Desert Barbarian

by Charlotte Lamb

  'Sorry. I'm lunching in the board room with MacIntyre and Hamley. We're in the middle of trouble.'

  'Oh?' Marie glanced at him in concern. So his grey look and furrowed brow had not merely been the result of seeing her mother again? 'Is it serious?'

  He gazed at her in silence for a moment, then shrug­ged. 'At this stage I can't say.'

  'What's wrong? Not another strike?' A strike had crippled one of their electronics factories last year for six weeks, losing them millions of pounds in overseas orders.

  He shook his head. 'No. A take-over bid.'

  She was immediately intent, knowing how such a bid would worry and disturb him. Although he had origin­ally owned most of the shares in Brintons the rapid development of the past ten years had been fuelled by the sale of shares, and control of the firm had passed out of his hands financially, although he was still managing director and a major shareholder. 'Who's making the bid?'

  'The Unex Group,' he told her.

  She frowned. 'What do they do? I've only heard the name, I know nothing about them.'

  He glanced at his watch again, hesitated, then said, 'They're a multi-national company, partly owned by Arabs.'

  She started, staring at him. 'Arabs?' He nodded, not apparently noticing her expression. 'They have a finger in dozens of pies… electronics, food, oil, manufacturing… they actually own a number of English companies. They swallow firms whole, strip­ping the assets and trimming them down as they go. They're offering my shareholders a price which I doubt if I can match. That's why I must see Hamley for lunch today. I have to ask if the bank can back me if I try to fight this take-over.'

  'Surely they will?' Marie was aghast at the idea of her father losing the company he had spent his life building up.

  He shrugged, his eyes expressionless. 'We'll have to wait and see.'

  'You don't sound very optimistic,' she said anxiously.

  'I'm not,' he said, moving to the door. 'Don't worry, Marie. My personal fortune is not involved in this and I won't let you suffer.'

  'Dad!' She was blazingly angry at that. 'I'm not my mother, remember! What do I care about the money? By all means use it if it will help you. I can always get a job if things go wrong.'

  He smiled then, his face lightening. 'My dear girl, what do you think you could do?'

  'I'll think of something,' she said lightly. 'I'm not altogether helpless, you know. I've had a good education and I'm not stupid. You never know, I might even get married one day!'

  He laughed. 'I certainly hope so. I want to be a grand­father, you know. Look, I must rush, I dare not be late for that lunch appointment. I'll see you later tonight. Don't forget—your mother expects you at her hotel for dinner at seven thirty.'

  'I'll be there,' Marie promised. 'And I'll be sympath­etic, I promise.'

  He blew her a kiss and left, slamming the front door behind him in a way which was not at all like him. He usually closed doors gently with care. She sensed that under his quiet exterior her father was seriously dis­turbed.

  She ate her lunch without noticing much of what she ate, and her father's housekeeper, Mrs Abbot, clucked disapprovingly over her half-eaten meal.

  'You hardly touched a thing. Are you sickening for something? I told you you'd catch something nasty if you went to that foreign place. When my late husband, Stanley, was in Cairo he had trouble with his tummy the whole time. That was during the war, of course. Army food was nearly as bad, he said, and he wasn't one to grumble…'

  'I brought you back something,' Marie said, as the other woman stopped speaking. She picked up a brightly wrapped parcel from the bureau behind her and handed it to Mrs Abbot, who stared at it with overdone amaze­ment. This ritual was proceeded with every time Marie came back from a trip abroad. She always brought Mrs Abbot a present, and Mrs Abbot always pretended to be taken aback.

  Now she turned the parcel over and over, saying, 'You shouldn't have bothered. Why, my goodness, what is it? You shouldn't have bothered, you know. I wonder what it is?'

  'Open it and see,' said Marie, as she always did. Mrs Abbot got as much fun out of the parcel first as she could, pinching it and fingering the corners, trying to guess what it was, before at last she untied the string.

  Marie had bought her a little Arab statuette of a cat, about five inches high, carved in creamy ivory, with green gem eyes. Mrs Abbot was crazy about cats and kept two Siamese in her own part of the flat. Now she exclaimed delightedly and thanked Marie several times before she departed with her gift.

