Читать книгу: «Summer Sheikhs», страница 2

Chapter Two

AT THE height of the heat wave, Desi’s father had accompanied her to Vancouver on a two-day modelling gig. Hating to miss one moment of time shared with Salah, she would have cancelled the engagement if she’d dared, and in the stifling heat of the city, she had wondered, not for the first time, why her friends envied her. She missed Salah with a desperate intensity, and could not wait to get back to the island. When they returned, it was Salah who met them at the ferry dock.

‘Your mother is a little sick with the heat,’ Salah explained, but when he looked at her, Desi knew. The knowledge was like chain lightning in her blood, striking out from her heart again and again, every time she thought of it: he had to come. He couldn’t wait even the extra half hour to see her.

‘It has not rained since you left,’ he told her, and Desi’s heart kicked with what he meant.

‘You’ll want to tell Salah all about your trip,’ her father said, with masterly tact, or, more likely, masterly insensitivity. So she got in the front with Salah while her father sat in the back reading the local paper. But they did not talk much. There was a killing awareness between them, so powerful she felt she might explode with it.

The tarmac was practically steaming in the heat, as if it would melt the tires, and when they turned onto the unpaved road that led to the cottage dust billowed up around them in an impenetrable cloud.

‘Like my country,’ Salah said. ‘Like the desert.’ And Desi half closed her eyes and dreamed that they were there, that he was driving her across the desert to his home.

‘I wish I could see it,’ she whispered. ‘It must be so beautiful, the desert.’

‘Yes, beautiful. Like you.’

He might as well have punched her in the stomach. She had never dreamed love would be like this, gasping for air, every cell of her body ready to burst.

‘Am I?’

‘I will take you to see it one day,’ he promised. ‘Then you will know how beautiful you are.’

‘Yes,’ she said softly, and they looked into each other’s eyes and it was as if the promise were sealed with a kiss.

The kiss came later, as they sat on the dock, wet from swimming, watching as the sunset behind the trees painted the lake a rich gold.

‘In my country I will show you an ocean of sand,’ he said. ‘The shadows at sunset are purple and blue. And every day it is different, because the wind—what do you say?—makes it into shapes.’

‘Sculpts,’ she offered.

‘Sculpts, yes. In the desert the wind is a sculptor. I wish I were a sculptor, Desi,’ he breathed, and his hand moved up to explore the line of her temple, cheek, chin, and then slipped behind her neck under the wet hair.

It was her first kiss, and it was unbelievably, piercingly sweet. It assailed her body as though a thousand tender mouths touched her everywhere at once. With Salah bending over her, their mouths fused, she melted down onto the dock, and the sun-warmed weathered wood against her back added its mite to the overwhelming sensation that poured through her.

Her hand lifted of its own volition to the warm skin of his chest, his shoulder, and a moment later Salah lifted his mouth to look at her. His face was gold and shadow, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. They gazed into each other’s eyes.

‘Desi, I love you,’ he said; she breathed, ‘I love you, Salah,’ and all around them was perfection.

She had never seen real desert so close before. Mountains and sea were her natural background; from her childhood she had never questioned the rightness of that.

Until now. Now, as she watched an eternity of dusky sand pass, smoky tendrils of longing and belonging reached out from the stark landscape into the vehicle, into her being, her self, and clasped her heart.

‘So,’ Salah said, in a harsh voice that immediately brought her back to the now. ‘So, Desi, you come to my country at last.’

She could feel her emotions rising to the bait, and fought down the impulse to rake over their ten-year-old history.

‘Well, I guess you could…’

‘After ten years, what have you to say to me?’

‘I didn’t ask you to meet me, and I’ve nothing to say to you,’ she said, forgetting Sami, forgetting everything except basic life-saving procedures.

‘You lie. What do you come for, if not this?’

This?

‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded.

He looked at her for an electric moment, his eyes blazing as if he were struggling against some powerful impulse, and she held her breath and awaited the outcome.

‘You know what I mean.’

She licked her lips. ‘Didn’t your father tell you why I’m here?’

Salah snorted. ‘My father’s work! Even the immigration official knew better than to believe it. Why do you come to me now? What do you want? What do you hope I can give you? You are too late.’

She couldn’t believe this. What was time, then? Ten years since they had spoken, but here they were, picking up the argument as if scarcely an hour had passed.

‘I don’t want anything from you! Who told you I wanted—?’

He pulled her sunglasses off, flinging them down on the seat between them.

‘Do not hide behind darkness and tell me lies.’

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ She grabbed the glasses up again, fumbling to unfold them.

‘When women veil their hair it is to protect their modesty. When they veil their eyes it is to conceal deceit.’

