Far Sanctuary

by Jane Arbor

  "Well, you won’t want to look for me, I daresay, so I needn’t tell you where I’m going. I’ve sold my car for enough to get me out. Meanwhile, forgive me if you can, and try to understand. You’ll go straight back to England if you’re wise. That’s what I’d like to think you’ll do. That - and that one day you will marry some much worthier chap...”

  Emma dropped the last sheet into her lap. The cold clamp round her heart tightened. But briefly there was relief in being able to despise Guy for his callous desertion of her before she had to face a future that was empty of him and of the reality of loving him. She read his letter through again. Not a word of the pseudo-humility of it rang true. He had simply abandoned her and run out on his other obligations by taking the line of least resistance. And “another girl”? At the thought of her – perhaps with him now! - jealousy stabbed sharply and her eyes pricked with angry tears.

  She was brushing them from each cheek in turn with the heel of her palm when suddenly she realized she was not alone. She had not heard him approach, but Mark Triton was standing a foot or two away, watching her.

  “Oh -!” The cry that broke from her was the expression of any wounded animal’s instinct to run for cover. He had surprised her in enough weakness already; she could not bear him to witness her tears for Guy. When he turned to hook a garden chair towards him, she furtively dried her eyes and was ready to face him, tight- lipped, when he sat down across the little breakfast table from her.

  Without preliminary greeting he said: “I had no news for you until it was too late to ring you last night. No certainty until around dawn, in fact-”

  “Please - you weren’t working on my account until then?" she exclaimed, in distress.

  He said dryly: “I’d promised you news, and your fiancé’s movements had eluded me until then.”

  “Don't! He - he’s not that any longer. He has gone. This letter came this morning -” She thrust it towards Mark Triton across the table-top.

  He squared its sheets, his eyes searching her face. “You want me to read it? ”

  “Please-”

  When he had done so his only comment was: “Would you care for me to fill in the gaps for you ? ”

  “Yes, I’d better know,” she agreed, dully.

  “Well, sparing you the details of my lines of inquiry, the ‘other girl’ is French and has been working as a waitress at the Casa del Sol for some months.”

  “And Guy was going there to see her, right up until I came out to Tangier?”

  “Since then, too, I daresay, as he had more time on his hands than he let you know of,” Mark Triton reminded her. “For the rest, unknown to the porteress, he had paid up his rent to the agent and had removed his things from his room earlier yesterday. He didn’t return there at all last night and he didn’t fulfill the order for the charter flight to Marseilles. He left, instead, in a coaster bound for Villefranche, which sailed on the early morning tide.’’

  “And she - the girl - went with him?”

  “No, she is still in Tangier, though for how long, of course, I don’t know. But I could arrange for you to see her if you wished?”

  Emma drew her shoulders together. “Oh no, I don’t want to. How could it help?"

  “It couldn’t.” He paused before adding: “May I admire a rare courage which already sees the, futility of — forgive the expression - picking over the bones ?”

  She frowned her rejection of his tribute. “It’s not courage,” she said. “Just the opposite, in fact. I know I couldn’t bear yet to meet the girl Guy loves more than me. So really I’m only running away from the size and shape of my defeat.”

  “You’re feeling defeated? You were deeply in love with. Trench?” .

  She nodded, not trusting her voice. And the simple “Yes” which was all she could have managed could never express her intolerable sense of regret and waste. Or her bewilderment at having been able to love Guy without ever really knowing him at all....

  She heard Mark Triton asking: “How long had you known each other?”

  “Four or five months. We met in England in the spring.”

  “And you were to Be married - when?"

  “As soon as I came out, I thought. He didn’t allow me to believe for long that that was possible. And now I see” - her lip trembled - “that he was only biding his time, making up his mind to go.”

  “Yes.” Mark Triton glanced again at Guy’s letter. “Do you accept his explanation that he wasn’t sure which of you he wanted when he allowed you to come?”

  “It sounds thin, but I suppose I must.” She avoided the shrewd question in her companion's eyes as she spoke. A lingering loyalty to Guy forbade her to admit that he had been brutally frank about his hope of financial help from her people.

  Mark Triton said: “It’s a good thing for our sex that love proverbially makes yours both tolerant and blind. Not so good, that you allow us to trade on it too often -” He frowned suddenly and with an air of wanting to change the subject he fingered Mrs. Marguan’s unopened letter towards Emma across the table. “You haven’t read this one,” he said.

  “No.” She opened it and read through the hastily- written note it contained. Mrs. Marguan wrote that she and the Commander had to leave at once for England, owing to the serious illness of their daughter who was a student there.

  “So, my dear, much as we regret it, we shan’t be in Tangier for your wedding and Charles won’t be able to give you away. But he will write from England to your padre to explain, and meanwhile you’ll get yourself married all the same!

  “Be happy, dear. We both send love. And when we return to Gib. you and your very new husband must come to stay. Affectionately, but in great haste, Georgina Marguan.”

  Emma folded the single sheet “Friends of mine in Gibraltar who have had to go back to England suddenly, writing to say they can’t be at my wedding,” she told Mark Triton. “That’s rather - funny, isn’t it?”

