Meet the Sun Halfway

by Jane Arbor

  MEET THE SUN HALFWAY By Jane Arbor

  Alice’s best friend who worked as Warden of a children’s home in Morocco had not got on well with the landlord. “Whether this is because he is a woman- hater or just anti-social, your guess is as good as mine,” she wrote to warn Alice about the forbidding Karim ibn Charles.

  Would Alice find favour with him? Time would tell.

  CHAPTER ONE

  For some way out of the city the road had run arrow-straight towards the ever-receding horizon where its bordering eucalyptus trees appeared to meet. On either side an arid, scrub-dotted terrain stretched away; at one point the road bridged a broad river-bed as dry as its rocky banks; cars flashed citywards or overtook the trundling bus with a shout of their horns; along the verges solitary hooded figures trudged, drove laden donkeys or rode mopeds — where to, where from? — since for upward of an hour there had been no sign of so much as an occupied hamlet.

  But now the road had turned east and had begun to climb towards the foothills of Atlas, hitherto a misty blue outline against the sky, but now showing detail and colour and the dappled shade of trees that was a relief to the eye, weary of the hot ochre glare of the plain. Here, it seemed, people did live. At turns in the road the bus would surprise huddles of sandstone houses; children waved to it from the roadside, and once or twice it stopped to take on or put down passengers or to unload parcels for claiming.

  The road was often a mere shelf, its turns so hairpin that it twisted back on itself as it climbed. From her front seat in the bus Alice watched, fascinated, as the steering-wheel, slewed full circle for a comer, had scarcely swung back of its own momentum before the driver had to turn it over again for the next corkscrew twist. The man drove fast. The bus lurched and bumped and yelled its approach to other road users on its klaxon. The passengers chattered intermittently in Arabic, scolded restless children, shifted unwieldy bundles to gain more ease for themselves, and accepted Alice as the only European present with Eastern unconcern.

  Now, in the kindlier country which fell away from the road, there was visible cultivation, as there had been none on the plain — plantations of trees in ordered rows - oranges? almonds? — from a distance Alice could not tell; the unmistakable heavy growth of banana and, tall, aspiring and laden with their as yet unripe harvest, date palms.

  Date palms! Alice couldn’t suppress a little croon of delight. So this was Morocco, the Barbary of fairytale! Last night, the lighted city glimpsed too late for an assessment of its strangeness; this morning again, too little time to stand and stare before she had had to catch the bus for Tazenir in the mountains, her journey’s end. But since then

  - an excitingly alien world, dull geography and history come alive, and all under the rewarding benison of the sun.

  She thought with renewed gratitude of Debbie Martin who had made it all possible. Debbie had been her senior by a year at the domestic science college where they had both trained. But they had been fairly near neighbours at home and had always been friends. When Debbie had qualified, she had worked in England for a year before she had snatched at the chance of this job as Warden of the Tazenir convalescent and holiday Home for Moroccan children, under the sponsorship of an Order of English nuns in Tetuan, and when, at the end of a year of successful wardenship, she had been due for three months’ home leave, she had recommended Alice as her locum for the summer.

  By this time Alice herself had completed a year as deputy-hostel warden at a red-brick university and so was free from June to October. The Tazenir post spelled work, of course, but when correspondence with the Order’s Reverend Mother, her references and Debbie’s backing gave her the chance of it, she grasped it eagerly. For besides work it spelled experience and “abroad” and contacts she might never gain otherwise. Yes, bless Debbie for all this. She deserved all that her planned touring holiday promised her - deserved all that and more, thought Alice gratefully.

