The Gabriel Hounds (10 page)

Halide brought coffee at nine o’clock, with the
information that Nasirulla had gone back to the village, and that my room was ready.

She was not much like her brother in appearance, being younger and slimly built. She was a dark-skinned Arab, walnut rather than olive, with huge dark eyes, slim neck and delicate hands. Her dress was of bronze-green silk, a rich-looking material and a sophisticated colour; her eyes were outlined with black in a way London would have recognised; and under the thin silk she wore, unless I was mistaken, a French – a very French – half-cup bra. Like a great many Arab women she wore her bank account on her wrists, which jingled with thin gold bracelets. No simple Arab maiden this one, and – if I was any judge – wasting no sweetness on the desert air. As she told Mr Lethman (in English) about the room, she looked me over in her turn, and the message passed, clear from female to female in any language from Eskimo to Aborigine: ‘Not that he’d look at you, the mess you look in those trousers, but keep off my patch, will you, or I’ll make you sorry.’

Then, with the black eyes modestly lowered, she was saying to John Lethman, in her pretty, softly-accented English: ‘When you have finished your coffee, the Lady would like to see you again.’

She went out, leaving the door open. I watched her slim graceful figure vanish into the shadows of the arcade, beyond the small light cast by the lamp; but I thought she hadn’t gone very far. In a moment or two I knew that I was right: where the waters of the lake reflected a faint greyness from the star-filled sky I saw a movement. She was waiting among the bushes by the
water’s edge, probably watching us through the open door.

John Lethman made no move to shut it. Since he was obviously anxious to finish his coffee and answer the summons, I hurried with mine, too.

Soon he got to his feet. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you now, but I’ll come back as soon as she lets me, and take you across. Now, are you sure you’ll be all right here?’

‘Why not? Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. I’ll find a book.’

‘Of course, take anything you want. You can turn the lamp up quite easily if it’s not bright enough; Halide’ll show you how.’

He turned his head sharply as a bell jangled somewhere deep in the buildings, sounding very loud in the hushed night. And from somewhere nearer, startled off by the violent and prolonged pealing of the bell, came the sudden furious baying of dogs. Big dogs, by the sound of them, inside the building, and quite near.

‘What on earth’s happened?’ I demanded, startled.

‘Just your great-aunt getting impatient. I’ll have to go, I’m sorry. I’ll be back to fetch you as soon as I can.’

‘But those dogs?’

‘Oh, that’s nothing, they always make that hellish noise when the bell goes. Don’t worry about them, I’ll shut them up before I come back for you.’

‘“Shut them up?” You mean they’re loose about the place? They sound dangerous.’

‘Well, they’re our watchdogs, they have to be. But they’re only turned loose at night, and they can’t get
into the Seraglio if you keep the main door shut. You’ll be quite safe.’ He flashed me a sudden smile. ‘Not to worry, it’s not your night for being eaten alive – at least, not by the dogs.’

He went. I heard the wooden gate shut behind him, and a few moments later his voice calling to the dogs. The baying stopped, and silence came back. In it I saw Halide, glimmering in the doorway in her green silk.

‘If you will come this way, I will show you your room.’

She had lit another lamp for me in the bedroom, and set it on a shelf near the bed.

This room was a twin of the other, but seemed bigger, as it contained no furniture but a narrow iron-framed bed, a flimsy-looking bamboo chair, and a hideous chest of drawers painted black, which held a rather beautiful lacquered looking-glass and a battered old tin box with metal clasps labelled S.S.
Yangtse Maid
. The floor was bare and so were the window-seats on the dais. The bed was made up with Irish linen, yellowish and not very well ironed, and the red honeycomb quilt covered what looked like the hardest and healthiest mattress in the world.

I didn’t think somehow that this was Halide’s patch; there would have to be a good deal more Eastern glamour about any affairs of hers. Was that what John Lethman had meant by ‘sleeping on the other side’?

However, it wasn’t this thought which made me say: ‘I’ve turned Mr Lethman out, haven’t I? Where will he sleep?’

A shrug, not quite insolent. ‘There are plenty of
rooms.’ When I didn’t answer she glanced at me, perhaps a bit uneasily, and added with an attempt at civility dragged up with obvious difficulty: ‘He is with the Lady often at night. He’ll maybe sleep in the morning.’

