The Sycamore Song Page 10

  Victoria stared at her, wide-eyed. “There’s still Juliette,” she heard herself say.

  “There have been many Juliettes,” Omm Beshir returned. “Did you imagine that with a man like Tariq there would not have been? But such women have nothing to do with you.”

  “But Juliette isn’t in his past. She’s the here and now,” Victoria objected.

  Omm Beshir shrugged, completely indifferent to such an argument. “What of that? To Juliette he is a passing pleasure, no more. Will she wish to serve him, to stand beside him in the bad times, to be a part of him? Will she put his good before her own? Of course she will not. Then why should she matter to you? Maybe he will find some pleasure in her for a while, but she will never be important to him as you are. If you are going to resent every pleasure he takes away from you, you had better go away from him now. Tariq has never had any loving for himself, except from me. His father had no time for him. He was left here with us until he was old enough to be sent away to school. After that, he was allowed to come here only once a year. For the rest of the time he went to holiday homes, or to relatives who didn’t want him. Naturally there have been many Juliettes. Why should he expect anything more from a woman?”

  “But I want to be the only woman in his life!” Victoria exclaimed, shattered.

  “Then, for a little while, you will have to accept his affection for Juliette, no?” Omm Beshir said placidly. “You must let him see that his happiness means more to you than your own. It will not be long before he will want to protect you from being hurt by other women, for he is a kind man, and he will guard you as closely as you could wish. He is a stranger to love, ya bint. You will have to teach him that he is the breath of life to you. You will not find him ungrateful.”

  Victoria was silent. She tried to imagine herself having a similarly intimate conversation with her own mother, and knew that her mother would have been as embarrassed as she. And yet she didn’t mind this odd, dumpy little woman poking her nose into her innermost feelings - feelings which she had scarcely admitted to herself until this moment.

  “You don’t know what jealousy is like,” she said aloud. “I didn’t before—”

  “Alallah! Leave it to God!” The older woman smiled. “I, too, know what it is to love a man as you do. Our customs are different from yours, but our feelings are not so very different, and all women know how it feels not to come first with the man they love. When I first married my husband, I knew him hardly at all, but he made me happier than I had thought it possible to be. But, after two years, there were still no children, and I began to be afraid. My husband was rich and handsome and other women would be willing to give him what I could not. Everyone, my own family included, would understand if he were to divorce me and marry again someone who could give him the sons he longed for. I told myself that after a time one woman is much like another in a man’s bed, but his children are a part of him. They make him immortal in this world. Yet what could I do? Divorce is very easy for us. A man has only to tell his wife she is divorced three times and the marriage is no more.

  “Then came the day when I was abusing him for not coming to me more often, trying to make him notice me. But when he opened his mouth, I was afraid he would send me away from him. I told him that if he wished it, I would accept another wife in the house sooner than have to leave him.

  “He was very kind to me. There was still time for me to have a child and he promised to do nothing in a hurry, although he had already been told of a woman who was willing to marry him. At first I was very upset that he should have thought of marrying again, but in time I accepted that it was important to me also that he should have the children he wanted so badly, and I became happier again.

  “But God is merciful. He answered my prayers, and I conceived my first child, my son Beshir, almost immediately. And my husband put this other woman out of his mind and I have been the only one to enjoy his favours ever since, although I am not beautiful as she was rumoured to have been, and never have been!”

  Victoria carefully arranged her face to hide the shock she felt at Omm Beshir’s story. “In England we are not expected to share our husbands,” she said, feeling that some comment was expected of her.

  “So I have heard,” Omm Beshir smiled. “But is it a good custom, do you think, to cast out the first wife when she is old? I have heard that this frequently happens.”

  “She may have cast him out first,” Victoria pointed out. “Supposing you had wanted to divorce your husband? Could you have done it?”

  Omm Beshir laughed at the thought. “A woman may not,” she acknowledged. “If she has her husband’s consent, she can go to the religious court and make an application for divorce, but without his consent she can do nothing.”

