by Jane Arbor
“Then, I’m afraid, we think again. Possibly wait until first light, when I’ll get every man on the estate into a proper search. Or we have to hope Hussein and Paul may have been more successful than we have.”
Alice didn’t think that likely, feeling that Xenie was shrewd enough to make for purposeful travelling, rather than an aimless, trek into the mountain ways. But when, later, Karim drew up and turned the car, saying, “This is about it, I think”, she acknowledged that his reasoning was sound. Under their own steam, Xenie and Rassim could hardly have got any further.
As Karim drove slowly back, she strained her eyes into the darkness, alert to every shadow that moved and to anything which might afford the children shelter from the driving rain — a stone wall, a huddle of trees and once, just discernible, the rough arch of a bridge over the bed of a stream.
Karim had just returned from an abortive search of the latter when her mind presented her with a flashback of something seen but not registered at the time.
She laid a hand on his arm as he was about to drive on. “No,” she said. “Go back - not very far. It’s a place where the land falls away and down very sharply beyond the verge. I remember now I caught a glimpse of a roof. Flat, but not a house, just a shed, I think, but —”
She stopped him again at a hairpin bend; rock-face bordered one side of the road; on the other by a natural lay-by from which the terrain dropped steeply down. They both got out and Alice pointed. “There,” she said. “I just caught a glimpse of it as the car swung round the corner. Do you think -?”
Karim nodded. “Could be. It’s a goatherd’s shed, worth a look. No, don’t come - it’s too steep for you.”
But she followed him down, grasping at tussocks and outcrops of stone and, looking back, he did not stop her. At the level of the hut he halted and turned, his arms ready to break her headlong plunge down
the last steep stretch. For a moment of closeness he held her to him and something indefinable seemed to pulse between them. Then he released her, stooped to the low entrance of the hut, put back a hand to draw her in beside him and murmured, “Good girl! End of search. Look-”
CHAPTER TEN
Alice followed the beam of the torch Karim carried. Its nimbus lit up the corner of the hut where, on a bed of dry bracken fronds, Xenie was sitting up, shading her eyes and squinting through her fingers. Rassim still lay asleep, his head on a curled arm. Karim did not speak. Alice said gently, “Xenie? Don’t be frightened. What a sensible girl to shelter from the rain!”
Xenie knuckled her eyes with her fists, and looked taken aback by the unexpected praise. “At first we did not,” she admitted. “I was afraid to stop, and we got wet - see!” Kneeling up, she spread the skirt of her smock in demonstration at the same moment as Rassim woke and began to whimper.
Alice felt the skirt. “Tch! Never mind - you found a dry place to sleep, and soon you will both be back in your own dry beds. What would you like before you go to sleep? Cocoa? Milk? Hot chocolate?”
Cowering, Xenie shook her head. “No,” she said. “I am afraid.”
“Of what, Xenie?”
“El Anissa Kent will tell the Caid that I stole her earrings, and the Caid will send me to prison.”
Alice knelt by her. “The Caid will hear nothing about it, because El Anissa won’t tell him. She knows now that you didn’t steal her earrings. And,” Alice lied, “she is very sorry.”
Xenie showed interest. “Another person stole them?”
“No, she found she hadn’t lost them at all. She had made a mistake.” Alice offered Rassim a reassuring hand which he clasped and stopped crying. “So now will you come back with me in Seiyid ibn Charles’s car? This is Seiyid ibn Charles,” she added by way of
introduction of Karim.
Xenie bowed her head in his direction. “I know Seiyid ibn Charles,” she said with the dignity of a duchess.
Alice sent a puzzled look between them. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know you had met. ”
“Yes, said Xenie. “At the Home in Tetuan. I see him there and he asks me if I am good, and he gives me a dirham to spend. I am pleased and I buy a gold dimale with it.” She went over to Karim. “You remember giving me a dirham, Seiyid?”
