Marguerite Kaye - Summer Sheikhs

‘You stirred up what was frozen, Desi. Until you came, I had forgotten how much I once loved you.’

‘Salah!’ she whispered.

‘And how little you loved me.’

‘You think?’ she said bitterly.

‘You did not love me at all. You said so, and you were right.’

‘I was sixteen!’

‘Yes. You were young. I also was young, too young for such powerful feelings. I could not control what I felt. You said I was like the Kaljuks, and my only thought, Desi, was to prove to you that I could never be like them.’

‘Is that why you joined Prince Omar?’ she breathed, horrified.

He shrugged. ‘I was running across a rocky ledge, looking for a way down to a Kaljuk gun emplacement that had been shelling a mountain town for a week.’ Unconsciously he stroked the scar that ran across his cheekbone to above his ear. ‘There was an explosion of light in my head, that’s all I remember. I woke up in the hospital.

‘You were there with me day and night, Desi. You were my solace and my torment, in one. I dreamed of you, sleeping and waking. I wanted you more than anything in the world. I begged you to come to me. You did not come.’

‘I tried, but Leo…’ Immediately she wished she hadn’t pronounced the name.

‘Yes, Leo,’ he said in a different tone. ‘Sami sent me a letter with pictures of you in your new life with this old man. Then I understood. You did not love me, you could never be mine. I wrote you the letter to tell you I knew it.

‘But I could not defend myself against the knowing. It went straight into my heart. The pain was like the end of the world, Desi. I did not recover, not even after I told myself I did. When you love someone the way I loved you…Every day and every night I yearned for you. In the bed of other women, I dreamed of you.’

Suddenly she had to choke back tears.

‘Why did you never tell me? Never try to get in touch?’ she demanded. ‘It was up to you, wasn’t it? After that letter did you expect me to try to contact you again?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I expected nothing. You were with Leo. My love died, a terrible, painful death that I thought had killed my heart.

‘One day, I awoke from the pain. But still I was not free of you. Then it was the memory of love itself that haunted me. Fool that I was, I wanted to find this feeling again, with another woman. I thought you could be wiped from my memory forever and I would feel alive again.

‘But that is impossible, I learned that. I can never feel such an impact again. I don’t know why it is so, but it is. I was ten times a fool to wish it. Such love is weakness. An addiction.’

He paused, but she had no words.

‘I thought it was dead, Desi. Before you came I thought there was nothing left, not even ashes. When my father told me he would let you come, I was angry, that was all. I thought, it is over. What business does she have, to come to me now?

‘Then you came, and it was not what I expected. Anger was only the first of many feelings. I understood things I did not understand before.

‘Our love and its death has affected every decision of my life from that moment, every breath I took, every woman I rejected as a wife. I understand it now.’

‘God,’ she whispered. Her heart was choking her.

‘I want to free myself, Desi. My parents urge me to get married—for ten years they have wanted this. Now even I see it is time. But I can’t go to my future wife with such a burden of the past. Not now that I feel its weight.’

Her mouth opened in a soundless gasp as she took in his meaning.

‘It is time to leave this behind. We have a few days together. I want to finish with these broken hopes. I want to bury the past once and forever. I want to go to my new wife with a heart free and ready to accept her.’

She was silent, struggling with feeling. A sound like gunshot startled her as one of the flaming torches fell to be extinguished in the sand, and its dying spark shot skyward like a soul going home.

‘And how will sleeping with me for a few days free your heart?’ she asked at last.

‘I have been haunted by you, Desi, by the memory of lovemaking that moved the earth. Nothing has matched it, but it is because nothing can match it. You can’t match a dream. It is a fantasy, I know it, born from the fact that you were my first experience of love.’

She wanted to tell him how it had been for her. The tearing grief, the bottomless yearning for that souldeep connection, the determination to forget. Then Leo’s terrible betrayal, and afterwards, the emptiness, the feeling that that part of her had died. And the terrible shock, seeing Salah again, to discover that it might still be there.

‘I want that haunting to stop. Can you understand this? And I think—to put out my hand and know that it is you, and that the sex is what it is and no more—then I can close the book. I want to close it, Desi.’

‘You’re going to marry my best friend, feeling like this?’ she protested.

‘Don’t you see, it is not feeling? It is a memory, that is all.’

‘What if it worked the other way? What if this revived your love? Then what?’

Salah shook his head. ‘Do not fear for me, Desi.’

‘And what about my feelings? They don’t matter?’

He was silent, his eyes meeting hers. He didn’t believe she had any feelings to be hurt, that was obvious. And she just could not open her mouth to tell him. What would he do with such knowledge?

‘You’re sure this is not a disguised desire to punish me?’ she pressed.

‘How would this punish you?’

‘You might think I’m vulnerable. You suspect me of coming here to see you. What did you imagine I wanted?’

An odd expression crossed his face in torchlight. ‘What power do I have to hurt you?’

Before she could answer, one of the Bedouin came and spoke to him.

‘Our tent is ready,’ Salah said. ‘Come to bed.’

And in spite of everything, her heart kicked with cell-deep anticipation.

The interior of the tent was softly lighted in the glow of two hurricane lamps. The earth was covered with reed mats and carpets, the space was divided into two sections by curtains of mosquito netting. On one side there was a large basin and two jugs of water behind a curtain. The other side held cushions and a thin mattress spread with a clean striped cloth.

A small spade was placed discreetly by the entrance, and Desi picked it up and went out to walk into the dunes. When she returned Salah had washed and was behind the netting, zipping their sleeping bags into a double. He turned and looked at her, and suddenly she was remembering the night they had spent in a little cabin on the island. Then, too, they had lit hurricane lanterns.

Then, too, the air between them had been thick with anticipation, and her limbs had been heavy with it.

They did not speak. He got up and went out.

Desi got out her sponge bag and went into the little space to bathe. She had packed unperfumed soap, to avoid enticing insects, but now she wished she could risk using some scent. Nor could the cotton pyjamas she had packed be called anything but plain.

She knew she was being a fool. She was storing up heartbreak for herself.

But if for Salah lovemaking was a necessary way of coming to terms with the past, for her it was thirst in the desert.

All those years of telling herself it had been nothing to him. That if he had truly loved her, he could never have written what he did. What he told her this evening was like a firestorm in her. He had loved her.

If she had known that, would she have had the courage to write back, to shout at him for his despicable attitude? To fight?

But how could she have been happy with a man who harboured such alien, archaic views? Would he ever have treated her as an equal? A man makes love to a virgin and then calls her a slut? When she looked at it squarely, she knew she had had a lucky escape.