by Lynne Graham
‘Discussed?’ Bethany repeated strickenly.
‘Our family may not suffer from the embarrassing intrusion of television crews and tabloid reporters in Datar but then our people have no need of such devices to know what we do. This is a small country and Datari society rejoices in a most effective form of the bush telegraph. The chemist will have been on the phone to his wife as soon as the door shut behind you, and she will have phoned all her friends while he was phoning his friends to share this exciting titbit, and within days everybody who is anybody hears of your interesting purchase. Had you wanted to maintain secrecy, you should have called me.’
Bethany’s legs wouldn’t hold her up any more. Wordlessly, clumsily, she sank down on the chair behind her.
‘I gather the test proved positive.’ Laila sighed. ‘Razul must be told.’
‘No!’ she gasped in horror.
‘Well, if you do not tell him I will,’ Laila informed her with flat impatience. ‘It is none of my business that you have driven my brother from you. I do not like you for it but the fact that you may be carrying the next heir to the throne of our country overrides all other considerations, and if you do not accept that fact you are indeed a very foolish woman!’
Bethany was paper-pale and furious. ‘I did not drive your brother anywhere! He left me!’
Laila looked angrily contemptuous. ‘I am aware that you want to leave him. He told me that—’
‘He was lying!’
‘My brother does not tell lies—’
‘But then you don’t know the promise he made to your father, do you?’ Bethany slung back with abrasive bitterness as she rose to her feet again.
‘I do know that he promised that if the marriage didn’t work out he would remarry without argument or fuss.’
‘But you don’t know that our marriage wasn’t a real marriage, do you?’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Laila enquired impatiently. ‘Did not my brother wait two years to win my father’s permission to marry you?’
‘But only temporarily, because that’s all your father would agree to...and what does that matter anyway now?’ Bethany demanded unsteadily. ‘Razul has walked out on me—’
‘Temporarily? What nonsense are you talking? Razul loves you. Everyone in Datar knows how much Razul loves you!’ Laila asserted with complete exasperation. ‘In the end everyone also supported his right to choose his own bride, and you were a very popular choice because you are from the West. Many find this glamorous and also encouraging proof of Datar’s new liberal image.
‘It is true that my deeply pessimistic father was stubbornly set against such a marriage, but only because he was afraid Razul would be hurt as he was hurt...that you would find our culture impossible to adapt to and that the marriage would end in divorce as his did.’
Bethany licked her wobbling lower lip, frozen to the carpet by shock. ‘Razul doesn’t love me—’
‘Of course he blasted well loves you, you stupid woman!’ Laila shot at her with raw impatience. ‘And now he’s undergoing the tortures of the damned listening to my father miserably bemoan the fact that he ever agreed to him marrying you! What the hell do you think it is like for Razul right now? His romantic, fairytale marriage has gone down the tubes so fast he feels a complete failure, and he feels he’s let the whole family down by marrying you, and he’s got my father muttering “I told you so” at every available opportunity... so don’t you dare talk about—leaving him!’
A strangled sob punctuated Laila’s last words. She turned away, visibly fighting to conceal her distress. Bethany was reeling with shock. Was it possible that she had somehow misunderstood Razul about the temporary nature of their marriage? She so badly wanted to believe what she was hearing that she was dizzy.
‘I am sorry to have called you stupid...’ Laila said stiltedly, having firmly reinstated her usual self-command. ‘But I love my brother very much and I cannot bear to see him in such pain.’
‘I love him too,’ Bethany managed in a wobbly voice. What had he said? Something about being unable to live with this rope hanging over his head? But he had always behaved as though he didn’t expect her to stay...hadn’t he? But then that didn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t want her to stay, did it? It might only suggest that he was very insecure about her feelings for him...
‘Then what the heck is going on between the two of you?’ Laila demanded blankly. ‘I don’t understand.’
