The Sycamore Song Read online

  “It’s the way I want them!”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Do you? I can’t think why. I haven’t helped you much so far, have I?”

  She smiled. “You’ve picked up the shattered pieces last night and again this morning. Do you think I’m not grateful for that?”

  “You’re easily pleased.” He eyed her thoughtfully as she sat down across the table from him. “You can’t go on having these ‘accidents’, so what are we going to do about it?”

  “You tell me,” she invited him. “Only I don’t want to go back to England - not yet!”

  “It depends how much you trust me.” He began to walk round the tent. “Do you trust me, Victoria? Do you trust me as Torquil Fletcher, your father’s declared enemy?”

  “You know I do,” she said.

  “You see it was a good idea of yours to put the onus on me by making me director here, but it wouldn’t answer. Juliette would have every right to object for a start. And then there would be nothing to stop you from sacking me if you felt like it, and so the obvious thing would still be to rid themselves of you. If you went, I’d have to go too. Do you follow me?”

  “But I don’t want anything to happen to you!”

  The grim look came back to his face. “They won’t get rid of me easily.” It was difficult not to believe him. He looked as though he could cope with anything at that moment.

  “What do you want me to do?” Victoria asked.

  He came across the tent towards her. “Marry me,” he said.

  The silence was like something tangible between them. Victoria hoped she wasn’t going to faint.

  “Marry you?” she repeated.

  He nodded, very much in command of himself and, she was afraid, of her. “Under your father’s will, your husband has the responsibility of designating how your money is to be spent. Your father seems to have been unbelievably old-fashioned about such things. If you married me, everyone would know that they had me to deal with in future and we might get somewhere. I think I could persuade the Department to grant me the licence and I’d finish your father’s excavation for him.” He put out a hand and touched her face. “Don’t look like that, habibi, I won’t rush you into anything you’re not ready for. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “I’m not,” she denied.

  “Look, it won’t be a proper marriage. We’ll go to the shard court and get married there. We’re neither of us Moslems and it won’t mean a thing to us. The point is that it’s a legal form of marriage in this country and it will give you the protection of being my wife.” He smiled wryly. “It has the other advantage that it can easily be brought to an end. Either I can divorce you over a period of three months, or I can consent to your going back to the court and divorcing me.” He took a deep breath. “Then we can both start again.”

  “Supposing we don’t want to start again?” she said.

  He stroked her cheek. “I shan’t take advantage of the arrangement. I promise you that. You’ll be my wife in law, but that’s all. When I marry myself a wife for keeps, I’ll marry her with a ceremony she can understand and with all my cards on the table.”

  “My father—” she began.

  “Your father will turn over in his grave, but it’s that, or closing down completely, probably without ever knowing who’s behind all these thefts amongst other things.” He turned her face towards him and held her eyes with his. “Do you trust me enough to go to the shard court with me?” It was an impossible question. Of course she trusted him! But to be legally married to him, and yet not married at all, would be a severe test of both of them. She wanted more than that.

  “I’ll understand if you can’t do it,” he went on. “If your father had liked me—”

  “Yes, I’ll marry you!”

  He looked at her in complete disbelief. “Just like that?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I won’t have you thinking that I don’t trust you, because I do! I’d trust you when I wouldn’t trust myself!” And that, she thought, was what she was doing, because she couldn’t trust herself not to want to take advantage of being Mrs. Torquil Fletcher to show him how nice it would be if she could be that for ever.

  “You’ll be trusting me with all your worldly possessions,” he reminded her. “I could take the lot and leave you to get back to England as best you may.”

  She managed a rather shaky smile. “They’re not my worldly possessions. I haven’t any worth speaking of, so if you’re marrying me for my money, you’ll get a poor bargain.”

  His eyes searched hers for a long moment. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said at last. “Shall we be off to Cairo, then?”

  “I have to change,” she murmured. “I hope you don’t intend to marry me in my jeans?”

  “Not if you hurry. I have a few telephone calls to make, and then I’ll pick you up by your tent. Okay?”

  It didn’t give her very long, but she made the most of the few moments he had allowed her, putting on her best chartreuse-coloured dress and a snappy little white hat that suited her better than most. When she had finished, she still looked pale and wan and not at all like the blushing bride she felt Tariq deserved.

  Her head was still aching when she got into the car beside him, but she summoned up a smile. “Have you told the others?” she asked.

  “There’ll be time enough for that. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “More or less,” she said.

  “Good.” He smiled at her, starting up the engine and driving off down the Cairo road. “By the way, do you know the names of your two grandfathers?”

  “Why, yes, Walter Lyle and Henry Babbett. Why?”

  “Islam has given a very patriarchal look to Egyptian law. The bride’s male relatives are as important as her own name on these occasions. It was very different in ancient times. Did you know that?” She knew he was talking for the sake of talking, to take her mind off what she had agreed to do, and she was grateful. She had never felt less like a wedding, with her head hammering and her bruises hurting every time she breathed. “In ancient times inheritance passed through the female line, as in Cleopatra’s case, for example. You may have thought she was a much-married lady because she was a noted beauty, but I’m afraid it was politics that made her such a desirable wife. The poor girl was married to first one of her brothers, and then to the other, so that each could become Pharaoh in his turn.”

