Meet the Sun Halfway

by Jane Arbor

  That was only a half-truth. She knew that she wanted time to herself to think, to remember, to wonder ... at the look of hurt, of deep pain, which she had surprised in Karim’s dark eyes as he had echoed that single word. She realised his mother had seen it there too, and had understood it, as Alice herself had not. She only knew that it showed he had not wantonly abandoned England and things English. Whatever his reasons, he had suffered in the doing of it, and that revealed him in a different light. Perhaps then he was less of the egocentric she judged him to be, and more of the someone with whom she had once, momentarily, felt a link. And supposing his exile hadn’t been by hi s own hard-headed choice, but had been forced on him by some circumstance outside his control, then he deserved sympathy, rather than judgment ... misjudgment.

  But could he care that she had had second, more generous thoughts about him? Or that she thought about him at all? She doubted it. He was still about as approachable as a beetling mountain crag, and their relationship as frangible as glass.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IT had been news to Alice that Sorab gave some of her free time to

  visiting Benoit Paul’s sick mother. Sorab herself had never mentioned it and, remembering her rather guarded reaction to Sister Bernadine’s questions, Alice asked Yves Renair about it instead.

  Yves said, “Yes, she is very good. Madame Paul is a little senile and has lost power in her legs, and Sorab is more patient with her than any nurse could be.”

  “She must be pretty old, if her son is nearing retirement age,” Alice suggested.

  “Benoit - retiring? Oh, he’s not near that yet,” said Yves.

  “But I thought you said -?”

  He understood. “Ah, yes, I remember saying he hopes to keep his job until he does retire. But as yet he is only in his early forties.” Yves paused to smile. “In fact, I sometimes question whether he isn’t part of the attraction for Sorab, as she for him.”

  Light dawned for Alice. “Really? That could explain why she seemed on the defensive for him, in answer to Sister Bernadine, I suppose. But - forty? She’s only eighteen!”

  “And as much of a woman as she will ever be. Moroccan girls mature very young. In the care of the Sisters she has been able to take things at the pace Europeans do. But if she had a mother as well as a father whom she sees only seldom, she would have been married with children by now.”

  “But still - forty!” Alice demurred.

  “If a man had been chosen by her parents, he might have been as old or older. She could do a lot worse than Benoit.”

  “But does he drink too much, as Sister Bernadine hinted?”

  Yves allowed, “Occasionally, yes. But usually under the stress of the fear of losing his job and of his not finding another out here, and his mother wholly dependent on him.”

  “Sister Bernadine suggested Seiyid Karim might speak for him to the Government, if it came to that. Would he, do you think?” Alice asked, aware that she wanted Yves to agree readily as to Karim’s disinterested help. But Yves answered with a non-committal shrug. “Who knows? The man is a law unto himself, and from time to time

  there has been trouble between him and Benoit. Benoit failing to report rock falls or broken boundaries to pasture - things like that.” Yves changed the subject. “Talking of romance—”

  “Were we?” asked Alice, a catch in her breath.

  “Surely - of Sorab and Benoit? So how do Rachma and Hussein progress in theirs?”

  Alice laughed. “You know about that too?”

  “Doesn’t the whole of Tazenir, when they are to be seen any evening until sunset, sitting on a wall on the medan, holding hands?”

  “Are they? It seems a very public way of conducting a courtship.” “It’s the only way officially open to them,” said Yves. “The y can walk together, talk, sit, even dance together, as long as they do it in full view of their neighbours, if not always of their parents. Until they are married they aren’t allowed the kind of privacy we demand. But Rachma and Hussein should think themselves lucky - at least they have been able to choose.” he concluded. He had been on a professional visit to one of the children and had stayed for a cup of coffee with Alice. Now as he prepared to leave, he said, “You must come over and meet Benoit one day - see how the other half lives.”

  “The other half?” she queried.

  “Two incompetent bachelors housekeeping for themselves and a bedridden old lady. Though one of them with marriage prospects ahead, if he can summon enough courage to ask the girl.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “Why, Benoit, of course.”

