Sweet Enchantress Read online

  Resolutely now Zaria shook her head to dispel the memory of him. He should no longer haunt her now that he could no longer torment her.

  Already she was beginning to think how weak and stupid she had been after he died not to have made an effort to go away, not to have contacted her aunt immediately in the hope that she might have forgiven the past and let her join her wherever she might be.

  And she knew that, although she said that she had not been ill, her inertia, coming from overwork, under-nourishment and mental bullying had sapped her health so that she was far more ill than many people who had doctors and nurses constantly in attendance.

  ‘I must get better, I must,’ she told herself now.

  Then, with a sinking of her heart, she realised that perhaps in forty-eight hours’ time she would be alone again, this voyage would come to an end and Chuck would have gone.

  She faced the fact in that flash of a second just what it would mean to her to lose Chuck, to lose that feeling of dependence upon him – and then tried to laugh because it was all so ridiculous.

  He was a man she did not know, a man she had met for the first time such a short while ago that she was ashamed to calculate how short it was.

  And yet, she told herself wonderingly, it was as if she had known him all her life. There was something so kind about him, something that made her instinctively rely on him even while, in a way, he was relying on her.

  ‘I want to see him,’ she thought and, hurrying over her breakfast, got up.

  She had nothing to wear but the seaman’s trousers and thick woollen jumper that she had worn the day before.

  She took extra pains with her hair, peering in the mirror to see if it had a little more strength and vitality in it and wondering as she brushed it if it would ever be thick and curly as it used to be when her mother was alive. She could hear her mother’s voice now saying,

  “You have lovely hair, darling! You must always remember to brush it. A shining head is one of the most attractive things a woman can have.”

  It had been so thick then. Her mother had often laughed and said,

  “With what we have to cut off, we could fill a mattress!”

  Zaria felt herself smiling over the memory and then, with something that was almost a little sob, she remembered how her mother had put her arms round her one night after she had brushed her hair and kissed her.

  “You’re going to be very pretty one day, my little Zaria,” she said. “And I hope you find a wonderful man to love. But remember one thing – that love is a very exacting taskmaster. When one loves, one has to give everything of oneself.”

  “I will remember, Mummy,” Zaria had answered.

  She had not really understood what her mother meant and the memory of her words had often puzzled her, “you have to give everything of yourself.”

  She thought of it now and wondered what she would be feeling if she was really engaged to someone, if she and Chuck loved each other.

  Quite unaccountably the thought brought a flush to her cheeks and she stared at her reflection in the mirror, seeing only the deep lines beneath her eyes and the sharpness of her jawbones.

  ‘Who would ever want to love me now?’ she thought bitterly and turned away to go up on deck.

  Chuck was leaning over the rail, watching the coast of Spain, the high cliffs and behind them undulating ground rising in the far distance to mountains that were topped with snow.

  “Oh, it’s so beautiful!” Zaria exclaimed involuntarily as she reached his side.

  “Good morning! Do you feel better?” he asked. “Yes, I can see you do.”

  “How can you see that?” she asked.

  “Haven’t you looked at yourself this morning?” he parried. “Jim tells me he’s feeding you up. I think it’s beginning to work.”

  “Jim is an incorrigible gossip,” Zaria exclaimed. “But he has been very kind.”

  “Why not?” Chuck asked. “Isn’t everyone kind to you?”

  He was not prepared for the way her face darkened and her eyes fell before his.

  “Not always,” she murmured, as if his words had brought recollections from the past that overshadowed her happiness in the beauty of the morning.

  “Then forget it,” he said seriously. “Never remember the past unless what you are remembering is happy or constructive. The rest has gone, it is finished with. Put it behind you, because it is tomorrow that counts. Never, never yesterday.”

  Then before he could say more, they heard Edie’s voice coming up the companionway and stood in silence while he came up on deck.

  “What a goddam awful night!” he exclaimed as he saw Chuck. “If anything would keep me from going to sea again, it would be this sort of experience. And we came across the Atlantic without a ripple.”

