City of Palms Read online

  She had been allocated an extremely luxurious suite, and the thing which surprised her most about it was that the bathroom was a miracle of up-to-date equipment. Surrounded by desert as they were, it seemed to her extra-ordinary that she could stand under a shower, or soak herself in a bath that was like a miniature indoor swimming pool. There were quantities of deliciously rough towels, taps that released boiling as well as cold water, jars of bath essences and dusting-powders, and an electric bell-push that summoned to her assistance a small, neat Arab girl with a mass of black plaits wound about her head, who was prepared to do anything, even bath her, if she expressed a desire for such attention.

  Having put away her things and written a short note to her father, she went into the bathroom and enjoyed the luxury of a shower before lunch, to get rid of the stickiness her mild exertions and the heat had covered her in. Then she changed into a crisp dress of pale lime-green, combed her hair until it stood out like a pale nimbus surrounding her face, added a touch of extra-bright lipstick to offset the faint colorlessness of her appearance, and went downstairs to look for Ayse.

  She expected to find her in the patio, but it was empty, and the huge salon, with its marble floor and rich rugs, where they sometimes forgathered for drinks in the heat of the day, was empty, too. She followed the coolness of the colonnades through courtyard after courtyard round to the front of the house, and arrived on the broad sweep where her car had come to rest on the night of her arrival just as another car was driven through the great entrance gateway and drew up, without even a whisper of suddenly applied brakes, before the impressive front door.

  It was a magnificently opulent-looking car, pale blue and silver, and as Susan drew back into the shadows an ebony-faced chauffeur leapt out from his driving-seat and assisted a woman to alight.

  She had been reclining languidly on the back seat, a woman so delicately proportioned and tiny that she looked like a doll in the huge car. And when she stood on the colorful mosaic pavement beside her physically splendid, uniformed chauffeur he seemed to dwarf her utterly—so utterly that an impression of rather delicious feminine helplessness was instantly heightened.

  She wore a white silk suit and an enormous cartwheel hat, and dizzily high-heeled white sandals that nevertheless failed to give her height. A diamond bracelet flashed on an incredibly slender ankle, and more diamonds flashed in shell-like ears beneath the hat. Her face looked small and appealing, and eager as a child’s, with eyes like purple violets turning hither and thither, as if anxious to catch a glimpse of someone before that someone caught a glimpse of her, while excitement bubbled in her like the rising of a spring torrent.

  Still standing in the shadows, Susan could actually feel that excitement herself, as if waves of it were transmitted to her over the warm air; and she was not in the least surprised when Raoul Mehmet appeared as if from nowhere, and the excitement burst its bonds.

  A pair of small, beringed hands flew out and caught at his sleeve, completely encircling a white drill-clad arm, and a throatily sweet voice cried his name:

  “Raoul! Oh, Raoul!”

  He stood looking down into the violet eyes, and if the chauffeur had towered above her, he towered above the chauffeur. The sunlight, white hot and blinding all about them, picked out all the coppery gleams in his uncovered head, and his face looked dark and unreadable, but there was a curious half-smile on his lips.

  “So you followed hard on the heels of your letter, Jacqueline,” he replied. “You didn’t give us any time to seek you out!”

  “Time?” she echoed, and Susan could have sworn that the upturned eyes were filled for an instant with reproach, which dimmed a little of the undisguised delight in her face. “Naturally I didn’t waste any time...”

  And then Susan, acutely uncomfortable because neither of them knew she was there, must have made an unwary movement, for the man turned and looked straight at her.

  “Ah, Miss Maldon!” he exclaimed suavely. “Come and meet Madame Dupont!” As Susan stepped slowly forward she felt that his eyes were raking her mercilessly and there was a harsh, mocking edge to his voice, perhaps because he resented her presence at such an ill-timed moment. “Jacqueline, you must meet Miss Maldon! She is our little English dragon who is to keep watch and ward over Ayse!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  INSTANTLY the somewhat haughty hostility that had flashed into the eyes of Madame Dupont vanished from them, and she laughed. The laugh made Susan feel even more embarrassed than she had done before.