  “And the other - you?”

  “Naturally. Who else? But at present without prospects, me.”

  “But with intentions, surely?” Alice teased him, wanting to know whether he had a girl; if so, where she was; who.

  He shook his head. “To have intentions, one needs hopes first, and it’s early for those as yet.” When she had given him her hand in parting, he went to the door, but looked back round it after he had gone out. “And when it isn’t as early as all that,” he grinned, “Benoit isn’t the only one who will need courage!”

  Which left Alice none the wiser about his love-life, as he had probably intended.

  It was a few days later that, returning from the village after ordering the weekly fruit and vegetables for the Home, she was told by Binyeh, who had admitted him, that Karim had called and was waiting to see her.

  “Where is Seiyid Karim?” she asked the girl. “In my office?”

  But Binyeh said no. On hearing Alice was out, he had said he would wait in the garden, and so far as Binyeh knew, he was still there.

  Alice went out. It was the children’s story hour and Miriam would be in charge of them. But to Alice’s infinite surprise, under the tree where they usually gathered, they were grouped in a half-circle around Karim, sitting cross legged on the ground as he was, with Miriam sitting more decorously on a chair beside him. Nobody seemed to notice Alice’s approach, so rapt was their attention to Karim. Halting a little way behind his back, she could tell from the rhythmic flow of his voice that he was relating something very absorbing to his audience. But as he was speaking in Arabic she didn’t understand a word.

  She stood listening. Every now and then the story - if that was what it was - seemed to call for action. Karim would shade his eyes and point, and the whole audience would do likewise; or he would go through the obvious motions of searching or drinking or sleeping, whereupon everyone would copy him. And at certain points in the narration he would pause and wait for the shouted chorus of repetition of phrases which they all seemed to know by heart. It occurred to Alice that the Three Bears, loud in their criticism of Goldilocks’s trespass, had nothing on this group’s passionate sharing of whatever Karim’s story was about.

  She did not stir, and if any of the children facing her had looked her way they gave no sign. When Karim stopped speaking at last, and stood, there was a concerted rush upon him, which he fended off adroitly, though the eager clamour of voices went on for some minutes after Alice had moved forward, showing she was there. Even then he was not free to go to her, hampered as he was by a diehard six-year-old, Brahim by name, who clung fiercely to his djellabah at about the height

  of his knee.

  He stopped, smiling down as he gently detached one clinging finger after another. Whereupon Brahim clung to his hand instead, gazing up at him in infinite faith that he could produce another story to follow the first. But Karim dismissed him with a feinted cuff to his head and jab to his stomach and he ran off, giggling, to join the others, before they all vanished in a churning medley of legs and flailing arms and flying plaits and round bullet heads. The whole scene left Alice with a curious sensation somewhere in the region of her heart.

  Her conscious, slightly astonished thought was — “He is fond of children; he loves them!” and the indefinable sensation was of pleasure that he did. Though why she should care; why she should be gratified if
it were so, she had no time to analyse before he was with her, offering his hand.

  She gave him hers. She said a little shakily, “You seem to make a great success as a raconteur. I didn’t understand any of it myself, but you had your audience enthralled.”

  He turned to walk beside her towards the house. “We are a nation of story-tellers and listeners,” he said lightly. “So we keep our history and our folklore alive.”

  “What was today’s story about?” she asked.

  “About a desert caravan waylaid by marauders, saved by the magical powers of a milk-white camel which, after it had done its good deed, disappeared no one knew where. By the way they joined in, you could probably judge that they had heard it often enough before.”

  “Yes. At that age, they love repetition, I think, and they get a lot of it in our traditional English stories, such as—”

  “Which you feed to them without a qualm of conscience?”

  Alice stared. “Of conscience? Why, what’s wrong with, say, Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood?”