  Marie watched her leave the room with an affectionate smile. Mrs Abbot had looked after her ever since her mother ran away. She was a kind, warm, caring woman without relations in the world since her own husband died. In her early sixties, she was still active and hard­working, with no intention of retiring, although Marie knew that she had plenty of money invested in a building society for the 'rainy day' she had been expecting all her life. She ran the flat with impeccable skill. Her cooking was plain but excellent. She tended to bully both Marie and her father at times, but otherwise she kept herself to herself, preferring to sit in her cosy living-room at the far end of the flat with her two cats rather than go out or meet friends.

  What would we have done without her? Marie thought. Then she walked over to the window and stared out at the London skyline, thinking over what her father had told her.

  What would they do if her father lost control of Brintons? Would he be forced to retire from the board? She could not imagine what he would do with the rest of his life if he lost the mainspring of his existence. Despite their close relationship, she had always been aware that Brintons came first with him. From time to time she had minded that, but she had learnt to face facts.

  She thought of the Unex Group with bitterness. Why were they so greedy, like great sharks devouring every­thing in their path! The impersonal face of big business hid a cruel ruthlessness every bit as harsh as the bleak wilderness of the desert.

  She remembered Ian MacIntyre, chief accountant of Brintons, once saying to her father that it was dangerous to grow much bigger. 'You'll attract the sharks,' he had said. And her father had only smiled and shrugged the warning away.

  Marie spent the afternoon on the telephone to her friends, telling them bland lies about her holiday. She would never tell a soul about her night in the desert, she thought, as she hung up for the last time. Let them all imagine that she had spent a blissful fortnight swimming in blue water and lazing on the beach. The reality was a secret locked in her own mind.

  For the first time she felt restlessly wistful about her lack of occupation. She had never got a job because her father had insisted it was not necessary. She was sup posed to run the flat for him, arranging his dinner parties and lunch parties, writing the personal letters which had to go to friends and doing all the jobs her mother would have done had she not run away.

  In fact, of course, she had very little to do all day for most of the time, and filled in the hours with idle leisure; shopping, visiting friends, reading books and playing the piano.

  Until now that had rarely bothered her, but now she wished she had a proper job, something to take her mind off the images which continued to haunt her. Every time she relaxed her guard that face flashed into her mind.

  Oh, well, she thought, time would solve that problem. In a few weeks she would be unable to remember what he looked like. That time could not come too soon.

  She slowly dressed for dinner, choosing her dress with care; a pretty blue dress she rarely wore because of its childlike simplicity, the bodice demurely sprinkled with very tiny white lace daisies, the skirts full and calf-length, swaying around her as she walked. With her hair styled in loose waves around her face she looked like a teenager, she thought wryly, gazing at her reflection.

  Well, that should suit her mother. She could hardly manage to look much younger.

  Her mother was staying at a large luxury hotel near one of London's parks. Marie asked for her at the re­ception desk an
d was immediately directed into the lounge bar. Pausing in the doorway, Marie saw her mother at once. She had hardly changed a hair. At a casual glance one would have put her down as a woman of thirty-five, but in fact, as Marie knew perfectly well, she was in her late forties. The miracle was accomplished invisibly. Her make-up was carefully applied, her clothes expertly chosen. Her beauty remained intact by some magical act of will.

  She turned, as Marie entered, a glass in her hand, and for a fleeting second Marie saw an unmistakable look of apprehension on the flower-like face. The blue eyes wid­ened, the mouth trembled, then Clare raised a hand in greeting, smiling brightly. 'Darling! There you are!'

  There were, naturally, some men hovering in vague attendance, their faces wearing the sheepish look Marie always associated with men whom her mother took in tow. But Clare calmly dismissed them all with a few sweet words, saying, 'Darlings, you must run along now. This is a very private meeting…' The smile which accompanied the words left the men bemused as they drifted away.

  'You haven't lost your touch,' Marie said lightly, brush­ing her mother's raised cheek with her lips. 'How are you, Clare?' Her mother preferred to be called that. She said the name Mother was 'ageing'.

