She had only seen him four times in the two years she had been out there, but each time her reaction had been the same. ‘It was as though he had become dedicated.’
‘Dedicated to what?’ I asked. But she couldn’t tell me, not in so many words. ‘To a way of life,’ she said, and went on to talk about the influence his father had had on him. The relationship hadn’t been at all easy at first. They started off on the wrong foot, you see. When David arrived at Saraifa Sir Philip Gorde was there with his pilot. The driver should have taken David to his father’s house; instead he was brought straight to Sheikh Makhmud’s palace. It meant, of course, that his arrival was immediately known to two Europeans. It complicated the whole thing, particularly as David was virtually smuggled into Arabia. His father thought it due to wilful disobedience and he was furious.’ She smiled at me. ‘I think they hated each other at first. They were too much alike, you see.’
I asked her whether she’d met Colonel Whitaker, and she nodded.‘Once, just over a year ago.’ He’d come to the hospital to see her. ‘It was just curiosity,’ she said. ‘There’s no feeling between us — not like there is between him and David. David’s got much more of his father in him than I have. And anyway,’ she added, ‘after being so long in Arabia he has the native attitude to girls; necessary for the procreation of the race, but useless otherwise. Being a nurse, I know. They’ll go to any lengths to get a sick boy to the hospital, but a girl child — she can die or not, just as she pleases.’
I asked her then what impression she had got of her father and she gave a slight shrug. ‘There’s no love lost between us, if that’s what you mean?’
‘Yes, but what’s he like?’ And I explained that I was looking after his financial affairs and had come out partly in the hope of meeting him.
She didn’t answer for a moment, as though she had to think about it. ‘It’s odd,’ she said at length. ‘He’s my own father. I know that. I think we could both feel that in our bones. But it meant nothing.’ She hesitated. Finally she said, ‘My only impression is one of hardness, almost of cruelty. It’s the desert, I think; the desert and the Moslem faith and the Arabs he’s lived with so long. He’s a little terrifying — tall, one-eyed, imperious. He’s like an Arab, but the sheikhs I’ve met are much softer, gentler men, more guileful. He has a strange quality of command, the sort of quality I imagine some of our kings once had when they believed implicitly in the Divine Right. You could never be easy in his company. His whole personality, it radiates-’ She paused, at a loss for words. ‘I can’t explain it, but he frightens me.’
‘What about David?’ I asked. ‘Did he feel the same way?’
‘At first. Later he came under his spell so that he looked upon him as something akin to God.’ He had been, she said, under the spell of his father when he had first come to see her. He had had six months at Saraifa, living the life of an Arab, and a year at an oil school learning to become a geophysicist. He had come to her straight from his first experience of field work and was then going on leave to Saraifa. ‘He talked a lot about Saraifa — about the way the desert was moving in on the oasis, slowly obliterating the date gardens. He could be very emotional about it.’ She smiled gently. ‘He was like a woman at times, the way he wanted to defend Saraifa.’
‘Defend it?’ I thought for a moment she was referring to the rumours of trouble.
‘From the Rub al Khali,’ she said. ‘From the sand. He dreamed of taking a seismological outfit there and proving his father’s theory. Oil, he said, was the only hope. If he could prove there was oil there, then the concession would he renewed and there would be money to rebuild the falajes.’ That word again. I asked her what it meant, but all she said was, ‘It’s some system for bringing water to Saraifa and it has largely been destroyed.’ She sighed and sat down on the sand, her hands clasped about her knees. I gave her a cigarette and she sat there smoking, remembering I suppose the last time they had been together.
‘Did he ever take a seismological truck into Saraifa?’ I asked her.
She looked at me quickly, her eyes big and round in the starlight. I think she had forgotten for the moment that I was there. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. And after a long silence she added softly, ‘I know so little about him really. I don’t know what he was doing, or why he was so depressed; and the truck abandoned like that. I know so little.’ And then she looked at me again and said with great emphasis: ‘But I know he was a man — a real man; and also that he would endeavour to the limit for something he believed in.’
‘Saraifa?’
She nodded. ‘Perhaps — for Saraifa.’
‘Because of his father?’
She didn’t answer for a while. At length, she said, ‘No. Not because of his father.’
‘What then?’
‘The people, his friend Khalid — the sand killing the place. I don’t know. The sand probably. That was something physical. He was always fascinated by physical things. He liked action.’
‘But he was a dreamer, too?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, he was a dreamer, too. He was always a rebel in the world he knew. When we were kids … he’d escape into a world of his own. A m-mental world, you see.
It was always much larger than life. He’d invent games — just for the two of us. And then, later — well, the gang life attracted him for the same reason. It was a form of escape.’
‘And you think his father’s world — Saraifa — was an escape?’
She shrugged. ‘Escape or reality — what does it matter? It was real to him. I remember the second time he came to see me. He took me to dinner at the Fort at Sharjah and he was full of plans, bubbling over with them. He was going to take over from a man called Entwhistle who was sick. And after that he was going on a month’s leave — to Saraifa. A busman’s holiday; he was going to run a survey for his father. He was so full of it,’ she said a little sadly. ‘And so bloody optimistic,’ she added, almost savagely.
‘Where exactly in Saraifa was he going to try for oil?’
‘I don’t know. What does it matter?’
‘Was this in July of last year?’
She nodded, a glance of surprise. ‘He had his own ideas; something he’d unearthed in some old geological report. I couldn’t follow it all. When he’s excited he talks nineteen-to-the-dozen and I’m never certain what is fact and what he’s made up. He seemed to think he could do in a month what GODCO had failed to do the whole time they’d had the concession. He was always like that. He could build a whole kingdom in five minutes — in his mind.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Once, you know, he ran a tramp shipping line out of Cardiff. It got so big that every ship that came into the docks belonged to him. That was the first time he got into trouble. He beat up a night watchman for telling him to get off the bridge of an old laid-up Victory ship.’ She sighed. ‘That was the sort of boy he was.’
‘And after he’d been to Saraifa?’ I asked. ‘Did he come and see you?’
‘No, he flew straight back to Bahrain. I didn’t see him until December.’
She didn’t seem to want to talk about it, for I had to drag it out of her. Yes, he had been going to Saraifa again. She I
admitted it reluctantly. He’d been loaned to his father.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked.
‘I can’t be sure about anything, but that’s what I understood.’
So The Times Correspondent had been right. And I remembered how Erkhard had skated round the question.
‘It was all so strange,’ she muttered. ‘I thought it was what he’d been wanting all along. Instead he seemed — I don’t know how to put it — almost appalled at the prospect. He was in a most extraordinary state of nervous tension-’
‘Had he seen Erkhard?’ I asked. ‘Was it Erkhard who had loaned him to his father?’
‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t talk about it. He just came to tell me where he was going and what he was doing. He didn’t stay long. In fact,’ she added, ‘it was a rather awkward meeting and I had the feeling he’d only come because he’d felt it was his duty.’