The Desert Castle (24 page)

‘
No,
’
Marion said.
‘
Are you
?’

He nodded.
‘
I have three children, but only one wife.
’

‘
But the Koran allows you more
?’
Marion teased him.

He smiled a shy smile.
‘
But to marry more than one wife you must treat them all exactly the same. That is impossible. Nobody with any sense marries more
than
one wife nowadays.
’

Reflecting on the incident of the lipstick, Marion thought he was probably right. How could you love any two people in exactly the
s
ame way?

‘
I must go down,
’
she said.
‘
My friends will be waiting for me.
’
She searched for the right word to wish him goodbye and triumphantly found it
.
‘
B-khatirkum
!’

He grinned, pleased by the courtesy.
‘
Ma-salami
!’
He stood up and shook her warmly by the
hand.
‘
You are welcome in Petra,
’
he added.
‘
Ahlan was-sahlan
.’

‘
Ahlan bekum
.’

Marion was smiling to herself as she retraced her steps down to the bottom of the valley. She felt
sh
e had acquitted herself rather well. Gregory—But she would not think about Gregory! And why should he care if she had mastered a few basic phrases in Arabic? He didn
’
t care anything about her!

She ran down the last few steps, catching right of Gaston and Lucasta waiting for her. T
h
e horses the Americans had ridden in on were huddled out of the wind and she had to walk round them to get to
th
e others.

‘
Was it worth the climb
?
’
she asked them.

Lucasta gave her a woeful look, very near to tears.
‘
No, it wasn
’
t
.
’
Her face crumpled as her control broke.
‘
I want to go home
!
’

M
arion supposed she must have spent more
trying
evenings in the past, but off-hand she couldn
’
t
think
of any. Gaston and Lucasta refused to address more
than
the most obvious courtesies to each other,
maintaining
a hurt silence off which her own remarks bounced straight back at her.

‘
What happened, Lucasta
?
’
Marion asked, when the two girls were getting ready for bed.

‘
Nothing
!
’
Lucasta insisted, but her woeful face gave her away.
‘
He was horrible, Marion! He wanted—
’
Her voice died away into silence and
sh
e sniffed pathetically into her handkerchief.

Marion
’
s conscience smote her.
‘
I should have come with you
!
’
she exclaimed.

Lucasta shook her head.
‘
He doesn
’
t love me
!
’

‘
Of course he does
!
’

‘
Not as I love him
!
’

There was no answer to that. Marion pulled on her nightdress, bracing herself against the cold of the bedclothes.
‘
I could have done with a hot water bottle,
’
she said, hoping to change the subject.

Lucasta sniffed again.
‘
I shan
’
t say goodnight to him I shan
’
t! He can think what he likes! He
’
ll probably think I
’
m too young and ally to have remembered his rotten code
!
’

Marion sighed.
‘
I should think he can hear every word through the wall if you speak so loudly.
’

‘
Good
!
’
said Lucasta. She heaved herself into bed, pulling the blankets up over her head.
‘
Goodnight, Marion. It isn
’
t
your
fault
!’

But
sh
e felt unaccountably guilty all the same. What could have happened up there to upset Lucasta to this extent? Marion tried to read for a while, but wild visions of Gaston trying to force himself on Lucasta kept coming between her and the written word. Common sense told her it was far more likely to have been the other way round, and that worried her too. She should have done something about it, Marion told herself, something more than she had done, but quite what that something should have been she didn
’
t know.

She switched out the light above her bed and fell deeply asleep almost at once. In the night she thought she heard rain pelting down
on
the roof outside, but dismissed it as being absurd. It hadn
’
t rained once since she had arrived here. At the first light of morning, however, it was still raining. Marion reached over to shake
Lucasta awake, but there was no one there. In
an instant she was out of bed and calling her name, but there was nobody there to answer her and, when she felt the girl
’
s bed, it was cold to her touch. Wherever Lucasta was, she had been gone for a long, long time.

CHAPTER
IX

They were very patient at the desk. The rain,
they
murmured, where would anyone have gone in this rain?

‘
But someone must have seen them
!
’
Marion interjected.
‘
Did they have breakfast at any time
?’

‘
I will enquire,
’
the receptionist soothed her.
‘
It
may
be that they have already gone on the horses.
’
He broke into a flood of Arabic designed to encourage those who were doing their best to mop up the puddles
as
fast as they appeared on the marble-tiled floor.