  “Dragon?” she echoed. “And English? But, my dear Raoul”—she spoke in English, but her voice had a pretty Parisian accent—“if you wished for a dragon for Ayse, you should have selected someone just a little older, surely? Dragons breathe forth fire, and are very fierce, but I’m sure Miss Maldon is not that type at all Also she is very English!”

  “Very English,” Raoul agreed, still looking mockingly at Susan. “Quite unmistakably English.”

  “I once wished to marry an Englishman,” Madame Dupont told him, a demure curve to her lips, but a not-so-demure sparkle of amusement in her eyes as she peeped at him sideways. “He might have been a brother to Miss Maldon here, and for a time I fancied I adored him. But it would not have done.” She slipped a hand into the crook of his arm as they moved towards the coolness of the patio. “Our temperaments would not have matched.”

  “No?” Mehmet Bey murmured, with almost complete casualness, as he drew forward comfortable wicker chairs for them, and then summoned a servant to bring drinks. “Why would they not have matched?”

  “Because there is no mating of fire with ice,” and she smiled at him as if they two were alone in the patio.

  Mehmet Bey’s dark eyebrows rose, and for an instant his eyes, with the strange little derisive golden lights in them, swung round again to Susan’s face.

  “You hear that, Miss Maldon?” he demanded, as he handed her the long glass of lime she had asked for. “The English are ice, and we must take care therefore that you do not melt here in this hot desert sun!”

  While Susan declined to meet the quizzical look that lingered in his expression, Jacqueline Dupont’s lovely, kittenish face betrayed a faint air of surprise, and her eyes, too, rested on Susan. She decided that, compared with her own vividness, the English girl had no looks to speak of, and that although the green dress she was wearing made her look crisp and cool like the green heart of a lettuce, it also took the color out of her face, and made her eyes look large and rather too darkly blue. She didn’t look in the least like inflammable or dangerous material, and Madame Dupont felt a faint uprush of contempt.

  With that skin, that pale gold hair, and that air of fragility, she could, of course, look quite wonderful—if someone with the knowledge of how to work such miracles took her in charge. But the English had no knowledge of these things, and they seldom, if ever, made the best of themselves. So she dismissed Susan as quite unimportant, and turned her attention once more to her host.

  Ayse joined them, and throughout lunch the visitor was bright, sparkling, and utterly vivacious. She had apparently recovered completely from the shock of her bereavement, and was full of the places she had visited in recent months, the people she had met, and the houses she had stayed in, and admitted with a look directed quite undisguisedly at Raoul that, but for the fact that she had felt compelled to return to the oasis, she would have stayed away even longer. But, now that she was back—and Susan gathered that the Villa of Stars was situated about a couple of miles away, on the far side of the oasis—she planned to entertain as much as she could, and was thinking about inviting all sorts of people to stay with her. Raoul and Ayse must spend a week-end with her soon, and so, of course, must Miss Maldon—with barely a glance at Miss Maldon, however, as if she was merely a kind of necessary adjunct to Ayse, and could not be dissociated from her at the present time.

  Susan noticed that Raoul’s eyes dwelt upon her with a half-look of amusement in them at times, although he undoubtedly seem
ed to find it necessary to look at her fairly frequently. Once the cartwheel hat was removed, her hair was revealed as dark and almost rebelliously curly, and the curls were so silky that anyone looking at her felt an almost instinctive desire to touch them. Her violet eyes were thickly and blackly lashed, and she had a habit of keeping her white lids lowered and peeping upwards through the eyelashes provocatively. Her mouth, heavily lipsticked, was a source of provocation in itself—or so Susan, who had never come in contact with anyone quite like her before, and had no real idea what was meant by provocation of that sort, felt somehow curiously certain.