  But if Debbie had a fault it was her somewhat baffling assumption that she had already related all the circumstances of her life or that her friends understood them without needing to be told. Her active mind baulked at letter writing, and her few letters home and to Alice had amounted to a kind of staccato shorthand which, Alice felt, expressed far less than she could have meant to tell. People appeared as mere names without function; there were references to events without background; places were hardly described at all. The results of which non-communication was that, in spite of the detailed questionnaire to which Alice was driven (and which Debbie failed to answer) Alice felt she was going blind into the job. Even today she knew little more than that the children came and went according to their need for coaxing into full health or for holidays; that she would have a cook and a small staff of young Moroccan girls; that in difficulty she could apply to “Sister Bernadine” - (one of the Tetuan nuns?) - and that in her relationship with the Home’s landlord she had been warned by Debbie to “watch her step.”

  For by no means the first time Alice thought back to this cryptic reference in Debbie’s last letter before she had left for Europe. This, characteristically, was the first Alice had heard about an uncooperative landlord to the Home. As a thorn in Debbie’s flesh he had never taken shape before, and even now she hadn’t given him a name. All she had said was -

  “Don’t ask me what’s biting the man, for I don’t know. He doesn’t fancy me, but whether this is because he’s a woman-hater or just antisocial, your guess is as good as mine. The gossips have it - but you don’t want to be bothered with that. Especially as you may not have to meet him, unless, say, your gutters overflow or the roof blows off, which shouldn’t happen at this time of year. I’ve been privileged only once or twice since I’ve been here, but on each occasion we didn’t Get On. So take warning, young Alice. If you don’t keep on the right side of him, that’ll be my problem when I come back, not yours. He has, by the way, a charming mother. No wife. No wives.”

  Devious Debbie! Exasperating Debbie! Warning of friction without whys or hows; leaving the man unnamed; hinting at gossip without finding it worthwhile to pass it on. And - “no wives. ” Why, in the name of wonder, should he have wives in the plural...? Unless -?

  But that piece of speculation on Alice’s part achieved no completion. For at that moment a front tyre burst with a deafening report. The bus swerved, careened round until it was almost faceabout, tottered and fell sideways against a wall of rock. On the outward edge of the road the drop was sheer. If it had fallen that way -!

  There were shouts and screams. Red dust rose chokingly arid blindingly. Settling slowly, it revealed the scene - windscreen and windows shattered, broken glass everywhere, dangerous knives of it adhering to the frames of the windows through which people are climbing in default of the emergency door at the back which had jammed. Someone helped Alice out by way of the driver’s cabin. A place on her forehead smarted and putting her fingers to it, she brought them away covered in blood. There was a cut on her arm too. Staunching both wounds as well as she could with a couple of handkerchiefs from her bag, she sat down on a boulder and looked about her.

  The bus leaned drunkenly, its roof-load dangling from its straps and ties. Everyone was out of it now, comparing injuries, abusing the driver and some of them eyeing Alice as darkly as if they suspected her of putting a European curse on the journey. A few of the men made a half-hearted attempt to right the bus, but gave up on the driver’s pointing out, so Alice gathered from his gestures, that the tyre could not be mended and he carried no spare.

  There was consultation. A man seemed to volunteer to walk back along the road to alert any car and to send it back for help. He left; the driver paced up and down, disclaiming blame, and a dull apathy settled down on the passengers, squatting in the
dust or, like Alice, sitting on boulders. Watched by the women, Alice ineffectually brushed dust from her cream trouser suit, which had a T-rent in one knee. She peered at her face in the mirror of her compact but, despairing of the sweat-streaked grime she saw, put the compact away again. She met no smiles in the eyes above the face-veils the women wore. The men simply stared in front of them, taking no interest.

  A child was crying. Its mother was dabbing with a dirty rag at a gash on its cheek, and Alice remembered seeing a first-aid box on a shelf in the bus.

  She went over to the driver. Now everyone was watching. Taking an envelope and her lipstick from her bag, she coloured in a fat red cross and pointed towards the crying child and then to the bus. He understood. He reached down the box, used its key and handed it over. Alice took it to the mother, selected a suitable dressing for the torn cheek and helped to put it on. At first the child yelled protest, but presently quietened, and then there were other candidates for treatment, offering angry bruises, blood blisters, cuts, an arm hanging limply from a shoulder, a wrist turned at the ugly angle which spoke of a break.