“I do indeed,” he said a shade too heartily. “So now will you let me drive you back to the Home in my car?”
For answer she tucked a hand confidingly in his and beckoned to Rassim. “Come,” she ordered. “The Seiyid and Miss Alice are going to take us home.”
They both scaled the slope with the ease of mountain goats and waited on the road above for Karim and Alice to join them. In the car Karim, amused, remarked to Alice, “A gold bracelet for one dirham -a pretty good bargain, that!”
“Of the quality of gold that Xenie favours, I’m surprised she couldn’t get two for the money,” Alice laughed, then paused. “I didn’t know you were in close contact with the Home in Tetuan. Do you really remember seeing Xenie there before she came up to Tazenir?”
He shook his head. “No. But I’ve found it never pays to tell a lady you don’t remember her with pleasure, and I certainly handed out largesse into sundry willing hands when I visited the Sisters.”
“When was that? Since I have been in Tazenir?” Alice asked.
“But of course - since you were the spur that booted me there.”
“I was? How could I have been?”
“By having lectured me on the virtues of the education the Sisters were giving the children. You had claimed stoutly that they weren’t being wholly alienated from Moroccan ways, and later, when I had business in Tetuan, I decided to find out for myself. I called on the
Mother Superior -”
“You hadn’t ever visited the Home before?”
“No. The lease of the Tazenir Home had been arranged before I inherited the estate, and I’d done all its business since through an agent. So, except for an occasional brush with Sister Bernadine, no one, before you, had taken my convictions to task. I resented your doing so.”
“I know you did. But you - listened to me.”
“With results that proved me wrong. Satisfied now with your crusade against my prejudices on education?”
“If you are,” said Alice.
He looked at her quickly and then away. “Well enough,” he said evenly. “Well enough.”
A little later he told her, “May I praise your handling of the Xenie situation ’way back there? No blame, no scolding, no reproachful ‘How could you do such a thing?’ Just pure tact, and it worked.”
Alice said, “Thank you. It didn’t seem quite the occasion for a curtain-lecture, though I think I must give her one some time.”
“On what theme?”
“Well, that when you are outraged or wounded or you’ve suffered injustice, you can’t just up stakes and run away —”
“And you hope to get that through to a nine-year-old?”
“If I put it simply enough. And it’s true, isn’t it? It’s a lesson people have to learn?” she appealed.
“So. But how many of them act upon it, when it comes to the crunch?”
A thought flashed for Alice. Without knowing it, he was telling her something she already knew - that originally he had run away from Elaine Kent’s cruelty. Aloud she said, “I don’t know. But even if they run away at first - from shock — I believe a lot of them would think again —”
“And having thought, would do what?”
She stared into the darkness. “Stop running. Face facts ... go round their mountain,” she said. It was her final sad renunciation of him to Elaine.
When they arrived a few minutes later she expected him not to wait. But when they had taken the children into the house he said, as if they had agreed upon it, “I’ll see you then, when you have Xenie and Rassim settled to your satisfaction.”
Alice said, “Oh, you shouldn’t stay. But I don’t know what we should have done without your help and I’m terribly grateful to you.”
“Then
you can afford me a little more of your time,” he said.
“I oughtn’t to take any more of yours,” she demurred.
“And I’m offering you no more than I meant to spend on an appointment I promised myself for this evening.”
“An appointment with me? But we’ve had it,” she puzzled.
“Not this one.” He looked at his watch. “I admit I planned it for rather earlier than this, but if your reputation can take it, mine can, and we’re well chaperoned.” Without waiting for permission he moved towards the visitors’ salon, and turned at the door. “Do you think that when your cook is preparing a nightcap for the Babes in the Wood, she might make some coffee for us too?” he added.
“Of course.”