  After lunch, while they sat in the patio sipping their coffee—thick, black, Turkish coffee, to which Susan had not yet become accustomed—the widow accepted one of her host’s Turkish cigarettes, and confided to him that she had added a new horse to her stables.

  “She goes like the wind,” she said, “and once you have seen her you will envy me the possession of her. In fact, you may even try to rob me of her!” She leaned towards him across the arms of their adjacent chairs, and the exquisite delicacy of her Paris perfume must have crept upwards to his nostrils. “How soon do you wish to be tempted, Raoul, cheri? Shall we ride together tomorrow morning?”

  He looked at her as if he still found something either in or about her that amused him, and admitted that he would not be free the following morning.

  “I have promised to teach Miss Maldon to ride. She has her first lesson tomorrow morning,” and his voice sounded soft and bland.

  “Miss Maldon?” Her voice was sharp and amazed. “The little English dragon?”

  “That was a joke.” He lay back and looked at her with his eyes glinting with humor under his own amazing eyelashes. “Miss Maldon is Ayse’s companion, and conditions out here are not such as she has been accustomed to. Unless we do something to prevent her from realizing how very different they are, and perhaps becoming bored, she may run away and leave us. Therefore I have decided that she must learn to ride.”

  “I see.” But the lovely mouth drew in to as thin a line as its slightly sensual shape would permit. “And is there anything else you feel you must teach Miss Maldon in order to persuade her to remain here?”

  “Not at the moment,” but this time his eyes glinted almost wickedly at Susan.

  She felt herself coloring in a kind of confusion.

  “If you would prefer to postpone the lesson tomorrow morning—?” she began.

  But he shook his head quite firmly.

  “Certainly not. That is an arrangement we must neither of us fall all down upon. Neither of us,” he repeated, as if he was once again challenging her.

  Jacqueline’s eyes, which had looked slightly bleak, revealed a sudden, almost malicious amusement.

  “If you have never ridden a horse before, Miss Maldon,” she remarked, “I think you are being very brave to allow Raoul to instruct you. He is inclined to regard the most mettlesome piece of horseflesh as extraordinarily docile, and although I’ve never known him willingly undertake to give lessons before, I have known him do so unwillingly. On that occasion it was my unfortunate younger brother who suffered,” and her amusement became a positive bright sparkle of gaiety.

  A little later she persuaded Raoul to take her away and show her the miniatures he had unearthed during his recent visit to Paris, which were supposed to be of Marie Antoinette and the man she gave her heart to during the unsatisfying years of her marriage, and Ayse invited Susan to inspect some of the new frocks she had bought in Paris. After that there was a brief siesta until tea was served in the patio, but neither Madame Dupont nor Mehmet Bey put in an appearance while the beverage—with lemon, and accompanied by very rich pastries—was being dispensed and drunk. And Susan did not again see the visitor until her sky-blue car was carrying her away from the great entrance gates, and Mehmet Bey stood watching while a small hand flashing with diamonds waved to him from the back seat.

  Once again Susan was in the shadows of the colonnade, and she vanished when Mehmet Bey turned. She made her way quickly, as if escaping from something, back through the various courtyards to the one where the low door admitted to the open space without, and once on the other side of that door she knew an urge to explore a little and find out what lay in the green heart of the palm grove.

  It was already cooler, because the sun was slipping rapidly westwards, and the green feathery fronds in front of her were glowing in the slanting light. The white road slipped between them, and it looked beautifully cool and inviting at that hour. Susan decided that she would follow it for a short distance only, and if she could come upon the village she would have some idea what a real, native village looked like.

  The palm trunks soared like the pillars of a cathedral on either side of her, and between gaps in the overhanging canopy of green she could see the deep blue of the sky—that incredible, miraculous blue, which only with the coming of night would soften its tones. Then, with stars hanging in it like lamps suspended by invisible threads, it would look like a pall of velvet, deep blue and mystical, and in some way lighted from behind to give it depth and luminosity.