  “Wasn’t one of them a little boy?”

  “He was quite a bit younger than she. They both died young, unfortunately for her, leaving Egypt very vulnerable to the attentions of Rome. Julius Caesar got the hang of things pretty quickly and married her himself in order to become King of Egypt. They had a child, a boy called Caesarian. But then Caesar was bumped off on the Ides of March and along came Mark Antony. He wanted to be King of Egypt, too, and so poor Cleopatra found herself with another husband. Their union resulted in two children, a boy called Alexander, and a little girl. Mark Antony went the way of all flesh, and along came Octavius. But Cleopatra had had enough and deciding, not without some justification, that she would sooner be dead than married to him, she clasped the famous asp to her bosom. Octavius, reflecting Roman law, had her two sons murdered, thinking that would make it safe for him to usurp the throne. His Egyptian subjects soon convinced him he’d got it all wrong, that it was the girl who mattered! But for some reason he didn’t kill the girl, only married her off to some extremely obscure king on condition he never heard of her again!”

  “Poor Cleopatra,” said Victoria. “But perhaps one of them really loved her.”

  “There speaks the romantic.” His tone was mocking. “They married her for what they could get. Most people do.”

  She shook her head. “Not me,” she said. “I’m with Omm Beshir in this. I’d only marry for what I can give.”

  That seemed to catch his interest, but he only laughed at her. “Like today?”

  “Maybe,” she compromised. “You’ll have to find that
out for yourself!”

  He looked her straight in the eye then. “Don’t flirt with me, Victoria,” he warned her. “You may get a great deal more than you bargained for!”

  As a reply, she managed a little yawn.

  Tariq drove as easily round Cairo as he did his own backyard. When Victoria thought of how nervous she had been of finding her way the day before, she was doubly glad that it was he who was behind the wheel. Today, she wouldn’t even have attempted to compete with the jostling traffic, and the noise of the horns hurt her head as they blared away for no reason at all.

  He parked the car, giving the crippled guardian a few coins to look after it until they got back.

  “You do know I don’t speak Arabic,” Victoria said to him as he helped her out of the car.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he reassured her. “All you have to do is repeat what the sheikh says to you as well as you can. Most of the time he’ll politely ignore you.”

  “Thanks very much,” she said.

  The shard court had little to recommend it in her eyes. The building was old and dusty and she couldn’t help thinking the law that was administered there could have done with a good spring-clean too. There were none of the trappings of a modern state to give the place an official look, such as there would have been at a register office back in England. Here, it was full of old men, dressed in the long robes that were traditional with them, reciting the Koran to themselves in high, sing-song voices that she found strangely hypnotic. Their female counterparts, black-garbed and patient, cluttered up the downstairs passages, sitting wherever they could find a space on the floor and pretending not to see the men who walked up and down the corridors between them.

  “We go upstairs,” Tariq told her. “And for heaven’s sake don’t speak unless you’re spoken to!”

  Victoria thought that after this place she would never be surprised again. She hung back a little as Tariq ushered her into a room at the top of the stairs and she recognised two of Omm Beshir’s sons already seated on one side of a desk. On the other side sat an old man she had never seen before, dressed in both turban and robe, with a younger man beside him to draw up the marriage documents.

  “Ahlan wa sahlan, el salaam ’aleikum,” the old sheikh intoned.

  Not one of the men so much as glanced at her, Victoria noticed with amusement. She felt it was a concession when one of them found her a chair, placing it as close to Tariq’s as he could put it. He gestured to her to sit down and she did so, suddenly glad that no one was paying any attention to her. She felt dizzy with the pain in her head and as plain as she had ever looked, and she didn’t want them to wonder why Tariq was taking such a poor dab of a thing to wife.

  Tariq took her right hand in his, holding it so tightly that she wiggled her fingers in protest, but he paid no more attention to her than anyone else was doing, not even when he began to repeat the long, complicated sentences in classical Arabic after the sheikh.

  Victoria’s attention began to wander. Was she doing the right thing, she wondered, marrying Tariq in this extraordinary way? But if she had refused him, how else could she have proved to him that it wasn’t only her father’s money she trusted him with, but her own person, with everything she was?

  A sharp dig in the ribs made her aware that silence had fallen over the room. She looked hastily round, but there was no clue as to what was expected from her. The sheikh leaned over the desk and whispered a few words to Tariq.

  “Repeat after him—” he translated.

  “But I don’t understand a word of it!”

  His lips twitched. “Just as well!” he said easily.

  It was almost impossible for Victoria to get her tongue round the strange words that the sheikh carefully enunciated for her to copy. It was as well he was a patient man, she thought, to have to listen to her murdering his beautiful language, the only recognisable pieces being the names of her father and grandfathers - and Tariq’s, though that too was unfamiliar under the guise of Torquil Fletcher.

  However, she finally stammered to a close and exchanged sheepish smiles with the old sheikh, whose eyes slid away from hers as soon as they met, as if afraid that his obvious curiosity about her might be unwelcome to her as a woman.

