Trickery Read online

  He paused and took a pull at his cigarette. Then he said, ‘That is one reason. But there is another. Are you a family man, Mr Cornelius?’

  ‘Unfortunately not,’ I answered cautiously.

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I have a wife and a daughter. Both of them, in my eyes at any rate, are very beautiful. My daughter is just eighteen. She has been to an excellent boarding-school in England, and she is now …’ he shrugged … ‘she is now just sitting around and waiting until she is old enough to get married. But this waiting period – what does one do with a beautiful young girl during that time? I can’t let her loose. She is far too desirable for that. When I take her to Beirut, I see the men hanging around her like wolves waiting to pounce. It drives me nearly out of my mind. I know all about men, Mr Cornelius. I know how they behave. It is true, of course, that I am not the only father who has had this problem. But the others seem somehow able to face it and accept it. They let their daughters go. They just turn them out of the house and look the other way. I cannot do that. I simply cannot bring myself to do it! I refuse to allow her to be mauled by every Achmed, Ali and Hamil that comes along. And that, you see, is the other reason why I live in the desert – to protect my lovely child for a few more years from the wild beasts. Did you say that you had no family at all, Mr Cornelius?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s true.’

  ‘Oh.’ He seemed disappointed. ‘You mean you’ve never been married?’

  ‘Well … no,’ I said. ‘No, I haven’t.’ I waited for the next inevitable question. It came about a minute later.

  ‘Have you never wanted to get married and have children?’

  They all asked that one. It was simply another way of saying, ‘Are you, in that case, homosexual?’

  ‘Once,’ I said. ‘Just once.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘There was only one person ever in my life, Mr Aziz … and after she went …’ I sighed.

  ‘You mean she died?’

  I nodded, too choked up to answer.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he said. ‘Oh, I am so sorry. Forgive me for intruding.’

  We drove on for a while in silence.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ I murmured, ‘how one loses all interest in matters of the flesh after a thing like that. I suppose it’s the shock. One never gets over it.’

  He nodded sympathetically, swallowing it all.

  ‘So now I just travel around trying to forget. I’ve been doing it for years …’

  We had reached the foot of Mount Maghara now and were following the track as it curved round the mountain towards the side that was invisible from the road – the north side. ‘As soon as we round the next bend you’ll see the house,’ Mr Aziz said.

  We rounded the bend … and there it was! I blinked and stared, and I tell you that for the first few seconds I literally could not believe my eyes. I saw before me a white castle – I mean it – a tall, white castle with turrets and towers and little spires all over it, standing like a fairy-tale in the middle of a small splash of green vegetation on the lower slope of the blazing-hot, bare, yellow mountain! It was fantastic! It was straight out of Hans Christian Andersen or Grimm. I had seen plenty of romantic-looking Rhine and Loire valley castles in my time, but never before had I seen anything with such a slender, graceful, fairy-tale quality as this! The greenery, as I observed when we drew closer, was a pretty garden of lawns and date-palms, and there was a high white wall going all the way round to keep out the desert.

  ‘Do you approve?’ my host asked, smiling.

  ‘It’s fabulous!’ I said. ‘It’s like all the fairy-tale castles in the world made into one.’

  ‘That’s exactly what it is!’ he cried. ‘It’s a fairy-tale castle! I built it especially for my daughter, my beautiful Princess.’

  And the beautiful Princess is imprisoned within its walls by her strict and jealous father, King Abdul Aziz, who refuses to allow her the pleasures of masculine company. But watch out, for here comes Prince Oswald Cornelius to the rescue! Unbeknownst to the King, he is going to ravish the beautiful Princess, and make her very happy.

  ‘You have to admit it’s different,’ Mr Aziz said.

  ‘It is that.’

  ‘It is also nice and private. I sleep very peacefully here. So does the Princess. No unpleasant young men are likely to come climbing in through those windows during the night.’

  ‘Quite so,’ I said.

  ‘It used to be a small oasis,’ he went on. ‘I bought it from the government. We have ample water for the house, the swimming-pool and three acres of garden.’

  We drove through the main gates, and I must say it was wonderful to come suddenly into a miniature paradise of green lawns and flowerbeds and palm trees. Everything was in perfect order, and water-sprinklers were playing on the lawns. When we stopped at the front door of the house, two servants in spotless gallabiyahs and scarlet tarbooshes ran out immediately, one to each side of the car, to open the doors for us.

  Two servants? But would both of them have come out like that unless they’d been expecting two people? I doubted it. More and more, it began to look as though my odd little theory about being shanghaied as a dinner guest was turning out to be correct. It was all very amusing.

  My host ushered me in through the front door, and at once I got that lovely shivery feeling that comes over the skin as one walks suddenly out of intense heat into an air-conditioned room. I was standing in the hall. The floor was of green marble. On my right, there was a wide archway leading to a large room, and I received a fleeting impression of cool white walls, fine pictures and superlative Louis XV furniture. What a place to find oneself in, in the middle of the Sinai Desert!

  And now a woman was coming slowly down the stairs. My host had turned away to speak to the servants, and he didn’t see her at once, so when she reached the bottom step, the woman paused, and she laid her naked arm like a white anaconda along the rail of the banister, and there she stood, looking at me as though she were Queen Semiramis on the steps of Babylon, and I was a candidate who might or might not be to her taste. Her hair was jet-black, and she had a figure that made me wet my lips.

  When Mr Aziz turned and saw her, he said, ‘Oh darling, there you are. I’ve brought you a guest. His car broke down at the filling-station – such rotten luck – so I asked him to come back and stay the night. Mr Cornelius … my wife.’

  ‘How very nice,’ she said quietly, coming forward.

  I took her hand and raised it to my lips. ‘I am overcome by your kindness, madame,’ I murmured. There was, upon that hand of hers, a diabolical perfume. It was almost exclusively animal. The subtle, sexy secretions of the sperm-whale, the male musk-deer and the beaver were all there, pungent and obscene beyond words; they dominated the blend completely, and only faint traces of the clean vegetable oils – lemon, cajuput and zeroli – were allowed to come through. It was superb! And another thing I noticed in the flash of that first moment was this: when I took her hand, she did not, as other women do, let it lie limply across my palm like a fillet of raw fish. Instead, she placed her thumb underneath my hand, with the fingers on top; and thus she was able to – and I swear she did – exert a gentle but suggestive pressure upon my hand as I administered the conventional kiss.

  ‘Where is Diana?’ asked Mr Aziz.

  ‘She’s out by the pool,’ the woman said. And turning to me, ‘Would you like a swim, Mr Cornelius? You must be roasted after hanging around that awful filling-station.’

  She had huge velvet eyes, so dark they were almost black, and when she smiled at me, the end of her nose moved upwards, distending the nostrils.

  There and then, Prince Oswald Cornelius decided that he cared not one whit about the beautiful Princess who was held captive in the castle by the jealous King. He would ravish the Queen instead.

  ‘Well …’ I said.

  ‘I’m going to have one,’ Mr Aziz said.

  ‘Let’s all have one,’ his wife said. ‘We’ll lend you a p