And before long she was in the large dark-tapestried room with Ramdez.
‘I share with you.’
‘But where will you sleep?’
‘With you, in the bed, my fruitful vine, my pillar of cedar, golden minaret.’
She said, ‘I have always had a leaning towards Islam.’ She looked round for her suitcase. Ramdez had placed it in a corner behind a dark screen that must have been bright at one time. Ricky went behind the screen to undress. She said, ‘If these lovely tapestries were cleaned, they would come up exquisitely.’
One way and another the spirit of the Crusaders in their everyday aspect brooded over the house that night. Ricky, when she had got into bed, sat up in it and recited, in her buxom, bough-laden poetry voice, the famous Islamic Throne Verse in the English Translation:
God — there is no god but He, the Living, and Self-subsistent: Slumber seizeth him not, neither sleep. To Him belongeth whatsover is in the Heavens and whatsoever is in the Earth. Who is there that shall intercede with Him save by His Will. He knoweth what is present with men and what shall befall them, and nought of His knowledge do they comprehend save what He willeth. His Throne is wide as the Heavens and the Earth, and the keeping of them wearieth Him not.
And He is the High, the Mighty one.
‘My rose of Islam!’ said Joe in admiration, heaving himself into bed beside her. ‘Well of sweet waters!’
Ricky said, ‘I am a virgin. Does it signify?’
‘It is highly satisfactory,’ Joe said, as he used to say, long ago, when he was a young schoolteacher, and was giving a lesson in Arabic to one of the British administrators in his spare time.
Freddy contemplated a meeting with Joe Ramdez without panic, not even that panic he had always felt in his previous encounters, at the Cartwrights, with Joe, when it had been merely a matter of mental association. Normally, of course, he was terrified of blatant liars like Joe and always felt a ruinous urge to conspire with them, as he did with his mother, to the effect that they were honest people. In his youth at Cambridge Freddy had known a liar whom he hated so much that he had given him a solid-gold hunter watch — not his good one, but a very good one.
This Monday morning, however, Freddy felt quite equal to Joe Ramdez, whose daughter was so sweet. He sat and had breakfast with Suzi while the rest of the house was still asleep from its busy night’s doings. He said, ‘I’m going to miss a day at the office. Oh, well —’ The day’s newspapers arrived and he sat screened by the local English-language one, while Suzi waited with wifely patience to talk to him seriously. ‘Australia Urges Britain Not to Join Common Market,’ Freddy read aloud. ‘What utter nonsense,’ he said. ‘Australia should keep her nose out of it. We must have our markets abroad and trade with the foreigners. We always have done and we always will. What’s the point of having foreigners on your doorstep if you’re going to let them put you out of business?’
‘Very wise and true,’ Suzi said.
‘We simply must decide to join the Common Market.’
‘My father has brought the woman called Miss Rickward. They both hunt for Barbara. I want you to know,’ Suzi said.
‘We’d better get her out of here, then,’ Freddy said.
‘She should rest in bed.’
‘I wonder if her ex-fiancé could help? He’s working at Qumran.’
‘What ex-fiancé?’
‘She was engaged to an archaeologist there, but she broke it off. Went right off him. So she said.’
‘Well, she must have gone on him again. She says he’s in Rome just now. She’s going to marry him, definite.’
‘Really? She might have told me.’
‘She had the scarlet fever too bad to tell you yesterday, Freddy. Were you hoping to be the next fiancé?’
‘No,’ Freddy said. ‘I had no such aspirations.’
‘Well, we can’t move her anywhere. So it means we stick around till my father goes back to Jerusalem with his woman, in case he finds Barbara. I have told him she is somebody else with scarlet fever, so I think he will keep away from my section of this house.’
‘What about the other Englishwoman who’s here?’
‘She will take care of Barbara when we leave her. But I prefer to wait for my father to leave first. No risks.’
‘I ought to be back in Israel tonight,’ Freddy said.
‘No, you wait tonight,’ she said.
He said, ‘It’s a tempting thought.’
She said, ‘If you mean what I think you mean, it’s not so easy with my father in the house. He is the only one that’s permitted to sleep with anyone he likes.’
