Court of Veils

by Violet Winspear

  Near where they sat the crumbling castle walls merged with the cliffs and a pair of black-tailed storks had made a home there, a scruffy flat nest on which they lounged without taking any notice of the human beings who sat only a few feet away from them.

  ‘They aren’t a bit nervous,’ Roslyn said, intrigued.

  ‘The stork knows he’s a sacred bird in the East,’ Tristan told her. ‘A slayer of serpents, a bringer of good luck to the house on which he builds his nest.’

  ‘If a stork lodged on my roof,’ Isabela murmured wickedly, ‘I should fear he was bringing me a little bundle.’

  Duane chuckled, then he said: ‘I thought Latin women liked pequiños. They seem to have pretty large families.’ ‘Children are cute,’ she shrugged, ‘but I have my career. Also the old-fashioned notion that women belong only in the home is no longer acceptable to Latin women of progressive ideas. Duane, surely you are not in favour of women being tied down to domesticity?’

  ‘Nothing animate should be tied down,’ he agreed, ‘but most men like the idea of perpetuation and having offspring is about the best way of achieving it.’

  ‘What a cold-blooded thing to say!’ The words broke from Roslyn before she could stop them. ‘Children are for loving and laughing with. They aren’t just mirrors for a man to see himself reflected in. Is that all yours will ever mean to you, Mr. Hunter?’

  Duane quizzed her over the rim of the glass in his hand, then his teeth snapped whitely in an unkind laugh. ‘I am not a sentimental man, Miss Brant. I learned quite young to look facts in the face, and the idea that love and marriage are worth getting romantic about is strictly - for the birds.’ He gestured at the storks on their nest, their sun-coloured bills touching as they snoozed.

  Roslyn looked away from him, out across the lake, scornful of herself for letting him ruffle her up. How, she wondered, could any woman want a man so bereft of tenderness? He had deliberately mangled it in himself ... if it had ever existed!

  ‘Is it really necessary for us to get dusty and hot down in those noisome souks?’ Isabela leaned back in her chair, a curved figure in white, cinnamon-patterned silk, the lobes of her ears covered by cinnamon-stones. She yawned delicately behind her hand. ‘I think it would be a bore.’

  ‘Roslyn wishes to see the souks,’ Tristan flicked a glance over Isabela. ‘You will grow fat, you know, if you laze about all the time!’

  ‘Fat?’ The enormity of the idea! ‘How dare you?’

  He had dared, his dark Latin eyes full of mischief as Isabela jumped to her feet and snatched up her wide-brimmed hat. ‘Well, come along all of you,’ she said, and the glance she gave Roslyn was one of open dislike. Roslyn caught it, but hardly cared. You couldn’t be liked by everyone, and being liked by Tristan made up amply for the animosity of the other two.

  They went ahead down the pavement of wide, uneven steps; Roslyn and Tristan were content to follow, enjoying the glimpses of peacock-water, sails and palms through oriental arches. The others were now out of sight, lost in the narrow streets of high-walled houses that led into the heart of the bazaar district.

  The streets looped, noise-filled lanes that led into each other and out again, where it would be as easy as anything for a stranger to lose herself.

  The souks of the East, covered by trellises that cast tawny-dark stripes over robes and faces and merchandise. Baskets of flowers lined a narrow stairway. Mimosa, carnations, roses and lilies - bride of flowers - to bloom gaily until the heart wilted them in a matter of hours. On grass panniers, like great shields, there were oranges and pumpkins, golden melons, and pomegranates, some of them sliced like hearts to collect the dust that rose under the shuffling babouches of the crowd.

  Left and right there was something fascinating to take note of, like the bearded scribe to whom women dictated letters. A couple of women wore the mysterious burkha that left only slits for the eyes; sooty eyes with an Eastern charm to them.

  ‘Don’t you find those women intriguing?’ Roslyn shot a smile at Tristan, close to her side in the crowd, the tips of his fingers touching hers. ‘It must set a man wondering, to see only a pair of painted eyes and fingers dipped in henna.’

  He returned her smile, and she thought again how attractive he was. ‘You, femme blonde, I find far more intriguing,’ he said. ‘Do you know what the African sun has done to your hair?’

  ‘Bleached it,’ she said flippantly.

