But I was barely listening to her, my mind on Erkhard and this extraordinary arrangement. If it was true, then it could only mean one thing — that Erkhard and Whitaker had some sort of an arrangement … an improbable combination if Otto was to be believed. ‘And this was in December?’
She nodded.
‘You said you’d seen him four times,’ I said. ‘When was the fourth?’
The fourth?’ She stared at me and her face looked very pale. ‘It was in February.’ She couldn’t remember the date, but it was early in February. I knew then that he’d come to her after he had boarded the Emerald Isle, probably that same night, because she said she was called out well after midnight by an Arab boy and had found him sitting alone on the sand. ‘Somewhere near here,’ she said, looking about her.
‘Did he talk about his father?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Though-’ She hesitated. ‘I think they’d had a row. I can’t be sure. It wasn’t anything he said.’ And she added, ‘He wasn’t very communicative, you see.’
I asked her how he’d behaved. ‘Was he scared at all? Did he behave as though he was in fear of his life?’
She looked at me quickly, her eyes searching my face. ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘No, I don’t think he was scared. More-’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t explain. He just behaved strangely, that’s all-very strangely.’ In fact, most of the time he’d been with her he’d sat in absolute silence. ‘David could do that. As a kid I got used to those silences. But … I don’t know. This seemed deeper, somehow, as though-’ But she couldn’t put it into words. ‘He didn’t talk much,’ she reiterated. ‘There was a moon and I remember his eyes riveted on my face. It was as though he couldn’t look at me enough. I felt… it was as though he wanted to capture an impression, take a sort of mental picture with him. It was a very strange, uncomfortable feeling — and he looked so like his father in the Arab clothes he was wearing.’
‘Did he tell you what he was doing?’
‘No. He wouldn’t tell me anything, but I had the feeling that it was dangerous. He was terribly thin, nothing but skin and bone, and his eyes, staring at me, looked enormous and very pale in the moonlight. When he left he kissed me, not with warmth, but as though he were kissing a priestess who held the key to the future in her hands. And just before he left me, he said a strange thing. He said, “Whatever you hear of me, Sue, don’t believe it.” And he added that if anything happened to him, I was to write to you. And then he left me, walking quickly across the sand without looking back.’
We were sitting on a little rise and the sand fell away from us, sloping gently to a barasti settlement, the dark shapes of the palm-frond huts barely visible, for the moon was new and only just risen. Nothing stirred and the only sound was the bleat of a goat. ‘I can’t believe he’s dead,’ she said. ‘I won’t believe it.’
And because it was what she wanted to believe I told her about the girl in Bahrain and about her mother’s reaction. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Mum did everything she could to discourage his interest in Arabia. But too late. When we were small she shared her thoughts with us, and her thoughts were of the man she called our “Uncle Charles”. That album of press-cuttings — they were almost the first pictures I ever remember looking at. And now here we are, the two of us, in Arabia.’
‘And your father?’ I asked. ‘Did he talk to you about Saraifa?’
‘To me?’ She smiled and shook her head. ‘I’m only a girl. He wouldn’t talk to me about what he was doing.’
‘You say David was loaned to him by GODCO,’ I prompted.
She nodded and when I pressed her for the reason, she said almost sharply, ‘Oh, his father is doing what he’s always done out here — dabbling in oil.’ And then almost gently: ‘It’s rather sad really. One by one the concessions he negotiated for GODCO have been abandoned. He was once a great figure out here — a sort of Lawrence.’ She had pity for him, even if she had no love.
‘And now?’ I asked.
‘Now?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. David wouldn’t talk about him, not that last time. But there are all these rumours. He had this theory, you know. Some say it’s crazy, but I’ve met others who believed he was right.’
I asked her whether she’d met Entwhistle. I thought perhaps he might have been to see her. But she shook her head.
‘What about these rumours?’ I said.
‘They’re just rumours.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know whether they’re true or not. Nobody I’ve met has ever been to Saraifa. With the border in dispute nobody is allowed to go there. It’s just… well, the desert is like the sea used to be, you know — exaggerated stories are passed on by word of mouth.’
I pressed her then to tell me what the stories were and she said, ‘He’s supposed to be drilling on his own account — with an old broken-down rig operated entirely by Bedouin. The oil boys I’ve talked to all say that’s nonsense, that uneducated desert Arabs couldn’t possibly operate an oil rig. But I don’t know. Though I’m scared of him and have no feeling for him, I know he’s a remarkable man, and you’ve only got to talk to the officers here to realize that the Bedouin are very quick to pick up a working knowledge of machinery.’
She threw the stub of her cigarette away and got to her feet. ‘I wish to God I knew what had happened.’ Her voice trembled; she was very near to tears. There was a lot more I suppose she could have told me about him, but I didn’t press her. I thought there was plenty of time and that I’d see her again. For her sake I steered the talk to other things. We passed a watch tower, standing like a lonely border keep, and she told me they were still manned, the guard climbing in through the hole halfway up the tower’s side every night and pulling the ladder up after him.
‘It looks so peaceful here,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘It is — on the surface. But who knows what is going on underneath? Certainly not our people. Some of these young English boys who are sent out here to advise-’ She shook her head. ‘Sometimes I wonder. What must the sheikhs think? This desert way of life, it goes right back to Hagar and Ishmael, racially and culturally hardly changed. They know human nature the way these youngsters out from England will never know it. They’re full of guile and intrigue; the Pax Britannica, even the oil, is just an incident in time. It’s only a few years back, you know, that the Sheikh of Dubai fell upon an Abu Dhabi raiding force, killing over fifty of them. It wasn’t very far from here.’
Back at the hospital she asked me whether I had arranged transport to get me back to Sharjah. ‘I can walk,’ I said. But she wouldn’t hear of it. ‘You’d lose your way in the dark. You’d either wander into the desert or else into the sabkhat. Step through the crust of that and nobody would ever see you again.’ She insisted that I stayed at the hospital.
They had a small guest room and I spent the night there, and in the morning she arranged a lift for me in a TOS truck going back to Sharjah. She looked cool and very matter-of-fact as she said goodbye to me. ‘Come and see me again before you leave. And if you have any news-’ She left it at that, and I sat and watched her from the back of the truck as we drove away, a solitary figure in white standing motionless outside the hospital. She hadn’t moved when I lost sight of her behind a shoulder of sand.
It was that lack of movement; I became suddenly instinctively aware of a loneliness that matched my own, and my heart went out to her. And as the truck roared along the packed mud surface of the Sharjah track it wasn’t of the girl who had walked with me in the moonlight on my first night on the edge of the Arabian desert that I was thinking, but of that other girl — the girl who had come to my shabby office in Cardiff to plead for help for her brother. She was a woman now and though she might not like her father, I felt he had given her something of himself that made her, like him, an unusual person. She had courage, loyalty and a strange aura of calm, an acceptance of life as it was. They were qualities both restful and disturbing, and remembering every detail of that walk in the sands, the watch tower and her perceptive comments on the desert world, I knew I didn’t want to lose her, knew that somehow I must discover what had happened to David and set her mind at rest. I was half in love with her. I knew that before ever the truck reached Sharjah, and all that morning I walked, filled with a restlessness that was the restlessness of frustration. But you could walk for a day and still have no sense of progress in the merciless emptiness of the sea of sand that stretched away to the south.