‘Well, he wouldn’t be sleeping with Miss Rickward, if she’s the woman Barbara’s trying to avoid. Miss Rickward is the head of an English girls’ school, if you know what that means.’
‘Miss Rickward is in the bed with my father this moment, if you know what that means,’ Suzi said.
‘How remarkable!’ Freddy said, his coffee-cup so moving in his hand, without a pause from the saucer to his lips, that he did not seem to think it very remarkable.
He was listening to the bang of a car door outside, the engine starting up and the sound of its being driven away from the house.
He finished his coffee. He examined the tips of his right index finger and thumb and rubbed them together.
‘That was our other English guest that I told you of,’ Suzi said. ‘She has gone to visit some friends in Amman, but she’ll be back tomorrow to look after Barbara. She will be good to her all right, but to tell you the truth this lady is a little bit mad.’
‘Oh, really? What lady is that?’
‘Remember I told you we have a woman staying here for a rest?’
‘Oh yes, of course. Who is she, anyway?’
Suzi said, ‘I shouldn’t tell you this. It is our secret, poor woman. I shouldn’t tell you as it is a lady married to a government officer of the British. Her name is Mrs Gardnor. She —’
‘Gardnor!’ Freddy said. ‘Why I know the Gardnors, of course. He’s stationed with me in Israel. Awfully nice chap. I know Ruth too, of course. What’s wrong with her?’
He thought Suzi looked relieved. He was sure she had been testing him to find his response; but now she looked relieved, and he hoped he had passed the test. But, he thought, this darling girl knows damn well — must know, ought to know, maybe, though, isn’t quite sure — that the paper I burned last night was no damn poem at all. He stopped himself fidgeting with the tips of his fingers and thumb where they had been nipped by the little flame.
She said, ‘Yes, you must,’ and then his ears caught up with the words she had spoken a split second before: ‘You must promise to tell no one what I am going to tell you.’ And now she said, ‘Yes, you must.’
‘Of course,’ Freddy said. ‘What is it?’
‘Why are you looking so much at me?’
‘Because you’re so charming to look at with your fawn skin and those blue eyes.’
‘My skin is not fawn, it is green this morning from never sleeping all the night.’
‘It isn’t green, it’s lovely.’
‘No, it’s like an ancient scroll is my skin.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘You don’t say “it’s lovely” and “nonsense” when you make love talk to a lady in Jericho. This is a place of the true Arabian civilization and if I say I look like old hell, then it’s your place to say a speech about me, that I resemble the winding River Jordan, when I turn from the shoulders to the hips, and that my voice is the bleating of a thousand flocks, and my skin is smooth and perfecter than the udder of the camel.’
‘Oh, I can think of more suitable things to say than that. Much more romantic. I’ll write another poem for you. In chant royal, which is a romantic verse form, or haiku might be more right for you, as it’s Oriental.’
‘You know Omar?’
‘Why yes, of course. The translation, I mean. It’s —’
‘All the English are crazy for Omar.
Abdul learned it at school, he could say it all in English, not Persian, which we don’t speak. Then Abdul got sick with T.B. and was in hospital, and there he said to me, Omar Khayydm is all olive oil poured over the troubled waters. Too much oil, and you don’t see the truth. So don’t copy Omar for a poem for me, I would make you put it on fire and burn your fingers. You have a lovely smile.’
‘I would say you were a pomegranate,’ Freddy said, ‘only you taste sharper and sweeter. Pomegranates look good but they taste insipid.’ And all this conversation was soon to be gone from his memory for many months, suddenly returning on a day when the sun was a crimson disc between the bare branches of Kensington Gardens, and the skaters on the Round Pond were all splashed over the heads and arms with red light, as they beat their mittens together and skimmed the dark white ice under the sky. So it was to be throughout the years; it was always unexpectedly, like a thief in the night, that the sweetest experiences of his madness returned; he was amazed at his irresponsibility for a space, then he marvelled that he could have been so light-hearted, and sooner or later he was overwhelmed with an image, here and there, of beauty and delight, as in occasional memories of childhood.
