The Other Miss Donne

by Jane Arbor

  ‘Courting?’ Carey questioned the word. ‘Then Frau Ehrens—?’

  Michael nodded. The young widow of a German steel king twice her age. Lovely lolly unlimited. Her daily crust permanently guaranteed; the rag to her back by Dior; gold mesh for her small change, and a slum of a penthouse in Dusseldorf for her hearthstone, one gathers.’ He suddenly grimaced. ‘My poor Denise! Two doses of her pet poison within six months! Rather you than me for breaking the news to her, Carey!’

  ‘About Frau Ehrens? Denise doesn’t like her?’ queried Carey, of one mind with Denise for about the first time.

  Michael grimaced again. ‘Putting it mildly. You might think, from her dealings with most folk, that Denise didn’t know what an inferiority complex was. But for some reason Gerda Ehrens gives her an outsize one. More money, more poise, more expertise in everything, more—to be really vulgar—more crust. Denise can’t compete, shows it, and suffers a soothing pat on the head for her pains. No, on the whole, I’d prefer not to be the slave who bears the ill tidings! Let’s hope she has heard it on another channel by now.’

  As, indeed, Denise already had when she and Carey met at dinner. More, she had met Frau Ehrens in the bar, had been soapily greeted by the older woman as ‘little Denise’, she raged to Carey and Michael, and proceeded to sulk throughout the meal—as Michael had forecast, the very shadow of her usual malapert self.

  For all their lack of accord, Carey felt sorry for her and found herself wondering whether that unfinished letter of Rosalie’s had furnished a clue to Denise’s chagrin. For if Denise had ‘a love-hate thing’ for Randal Quest that would account for both her cavalier treatment of Michael’s devotion and her undisguised resentment of Frau Ehrens. She had power with Michael and used it; with Randal, who treated her like a child, she had none. No wonder, thought Carey, she despaired of competing, in face of this reappearance of Gerda Ehrens on Randal’s scene, if she knew them to be as ‘close’ as the other woman claimed. Catching Denise’s oblique, lowering glances at the well-placed table where Frau Ehrens was dining alone, Carey pitied the defeat behind her eyes.

  Plainly Denise recognised the older woman’s pride of place; had already seen in play the qualities—worldly poise? feminine allure? assurance (silk-covered) to match his own?—which had appealed to Randal. But her jealousy didn’t want to know ... was set on fighting the losing battle which for one blindingly clear moment of truth Carey craved to share ... even to make her own.

  In that moment she wasn’t merely feeling for Denise ... in her place. She was Denise—jealous, and of Gerda Ehrens, and for the same reason—But no! Covetous of Randal Quest’s attention? How could she be? The moment passed and as sanity returned the sharp intake of her breath of shock brought the glances of the other two her way.

  She smiled and sat forward to take a sip of her wine. ‘It’s nothing. Just a goose walking over my grave,’ she said. And believed it, for what was jealousy of Gerda Ehrens to do with her?

  She had no contact with either Randal Quest or Frau Ehrens the next day, seeing him only that evening, dining in the party of people whom Frau Ehrens had taken less than twenty-four hours to gather about her. Denise was among them—an unwilling guest, as Carey heard from Michael when they met at dinner.

  ‘She did her best to dig in her heels, but Randal dragooned her into it,’ Michael said, and sighed. ‘Poor kid, she’s so very young and turns so painfully gauche when she feels she is outclassed. She can’t take it. Look at her now—all the zing gone out of her; nothing but a foil to that woman’s showmanship! G—rr—! What I’d give to mount a rescue operation this very minute and have her out of it, bang-bang!’

  ‘And probably get slapped down for your pains? You’re very—generous, Michael,’ said Carey with a smile.

  ‘Ah, you shouldn’t judge her by that scene yesterday. She has a lot of nicer moods than that. I suspect she was only showing off in front of you. As for “generous”—I don’t know that it’s a word in my dictionary where Denise is concerned.’

  ‘Because you’re in love with her?’ asked Carey boldly.

  His grin was rueful. ‘You said it, I didn’t. But that’s about the ticket, yes. If she would have me, I’d marry her tomorrow.’

