lemon.

  “You like, my princess ?” Brooke imitated a Russian accent and clinked his wine glass against hers.

  “Is good, comrade.” She laughed, his gaiety and the wine warming away the chill that lay round her heart.

  After the caviar they had steaks, beautifully crisped outside and tender inside, with long green beans and delicious potatoes, then a crisp fruit salad, followed by Turkish coffee. As their waiter poured the dark, thick coffee into little cups, Brooke said to him : “Please give our compliments to the chef. Those steaks were out of this world.”

  “Tres bien, monsieur.” The waiter placed a silver dish of Turkish sweetmeats between Madeline and Brooke, his dark French eyes holding that indulgent expression that said he was entirely on the side of young lovers. And it surely wasn’t a coincidence that only a moment after he had passed the three-piece orchestra the music took on a romantic sound.

  “I’ll always reme
mber this strange little restaurant,” Brooke glanced round him as though he wanted to memorize every detail. “That crazy music, the smell of the sea outside, and being with you, Madeline.”

  A little later they wended their way through narrow, cobbled streets, passed blank-faced houses with glimpses into cypress courts where old tiles glimmered and fountains played.

  They saw old corn mills, and unconsciously linked fingers to watch a closed harem-carriage roll slowly by. The lowered blind flicked aside an inch and a kohled brown eye dwelt on them.

  “Now that’s the proper way to treat women,” Brooke peered beneath the straw brim of Madeline’s hat. “Make ‘em prisoners of love.”

  “You men would get a kick out of that, wouldn’t you?”

  she retorted. “The world your oyster, your women locked up like pearls for private viewing only.”

  “What a thought! Languishing on a divan for a guy when he returns from the busy city, instead of dashing home an hour before him to thaw out the frozen fillets, the peas, and chips.”

  She grinned, and thought he had something there. Modern marriages were beginning to resemble the frozen foodstuffs on which couples nourished their questionable bliss. Children were planned to fit in with holidays and payments on the car.

  The men looked too mature, with worry lines at the sides of their eyes. The women had hard, searching eyes. Something was missing. Perhaps it was gaiety and joy.

  “No frozen fillets and chips for you, Madeline, eh?” Brooke smiled down at her and tucked her fingers closer into his.

  “You’d be waiting for a guy on his return from work, and there would be more to be had than dried peas.”

  Colour ran up into her cheeks — Victor came into her mind.

  “Brooke,” she clutched at his arm as though at a lifeline, “let’s go and take pictures from those battlements.” She pointed up an incline of cobbles to where the remnants of an old castle stood outlined against the blue sky, its mouldering, lichened walls dropping sheer into the sea. Barbary corsairs must once have sailed into this harbour in their black galleons, and Portuguese lookouts would have kept watch from those ramparts which now echoed to the cries of gulls. Its loneliness beckoned and they climbed to the castle and explored it for ghosts, but they found only an old cannon or two, and an old crone crouching under the shade of a bent cypress tree.

  They thought she was snoozing and were turning to go when she glanced up. She stared at them with birdlike eyes in a dirty, seamed face, then said something in Berber. Brooke thought she was begging, and he was putting his hand into his pocket when she scrambled to her feet with an agility that was amazing and shook her head. She hobbled over to them and in broken French said that she was a teller of Fates and of life held in store for them.

  Madeline backed away. She wasn’t frightened of the old woman, only of something Brooke’s aunt had told her. It didn’t do, she had said, to scoff at these people for claiming the powers of clairvoyance. Long ago an old man in Tunis had warned her that she would pass the second half of her life in loneliness, but she had been young at the time and only a year married to Henry Van Cleef. It had seemed impossible that anything could ever take him from her. “You shouldn’t go around frightening people,” she had scolded the old fortune-teller. “It’s a cruel way to earn a living.” “I tell only the truth,” he had replied. “The sands never lie, and you should never again ask for them to be spilled, always they will spell out the same story. What is written — is written ! ”

  “Come away, Brooke ! ” Madeline spoke in a low, urgent voice. “Give her some money and let’s go.”

  He glanced at her in puzzlement. “It’s only fun, honey,”

  he laughed. “Come on, let the old witch tell us how many kids we’re going to have.”

  The old woman was gazing up at Madeline with her hooded head perched on one side like a raven listening in a tree; her eyes were full of curiosity at the young bint’s obvious reluct-ance. She rattled the little leather drawstring bag in her hand, a trifle mockingly.

  “Madeline,” Brooke’s arm twined itself round her waist, “she’s only an old charlatan. You’ve nothing to be afraid of.”

  His arm was solid and warm, but though she relaxed within it, she knew she was strangely afraid. The gulls cried across the water, while the sky was flushing to the rose madder that preceded the nightly dying of the sun. Some vines rustled against the walls of the castle and spread claw-like shadows.

  “All right,” Madeline’s voice shook slightly, “tell her to go ahead.”

