Love Is Dangerous Page 14

  He produced a small bottle of kohl from a cupboard and, drawing Melina’s yashmak gently from her face, started work on her eyes.

  A small boy, little more than a child, brought mint tea and there were small almond biscuits, which Rasmin encouraged Melina to eat, saying it might be long before she had further food.

  He darkened the skin of her hands and arms, telling her that while the Ruffians might have fair skin on their faces, their hands were used to work and were therefore exposed to the sun.

  The bronze henna looked strange on Melina’s nails after the pink lacquer she ordinarily used had been removed and Rasmin coloured the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet, exclaiming as he did so at the bruises and cuts she had incurred in her encounter with the cacti and from trying to keep up with Bing.

  It all seemed to take a long time, but, actually only half an hour had passed before Bing returned with his skin darkened and wearing different native clothes which, Rasmin explained, proclaimed him as coming from a part of the country that few of the passengers on the bus would have visited.

  Bing gulped down a cup of mint tea and, turning to Rasmin, held out his hand.

  “Thanks to you, we may succeed, my old friend,” he said.

  “Inshallah!” Rasmin replied, which Melina had learnt meant, ‘If God will it this way, let it be so’.

  She was too shy to attempt to speak in Arabic, so she said ‘thank you’ in French to Rasmin, to his son and to the small boy who had brought them in tea who, she gathered, was a grandson.

  Then in the darkness they slipped silently out of the door and Abdullah led them through twisting deserted lanes right across the City to where the buses were waiting outside the railway station.

  “What time does it go?” Melina asked Bing in such a low voice that no one could have overheard her.

  “Five o’clock,” he answered.

  “So early?”

  “It is a long way to travel,” Bing replied. “The buses, which are almost the only way the natives can travel about the country, stop at every village and hamlet and often because the driver needs a nap. Be prepared for your liver to be shaken up,” he added as an afterthought.

  Within sight of the station Abdullah faded away into the shadows they had just come through.

  Feeling naked and exposed, Bing and Melina walked across the open square where men were already setting out fruit stalls, and women carried from the well huge stone pots of water on their heads.

  The bus for Marrakesh was waiting, besides several others, which Melina guessed were not to go so far or leave so early. Already theirs was half-full.

  Bing demanded two tickets in a voice that was part aggressive and part nervous as though he was afraid of so modern and swift a method of travel.

  They climbed in. Bing going first with a masculine arrogance, spreading himself comfortably in the seat nearest the window while Melina perched beside him next the aisle, her head downcast, her feet tucked beneath her seat.

  A woman carrying a basket of eggs, another with two live chickens suspended by their legs, a commercial traveller with a number of worn suitcases, a family of two or three children and a Catholic Priest, all entered one after another.

  Outside, as daylight grew and the sun flooded over the City, people began to crowd the square. An open lorry packed with workers for a factory moved off amid shouts and catcalls.

  Bing was sitting back comfortably at his ease, but Melina knew that underneath his air of bravado he was as afraid as she was that they might be stopped at this eleventh hour.

  With a last word to a friend, wiping his mouth after the breakfast he had consumed and spitting as he climbed into the front seat, the driver took his place. He glanced round at the passengers. Someone slammed to the door at the back.

  The engine started up, there was a backfire and one of the veiled women at the back of the bus gave a scream of fright. A man laughed. The driver grated the gear into place and they were off.

  “We’ve done it!”

  Melina wanted to cry the words out loud. Instead she kept still with her head a little down not daring to look at Bing.

  It was then she felt his hand touch her, reassuringly, the approving touch of a man who wants to convey his gladness. Things had gone right!

  She felt his hand for one moment and then he was looking out of the window apparently indifferent to her, absorbed only in the new sensation of travelling by bus.

  But in that fleeting moment Melina had known the answer to the question she had been asking herself all night.

  She loved him. She loved Bing.

  Whatever he was, however much he had frightened her.

  She loved him and she could not deny her leaping heart.

  Chapter 9

  Melina’s head dropped forward on her chest and she awoke with a start.

  For a moment she could not think where she was.

  Then the rattle of the bus over the rough roads, the stifling atmosphere all around her, the glass windows fogged with heat and smoke, brought everything flooding back to her mind.

  It had been the longest day she could ever remember. They had moved at quite a good speed between stops, but every hour or so the passengers had disembarked to sit drinking mint tea in some flyblown café or to eat Arab food, which Melina found extremely unappetising.

  There was no question of Bing and herself ordering anything else. So, because she was tired and hungry she forced herself to swallow mouthfuls of camel meat and other more anonymous dishes, which smelt so disgusting that she dared not even guess their origin.

  Bing had not spoken to her since they left Fez except to give a brief command to dismount from the bus or to mount it again and she understood from watching the other couples that this was the usual behaviour of a Moslem to his wife.

  Meekly she walked behind him when they disembarked, seated herself in the worst places in the cafés, which, fortunately, meant that she usually had her back to the other people in the room.