But when she and Sorab had shepherded the children into bed with the least possible disturbance of the others in their dormitories, Alice sent Sorab and Sarepta to bed too, and herself prepared and carried in the tray of coffee. While she had got it ready she had wondered at his insistence on staying longer in order to see her alone. Though as if they needed to be chaperoned, when all he could possibly want would be to tell her he was going to marry Elaine! That moment of their admission of their shared fear for the children, and that other one of closeness when she had run into his arms had lasted no longer than the beat of time they had taken - and they had passed.
He took the tray from her, and she sat down while he poured and brought a cup to her. With his own in his hand, he didn’t sit, but stood near her. He said easily, “I hope you appreciate, from my quoting the Babes in the Wood, the zeal with which I’ve been doing my revision of English folklore? Don’t you want to know why?”
She looked up at him. “I imagine it’s because of what you said in a note you wrote me - and asked me to wish you Bon Voyage.”
“Which you did - rather curtly, without asking where my journey was taking me.”
“You had written that you didn’t know where you - you were going to meet your sun,” she reminded him, keeping up the parable.
“Ah, I misled you. I knew where it was ... is. I ought to have written instead that I didn’t know how or when or where — or even whether
— I should succeed. And then perhaps you might have helped by asking me what I meant?”
She looked away. “I thought — I think I knew what you meant. You were telling me that you didn’t need my advice, because you had already decided to take up the threads of the relationship you had had with Miss Kent in England.”
He set aside his coffee without having tasted it and folded his arms. “And what do you know of my relations with Elaine in England?” he asked.
“As much as she has told me.”
“Really? It’s news to me that you’ve been in her confidence.”
“I’m not. Not as a friend.”
“Then how?”
“Well, just once she came to me, told me how close you had been in England and that she felt you might still be judging her for - for the harshness which had parted you.”
“Harshness being your word for it, or hers?”
“Mine,” Alice admitted. “In fact she told me what she had called you to your face —”
“I see — the complete clean breast. But what did she hope to gain by making it to you?”
“She said she felt Seiyida Charles distrusted her; that though she knew you wanted to return to her, you were having to fight your mother as well as yourself. So she came to me, believing I could influence the Seiyida in her favour.”
“And you told her?”
“That I couldn’t possibly; that I wasn’t on such intimate terms as would let me.”
“Which Elaine accepted?”
“Not willingly. She didn’t believe me.” Alice stirred uncomfortably. “If she had really confided in me as a friend, I shouldn’t have told you this. It’s only that —”
Karim shook his head. “I shouldn’t let that prick your conscience too much. You must know in your heart that she never was your friend, even before you refused to help her with my mother.”
“But she hasn’t any reason to dislike me or resent me. We hardly know each other.”
“What of it — in the circumstances? Can’t you really guess why she told you - almost a stranger to her - just how intimate she and I had been with each other?”
“Well, I suppose she felt she had to tell me, or she couldn’t enlist my sympathy for her.”
Karim’s hands made a little despairing gesture. “You suppose!” he exploded. “Don’t you recognise jealousy when you see it - in the raw, turned against yourself, warning you off? And I thought you were a girl of infinite intuition ... perception. How wrong I was!”
Alice stared up at him bewilderedly. Where was all this leading? This criticism of Elaine, this dissection of her motives, this apparent siding with herself against Elaine? “That’s absurd,” she said. “Jealousy of me didn’t come into it - how could it?”
“Even though,” he countered, “Elaine gave you a blow-by-blow account of my courtship of her in England, and even though, I suspect now, she may have used this theft charge through Xenie but against you? Even though she loses no chance that offers of belittling you to me? And you still claim she isn’t jealous of you?”
“She had - has no reason to be jealous of me over you,” Alice insisted again. “She must know that.”
“Must she?”
“And you still want her-”
"Do I?” Both questions had carried the same quiet emphasis, but Karim didn’t make her answer either. Instead he went on, “Tell me, if I really wanted Elaine now, do you suppose she would need to ask your help?”
“I - don’t know.”
