by Isobel Chace
‘Yes, of course,’ she said quickly.
‘I’d better go,’ Gloria hissed across the room as he disappeared into the kitchen. ‘I had no idea things were like that between you. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘There’s nothing to tell!’ Stephanie said weakly.
‘No?’ said Gloria. ‘I’ll go anyway.’ She gathered up her things with a disapproving sniff and walked quickly towards the door. ‘I don’t like this sort of hole and corner business, but it won’t do any harm to wish you good luck. Having seen the opposition, I think you’re going to need it!’
CHAPTER V
Cas emerged from the kitchen triumphant, a can of beer in his hand.
‘Just testing your domestic organisation,’ he teased her. ‘You’ve underrated my capacity, though. I can get through your whole supply in a single evening.’
‘I didn’t get it in for you!’
His confidence was undaunted. ‘No? Are you a secret beer drinker, my love?’
‘I had it for my father,’ she said repressively. How like him, she thought, to walk in on her when she was least expecting him and to take command of her arrangements as though he had every right to do so and without so much as a by your leave! Didn’t he know that he had set the office tongues gossiping about the two of them, for the chances were thin that Gloria would keep such a spicy item to herself?
‘I never doubted it,’ he drawled. ‘Want some?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t like it.’ She sounded as stuffy as she felt, but she didn’t care. If he didn’t like the coolness of her welcome, he could always go back to Amber!
‘I came for a reason,’ he said. He folded his length into the corner of the sofa and patted the vacant seat beside him. ‘I started to think about you, honey, and I don’t think you’re the sort to cry about nothing. What was it all about?’
‘Nothing.’ Now she sounded sulky as well as everything else, she thought in despair.
‘There’s nothing you want to tell me about?’
He patted the seat beside him again and she sat down quickly, almost collapsing on to the sofa, because her knees felt suddenly weak and quite unable to support her. The dreadful thing was that if she didn’t make an effort now he would know—Only there was nothing to know, because she wasn’t sure herself, at least, she wasn’t completely sure. How could she be? Nothing like this had ever happened to her before!
She cast him a confused glance from beneath her lashes and as promptly wished she hadn’t, for the look in his bright blue eyes had a chaotic effect on her mental processes, sending her into a delicious panic. She should have sat further away from him, anything rather than betray to him the effect he was having on her.
‘What did you really do with Casimir’s dreamboat?’ she asked him, no longer sounding either stuffy or sulky.
‘With what?’
She lowered her eyes, looking demure. ‘That was Gloria’s name for her. Did you really lose her on the dance floor?’
‘She isn’t the kind to be short of partners,’ he answered dryly. ‘I’ll take you to see her act one of these days, if you like? She’s quite something!’
Stephanie could imagine! ‘I suppose you’ve known her a long time?’ she said carefully.
He put a finger under her chin and turned her face towards him. ‘A couple of years. I met her first in Beirut, and I’ve seen her from time to time ever since. Anything else you want to know?’
Yes! She passionately wanted to know what Amber meant to him. She wasn’t the sort of person that any man could contemplate with only platonic friendship in mind. She was far too beautiful for that! Too beautiful and too exotic by far!
‘I suppose not,’ she said.
He picked up his can of beer and poured some of the frothy fluid straight down his throat, without troubling to pour it into a glass. ‘Amber would be flattered,’ he said.
She didn’t know what he meant by that. She watched, fascinated, the smooth, tanned column of his throat as the beer disappeared without his seeming to swallow even once.
‘How do you do that?’ she demanded.
‘It’s an old college trick.’ He smiled at her, his eyes bright. ‘You shouldn’t tempt me to show off. If you look at me like that, I might be tempted to try out another trick or two I have up my sleeve.’
She looked away hastily, her breath catching in her throat. ‘Like what?’
He grinned. ‘I think it’s a bit soon to give you a demonstration. Besides, if you don’t like beer, I’ll drink something else before I show you what I mean. I don’t want to give you a distaste of me!’