  “The Mediterranean can be very treacherous,” Chuck said quietly. “Everyone else all right?”

  “Victor says he has a headache,” Edie Morgan answered. “But if you ask me that came out of a bottle.”

  He seemed to ignore Zaria deliberately and, though she thought him rude, she was thankful for his lack of interest in her.

  The ship moved on. They were now under the shelter of the land and she was running extremely steadily.

  Nevertheless it was some time later before Victor Jacobetti came up on deck.

  “Why do you choose such a hellish place to get to?” Zaria heard Victor say to Edie Morgan. “It must have been hard for Lulu to get there.”

  “She has cars, hasn’t she?” Edie snapped. “Plenty of the tourist trade starts at this time of the year. What’s the matter? Getting breezy?”

  “No, of course not,” Victor answered. “You know your own business best.”

  ‘What a funny crowd they are,’ Zaria thought to herself. ‘They none of them seem to like each other.’

  Kate came up the companionway looking extremely pretty, but yawning.

  “Aren’t we there, yet?” she asked. “I could have stayed in bed a bit longer.”

  “I should have thought you’d stayed there long enough,” Victor retorted.

  She gave him a glance that seemed to Zaria to express nothing but contempt.

  “That comes well from you,” she said. “I hear you weren’t so strong on your legs last night, in fact the Steward tells me that Mr. Tanner was the only survivor of the storm.”

  She smiled at Chuck and slipped her arm through his.

  “Tell me, big boy, how do you do it?” she asked. “Is it pills or natural competence?”

  “I think it’s just a little thing called having one’s sea legs,” Chuck answered easily.

  “Aren’t you clever?” she said with an exaggerated intonation, smiling up at him provocatively, her long mascaraed eyelashes flickering against the pink and white of her complexion.

  Zaria looked away from them, feeling suddenly miserable.

  ‘Why can’t I talk to him like that?’ she thought. ‘Why can’t I be gay? Laughing, joking and making jests, instead of feeling frightened and tongue-tied. What’s wrong with me that I cannot be like other women?’

  She knew the answer to all her questions, but that did not make it any better. She wanted to be more like Kate – lovely, with the voluptuous curves of her high breasts showing beneath the pale knitted sweater she wore.

  “Do you think there are any shops in Tarralisa?” Kate asked. “We might all go ashore looking for souvenirs.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort,” Edie Morgan said sharply. “We’re going to stop for just a few minutes to pick up Lulu and Ahmed and then the Captain’s instructions are to get the hell out of it.”

  “Oh, Ahmed’s meeting us here, is he?” Kate asked. “Yes – it was obvious, I should have thought, that we would need him and I told Lulu that he could drive the second car.”

  Kate giggled.

  “Can’t you see Ahmed in a chauffeur’s cap? What a lark!”

  “Your sense of humour was always mistimed,” Edie answered sourly.


  The ship was rounding into the bay and the small harbour of Tarralisa was in sight. It was nothing more or less than a fishing village with a few white cottages sloping down to a long quay.

  “There’s Lulu!” Kate screamed suddenly.

  They saw, standing on the quay, a small squat figure and behind her a great pile of baggage of cabin trunks, boxes and suitcases. All looking in their smart colourings very out of place on the dirty quayside.

  “What an enormous collection of luggage!” Zaria remarked.

  “But, of course,” Kate replied. “Didn’t you know Madame Bertin is starting a shop in Algiers? She’ll want a lot of clothes and they must all come from Paris.”

  “That’s right,” Edie Morgan said. “A shop needs a lot of planning unless it’s to fail and we can’t afford failure on this one, eh, boys?”

  “Certainly not,” Victor agreed.

  “And what about you, Corny?” Edie Morgan enquired of Mr. Virdon, who was standing silent, his arms resting squarely on the rail of the ship. “What do you think?”

  Mr. Virdon was wearing his inevitable white flannels with the brass-buttoned blazer and white-topped yachting cap in which he had come aboard.