  ‘Mais non,’ he protested. ‘Gilded it, and now you look like an Attic slave-boy. Quite charming, I assure you, with those pants.’ His fingers took hers, sudden and hard. ‘But tonight you will wear a dress and we will dance, no?’

  She nodded, not looking at him, her heart beating quickly as she remembered the lake-shore assignation she had planned for herself.

  Oh, the smells of this place, tingling in her nostrils. Green mint, overflowing from baskets. Crushed herbs and spices mingling. Henna in panniers, cosmetic of joy. Arab coffee to which vanilla had been added, goat meat on the spit, onions, warm bread; musk and amber as they passed a perfume seller.

  Tristan wanted to stop and buy her a phial of some exotic scent, but she laughingly shook her head and said she wasn’t the type. His eyes met hers, brushing down over her face to her lips. ‘You child,’ he said, and let her hurry him on to the silk-spinners’ corner, where she fingered the citron and Meccan-green stuffs, and drew her fingers down a length of night-soft velvet.

  She just wanted to feel and be aware; to take into herself the hot, clamouring, aroma-rich fantasy of the souks.

  Irresistible fantasy in the shape of a teller of fates; a vendor of love and hate potions, amulets to ward off sickness, to ensure the birth of a male child, or to lessen the dangers of a journey. When the old wizard held out in his palm a tiny gilded Hand of Fate, Roslyn knew she had to have it. She dug into her purse, shaking her head at Tristan. ‘You can’t buy good fortune for me,’ she protested. ‘I must pay for it.’

  The little hand was quite perfect in detail, though not of any real value ... except as a charm. Roslyn fingered it as they wandered on. Would the little hand work the magic that would lead her out of the half-land in which she was lost?

  She felt Tristan looking at her and summoned an airy smile for him.

  ‘You must let me buy you a hadya of some sort,’ he said, ‘Come, what would you like? Beads, a scarf, or a scarab ring?’

  ‘Hadya,’ she murmured. ‘It means gift, doesn’t it? All right,’ she pointed at something that had been wringing her heart ever since their entry into the souks. ‘Buy me a cage of singing birds.’

  ‘You strange child!’ he exclaimed. ‘What will you do with them?’

  ‘Let them go.’ She was regarding the caged birds with a look of pain in her eyes. The tiny things sang because it was half dark in the souks, and Roslyn couldn’t bear their desperate little songs.

  Tristan strode over and bought one of the bigger cages in which nine or ten birds were imprisoned, and they walked on out of the noisy, trellised lanes into sudden sunlight that made Roslyn blink. She put on her hat and pulled the brim down over her eyes. Shaded now, and luminously grey, they met Tristan’s. ‘Thank you for my hadya,’ she said. ‘Now I’d like to go somewhere quiet and let the birds fly away.’

  ‘I know the perfect place,’ Tristan said, ‘if your feet can stand some more walking? Prowling the souks can be hard on the feet and we have been in there rather a long time. Where, I wonder, could Isabela and Duane have got to?’

  ‘Isabela wasn’t keen on seeing the souks, so perhaps she persuaded your cousin to take her somewhere less crowded,’ Roslyn said casually.

  ‘Yes, they did appear to want to be by themselves.’ Tristan smiled down at her, carrying without embarrassment the cage of birds so soon to be given their freedom. ‘But we do not mind each other’s company, do we? We will perform our errand of mercy, then find ourselves a cool cafe and have mocha coffee, just as I promised.’

  ‘What about the minaret?’ she asked. ‘Whe
n shall I see that?’

  ‘By starlight, chérie. We will put out our hands and touch the stars.’

  ‘How exciting,’ she smiled, a catch in her throat.

  They climbed the staired streets side by side, passing the blank-walled Arab houses in which high, studded doors were set. Mysterious houses, their inner life never revealed to the stranger, though Roslyn knew from Nanette that Duane had Arab friends who made him welcome and shared with him their hunting falcons ... evidently the greatest of honours out here in the east.

  She and Tristan climbed out of the town and came to an old ruin. Sand covered the broken columns and shifted through the courtways, and all that was left of the walls made nesting nooks for storks, the serpent slayers. All but one comer, where a coign of carved stone defied erosion, the remainder of what long ago had been a bastion. From beneath it the city of El Kadia looked like a huge buff-cream honeycomb, nibbled here and there, its minarets rising into the air like sticks of candy.

