Meet the Sun Halfway

by Jane Arbor

  As they went past the rider lifted a hand in silent salute, and Alice recognised him - not now in Moroccan dress, but riding on a long stirrup in narrow trousers and full-sleeved open-necked white shirt. Yves Renair waited until the hoof-beats broke into a cantering rhythm and faded before he put the car in gear, preparatory to moving off.

  “You know who that was?” he asked.

  Alice nodded. “But what a strange time to choose to go riding!”

  “Not for Karim. It’s a habit of his. I’ve frequently met him when I’ve been called out late on a case.” Yves paused to laugh. “And if he were disposed to be as critical as you sound, he could think that you and I were keeping a pretty late rendezvous too! However, I’m off now. But may we do something of the same sort another day soon?”

  “I’d like that very much,” she said, and waved him away.

  Evidently Seiyida Charles’s suggestion that she would invite Alice to luncheon again had been no empty promise. For a week later she rang to ask her for a day or two ahead, by which time things were running smoothly enough at the Home to enable Alice to accept. As she replaced the receiver she questioned her willingness to do so this time. She had been charmed by Seiyida Charles and would have hated to be forced to refuse once more. But was that all? Her honesty suspected it was not. At the Dar el Faradis there was a challenge waiting for her, and though, as guest and host, she and Karim ibn Charles could hardly cross swords under his roof, the prospect afforded her a quiver of excitement which she could only compare to her nervous tenterhooks before an impending exam.

  But alas for anticipation that was half hope, half dread! On the day before the luncheon date Sister Bernadine from Tetuan announced herself as coming to stay for a couple of days, to meet Alice and to go over with her whatever points or questions either of them wanted to raise. Obviously Alice couldn’t plead a previous engagement and had no thought of doing so. But - so much for anti-climax! she thought as she telephoned Seiyida Charles, apologising that she must excuse herself a second time. She was grateful when the older woman seemed to understand her dilemma and after they had chatted a little, rang off with a gay, “Our third attempt must be lucky, my dear! I shall look forward to that.”

  Sister Bernadine proved to be not English but Irish. She was plump with an apple-blossom complexion and a twinkling eye. She was bustling, thorough, as willing to listen as to advise and not at all averse, Alice was to find, to as much Tazenir gossip as she could collect. From the questions which she pressed upon Sorab at mealtimes Alice learned more about her neighbours and their circumstances than Sorab had volunteered yet.

  She enquired about the few English and French residents in and around the village, and of Benoit Paul, Doctor Renair’s landlord, she asked, “And has the poor man the same unfortunate trouble on him still?”

  At that Alice was surprised to see Sorab’s eyes go hard. “You mean

  his bedridden mother?” she countered. “Yes, she is still alive.”

  Sister Bernadine snorted. “And would I be calling the distressed woman an unfortunate trouble?” she demanded. “That she i s bedridden is sad, but can she help that? No, child, you know I meant the unhappy habit he has of sometimes enjoying the wine of the country too much! A fine man otherwise and a loyal son to his mother, but -”

  “As far as I know, Monsieur Paul drinks rather more than he should only when he is worried,” put in Sorab stonily.

  T o that Sister Bernadine nodded sympathy. “And hasn’t he much to worry him, poor fellow - his mother’s illness and the way he isn’t knowing how long the Government will leave him to his forestry? Tell me, do you still do Madame Paul the charity of going to sit with her from time to time?”

  Sorab stared down at her plate. “Yes - on my free day.”

  “May you be blessed for it. You are a good girl. And when the time comes, we must hope that Seiyid ibn Charles will speak up on Benoit Paul’s behalf. Large landowner that he is, he must have power with the Government.” Sister Bernadine turned to Alice. “Have you met our landlord yet?”

  “Yes.” Alice related the story of their first meeting; would have suppressed the second, but that Sorab knew of it and might wonder why she did. Sister Bernadine clucked sympathy again.