  “But that isn’t fair!”

  Omm Beshir laughed again. “You are still a child if you expect life to be fair,” she said in fat, consoling tones. “It is God’s will that it is as it is.”

  A sentiment which Victoria found more shocking than all the rest. “Tariq is a Christian, isn’t he?” she insisted.

  “Of course.” The old lady’s green eyes snapped with amusement. “But first you must marry him before you can divorce him.”

  “He may not want to marry me,” Victoria said.

  “That would be a pity,” Omm Beshir conceded. “You are what I have always hoped for Tariq, despite being your father’s daughter. Your father was not a loving man. He made use of Tariq and then dismissed him because this Juliette has the morals of a belly-dancer.”

  “Perhaps he was in love with Juliette himself,” Victoria suggested gently.

  Omm Beshir shook her head. “No, no, Juliette was not the only one with him either. He had no wish to make a stable relationship with anyone.”

  Victoria put a hand to her mouth to hide her reluctance to discuss her father when she knew so little about him. “He was unloved too,” she said. “My mother wouldn’t travel with him out of England and they scarcely ever saw each other. It wasn’t a happy marriage.” She made a movement to get up. “I must go. May I come and see you again?”

  Omm Beshir rose to her feet with surprising grace considering the shape of her figure. “Come whenever you will, ya bint, my daughter.” She took Victoria’s hand in hers and lifted it to her lips. “It will be as God wills it, and a little bit as Tariq wants it to be. You can do no more than love him. I will call one of the children to walk with you to your car. I would come with you myself, but it is time for the prayer, and one must not keep God waiting.”

  Victoria allowed herself to be smothered in the Egyptian woman’s perfumed embrace, sniffing the air appreciatively. “I like your scent,” she said. “What is it?”

  “The essence of the lotus flower. I will give you some for yourself to wear when you are with Tariq.” She chuckled happily to herself, pulling Victoria behind her into the bedroom, where her prayer mat was already laid out on the floor, facing towards Mecca.

  She sat down on the edge of the creaking iron bedstead and, with deft fingers, transferred some leaf-green liquid from the larger bottle into a smaller one made from cut crystal. “There! Now you will smell like one of us! Shall I put some on for you? Here, on your wrists, and here, on the nape of your neck. You must rub it in a little so that it lingers on your skin. That’s the way!”

  Victoria smelt her wrists and smiled. It had a pleasant, sharp tang that stopped it from being over-sweet. “I hope Tariq likes it,” she said with a touch of mischief.

  Omm Beshir’s eyes twinkled appreciatively. “He gave it to me! He had better like it! There now, if I put a piece of sticky tape over the stopper it won’t fall out. I hope you enjoy wearing it, my dear.” She handed Victoria the little bottle with a sly smile. “And now you must be going, but come and see me again whenever you come to Cairo.”

  Victoria promised she would, kissing Omm Beshir’s wrinkled cheek and submitting to a long blessing in Arabic that she thought it was probably as well she didn’t understand. She c
lutched the bottle of scent tightly in her hand and followed the small girl who had been called to show her the way back to the car with her mind in a whirl. The thought of Tariq as a small boy, unwanted and unloved, tore at her heartstrings. Could she make up to him all that he had lacked all through his childhood? Could she love the child he had been as well as the man he now was? More, did he want her to? Victoria had no means of knowing. She could only try, she thought, and see what happened. Alallah. Leave it to God, Omm Beshir had said, but Victoria lacked her faith. She wanted Tariq to love her, and only her, and she wanted it now. She wanted it more than she had ever wanted anything in her whole life.

  The light was already fading from the sky when she got back to Sakkara. Abdul had started to light the lamps and she stood for a moment in the open doorway of the communal tent, watching him pumping up the flame until the mantel burned bright and very white.

  “I’m surprised the light doesn’t bring the insects flooding in,” she said.

