‘A fat lot of chance you had to be anything else,’ said my cousin. ‘You were as fat as a seal puppy yourself. I must say you’ve improved.’ A sideways look, summarily brotherly, with rather less sexual appraisement than a dog-show judge. ‘In fact you’re rather gorgeous, coz, and I like that dress. Well, blight my hopes if you must. Is there someone?’
I grinned. ‘Watch it, love, or you’ll find it’s for real, and you’ll be selling your car to buy a diamond.’
‘Suits me,’ he said lightly. ‘And here we are.’
The Porsche slowed down and turned at right angles out of the street into a small unappetising courtyard, where the sun struck blindly down into the dust, and two cats slept on a stack of battered petrol cans. In one corner was a wedge of indigo shade, and into this, with an elegant economy of effort, he drove the car and parked it.
‘Front entrance. Damascus style, Looks like nothing on earth, doesn’t it? Come in.’
It didn’t look at first as if the courtyard could be the entrance to anything. It was boxed, stiflingly, by its high, blind walls, and smelt of hens and stale urine. But at one side a big archway was forbiddingly blocked by a door whose warped timbers still held, in the massive wrought handle and hinges, a hint of some ancient splendour. Charles opened the door on a black passageway, which gave at the other end on an arch of light. We went through.
The light came from a second courtyard, this time an oblong about the size of a tennis court, with pointed Moorish arches on three sides holding a shady cloister, and on the fourth, at the end of the court, a raised platform or dais behind a triple arch, which made a kind of stage or small inner room. The back and sides of this dais were furnished with wide bench seats set against the wall, and I recognized the ‘divan’ or place where men of the East meet and talk. Even in modern Eastern houses today the sitting-rooms are often arranged like this, traditionally, with chairs and sofas backed against the wall on three sides of the room. Low tables stood in front of the couches. In the middle of the court a fountain played; the floor was tiled with blue and white, and the miniature colonnade was jewelled and glittering with mosaics in blue and green and gilt. A turtle dove crooned somewhere, orange trees stood here and there in tubs, and where the fountain splashed I caught the gleam of gold fin. The court was very cool, and smelt of orange-blossom.
‘Come into the divan,’ said Charles. ‘Yes, it’s rather lovely, isn’t it? There’s something very satisfying about Arab building, I always think – all poetry and passion and romance, but very elegant with it. Like their literature, if it comes to that. But you ought to see the furniture; my bedroom’s done up with the rejects from Bluebeard’s chamber.’
‘I know what you mean, I saw some choice pieces in those homey little rooms in the Azem Palace – all inlaid with mother-of-pearl like smallpox, or else pure Victorian and made of arthritic bamboos. But oh, Charles, the rugs! Look at those … and that blue one on the couch … am I really allowed to sit on it?’
‘Go right ahead. I think Ben’ll be in soon, but meanwhile, as he keeps telling me, his house is mine, so what would you like? Tea?’
‘I think I’d rather have coffee. What do you do, clap your hands and summon the eunuchs?’
‘More or less.’ There was a little brass bell on the quite hideous inlaid table in front of me. He picked this up and rang it, then prowled restlessly – he had always been restless – down the steps of the divan as far as the fountain, waiting. I sat down on the beautiful blue rug, leaned against the cushions, and watched him.
No, he hadn’t changed. As children, we were always supposed to be very much alike, Charles and I; in fact, when we were small, people had taken us for twins. This had always infuriated Charles, who in those days had been aggressively masculine, but to me, dumbly worshipping my clever cousin as only a small girl can, it had been a delight. As we grew up the resemblance had, of course, faded. There were still the basic similarities, the dark hair, high Slav cheekbones, slightly aquiline nose, grey eyes and spare build. Now he was some inches taller than I, and he had broadened, but had seemingly reacted from the aggressive masculinity of adolescence towards a sort of carefully casual elegance which somehow suited him, and oddly enough was no less male. He had on his North African travels acquired a fine tan, and this made his eyes look lighter than my own, though this may only have been in contrast to the black lashes which were (in Nature’s unfair way) longer and thicker than mine. Be that as it may, Charles’s eyes were beautiful, dark grey and thickly fringed. Occasionally still, I thought, the resemblance between us must be striking; a turn of the head, a trick of the voice, a movement. What we certainly had in common was the ‘spoiled’ quality that we were so quick to recognise in one another; a flippant cleverness that could become waspish, an arrogance that did not spring from any pride of achievement but was, I am afraid, the result of having too much too young; a fiercely self-conscious rejecting of any personal ties (including those of our families) which we called independence, but which was really an almost morbid fear of possessiveness; and something we called sensitivity, which probably only meant that our skins were too thin for our own comfort.