Ten minutes later Bethany was rigidly seated in Laila’s chauffeur-driven Mercedes. ‘If your brother shoots me down in flames,’ she warned shakily, ‘you do understand that it will be my turn to call you a very stupid, foolish woman?’
Laila laughed with amusement. ‘That is an opportunity you will be denied.’
Bethany wished she had that confidence. Could Razul have left her because he believed she was planning to leave him? That pride—that incredible pride of his, she recalled painfully as her fingers knotted tightly together on her lap.
‘Ah, my father’s secretary,’ Laila announced, waving an imperious hand in the echoing foyer of the old palace. as Mustapha trod towards them looking most reluctant to respond to that gesture. He avoided looking at Bethany altogether.
‘Mustapha will take you to my brother,’ Laila informed her.
Mustapha turned pale, his jaw-line stiffening. ‘I regret to say—’
Laila murmured something low-pitched and brief in Arabic. Whatever it was, it had an extraordinary effect on Mustapha. His compressed mouth fell wide, and he flushed and shifted from one foot to the other in clear perturbation.
‘Yes, indeed,’ Laila sighed. ‘If I were you, I would endeavour to circumvent such instructions. I would practise true diplomacy.’
It suddenly sank in on Bethany that Razul had already given instructions that if his wife should show up she was to be shown the door again. She began turning on her heel, white with furious humiliation, but Laila caught her arm and hissed in a fierce undertone, ‘Do not be foolish, Bethany. My father is furious with you. This is his command. As far as he is concerned you have ditched his beloved son and a whipping three times a day would be too good for you!’
With a smile of reluctant amusement Mustapha inclined his head to Bethany and politely asked her to follow him. But what possible point was there in even approaching Razul if King Azmir was still so bitterly hostile to her? Her heart had sunk like a stone.
In silence Mustapha escorted her deep into the bowels of the palace. He halted outside a courtyard, ducked his head as if to check that it was unoccupied, and murmured, ‘Please wait here, my lady. I believe Prince Razul is with his father.’
The courtyard contained a very elaborate and large conservatory. Unable to stay still, Bethany wandered into it and was astonished to feel the temperature-controlled cool of the interior, and even more astonished to lay eyes on the glorious collection of bonsai trees displayed on a series of ornamental plinths within. She focused first on a miniature forest of pine trees, and then, reached out a reverent hand towards an ancient-looking and gnarled Acer barely thirty inches tall, quite dumbstruck with admiration.
‘Do not touch!’ a harsh voice rapped out at her.
Bethany very nearly leapt out of her skin. She spun around and only then noticed the elderly man seated in a chair by a bench in the far corner. Clad in an old apron, with a pair of scissors clenched in one hand, he almost stared her out of countenance, so visibly infuriated was he by the interruption.
‘I’m sorry. I should have known better but it looked so beautiful...you see, I have some at home. They’re my bobby.’
The fierce dark eyes narrowed fulminatingly. ‘Bonsai trees?’
‘Yes. I’m so sorry I interrupted you. Please excuse me.’ A rather ghastly suspicion was beginning to cross Bethany’s mind. Those dark, deep-set eyes, those level brows...
‘I do not excuse you.’
The rather ghastly suspicion was decidedly confirmed by that tone of hauteur. Bethany sti
lled, the colour draining from her cheeks.
‘You are the wife of my son,’ he pronounced through compressed lips. ‘Why do you come here?’
Bethany tried and failed to swallow the constriction in her throat. ‘I...I wanted to see Razul—’
‘Why should you want this?’ King Azmir demanded harshly.
Her eyes burned, her tongue cleaving to the roof of her dry mouth.
‘Why?’ He repeated the question with grim emphasis.
Bethany hovered, tears of stark pain suddenly welling up in her eyes. ‘Because I love him!’ she finally bit out, thrusting her chin in the air.
He frowned at her, clearly taken aback by the announcement.
‘And I believe I could make him happy...that is if he wants me to,’ she adjusted unevenly.