  ‘Have you tried asking her?’

  ‘Not on. There are—obstacles.’

  ‘Such as?’ Carey wondered if he shared her guess that for Denise he was someone standing only half noticed in Randal Quest’s shadow. But if he did, he gave no hint of it as he jerked a thumb at the stick which hung on the back of his chair.

  ‘Among other things, that,’ he said. ‘I’m never likely to move far out of the right-hand-man-to-a-bigger-man class, and Denise deserves more than a chap who can’t share any of the active stunts with her. As I said—it’s not on. What’s more’—he fixed Carey with a frown—‘if you were thinking of putting in a bit of special pleading on my behalf, you can forget it. For I’m not taking pity from her. That’d be the last straw. Understood?’

  Carey nodded, understanding a pride that would go hungry, rather than settle for a thrown crumb of pity. Though had Denise Corel even pity to spare for Michael? Carey doubted it.

  Her own days, for all the variable demands on her, began to have some pattern. She did her morning stint in the library, supervised the patio arrangements, acted as secretary to Mrs. Hobart again, and to one or two businessmen; played interpreter, answered questions and was on unobtrusive duty every evening in the lounges.

  The days became a week; two, three. Carey woke each day to a question-mark as to what problems it might produce. But they were all interesting, some of them enough of a challenge to give her a sense of having taken a grip on her job. The staff accepted her, the guests seemed to appreciate her. She was able to write truthfully to Rosalie that everything was all right with her, that she thought she was settling down. She rather deliberately refrained from commenting on the personal undercurrents of the El Gara. Rosalie and Martin had chosen to opt out from it and Carey argued that she had no right to speculate, for Rosalie’s curiosity, on whatever frictions there were between Denise and Randal Quest, or even on her own relations with either of them. And Gerda Ehrens’s name would mean nothing to Rosalie. Carey did not mention her.

  The guests came and went at varying intervals, some of them seemingly wealthy or leisured enough to spend a long season at the El Gara. Mrs. Hobart, who was collecting local colour for a novel with a Moroccan background, planned an indefinite stay, as also did Carey’s first contacts, the Theodore Calvins. These latter proved to be an outgoing couple, needing and making a lot of acquaintance and giving drinks parties in their suite two or three times a week. From the outset Carey had been in their favour and had had more invitations from them than she thought discreet to accept. True, Randal Quest had left the discretion to her, but she doubted if he would approve of regular hob-nobbing in the same people’s circle, and so, though she had accepted on one occasion, she had since excused herself on the score of having to be ‘seen to be there’ in the public rooms in the evenings.

  However, on a day which was to hold a small gratification for her, Mrs. Calvin, meeting her in the foyer, refused to take No for her answer.

  ‘You must come. I insist. We need some young blood. The idea is a welcome party for Theodore’s nephew, Auden, who is joining us for a time. He has been a yes-man in one of Theodore’s minor concerns, but now Theodore is grooming him to take over the parent company. But that’s by the way—he’ll be playing for a month or two out here. So—any time from six to eight. That’s elastic enough, surely? Yes, my dear, you can manage it. We shall expect you,’ Mrs. Calvin declared in an ultimatum to which Carey had to bow. She would try to be there for a little while, she promised. She would look forward to it.

  It was as she was passing the bellhops’ bench a few minutes later that she was arrested by a half-whispered, half-croaked, ‘Mees! Mees!’ and there, crowded on to the end of the bench was Absalom Seid, his wide grin claiming her as a regained f
riend.

  So Randal Quest’s promise to look up the boy and give him a job hadn’t been idle. Carey felt as pleased and rewarded as Absalom looked.

  She smiled her welcome. ‘So you’ve made it into hotel work! When did you arrive?’

  Yesterday. On the motor-bus, by myself. I am a man now, I told my mother, “You must not come with me.” ’ He stood up, preening. ‘How do I look in my uniform, mees? It is smart—h’m?’

  ‘Very smart.’ In fact, tightly buttoned into maroon and silver, he looked very far from the man he claimed to be and Carey felt a pang at his having to leave home to work so young. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t any English stamps for you yet,’ she told him. ‘I haven’t been back myself, but the first letters I get from there, you shall have the envelopes.’