  Abdul stood on a chair and hung the lamps, one at a time, on a piece of string that had been tied between the two tent-poles over the table. “No, no, madame, no insects in here! Ladies dislike insects and there must be none allowed to come in here! I, Abdul, keep them all away!”

  She was amused by his earnestness. “How do you do that?” she asked him.

  “I flit everything, all the time, morning and evening. All the insects they fall down dead. You have nothing to fear in the desert from them, madame.”

  Victoria wrinkled up her nose. “Good. I’m glad,” she said.

  He smiled down at her. “You find it nice here when there are no insects? You find it beautiful?”

  “It’s lovely. And you make us very comfortable, Abdul. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

  He was pleased, and he stayed on to talk for a little longer, only going when he couldn’t delay starting the preliminaries to the evening meal any longer. Victoria was sorry to see him go. She looked round the camp, wondering what the others were doing. Juliette was back, for there was a light in her tent, and Jim was talking to someone over by the mastaba, but who it was, Victoria couldn’t see. Of Tariq there was no sign at all. She would have liked to have talked to him about her plan to make him the director of the excavation before he received the letter from her lawyers in the morning post, and she had hoped to see him before dinner when the presence of the others would have made such a discussion impossible.

  She called out a final word to Abdul at work in his kitchen-tent, and went reluctantly towards her own tent to change for dinner, taking one of Abdul’s lamps with her to light her way across the stony sand. The guy-ropes shone white in the beam of light and she walked carefully round them, remembering her last encounter with them. Did Juliette change in the evenings? She should have asked her before, she supposed, if she wanted to compete in that direction. Juliette was bound to have something French and very chic, whereas Victoria’s wardrobe was strictly limited when it came to evening wear. Still, she had Omm Beshir’s essence of lotus blossom and, unless Tariq had given her some too, it was unlikely that Juliette would have anything to trump that!

  There was an open book lying on her bed. Victoria went straight over to look at it, wondering who had put it there. It was a collection of poems, she saw, culled from the long centuries when Egypt had possessed the greatest civilisation in the world. She gave an exclamation of sheer pleasure, and threw herself on to her bed to look at it more closely. Some of the verses had been marked and, to her delight, she recognised them as the Sycamore Song which Tariq had quoted to her just after they had met by the Virgin’s Tree.

  “A letter of love will my lady fair

  Send to the one who will happy be,

  Saying: ‘Oh, come to my garden rare

  And sit in the shade with me!

  “Fruit I will gather for your delight,

  Bread I will break and pour out wine,

  I’ll bring you the perfumed flowers and bright

  On this festal day divine.’

  “My lady alone with her lover will be,

  His voice is sweet and his words are dear—

  Oh, I am silent of all I see,

  Nor tell of the things I hear!”

  She read it once silently to herself, and once out loud for the sheer joy of hearing the words spoken. It could only have been Tariq who had left it there, and she loved him for it!

  There was a scuffing movement behind her head and she turned quickly to see what it was. A beetle she thought she could dispose of, but what would she do if it were a spider? The scuffing was joined by other noises and her blood froze with horror. There were hundreds of them! Pink and deadly, with their tails in the air, they were scorpions! Victoria shut her eyes and prayed they would go away, but she could hear them coming closer - and closer!

  It didn’t sound like herself screaming. She had never screamed in her life before. But the sound of her own hysteria compounded the panic that gripped her. With a cry of terror, she leaped off the bed and ran for the door, her flesh crawling with fright. She barely noticed when she ran full-tilt into someone standing out there in the darkness.

  “Tariq!” she yelled.

  “No, it’s Jim. Whatever’s the matter? You were screaming loud enough to wake Kha-sekhem himself—”

  She pushed away from him. “I want Tariq,” she wept.

  “I’m here, Victoria.” The tears fell thick and fast, making her quite unintelligible as she sobbed against his chest. He let her cry it out, holding her close, until she ran out of tears and breath. “That’s enough now, Victoria. You’ll feel awful if you go on like this!”