  ‘This is the place I told you about, Roslyn - from now on known as the Bastion of Angelot.’ He hoisted a leg upon some broken stonework and watched Roslyn open the cage and release the little birds into the honey-blue sky.

  ‘I am not a little angel,’ she grimaced as she smiled. ‘Birds just weren’t made to be caged - what shall we do with the thing?’

  It was made from osier and not worth much, so he crushed it underfoot and kicked the remnants out of sight. ‘There, as you hate cages so much.’

  Roslyn faced him, silent for a moment, then a diffident smile touched her lips. ‘Do you think me odd?’ she asked. ‘I know those birds might fly again into the nets that caught them before, but for a while they’ll be free and happy.’

  ‘Moments of happiness are all anyone can expect.’ He looked wry and grave at the same time. ‘When we face up to that, we can perhaps call ourselves grown up.’

  ‘I shouldn’t want to gorge on happiness all the time,’ she said. ‘I should be afraid of growing surfeited, blunted against joy in the feel and smell and texture of things. They are the real possessions of life, aren’t they? If you are blind but aware, you are not blind.’

  ‘Suffering has made you wise, cherie.’ His hand was gentle under her chin as he raised her face to him. ‘But there is another kind of awareness, you know. The awareness of what is in one’s heart and what to do about it.’

  ‘I - know,’ she said.

  ‘I should like right now to finish the kiss we started last night, Roslyn, but I am not going to.’

  ‘I understand, Tristan.’ And there was no need to say more, for they could communicate without words. She didn’t have to say that he looked like the pictures of Armand she had been shown, and that the arms she wanted around her might be another’s. They didn’t need words or embraces right now, only the mutual peace of standing beside the sun-warmed bastion, listening to the ghostly eddies of sand whispering about their feet.

  ‘Come,’ he said at last, ‘let us go and have luncheon.’

  Suddenly feeling as released as those little songbirds, Roslyn wanted to eat à l'arabe, and this they did at a small terrace-cafe shaded by the mushroom dome of a nearby mosque. They had bourak, a tasty roll made of minced mutton, sage and mint, and baked in a light pastry. Then kus-kus of semolina, rich with cream and studded .with pieces of apricot, prunes and sweet almonds.

  Over small glasses of mocha coffee, dark and rich, Tristan told her about Paris, the cocotte of cities, and his conflict in the beginning about attending the Academy of Music instead of learning the running of the plantation. ‘My father was then alive, but already a sick man, and had it not been for Nanette, who understood so well my need to express myself in music, I should have supervised Dar al Amra without any of the passion that Duane gives to the place.’

  ‘Is it passion that he feels?’ Roslyn brooded on the arrogant, hawk-face of the man. ‘I should have called it ambition.’

  ‘Some of that, of course.’ Tristan ran a finger round the rim of his coffee glass. ‘Ambition for Dar al Amra to be first class, the most fertile of plantations, king of them all. I could never have felt like that, and how I blessed the turn of events that made it possible for him to come and take charge of things. In many ways he is a far more able man than I. I am a dreamer, Duane is a realist. I sometimes envy him for having both feet firmly planted on the ground, and yet I wonder what flight of ruined fancy makes him cling to the things of the earth and deny heaven.’

  ‘A woman, perhaps.’ Roslyn felt sure it had been.

  ‘Yes, in most cases it is a woman.’ Tristan glanced up with a smile, ‘Do you like mocha coffee ?’

  ‘I’ve liked every moment of this morning, Tristan. The souks, and the songbirds you let me give back to the skies. Our lunch, talking about Paris and your music.’

  The dome of the mosque cast its jade shadow over them, and they sat there as the streets emptied of people and the shutters closed above the red and blue Hands of Fate. Their waiter stood in the doorway of the cafe in a resigned attitude. Crazy Europeans, he seemed to be thinking, making talk when they could be taking siesta.

  His babouches shifted restlessly.

  ‘We cannot stay,’ Tristan murmured. ‘We have to shatter this perfect moment, or drive that poor fellow quite crazy.’

  She watched the waiter come with an air of relief to their table, and she thought, with abrupt melancholy, that what was now shattered could never be replaced. Perfection couldn’t be, and the next time of happiness waited to be carefully shaped, like a pot on the wheel, to emerge in loveliness, or with a flaw that made you careless of breaking it.