  'Hasn't James told you ? Poor Arturo… so sad. And those horrible sons of his, grabbing everything, even my cars and my house. All I had left was the clothes I stood up in, I swear.' Clare looked tragic, her lower lip tremb­ling, her wide pansy blue eyes filmy as though with tears.

  Marie glanced at the flat pearl studs in her mother's tiny ears; at the diamond bracelet clasped around that slender wrist, at the diamond and pearl brooch discreetly pinned into the elegant black dress into which her mother's slender youthful body had apparently been poured so that it clung to her from the neck to the hem, accentuating the delicate sway of her hips, the alluring uplift of her breasts.

  She vividly recalled the other jewels which Arturo had showered upon Clare over the years, and suspected that Clare's poverty was by no means as drastic as she wished people to think.

  'I'm very sorry, Clare,' she said, however, mindful of her promise to her father. 'You look marvellous, in spite of your grief…' then hoped her mother would not take the words as irony.

  Clare, however, was ready to accept her words at their face value, eager to be friends, apparently.

  'Thank you, darling.' The blue eyes scrutinised her, approving of the blue childlike dress. 'You look very sweet yourself. I like to see you dress your age. I thought, last time we met, that you were in that tiresome stage of trying to be very sophisticated, which doesn't suit the young, you know. What will you have to drink?'

  'Something cool and refreshing,' Marie said demurely.

  Clare ordered her a glass of lemonade, adding mis­chievously, 'With just a dash of gin, barman. We don't want to overdo it, do we?'

  Marie saw the barman eye her curiously, and lowered her lids. It would become tiresome, she thought, if she had to keep up the fiction of being sweet seventeen for hours. But it was all in a good cause if she was to keep her mother happy and satisfy her father.

  After their drinks they repaired to the dining-room to eat. Clare gazed at the menu with glazed despair, then ordered melon and salad. Marie decided to follow suit to keep her company, and was rewarded with another smile.

  'Very sensible. You must look after your figure.' Clare studied her with knowledgeable eyes. 'Tell me about your boy-friends.'

  Unconsciously, Marie wrinkled her nose, thinking of the men she knew, her escorts in past months: Nigel with his bland smile and passion for cars, Daniel who talked obsessively of cricket and danced like a rogue elephant, Stephen, the shortest man she had ever met, who was aggressively masculine and carried a chip on his shoulder the size of a tree.

  Clare saw the expression and laughed suddenly, her eyes bright. 'Darling! I know just how you feel! Dull, are they?'

  'As ditchwater,' said Marie.

  Their eyes met in a smile of entirely new sympathy. Clare leaned her elbows on the table in an attitude of confidentiality. 'Poor girl! Has there never been anyone who…?' Her carefully pencilled brows rose enquiringly.

  Marie, caught off guard, thought of Khalid, and at once her mother's face reflected an amused curiosity.

  'I see there was someone. Who was he? Was he ex­citing?'

  Marie laughed ruefully. 'Very.'

  'English?'

  'No,' Marie admitted.

  'No, darling, they rarely are,' her mother mourned. 'Are you still seeing him?'

  Marie shook her head, her lower lip caught between her teeth, and Clare's blue eyes shrewdly assessed her.

  'Serious?'

  Marie shrugged. 'I don't know. But…' words failed her and she broke off the sentence, unable to put into words what she felt.

  Clare sighed sympathetically. 'I see—like that. Well, if you want my advice, darling, which of course you don't, but I'll give it all the same… go after him if you want him. They say men are the hunters, but that's just a myth invented by women to flatter the poor deluded creatures. Of course it's the woman who pursues, but she does it so subtly that he always imagines it was his own idea.'

  Marie laughed aloud, and as she did so her laughter attracted some attention from a party just entering the dining-room. They halted to look at her, and she, look­ing up, aware of being watched, saw her father smiling at her across the room. She smiled back at him, delighted to see him. Then her glance moved on to his com­panions, and something happened to her heart. She felt a quick fierce pain, as though someone had squeezed her heart in a vice. Her breath seemed to stop and her pulses to accelerate.