  The scout came back, clinging to the door of a car. Another car followed close behind. There was a counting of heads and an assessing of need, then one car crammed in five or six people and went on towards Tazenir, while the other loaded Dislocated Shoulder, Broken Wrist and a man with a head-wound, and went back towards the city — hospital-bound, Alice supposed and hoped.

  Presently another group gathered itself and left on foot towards Tazenir, after which remained two men, a woman and a child, Alice and the driver, who did his best, explaining the situation to the others and sketching in dumb show for Alice the imminence of a breakdown outfit which would bring another tyre and right the bus. Alice smiled and nodded and was rewarded, as were they all, with the gift of an orange, green of skin but surprisingly sweet and thirst-quenching.

  Then another car, a big open one, taking the gradient with a purr of controlled power, came up from the direction of the city. At the wheel was a tall Moroccan in a crimson tarboosh and a conventional brown djellabah, the wide-sleeves of which fell back from the tanned lean hands on the steering-wheel. The car stopped, the man got out, standing a full six feet in his heelless babouches of soft yellow leather. His dark eyes scanned the forlorn tableau before him, then he spoke to the driver, glancing once or twice Alice’s way and frowning.

  He inspected the bus, then came over to her and put a question.

  “French? English?” he said.

  Hastily she discarded orange peel and dabbed at her sticky mouth with the back of her hand. “English,” she told him.

  “And what are you doing here?” he enquired in English without a trace of accent. “Where are you bound?”

  Feeling that it was obvious that what she was doing was eating an orange on a dusty mountain-track in the High Atlas, she answered only his second question. “I’m going to Tazenir,” she said. And even that the driver must have told him, she thought.

  “Exactly,” he agreed, “since the road goes only to Tazenir and not beyond. But I meant, of course - where in Tazenir were you going when this” — he jerked his head at the bus - “happened?”

  “To the Tazenir Children’s Holiday Home. I am” - she paused, looking him straight in the eye, daring him to doubt it of the bedraggled, blood-stained figure she was - “the temporary Warden, acting for the permanent Warden, Miss Martin, who is on summer leave.”

  “Warden? You?” He looked her over. “Then why were you travelling by the local bus? The Home could have sent some transport to meet you.”

  “So they may have done yesterday,” she agreed. “But there was trouble in London at the airport, and I’m eighteen hours late.”

  Stating the fact, not asking a question, the Moroccan said, “The Home is on the telephone. You could have rung up or taken a taxi. Even though Miss Martin isn’t there, someone must be in charge.”

  Wondering how he knew that Debbie had already gone, Alice admitted, “Yes, I suppose I could. But when I went to the city square and found there was a bus coming up, I took it.”

  “Tchah!” He gave the ejaculation an unmistakable English sound. “You had luggage, I suppose?”

  She glanced at the duffle bag she had brought away from the bus and then at her suitcase canting over the edge of the roof rack. “This, and that case,” she said. “I understand there’s help on the way, but I admit I’m wondering just when I’m going to be able to travel on to Tazenir.”

  The man turned away. Over his shoulder he said, “No problem there. I’ll take you on, of course. I’ll get your case.”

  She looked after him, wishing she hadn’t seemed to be begging a lift and doubtful of the wisdom of accepting one from a strange foreigner, however caustically critical his approach. Then she remembered her companions and followed him. “And the others?” she asked.

  “Them too. There’s room for you all.” He turned and looked down at her beneath hooded lids. “I’m not kidnapping you,” he said. “But if that’s what you are fearing, I daresay Hakim ibn Raud” — he indicated the bus driver — “will speak for me. He knows me well.” Alice flushed, ashamed that he should have guessed her suspicion. He opened the boot of the big car, loaded her case and the Moroccans’ bundles, put them into the back seat and Alice into the front, beside him. He and the driver shook hands, each touching their own left breast over the heart after making the gesture; then he drove ahead round the next turn in the road.