  Roslyn opened her powder-compact and wiped some of the shine from her nose. As she dropped the compact back into her bag, the gleam of her tiny Hand of Fate caught her eye. The talisman she had bought in the souks, all that was tangibly left of the happy hours that had sped so swiftly.

  Sad, and also frightening, that what had been could never be quite the same again. You could never go back to see again quite the same look on a face, or hear again the same note in a voice. No lance of sunlight, no wedge of shadow was sculpted the same as before. Everything moved on and changed with every movement of the hand of time.

  ‘If we went to the lake, there would not be a boat available at this hour,’ Tristan said, as though reading in her eyes her reluctance to return to the hotel.

  ‘It’s hot,’ she said. ‘We had better go back.’

  So they panted up the hill, the cabs deserted of drivers, the city as still as if under a spell. ‘The city sleeps and only Beauty and the Prince are awake,’ Tristan quipped, the perspiration making his hair cling in dark squiggles to his forehead.

  Wearily they walked into the hotel and Tristan took their keys from off the wall behind the empty reception desk arid they trudged upstairs to their rooms. Tristan unlocked her door for her.

  ‘Have a rest. I want to take you out again tonight.’ He leaned against the wall and his eyes flicked her boyish pants and shirt. ‘I hope you brought a dance dress with you?’

  She nodded, then had a thought. ‘Supposing I can’t dance?’

  ‘Then I shall teach you.’ His eyes creased in a half smile. ‘I shall enjoy plucking the veils one by one from those wide grey eyes of yours - I think you have many things to learn.’

  ‘Meaning I’m naive?’ Her cheeks grew pink and this added to her sunflushed look. ‘You’re a man of the world - it’s a wonder I don’t bore you.’

  ‘You know you don’t bore me.’ His dark eyes followed her blush. ‘See, you are too young not to feel flattered that a man finds you appealing, and not old enough to be coy or calculating about it. Armand did grow up in Europe! I used to think he liked his girls to bubble and bounce.’

  ‘Perhaps with Armand I did behave like that.’ She shrugged. ‘Who knows? I certainly don’t, and we’re all said to be split personalities.’

  ‘The image is not always the truth, to be sure.’ He smiled, took hold of her wrist and brushed his lips ac
ross her pulse. ‘I will take a chance on your essential inability to bubble and bounce - I hope, Roslyn, that the dress is a pretty one—’

  ‘What a charming scene,’ drawled a voice. ‘Tristan and Ysolde, I presume?’

  A door had opened across the corridor and when Tristan turned sharply to look, Roslyn saw past him the figure of Isabela Fernao. There was something about her that sent a small thread of shock through Roslyn, then she realized that Isabela had on a flowered chiffon robe, the bedroom kind; a sleek nude leg showed beneath the long folds for an instant, and her luxuriant hair was loose on her shoulders.

  The room out of which she had stepped was not hers. Behind her in the doorway stood Duane, his hair a coppery muzz above sardonic eyes, his shirt open like a jacket to the band of his slacks.

  ‘Where have you two been all this time?’ Isabela demanded. ‘Did you get lost?’

  ‘I think we did.’ Tristan was still holding Roslyn’s wrist, and she had a feeling he implied something subtle. ‘And what became of you - and Duane ?’

  His eyes flashed to his cousin, tall behind Isabela in the doorway of his room, from out of which she had strolled in her bedroom robe.

  ‘We went into the mellah,’ Duane’s voice was lazy as the relaxed posture he had now assumed. ‘Isabela wanted to buy a length of gaberdine - didn’t you, honey? When we came out, we looked for you two, but you must have been deep in the heart of the bazaar. Still,’ his gaze fell to the wrist Tristan held captive, ‘I don’t suppose either of you missed us.’

  ‘And vice versa,’ Tristan said smoothly.

  ‘My dear,’ Isabela was looking Roslyn up and down, ‘have you had this poor girl out in the hot sun all this time? No wonder she looks such a wreck.’

  ‘I - I must have a wash.’ Roslyn backed into her room, adding with desperate humour: ‘Tristan, my hand, please. It’s the one I soap myself with.’

  He let her go and, with a general au revoir, she closed her door and retreated from what she believed was called a ‘situation’. Poor Tristan! It must hurt when you saw exposed the clay feet of an idol, or more accurately the bare legs branching up into a golden torso equally bare beneath flowered chiffon.