  “Ah, a difficult man indeed. One wonders what has soured him, with all the advantages he has,” she commented, then, as if at a memory, smiled a little ruefully and went on, “Do you know, once when he and I had differed on some matter, my tongue ran away with me and I told him, ‘The best thing I could hope for your lack of charity, Seiyid, would be that you should marry and have children of your own.’ Just to shame him, you understand? But did it?”

  Alice bit her lip. “Didn’t it?”

  “Ne’er a bit. Bold, he looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘I’m sorry, Sister, but I happen to put self preservation rather high on my list of priorities. Or, in the words of one of our Moorish proverbs - A bachelor is the wiser man. He does what he likes; goes where he pleases — and is saved from running!’ To which I, God forgive me, snapped ‘More’s the pity -’ ”

  “And what did he say to that?” Alice’s throat had gone dry.

  Sister Bernadine laughed merrily - at herself. “Nothing. He wasn’t there.”

  “Not there?”

  “Not he. When he had done with withering me, he swept off, for all the world as if he knew he had had the last word.” She paused and added reflectively, “Maybe he had, at that.”

  When Sister Bernadine had gone, Alice debated what good manners demanded of her in the matter of Seiyida Charles. At home she would probably have sent flowers to a would-be hostess whom she didn’t know too well and had had to refuse twice. But flowers - for a woman whose garden rioted in exotic blooms of every kind and dramatic colour? Besides, there was no florists’ shop in Tazenir.

  Then, one day in the garden of the Home, she had an idea; hurried back into the house and found what she wanted - a flower-book in the children’s library — a coloured plate of a Victorian posy of the cottage-type kind of flowers which the Home garden grew in profusion. Now if she could persuade Hussein or one of the garden-boys to help her to make up just such a posy— Taking the book with her, she went in search of Hussein, found him, and though his lack of English and her lack of Arabic confined them to sign-language, he showed his white teeth in a willing grin and achieved as faithful a copy of the pictured posy as she could have wished. Tight, compact, frilled round with pointed green leaves, the finished posy was a perfect, slightly convex cushion; each moon-daisy, snapdragon, gillyflower, pansy-face was neck-close to its neighbours with no stalks showing. It was a homely little poem in flower arrangement and Alice couldn’t have been more pleased, either with her idea or with Hussein’s execution of it.

  She would deliver it herself. She could hardly do otherwise with so unpretentious a gift, and chose the late afternoon as being a suitable time to walk over to El Faradis, on the far side of the village.

  She had just crossed the medan when a car overtook her, backed and drew level. Karim ibn Charles, dressed as when she had first seen him, except that today his djellabah was white, leaned across to open the passenger door to her. “May I give you a lift to wherever you are going?” he offered.

  “Oh ... Thank you. In fact, I was just on my way to take a small present to the Seiyida.”

  “Really?” His glance went to the posy in Alice’s hand and it suddenly appeared a little silly. But he went on urbanely, “Very kind of you, and you will accept a lift?”

  There was not much further to go and little time for conversation to develop. Karim confined himself to mentioning that this was the afternoon on which his mother visited any patients there might be in the hospital, but that she should soon be home, and Alice agreed that she would like to wait for her.

  At the house he showed her in by the same way as on her first visit and asked whether she would prefer to wait indoors, on the covered patio or in the garden. She chose the garden and he led the way to
a swing-lounger in the shade of a lebanon cedar. He didn’t sit beside her but stood, one hand high on the stanchion of the lounger, looking down at her.

  “You wouldn’t, by any chance, have been avoiding us?” he asked. “Avoiding you? What do you mean?” But she could guess.

  “By way of two rather convenient ‘previous engagements.’ No?”

  “Of course not. And only the first was previous. The second time, I did accept, and couldn’t have known that I should have to cry off. I didn’t want to. And I’m not in the habit of being deliberately rude.”

  “You didn’t want to refuse? You surprise me, considering the dudgeon in which you parted from me, the last time we met!”

  She looked up at him, meeting the challenge in the dark-fringed eyes. “I think you must know you were to blame for that, Seiyid ibn Charles

  “My name is Karim.”

