Lucy Gordon: The Sheikh’s Reward

Goodbye, my darling. I wonder where we’ll meet again? Will it be in the Enchanted Gardens? Were we ever destined to find them? Or maybe they don’t really exist.

I’ve wondered how to sign this letter. You gave me so many names, and it was lovely pretending to be them for a while. But they were only illusions, and I can’t live on illusions. If you can’t love the woman I really am, let us forget each other.

No, not forget. Never. But put the dream aside as too beautiful to be true. I’ve signed this letter with the one name you never called me, but the only one that was true. Try to forgive me.

The letter was signed, ‘Frances.’

When he’d finished reading Ali realised how quiet and empty the apartment was. Where once there had been her laughter, now there was nothing. Her defiance had enraged him, but he would have given all he had to have her there again, telling him that she would do as she pleased, no matter what he thought. With what courage she had opposed him, and how wonderful that courage seemed now.

Only the soft plashing of the fountains broke the silence, and suddenly he realised that another noise was missing. He’d grown used to the cooing of her white doves, the faithful birds that would never leave her. He strode out to the courtyard.

But the dovecote was empty. The doves had flown away.

He knew then that she had really gone.

It was strange, Fran thought, how you could love a man so much that it hurt. You could dream of him at night and yearn for him by day. The memory of his passion and your own could make your flesh ache with longing. He could fill your heart and thoughts until nothing else existed in the whole world.

And yet you could force yourself to leave him, and know that you’d done the right thing. You could struggle not to be crushed by your own heartbreak and resist the fierce temptation to run back to him.

For the first few days she flinched whenever the telephone rang, certain that it must be Ali. But it never was. She’d half expected an explosion of wrath at her defection. But perhaps he would simply ask her to talk, say that he understood, and wanted to start again, without coercion. If he truly loved her…

But there were no telegrams or letters, and nobody came to the door. It was as though he had wiped her out of his existence, and a shiver went through her. He’d planned to marry her out of duty, because he’d ‘compromised’ her. Her departure had actually been a relief to him, and now it was all over.

Barney, a kindly elderly man who ran The Financial Review , threw up his hands at the sight of her.

‘So the prodigal returns! There was a crazy rumour that you were going to marry Prince Ali.’

‘Crazy,’ Fran agreed with her brightest smile. ‘You shouldn’t believe all you hear. But I have been in Kamar.’

‘Great! So what really happens to all that money?’

‘He spends it on his people.’

‘Oh, c’mon; the story must be better than that.’

‘It’s the truth. He doesn’t make a big fuss about it because he thinks it’s nobody else’s business. But he isn’t the way we thought. In fact, I don’t think there’s a story there at all.’

The editor’s jaw dropped. ‘No story?’

‘Well, if there is, I can’t write it. I’m sorry.’

‘Then I’ll have to assign someone else.’

‘I wish them luck,’ Fran said with a wan little smile.

Once she would have thought herself crazy to give up an assignment, but what had happened to her was something that could never be mined as raw material for a feature. It was too precious, too sacred.

Howard called. After the volcanic emotions of the last few weeks his kindly, slightly pompous voice sounded very welcome, and she agreed to have dinner with him.

Luckily he was a man of little imagination, and he readily accepted the story that she had been in Kamar to work.

‘You really have been the mystery woman,’ he said, when he’d ordered an excellent supper at an expensive restaurant. Howard always ate at expensive restaurants. He felt it was expected of a man in his position. ‘You might have given me a call, my dear.’

‘I’m sorry, Howard, there was a lot going on.’

‘Of course, of course. And I’ve been very busy myself. There’s a bit of manoeuvring going on at the bank. The chief executive is retiring, and-er-’ he coughed modestly ‘-it’s between me and one other fellow.’

‘I’m sure the other fellow doesn’t have a chance,’ Fran said dutifully.

‘Well, if I could bring some spectacular new business it would certainly help.’ He smiled at her. ‘I’ve missed you, my dear. I enjoy taking you to dinner. You’re a fine-looking woman, and you make me very proud.’

‘Your hair…is like a river of molten gold… How your eyes enthral me!’

Fran closed her eyes against the sound of Ali’s voice whispering passionate hymns to her beauty. When would those memories cease to torment her?

‘Well,’ Howard said, filling her wine glass, ‘I hope it was all worth it.’

‘Worth it?’

‘I mean did you gather plenty of material?’

‘Well-’

‘You must brief me about Kamar. It’s a big nut and I’d like to crack it. That would really be a feather in my cap.’

Fran repeated what she’d told the editor about how Ali handled the Kamari budget, and his lavish giving to charity. Howard listened with a gleam in his eye that told her he was mentally taking notes.

It was a dull evening because Howard was a dull man, but dullness was what she wanted right now. It relaxed her tortured nerves, even though nothing was going to ease the pain in her heart. He drove her home and gave her a brief kiss goodnight, but she escaped before it could develop into anything more intense.

She had been home a week when she received an excited call from Barney.

‘I’ve just had a call from Prince Ali’s office. We can do the feature with his co-operation, the lot.’

‘That’s wonderful, Barney. I’m very pleased for you.’

‘Not me, love, you.’

‘I’ve told you, I can’t do it.’

‘You have to. Prince Ali made it a condition. You or nobody.’

At the words ‘You have to,’ something inside Fran flinched. This was the old Ali, laying down the law, insisting on his own way, giving her no choice. He wanted to see her again, but it was beneath his dignity to ask, so he tried to coerce her. He’d learned nothing.

‘It can’t be me,’ she said in a tense voice.

‘Fran, if you turn down a scoop like this I’ll have to say you’re unreliable, and then I couldn’t use you again.’

‘All right,’ Fran said in a smouldering voice, ‘I’ll do it.’

Even now the signs of Ali’s power were all around her. She arrived home to discover that some files, containing a wealth of material about Kamar, had been delivered in her absence.

There was also a typewritten note, saying that she would be given twenty-four hours to master the material, and then Ali’s secretary would see her.

Perhaps that meant he wouldn’t be there himself. This was a farewell gift. Afterwards she would hear of him no more, and somehow she would try to persuade herself that it was for the best.

Reading the file, she felt as though somebody had let her into Aladdin’s cave. All the doors she had knocked on fruitlessly were now open to her. With what she had learned while in Kamar, she had the basis for a splendid feature. Once that would have been enough.

She made a long list of questions, and on the appointed day she approached Ali’s house. The huge front door opened while she was still halfway up the path.

Ali’s secretary advanced to meet her with a bow. If he knew that this was the woman who’d jilted his master he gave no sign of it.