Perhaps I should explain here that the relationship between Charles and myself was rather closer than that between ordinary cousins. Our fathers, Charles and Christopher Mansel, were identical twins who had been, almost up to the time they were married, both inseparable and indistinguishable, and they had in fact married on the same day – girls who bore no relation to one another, but who (as one could see still) had been of much the same physical type. And happily the two Mrs Mansels liked one another immensely – happily, because Charles and Christopher were business partners, and when the elder twin had inherited the family house in Kent, the younger, Christopher, had built one for himself within a mile of it. So Charles’s son and Christopher’s daughter had been brought up together until four years ago, when Christopher had exported his family – Mummy and myself – to Los Angeles, from which earthly paradise we had escaped occasionally to stay at Charles’s home, ours being let for the duration. But my visits there had never coincided with my cousin’s. In the intervals of Oxford he had spent his time abroad, enjoying himself doing what he called ‘looking around’, and indulging the flair for languages which was part of our heritage from a mongrel ancestry, and which young Charles intended to turn to account when he went into one of the family’s Continental banks. I had not flown so high. I had brought nothing home from Los Angeles except an American flair for dressing, an accent which I lost as soon as I reasonably could, and three years’ experience of the frenetic world of American commercial television, where I had served a wild apprenticeship as producer’s assistant in a small company calling itself Sunshine Television Incorporated – this apparently in blissful ignorance of the fact that like most companies it was normally referred to by its initials, S.T. Inc.
Now here we were again, my cousin and I, and back without effort on the same terms. It was not that we had been, like our fathers, inseparable – that wasn’t possible. What had held us so easily together was, paradoxically enough, a sort of mutual rejection. We had each recognised in the other a refusal to be claimed, and respected this. This had made tolerable – and even funny – the thin-worn family joke about our engagement, and all the cooings over us and ‘how lovely it would be …’ that we had had to endure as children. The cradle-made match of the joke had not in fact come from our parents – I had heard my father insisting that the family characteristics were bad enough singly, but squared they would undoubtedly produce criminal lunatics, where upon Charles’s father would retort that nothing could be more likely in a match that was practically incest, but that since my mother was partly Irish, and Charles’s half-Austrian, half-Russian with French overtones (as her husband put it) the stock might be strong enough to stand it. We also had a Polish Jew, a Dane and a German among our assorted great-grandparents, and counted ourselves English, which was fair enough.
But the auntly cooings
over the two charming children (as I believe we were) had gone on, and Charles and I had listened, fought, hated and defended one another, and stayed together. It had occurred to neither of us in actual fact that we could be the object of one another’s sexual stirrings – it would, at sixteen or seventeen, have indeed been incest. So, as much proof against one another as brother and sister, we had watched with equal amusement and derision each other’s first romantic adventures.
The affairs were brief, and inevitable. Sooner or later the girl would start assuming a claim on Charles, and be dropped without trace. Or, somehow, my own pinup would lose his gloss, Charles would say something less than forgiveable about him, I would retort furiously, then laugh and agree, and life would be whole once more.
And our respective parents bore with us lovingly through it all, took off the leading strings, gave us the money, listened to what mattered and forgot the rest, possibly because they wanted freedom from us as urgently as we thought we wanted freedom from them. The result was that we went back to them at intervals like homing bees, and we were happy. Perhaps they saw more clearly than could Charles and I, the basic security in our lives which made his restlessness and my indecisiveness nothing more than the taking of soundings outside the harbour. Perhaps they could even see, through it all, the end that would come.