  Now he raised his head and asked, with what seemed to Zaria almost heavy sarcasm,

  “Are you really interested in my opinion?”

  “Sure,” Edie Morgan answered. “We certainly are. Isn’t it your money that we’re spending in this enterprise?”

  There was a deliberate accent on the pronoun.

  And Mr. Virdon replied,

  “Of course! So naturally I hope it will be a success.”

  “Your enthusiasm overwhelms us,” Edie Morgan said. Then in an aside to Victor Jacobetti he added, “Where the hell’s Ahmed?”

  “In a bar I expect.”

  “Very funny,” Edie Morgan ejaculated.

  The ship drew near, coming in slowly to tie up against the end of the long jetty. Kate was waving and so was Madame Bertin. Zaria could see now that she was a middle-aged woman, heavily made up with deep blue eye shadow and lips so thickly painted that they seemed almost as if they were lacquered.

  She was ugly with dark hair, thick lips, a heavy jowl and a thick-set body. And yet she had the almost indescribable chic that every Frenchwoman seems to acquire by nature.

  “Hi’ya, Lulu!” Edie Morgan was shouting and she shouted back,

  “Soyez le bien venu! It’s good to see you. Ah, mes amis, I am glad you have arrived.”

  The tide was in and the bay was deep, so they managed to tie up at the extreme end of the jetty. A Customs official came aboard and immediately behind him Madame Bertin.

  “I must introduce this gentleman,” she said with an expressive glance at the Customs Officer that made him twirl the ends of his moustache.

  “He has been so very kind to me, so charming. Would you believe it, his assistant wanted to unpack all my beautiful gowns! I said to him, ‘if you put your dirty fingers on these clothes what will they be worth? Nothing! And there are thousands, no millions, of francs in these very precious cases.’

  “But he did not understand. Ah! He is an imbecile that one. Monsieur is different. Monsieur is an artist. He likes pretty women – whether they wear pretty clothes or whether they wear nothing.”

  There was a shriek of laughter at this. Edie Morgan was shaking the Officer by the hand and introducing him to Mr. Virdon. Then they disappeared into the Saloon and there were the sounds of Edie Morgan shouting for the Steward and the clink of glasses.

  “How are you, Lulu?” Kate asked, pressing her cheek affectionately against that of the older woman.

  “You are prettier than ever, Kate,” she replied. “But your hair is too bleached. Je vous dit a darker colour would suit you better.”

  “Gentlemen prefer blondes,” Kate answered.

  “So, you know some?” Madame Bertin asked in affected surprise and then patted Kate on the arm. “De grâce. But we must not fight so early. It is always the same when you and I meet, the sparks fly.”

  She turned to look at Chuck and Zaria, who were standing a little back from the others, just watching.

  “And who is this?” she asked.

  “Oh, this is Miss Brown,” Kate said, “and her fiancé, Mr. Tanner. They are getting off at Algiers. By the way, where’s Ahmed?”

  “Oh, Ahmed! He is not with me,” Madame Bertin replied.

  “Not with you!” Victor Jacobetti ejaculated. “But I understood that he was driving one of the cars.”

  “Oui, mais – quelle catastrophe,” Madame Bertin seemed to hesitate for words. “At the Spanish frontier his papers were not in order. They – they sent him back.”

  “Oh, I see!”

  Victor Jacobetti was watching her intently, almost as if he was reading some message from her eyes rather than from her lips.

  “Everything else all right?” he asked.

  “Comme ci, comme ça,” Madame Bertin answered. “But do not let us linger here too long.”

  “No, no, of course not.”

  He went across the deck and put his head round the door of the Saloon.

  “Shall we start bringing the luggage aboard?” he asked.

  The answer was obviously in the affirmative and he shouted to the sailors.

  “Hurry up with that luggage and handle it carefully. It’s all to go below in the hold.”

  “Pas tout,” Madame Bertin screamed. “There are three or four for my cabin. They have labels marked ‘cabin’ on them. Don’t muddle them with the others.”

