City of Palms

by Pamela Kent

  She preceded him out into the patio, and he provided her with a chair and offered her a cigarette as he usually did at this hour of the evening. Then they sat for a while in absolute silence, with the night deepening around them, so that it was once more very dark beneath the colonnades, a darkness touched with the phosphorescent light of stars peeping at themselves in the waters at the base of the fountain.

  Susan was so aware of the silence, curiously emphasized by the tinkling music of the fountain, and of the velvet quality of the shadows that engulfed her, that she began to feel as if they were declared enemies attempting to test the strength of her nerves and her resistance to unbearable tension. She clasped her hands tightly together in her lap, having refused the cigarette that would have kept one of them at least occupied, and as an attempt to divert her thoughts sought to work up some feeling of regret because she had had so little opportunity to talk to Nick Arnwood alone before he had gone back to Baghdad.

  The only opportunity they had had to talk naturally to one another was in the last few minutes before he left, when the others had permitted her to see him off in his car alone. And then all he had wanted to extract from her was information as to how and where Ayse had been infected by food-poisoning, and when she told him about the Villa of Stars, and the long week-end they had spent there—but not about the disappearance of the jug of lemon squash—he had looked both interested and thoughtful.

  “H’m!” he had exclaimed, at last. “It must have been a pretty grim bout, because she looks very much pulled down at the moment.” He pinched her cheek gently. “You must look after yourself in this climate, my dear, and don’t you start picking up anything!”

  As he got into his car and pressed the self-starter button, he looked at her with rather a quizzical gleam in his eyes.

  “Do you know,” he said, “I don’t think your Mehmet Bey likes me very much. Do you think it’s jealousy?”

  “Jealousy?”

  “Yes. Because I’m an old friend of yours.”

  “But that’s all you are!” she exclaimed. “And in any case...”

  “Yes?” as she paused.

  Susan felt herself flushing brilliantly, revealingly.

  “In any case, why should he be jealous of you? Or—or any man I know?”

  “Ask yourself that question, not me!” Arnwood replied, as if she amused him. “You’re a woman—and, if I may say so, an extremely attractive one, Sue!—and I’m only a mere man!”

  But as she followed the progress of his car as it swept through the gates she told herself that he was being quite ridiculous. If Mehmet Bey hadn’t taken him it was solely on account of Ayse, for a man in love with another woman didn’t concern himself with the masculine acquaintances of a girl he was merely employing.

  In the case of Nicholas Carlton it was different, for Ayse had wanted to marry him.

  She was telling herself that it was odd that two men with the same Christian name should make their impact on Ayse’s life, but that Mehmet Bey had no cause to feel anxiety where the doctor was concerned, because he was a man of unassailable integrity, when her silent companion in the patio abruptly crushed out his cigarette beneath the heel of his shoe, and then addressed her as if the action had released a good deal of pent-up feeling.

  “I suppose you thought it was clever to let me think you and Carlton were old friends, and that it was he who wrote in your book?”

  Susan tensed herself, her fingers clutching at one another.

  “You rather assumed all that for yourself, didn’t you?”

  “But there was no reason why you should allow me to continue in a wrong assumption.”

  “It didn’t seem—very important,” she answered, rather feebly, while he sprang from his chair and started pacing up and down behind her like a caged tiger in the gloom.

  “You mean that your friends, your purely personal affairs, are nothing to do with me? I’m merely a man you met for the first time in an airliner, and whom you now look upon as someone who pays you a salary? The fact that I insulted you on the night of your arrival, and have made myself look a fool since by giving you advice about Carlton, is unimportant—so unimportant that you never really bothered to defend yourself!”

  “I”—Susan swallowed—“it didn’t seem to me that you would listen to any defence. You were so completely convinced.”

  “Nonsense.” He stood behind her chair, and she could feel anger emanating from every pore of his body. “You had only to tell me that you had never met Carlton before you arrived in Baghdad, and that it was an English doctor who wrote in your book. Another Nick!” He sounded as if the name was causing a constriction in his throat. “What could have been simpler than that, and why shouldn’t I have believed it?”

  “I don’t know.” It was no use telling him about the promise Ayse had extracted from her, but she wished miserably that she could. “Except that I don’t believe you would have listened to me on the night of my arrival.”

  “We discussed the matter a couple of days later. You could have told me then.”

  She remained silent, a little alarmed by that concentrated violence that seemed to be waiting to pounce on her behind her chair. She had never known a man like him before—a man who could become so possessed by anger about something which should have struck him as trivial that it was making his voice shake a trifle, while at the same time it was cold as his eyes. She felt as if she had committed a crime of major importance.

  “You could have told me then,” he repeated.

  Susan stood up, and backed away from him.

  “I think,” she said, her own voice not quite like her normal voice, “that you are making a great deal of fuss about something that is really trifling.”