But here we were at the beginning. A young Arab in white had brought in a tray holding an elaborately chased copper urn and two small blue cups which he set on the table in front of me. He said something to Charles, and went out. My cousin came quickly up the steps of the divan and sat down beside me.
‘He says Ben won’t be in just yet, not until evening. Go on, you pour.’
‘Is his mother away, too?’
‘His mother’s dead. His father’s sister runs the place for them, but she lives retired, as they say. No, not a harem, so don’t look so curious and hopeful; she merely has a long siesta and won’t come out till dinner-time. Smoke?’
‘Not now. I don’t much, as a matter of fact, only now and again for effect, rather silly. Good heavens, what are those? Hashish or something?’
‘No, absolutely harmless. Egyptian. They do look awful, don’t they? Well now, tell me what you’ve been doing.’
He accepted the cup of strong black coffee from me and curled back on the silk-covered seat, waiting expectantly.
Four years of gossip is a lot to catch up on, and we had never been letter-writers. I suppose more than an hour had gone by, and the sun had moved over to leave half the court in shadow before my cousin stretched, stubbed out another Egyptian cigarette and said: ‘Look, what’s all this about sticking with your group? Won’t you change your mind and cut loose now? Stay till Sunday, and I’ll drive you up – the Barada Valley’s lovely and there’s a good road.’
‘Thanks all the same, but I’d better stay with them. We’re doing that run by car in any case, and having a look at Baalbek on the way.’
‘I’d take you there.’
‘It would be smashing, but it’s all fixed, and as a matter of fact I’ve packed, and you know there’s all that silly business with visas here. Mine’s dated tomorrow, and there’s this business of a group passport, and there was such a hooha anyway about my staying behind after the group leaves for England on Saturday that I can’t face it all over again. I think I’ll just go.’
‘All right, then, I’ll see you in Beirut. Where are you staying?’
‘I thought I’d move to the Phoenicia once I’m on my own.’
‘I’ll join you there. Book in for me, will you? I’ll telephone you before I leave Damascus. What had you planned to do with the extra time, apart – I suppose – from going up to Dar Ibrahim?’
‘Dar Ibrahim?’ I repeated blankly.
‘Great-Aunt Harriet’s place. That’s its name, surely you knew? It’s on the Nahr Ibrahim, the Adonis river.’
‘I – yes, I suppose I knew, but I’d forgotten. Goodness, Great-Aunt Harriet … I never thought … Is it near Beirut, then?’
‘About thirty miles away, along the coast road to Byblos and then inland into the mountains, up towards the source of the Adonis. The road runs up the ridge on the north side of the valley, and somewhere between Tourzaya and Qartaba there’s a tributary river called the Nahr el-Sal’q that goes tumbling down to meet the Adonis. Dar Ibrahim’s in the middle of the valley, where the rivers meet.’
‘Have you ever been there?’
‘No, but I’m planning to. D’you really mean you hadn’t thought about it?’
‘Not a flicker of a thought. I’d certainly intended to go up the Adonis Valley and see the source where the cascade is, and the temple of Whoever-it-is, and the place where Venus and Adonis met – in fact I was thinking of hiring a car for the trip on Sunday, after the group go … But to be honest I’d forgotten all about Aunt H. I hardly even remember her, you know, we were in Los Angeles when she was home last, and before that it was – heavens, it must be all of fifteen years! And Mummy never said a thing about this place of hers – Dar Ibrahim, was that the name? – but that’s probably only because her geography’s about on par with mine and she’d never realised Beirut was so near.’ I put down my cup. ‘Right in the Adonis Valley? Well, I might go with you, at that, if only to see the place and tell Daddy what it was like. I’m sure he’d think there was hope for me yet if I told him I’d trekked up there to put some flowers on the old dear’s grave.’
‘She’d probably kick you in the teeth if you tried,’ said Charles. ‘She’s very much alive. You really are a teeny bit out of touch, aren’t you?’
I stared. ‘Alive? Aunt H? Now who’s out of touch? She died just after the New Year.’