  ‘No matter.’ He brushed her apologies aside. I knew you were still in Morocco, that you were here. When the sidi, the master, came to see my mother he says it is the lovely English mees who tells him about me—’

  Carey laughed aloud. ‘Absalom, I’m quite sure Mr. Quest said nothing of the sort!’

  ‘But yes. He says it is the sister of his brother’s wife who tells him; I ask him if that is the pretty mees who walks alone in the medina, and he says Yes, it is. And that satisfies my mother that it is O.K. for me to come to work for him. A very good thing, she says, that you are of the sidi’s family, and so will be able to do much to advance me in the hotel which he owns. My mother is pleased and so am I. I shall not need to ask her for dirhams to spend. I shall have my own pay, and then more and more. For I shall not be one of your bellboys for long, mees. You will say to the sidi or he will say to you, “This Absalom—he can be of more value to us than this.” And then—’

  He sat down again abruptly, cowed for the moment by the bell-captain’s frown, hinting that as a raw recruit to the brotherhood, he was getting above himself. Carey, murmuring, ‘Well, good luck,’ to him, went on her way, relieved to have been spared the complications of explaining how little promotion he could expect through her, though more than once during the morning she found her thoughts reverting to the description of her which Randal Quest had used to convince Absalom’s mother of his bona fides.

  Of course his experience would know that the Eastern sense of family would be reassured by ‘my brother’s wife’s sister’. And of course the exaggeration of ‘The lovely English mees’, had been Absalom’s, not his. But she was intrigued a little by this new view of herself in relation to him. Odd that she had never looked at it before. Odder still, her curiosity to know how much more he had said of her to give Absalom and his mother the idea that she had influence at the El Gara. Or had that been mere wishful thinking on their part? She decided it must have been.

  That afternoon she chose to spend her siesta hour at the beach which, on any English coast, would have been a treasure long since violated by crowds, but which was mostly neglected by the El Gara’s guests, who seemed to prefer the hotel pool with its handily adjacent bar, its scurrying waiters and the opportunity to appraise and compare suntans over drinks which arrived at the languid lift of a forefinger.

  The path to the beach went down from the garden; the beach itself was a crescent of fine sand with enough rocks nosing above the shallows to make the shoreline interesting. It was backed by a fringe of pine and scrub affording some dappled shade. The gentle shelving made the water safe for lazy swimming; Carey had found it an ideal retreat.

  This afternoon, however, she was not to have it to herself. She had been in the water and was sunning-off in the creaming surf when three figures came out on one of the ‘horns’ of the crescent—a young couple in towelling wraps over their swimsuits, and Randal Quest. Carey watched as the sweep of his hand indicated the curve of the beach, then pointed out to sea. The boy and girl dropped their wraps, ran hand-in-hand down the sandy path, kicked delightedly at the foam for a few minutes, waded as far as they could and then made for the deeper water where they became a couple of bobbing heads in the distance, only their laughter now and then floating back on the still air.

  Randal Quest shaded his eyes with his hand, then came over to Carey. He sat down on the dry sand, a yard or two above her, still in the shallows. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Harvey. Have you come across them yet?’ he asked.

  Carey nodded her recognition of the couple as she knelt up to face him. ‘Yes, I met them this morning. They arrived last night.’

  ‘And I met them in the garden, wanting to swim, but rather understandably wanting to be alone.’

  Carey looked out to sea at the couple. ‘Understandably?’ she queried.

  ‘Well, rather obviously honeymoon, wouldn’t you say?’ Without waiting for her reply Randal Quest went on, ‘So I played guide to them down here, and the solitude seems to please.’

  ‘Except that I’m here. Had I better collect my things and go and leave them to it?’ asked Carey, standing up.

  ‘No hurry, until you’re ready to leave. I gather they were only brand-new shy of their fellow-guests. You and I, as mere staff, probably don’t count. What’s the matter?’ as Carey narrowed her eyes against the glare of the sun and gazed seaward.

  ‘Nothing. Except that I can’t see them now. Do you think they’re all right?’