It was impossible to put the glasses back on, after that, impossible to leave them off. She glared at him, anger rising in her.

‘And when men accuse women it’s to avoid facing their own guilt. What do you want?’

‘We will discover. But I did not go to you, Desi. You came to me.’

‘That’s a Napoleonic ego you’re nursing there, Salah. I came to your country.’

The flesh on his face tightened. ‘To visit my father,’ he said, measuring every word.

‘Exactly!’ she said. ‘I think we’re back where you started, aren’t we?’

He was not fazed.

‘Why do you deny it? There is no shame in returning to your first love when other men are unsatisfactory. If your first love has waited for you, all is well.’

‘Do you have any idea how pompous you sound?’

‘Do you regret our unmatched passion, Desi?’ His black eyes burned into hers. ‘That day in the cabin—do you remember it? What could ever reach it, if we lived a thousand years? Is that why you are here?’

The memory of that summer welled up in her at his words. Heat burned her blood. That incredible, bone-deep, never-to-be-repeated yearning for the touch of another human being—it was as if she had sat by a fire she thought was ashes and dust, and with one measured kick he had set it roaring into an inferno again.

‘I regretted it for a while,’ she said. ‘And then not. What about you?’

‘Your hair,’ he said. ‘I want to see your hair.’

Her head twitched back. ‘Don’t touch me!’

‘Ten years.’

She could not prevent him. He reached out to grasp the brim of her hat and slowly pulled it off. At his bidding, the ash-blond hair came tumbling down around her shoulders. It was like being undressed by any other man.

‘Still the colour of the desert at the edge of the mountains.’

One strong finger reached for a lock, curled around it. He had said it ten years ago. Not the golden sand you see on postcards, Desi, he had whispered as they lay in each other’s arms, and he kissed a lock of her hair, more beautiful than that. The colour before sunset, just where it flows into purple foothills. I will show you.

Her skin shivered with unbearable sensation. He was watching her with half-lidded hawk eyes, the better to see her with. She lifted her chin to draw back, and could not.

Time, the great trickster, stopped altogether then, and they stared at each other, unmoving, his hand locked in her hair, her eyes wide, hypnotized. Outside the car, blinding sun and a harsh, unforgiving landscape. Inside, the unforgiving landscape of the heart.

The car went over a bump, kicking time into motion again. Desi lifted her hand and pulled her hair from his grasp.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she began, but even as she spoke the command his control snapped. One strong dark hand clamped her wrist and his other arm went around her waist to pull her into his embrace, thigh to thigh, breast to chest, her hands helpless, her body arcing against him as if in erotic submission.

For a moment they were frozen there, eyes fixed on each other’s face, but if it was the past she was yearning for, there was nothing of the tender boy she remembered in the angry blackness of a gaze that seemed to swallow her every attempt at conscious thought, fatally weakening her resistance.

At last she found the use of her hands and lifted to push them against his shoulders. Still he held her, resisting the pressure with frightening ease. His keffiyeh fell forward over one shoulder, cocooning them in their own little world.

Their own world. It had always been their own world.

‘Salah!’ she protested, but the name was lost in a gasp as his lips took possession of hers.

His mouth was strong and hungry, and her body heat went instantly to melting point as the kiss devoured her. Need like a starving child rose up in her then, an ancient, unfamiliar yearning—hunger, and thirst, and the bone-deep ache of a decade bursting a heart that had been locked tight against feeling for too long.

Terrified by the force of her anguished need, gasping at her overwhelming response, she resisted the powerful urge to wrap her arms around his neck and drink deep of what she had been deprived of so long, and instead struggled and pushed against him, dragging her parched mouth away from water in the desert, fighting against instinct and compulsion like one who knows the source of all they need is poisoned.

He lifted his mouth at last. Again they were still, staring into each other’s eyes at point-blank range, her hair flowing over his arm, his black gaze over her face.

‘I always liked to taste my name on your lips,’ he said, remembering.

Something like panic gripped her. ‘Let me go.’

Salah breathed as if for ammunition in the battle for self-control, and opened his arms. She flung herself back indignantly, flicking her hair, tweaking her clothes straight, avoiding looking at him for fear of what he could read in her eyes.

With all her heart she wanted to avoid confrontation, pretend this had never happened. But it would be fatal to let it pass. At last she could raise her eyes and stare at him.

‘If you kiss me again I will hit you,’ she said between her teeth.

‘Beware of chain reactions, then.’

His voice was like iced gravel. A thrill of something that was not quite fear went through her.

‘Can we leave it out?’ she cried. ‘I’ve been flying for most of a day and I’m tired!’