She was unaccountably disappointed. The colour came and went in her cheeks as she made a determined effort to pretend that she hadn’t understood him.
‘You shouldn’t have come here!’ she burst out with a petulance of which she had not known herself capable. ‘Gloria will spread it all over the office that you’re interested in me!’
‘So I am.’ He frowned. ‘Are you ashamed of being seen with me?’
‘Of course not!’
‘Then I don’t see your problem.’ His very gentleness disturbed her more than his anger would have done. ‘Do you want me to go?’
‘No,’ she admitted.
‘Good.’ He relaxed completely, with his long legs stuck out in front of him, and shut his eyes. ‘Gloria would gossip about us whatever we do, partly because she’s the type, and partly because she’s jealous of you. If I were you, I shouldn’t get too friendly with her. She’ll make your life a misery if you let her. I’ve seen her kind before.’
She opened her eyes wide, deliberately mocking him. ‘In America?’
‘You meet the same types all over the world, my dear, especially in America, and especially on the distaff side.’
‘I suppose you’ve met my type before too,’ she said huffily.
He opened his eyes and smiled at her, watching the colour edge up her neck and face. ‘Not quite like you,’ he drawled. ‘And believe me, I’d have noticed if I had!’
‘No English roses?’ she pressed him.
He studied her thoughtfully. ‘Are there honey-coloured roses? I think you’re a less obvious flower altogether. Perhaps not a flower at all, but a sheaf of corn, like one of those delightful corn-dollies that country people make. Highly decorative!’
She made no effort to hide her pleasure at the compliment. ‘Perhaps I’m more complicated than you think,’ she murmured.
‘Corn-dollies come in some very intricate designs,’ he answered.
She hesitated, feeling unaccountably guilty. ‘Cas, do you ever wonder if you’re doing the right thing? I mean, do you always put your loyalty to your work first?’
‘I put it before my own comfort.’
That gave her a jolt. Was it more comfortable to think she was being loyal to her father, when perhaps she ought to trust him more? Was she only afraid of the hornet’s nest she might stir up by telling Cas about the letters? But supposing, just supposing her father had written the letters and she were the one to bring it to the company’s attention. Would she ever be able to forgive herself?
‘Well?’ he prompted her.
She shook her head. ‘I have to work it out for myself,’ she said.
‘But you’d tell me if you told anyone?’
‘Yes—yes, I would!’
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’ll be content with that. I can wait.’
‘But how do you know you can trust me?’ she fretted. ‘Half of me doesn’t think I’m right at all! Only—’
‘I’d trust you against pretty long odds. You’ll tell me when you’re good and ready.’
She didn’t know how he could be so certain. ‘I may never tell you. I hope I won’t have to!’
‘If it concerns your father, so do I! You look tired, my dear. How about leaving everything for now and getting an early night?’
‘I haven’t done the washing up!’
He stood up immediately. ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ he
volunteered. He pulled her to her feet, combing her fringe into position with his fingers. ‘I wonder if I ought to make you tell me now, away from the office,’ he mused. ‘It may be that Cas can be a great deal more sympathetic to your cause than Mr. Ruddock will be able to be. I’m not my own master when I’m on duty, my dear.’
‘I shouldn’t expect any favours from you—ever.’ she insisted.
The smile he gave her was decidedly wry. ‘You might not expect it, but I should find it very hard not to do my best to protect you, no matter what the circumstances.’ He took her hands in his, looking down at her neatly shaped nails and the network of little lines that crisscrossed her palms. ‘You have more power than you know,’ he said finally. ‘Use it wisely, little one.’
Stephanie wasn’t accustomed to having anyone to help her with the washing-up. Cas gave the impression of filling the whole kitchen as he stood beside her at the sink, accepting the soapy dishes from her hand and drying them carefully before placing them on the table for her to put away.
‘You ought to rinse them if you want to stay healthy,’ he told her. ‘The best way is to have a double sink, like we have back home, then all you have to do is to slip the dishes out of the detergent and into the plain water to rinse them.’