‘Oh, well, perhaps I haven’t upset things as much as I thought.’ I smiled at her. ‘But I’m afraid it’s giving you a lot of trouble, changing the rooms round twice.’

She didn’t make the usual disclaimer, but this may only have been because her English wasn’t good enough for polite skirmishing.

‘You have seen the bathroom?’

‘Yes, thanks. Is the water drinkable?’

‘Yes, but there was water on the supper tray. I will leave that. If there is nothing else—?’

‘I don’t think so, thank you. It all looks very nice, and I’m sure I shall be comfortable. Oh, would you show me how to turn the lamp higher, please? Mr Lethman said I might look at his books while I was waiting.’

Back in the other room she obliged, lifting the lamp down and setting it on the table among the books. I thanked her, and examined them while she began to stack the used dishes on the tray. She said nothing more, but I saw how she watched me, and it wasn’t imagination to read a wary hostility into those quick sidelong glances. Irritated now, and wishing she would finish her job and go. I concentrated on selecting a book. As light reading for whiling away an hour or two they were hardly promising. An Arabic grammar, a few books on Syria and the Lebanon which I had already read during my convalescence in Charles’s room, and
a collection which might be said to represent John Lethman’s homework – some volumes (also familiar to me) about the original Lady of the Lebanon: Joan Haslip and Roundell and Silk Buckingham and the three old volumes of Dr Meryon’s diary about his redoubtable patroness. I looked at the fly-leaves. As I thought, they were Great-Aunt Harriet’s own copies, presumably lent to her latter-day ‘Dr Meryon’ for his close study … I skipped along the row. T. E. Lawrence’s
Crusader Castles
, Guillaume’s
Islam
, the Everyman
Koran
, King-lake’s
Eothen
… all Aunt Harriet’s. No medical textbooks, which were presumably too bulky to carry on field work. The only things which carried his own name were – interestingly enough – Huxley’s
The Mind Changers
, Fraser’s
Golden Bough
, and a newish paper-bound copy of Théophile Gautier’s
Le Club des Hachachiens
. No novels except Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov
and Margery Allingham’s
The Tiger in the Smoke
.

The last volume in the row was de Quincey. I turned the pages idly while Halide stacked the dishes rather loudly on the tray.

‘The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities, or aspirations: he wishes and longs, as earnestly as ever, to realise what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely out-runs his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt. He lies under the weight of incubus and nightmare …’

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
. It was exactly what Hamid had said. I put the opium nightmare back as Halide lifted the tray and went with it to the door.

‘I’ll shut it for you,’ I said, moving to do so, but she paused in the doorway and turned.

‘You are really the daughter of the Lady’s brother’s son?’

I worked it out while she stared at me across the dishes.

‘Yes.’

‘Your father is also here in the Lebanon?’

‘No.’

‘He is dead?’

‘No,’ I said, surprised. ‘Why?’

‘Then you travel alone?’

‘Why not?’

She ignored this, too. She was intent on some line of her own which I couldn’t follow, but which was obviously intensely important to her.

‘You – you stay here long?’

Curiosity made me less than truthful. ‘As long as she’ll let me,’ I said, watching her.

She said quickly: ‘She is not well. You will have to go in the morning.’

I raised my brows. ‘That’s for her to say, surely?’ I added, with innocence concealing a flicker of malice: ‘But of course in a place this size I needn’t be in her way. Mr Lethman asked me to stay as long as I liked.’

The black eyes flared, whether in alarm or anger it was impossible to say. ‘But that is not possible! He—’

Jangling, imperative, and sounding very bad-
tempered, Great-Aunt Harriet’s bell shattered the silence once more. Farther away, but still obviously at large, the watchdogs bayed. The girl started, so violently that the things on the tray clashed and rattled.

‘Saved by the bell,’ I said. ‘You were saying?’

‘No. No. I must go!’ Then, almost fiercely, as I made a move to follow and open the main gate for her: ‘Leave it! I can manage, I can manage!’

The gate shut behind her. I stared thoughtfully after her. Saved by the bell, indeed. I thought I could add the score. Whether or not John Lethman had a stake in Great-Aunt Harriet, I was sure that Halide had a stake in John Lethman. And I wasn’t sure how that added up for Great-Aunt Harriet. I went back to the bookshelf.

