The Desert Castle

by Isobel Chace

  THE DESERT CASTLE

  Isobel Chace

  When her mother, rather highhandedly, arranged for her to go out to work for Gregory Randall in Amman, Marion Shirley was uncertain about her feelings.

  Although that part of the world was bound to be fascinating, perhaps Gregory himself might be too fascinating for her peace of mind.

  ‘It seems no work of Man’s creative hand,

  By labor wrought as wavering fancy planned;

  But from the rock as if by magic grown,

  Eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!

  Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine.

  Where erst Athena held her rites divine;

  Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane,

  That crowns the hill and consecrates the plane;

  But rose-red as if the blush of dawn

  That first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;

  The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,

  Which man deemed old two thousand years ago. Match me such a marvel save in Eastern clime,

  A rose-red city half as old as Time.’

  From Dean Burgon’s Newdigate Prize Poem ‘Petra’

  CHAPTER I

  The man had no right to be there. Marion Shirley watched him idly from beneath her eyelashes, wondering why he should have gate-crashed her class. It was practically the end of term, so it was unlikely that he had enrolled as a student. Besides, he hadn’t shown the slightest interest in anything she had said all evening. He had just sat there, making her nerves tingle and distracting her attention from the lesson in hand. It was a good thing she knew tonight’s subject backwards, she reflected grimly, or she might have come to a shuddering stop long since under the weight of that lazy stare with which he had favoured her whenever he had not been tapping his fingers on the desk in time to some imaginary tune or, worse still, had gone off into a daydream with an inexpressibly bored look written large on his face.

  ‘So we see,’ she said, ‘wall paintings are far from always being true frescoes, which is a very specialised technique, where the paint is laid on damp plaster, so that it penetrates it and marries into one substance with it. In many instances Byzantine wall paintings were executed in glue or a tempera medium, laid upon hard plaster, in much the same way as they were put on the gesso background of a panel. Over the centuries, the plaster sets to a rock-like hardness. The nature of the plaster varies from district to district, of course, but when making up your mind what was painted where, the stylistic evidence is far more important than the technical.’

  She drew a deep breath, glad that the evening was coming to an end. ‘Any questions?’ she snapped out

  The man tipped his chair forward and Marion had a sudden, nervous fear that he was about to ask her something that she wouldn’t know the answer to. It would be just like him to show her up before such a disparate class that she was already finding hard to handle.

  But the question never came.

  ‘Miss Shirley, I asked you if there were any examples of the true fresco in Rome? I’m going there for my holidays later this year.’

  Marion turned her attention to the questioner with a burning sense of relief. ‘Some of the best examples are there,’ she answered. ‘Many true frescoes survive in the catacombs and the early churches in Rome.’

  She waited to see if there were any more questions, standing quietly beside the tall desk she had been given on which to prop up her notes. She had learned early in her career to let the interest of the class come to her rather than try to impose her own interests in the subject on them. When she had first been asked to teach the History of Art to an evening class at the local adult education centre, she had been amused to discover that the problems of discipline in a class there were no different from the school where she taught. It didn’t matter at all that the students had not only chosen to come along, but had paid to do so, there was always someone intent on breaking up the concentration of others, and the same few who couldn’t resist challenging her right to control the class. So far she had always won these battles by exhibiting the quiet good manners that had brought her the support of the majority and had swung the prevailing opinion of the class into being on her side, sometimes with a fierce protectiveness that could be equally difficult to control.

  If only she had been taller, but even the highest heels couldn’t make her more than five feet, two inches. Then she was impossibly pretty, with a fine pair of laughing eyes and an infectious smile that, coupled with a tip-tilted nose and a mobility of expression, was of no help to her in front of the blackboard. Try as she would to discipline herself into presenting a sober mien to the world, the laughter would peep out to undo all her good work and it would be her leading the gust of laughter as it swept through her class. That she was well liked, she knew, but that she was respected as a fully qualified teacher ought to be respected, she doubted. Her students treated her as one of themselves and that had caused her nothing but trouble in the teachers’ common room where these things mattered almost as much as the academic achievements of the girls concerned.

  The smile burst out now. ‘That’s all, then, for tonight,’ she said.

  She hadn’t meant to, but she found herself seeking out the place where the strange man had been sitting, to see if he were leaving with the rest. But, on the contrary, he was still lolling at his ease on the hard wooden chair that looked as if it might collapse under him at any moment. Her eyes met his, and the thought of him coming to grief there and then brought the laughter to her throat and her lips trembled with the effort of suppressing her amusement.

  He stood up and came towards her with the easy movements of a man who was used to walking, and long distances at that. He put a hand on her desk and looked down at her in silence. His eyes, which she had thought were almost black from the other side of the room, were actually a deep navy-blue, she noticed. They were fringed with long, black eyelashes that matched his eyebrows and his short, curling hair. His face was dark as though he lived in the sun, which he probably had, for he had a network of little lines round his eyes which come from looking into the distance under a hot sun. His mouth was straight and disapproving, which made her feel uncomfortable, for the only thing in vision for him to disapprove of was herself.

