Meet the Sun Halfway

by Jane Arbor

  A fear-ridden little shiver of excitement ran along Alice’s spine. With her first question to him she had asked for this, though not then foreseeing the danger ahead. Or to be honest, had she seen it, courted it, flirted with it? Irrelevantly she recalled Sorab’s innocent wisdom -“When the will and the chance are leading the same way, does anyone count the danger?” Sorab had wondered, though knowing the answer, as Alice knew it now.

  For there was danger in discussing even the theory of love with a man who - She checked and faced it squarely. With a man ... the man for whom, unasked, she realised she had begun to feel it all - all the desires and needs which stumblingly she had listed for him and which he had dismissed. To feel all love for him, in fact, beyond all reason, beyond all hope. Until this moment, what was more, without her own knowledge that it had happened to her. And even now without her conscious will. She was afraid. For to admit to loving Karim ibn Charles could lead nowhere. Nowhere at all.

  She saw that he was waiting for the reply her heart longed to give, and must not, for pride’s sake. (“Yes. Yes! It is all there. I know. I know -”) She began lamely, “I don’t know. I-” and stopped as he laughed shortly.

  “Then you were talking in abstractions? But tell me — not even one love-affair behind you on which you were able to theorise in the light of cold hindsight as to what it should have meant, and didn’t?”

  She shook her head dumbly.

  “‘Nor a current one which, according to my reasoning, you are happy to accept and live with, without examining its hows and whys?” “Not that either.”

  He pursed his lips. “Too bad. It’s an intriguing theme and I’d hoped we might go on to compare some factual notes. But later, perhaps -when you’ve had more experience?”

  She managed to summon a smile to answer the note of banter which had invaded his tone. “Perhaps,” she agreed non-committally, and looked away down the length of the terrace to indicate that she had had enough of a subject which for him was merely a theoretical argument without the cruelly ironic turn it had taken for her.

  During the rest of the meal she hoped her manner did not betray that she hardly knew what she was eating or drinking. When Karim was not talking or looking directly her way, she watched him, thinking once that in trying to give him her idea of the pattern of love, she had missed one quality - curiosity.

  For curiosity - the need to learn, to question, to explore — was as germane to loving as was one’s craving to tell and be explored in one’s turn. And this alone, she thought, should have warned her earlier where she was heading in relation to Karim. For from their very first meeting she had found him an enigma she couldn’t solve; his manner, his looks, his motives :all intrigued her. She wanted to know him for the man he was beneath his urbanity, his reserves, his disinterested courtesy — And still knew as little now as she ever had!

  She had missed something he had just said about Yves Renair and had to ask him to repeat it. “I was saying,” he told her, “that Renair will need to find fresh quarters when his present landlord gets out.”

  “Oh.” It was a cold douche on Alice’s thoughts. “I’ve heard something about that. But must Monsieur Paul go?”

  “By the Caid’s orders.”

  “Yes, so Sorab bint Khaled tells me, and she is very unhappy about it. She is very good to his sick mother, and she thinks he deserves better than to lose his job while she is dependent on him and he has no other to go to.”

  “The man is a drunkard and an incompetent,” said Karim shortly.

  “Is he? Sorab says he only neglects his work when he has been drinking, and he only does that when he is worried to despair.”

  “Did you ever know a man who drinks too much to want for the most plausible of reasons as to why he does it?” Karim challenged.

  “Yes, but these were Sorab’s own reasons, from her understanding of him as a good man at heart. She knows he would not drink if he were less insecure. But she can’t hope to make anyone understand this as she does.”

  “She claims more insight than the rest of us? How so?”

  Alice looked down at her plate. “She is in love with him. She would marry him and be there for him ... behind him, if he would ask her.” “The steadying influence of a good woman’s love, h’m?

  It’s a fiction which dies hard with your sex, doesn’t it?”

  At that, hurt to her core, Alice flashed back, “That’s not funny. It’s no fiction. It can happen, and it could for Benoit Paul through Sorab, if he would marry her.”