  It was correct for her to keep her head bowed and to raise her yashmak only a fraction above her mouth when she ate and she knew that the other Moslem men would, traditionally, not look in her direction for fear of insulting the man she belonged to. She felt that her anonymity was, therefore, easy to preserve and it gave her a sense of security.

  Now, however, she realised with something of a shock that they were arriving in Marrakesh.

  Through the clear windscreen at the front of the bus she had a vision of high ramparts, red-gold in colour extending with geometrical perfection into the distance and of a sky glorious in crimson, flame and yellow as the sun set behind the tall palm trees.

  This was Marrakesh, she thought. The place that Winston Churchill loved. A City of a thousand date palms, enchanted parks and gardens of pomegranates and apricots.

  She remembered now that the red ramparts were almost a thousand years old and, as they passed through them, she saw ahead Islam’s most famous minaret, the Koutoubia, changing its colour even as she looked at it, from ivory to brown, from the pink of a seashell to the flaming red of the last rays of the setting sun.

  She longed to speak to Bing and to ask him questions. But she knew she could say nothing, only watch with fascination as the bus drew up in a great square filled with crowds of people.

  There were shouts and exclamations from the other travellers as they waved to their friends or called out their excitement and appreciation of having arrived safely after what was to them a most dangerous journey.

  And then they were hurrying and crowding out of the bus and Melina and Bing, moving more slowly, were the last to descend.

  The noise and confusion outside was almost overpowering. It was very hot. Melina could feel the sweat gathering on her forehead.

  As they moved through the crowd she found it difficult not to be pushed away from Bing by those too intent on peering at the amusements around them to look where they were going.

  She had heard often enough of Djemma El Fn
a, the famous market square in Marrakesh, and now that she saw it for herself it seemed even more incredible than the descriptions she had read so avidly in her father’s books.

  There were snake-charmers and fire eaters, acrobats from the souks, daring Shleh boys with provocatively wiggling hips, grave-eyed medicine men advising customers on how to prolong their virility, sword dancers and Berber dancers, water-carriers with straw hats decorated with brightly coloured wool and hundreds of beggars in patched tatters holding out supplicating hands to the tourists or to anyone else who would listen to them.

  Melina was wide-eyed with interest and astonishment, but Bing moved purposefully through the crowd, seldom looking to right or left.

  This was the great El Dorado of the South, the destination that camel caravans from the desert journeyed to as they had done for a thousand years.

  But Bing was concerned with only one thing, his concentration pinpointed on what he had come to find.

  Melina kept up with him breathlessly. Now they were moving on the fringe of the crowd. Crossing the road, they came under the shadow of some great trees that overhung a crumbling wall.

  The swift twilight of the East had almost gone, darkness was falling. The minaret was already silhouetted against the sable sky in which the stars were coming out one by one.

  There was a gap in the wall where the bricks had fallen away from the pavement into the garden beyond.

  Bing glanced quickly over his shoulder and climbed through it, leaving Melina to scramble after him.

  In the privacy of the garden that lay beyond, he turned to give her his hand and to help her over the fallen stones until her feet touched softer ground. They had to force their way through some rough overgrown shrubs, the flowers of which gave off a sickly, almost overwhelmingly sweet fragrance.

  After a few moments they came to a tumbledown edifice with a pillared front.

  The stars were brighter and the moon was rising. They were able to see quite clearly what lay round them.

  “Where are we?” Melina asked in a whisper.

  “Safe, I hope, for the moment,” Bing answered.

  There were two steps leading up to what appeared to be a small Temple. Bing sat down on the top one, leant his back against the pillar and gave a sigh of exhaustion and relief before he stretched his arms above his head.

  “I’m stiff,” he said, “So must you be.”

  “Every bone in my body is aching,” Melina answered. “But I am too thankful to be here to worry about it. What is this place?”

  “A tomb,” Bing told her.

  Melina gave a little start and he smiled.

  “Relax,” he said. “The occupant has been dead for hundreds of years and only the faithful believe that he walks these grounds at night. Anyway, his ghost, real or otherwise, will protect us now that it is dark from inquisitive strangers.”

  “Do you mean we are going to stay here?” Melina asked incredulously.

  She sat down beside Bing as she spoke and pulled off her yashmak. Her face was hot and wet and it was with a feeling of real pleasure that she was able to pull out her vanity case from beneath the enveloping folds of her robe and powder her nose.

  “You don’t mean to say that you have brought that with you?” Bing asked in an amused voice.

  “Do you really think that any woman would travel without her handbag?” Melina enquired. “I attached it to the belt of my dress.”

  Bing laughed and somehow the sound was human and comforting.

  Melina put her vanity case away and turned towards him.

  “I want to know what’s going to happen,” she said. “It has been ghastly being silent all day, longing to ask you questions, but not daring to open my lips.”

  “A good lesson in femininity,” Bing chuckled.

  “Don’t you dare say that!” Melina retorted. “After all those beastly meals and the discomfort of the bus – you at least owe me an explanation of what you intend to do now.”

  Bing looked across into the dark shadow of the trees.

  “There is only one matter that concerns me,” he said, and his voice was suddenly grave and deep.