  “I see.” She saw him gnawing hard at his lower lip. “I wonder whether you are really as cool and remote and uninterested in men as you would make it appear? Your friend Dr. Arnwood treats you as if you were his sister, and it’s quite obvious you have no desire for him to treat you in any other fashion, and Nick Carlton doesn’t seem to be making much impression on you—unless he hasn’t tried very hard! I, of course, am not a fellow-countryman, and so I suppose I don’t count! Because I don’t live the narrow little life you are accustomed to, you probably think I’m barely civilized!”

  “Are you?” she asked suddenly, without quite realizing that she allowed the words actually to pass her lips, and she looked up at him in a sudden questioning fashion. But he took a quick step towards her, and once more she shrank backwards.

  “What do you mean? Am I?”

  “I don’t know...”

  She felt suddenly terrified by what she had said, and his reaction to it. It was such an instantaneous and unconcealed reaction that the sight of his dark eyes with those frightening lights in them blazing through the gloom filled her, suddenly, with a surge of panic.

  She remembered that night when she had annoyed him once before, but on this occasion she had the feeling that she could not escape the results of what she had done.

  His voice went suddenly soft and silken.

  “So you do think I’m not in the same category with men like Arnwood and Carlton! ... You think I’m primitive, that I belong here in the heart of the desert, and that I’ve mixed blood, and being mixed it can’t be good blood! You think I’m uncivilized because I refused to allow Ayse to make a mess of her life, and because I treat women somewhat differently to your precious pair of Englishmen! Because I don’t believe they’re always capable of making wise decisions for themselves, and sometimes they have too much freedom!”

  Before she could back away still further he reached out and caught her by her slender hands in a grip of steel and, drawing her towards him, almost in the same movement crushed her up against him with so much strength and purpose that she could hardly breathe.

  “There’s only one way of finding out whether you’re as highly civilized as you look,” he told her, “and I’m going to make the experiment!”

  CH
APTER TEN

  AFTERWARDS Susan realized that what prevented her from offering any fierce resistance was a kind of exquisite terror that came upon her and petrified her limbs, and temporarily numbed her wits. She did make one or two abortive attempts to free herself—attempts such as a trapped bird might make—and the thought that at all costs she must avoid the downward thrust of that dark face that loomed above her caused her to twist her own face away in a sudden agony of desperation.

  But while one arm held her with brutal firmness, his free hand caught at her chin and forced her face out into the open, and as the starlight made it look small and mute and pale, she looked almost fascinatedly into his eyes. The conviction seized her that there were demons dancing up and down in them, and they were blazing in such a way that they seemed to mesmerize her. And when his lips fastened upon hers it was just as if something rushed at her and engulfed her, and she knew that however wildly she might seek to escape from it in future, for her there never would again be any escape.

  How long that kiss lasted she had no idea, but while it lasted the stars were blotted out above the patio, and the world about her ceased to exist. There was no fountain falling into a marble basin, or sleepy chirrup of pigeons roosting somewhere under the colonnades. There were no frightening shadows, or patches of white light. There was only a sudden wild desire which sprang to life in Susan—like the uprush of a hidden spring—to respond, and go on responding, to the pressure of that relentless mouth upon her own, and without her knowledge her hands reached out and clutched at him.

  He lifted his head for a bare few seconds and gazed at her, and she thought he smiled crookedly. Then once more his lips were on hers, and this time he seemed deliberately to savor the sweetness of the soft mouth that he had just bruised brutally with his own, and a little of the ferocity fled away, and the kiss acquired a different meaning. Susan felt as if her bones melted, and she went utterly limp against him. Resistance was no longer possible, and she had no strength left to cling to him because he had drained it all away through her lips.

  And then he let her go so suddenly that she was forced to put out a hand and steady herself against one of the supporting pillars of the colonnade.

  “Well?” he said, and although his eyes mocked, the lights in them seemed to have been extinguished and they were intensely dark. “What is your own opinion of the result of that experiment?”

  Susan turned blindly towards the open windows behind her.

  “I’d like to go to bed,” she said. “Good night!”

  “Just a moment,” Mehmet Bey said. There was no derision in his voice, but it held a note that checked her. “I offer you my profound apologies, Susan,” he told her, with a stiffness she had never known from him before—a stiffness and stiltedness that caused her, despite the fact that she still felt strangely bemused, to look at him more carefully, and to note that there was absolutely no expression in his face. “An Englishman would not have behaved like that, would he?—Not an Englishman like Arnwood! He would have remembered that he was your employer, and that he had given his word to your father that you would receive the same treatment as his sister! And that’s why I beg you to overlook the lapse!”

  But he did not sound as if he was begging her to do anything—he sounded aloof and unapproachable, and even rather icily arrogant.

  “There’s not very much point in talking about it, is there?” Susan replied, realizing that words did not come easily to her just then. And she turned once more towards the windows.

  But he got between her and the rays of mellow golden light that streamed across the rugs and the furniture in the big room behind him.

