‘Saraifa? Sure I have. We had a concession there once.’
I asked him how far it was to Saraifa and he said something over two hundred miles. A long way across the desert, but less than two hours’ flying by plane. ‘Has it got an airfield?’
‘Sure. You don’t think I walked, do you? But that was four years ago,’ he added. ‘I’m told the sand has moved in since then. Funny thing.’ He glanced at me quickly. ‘You’re out here on account of young Whitaker; his lawyer — that right?’
I nodded.
‘Well, that last time I flew Gorde in to Saraifa, it was the day David Whitaker arrived there. It was about the last thing Gorde did before he handed over to Erkhard and went home on sick leave. We flew in to Saraifa to break it to the Sheikh Makhmud that the Company wasn’t going to renew the concession. They were arguing about it all evening with that one-eyed devil, Haj Whitaker, sitting there like an Arab and swearing by the Koran that he’d get even with Erkhard. Has anybody mentioned the Whitaker Theory to you?’
I nodded.
‘Oh well, you’ll know what it meant to the old Bedouin then. Saraifa was his baby. He’d negotiated the concession and if it hadn’t been for Erkhard they might have been drilling there now. But Erkhard was the new broom and if Whitaker could have got at him that night I swear he’d have killed him with his bare hands. It was as elemental as that.
Now, of course,’ he added, ‘it’s a different story. Erkhard’s under pressure and Haj Whitaker-’ His navigator called him from the doorway. ‘Okay, Eddie. Be right with you.’ He swallowed the rest of his beer and got to his feet.
‘You were saying you were there in Saraifa when David Whitaker arrived?’ I said.
‘Oh, yes. Well … I was just there, that’s all. He was dressed in Bedouin clothes; he was very young and he looked scared stiff. Couldn’t blame the poor kid. He’d never been in Arabia before, never met his father before, and that black-hearted bastard just stared at him as though he wished the floor would open up and swallow him. He even introduced the boy to us as David Thomas. It seemed like he didn’t want to acknowledge him as his own son, which wasn’t very clever of him, for the boy had the same cast of features — the nose, the jaw, the heavy eyebrows. Well, I must go now.’ He held out his hand for the envelope. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll see Gorde gets it. And I’ll come and rescue you sometime during the week if you haven’t flown out by Gulf Airways.’ A wave of the hand and he was gone, out through the screen door. I was alone then with the posters and the lazy circling flies and the old magazines.
It was siesta time and after the departure of the plane the Fort went back to sleep. I was allotted a room and after I’d had a shower, I went up on to the terrace that ran like a broad firing step round the inside of the walls and sat there in a pair of shorts and sun-glasses staring at the shimmering line of the mountains. Down there to the south, where the high volcanic peaks disappeared below the sand horizon, lay Saraifa. Two hundred odd miles, Otto had said. I remembered Griffiths’s description of conditions in summer — hot enough to burn the tyres off a truck and the soles off your boots. The heat came up at me with a furnace fierceness and the flat expanse of the airfield lay in mirage-pools of water.
But if I’d been manoeuvred clear of Gorde, and Whitaker was inaccessible, there was at least one person available to me here. And as the sun sank and the breeze came up, damp off the sea, I dressed and made enquiries about getting to Dubai. A lieutenant of the Trucial Oman Scouts, who was in the lounge having a drink, offered to take me in after the evening meal.
It was just over twelve miles to Dubai, out past the sheikh’s palace with its string of fairy lights and the hum of its generator, and along a winding road beaten out of the sabkhat. The road was as black and hard as macadam and all to the right of us were salt flats running out into the sea — a thin, baked crust, treacherously overlaying a slough of mud that was as lifeless as the surface of the moon. To the left the desert sand was humped like the waves of a petrified sea, and far in the distance the mountains of the Jebel, purple and remote, stood sharp-etched on the earth’s rim.
As we drove through this empty world I asked the lieutenant whether his outfit was expecting trouble in the interior. He laughed. ‘We’re always ready for trouble. That’s what we’re for.’ And when I mentioned the rumours circulating in the bazaars of Bahrain, he said, ‘Oh, you don’t want to worry about them. Bahrain’s always buzzing with rumours.’ He had a soldier’s contempt for civilians and I think he thought I was scared.
The hospital was a mile or two outside Dubai, a solitary building sprawled over a sand hill. The last glow of the sun had gone, the sky fading to darkness, and the building stood black against the sand. Night was falling fast. ‘Give Doc Logan my salaams and tell him I’ll come over tomorrow and help him drink his Scotch,’ my lieutenant said and roared off in his Land-Rover towards the distant wind-towers of Dubai.
The hospital was a ramshackle building, part mud, part wood; a strange place to meet a girl I hadn’t seen for four years. She came to the little waiting-room dressed in apron and cap, and at the sight of me she stopped and stared in surprise, for nobody had bothered to enquire my name.
‘Mr Grant! I–I can’t believe it.’ She came forward and shook my hand.
‘Well, you’re not the only one,’ I said. ‘I can hardly believe it myself.’
Her hand was smooth and dry and firm. Her face looked thinner and the fat of youth had been worked out of her body; her blonde hair was bleached almost white by the sun, her skin tanned. She looked fit and the shine of youth was still in her eyes. It was a strange meeting, and for me — and I think also for her — it brought a feeling of relief, for there was that bond between us and from that moment neither of us could feel entirely alone any more. It was also to have the effect of making me determined, somehow, to get to Saraifa.
‘We can’t talk here,’ she said. ‘I’ll be b-back in a minute.’ Still that slight attractive hesitation in her speech.
When she returned she had removed her cap and apron and wore a light coat. We left the hospital and strolled north whilst the sand turned from brown to silver and the stars came out. I held her arm because I felt her need and mine for the touch of companionship, and the wind was warm on my face.
She had received my letter, but she hadn’t been to Bahrain, hadn’t even written to Erkhard. ‘What was the use?’ She seemed at first to have accepted the fact of her brother’s death and she was quite willing to talk about him. And as she talked, the picture that emerged was of a man I had only just begun to guess at.
She had come to Dubai two years ago, not so much to be near him — she had had the sense to realize that she would very rarely see him — but because of his fascination for Arabia, which he had somehow managed to convey to her. ‘I was here almost three months before I saw him, and then he came, without warning. He was straight out of the desert, from a survey down by the Liwa Oasis, and I didn’t recognize him at first. He was dressed as an Arab, you see. But it wasn’t that,’ she added. ‘And he hadn’t changed, not really.’
She paused there, as though collecting the details of that meeting from the recesses of her memory. ‘I can’t explain it,’ she said finally. ‘He was just different, that’s all. He had become a man and there was a remoteness about him. Do you read the Bible, Mr Grant? Those descriptions of the prophets. There was something of that about him. He always had enthusiasm, a sort of inner fire, but now it seemed to have depth and purpose.’