  For what seemed an endless eternity her blue eyes looked into the mocking dark eyes of Khalid.

  Then he bowed, and Clare, who had turned in her chair to see what Marie was staring at, gave a little cry of amazement.

  'Why, there's James, and he has Stonor Grey with him. Now what are those two doing together, I won­der?'

  'Which one is Stonor Grey?' Marie asked with an, effort, trying to silence the thunder of her pulses, her eyes moving around the little group of men who were now advancing towards them with polite smiles. She recog­nised Ian MacIntyre, a stooped man of fifty with a tired smile, but the other two men were strangers to her. One was in his early thirties, with short curly brown hair and trendy clothes. The other was plump, smooth, cordial, his dark suit cut on fashionable lines.

  'Darling, you must have heard of Stonor Grey,' said Clare in scornful disbelief. 'He's the whizz-kid behind Unex; of course, he started with an enormous personal fortune. His mother was the granddaughter of an oil sheik, so he had a lot of money from her, and his father was Sir Ronald Grey, the stationery king. You know, they make paper and office equipment by the billion…'

  Clare had said all this very fast, very softy, while she kept smiling towards the men. She had just finished before they joined them, and she extended her hand to Stonor Grey with a charming, eyelash fluttering smile. 'Stonor! How are you?'

  He bent his black head to kiss the back of her hand with a courtly gesture. 'Clare, you look as enchanting as ever. What magic spells do you say? You look about twenty-five.'

  'Ssh, don't mention age!' she pouted. 'I'm old enough to have a daughter who's nearly grown up… Marie, this is Stonor Grey. Stonor, my little girl.'

  Marie coolly offered him her hand. He took it, turning slightly away from the others, so that only she could see his expression. The dark eyes mocked her as he bent over her hand. The courtly gesture was somehow different this time. As he brushed his lips over her hand he let them slide down until they touched the little blue pulse beating with telltale speed at her wrist.

  She was so angry she could scarcely breathe. Rage sent sparks into her blue eyes; made her fingers shake and her lips tremble so that she had to bite at their inner skin to stop them from visibly trembling.

  No doubt he thought himself a great humorist. The full situation burst upon her gradually, like a series of wild explosions. He had prete
nded to kidnap her in order to make her look a fool. All that stuff about a ransom… carrying her off into the desert for a few hours… just to teach her a lesson!

  'Stonor is an original,' Clare was saying. 'You must get him to do some of his imitations of politicians. He's so funny.'

  'Oh, a comedian?' said Marie, her tone involuntarily touched with acid.

  Stonor laughed, and Clare looked puzzled, while James Brinton stared at his daughter with anxious be­wilderment.

  'Sometimes I get carried away with my little jokes,' he said, the dark eyes on her face.

  'That can be dangerous,' Marie snapped.

  He smiled wryly. 'Very true. I gather you've just come back from a trip to my mother's country, Miss Brinton. How did you like the desert?'

  She had a hard job to fight down her first reaction, which was to slap his face. With a great effort she managed to say sweetly, 'The desert was… sandy, Mr Grey.'

  'And the people?' he asked still in the same courteous, detached voice.

  'I met some very pleasant people. Only one person seemed at all objectionable.'

  'And who was that, Miss Brinton?' he enquired suavely.

  She shrugged one slender shoulder, her oval face scorn­ful. 'Oh, no one of any importance. Just one of those silly men who think they're irresistible…'

  Clare gave a soft chuckle, but James Brinton looked astonished. 'Marie? What happened? You never men­tioned it to me?'

  'It really didn't matter, Dad. I got away from him without any trouble. He was the sort of pest who's so consumed with vanity that he's merely laughable.'

  Stonor Grey's eyes were filled with shameless laughter. She saw that, far from having offended or shocked him, she had merely amused him. Gravely he said, 'I hope you slapped his face, Miss Brinton. Men like that have to be taught a lesson. The trouble is, so many girls get taken in and swoon helplessly in their arms. I'm sure you were far too level-headed to be swept off your feet merely by a handsome face and a charming manner.'

  She glared at him, silenced by sheer awe-stricken rage at his effrontery.