  ‘There’s no need to offer to pay for a single lecture,’ she volunteered, unable to bear the silence between them any longer. ‘If I don’t mark you down as having been present, I don’t suppose anyone will notice that you wandered in by mistake—’

  ‘No mistake, Miss Shirley. I came to see what I thought of you.’

  What he did think was not much, Marion thought wryly, and wondered why the knowledge hurt. She didn’t like him much either, come to that!

  ‘You have the advantage of me, Mr.—?’

  ‘Gregory Randall,’ he supplied. He said it as though he were expecting it to mean something to her, but she didn’t think she had ever heard the name before.

  ‘Well, Mr. Randall, class is out as you can see and I’m in a hurry to get home.’

  ‘I shan’t keep you, Miss Shirley. All I want to know is if you really know what you’re talking about when it comes to frescoes and the like. Do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marion.

  ‘Good enough.’ The disapproving mouth relaxed into a faint smile. ‘That’s all, Miss Shirley. You can go home now if you like.’

  She was about to tell him that he had no means of preventing her from doing exactly as she liked when she caught right of the twinkle in the back of his eyes, and realised that, in his own way, the man was baiting her, no doubt hoping that she would fly out at him. But why? Was she exaggerating his motives because of the impact he had had on her? He had not, after all, asked any question in front of the class
and she had been quite sure that he had been going to.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. She lifted an eyebrow to show her displeasure, but her effect was ruined by the dimple that came and went in her cheek. He was impossible by any standards, she thought, and yet there was something funny about the casual way he dismissed her from her own classroom. ‘Did you enjoy the lecture?’ she asked him.

  ‘Parts of it. Parts of it I suspected you had mugged up for the occasion, hoping to sound convincing. But you were quite interesting when you were talking about preserving these wall-paintings, and restoring them where necessary in village churches and so on.’

  ‘Byzantine art is my particular interest,’ she told him in frozen tones.

  The disapproving mouth relaxed still further into an almost genuine smile. ‘Oh, quite. Have you done any restoration work yourself?’

  ‘A little. When my father was alive—’ She broke off, a little dismayed that she had been about to tell this unlikeable man all about herself when nobody could have said he had offered her the least encouragement to confide anything but the most ordinary courtesies and those as briefly as possible. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she ended.

  He showed no signs of having noticed her discomfiture. ‘Know anything about Islamic art?’ he asked her.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  She went on shaking her head. ‘That’s one of the bits I hope to mug up—if I touch on it at all.’

  The disapproving look was back with a vengeance.

  ‘Won’t it leave rather a gap in your history of world art if you exclude it?’

  It would, but she certainly wasn’t going to admit it to him. ‘Most of my students are more interested in European art,’ she defended herself.

  ‘Then you should call it that,’ he retorted. ‘European art, not the history of art, which implies a more universal conception than you have so far offered them.’

  ‘One has to be selective—’

  ‘From ignorance?’

  ‘No,’ she sighed. Unlikeable? The man was a menace!’ Still, European art has more to offer—’

  ‘May God forgive you, Miss Shirley. I hadn’t thought you so insular. What about China? North America? The Indian sub-continent?’

  Marion knew herself to be in the wrong, but nothing was going to induce her to admit it. ‘I was going to say, if you had allowed me to finish, that European art has more to offer those of us who share the European culture by living here.’ She looked up in triumph. He could hardly fault that argument!’ Naturally we want to know more about what is more familiar to us.’

  ‘Then why isn’t Turner or Constable your “particular interest”?’ he demanded. ‘Why Byzantine art, Miss Shirley? Were you brought up with ikons hanging on the walls of your nursery? Or were you more familiar with Mickey Mouse?’

  ‘With ikons,’ she said in a small voice.

  He put up a hand and smote his forehead. ‘Henry Shirley!’ he exclaimed. ‘Your father, I suppose? Very well, I give you best this time, though I’m pretty sure you hadn’t given a thought to such an argument when you planned your lectures.’ He turned on his heel, and then turned back again, the navy-blue eyes flickering over her. ‘You must miss your father. I’m sorry if I’ve aroused painful memories for you.’

  She was startled and she looked it. ‘Did you know my father?’ she asked him.

  ‘No, but I knew of him. Like you, he didn’t know much about Islamic art and we exchanged some letters on the subject.’

  Her smile kicked up the corners of her mouth as the dimple came and went in her cheek. ‘Did you learn anything from him?’ she asked, veiling her eyes.

  ‘It was he who was seeking information from me,’ he answered drily. ‘Good night, Miss Shirley.’