  Victor Jacobetti was about to repeat the order when suddenly she put her hand on his arm.

  “Non! J’ai une idée,” she said in a low voice. “Put them all in the cabins. It’s safer. The holds are always inspected first.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he answered. “Choose what you want and put some in Kate’s cabin as well.”

  Madame Bertin hurried down the gangway and started giving orders, first in English to the sailors and then in Spanish to the local men who were helping them.

  The noise was almost deafening as everyone seemed to be talking at once with Madame Bertin’s voice drowning everybody else’s.

  The luggage was beginning to come aboard and, as it did so, the Saloon door opened and the Customs Officer came out wiping his lips with the back of his hand, a hand that Zaria noticed immediately was holding a good wad of dollar bills.

  He slipped them into his pocket, saluted smartly and went down the gangway to give orders ashore.

  Zaria thought that she would go below. She moved away from the little group of people watching and reached the top of the companionway.

  As she did so, she saw Victor Jacobetti take Edie Morgan by the arm and pull him to one side.

  “Wait a minute, Edie!” he said. He spoke in a low voice, but Zaria could hear him quite clearly. “Have you heard the news? That damned fool Ahmed has been copped!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Zaria stood still as she heard Edie Morgan say,

  “The goddam fool! I said it was a mistake in the beginning to try and bring him.”

  He spoke in a low almost hissing whisper, yet every word was clear, and instinctively, without consciously realising that she was eavesdropping, Zaria paused for Victor Jacobetti’s reply.

  “It’s all right or she wouldn’t be here. She will have said that he was only her chauffeur.”

  “What a risk!” Edie exploded, still with his voice so low as to make every word sound sinister and yet overcharged with emphasis.

  Zaria was just about to go on towards her cabin when she heard Edie add, almost as if it was an afterthought,

  “And what are we going to do without Ahmed when we get to Algiers?”

  “Of course, I’d forgotten that,” Victor answered. “Well, there’s always the girl.”

  “It’s taking a chance,” Edie said sharply.

  “Oh, she’s all right,” Victor answered. “It’s the man I’m worried about.”

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bsp; “We’ll have to deal with him, that’s all,” Edie said.

  “Now tell the Captain to put to sea and be prompt about it.”

  They walked away from the top of the companionway and Zaria, gripping the handrail, realised that she was trembling.

  For a moment she felt incapable of moving and then suddenly, galvanising her strength, she ran to her own cabin and closed the door.

  What did that strange whispered conversation mean? She pressed her fingers to her forehead trying to make the words into sense, trying at the same time to refuse to believe what her mind told her was the truth.

  These people were crooks! She was sure of it. And yet what did she have to go on? Only a few words whispered in low undertones, which she might easily have misunderstood.

  And yet one had only to look at Edie Morgan, one had only to listen to him, to know there was something wrong. But what about Mr. Virdon? Did he know? Was he part of this extraordinary set-up? And if so, why?

  And Chuck! Edie had said that they would ‘deal with him’. There was something ominous and distinctly sinister in the way he had said it.

  She must get hold of Chuck at once and warn him. She must rely on him to cope with all this. It was too big for her, beyond her comprehension.

  Perhaps he would laugh at her fears and tell her how stupid she was. There was no reason for Mr. Virdon, the rich American tycoon, to be mixed up with anything shady.

  And what could interest people like Edie, Victor and Kate except money?

  She had a sudden wild urgency to be beside Chuck, to hear his voice and to feel the strength and bigness of him reaching out to protect her.

  She reached the deck just as the gangway was being pulled in from the shore.

  The Spaniards who had helped with the luggage and the Customs official were standing on the quay bidding them Godspeed.

  “Adios, señores! Adios!”

  It was obvious from their smiles that they had been well paid for their work in bringing the luggage aboard.

  The yacht began to draw away and the Customs official raised his hand in salute.

  Zaria looked round for Chuck. There was no sign of him and she felt her breath almost stop in sudden terror lest something should have happened to him already.