Doom's Caravan
Page 22
Next day I presented the empty trunk to my laundry maid and drove to Sir, leaving the truck with Gunn while I walked up to the valley alongside Holloway and the three horses, one of them loaded with the two remaining trunks. Valerie’s welcome was cold and jittery—too unsure of herself even to take her usual refuge in moody silence. She could no longer live on the hope that one week or the next Oliver would turn up. He had told her that this time she must be patient indefinitely. And she had not the least idea how much I knew or what help I could be.
Biddy on the other hand was bouncing about, not unnaturally pleased with herself. As soon as Holloway had carried the trunks into the house and led off the three horses to the village—I don’t think they were theirs, but they must have been desperately needed—she asked me how much she had.
‘More than eight thousand pounds, and it’s safe to stick to it.’
‘Eight thousand!’ she yelled. ‘Oh, Val, we can go home! Where’s the rest of it?’
I ignored the suggestion that I was not behaving like an officer and a gentleman and explained that the rest was in trust for Valerie. Valerie shook her head at me violently behind her mother’s back, but I quieted her down with the discreet wave of a conductor silencing the woodwind.
‘Val is quite irresponsible,’ her mother complained. ‘Just look at the way she disobeyed and escaped to Tripoli!’
‘I think she was very sensible. She knew very well that she might not see either of us again.’
‘But she had only to go to Reggie or someone and be sent home. I can’t think what she was doing down there.’
The perfect opening. I nodded to Valerie to bear down on the kettledrum.
‘I got married,’ she said.
‘But you haven’t had time! Who to?’
I was desperately afraid she would say Oliver Enwin. But of course she could not. The certificate would have been worthless. She produced it for our inspection.
‘Ibrahim el Amr!’ I exclaimed, doing my best to express surprise and admiration. ‘But I didn’t know you knew him!’
‘We have been meeting.’
I was eloquent. As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. I said that he came of an old Arabian family, was educated in the west, a descendant of the Prophet and of immense distinction. I almost believed myself. There was a truth independent of truth in my last glimpse of Oliver when the policeman saluted him.
Biddy took her face out of her hands.
‘Has he got any money?’ she asked.
‘He will have.’
‘But where is he? When can I see him?’
‘Not for a while. He’s gone to Turkey.’
And, by God, I hoped he had only to wait for night to land! When I walked back to Sir with Wilson and Holloway, I began to realise that again I had created about as much trouble as I had prevented. But all remaining problems were out of my hands. Rommel settled them for me. At the end of June, when there was nothing between him and Alexandria but our last stronghold of El Alamein, all British women were evacuated.
Biddy was shipped home with her money changed to sterling. Valerie insisted on going to the British Embassy in Ankara. Cables flew back and forth, and the cousins gave orders from Whitehall. So I did in fact send her up by the Taurus Express as instructed. I think Biddy was only too pleased to hand responsibility to her unknown son-in-law. She was all right, Jack. And even if she never got the château, at least she was able to cheer her old age by long holidays in something damn near a deer park between Adana and the mountains.
I would love to know her reaction when she met Ibrahim after the war. She must have recognised him. But it would not have been difficult for Valerie to threaten her into silence. Social position, you see. What was little Oliver Enwin compared to this romantic and scholarly figure, already accepted in diplomatic society, whose marriage was an idyll of East and West. I can hear her saying how in India she and her husband always accepted distinguished Mohammedans as equals. Not wholly hypocrisy, bless the old fool! If there’s any illusion of money where she is, I hope it’s her husband who signs the cheques.
Ah, I see that at last the name means something to you! It’s so hard to combine two different identities in one’s memory, as Oliver said. Yes, my dear man, he is the Ibrahim el Amr, the Professor of Oriental Languages who writes articles for The Times and is invited to Washington whenever they need a tip straight from the stable. Naturally I have never gone near them. Nobody else knows who he is, and the children, I hear, are brilliant. I don’t want them all to start fussing about what I might give away. Somebody may have recognised him once, for I was told in the club a story of his masquerading as a British officer in the war. For what purpose was unknown. But it was all very patriotic, and an example of the love felt for us by the most distinguished Arab notables.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1971 by Geoffrey Household
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
978-1-5040-0661-3
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