It would be nice to be able to record that I was the kind of person who would pick up the Dostoevsky or the Huxley or even
The Golden Bough
and curl up with it for a glorious evening’s read. But when eventually Mr Lethman came for me as he had promised, he found me a few chapters into
The Tiger in the Smoke
, and half-wishing I had chosen something less exciting for a night in the deserted wing of a ruined palace.

He was armed, not with an oil lamp, but with an enormous and very powerful electric torch.

‘Ready?’ he asked.

He led me back to the courtyard where Hamid and I had waited, but there we turned right, away from the main gate, the way I had seen him go to Great-Aunt Harriet. The place was vast, far bigger even than I had imagined. We seemed to walk for ever up corridors, round corners, up steps, down steps, and across at
least two more small courts, in the first of which a trickle of water showed that all the wells had not dried. As we traversed the second I heard, from behind a closed door, a scratching sound followed by a deep whining yelp that made me jump.

‘It’s all right, I told you I’d shut them up.’ He shone the torch momentarily towards the door, and in the gap at its foot I saw the gleam of a dog’s damp nose snuffing at the air. ‘Sofi! Star! Quiet there! Watch your step, Miss Mansel, the threshold’s broken here. This is the Prince’s Garden.’

I don’t know quite what I had expected, something at least as grand as the Seraglio Garden, but in fact the Prince’s Garden was very small. The air was heavy with the scent of jasmine, and I caught a glimpse in the torchlight of a low wall which might contain a pool, but the garden seemed to be little more than an oblong yard with one or two troughs of flowers and some small symmetrical trees in tubs. John Lethman shone the torch straight down on the cracked slabs of the footway, but he could have saved himself the trouble, for, from an open doorway about half-way along the side of the garden, light was spilling out between two small tubbed trees. It was only the dim orange light from a lamp like the one in my own room, but in the heavy darkness it seemed very bright.

He paused in the doorway to stand aside for me. His voice sounded different all at once, tight, wary, deferential.

‘I’ve brought Miss Mansel, Lady Harriet.’

I went past him into the room.

There came

A tongue of light, a fit of flame;

And Christable saw the lady’s eye,

And nothing else saw she thereby …

S. T. Coleridge:
Christabel

T
HE
Prince’s Divan was enormous, and in it prevailed what I can only call a luxurious squalor. The floor was of coloured marble, strewn here and there with Persian rugs, all very dirty; the walls were patterned with intricate mosaics, each panel framing in fretted stone a recess which must once have held a statue or lamp, but which was now empty except for an accumulation of rubbish – cartons, papers, books, medicine bottles, candle-stubs. In the centre of the floor the fountain had been roughly boarded over and now did duty as a table where stood a large tray of greyish silver holding a pile of plates and the remains of a recent meal. Beside this, on the floor, was an empty bowl labelled
DOG.
A chest of drawers in shiny mahogany, covered with more bottles and pill-boxes, stood against the wall. One or two shabby kitchen chairs and a big throne-like affair in red Chinese
lacquer completed the furniture of the lower end of the room. Dust lay everywhere.

A wide archway of delicately chiselled stone framing three shallow steps divided the lower from the upper section of the divan. Set right back in one corner of the upper room or dais was a huge bed, which at one time must have been a luxurious affair with legs shaped like dragons’ claws, a high carved head-board, and hanging from the ceiling above it some sort of gilt device resembling a bird, which was supposed to have held bed-drapes in its talons, Now one wing of the bird was broken, the gilt was flaked and dirty, and from the claws hung only a couple of rubbed velvet curtains which could have been any shade from dark red to black, and which sagged in big loops down on either side of the bed-head, almost concealing with their heavy swags of shadow the figure which reclined in a welter of rugs and blankets.

The light which had flowed so generously out on the flag-way of the garden hardly penetrated into the upper corners of the room. It came from an old-fashioned oil lamp standing among the supper dishes, and as I passed it, approaching the bed, my shadow seemed to leap monstrously ahead of me, then teeter up the steps of the dais to add another layer of darkness to the grotesque obscurity in the corner.