  He stood and joined her to scan the bright expanse of the sea. ‘Yes, there—Look, just rounding the bluff, both of them—’ His hand on her bare wet shoulder, casual at first, then tightening in order to turn her in the right direction, sent an inexplicable tremor along her nerves—a physical response which she despised. She nodded, ‘Yes, I see,’ and his hold relaxed. For a wild, crazy moment she wished it hadn’t ... Then she pulled herself together. ‘My towel,’ she said flatly. ‘I left it under the pines—’

  ‘Do you want it?’ He fetched it for her and sat again while she did a cursory drying of her arms and legs and hair before kneeling, then sitting beside him, the towel draped across her shoulders.

  She felt his glance on her. ‘You’ll never achieve the prized boot-polish patina that way,’ he commented idly. ‘If you want to continue the treatment, don’t mind me. I can behave. Come—!’ As he tweaked away the towel, exposing her arms, shoulders and her slim torso to the sun, he gestured at the emptiness of sea and sand and sky around them. ‘Anyway, what’s your worry—here? See for yourself—no saucy guitarist to jump to the wrong conclusions as to what we might be up to; no seductive candlelight; no suggestive serenatas. No indeed—in these clinical circumstances you’re quite safe from assault, Miss Donne, I assure you!’

  Carey looked at him quickly, then away. Had the involuntary yielding of her shoulder under his hand betrayed to him her awareness of his touch, and he had misread it as recoil, when in fact it had been—? She jerked away from defining what it had been and answered his raillery lightly.

  ‘Perhaps you jump to too many conclusions yourself, Mr. Quest,’ she countered. ‘How do you know I’m not obeying the beauty articles’ warning, not to try to take a suntan too quickly? Hence the towel—’

  She watched him look her over. ‘M’m, though I’d have said you were well past the boiled lobster stage by now,’ he agreed judicially. ‘However, if you say so—’ He lay back, shading his eyes with his hand, and presently asked, ‘What were you able to do for the Harveys yourself, by the way?’

  ‘Nothing they wanted, I’m afraid. They thought the hotel would have a shop.’

  ‘A shop?’ His echo brought him to sit upright. ‘A shop—selling what? Kewpie dolls and aspirin? I hope you told them they could get anything from safety-pins to needle and thread from their floor maid? And picture-postcards from reception and postage-stamps from the hall porter?’

  ‘They didn’t want aspirin. Or picture-postcards. They had already bought some from the desk. But they aren’t staying long, and what they were hoping to find, I think, was a choice of some of the local craft things—leather and brass and basketware and perhaps silks, to buy as presents to take back with them.’

  ‘All of which they can find
in abundance in the town.’

  ‘In Hassi Ain? Yes, but they seem to have heard some horrific tales of how they would have to haggle for anything, and even then get cheated, in any Middle East souk. Of all things they couldn’t bear, they said, would be to take, says, some brasswork back with them, only to find it was made in Birmingham. They come from Birmingham, you see,’ Carey explained. ‘Anyhow, I doubt if they would venture into the Hassi Ain medina on their own.’

  ‘Then the solution is simple, isn’t it? You go with them and do their bargaining for them. Among other things, it’s what you’re for.’ He threw a pebble idly seaward. ‘You promised them that you would see them safe in the matter, I daresay?’

  ‘Oh yes. I told them that if they would let me know when they wanted to go shopping, I’d go along with them. Though it has occurred to me since—’

  He waited for her to break her pause. When she did not, ‘What has occurred to you since?’ he prompted.

  ‘Well, would it be such a very bad idea—a shop in the foyer, or at least some showcases displaying Moroccan things?’

  He shook his head. ‘The Harveys are exceptional. For most of our clients it’s part of the holiday to haggle in the souks. Manning a shop full time and buying for it wouldn’t be justified by the profits it would show us.’

  ‘I meant on a sort of concessionary basis to a Moroccan trader, who would pay the El Gara a percentage on his sales,’ Carey pointed out.

  A short laugh greeted that. ‘You underestimate the Eastern ability to make a virtue of cooking the books. It would be almost impossible to check on the hotel’s due from the sales. Still’—another duckstone pebble went to skid over the surface of the water—‘you might have something, if it were feasible to sort out the question of manning and stocks.’