  After a day which had included little exercise, because of the enervating heat, Susan was glad to be able to walk forward at a fairly brisk pace, and feel the mere semblance of an evening breeze reaching her. She had been given to understand by Nicholas Carlton that the village was quite close, but the first indication she had that she was almost on top of it was when a curious twanging noise shattered the silence, and a thin, flute-like voice lifted itself up on the evening air, and she realized that it was someone singing, in the monotonous, unchanging key of the East, and accompanying the song with a stringed instrument.

  Then the palms thinned abruptly, and in front of her was an open space, with a huddle of houses glaring strangely in the glass-clear light, and one or two larger buildings with weather-browned shutters and balconies looking slightly more pretentious. In front of the houses some children were playing in the grey dust of the roadway, and a veiled, black-clad Bedouin woman bore some sort of large brass container away to the end of the village.

  But the thing which instantly riveted Susan’s attention was the gleaming, ostentatiously opulent car that was standing outside one of the larger houses. She had seen that blue car glide away from the entrance to her employer’s house so very recently that she couldn’t possibly mistake it, and as she recognized it she came to a complete standstill in the path.

  She saw Nicholas Carlton—impossible not to recognize him, too, after a lapse of only a few days—come out from the house and hold open the rear door of the car for the slender white figure beside him. And when the rear door was closed, and the white figure comfortably seated, he bowed—a little mockingly, Susan thought, though she was still some distance away—and for the second time that day Susan saw the car drive away this time, however, in a cloud of dust thrown up by the primitive roadway.

  She had just made up her mind to turn swiftly and return by the way she had come, when the realization that it was too late to make such a move filled her with a certain amount of dismay. Nicholas Carlton had turned deliberately in her direction, and as she stood regretting the impulse that had caused her to take an evening walk he moved with a kind of lithe grace towards her.

  “What an unexpected pleasure!” he exclaimed, when he was close to her. In spite of the derelict appearance of the house he had left he was well-dressed, in a thin silk suit, and his eyes, as they strayed over her, looked bluer than ever. “What a completely unexpected pleasure!”

  Susan bit her lip and felt trapped. She also felt extremely annoyed because of the amusement in his eyes.

  “I’ve been wondering how you were getting on,” he told her. “Jacqueline has just passed on to me the information that you seem to be settling down rather well, but in view of the promise I made to your father it’s a relief to come across you myself. Won’t you come along in and let me give you a drink? My friend has gone off to Tehran, and I’m temporarily in
possession of this house, so there’s nothing to prevent our having a little chat.”

  “Except that I must go back,” she said. “I had no intention of doing anything more than discover where the village was.”

  “And now that you’ve discovered it, are you afraid to spare me a quarter of an hour of your time? Or is it that you’re too conventional?”—with a quizzically lifted eyebrow.

  “Of course not,” she protested instantly. “Only it will soon be dark—”

  “Nonsense! There’s a full hour yet before the sun sets, and in any case I’ll walk back with you, so there’s nothing to be afraid of.” He took her by the arm before she could offer any more protests—or even think up an excuse that would prevent him from walking back with her, at least and for the first time in her life she found herself entering a genuine Arab house, with thick walls that shut out the sunlight and created an atmosphere of almost icy coolness by contrast with the warmth outside.

  But although the living-room they entered was pleasant enough, with a bright mat in the centre of the floor, some cushioned divans around the walls, and a low brass table or two bearing books and cigarettes, they did not pause there. They went through into a kind of palm garden, with orange trees, and some oleanders in tubs, and here Carlton placed Susan in a comfortable chair, and provided her with a long, cool drink which he fetched himself. Then he sat in a chair beside her and looked at her in the way that had confused her in Baghdad.

  “Well,” he said softly, as he lifted his glass to her, “this as I said before, is a pleasure!”

  “I had no idea you were still here,” she replied, a little stiffly.