He nodded, lifted up and opened a briefcase, pulled out some papers, and began to study them. Suddenly he was the stranger again, in the unfamiliar keffiyeh and desert robes. He looked like an oil sheikh.

Just like that, it seemed, he could dismiss her from his consciousness. Desi resisted the sudden, mad urge to go for him and tear off the intimidating headgear, as if that would restore him to the boy she had known.

But there was more than a keffiyeh between this chiselled, haughty face and the Salah she’d once overwhelmingly loved.

Chapter Three

PERHAPS if her parents had been more awake to what was going on, Desi’s personal disaster might have been averted. But the house was at peak capacity, with every bed full, and in the heat there seemed to be twice as much work, with guests demanding fresh towels, cold drinks and extra service.

They had a retreat, a place that the children had used as a hideaway for years: under the old wooden pier that lay on one side of the lake a few hundred yards from the house. Every summer Desi and her brother dragged an air mattress underwater and up onto the rocks beneath, and then inflated it so that it lay half floating, half moored.

They called it their clubhouse. Sometimes, when avoiding household chores or ignoring mealtimes, the children had hidden there, giggling and listening to their mother call.

In sunlit hours, the spot was pleasantly shady. In rain, they could pretend it was dry. And in the evening it was perfection to sit there with a small smudge coil keeping the mosquitoes at bay, talking about life, death and destiny, and what they would do when they grew up.

Salah and Desi spent many hours there that summer, away from the paying guests who wandered up and down at the lake’s edge. In the searing heat, it was pleasant to lie there, while shafts of burning light pierced the gloom, the air mattress bumping lightly against the sides of the pier or the rocks as the water lapped. In the evenings they lay in each other’s embrace, watching as stars and moon appeared.

With her head resting on his shoulder, his fingers threading her hair, they dreamed together about the future. They would get married as soon as she finished high school. She would move to the Barakat Emirates to be with him, and make her life there. They would have four children, two boys and two girls.

Neither Salah nor Desi meant for it to happen, though it was always Salah who drew back, when Desi was too much in love, and too drowned in sensation, to know where the point of no return was.

‘We have time, Desi,’ Salah would say gently. ‘All our lives. We can wait.’ And of course she agreed.

But everything seemed to conspire against this determined nobility: the heat, their innocence and the fact that they were always together, so often alone.

It was there under the dock, when he told her about the war in Parvan, that their control finally broke.

Brave little Parvan, which had been invaded by the Kaljuks, and had long been fighting an unequal war with little help from its friends. Prince Omar of Central Barakat had formed a company of Cup Companions and joined the war on the side of Prince Kavian of Parvan.

‘The Kaljuks are monsters,’ Salah told her. ‘Prince Omar is right—we can’t let them do what they are doing to Parvan. He is right to join the fight.’

Desi’s heart choked with a sudden presentiment of doom.

‘You—you wouldn’t go, would you?’

‘My father has forbidden me, he says I must finish one year of university first. He thinks the war will be over this winter. The Kaljuks are tired and Parvan will never give up. But if it is not—what else can I do, Desi? I must join the Prince. I must help them.’

Tears starting in her eyes, she begged him not to go to war. She pleaded her love and their future. The life together they would never have if he were killed. Those four children who would never be born.

‘Marry me now, Desi,’ he said roughly, drawing her in against his chest and holding her tight. ‘Then, if I die, I will leave you with a son to take care of you when he grows up. Come home with me! Marry me now!’

He kissed her then, when all their barriers were down. And amid the perfect silence of nature, that silence that is wind and birdsong and still water, they could no longer say no to the wild desire in their blood.

She always marvelled, afterwards, at the coincidence. After two weeks of utter joy, of living in their own secret, magic world, on the night before Salah’s departure, her brother Harry arrived for the weekend bringing a magazine.

‘Baby, it’s you!’ he said proudly, opening it to show them all something that the family was still a long way from being used to: a full-page ad with Desi’s photo.

It had been her first high-fashion assignment, shot in Toronto months before, and it had been a very different world from any she had experienced up till then. Desi had been awed by the arrogance of the makeup artist, never mind the photographer, who everyone said was the absolute best…

The results, too, were different: the peak of professional skill evident in the ad, which was all in shades of bronze. Desi sat on a director’s chair with her feet sprawled wide, her knees angled in, in a trench coat, buttoned and belted, but exposing a V of sensual dark lace at both breast and hip. With her elbow resting on the arm of the chair, propping up her chin, Desi gazed at the viewer with limpid beauty. Between her feet was a fabulous leather handbag. Glossy shoes matched the bag.

The family and guests crowded round. ‘You look absolutely stunning!’

