The Weeping Desert (9 page)

“Then you go without,” said John firmly, nodding to the officer to remove it from the pile. He heard a whimper, but the line had to be drawn somewhere.

Even with some ruthless pruning, the duty was more than a month’s salary. John managed to write the cheque with a steady hand, but he felt sorely tempted to send her straight back to, Shuqrat on the next plane.

“There’s this, sir.” It was the wicker basket. “Would you be good enough to sign this quarantine form?”

Khadija gave a small cry of delight and ran to the basket. She unfastened the lid and lifted out a beautiful pale brown Siamese cat, its haughty blue eyes at this moment looking extremely wicked and annoyed.

“Yasmine,” purred Khadija, and began murmuring endearments in Arabic into the cat’s ear.

“This is most unorthodox,” said the officer, beginning to feel uncomfortably hot. “This animal should have been declared at Oman Said.”

John drew Khadija aside. “You must say good-bye to your cat,” he said, more kindly. “There are rules in England about bringing animals into the country. She’ll be well looked after at a cats’ home.”

“Yasmine goes everywhere with me,” said Khadija, clinging to the cat. Yasmine glared malevolently at John, the customs officer, the airline official, the porter and everyone else in sight.

“Not here, she doesn’t,” said John, firmly removing the cat from her arms. At this, the cat went wild, biting and scratching, and it took all three men to get her back into the basket, where she continued to yell and swear and spit.

“Now will you please decide which of these cases can be stored? I have no intention of travelling to Pinethorpe with seventeen pieces of your luggage, plus my two cases. What about those two cabin trunks, for a start?”

Khadija’s dark eyes glinted stubbornly. “No.”

“If you don’t choose, then I will,” said John, equally determined.

“No!”

John bent down and hissed into her ear: “You will do as your husband says.”

He knew he was not being fair. But he was not going to spend all day arguing with an irresponsible Arab girl about a mountain of clothes.

There was a pause and he could sense her struggle. But she had been brought up too strictly, for too long, in the Arabic custom of complete obedience. Silently she pointed at the cases she wished to keep, and then shook her head at the remainder. John noticed that the Diorling perfume and rose-leaf jam were accompanying them to Pinethorpe, but the ink horns and pieces of ambergris were destined to remain in store. For a moment John felt a fleeting admiration for Khadija. She was behaving in a brave and dignified manner. She had arrived in a foreign country, with a strange man to whom she had given her trust, and was now being made to part with half of her belongings. John promised himself that he would buy her something really frivolous and feminine to make up for his harshness.

“We’ll go and find a taxi into London,” said John heartily, trying to lift the atmosphere of gloom. Khadija padded silently behind him. John stopped and turned to her.

“This is England,” he said. “You don’t have to walk behind me. You walk at my side, like this.”

He took her arm and steered her through the crowds.

Khadija’s sadness lifted a little as she walked beside the tall, sunburnt Englishman. So many things in the last few hours had dismayed and frightened her. Many times she dearly wished herself back in the cushioned familiarity and safety of the royal harem. Then her young, struggling spirit that yearned to be free looked around at the European women with their bare faces and short skirts, and she realised that if she wanted to taste these freedoms, then she must conform to other Western customs, however strange and heartbreaking they might be.

They had to take two taxis into London, for there were still ten pieces of luggage. John saw his savings disappearing as fast as ice under the desert sun, if this was a sample of how much Khadija was going to cost him.

“Is this still London?” she asked every few minutes, hardly taking her eyes off the busy streets.

John nodded. “It’s a big place.”

He booked into a hotel near Marble Arch and took two rooms for the night. Khadija was obviously flagging. The long flight had been tiring and neither of them had had any sleep the previous night.

Khadija looked round the foyer of the hotel, at the modern decor and deep, comfortable furniture. Her appearance had caused very little stir, for the hotel staff were used to a cosmopolitan clientele.

“Is this your palace?” she asked, impressed.

“I have already told you, I do not live in a palace,” said John, steering her towards the lift. “Glen Craven House is large but by no means a palace. My father has his surgery, a waiting room and an office downstairs. There are four bedrooms, and two more bedrooms above them in the roof, which my brother and I used to have when we were kids.”

The lift doors clanged shut, and with a faint whir the lift shot upwards. Khadija would have fallen if John had not caught her arm.

“What is happening?” she gasped.

John explained the function of a lift. “We can always walk down if you don’t like it,” he sighed.

Khadija did not like it, and once she had reached the safety of her bedroom on the sixth floor, she refused to leave it. John tried to persuade her to join him in the dining room for a meal, but she was adamant. In the end he rang room service and ordered a light supper for her on a tray. Perhaps it was just as well. He supposed Arab women removed their masks in order to eat, and Khadija did not seem ready to do that in public yet. She liked her room and the adjoining private bathroom, although she remarked that it was the size for a doll. John explained that his room was next door, but Khadija did not answer.

John left her when the supper trolley arrived. Khadija looked at it distastefully, and John knew what she was thinking.

“You’ll just have to get used to using other people’s cups,” he said, which sounded unhygienic even to his ears.

When John knocked at her door early next morning, Khadija appeared, very subdued. She had not found it easy without Is-if to tend to her needs, and everywhere was in wild disorder. Half her cases were open, and sandals and dresses and jars and combs littered the room. John strode into the bathroom and turned off the taps, which she had left running.

“I’d better help you pack or we shall miss the train,” he said, and he began scooping up garments before Khadija could object.

“It is not fitting,” she began in a wifely tone, but she had been a leisurely princess for far longer and so allowed John to re-pack her possessions.

Roughly he folded the sumptuous gold brocade dresses and yards of gaudy silks. He wondered if she was going to flap down Pinethorpe High Street in her black gown and mask. She would certainly give the place something new to talk about, but his mother was not going to like it at all.