‘
But what am I to do
?
’
Marion demanded.

The receptionist looked at her with reproachful eyes.
‘
Are you sure that they are nowhere in the Rest House
?
’
he asked without much hope. He went to the door and looked out at the teeming rain, his shoulders hunched against his dislike of the wet. Marion went and stood beside him. There was no sign of Gaston
’
s car, but it could have been parked further round the
corner
out of
s
ight.

‘
They could have been gone for hours
!
’
she sighed.

Th
e man beside her quivered like a cat faced with something distasteful, then inspiration struck him.
‘You
must have your breakfast! You are cold and hungry, no? And afterwards perhaps they will have arrived. I will order your breakfast to be brought to you at
once.’

The dining-room, like everywhere else in the
Rest
House, had been thoroughly disorganised by the
rain.
The electricity had failed and, as the Cave had
no
other means of lighting, a Tilley lamp had been lit
and
placed on a strategic table, accentuating the shadows m the
corner
s and breathing heavily
in
a way that
made
Marion hope it was not going to explode. Her
experience
of oil lamps was strictly limited, confined
to the
occasional battle with a hurricane lamp, and this
one,
with its glowing mantle, pump at the ready,
and pol
ished exterior, bore little relation to its battered cousin that Marion and her mother kept in the cellar of their house in London “against eventualities”, as
Mrs.
Shirley put it.

Toast, jam, and butter were brought almost immediately, together with some hot water with which the waiter invited her to make her own coffee, pointing to the jar of instant powder on the table. In other circumstances, Marion would have enjoyed her breakfast, but her anxieties as to what Lucasta and Gaston were up to had deprived of her any appetite. Yesterday she had felt a thrill to be sitting in one of the actual caves that the Nabateans had carved out of the hillside, today she barely noticed her surroundings. There was no one else in the dining room. The little alcoves round the room were dark and empty, and without the multicoloured glass lights it was hard to see the chisel marks left by the mason who had dressed the stone of the walls.

How could Lucasta have done this to her? Had her quarrel with Gaston been a blind to throw her off the scent of what they had planned together? And, worst of all,
what
was Gregory going to say to her?

Marion was so
s
unk in misery that she scarcely noticed the tourist policeman as he came in, his Air
Force blue sweater glistening with damp from the rain. He had come right up to her table before she realised he was waiting to
s
peak to her.

‘
Have you found them
?
’

His face looked white in the light of the Tilley lamp, without any colour at all, but his eyes were kind and there was no sign that he had any bad news for her after all. She took a deep, gulping breath, and tried to calm herself.

‘
You have ordered horses this morning,
’
he said in only slightly accented English.
‘
They are waiting for you. It is best to have your ride as quickly as possible in this rain.
’

‘
But I can
’
t go without the others
!
’
She looked up at his surprised face.
‘
I must wait for them
!
’
she almost pleaded with him.

‘
If you wait there may be too much water,
’
the policeman told her, but Marion wasn
’
t listening.

‘
Perhaps they went ahead
?
’
she suggested.

The policeman frowned.
‘
You have some companions with you
?’
he questioned her.
‘
A man and a woman
?
’

Marion nodded eagerly.
‘
Have you seen them
?
’

‘
There are some people who have gone into Petra this morning. I will ask if they are among them. I may not have seen them myself, but they will have
s
igned the book.
’
He smiled and for the first time Marion saw him as a man and not just at a uniform. It was apparent to her that he had seen her as a woman from the
s
tart and she found herself aware of the naked appreciation in his eyes.
‘
You will come quickly
?
’
he commanded her.
‘
You will not waste time. The horses and your guide are waiting for you.
’

She nodded her head, saying nothing. She wished Gregory were with her. The look in the policeman
’
s eyes had accentuated her vulnerability and she, not normally nervous of b
e
ing on her own, was strangely reluctant to leave the breakfast table and encounter him again.

It was raining harder than ever when she did go outside. She ran down the path, her head well down, in a mad dash for the tourist office. There was no sign of the policeman there, but the young man who came up to her and shyly introduced himself as her guide seemed to know all about her.

‘
Have the others gone ahead
?’
she demanded, rather breathlessly, for her hundred-yard sprint had been faster than she usually travelled.