‘Oooh, very sexy!’

‘I’ll buy one! Just show me the money!’

Everybody was delighted, thrilled for her. Only one voice was silent. Desi looked shyly up at Salah, expecting his proud approval.

His face was dark with shock.

‘They exploit you,’ he said quietly, and it was a terrible slap, all the worse because it was public. The babble in the room damped down as Desi gasped and blushed bright red.

‘Exploit me? Do you know how much I was paid for that shoot?’ she cried indignantly. ‘And the hotel where they put us up…’

‘They put you up in a fine hotel and pay you to expose yourself,’ Salah said.

‘Expose? My legs!’ she cried. ‘Everybody does it! I’m not nude, you know!’

‘Yes,’ he said. And it was true that the positioning of the bag between her feet, with the innocent vulnerability in her eyes, was disturbingly erotic.

For once her mother rose to the occasion.

‘Isn’t it wonderful the differences you still find in cultural perceptions, when we’re all so worried about American monoculture sweeping the world?’ she said, picking up the magazine and flipping it shut. ‘Congratulations, darling, we’ll look at it again later. It’s a cold supper tonight, everyone, shall we eat now?’

Tears blinding her, Desi got up and banged out through the screen door into the star-filled night. The door banged a second time behind her, but she did not stop running.

He caught up with her down by the water’s edge.

‘Desi!’

‘Why did you do that? Why did you humiliate me in front of everyone?’ she demanded.

‘If you are humiliated, it is not me. That picture, Desi—’

‘Oh, shut up! Shut up! There is nothing wrong with that picture! It’s a fashion shoot! I was so lucky to get that job, girls wait years for something like that! It’ll open so many doors for me!’

That was her agent talking. The truth was that modelling, the teenage girl’s fantasy, had never really been Desi’s dream. Perhaps it was the impact of her parents’ ideals on her, her island upbringing, for what she had seen of the life so far she did not like. But, perversely human, when pressed, she defended what she did not believe in.

‘Desi, we are going to be married. You will be my wife. You can’t pose like this for other men.’

‘Men?’ she cried. ‘That’s not a men’s magazine! It’s fashion! It’s for women! I’m advertising a handbag!’

‘No,’ he said levelly. ‘You advertise sex.’

He had the outsider’s clarity, but it was too much to expect that she could see what he saw, or that he would understand the intimate connection between sex and sales.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’

‘Desi, one picture is not important. But this work you do—will it all be like that? Is this what a modelling career means?’

‘All like what, for heaven’s sake? I was fully dressed! Wait for it, Salah, next month I’ll be in an underwear catalogue! What is your problem?’

‘Desi, a Muslim woman cannot do such things. It is impossible.’

She was silent, listening to the crickets. Then, ‘I’m not a Muslim woman,’ she said slowly.

‘Desi!’ he pleaded.

She burst into tears. ‘And if that’s what it means—that my photograph is seen as disgusting, then…and if that’s what you think—if that’s what you see when you look at that picture of me…oh, God, you make me feel like a…like a…’

They were too young to see that what had motivated his outburst was not religion, but jealousy. Sexual possessiveness.

‘And if you’re so high and holy, Salah, what about what we’ve been doing? How does that stack up with your principles?’

‘We love each other. We are going to be married!’ he said, but she thought she could see doubt in his eyes.

She said accusingly, ‘You think what we’re doing is wrong, don’t you?’

‘No, Desi!’

She cringed down to the bottom of her soul.

‘Oh, God! That is so sick!’

If he felt guilty about their lovemaking, what did that mean about how he saw her? Shame swept through her. And the stupid fragile dream she’d been dreaming cracked and split open, and the real world was there, beyond the jagged edges, telling her she’d been a fool.

Suddenly she was saying terrible things to him, accusing him of tricking her into sex, and then judging her for giving in. Horrible things that she did not believe, but was somehow driven to say.

His face grew white as he listened, and then Salah erupted with things about the corrupt West which he did not believe and always argued against with friends at home.

Corrupt. The word hung in the air between them as they stared at each other, bewildered, their hearts raw with hurt, and far too young to make sense of what was happening.

‘You mean me!’ she cried then. ‘Well, if I’m corrupt, you’re the corrupter! I hate you!’ She whirled and ran back into the house and up to her room.

She locked her bedroom door, and buried her head under the duvet, trying to drown out the sound of pebbles hitting her window during the night, the whispered pleadings at her door.

She did not come down again until after breakfast the next morning, just in time to say a cool goodbye to Salah, with all the others, before her father took him to the ferry. As he got into the car he looked at her with the reproach of a dying stag who cannot understand what has motivated his killer.

Salah never came to the island again.