  “I think there is,” he insisted, with a kind of deadly quietness. “I want you to understand that there is no danger of such a lapse being repeated!” For one instant, as she looked directly up at him, a kind of piteous bewilderment chased itself across her face, and she caught her lower lip between her teeth because it felt traitorously inclined to tremble. And then she forced her voice to sound remote and detached as she answered: “In that case, and as I’m really very tired, may I please go upstairs to my room?”

  “In a moment,” he told her again. “But will you first let me know that my apology is accepted?”

  “I—” She pushed back a strand of the golden hair that had become disordered in the wildness of his embrace, and although the gesture was purely mechanical, her hand—like her lower lip—felt unsteady and fumbling. “Yes—yes, it’s accepted,” she said, almost in a whisper.

  For several seconds there was silence between them—seconds that seemed like minutes to her, with the tinkling music of the fountain uncannily loud in such a silence. And then he informed her in the same toneless voice he had used before: “Before he left this afternoon I invited your doctor friend to spend a week or so here before he went back to England. I understand he’s interested in the opening of a new clinic, and is not in any particular hurry to return.”

  Susan stared at him in amazement.

  “You invited—Nick?”

  “Yes.” He looked down at the cool marble pavement beneath his feet. “The other Nicholas of your acquaintance!”

  “But—but he didn’t say anything to me!”

  “Didn’t he?” Mehmet Bey shrugged his shoulders. “Nevertheless, he accepted the invitation. And you”—looking up at her swiftly and impenetrably—“will regain some of your confidence now that you know he is coming! And by the time he departs that will be once more firmly established.”

  But Susan felt she had had more than enough for one night, and she made a little determined movement to pass him, and this time he turned and accompanied her across the gleaming floor in the direction of the silken curtains beyond which lay the hall and the handsome baroque staircase.

  He held aside the curtains for her, bowed in his distinctly foreign manner without looking at her, and then, as soon as her slight bade was turned, watched her walk towards the staircase.

  “Sleep well,” he said, and whether there was mockery in his voice she couldn’t tell, for she was incapable just then of distinguishing between shades and inflections in a voice which must have struck anyone else who overheard it as merely smooth and polite.

  But when she reached her room she stood for a minute in the middle of it, taking in all the familiar appointments and feeling, for the first time, actually oppressed by the luxury; then took a few steps towards her bed and flung herself down on it, clutching convulsively at the pillow. He had said that the lapse would never be repeated, and that by the time Nick took his departure her confidence would be re-established I And all that she wanted—all that she craved!—was to be back in his arms, and to feel his kisses on her mouth, and, even if they hurt her, to know that it was merely the madness of his desire to kiss her and not because he was anxious to try out an experiment!

  An experiment!...

  The experiment had taught her that for her the future loomed empty indeed—unbearably empty!—and she buried her face in her pillows and indulged in the luxury of overwrought tears.

  Two days later she and Ayse lunched with Dr. Arnwood in Baghdad, and although Ayse looked as if she enjoyed every minute of that lunch, Susan had to make a supreme effort to appear as if she found any enjoyment in it at all.

  They had been driven in by Raoul’s own chauffeur in the big cream car, and Arnwood himself welcomed them in the entrance to his hotel. It was too early for pre-lunch cocktails, and so they had had coffee, and then Ayse explained that she wished to visit a particular corner of the bazaar where wonderful lengths of material could be obtained. So Nick acted as their escort, and afterwards carried Ayse’s parcels when she became loaded down with them.

  Today Ayse had lost her diffidence and her faint air of wishing to be allowed to remain in the background, and Susan was sure that she did actively and openly flirt with her old friend from England. It was the most charming manner of entering into a flirtation Susan had ever seen, with nothing obvious or too provocative
about it, but accompanied by long, shy looks under devastating eyelashes, vivid but delicious blushes, and utterly irresistible smiles.

  Nicholas Arnwood responded by plainly feeling quite unable to take his eyes off her, and as she was wearing primrose silk and a large white hat beneath which her perfect heart-shaped face looked both flawless and appealing, Susan was not in the least surprised to see him worshipping, as it were, at the shrine of beauty. The thing which did surprise her was that it was obviously not merely the beauty that moved him and caused him to look so much in open admiration. Ayse herself—the gentle, uncertain, slightly timorous Ayse—seemed to have done something to him that no other woman, so far as Susan was aware, had ever succeeded in doing.

  A fashionable London practice, through which he must have met many attractive women, had seemed up till now to fill his life. That and his regular attendance at hospitals where his reputation was well established, his lectures and daily commitments, his interest in little-known tropical diseases, had seemed to leave no room for the softer feminine influences, or for such a thing as marriage.

  He had allowed the silver threads to invade the night-darkness of his hair above the temples, and his age to creep within a year or so of forty before discovering a woman who apparently had the power to make him forget everything but a desire to watch her and talk to her and listen while she consented to talk almost eagerly to him. While she put guileless questions to him about his life in London, the things he did, and the things he enjoyed doing. And when she discovered that many of those things were things she enjoyed doing herself, a flush of pleasure overspread her face, and to Susan the moment became one of embarrassment.