‘You sound as though you wash-up all the time,’ she said.
‘Why not? I eat all the time too!’ He sniffed appreciatively at the remains of the chicken dish, sticking a finger into it and tasting it thoughtfully with his head on one side. ‘Not bad at all!’ he commented. ‘It’s a darned sight better than the mess Amber and I were served tonight.’
‘At your hotel?’
‘No, not there! I moved out of there this morning and into your erstwhile apartment. No, Amber feels she might be recognised if she goes anywhere anyone has ever heard of. Tonight’s retreat was an all-time low!’ His eyes met hers with a flash of amusement. ‘You didn’t miss a thing!’
She turned on both taps so that she wouldn’t have to answer and was hardly surprised at all when he reached over and turned them off again. ‘I’m washing! You’re supposed to be drying!’ she rebuked him.
‘Very unhygienic! One ought really to leave them to drain!’
‘I haven’t the space! Besides, I didn’t ask you to help! I’d just as soon you went and sat down and left me to it. It would feel a lot less crowded, if you want to know. I might even have room to breathe!’
He turned her round forcibly to face him, taking first the plate she was holding and dropping it into the bowl of water and then the cloth which he threw into the corner of the sink.
‘Stephanie, don’t try me too far!’ he warned her. ‘What do you suppose you do to my breathing?’ He looked down at her agitated face and lifted her clear off her feet until she could look him straight in the eyes. Only she didn’t feel able to look at him at all! She wriggled her toes and her shoes fell off with a little plop. He gave no sign of even noticing. His blue eyes blazed with sudden emotion and he kissed her very gently full on the lips. ‘And don’t pretend you don’t like it!’ he commanded her with a masterful air. ‘You like it every bit as much as I do!’
He put her back on her feet, pushed her fringe back into position one last time with a proprietorial hand, and walked out of the kitchen. He didn’t even hurry. Stephanie heard the front door shut behind him, but she made no attempt to move. If she hadn’t known it before, she knew it now. She was in acute danger of falling deeply and irrevocably in love with Casimir Ruddock! And she was very much afraid that he knew it too.
It was too early in the morning for there to be many people in the courtyard of the College of the Mother of the Shah. Stephanie had woken early and had spent nearly an hour watching the sun come up through the rosy glow of dawn behind the dome of the College. Her thoughts were too uncomfortable for her to want to dwell on them. Indeed, she seemed to have spent most of the night worrying about the letters she had found, wishing she had confided in Cas when he had first given her the opportunity, and then falling into a fit of despair when she considered what the future held for her. It had made for a very long night and she had been quite glad to see the darkness finally give way to the pale light of day.
She had made herself some coffee and had thought about going back to bed, but the relative smallness of her new apartment, which hadn’t mattered at all until that moment, seemed suddenly oppressive and, without conscious volition, she had started off down the street and had found herself outside the magnificent silver doors of the Madrasseh itself. For a moment she thought it might be locked, but the door opened to her touch and she slipped into the shadowed interior with a sense of wonder. She had half expected that she would be disappointed in the building that supported the dome she had come to love. Instead she was overwhelmed by the charm of its setting, and she was no longer surprised that it had been described to her as the last of the truly great buildings of the Safavid period in Iran.
The College had been built between the years of 1706-14, under the patronage of the mother of Shah Sultan Husain, as a seminary for theological students. Nowadays, although the place is still open for prayer, there are no students left. The building has been magnificently restored, however, from the ruin it had become, and Stephanie was well content to wander through the stalactite-vaulted iwan and into the vaulted octagonal vestibule where stands a huge stone basin used for ritual ablutions. It was the main court that she liked best of all for, instead of the usual paving stones, she found herself in a delightful garden, set about with pools that reflected in their depths both the building and the white-stemmed chinars which shaded the open space from the rigours of the noonday sun in summer.