  Karim’s expression softened. “I’m sorry for the cheap joke,” he said. “But why won’t Paul marry her? Does her understanding of him tell her that?”

  “It doesn’t have to. They’ve talked about it, but he says he hasn’t the right to ask her, placed as he is.”

  “And she believes him?”

  “Of course. They have been close for a long time, and she knows him.”

  “Well, she seems to have convinced you of her faith in him. Why then doesn’t she try elsewhere? There are ways of approaching the Caid, or she could have come to me.”

  “She wouldn’t dare go to the Caid. Nor to you. She says the custom of your country wouldn’t allow her to plead on behalf of a man who

  is no relation to her. Besides, she knows you aren’t on her side in this.”

  “There’s no question of my being on her side or not. I didn’t know she was involved.”

  “But she knows the Caid would have consulted you, and she believes you would have advised him against Monsieur Paul.”

  “Which I did. He would get compensation for any breach of contract, and at his age he should get another job.”

  “In Morocco? Doctor Renair thinks he may not.”

  Karim made a gesture of impatience. “Renair in this too? You have had a Committee of Ways and Means, haven’t you? With you as chief envoy to me?”

  “Nothing of the sort,” she disclaimed. “You brought the subject up. Sorab didn’t know I should say anything to you, and neither did Doctor Renair. But forget it, please. I think it is harsh treatment for Monsieur Paul, but I could be wrong. You should know best.” As you say, I should.” His bland agreement had the effect of dismissing the subject, and Alice had no choice but to let it go.

  Though it was late when they left the terrace, the subtropical night was still warm. There was no moon and the stars were in splendour.

  “Let’s walk a little,” Karim offered, a hand lightly under her elbow. “I’d like you to see the twelfth-century gardens of a palace which are only a stone’s throw or so away. By day they are all colour, and you’ll miss that. But for me they have infinitely more charm after dark, when the trees are only silhouettes against the sky, and the paths could lead anywhere, and it’s possible to trace the whereabouts of fountains only by sound.” He paused with a short laugh. “Perhaps you are right, and I am a little in love - with a place,” he said.

  The gardens were not quite dark. Here and there were dim flood lamps, angled on vistas and flights of rough steps and the play of fountain-water, and making the long shadows deeper by contrast. Except for the sound of their own footsteps the silence was profound, almost a tangible presence, and in the air there was an appeal to one of her senses which Alice hadn’t expected. On a long-drawn breath she tried to drink it in, and exhaling slowly, “Perfume!” she breathed. “What is it?”

  “A mixture. Jasmine, night-stocks, myrtle perhaps, and after a warm day, even the roses aren’t mean with theirs.” He paused on a stone bridge over an artificial stream, leaning back against its low parapet. Alice halted too, facing him. “Beguiling, isn’t it?” he said. “Hasn’t somebody written of ‘the base trickery practised by the evening scents of a garden in Morocco’?”

  “Have they? But why trickery?”

  “Bitter experience perhaps, if whoever it was had been befooled by them into deplorable indiscretions. Isn’t moonlight also supposed to have the same effect on our more impressionable senses?”

&n
bsp; He was playing with words, deliberately baiting her! Perhaps he even thought she had expected something romantic to come of his invitation. “I don’t know,” she denied, and made to move on, but he caught at her wrist, detaining her.

  “You do know,” he said. “This can’t be the first time you have walked with a man at night, and whether or not you were tempted by the consequences of his awareness of you, you must have had to face them. As now —”

  With an adroit turn of his own wrist he had released hers and drew her into his arms, taking possession of her mouth in a long compulsive kiss.

  Her lips quivered beneath its pressure and then, to her shame, since he meant nothing by it, responded. Her hands, on his back, explored and clung, then fell away as he lifted his head at last and held her off by the elbows. Studying her face, but more to himself than to her, he murmured, “Folly indeed — between two worlds.”

  “Wh - what do you mean?” Her voice shook.

  “It doesn’t matter. Call it a reflex action. But you appreciate now the influence of our literary friend’s ‘trickery’?”