  “Nothing at all — for English children.” He paused. “Nor, I suppose, for Moroccans if they are to be thoroughly Anglicized.” Suddenly Alice saw where this argument was trending. It wasn’t

  about fairy-stories as such; it was about prejudice. His. And adopted prejudice, at that. Roused, as she had warned Yves Renair she would be, she went straight into the attack.

  “By which, I gather, you deplore the Sisters’ work in training the children in any English ways or customs?” she demanded.

  He allowed himself a slight smile. “If you can ‘gather’ that from a couple of apposite remarks, I’d say you are either clairvoyant or you have already been primed as to my views. Which, I wonder? And if the latter, by whom? Possibly by your friend Yves Renair, who knows what they are well enough?”

  She realised that the swift rise of her colour had given him his answer, and that the attack had passed to him. She said defensively, “Doctor Renair did warn me that you — disapproved. But on what possible grounds? You can’t seriously argue that the Sisters are doing the children any disservice by trying to equip them for either European jobs or Moroccan, when the time comes? By helping them to live in -in both worlds, as it were?”

  He shook his head. “The East can live in one world — or the other. Not in both.”

  “But - but it’s only one world, after all!”

  “Geographically, yes. But if you can believe that the people in it don’t make it two, then you are either palpably naive or you have been doing a Rip Van Winkle all your young life,” he retorted, adding, “On the other hand it could be kinder to suppose you have merely been sheltered, and that you haven’t experienced the ‘neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring’ syndrome at all.”

  That brought her swift reaction. “You don’t have to bend double to be kind,” she snapped. “So I’m naive. So I may have been asleep for -for twenty-three years. But I still know I’m right, that’s all!”

  They had reached the steps to the house by now and as, one tread above him, she paused to gesture him inside, her eyes were level with his. He said, “No, I won’t come in. I only came to bring a message from my mother.” But he continued to hold her gaze as he added with an unexpected laugh, “I declare it’s all there in your outraged face -fiery sword and all! You really force me to believe your convictions are all your own - that you grew them yourself unaided.”

  “But of course they are my own!” she claimed indignantly.

  “As mine are too,” he agreed. “Equally unshakeable on the other side and with considerably more first-hand experience behind them.” “Though how can they be, when -?” Only just in time she stopped short of the insolence of reminding him of the double loyalty he owed to both his birthrights, and he cut quickly into her pause to reiterate,

  “As mine are too. And so, agreeing to differ and with respect, may we leave it there, would you say?”

  His tone made it more of an order than a suggestion she was free to reject. She nodded dumbly, aware that he had emerged from the clash with more dignity and sangfroid than she. After a moment she asked, “You brought me a message from the Seiyida?”

  “An invitation. To luncheon on Sunday, if you can manage that?”

  “Yes. Please thank your mother. At what time?”

  “At about half-past noon. I will call for you, if I may.” They arranged it so and he left. What was it about him that so challenged her? she wondered after he had gone. And was it simply her Pandora complex - the feminine urge to probe anything withheld - which longed to learn the reason for his rejection of his father’s world? She hoped not. She thought not, because behind the curiosity there was something more - a kind of caring, a sympathy which the distance between them would not allow her to express. She wanted to say, “What is it that has soured you? Let me try to understand.” But as that was unthinkable, her frustration voiced itself in argument which he demolished at a touch - of logic or of irony or of plain stonewalling. She knew she was looking forward to Sunday with mixed feelings, and she wanted badly to be sure that under his own roof she need not all ow herself to be “drawn”.

  As it happened, she had not to be on her guard. For when he had driven her to the Dar el Faradis and Seiyida Charles had welcomed her, he excused himself. He had business to discuss with the Caid — the district governor - and must lunch at the Caid’s house. But he would

  return in time to take her home, he told her.

  “I am sorry about this,” the Seiyida apologised. “I had hoped that after luncheon Karim would have driven you round the estate. But there will be other days, and a luncheon a deux will give us a chance to talk - women’s talk, you know,” she smiled. “And you must tell me about England - as it is now.”