  “I know that,” Melina said. “But how are we going to find him?”

  “Someone will come for us here later on tonight, I hope,” Bing said. “If they are not too afraid.”

  “And if they are?” Melina enquired.

  “Then we shall have to work without them.”

  “If only we could make a plan – ” she cried, then stopped and looked at him, her eyes searching through the darkness to discern the expression on his face.

  “You have a plan,” she then asked him accusingly.

  “No,” Bing answered, but he hesitated before he spoke and she did not believe him.

  “Don’t shut me out,” Melina begged. “I am in this with you. I have a right to know what you intend to do.”

  She thought with a kind of desperation that it would always be like this between them.

  Bing, reserved, taciturn, keeping his thoughts and feelings from her as if a wall as high as the red ramparts existed between them.

  ‘He does not trust women,’ she thought, and felt a sudden pang of loneliness and, at the same time, a desperate urge to prove her own worthiness to be trusted.

  “Tell me, please tell me,” she urged him, only to know that her pleading was a mistake and that it had driven Bing further away from her for ever.

  “There is nothing to tell,” he answered. “You realise how difficult and discreet communications must be. Rasmin will have done what he can. It remains to be seen what support I will be given here.”

  “What about the hotel in Fez?” Melina asked. “What will they think when we don’t return and they find all our clothes in the rooms we occupied and the bill left unpaid?”

  “Don’t worry about them,” Bing answered. “Mr. and Mrs. Cutter were called to America at a moment’s notice owing to the death of Mr. Cutter’s father. Their luggage was packed and sent to the airport to follow them on the next available aeroplane.”

  “And the car?” Melina asked. “Moulay Ibrahim’s men will have reported that we left it there.”

  “It will have told them little,” Bing replied. “The number plates will have been changed and a young man respected in the town will have been relating to his friends all day how he had to walk home having run out of petrol.”

  “You think of everything,” Melina said, as she had said it before only to be quickly shushed into silence by Bing’s raised hand.

  “No compliments,” he said quickly. “It’s unlucky.”

  “What about our passports?” Melina asked.

  “They are in my jacket pocket,” Bing replied. “The ink has already faded and, on paper, you are no longer married to me.”

  Melina longed to reply that it was the one thing she wanted above all else.

  Then, like a nightmare from the past, there flashed before her eyes the petulant face of Lileth Schuster.

  She could hear again the passion in her voice when she told Bing that she loved him.

  ‘Forget her,’ Melina longed to say to him. ‘Forget her for she is hard and cruel and will bring you only unhappiness.’

  She felt in that moment as if Bing was her son instead of a full-grown man. Everything that was maternal in her longed to protect him, to save him from being hurt, to prevent his faith and love from being destroyed.

  She knew instinctively with each one of her five senses that Lileth Schuster was a bad woman, just as she knew that her own love was something real, true and enduring.

  It would not matter to her, she thought, if she had to live like this for the rest of her life. A despised woman in the Moslem creed, a creature of no importance and of no consequence, so long as she could be with Bing. Better this than the emancipation of the West if only, in fact, Bing could be with her and she loved him, even if he never knew it.

  Bing moved restlessly and Melina guessed that under his outward appearance of calm,
he was anxious, tense and irritated by the inevitable delay of any action.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “Not for any Arab food,” Melina replied, thinking with a sudden nausea of the sweet softness of the camel meat.

  “Shall I go and see if I can find you some fruit?” Bing suggested, but she knew his solicitation was not really on her behalf, but because he wanted to do something rather than sit waiting.

  “Must you leave me here?” she asked. “Let me come with you.”

  “It would be safer for you to remain where you are,” he said. “If you hear a noise, move into the tomb. No one will go there unless it is one of our friends.”

  “It does not look as if they treat a cemetery with much respect,” Melina protested, thinking of the broken wall, the overgrown unkempt garden and the stained and cracked pillars against which they were leaning.

  “Que sera sera,” Bing remarked. “In Moslem countries everything is left in the hands of Allah. You must realise that by this time.”

  “I only wish I knew whether Allah was for us or against us in this project,” Melina said a little sarcastically.

  To her astonishment Bing answered her with complete seriousness.

  “He is with us,” he answered. “I have never doubted it for one moment since I undertook to find the boy.”

  For an instant they stared at each other.

  She thought in the moonlight that his expression was hard and then his hand came out and touched her cheek.

  “You are a brave girl, Melina,” he said. “Your father would have been proud of you.”

  She felt the sudden tears prick her eyes, both at the kindness of his voice and because he had praised her with words she valued above all others.

  Then, before she could answer him, he had gone. The darkness swallowed him up and she was alone.

  Because she was afraid, she retreated into the entrance of the tomb. There the air was stale and unpleasant and, after a moment she moved back again to the step, hoping that a little breeze would reach her to relieve the sultry heat which was still almost overpowering.

  Melina longed to throw off her djellabah, but knew it would be unwise. She wondered in what state her evening dress would be after this and thought with a little twist of her lips that if it could survive the heat and discomfort of the bus ride, it was the best advertisement that nylon could ever have.