  The younger man, who had sat on the same side of the desk as the sheikh, produced two important-looking documents with a flourish and laid them carefully down in front of Tariq and Victoria. As they were written in the beautiful calligraphy of the Arabic Kufic script, they were as meaningless to Victoria as everything else had been. Tariq picked up a pen and signed his copy quickly in the same script, much to Victoria’s obvious admiration. She herself had to wait for the clerk to tell her where she was expected to append her own signature, and she thought it looked far from graceful when she had written it, standing out like a sore thumb on the beautiful parchment paper.

  She signed the second paper with even greater reluctance, accepting it as her own copy, and folding it, putting it away in her handbag. Tariq put his copy in his breast pocket, giving it a little pat as he turned to accept the congratulations of the old sheikh and his foster-brothers. No one spoke to her at all.

  To her joy, however, Omm Beshir was waiting for them outside the building. She wasn’t wearing a veil - evidently she was too emancipated for that! - but she had a large, shapeless black cloth over her head which she held under her chin with one tiny, dainty hand. The other hand was resting on one of her daughter’s arms with a certain pride of possession, as if inviting the world to see that she was an appreciated member of a happy family.

  “That girl is ill and should be in her bed, not gallivanting round with you,” she berated Tariq the minute she set eyes on Victoria. “Are you truly married?”

  Victoria, unwilling to be ignored by Omm Beshir as well as everyone else, decided to answer for herself. “El hamdu li’llah,” she murmured, rather pleased with her carefully acquired Arab sentence.

  “Thanks be to God indeed,” the old lady retorted. “Are you happy now?” She uttered a long, low chuckle. “Did he say if he liked your scent?”

  “No,” said Victoria.

  Tariq bent his head and inhaled gently. “Lotus,” he pronounced. “Are you wearing that for me?”

  “Omm Beshir gave it to me,” she told him. “Please may we go home with her, just for a little while?”

  He put his hand on the nape of her neck. “Not now. You’ll feel more like celebrating when your head isn’t aching and you look a little less like a ghost!”

  She made a face at him and Omm Beshir gave her an amused glance. “You must da as he tells you, ya bent, now that you are his wife. We will have a party for you some other time.”

  But they stood for a while, exchanging jokes in Arabic, which Tariq accepted in remarkably good part, though one or two thrusts got under his guard and heightened his colour. Victoria wished she knew what they were saying. She hadn’t thought that anything could throw Torquil Fletcher off balance, and she savoured the moment, half-hoping that one day she, too, would one day be able to tease him in the same way, and be so teased by him.

  Tariq put his arm about her and she realised she had been swaying where she stood. “Don’t you honestly think you’ll be better off in bed?” he asked her.

  “I suppose so,” she admitted. “But it doesn’t seem much of a celebration.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Have we something to celebrate?”

  She refused to be nettled. “Why not? I might have shone as something in my own light, as anything, instead of being virtually ignored by all and sundry!”

  “You are tired,” Omm Beshir said wisely. “I shall say goodbye to you now before you say something you’ll regret.”

  Victoria suffered her embrace, feeling more lightheaded by the moment. She kissed Omm Beshir’s hand, followed by both her daughters, and then allowed Tariq to take her arm in his and lead her away to where they had left the car.

  “Feeling better?” he asked her, opening the door for her.


  She shook her head. “I’m afraid I’m not feeling frightfully good at the moment.”

  He got into the car beside her and took her firmly into his arms. “All you need is a good night’s sleep and you’ll be as good as new.” He kissed her hard on the mouth and put her back in her seat, starting up the car immediately. “Cheer up, Mrs. Fletcher,” he added. “I think you put up a pretty good show. What’s more, I think that old sheikh was envying me!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Victoria took out her copy of the marriage contract and examined it closely.

  “I wish I understood it,” she said.

  “It’s written out in English and French on the back,” he told her. “You’ll find there the Moslem marriage laws as they apply to Egypt.”

  Victoria turned the parchment over and began to read them for herself. “It is a legal marriage, isn’t it?”

  He stopped the car at once and took the paper from her, stowing it back into her handbag.

  “It’s legal, yes. Wasn’t that the idea?”

  She saw that she was being unreasonable. “I know it is,” she said. “But I feel so strange, and when I think what my mother will say—” She made a gesture of despair. “You don’t know how she goes on about things. She’ll never forgive me!”

  He looked amused. “Because you haven’t married the boy next door! There’s a simple answer to that, sweetheart. Don’t tell her!”

  Victoria was shocked. “But she’ll have to know sooner or later. One can’t get married and not have people know!”

  “I don’t suppose Juliette or Jim Kerr will ever tell her, or that she will ever meet either of them. By the time you get back to England the marriage will be over, and what will be the point of telling her then?”

  “I suppose so,” she said, unconvinced.

  He pulled off her hat and threw it behind them on to the back seat. “Won’t you leave the worrying to me? I promise you this marriage won’t make any difference to you in the long run.”

  It was impossible to tell him what was in her mind - shat she wanted to have something to tell her mother about. She shook out her hair, glad to be free of the restricting band of her hat, and then she became aware of him watching her.