  "Funny?" His echo and his glance at her were sharp. “Almost funny, ha-ha,” she confirmed. She believed she could force her stiff lips into a smile and did not realize she had achieved only a grimace. “I mean - people regretting they can’t attend something that isn’t going to happen at all But on the last word her voice cracked on a note of rising hysteria and with a little empty gesture she hid her face in her hands.

  For a minute or two he allowed her to indulge the complete loss of control which the anti-climax of Mrs. Mar- guan’s letter had touched off. But when her efforts to check the hard dry sobs resulted in mirthless, unreal laughter, he was at her side, pulling her to her feet, and this time he did shake her hard.

  “Stop that,” he ordered. “Stop it, Emma - Stop!” Startled, she stopped on the instant and obeyed the insistence of his hands thrusting her back into her chair. He stood over her in silence until she looked up. Then he smiled: “Sorry. But that threatened to be an ugly moment for you. There was nothing funny about it at all, and cynicism isn’t really another word for courage, you know.”

  “No, and I’m sorry. - I - I’m all right now.” Her answering smile, though wintry, was at least a smile.

  “Good girl.” He turned to busy himself with her untouched café complet tray, and she thought that he added something to her coffee from a hip-flask before he handed her the cup. But she drank without question and was grateful for the warm strength, however induced, which flowed again along her veins.

  Presently he said: “It’ll help, you know, if you can busy yourself at once with your future plans. Have you other friends in Gibraltar or Tangier? Or do you mean to go back to England?"

  “I haven’t any other friends out here,” she told him. “But - straight back to England? No, unless I can’t help myself, that’s the last thing I want to do.”

  “But why? It’s your home, isn’t it? You should give your own people the chance to help you through the difficult time ahead of you.”

  “If I had anyone very close of my own, I would. But my parents are dead. I mad
e my home with an Uncle and aunt.”

  “Even so—are they likely to care much for the thought of your not going back?”

  “If I’m frank with than I think they’ll understand that I can fight better here, where nobody knows me, than in my own suburb where inevitably I should dread being - pitied. Besides, I resent Guy’s assumption that he can wipe me off his conscience because he knows that England is still safely there, waiting for me. I won’t run back there for refuge until I go with some sort of dignity and because I choose to go. I’ve simply got to prove to myself that I’m able to stand on my own feet without Guy.”

  “And the question of your finances now?”

  “Well, I couldn’t just loiter on here. I meant I’d see if I could get a job. In England I was in a shippers’ office. And though Guy said I’m not poly-lingual enough for an office job in Tangier, I believe I could adapt myself to anything else which offered - if anything did." “But aren’t you deciding your immediate future over soon? It can be barely an hour since you have had to face a decision at all,” Mark Triton objected.

  Emma shook her head. “I had all night for thinking. I believe I felt forewarned, from the moment when Guy didn’t keep our rendezvous, that we were up against some sort of crisis that had to be faced. I began to make plans, though of course without realizing that -” “That you’d be facing the crisis quite alone?” Her companion paused and studied the tip of his cigarette. Then: “Tell me, if you could adapt yourself to a different kind of job, could you afford personal references to a friend of mine?”

  “Oh, yes. Please, though - I didn’t mean to -”

  He ignored her embarrassment. “I’m not offering you charity. The job might or might not prove acceptable - to either side. It would be as social companion to the young sister-in-law of my friend, Señora de Coria. Briefly the position is this: Señora de Coria is the widow of a cork- exporter who died a couple of years ago and shortly before his own mother’s death left his young sister without a home. So Pilar now lives with Leonore - Señora de Coria - and Leonore is looking for a companion for her. Someone who is nearer Pilar’s age than she is herself. But, also, someone who could deal sympathetically with the particular problem that the girl presents.”

  “How old is Señorita Pilar?” asked Emma.

  “Just seventeen.”

  “And I’m twenty-one -”

  His glance was appraising, impersonal. “That’s about what I judged. And about right, I’d say, to meet the requirements of Leonore.”

  The Christian name, Emma noticed, came more easily to his tongue than the formal “Señora de Coria”, and she remembered Guy’s sour “Lately, Triton is always dancing attendance on La de Coria,” which had seemed to give the relationship a flavour of scandal. But, probably Guy’s bitterness had meant it to....

  She demurred quickly: "But I don’t understand. With my poor Spanish, should I be of any use at all?”

  He shook his head. “That doesn’t present any real difficulty. Leonore spent several years of her girlhood in England. She prefers to speak English, and Pilar speaks it adequately, too."

  “Oh, I see. And the ‘problem’ of Pilar which you spoke of, Mr. Triton?” “It’s an emotional one, largely. Pilar was passionately fond of her brother Jaime, and took his death morbidly to heart. For a child in her teens her, grief was quite ab- normal and lasted a great deal too, long. However, Leonore can best explain how you might be able to help her. What do you say?. Would you like me to arrange an interview for you with Leonore?” He rose as he spoke.