John thought about his parents for most of the long train journey to the north. Khadija sat huddled in a corner seat, tracing their route with a finger on the small map of England John had bought for her at the station bookstall.

“It is most amazing,” she said. “Never have I seen so many trees, so much grass, such abundance of cultivation. This is indeed a fortunate and provident land.”

The English countryside was certainly a joy to look at after his months in the desert, and John saw it afresh through Khadija’s eyes. He was glad to be home, even though he felt chilly in his thin suit. He wondered if Khadija, in her many layers, was feeling the drop in temperature.

The impact of Khadija’s arrival in Pinethorpe began as the train slowed down, crept into Pinethorpe station and stopped at platform one. A porter caught sight of Khadija’s masked face, and his mouth fell open with a look of utter amazement.

John had become used to working with Arabs and living in the Persian Gulf,
and London had always had nationalities of every kind fed into its veins daily; but Pinethorpe, a small, old-fashioned seaside town built with dignified restraint on the slopes to the sea, rarely saw anyone more exotic than the odd au pair girl, or foreign waiter in the summer season.

The porter watched John helping Khadija to negotiate the steep step down from the train, and it was some minutes before he came to his senses and realised that the great pile of suitcases emerging was business for him.

“Well, if it isn’t Mr. Cameron himself,” said the porter. “You home already? It only seems yesterday that you were off to that Middle East place.”

“I’m home on leave,” said John. “Then I go back for another tour to finish my contract.”

“My goodness,” went on the old man, never taking his eyes off Khadija. “Where did yer get ’er? Did yer pick ’er up in one of ’em bizarrs?” He chuckled to himself.

“The young lady is visiting England for the first time on a holiday,” was all the information John was going to give the old gossiper. He knew that a wildly inaccurate version would be round the town before they were halfway down to Market Hill.

John went into the station yard to get the two taxis that normally met the London train. Only one old battered black car was there.

“George has just taken Mrs. Armitage from the hotel into Scunthorpe to see her daughter in the maternity hospital,” the driver volunteered chattily. “We didn’t expect anybody on this train, it being mid-week.” He looked happily at the pile of luggage being wheeled unsteadily out of the station without any visible signs of propulsion. “I can come back for that lot.”

The driver did not have to be told where John lived, but he made the most of the occasion by driving the long way round and slowing down at every road junction so that the townfolk of Pinethorpe could get a glimpse of his extraordinary passenger.

Glen Craven House was a large double-fronted Victorian house built of grey brick and roofed with grey slates. It stood almost at the top of Market Hill, with a semi-circular in-and-out gravel drive and a crescent-shaped bed of flowering shrubs.

John went up the steps and pushed open the glass-panelled front door. He could hear his parents’ voices in the dining room.

Edith Cameron took one look at her tall, sunburnt son standing in the doorway, and let out a small shriek of delight. In a moment, John was hugging her, and his mother was weeping weak tears of welcome.

“Why didn’t you let us know when you were arriving, my boy?” said Dr. Cameron, pumping John’s hand up and down, and clapping him on the back. “We’d have come and met you.”

“I didn’t want Mother to make a fuss. I knew she’d only start spring-cleaning the house and laundering the covers.” He grinned down at his mother. “You look marvellous,” he said, pretending to ruffle her elegantly set grey hair. “Young as ever.”

“We have missed you,” she said. “I don’t know why you ever wanted to go to that dreadful foreign place when—”

Mrs. Cameron broke off as she caught sight of the strange black-robed figure in the doorway behind John. She was lost for words as John led the Arab girl into the dining room.

“This—er—young woman is the daughter of Sheikh Abd-ul Hamid, the Ruler of Shuqrat. She is—er—” John cleared his throat. “She’s visiting England for a short holiday. I thought perhaps she could stay here—for a while. Would that be all right, Mother?”

Khadija stepped forward and smiled gravely at the middle-aged English couple who looked at her with such astonishment. She brought her hands out of her gown, put them together, palms touching, as if in prayer.

“I am Princess Khadija Safieh, favourite daughter of Sheikh Abd-ul Hamid, and now wife of John Cameron, purveyor of oil and provider of prosperity to Shuqrat. I salute and respect the honoured parents of my husband,” she said.

To John’s horror, she sank down on her knees at their feet, her forehead touching her hands, in complete obeisance.

Chapter Five

They had to give John’s mother a large brandy. Mrs. Cameron took one look at the prostrate figure on the floor and collapsed into a chair, weeping afresh.

John was not sure whether the weeping was grief or fury. His mother had a strong character and was not normally given to hysterical outbursts.

Dr. Cameron tried to comfort her, a mixture of incredulity and disbelief on his face. He looked at John and said: “Well, I never. Fancy that, an Arab wife.”

“If Mother would only stop crying, I could explain that Khadija is not my wife,” said John drily.

Mrs. Cameron dabbed her face with a small embroidered handkerchief. “What do you mean, John? Not your wife. This young woman has just said that you are her husband. Oh no…” She broke into fresh tears as further complications occurred to her. “Is she pregnant?”

“No, she isn’t, and will you please listen to me? It’s a long story, and I’m in no mood to keep repeating myself.”

Dr. Cameron looked at his son sharply. “And that’s no way to talk to your mother.”

John ran his hand through his thick sun-bleached hair. “I’m sorry. I’ve had a bad day, or two or three.”

Khadija stood in the corner of the room, bewildered. She could not understand why the mother of John Cameron should have shrieked that way, as if her new daughter-in-law were a poisonous desert snake. She could not see what she had done wrong; she had spoken in the most respectful manner. But perhaps in this strange country there were special words she should have said to the parents of her husband. It was all most confusing.