  “Very well - Seiyid Karim.”

  “My friends settle for Karim - simply.”

  She ignored that, wondering whether his interruptions had been deliberate ploys to throw her off her stroke. If so, he had succeeded, for she fumbled for words as she went on, “You — know — or you should — that if you had given me the real reason for your expelling me and the children from your plantation, I’d have had to be grateful to you, instead of as — as obstructive as I was.”

  “And you should know,” he countered, “that if you had shown any co-operation at all, I would have told you the danger you and they were courting.”

  “You accused me outright of trespass!”

  “So I did - in the moment’s heat. Of alarm at your folly, as I saw it. I couldn’t credit that you hadn’t been warned -”

  “And you didn’t believe me when I told you I hadn’t.”

  “Oh, I believed you as soon as you called your defence witness - the boy. But by that time and later, you may recall you indulged in a pretty turn of sarcasm which I hadn’t the heart to confound by telling you the truth. Enjoying yourself, I realised.”

  “I was not enjoying myself - I was angry.”

  “That as well. Too angry to listen to reason, in fact. So I decided you could wait to hear that in this region snakes, some of them killers, are indigenous to date-groves.”

  “Wasn’t that rather petty of you?”

  He agreed blandly. “Perhaps. But at the time I was mainly concerned to get you safely out. Which I did, gauging from your mood that you weren’t likely to venture in again without an escort. Besides, I was pretty certain that you would be sure to run to some sympathetic ear with your story of my obduracy, and that you could hardly fail to hear then that my motives at least were well meant.”

  Again that claim to foresight of her reaction to any given situation! Did he know how irritating labels could be? she wondered, and half suspected that he did.

  She had to agree, “Well, naturally, not understanding your attitude at all, I told Sorab bint Khaled about it. Yes, and Doctor Renair.”

  “Ah, Yves Renair. Of course.” In a movement which took her unawares, Karim stooped slightly to put a forefinger beneath her chin, tilting her face upward, so that her eyes had to lift to his. In a man whom she knew better ... well enough for a thread of understanding to run between them, it might have been a gesture of intimacy; his dark gaze a question that begged an answer. But from him to her it could only be enquiring - a touch and look as clinical as any doctor’s - as was evidenced when he gently traced the line of the scar on her forehead and asked, “Renair didn’t think it necessary to stitch you up?”

  “No.” She touched the scar herself, then ran that hand under the curve of her hair. (Why was she so conscious of the man; so aware; so watchful of what he did, said, looked in relation to her - on the defensive against him always?) Now he was saying, “Yves knows his job. You liked him well enough?”

  “Very much, and the children love him. He told me you asked him to come to see me.”

  “Yes, I thought it important you had a shot of vaccine. And since then-?”

  As she felt he meant her to, she read that as an invitation to enlarge on the subject of Yves Renair. She said, “Well, your mother will have told you he had asked me to go out with him on the afternoon she first invited me. He drove me through the mountains, down to the plain and to M’Oumine, the first walled city I had ever seen.”

  “Our own city down below is walled,” he reminded her.

  “Yes, but I arrived in that; into the modern quarter from the airport and after dark. It wasn’t like coming upon a town, completely surrounded by its walls and its only entrance through gateways. Going into it I felt as if I’d been set back centuries in time.”

  “In Renair’s modern car and with the Sunday tourists flocking? But you let the tourists go back to their hotel dinners betimes, while you lingered long enough to see M’Oumine by night?”

  “Oh no. I couldn’t be away from the Home so long. We came back through the mountains as the sun was setting - a wonderful sight. Oh-” As she realised the reason for his question - because, riding by, he had seen Yves parting from her very, very much later than sunset that night

  - she thought it intrusive and, deliberately perverse, refrained from mentioning the emergency which, since their return from M’Oumine, had taken Yves to the hospital and back and had necessitated his being invited to stay for a very late dinner with herself and Sorab.

  “Oh-what?” Karim prompted.