  The old crone crouched, muttering, and pulled open the neck of her little bag of sand. She spilled it out on to a paving stone of the battlements and stirred the grains with fingers that looked not unlike the gnarled, running legs of a scorpion.

  She mumbled, nodded to herself, then shot an upward glance at Brooke.

  “You will travel much,” she said. “It is written here.”

  Then she scattered the pattern, brought the sand back into a mound between her palms, flattened it and made a new pattern with her fingers. “When a hawk appears the other birds go quiet,” she muttered, after studying the grains for about a minute.

  Brooke at once leaned down and asked her what she meant.

  She studied the faint smile on his face, then glanced at Madeline. “You understand me,” she said. “This hawk flies towards clouds that grow darker all the time, but where he goes you will not be able to follow. You will be elsewhere … ah !” The old crone threw up her hands, for in that moment a gust of wind blew over the battlements and scattered her sand pile in several directions. It was a strangely significant moment, unbearable for Madeline, who pulled out of Brooke’s encircling arm and almost ran down the steps that led to the shore. A minute later she heard the running thud of Brooke’s sandals and he was gripping her shoulders and swinging her round to face him.

  “What was she getting at ?” he demanded. “She meant something, that’s why you ran off.”

  Madeline, feeling the urgent bite of his hands and seeing the suspicion darkening his eyes, at once pulled herself together.

  She must not believe that what she had just heard from that old teller of Fates had any real significance — she would go mad if she thought Victor was in any sort of danger!

  “I — I don’t know what came over me, Brooke,” she managed a shaky smile, “getting all steamed up over a — a lot of nonsense. It must have been the creepy atmosphere of that old castle.”

  “I think she was referring to a man !” Brooke gritted. “If there is one, then I’ve a right to be told about him. Come on, is it a guy back in England?”

  His hands were now gripping her waist, and close by water lapped the shore, wine-red under the westering sky. It reflected in a distorted way the ramparts of the castle and the rigging of native fishing boats rocking against the mossy stone of the quay. Brooke’s face above Madeline’s was, dark and faintly cruel… for, as he had said, love was cruel.

  “There’s no one,” she replied, almost with truth. There was only a dream that could never come true.

  Brooke stared down at her, she saw his throat move, then his grip slowly slackened on her waist. “That crazy old coot,”

  he groaned. “She had us both going, huh, with all that gibber-ish about clouds coming between you and someone? I hope she didn’t mean me.”

  “She was just giving dramatic value for her money.” Madeline took a look at the sky. “It’s growing late, Brooke. Hadn’t we better be getting back to Mazagan?”

  “I guess so — say, you’re shivering, honey! Now take my jacket —” he shrugged out of it and swung it about her shoulders, “and let’s go and buy you a sweater for the drive back.”

  They found a shop, where instead of buying her a sweater Brooke insisted she accept a lovely fringed Kashmir stole. It was soft as a baby’s cheek and warm on the drive back. Above the sea a little gold horn of a moon pricked the plum-blue sky and it was perhaps inevitable that Brooke should take her into his
arms and that she, wanting an alleviation for the ache within her, should accept his kisses.

  The Harringtons’ yacht had put out from Mazagan that morning carrying a skipper and a crew, and half a dozen friends. Its long, graceful hull was cutting through the blue Atlantic and leaving lacy furrows in its wake; the white sails were spread like wings and there was poetry in the motion of the lovely sea-rover, the ocean spray over her bows like showers of pearls in the sunlight.

  “This is the life !” Lilane Annderson lay at her ease on a steamer-chair, clad in white pants and a vixen-red halter that matched her lips and her nails. “I guess all this is a big thrill for you, Madeline?”

  She smiled knowledgeably upon her steamer-chair companion. The rest of the party was distributed about the yacht, playing games, or taking a siesta in their berths.

  “D’you know what I was before I hooked Greg?” Lilane lifted a slender hand and studied the rings on it. “I was a sales-lady in the perfumery department of a swank store on Fifth Avenue. And, brother, was it the devil seeing those Park Avenue socialites sauntering in after knick-knacks it would have cost me six months’ salary to buy. Then one happy day Greg breezed in with his sister. He was buying her a birthday gift, and at the same time he was looking at little black-gowned, lace-cuffed me as though he wished it was his birthday and I was tied up in a bow on the counter.”

  Lilane laughed reminiscently. “When I got a load of that look, then I knew it was time little Lily O’Keefe played her trump card. His sister was kind of snooty, and I worked it so I brought out all the chivalry in Greg … I spilled a bottle of Caron perfume all over sister’s Carnegie suit and burst into tears all over brother’s custom-made jacket when the manager-ess fired me on the spot, What a gambling moment that was !

  Greg’s never brought off a better finesse in a game of canasta.”

  The petite brunette flipped open a gold case and extracted a cork-tipped cigarette. She spun the wheel of a matching lighter and seemed not to care that there was something beside money that a woman should want.