  Alice was puzzled by him. His command of English so perfect, his dress and his looks - the raven gloss of hair beneath the tarboosh, the dark eyes beneath the heavily fringed lids, the aquiline nose, the firm jut of chin - so foreign, so much of-his-race. She felt intrigued with the enigma he posed - his easy familiarity with the bus driver, the luxurious car, the nods and becks with which their other passengers had greeted him, obviously knowing him. Perhaps, when he told her his name -?

  As if he had again read her thoughts, he said suddenly, “We haven’t been introduced. What is your name?”

  “Ireland,” she told him. “Alice Ireland.” “Miss Alice Ireland?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “Mine is Charles. Karim ibn Charles,” he said.

  “Charles?” she echoed blankly, savouring the English sound of it in surprise.

  “Charles,” he repeated. Without explaining the incongruity of it allied to “Karim”, he threw her a swift glance. “You look as if you’ve never heard of me,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I - I haven’t.”

  He glanced down at her again. “Oh, come!” he urged. “If not, then how little do you know Miss Martin?”

  “I know her very well. We’re neighbours at home in England, and we were at college together.”

  “Then perhaps I should have asked, How little do you know of her circumstances in T azenir?”

  “I’m afraid, less than I’d like to, having to stand in for her, even if for only three months,” Alice admitted, adding in explanation, “Debbie -Miss Martin - is a very poor correspondent.”

  “Evidently.” He paused to take a sharp turn on an upward gradient. “Then she hasn’t mentioned in passing that she is by way of being a tenant of mine?”

  Alice’s jaw dropped slightly. “You mean, you are the Home’s landlord?”

  “It follows, doesn’t it?” he enquired urbanely. “We are nearly into Tazenir now. You’ll be able to see the minaret of its mosque at the next corner, and I happen to own all this land,” - a wave of his hand indicated the groves through which they were passing as the road levelled out - “which makes a good deal of the village my property.” “Oh. I see. Yes,” said Alive, needing time to discard her mental picture of a paunchy middle-aged lord-of-the-manor type and to substitute a personable young Moroccan instead. For he was young, wasn’t he? She stole a covert glance at his profile. Say thirty? Which made him only seven years her senior ... So he was the landlord she had been warned she must placate? How was
she doing so far? she wondered. From his cool, impersonable manner with her

  it was impossible to tell. Her thought about him shot off at a tangent. Now she understood Debbie’s reference to “no wives.” For Moroccan custom allowed men more than one, didn’t it? Four, in fact - Aloud she went on, “Yes, well — I have heard of you as the Home’s landlord, though not by name until now.”

  “Nor by reputation?” The riposte came quickly and when, confused, she did not answer, for the first time a faint smile pulled at a corner of his mouth.

  “Sorry. Unfair question. One must make allowance for prejudice,” he said, and then, changing the subject, “I live here myself, of course. I shall be taking you to my house when we have dropped our other passengers at their homes.” She looked at him in protest. “Oh no, to the Holiday Home, please. I’m so late already.”

  He agreed smoothly, “Already so late that an extra hour can’t matter. You need to freshen up, and that cut on your forehead needs dressing.” With a touch of the oblique sarcasm with which he had assured her he had no wish to kidnap her, he added. “Perhaps I should have said my widowed mother’s house. The proprieties must be observed!”

  As they drove into the little town he pointed out landmarks. “The forest ranger’s house; the hospital - no resident medical staff, just two nurses and half a dozen beds; the medan - the central square; up there”

  - pointing along a shady avenue - ‘Your Home: the Hotel. You’ll notice that the place is not wholly Moroccan in character. Before the French left they made a mountain resort of it. In the winter there is skiing higher up. Some of the French people who built chalet-villas for themselves are still here. You’ll meet some of them, I daresay. I shall be dropping our friends in the Moroccan quarter, and then I shall take you home.”

  Alice found she was curious as to what his home would be like - a chalet-villa or, for the man of property he claimed to be, something grander? The reality was to bear no resemblance to any house she had ever entered before.