‘Then why are you not making him happy?’
‘I would rather discuss that with him,’ Bethany said stiffly.
Her father-in-law shook his head in exasperation. ‘I do not like my son to be upset.’
‘If you will excuse me for saying so, your son is very well able to look after himself,’ Bethany murmured.
‘Not when he marries a woman he cannot persuade to stay with him,’ he retorted brusquely.
‘I will stay.’
‘Then why is he here and not with you?’
‘I thought I couldn’t stay. I thought that you...wouldn’t accept me as his wife,’ Bethany stated tautly.
‘Do you not think that that is a most peculiar belief to hold when I agreed to the marriage?’ he pointed out rather more gently.
‘But that’s nonetheless what I believed.’
‘Is my son’s English so poor?’
‘In certain moods he is not the soul of clarity,’ she muttered tightly.
Her companion studied her for several unbearably long seconds, and then he threw back his head and laughed with rich appreciation. ‘Tell me about your trees,’ he invited.
In a daze she began to do so and then he moved a silencing hand. She followed the path of his gaze and went rigid when she saw Razul standing in the doorway, his dark features frozen with incredulity.
‘Take your wife home, my son, and borrow a dictionary,’ his father urged him, with a wry look of amusement.
A tide of dark colour obscured Razul’s hard cheek-bones, which were more prominent than they had been a week earlier. His lips parted and then, as he clearly thought better of comment, compressed into a bloodless white line. He-inclined his head then strode back out of the conservatory. Hurrying in his wake, Bethany could barely keep up with that long, ferocious stride. They were out of the palace in five minutes flat and she was out of breath.
‘A car will convey you home,’ Razul informed her.
‘Are you coming too?’
‘No.’
He very badly wanted to know what had passed between her and his father but she sensed that torture would not have driven him to request an explanation. He wouldn’t even look at her. She searched that coldly clenched profile and decided that it was not imagination which made her think that he had lost weight since she had last seen him. A Mercedes drew up.
‘I’m sorry I insulted your father,’ Bethany confided in a rush.
‘We have nothing more to say to each other.’ He turned fluidly on his heel.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she revealed dulcetly as she slid into the waiting car and slammed the door. The car drew off within seconds.
She glanced back over her shoulder. Razul was standing where she had left him, wearing an arrested expression of extreme shock. Well, whatever happened, she had had no choice but to tell him, and no doubt it was just one more messy complication, she reflected miserably, and, moreover, a complication that she was wholly responsible for creating. How stupid she had been—how unutterably stupid. Razul regretted their marriage now and she would just have to take that on the chin. However, her attempt to apply common sense to their problems only confused her more, for she could not imagine what could possibly resolve the situation that they were now in.
She was feeling a bit dizzy when she got back to the palace, so she went to her room. She had barely lain down when the door went flying open. Zulema stole one startled glance at Razul’s furious face and scurried out past him at speed. Pierced to the heart by that dark fury, Bethany closed her burning eyes.
‘Tell me that what you said is not true,’ Razul breathed rawly.
‘I’m afraid it is and it’s all my fault. I suppose you want to strangle me and right now I want to strangle myself,’ Bethany whispered with painful honesty. ‘I lied to you when I said I was on the Pill. I deliberately set out to get pregnant, and I did feel bad about deceiving you, but not bad enough until it was too late—’
‘Why did you lie?’ Razul broke in roughly.
‘I wanted a baby,’ she muttered painfully.
‘Without a father?’ he gritted with contemptuous distaste. ‘I have read about such women in your newspapers.’
‘Well, I wasn’t one of them! I wanted you too,’ Bethany confided miserably. ‘And if I couldn’t have you the baby was the next best thing. I just don’t know what came over me. It was a crazy, stupid thing to do. I knew you didn’t want me to become pregnant.’