  She took a grip on herself, drawing free of his hold and turning to walk on, as if every nerve she had wasn’t tense with her need to hold and be held by him again — in something more than an impulse of

  desire which must have died for him as quickly as it had flared. As coolly as she could she said, “Yes. It certainly does seem, doesn’t it, that it is lying in wait for - for fools?”

  With a shrug he agreed, “And some fools never learn,” as he fell into step beside her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  YVES Renair’s arrival to take her back to Tazenir was for Alice a touch of sanity which she badly needed. Her welcome to him was as eager as if she had been exiled and idle for months rather than for thirty-six hours or so, and she felt that every kilometre the car covered was returning her to an everyday world with which she could cope.

  She was balanced enough to know that her overnight mood of recoil would pass. It had to. It was inevitable that she would have to meet Karim normally again, and indeed their mutual rejection of that moment of madness in the gardens had put it behind them almost at once. Before he had left her at the hospital they had reverted, if uneasily on her part, to casually friendly terms and had parted coolly on her thanks to him for “a lovely unexpected evening”.

  But the memory still rankled and would for a long time whenever she recalled it. It had all been so — so unnecessary! When he had made opportunity of their nearness and intimacy, she should have resisted him. He would not have forced her, she was sure, and she need never have known the temptation to allow her lips to flower to the touch of his. She would have remained - not free of him, never that until she learned to forget him - but spared his retreat from an impulse which, she sensed, he had regretted even more finally than she had. His muttered, “And some fools never learn” had said as much. He had yielded to it before - with some other girl, perhaps more than one, whom he did not love nor want any more than he needed her. And she needn’t have been pliant and willing - too willing. She had only herself to blame.

  Overnight in her room, she had unfairly blamed the kaftan. Silly and petty, that. But she felt that whenever she wore it in the future she would remember this humiliation and blush.

  She waited in the main hall for Yves while he went with the surgeon to visit Omar. She had not been able to pack the dress in her small holdall, so had it in its original box, and when he rejoined her he noticed it, taking it and the holdall from her out to his car.

  “So you managed to do some shopping?” he asked.

  “A dress I liked and didn’t try very hard to resist.”

  “So? A nice one?”

  She pulled a little face. “Too expensive,” she said with a touch of bitter irony at which of course he couldn’t guess.

  She didn’t have to ask him how Karim had known she was in the city. He told her. “He promised to call and see you at the hospital. Did he?”

  “Yes, and he asked me out to dinner. At the Menoubia.”

  Yves lifted his brows. “The Menoubia?” He paused for thought. “And did you wear the new too-expensive dress? Or isn’t it that kind?”

  “It is that kind, and I wore it. I hadn’t anything else with me.”

  “Oh. That’s a pity.”

  “A pity? Why?”

  “Because you and I might have christened it somewhere, some time, I was thinking.”

  She forced a laugh. “Well, it isn’t exactly in holes with just one wearing!”

  “No, but-” He threw her one quick glance, then looked ahead again. “The Menoubia is in the medina, and you had agreed to let me show you that.”

  She wished he hadn’t reminded her. “Yes, well-” she said. “It was dark and I didn’t see much of it — just a kind of panorama from the hotel terrace.”

  “Not the medan, with the jugglers and the snake- charmers?”

  “No. We drove straight from the hospital to the Menoubia.” Alice went on, “There was something I forgot to tell you, to ask you, the other night. But while we were talking Seiyid Karim brought it up and I found myself telling him instead.”

  “He seems to have stood in for me in more ways than one,” Yves commented drily. “What was it?”

  She told him about Sorab’s plea for help which she had promised to pass on to him, and of Karim’s lack of sympathy, finishing, “I got rather worked up, but it was like arguing with a stone wall. I didn’t achieve a thing.”

  “It was rather rash of you to try. I told you he is a man of conviction.”

  “But this time, about the wrong things, surely?”

  Yves shook his head. “I don’t know. He has had to stand a fair amount of trouble from Benoit Paul in the past. But did you want me to put in a word for him?”