Stephanie was still standing, looking around her, when a small figure came up to her out of the shadows, allowing her chador to fall away from her face to reveal a welcoming smile.
‘I have never seen you here before!’ Fatemeh greeted her. ‘It is lovely at this time of day, isn’t it?’
‘I should think it’s lovely at any time of the day!’ Stephanie exclaimed,
‘Yes, but it is nicer before the tourists come and all one can hear is the clicking of cameras and bright, brittle voices!’
Stephanie gave the Persian girl a startled look. ‘Is that how we sound to you?’ she asked.
Fatemeh nodded regretfully. ‘I expect we often sound strident to you, though, don’t we?’
‘Not to me personally,’ Stephanie denied.
‘But then not all Europeans make noises like birds,’ Fatemeh laughed at her. ‘I have never heard you giggle and gossip as Gloria does, and who can imagine Mr. Ruddock talking other than like this?’ She gave a very creditable imitation of Cas’s deep voice slightly slurring his consonants, especially the ‘t’s and ‘d’s, so that they were indistinguishable to an English ear.
Stephanie giggled then. ‘Can you imitate everyone as well as that?’ she asked.
Fatemeh looked pleased. ‘It’s my—how do you say it?—my party trick!’ She lifted her voice almost an octave, setting her mouth in a tight, round shape. ‘Have you ever seen anything like our Mr. Ruddock? He doesn’t set my heart beating any faster, of course, but do you know, Miss Black actually allowed him to trim her hair! I think there must be something there, don’t you?’
Stephanie could feel herself blushing. ‘I’d like to see her stop Mr. Ruddock doing anything he had set his mind on—’
‘But it looks pretty, Stephanie! Why should you pay any attention to anything Gloria says? We all know what she is like.’
Stephanie couldn’t help remembering Gloria as she had last seen her, and her mouth had been exactly as Fatemeh had betrayed it, and her eyes full of jealous dislike for herself. She shivered, feeling suddenly cold. No one had ever disliked her before that she could remember, not with the implacable malice that she had seen on Gloria’s face last night, and she wondered what she could have done to the other girl to have inspired such hatred.
‘I wish I liked her better,’ she sighed.
&nbs
p; But Fatemeh was unimpressed. ‘She doesn’t wish you to like her. Surely you know that? When she came out here she expected to work for the top man, but your father brought you with him, and now, when she might have replaced you with Mr. Ruddock, he seems more than content with you—in and out of the office!’
‘He’s no more than friendly! Americans have a gift for getting on quickly with other people. They don’t need time to get to know one, like we in England do!’
‘And we in Iran! We are very good to foreigners—we never shot them, not even when we were still fighting, one village against the next, all the time. But we suspect all strangers to the very last, until they have proved themselves to us!’
‘Then you must suspect me?’ Stephanie challenged her, but Fatemeh only laughed at the thought.
‘You have never been a stranger, Stephanie. I have always felt at home with you!’
Stephanie’s eyes misted, feeling as though she had had a medal pinned on her. ‘I thought I had the reputation for being stand-offish and aloof?’
‘Not amongst us Iranians. How could you think that?’
Stephanie knew very well why she had thought it. ‘I don’t know, I just did,’ she said. She was tempted to tell Fatemeh about her evening the night before, if only to spike Gloria’s guns before she got busy regaling the office with her version of what had happened. But how was she to explain Cas’s visit even to Fatemeh? She couldn’t explain it to herself! All she knew was that she had only to think of him standing beside her at the sink in her tiny kitchen for her heart to go into an acrobatic, swooping action that made her feel quite dizzy and peculiar, and quite unlike her usual orderly, slightly staid and even more serious self.
‘Do you come here often?’ she said instead.
Fatemeh chuckled. ‘All the time. I come for the morning prayer when I want to be alone. It will not be long now before I am to marry, and it is good to prepare oneself well for our new life.’ She turned impulsively to Stephanie. ‘Will you come to my wedding? I should like you to be there! It will be such a happy day for me!’