  ‘Good night,’ she murmured. She watched him go, recalling herself to a sense of urgency with an effort when she remembered that her mother would be waiting for her. She was glad that it wasn’t every day that she was called upon to meet a Gregory Randall, and she hoped it would never be her misfortune to meet him again, yet he was quite different from anyone she had ever met before. And a very handsome difference too, she thought with a smile. Now that he had gone, she wondered what it had been about him that had set her nerves on edge. Her mother, she knew, would have pronounced him dishy and would have been disappointed that she hadn’t asked him home. It would be a mistake to mention Gregory Randall to her mother, Marion told herself. She would dismiss the whole incident from her mind—and spend the holidays revising the syllabus of her lectures, not because he was right in thinking she dismissed the rest of the world as unimportant, but because it was impossible to understand the movements of European art in a vacuum, and she knew it. Hadn’t her father said again and again that the only unforgivable approach to art was the parochial one? And there was this beastly man saying exactly the same thing exposing the major weakness in her series of lectures in one blinding sentence. May God forgive you, Miss Shirley. All right, so she shouldn’t have loaded the syllabus so heavily with her own particular interests, but it would be a long, long time before she would forgive him for pointing it out to her.

  Her mother had been attending a dressmaking class and was not appreciating having to wait for her daughter.

  ‘Marion, what have you been doing? I couldn’t even get a cup of tea!’

  ‘Did Father ever speak to you about a Gregory Randall?’ Marion burst out, climbing into her coat.

  Her mother’s eyes opened wide. ‘Of course he did! He writes books.’

  Marion’s blood ran cold. ‘What about?’ she breathed.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ Mrs. Shirley said comfortably. She set off down the corridor with a frowning look that told Marion she had better hurry after her if they were to walk home together. Her mother gave her that sudden, slanting smile that her daughter had inherited from her. ‘Did you like him, darling? He was at your lecture, I presume.’

  Too late, Marion remembered that she had decided not to mention him to her mother. ‘When he wasn’t asleep, he tapped messages to himself on his desk. I hope he doesn’t come back next term!’

  Mrs. Shirley gave her daughter’s arm a comforting pat. ‘No danger of that, my dear. I remember now quite distinctly that he doesn’t live in England, though I can’t remember where he does live. You could look him up if you’re interested in your father’s address book. They wrote to each other quite often. Henry liked him.’

  ‘He didn’t like me—’

  Mrs. Shirley did her best to keep the laughter out of her voice. ‘Did you want him to?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course not!’ The protest was too fiercely uttered to be believable. ‘I didn’t like him either!’

  Marion didn’t have to look through her father’s papers to find about Gregory Randall. Once she had heard his name she kept on hearing it. It seemed that everyone read his books, and when she went to get herself one out of the library she found she had to put her name down on a waiting list even for one that had been written some four years before.

  He wrote historical thrillers. There had been one about the elusive Richard III, which came down rather heavily on the side of the Plantagenet king; another about the gold and diamond mines of Africa in which Cecil Rhodes was not the hero he has often been made out to be; and yet another about the Red Indians of North America in which heroes abounded on both sides. Marion read all three and combed the shelves for more. She found she liked having her history mixed up with a story that was both exciting and believable. She liked his books far better than she had liked the man.

  ‘I wonder what he’s writing now?’ she had said suddenly to her mother across the breakfast table.

  Mrs. Shirley had given her daughter an exasperated glance. ‘I don’t have to ask whom you’re talking about,’ she had sighed. ‘The Gregory Randall. Darling, I like his books too, but I don’t have to brood over them as if he were the only readable writer left in the world. What on earth did he say to y
ou that you can’t think of anybody or anything else but Gregory Randall?’

  ‘I just wondered,’ Marion had murmured.

  ‘Then wonder about something else,’ her mother had advised. ‘He’s writing a book about the Crusades, I believe. He’s had it in mind for some time,’ she had added as an afterthought.

  It was only later that Marion had thought that her mother seemed to know a great deal more about Gregory Randall than she was saying, and that was more than mysterious, it was downright uncanny, for her mother was constitutionally incapable of keeping quiet about anything.

  She was thinking about this, rather than the rising noise of the girls in her class, when she became aware of one of them standing in front of her.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you, Miss Shirley?’ the girl was saying.

  ‘Don’t mind what?’ Marion demanded.

  The girl sighed. ‘I knew you weren’t listening! I’m talking about the holidays—’

  Marion’s interest was immediately caught. She had been concerned about Lucasta Hartley for some time. Her parents never seemed to be at home and the girl was left to her own devices far too much. When she was eighteen, Marion had no doubt that Mrs. Hartley would swoop down on her and launch her in the jet-set life she and her husband shared so happily, but at only seventeen Lucasta was of no interest to either of them.

  ‘Yes, what are you doing for the holidays?’

  ‘I’m going to stay with my uncle,’ Lucasta replied, looking sulky. ‘Nobody else will have me and he won’t have me either unless I have a responsible adult with me to keep me out of his way. The parents told me to ask you.’