  “If you would.”

  He promised, “I’ll do my best, though you have to remember that I am an interested character.”

  “How so? What do you mean?”

  “That if Paul goes, he will be replaced by a Moroccan, almost certainly with a long family, and I shall lose my very convenient quarters. And one can trust Karim’s logic to realize that I have a — a knife of my own to sharpen.”

  Alice laughed. “Don’t you mean an axe to grind?” she suggested. “Of course I do,” Yves retorted, laughing too. “But what matter? Knives, axes, they are both lethal weapons, aren’t they? In French we say un couteau a repasser. You English haven’t all the best phrases!”

  It was good to be back in her own pleasant room after the austerity of the hospital cubicle. Alice had unpacked her holdall and taking the kaftan from its box, had laid it out on the bed while she found a hanger for it, when Rachma came with a message from Sarepta to the effect that, there having been no veal in the market that morning, would savoury rice balls do for the children’s supper, and curried

  left-over chicken for Alice’s and Sorab’s?

  Knowing from experience that, coming from Sarepta, this was an ultimatum rather than a question, Alice said easily, “Yes, rice balls and chicken would be fine,” only to notice that Rachma’s wide-eyed attention had been taken by the dress lying across the bed.

  “That is a Moroccan gown,” she murmured. “But you wear it, Miss Alice? It is yours?”

  Alice produced a hanger. “Only just,” she said. “I bought it in the city yesterday. Do you like it?”

  Rachma’s reply was to reach to touch the material and to lift and let fall a fold of the skirt. Then, as if she had to make her hands resist it, she put them childishly behind her back. She nodded. “But it is a lady’s gown, for gaieties ... festivals ... weddings. Not for anyone like me.”

  “Nor for me, perhaps you think, as I’m not Moroccan?” Alice questioned.

  “Oh no, Miss Alice,” Rachma disclaimed politely. “For you — yes. In the city a great many European ladies wear them, and of course we are glad for you to copy our national dress. I only meant that for a country girl like me, one like this w
ould be much too grand, too rich, too proud.”

  And a gallant little effort to claim the grapes were sour, that, thought Alice as Rachma departed and she put away the kaftan in her wardrobe. For Rachma’s eyes had shone as she felt hers must have done at her own first sight of it - the difference between them being that Rachma had put a brave face on her rejection of it, where she herself had succumbed. And in her present mood of disillusionment with it she envied Rachma her courage. Much better if, last night, she had had to tell Karim that she couldn’t go to the Menoubia with him as she hadn’t anything suitable to wear. Much, much better. And yet-!

  She was in her office the next morning when the telephone rang and to her surprise he was on the line. Her heart hammered as she answered him. This was the first test of her self-possession in face of an urbanity which, in her experience, had only once deserted him. How well could she carry it off?

  But she found he was asking for Sorab, wanting to speak to her. Surprised at that too, Alice asked him to hold on, and when she had called Sorab, left her alone in the office to talk to him. If his business with the girl had anything to do with Benoit Paul, and she thought it must have, Yves couldn’t have lost any time in entering the fray, and she was wondering whether he might have had some success where she had failed, when Sorab, bubbling with excitement, came to find her.

  Nervously clasping and unclasping her fingers, Sorab announced, “Seiyid Karim has promised to ask the Caid to give Monsieur Paul another chance! If he does his work well enough between now and the autumn, Seiyid Karim will see that he does not have to leave, after all!”

  “I’m so glad about that,” Alice told her. “It was only yesterday that I asked Doctor Renair to speak for him, but he must have approached Seiyid Karim at once, I suppose.”

  “Doctor Renair?” Sorab looked puzzled. “No, Miss Alice. Seiyid Karim said it is you I have to thank. For telling him, asking him.”

  “Me? But - Yes, I did speak to him myself, try to gain his sympathy for you both. But he left me with no idea of whether I had succeeded or failed. Are you sure it isn’t Doctor Renair who has persuaded him?”