  “Nothing. Just that I realised you thought we had stayed late at M’Oumine because you saw Doctor Renair leaving after staying to dinner.”

  “I see. A pleasantly intimate climax to a day you had both enjoyed?”

  “Very pleasant indeed,” she agreed equably - of a scratch invitation and a threesome meal to which there had been nothing intimate at all. But he wasn’t to know that, and in answer to his curiosity, was there any real harm in letting him suppose that both her day and her very late evening in Yves Renair’s company had been planned so from the outset? “Intimate” - of a first friendly date! Just what was he probing to learn?

  She looked at her watch. “Perhaps I-” But at that moment Seiyida Charles came out from the house, crossing the lawn towards them. As on the earlier occasion, she made an extraordinarily graceful figure in a kaftan of red and gold, and several gold bangles made music at her wrists as she offered both hands in frank welcome to Alice.

  “My dear, what a happy surprise! Or was it Karim's surprise for me, I wonder? Did he kidnap you and forcibly bring you over, in despair of our getting you any other way?” she asked gaily.

  It crossed Alice’s mind that in anyone else such a greeting might sound fulsome. But somehow the Seiyida radiated such kindness and real pleasure that it was impossible to doubt her sincerity.

  Alice told her, “No, I was walking over, and Seiyid Karim picked me up.” She proffered the posy. “I wanted to bring you this, as a sort of apology for having had to refuse both your invitations to me.”

  “For me?” Seiyida Charles cupped both hands around the circle of dark leaves, murmuring, “Lovely! Lovely! Daisies. And marigolds. And pansies. So - so cottage- garden. So English! Look, Karim —” She offered the posy to him. “I know they grow here too, but don’t they remind you of -?”

  He frowned. “Yes, typically English,” he said shortly.

  His mother threw him a troubled glance, then said to Alice, “We had flowers just like them in our garden in England, and I would gather them and have them in pottery jugs in the house. We lived there in the country until my husband died when Karim was fifteen. You may have heard, I expect, that his father was English?”

  Alice said, “Yes. I was puzzled that you both spoke English so perfectly, and Sorab bint Khaled told me. Where was your home, Seiyida?”

  “In the county called Essex. Do you know it? Our house had once been a water-mill, and there was a pond where we had ducks and little water-fowl. Prettily coloured ducks — I forget their name in English. What were they, Karim?”

  “Mallards
.”

  “Oh yes. And Karim gave each of them a name of its own. But one dreadful time a fox - Karim, do you remember that night when -?”

  He cut her short. “Yes, Mother, I do. But Essex, pet ducks and marauding foxes are a long way behind us now, and I can’t think that Miss Ireland can find them a particularly absorbing subject. In any case, there’s no need to harrow her with an ugly story of a carnage that didn’t quite happen all those years ago.”

  There was a pause. Alice watched a shadow cross his mother’s face before she spoke again. “No. No, of course not,” she agreed slowly. “Except that I was going to tell how there wasn’t carnage, because you saved the ducks in time. The flowers and remembering England brought it all back, you see.”

  “But not so close, after all this time, that it is very important any more.”

  She shook her head. “One knows that it is neither close nor important to you, son, because you have willed that it shouldn’t be. But for me England was a part of my life and a happy time, and I do not forget it so easily.”

  “Easily??”

  His echo was sharp, so much a disclaimer of the word, that the eyes of both woman and girl turned on him, startled by its vehemence. But when he added nothing to it, after a moment his mother said, “I am sorry, son. I should not have implied that the problem was all mine ... only mine.” Then, as if with a conscious effort, she summoned a smile which included Alice. “Meanwhile,” she asked him, “what hospitality have you offered Miss Ireland? Tea? Anything at all?”

  But Alice forestalled his reply by saying she must go, that she hadn’t meant to stay so long, and though Seiyida Charles claimed that Karim must drive her back, they let her go - the Seiyida parting from her with a light kiss on either cheek - when she convinced them she had come partly for the walk and that she would like to walk back for the exercise.