But he did remember almost immediately, when, three weeks later he remembered anything at all, the promise he had made to Suzi Ramdez that Monday morning at breakfast.
‘Promise me that you won’t speak of Mrs Gardnor’s breakdown in your office. We have taken her as our guest, and there would be great distress for us to betray this poor woman’s sickness, so that they laugh at her in her husband’s office in Israel.’
‘We wouldn’t dream of laughing at —’
‘Promise. Never speak of her. Promise, and I shall explain how she is mad.’
‘Yes, of course, I promise. I won’t say a word.’
‘She imagines that she is being spied upon and is mixed up in political things to spy upon the Arabs, maybe. I don’t know. She writes stupid letters in code and hides them places, to find them again and say “Look what I find!” So we make her well again soon and let her rest as we have promised her husband who brought her to us.’
‘Doesn’t she see a doctor?’
‘Oh yes, many doctors. Two times a week she goes to visit a psychiatrist, very clever, in Amman.’
‘Poor woman.’
‘She will take great care of Barbara. It will do good for herself to have this job, and she is so kind. Never will she betray Barbara if we tell her so. You say nothing of this to your government friends, please, as you promised. Then we count on her to be good to Barbara and keep her secret.’
Freddy said, ‘I see.’ At that time he was not sure how much Suzi expected him to believe. He said, ‘I see. Oh, well. if she’ll keep an eye on Barbara, that’s all right.’
‘I shall come myself many times while she is sick. Maybe she gets up in ten days. This morning she’s O.K. already. No temperature or nothing. And the infection is past, so you could sleep with her, even.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Freddy said. ‘I want to sleep with you. But I’ll go and see her now, I think. Does she know your father and Miss Rickward are in the house?’
‘Oh no. It would only make her a fever perhaps. She knows only that some people are here and she must keep quiet in the room.’
On that day when the two young consuls brought and broke the news to Freddy that his mother was dead, murdered by Benny, knifed by Benny insane, killed in violent blood, and the memory of his absent days in Jordan first flooded upon him and was half-lost again, it was then some hours before detailed scenes, one by one, began to seep back. There was Benny’s letter — Bloodshed, Mr Freddy … She … I hear those voices again … There will be Blood come from it….
‘I thought it would be here,’ Freddy said. ‘Somewhere in my mind I knew there was to be bloodshed, but I thought the danger was here, I didn’t think it was in Harrogate.’
And he recalled his answers to the letters. There was something urgent he had to remember. He had answered the letters, but hadn’t posted them, hadn’t posted them. Where had he left them? Yes, but he had set them on fire. That was so. He had burnt his finger and thumb. And presently, the image came to him of that moonlit wait outside Barbara’s convent, while Alexandros went to bribe the janitor, and he heard again the chanting voices from minaret to minaret calling the faithful to prayer under the stars.
‘Where is Barbara Vaughan?’ Freddy said.
‘Oh, her? Well, apparently she got back to Israel yesterday. We only heard this morning. We’d assumed, you know, that she’d gone to Rome, but it seems she’s been hiding in Jordan. Her family are awfully relieved to know definitely that she’s safe and so are we, of course. Silly woman.’
‘Did she ask for me?’ Freddy said.
‘No, she didn’t mention you. Look, Freddy, you should lie down, you know.’
‘I must get back to London,’ Freddy said. There was something urgent to remember. His head was in his hands, and it was then he saw, once more, that walk of Ruth Gardnor’s across the forecourt to the palm-tree in Jericho.
The consuls did not leave after that. They stayed on for lunch, which Joanna herself served to them in a room alone, in compliance with their request, withdrawing as silently as their Arab boys when she had done so. One of the young men then left abruptly, returning at half past five in the afternoon. He announced: ‘We’ve got Gardnor.’
And meanwhile Freddy had given every other part of the story he could then heave to mind. There was the Arab woman, you see, a daughter of Ramdez. Now, I know for a fact that she suspected I’d got this message from the tree that night, so next morning she went into a long rigmarole about Ruth Gardnor having had a nervous breakdown — a great secret, and Gardnor didn’t wish it to be known to us.’
‘Understandably,’ said Freddy’s colleague, with a bit of a smile.