  She made an effort to pull herself together. “Oh, Tariq, I didn’t know where you were!” Her hands plucked at his shirt. “There are hundreds of scorpions in my tent! I thought they’d kill me - and I wanted to thank you for the poem!”

  “Have you ever seen a scorpion?” he asked her patiently.

  “Of course I have! I’ve seen whole films about them!” She might have known that he wouldn’t believe her. She freed herself from his embrace with an impetuosity that unbalanced her. He steadied her with a hand on her arm. “I’ll take a look,” he said. “Are you all right now, habibi?” She felt foolish that she had made such a fuss, and she nodded quickly, turning away from him. But when he left her to go into the tent, she began to shake with fright again, and went rushing after him, standing in the doorway as he went over to her bed, picked up the light, and held it high as he looked round the enclosed space.

  “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  She uttered a stifled gasp. “Over there! In the corner!” He saw it and stamped on it before she could stop him, looking grimmer than she had ever seen him. He pulled back the bedding on her bed and two more of the creatures crawled out into the light. He stood, staring down at them, his fists clenched. “My God!” he said.

  “There were lots of them,” Victoria gulped. “They were everywhere!”

  He strode out of the tent, yanking her out after him and hurrying her before him across the rough ground.

  “What’s the matter?” Juliette’s voice rang out. “What’s happening?”

  Tariq paused. “There’s a nest of scorpions in Victoria’s bed,” he said, his voice flat and without any emotion at all.

  “C’est incroyable! Who would do such a thing, mon cher?”

  “Perhaps they just came,” Victoria suggested lamely. “I can’t believe anyone would deliberately—”

  “I should have looked after you better!” he bit out.

  “But you couldn’t have known—”

  “I should have known!” She had never heard anyone sound as angry as he did then. “You can sleep in my tent in future and it will be searched every night before you set foot in it. I’ll use the communal tent tonight. I’ll go and tell Abdul. He and I can clear out this place tomorrow.”

  “Yes, yes,” Juliette said at once. “Meanwhile Victoria can come to my tent and rest herself. Mon di
eu, what a terrible thing! Scorpions! It’s as well they were not snakes, or I should be sleeping in Cairo tonight!”

  Tariq went away, taking the lamp with him. Victoria’s knees buckled under her and she sat down heavily on the sand.

  “But why?” she asked.

  Juliette put her arm round her. “It’s best not to think of it, cherie. Whoever it was will not try that trick again to get rid of you. They’ll know that you’ll be prepared next time. It was probably only to frighten you into going back to England without starting the excavations up again.”

  Victoria winced. “Why should anyone care?”

  “Your father thought that when we opened up the mastaba we would know who the thief is who has been stealing all these things. Of course he thought it was Tariq—”

  But Victoria shook her head. “It wasn’t Tariq!”

  The French girl flung up her hands in a Gallic gesture of fatalism. “How like your father you are! He, too, would believe only what he wanted to believe! Why can’t it have been Tariq? He went into your tent earlier, because I saw him go inside myself!”

  “He put a book on my bed. But it wasn’t him. If he wanted to get rid of me, he has only to say the word to the Egyptian government and I’d be on the next plane!”

  “Are you sure you won’t believe it because you are a little in love with him?” Juliette countered. “Tariq is mine!”

  Victoria shut her eyes, shivering a little as she recalled the scorpions running over the floor of her tent. “Tariq makes his own friends,” she said quietly. “I can’t imagine him ever allowing any woman to change that, and I wouldn’t want him to.” She shivered again and Juliette was immediately concerned that she was cold.

  “You are tired out,” she murmured, “and the night air is bad for you. Come, we must move ourselves before you catch a chill. Tonight I shall give you something to make you sleep, and tomorrow I shall take you myself to see the Pyramid of Unas to take your mind away from these horrid animals!”

  “You’re being very kind,” Victoria thanked her.