“I think you must. And can you honestly claim to have witnessed any tendernesses between Elaine and me that might show I still cared for her?”
“I haven’t been there to see, as often as you have been together.”
“When I could help it, no more often than courtesy to a guest of compatriots demanded.”
“And she claimed to me that your very coolness and criticism of her showed your need of mastery over her, and that for her part she found it ‘delicious’ - her word,” Alice continued.
Karim laughed softly. “Elaine is a determined predator, with a very thick skin. She doesn’t give up. Though why she should think I’ve hesitated to tell her I love her, for fear of my mother’s prejudices, I can’t imagine. Other fears may hold a man back, but not that. And sooner or later any man worth the name will put his fears behind him and go to his woman - at least hoping. As, later — but not too late? -I’ve come to you. Alice -? You know what I am trying to say?”
He was at her level now, kneeling beside her chair. He put her coffee-cup with his own and took both her hands in his, turning them palm upward and setting a kiss on each.
To his bent head she said, “I think I know. But I - can’t believe it.”
He looked up. “Do you want to?”
She nodded. “For a long time - so much!”
"A long time?” he questioned. “You didn’t let me guess.”
“At first I didn’t know. And when I did, there was Elaine for you.”
“No. Never Elaine for me, ever since I realised she despised me for what I was and am. Whatever her second thoughts, I've had none.”
“But why me?” Alice asked wonderingly.
“Because to me you are beautiful, and because, if you can love me, you love what I am and accept it - the product of two countries and two cultures, not just the one I ran back to when I ran away from the other, hounded by Elaine’s scorn.”
“You acknowledge now that you belong to both - that it’s right and good that you should?”
“Only since you took me to task, my sweet critic,” he smiled. “Even my mother had never questioned the rightness of my choice as you did from the depth of convictions that were at least as strong as mine. I’ll be frank - I resented them and I fought you. But when you fought back, I came to admire them and to love you ..
. want you ... desire you. But when I dared to kiss you, hoping it should tell you -”
“You called us both fools for being tempted into that,” she reminded him.
He agreed, “Yes, I know, my heart. Suddenly I distrusted your very response. Elaine had answered kiss for kiss as ardently as that, and she had betrayed me - so why not you too, another English girl, a little bewitched by the East into showing a desire she didn’t feel and which wouldn’t last?”
“You should have asked me if I cared. Instead, you almost - flung me away.”
“And helped you, as I thought, to put the whole mad moment behind you, so that when you went back to England and married the boy next door or whoever, you could laugh it off and forget it. For you, just a romantic interlude in a Moroccan adventure; for me, an awareness of you in my mind and my heart and my thoughts ever since-”
“As you’ve been in mine too,” Alice whispered. “Sometimes I’ve thought you must know it, feel it-”
He shook his head. “Never daring to. Besides, Yves Renair seemed to be beating the boy next door to it. He wanted you too?”
“He did ask me to marry him. But I couldn’t.”
“He knows about me - or suspects?”
“No. No one does.”
“Just you and I and our shadows so far - h’m?” He drew her to her feet and closer, close to his body, fitting its taut-drawn muscularity to the soft curves of hers, as he kissed throat and brow a little humbly, then thrust her off to stare into her eyes in wonder before taking her into his arms again to press kiss after kiss upon her yielding lips, drowning her in delight. She revelled in the sensation of being subject to his will, yet newly aware of her power with him. He was demanding, yet pleading; she was submitting, yet taking. Their surrender and their mastery were equal, the eternal sweet complement of man to woman and woman to man which would make them one.
When at last he released her he smiled at her little gurgled sigh of happiness. He tested her, “Do you know what you are taking on - the double life you will lead, married to me?”
She rubbed her face on his shoulder. “As long as it’s your double life too.”
“It will be,” he assured her. “You’ll be my wife for ever - here in Morocco, there in England, whenever you or both of us want.” He paused. “You know, I’ve missed it so-”