He laughed. ‘Not she. If you’re thinking about the Last Will and Testament, that’s nothing to go by, in the last few years she’s sent them round about once every six months. Didn’t Uncle Chris get the famous letter renouncing her British nationality and finally cutting everyone off with sixpence? Everyone except me, that is.’ He grinned. ‘And I was to have the Gabriel Hounds and her copy of the Koran because I showed signs of taking a “reasonable interest in the real civilisations of the world”. That was because I was learning Arabic. In some ways,’ added my cousin thoughtfully, ‘she must still be very innocent if she thinks Mansel and Mansel takes an interest in anything whatever except for the basest of all possible reasons.’
‘Look, come off it, you’re kidding me.’
‘About the Wills and so on? Indeed I’m not. She renounced us in beautiful round early-Victorian terms – her letters were period pieces, you know – the family, Britain, God, the lot. Well, perhaps not God exactly, but she was going to turn Mohammedan, and would we please send out a reliable English stonemason to build a private cemetery where she could rest for ever in the peace of Allah among her beloved dogs, and would we also inform the Editor of The Times that the paper of the overseas edition was too thin to allow her to do the crossword puzzles properly, and she would like it changed.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘As an owl,’ said my cousin. ‘I swear to every word.’
‘And what in the world are the Gabriel Hounds?’
‘Don’t you remember them? I suppose you don’t.’
‘I seem to remember the phrase, that’s all. Wasn’t it something in a story?’
‘A legend in that book we had called “North-Country Tales”, or some such title. The Gabriel Hounds are supposed to be a pack of hounds that run with death, and when someone’s going to die you hear them howling over the house at night. I think myself that the idea must have come from the wild geese – have you heard them? They sound like a pack of hounds in full cry overhead, and the old name for them used to be “gabble ratchet”. I’ve sometimes wondered if the “Gabriel” doesn’t come from “gabble”, because after all Gabriel wasn’t the angel of death …’ He glanced across. ‘You shivered. Are you cold?’
‘No. One of them gabbling over my grave, I expect. What have they to do with
Great-Aunt Harriet?’
‘Nothing, really, except that she had a pair of china dogs I lusted after, and I christened them the Gabriel Hounds because they were like the illustrations in the book.’
‘A pair of – oh, no, really, you must be out of your tiny mind. That’s schizophrenia, or is it skitso? Nobody in this world can want to own a white Porsche with one hand and a pair of china dogs with the other! I don’t believe it.’
He laughed. ‘Real china, Christy love, Chinese china … They’re Ming as ever was, and probably museum pieces. Heaven knows what they’re worth now, but since I had the good taste to fall flat in love with them at the age of six, and Great-Aunt Harriet with even better taste fell flat in love with me at the same time, she promised them to me. And stark raving bonkers though she undoubtedly is now, she seems to have remembered.’ He made a restless movement. ‘Oh, don’t you see, it doesn’t really matter about the dogs, they make a good excuse, that’s all.’
‘For going to see her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Family feeling cropping up a bit late in the day?’ I said it derisively, but he didn’t laugh or disclaim, as I had expected. He gave me an odd, slanting look from under the long lashes, and said merely: ‘I don’t want to pass up the chance. It sounds such a damned intriguing set-up.’
‘Well, of course I’ll go with you, out of sheer roaring curiosity, and let’s hope she does remember you, because I’m darned sure she won’t remember me. She must be at least a hundred.’
‘Not a day over eighty, I swear, and active with it by all accounts. She’s a local legend, goes galloping about the country-side on horseback with a gaggle of hounds and shoots whatever there is to shoot for her own dinner.’
‘Gabble, you mean. I remember that about her, who could forget? When she stayed with us that time she brought eight King Charles spaniels.’
‘It’s Tibetan terriers now, and salukis – Persian greyhounds, the dogs the Arab princes used for hunting. Oh, she’s gone the limit, I gather – turned Arab herself, male at that, dresses like an Emir, smokes a hubble-bubble, never sees anybody except at night, and lives in this dirty great palace—’