  The meal was the first which Alice had taken Moroccan-fashion -seated on a cushion-piled banquette at a knee-high table. It was served in silence by the Seiyida’s rather dour woman and a young Moroccan girl, and the dishes for each course were placed in the centre of the table for Alice and her hostess to help themselves. To Alice the food itself was an adventure into the unknown. Rice and raisins were wrapped in a crisp blanket of puff pastry as an entree; the main dish was wafer-thin slices of lamb in a sea of hot honey, flavoured with almonds and a suspicion of garlic; the dessert was beghrir - pancakes so light and thin that they were almost transparent. Afterwards crystallized orange-slices and dates stuffed with almond paste accompanied the coffee for which they adjourned to the Seiyida’s boudoir.

  Meanwhile they had talked easily and without constraint. Alice filled in her own background of home, family, friends and pets, and did her best to satisfy her companion’s hunger for news of the England which the years of her marriage had known until she was suddenly widowed.

  “That was — yes, about fifteen years ago,” she mused aloud.

  “Which was when you came back to Morocco?” Alice prompted.

  “Not at once. You see” - the Seiyida hesitated, “I had married Alec, my husband, against my father’s wishes, and at first he was not willing to welcome me home. I was homesick and lonely, but I was too proud to urge it, either for Karim to meet his grandfather, or for myself.”

  “What was your husband’s work?” Alice asked.

  “He was an architect. Our coastal resorts here were just going in for more tourism, and I met him when he was in Agadir, designing a modern hotel. I defied my father; we went to England, where Karim was born. Alec had no business partners, so that when he died suddenly there was very little money to come to me. But I was fortunate. I was able to keep Karim at school by my working as a model for clothes for the ‘over-thirties’ woman in a West End couture house. And then, when Karim was eighteen and had passed for Oxford, my father suddenly relented and demanded that we both come back to Morocco.”

  “And then you did?”

  “Yes. It was difficult for me at first to conform again to Moroccan custom. For instance, my father even expected me to wear the face-ve
il out of doors. This he did come to see was not the modern way for women of our class. But in many other things I conformed, in order to please him, telling myself that nothing could rob me of my ties with England, since I bore my husband’s English name and my son was English, at least by birth and schooling. And if Karim had chosen to marry an English girl —”

  “You would have been glad if he had?” As Alice spoke she mentally questioned the tacit way in which they had both used the past tense - as if the possibility of his doing so were long past and had no future. Was it so? His mother must surely know, even if she did not.

  The older woman agreed, “Happy indeed.” She smiled wistfully. “For that would have given me yet another stake in England - through my grandchildren. However, just at the end of Karim’s years in college, my father died. At the time I wondered whether, in willing this house to me, and the whole of the estates to Karim, he might have tied strings to the bequest - namely, by imposing on Karim much the same moral obligations as he had laid on me. But there were no strings. I was free, as Karim was, to do as we pleased with the house, with the estates, with our lives. And so I thought - But alas for hopes! When Karim came back to take up his heritage, it was he who tied the strings. New ones. Harsher ones still around himself, and so, for loyalty’s sake, around me.”

  To that Alice said nothing. It was little more than she had so far learned by hearsay, but she wondered what right she had to listen to confidences which her hostess might later regret having given to so much younger a person. But as if the Seiyida had sensed her thought, she said, “I embarrass you a little with these intimacies? Believe me, child, I shouldn’t trouble you with them, if I didn’t remember how, the other day, Karim and I made you an enforced witness to our differences. You would be puzzled by his refusal to discuss England with me. This I knew, and it made me sad.”

  Alice murmured, “At the time, I did wonder, and I do appreciate your explaining it to me, Seiyida -”

  “Ah, if I could explain it! But believe this or not - in seven years of living with him, talking with him, watching him ... loving him, I still do not know why he has turned his face so firmly East and his back to the West. He has a reason, this I know. Also that he has suffered for it. But he has locked it away in a corner of his mind, and he is giving