  It was work Emma had never envisaged. But, her imagination caught by its difference and the challenge of its probable demands, she said quickly: “Yes, please do. And even if I don’t get the job, I don’t know how to thank you for all you’ve done -” She paused, half expecting him to say something which would help her out. When he did not she added impulsively: “What’s more, you’re doing it believing, I think, that I’d be better advised to go back to England. Why?”

  He looked down at her, frowning a little against the sun. He said: “In fact, it’s something I have been wondering myself. Don’t let me down, will you -?”

  A moment later she was alone again with the empty shell of her future which was all that Guy had left her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE Villa Mirador stood back from the Rue San Francisco behind six-foot walls and double wrought-iron gates, of which the delicate scrollwork was repeated in the bougainvillea-hung balconies of the first floor windows. The windows themselves were shuttered against the late afternoon sun, and even the house had an air of being in siesta as Emma approached it for her interview with señora de Coria.

  She had practised a careful statement of her business in Spanish. But the Moorish maid who answered the door had a wide, childlike smile for her and was evidently expecting her. She stood aside in silent invitation to Emma to enter the cool tessellated hall and then managed in English: “señora de Coria likes the Señorita to mount to her room. Please?” before leading the way up the short curving staircase.

  The upper hall was also cool, but sunnier, as at its far end a window was open to a view of unstirring trees.. The doors of natural oak giving on to the hall were shut, but the maid signalled Emma to one of them and when her knock was answered she announced: “Señorita Redfern” to the perfumed twilight within before she slipped quietly away.

  The sharp sunshine from which Emma had emerged put her at a disadvantage. At first she was only vaguely aware of the luxury of the boudoir in which she found herself. Then she could focus on details - the pale green silk hangings, the matching circular rugs on the marble- paved floor, the appointments of the toilet-table all in green cut glass. Seconds later, she could discern more clearly the woman who lay back against the piled pillows of a long rattan chair.

  Leonore de Coria wore a negligee of incredibly finely pleated nylon, its halter neckline wide and low. Above its snowiness her shoulders and the column of her throat were a smooth dark gold; the mass of her Titian hair was a flame. In the shadowed room even her eyes seemed to reflect the tawny fire of the great square topaz she wore as a ring. At once Emma saw the likeness of her colouring and air to that of a tiger-lily, and later, was to wonder at the sureness of her first comparison between that blazing, curled arrogance of flowerhood and Leonore de Coria...

  She did not rise, and the gesture of her forefinger in Emma’s direction was languidly imperative. When Emma had taken the chair she indicated, she said, hiding a yawn behind her hand: “Really, I can’t think why I asked you to come at such an hour. I always rest until six. But I suppose any time would have been equally tiresome, and at least you have found me at home.”

  Her voice was low-pitched and lazy, but apart from an oddly-accented syllable or two, her English faultlessly expressed the grudging welcome which did nothing to put Emma at ease. When Emma murmured: “I could have come at any other time which suited you, señora de Coria,” she was further daunted by the long look of slightly insolent appraisal to which the other woman was subjecting her.

  The result of this measurement of Emma emerged at last. Leonore de Coria commented: “Well, certainly no one could mistake you for anything but English,” and managed to convey a subtle offence by the phrase. She went on: “Your name is Redfern? You are twenty-one, and you have been in Tangier - how long?”

  “I came out at the beginning of July. I was expecting to be married. But my engagement - fell through.” How much more than the bald details of her plight Mark Triton had already told or expected her to pass on, Emma did not know. But the other woman merely continued: “Yes, well - it’s not important to me, that. I would rather hear what Mr. Triton gave you to understand about my needs?”

  Emma said: “He told me you were looking for a companion for your sister-in-law, señora.” By way of a retort which she could not resist she added: “He was good enough to suggest that my being English wouldn’t stand in my way if you found me suitable otherwise.”

  The
tawny eyes narrowed. “And in saying so, was he chiefly concerned to suit you, I wonder? Me? Or just finding you eminently suitable himself ?”

  Emma drew herself up. “I think,” she said stiffly, “that he believed he was suggesting an arrangement which might suit everyone. Certainly not that he hoped to be able to press my services upon you against your better judgment.”

  Leonore de Coria’s fleeting smile was a secret thing, without warmth. A foam of snowy nylon fell back from the graceful curve of her arms as she stretched them up-ward, meeting her fingertips before clasping her hands behind her head. “Well, of course, that goes without saying,” she commented lazily. “Even Mark Triton - whom, within limits, I indulge in most things which he makes a point of favour from me - wouldn’t presume quite so far as to thrust upon me a protégée of his for whom I had utterly no use -”

  Emma’s hold upon her bag shifted and tightened as she made to rise. She had to summon all her control to say, without overt rudeness: “There was no question of seeking a favour from you, Señora de Coria. Mr. Triton spoke only of a vacancy to be filled. And I am not his ‘protégée’!”

  Leonore de Coria shrugged. “So? All I want to know is where Mark has placed me in the matter, and also to find out whether he has allowed you to cherish fanciful illusions about the depth of his interest in you. After all, your situation does afford you a certain appeal, and a Spanish girl could conjure all sorts of silly expectations from finding herself under the wing of a man of influence like Mark Triton.”