‘Yes, according to Miss Ramdez, Gardnor didn’t wish anything to be known to us. This Arab girl’s yarn was that Ruth was mad as a hatter, and was sending herself messages, believing herself to be a spy. I listened to it all, of course … Well, I can only say I’m sorry I didn’t get this news to you immediately. I could easily have dropped into our embassy at Amman, but to be quite honest I’m sure I would have been followed and then Gardnor would probably have been alerted. And of course the telephones are all tapped. Spies everywhere over there. I waited over till Tuesday, hoping to get some more evidence, you know, and then, don’t you see, it all went. It all went out of my mind. I just lost my memory, that’s all. God knows what else I did all that time.’
Then he worked over the story again.
‘Freddy, take it easy. I’ll get Joanna. She’ll —’
‘You’re sure you’ve got Gardnor?’
‘Oh yes, we’ve got him. He isn’t giving much trouble.’
‘He’s talking?’
‘Well, he’s begun.’
‘I must get back to London.’
‘You must get to bed.’
‘Gardnor, of course, has been anxious to implicate me,’ Freddy said. He was not sure, but he felt fairly certain he had been under unofficial house arrest at the Cartwrights during the past few days of his amnesia.
‘Oh goodness, Freddy. Gardnor’s report would never have stood up. One needs evidence, you know.’
Yes, one needed evidence. And while investigating the sources of evidence, suspicion must have lingered. How long had his mother lain dead in a mess of blood? Freddy wanted to know the details. He said, ‘Are you sure you’ve got Gardnor? Really got him? Was there any difficulty getting into the house at Jericho?’
‘No, they say from Amman that the Jordan police were quite helpful. There were a few things there — cameras and a transmitter — the usual. Ruth Gardnor had gone, of course. She must have got wind of something from the police or someone.’
‘Well, if you’ve got Gardnor, that’s the main thing.’
After breakfast with Suzi he had gone to see how Barbara was. He said to her, ‘You know, i
f we put you in the Embassy at Amman — send for them to fetch you — they’ll look after you and you’ll be quite safe. Don’t you think you should do that, and cut out all this pilgrimage lark?’
She said, ‘What would you do in my place?’
To his later horror, he said, ‘I’d be inclined to stick it out, personally. I’d hate the idea of these fellows getting the better of me.’
That’s exactly how I feel,’ she said. ‘Now I’m in it, I’m going to stay in it.’
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’m not a half-Jew and I haven’t got scarlet fever. So I don’t want to encourage you to take these risks. On the other hand, if you do manage to lie low for a couple of weeks, and then get up and put on those widow’s weeds again, and get around the country, it would be rather a triumph for us.’
‘That’s what I’ll do. The only thing I dread is the boredom. Is there anything to read in this house? Is there a wireless or something?’
‘I wouldn’t have a wireless on if I were you,’ Freddy said. ‘You might attract attention. I’ll see if I can find you some books, or Suzi will get you something to read. But don’t move from this room and don’t make a noise. By the way, Joe Ramdez is in the house. He’s supposed to be leaving tomorrow, but I’ll wait till he leaves, so don’t —’
‘My God, he may be looking for me! Everyone must be looking for me after that piece in the Israeli paper.’
‘Suzi has warned him to keep away from this part of the house. He thinks you’re a Moroccan dancer, just arrived from Tangier with scarlet fever. Are you frightened, though? Because —’
‘No, I’m not frightened. The danger doesn’t seem so very real to me, somehow. It’ll make a lovely story to tell afterwards.’
‘Yes, that’s what I was thinking, too,’ Freddy said. He thought Barbara Vaughan was a jolly good sport, and it was the one solid opinion he formed during his lost days in Jordan that he retained ever afterwards.
She said to Harry later, when she was safe, ‘I honestly couldn’t swear that I went through all that from a determination to pray at the Christian shrines. It’s true I’d set my heart on the pilgrimage. But, to be perfectly honest, I might have taken refuge at the Embassy — Freddy did suggest it — only in fact, I could see he really wanted me to be a good sport. And Freddy was so very nice, I sort of couldn’t let him down.’