‘I assumed you would not want to become pregnant.’ Razul sounded desperately strained. ‘Nor would I have risked such a development, not with the lesson of my own childhood behind me.’
Shock was settling in on him hard. She knew how he felt. Her own head was whirling in ever more torturous circles, for she could see no easy way out for either of them. She guessed that if she had a girl it would be all right for her to leave, but suppose she had a boy? And why did his father have to accept her when it was too late to make any difference? How much had his hostility towards their marriage contributed to Razul’s rejection of her?
‘You said...you said you wanted me too,’ Razul remarked rather unsteadily.
‘Yes,’ she said equally unsteadily. ‘My timing is very off, isn’t it?’
‘How deep does this wanting of me go?’
Her nose wrinkled. ‘Miserably deep.’
‘I need the dictionary.’
‘I love you...all right?’ she flung at him with sudden defensive aggression, her anguished eyes flying wide.
‘But you are most unhappy about it, and no doubt if you are unhappy about it for long enough you will soon overcome such unwelcome feelings altogether and feel a strong sense of achievement,’ Razul assumed with dark fatalism.
Bethany sat up. ‘Is that what you’re hoping for?’
‘I am sure it is what you are hoping for—’
‘And since you are always so sure that you know what I want, how could you possibly be wrong?’
‘I already know that you have good reason to have little faith in marriage. I also know that you are devoted to your career. I cannot blame you for these facts. But last week, when I believed we were happy and that there was hope for us, I was devastated to realise you were still thinking of leaving me—’
‘Razul... you left me with the impression that I had to leave at the end of the summer...no matter how either of us felt!’
‘That is not possible. I was entirely honest with you,’ Razul countered tautly.
‘I believed that your father had only agreed to a temporary marriage between us,’ Bethany spelt out. ‘For heaven’s sake, who was it told me on our wedding day that he would divorce me at the end of the summer and take another wife?’
‘But this was when you’d accused me of deceiving you into marriage and made it clear that you wanted your freedom back and I said nothing that was not the truth,’ Razul defended himself. ‘I promised my father that—’
‘You would remarry if our marriage failed?’ At his frowning nod of assent she was ready to explode. ‘You know something, Razul? You embarked on our marriage with so much pessimism you deserve everything that’s gone wrong!’
‘It was not pessimism. I did not believe that I had much hope
of you staying with me—’
‘Pessimism,’ she said again.
‘And naturally I had to be frank on this subject with my father—’
‘Instead of keeping your mouth shut...you turned him right off me, didn’t you? And you kept on saying things to me like “one last chance to be together”, and you mentioned the end of the summer with such frequency that it became firmly fixed in my head as the date of my expected departure!’
His lean hands were clenched into feverish fists. ‘Naturally I had to prepare myself for that departure—’
‘But I didn’t want to depart...I wanted to stay,’ she whispered vehemently.
‘Your career—’
‘Stuff my career!’ she raked at him, out of all patience.
Breathing fast, he studied her with painful but silent intensity.
‘Just why were you so convinced that I would leave?’ Bethany pressed furiously. ‘Was it because that was what you really wanted to happen?’
His strong jaw clenched hard. ‘I did not feel I could offer you enough to make the sacrifice of your other life worthwhile,’ he proffered in a stifled and driven undertone.
All the anger in her was instantly doused. She could not doubt that sincerity. She lowered her fiery head, and there was an enormous lump in her throat. She blinked back tears. If he saw them, his pride would be savaged.
‘All you have to offer me is yourself,’ she managed gruffly. ‘And that is enough for me. I happen to love you a lot. I can’t even imagine my life without you now, and you know...I don’t even know whether that pleases you or not.’
‘It pleases...it overwhelms,’ he muttered unevenly.
The silence went on endlessly. She heard his breath catch, listened to him swallow convulsively.
‘Does that mean you love me?’ she finally dared to ask.
‘I have always loved you,’ he said thickly. ‘Surely you know this well?’