There was a gentle knock on the door and Melina, who was only half asleep, was instantly wide awake.
“Who is it?” she asked.
In answer the door at the far end of the bedroom opened softly and she could see Bing’s shoulders silhouetted against the light of the room beyond.
“It’s eight-thirty,” he began apologetically, “and I think if we are going to order breakfast I had better bring these things back.”
“Of course,” she agreed. “Wait one moment.”
He turned away and she slipped out of bed into her dressing gown, which was lying over a chair. Then she drew back the curtains from the window and the sunshine came flooding in, enveloping her in its golden rays that dazzled her eyes and made her lift up her face towards it like a flower towards the light.
Then her eyes cleared and she saw a vision of high palm trees, climbing bougainvillaea, crimson and pink geraniums and white lilies and beyond, the sand-coloured walls of the native City of Fez.
The hotel that Bing had taken her to was just outside the walls, high up on a hill and, he told her, it had once been a Palace belonging to a former Sultan.
The proprietors had done little to spoil the atmosphere. The rooms were furnished in Moorish fashion. There were coloured tiles on the walls, there were Moorish carvings, hangings which might have come straight from a story of the Arabian Nights and all the main rooms opened onto a terrace on which there was a large and tinkling fountain surrounded by palm trees and flowers.
The night before, when they had arrived, the fountain had been lit with coloured lights and Melina had thought it beautiful. But this morning, in the sunshine, she thought that it held an enchantment beyond comparison with anything she had seen before.
She stood there staring until a noise in the room behind her made her turn round. Bing was struggling through the communicating doorway with sheets, blankets and pillows and now he put them down on the empty bed that stood beside Melina’s.
“I’ll make it,” Melina said, turning towards him.
“Thank you,” he answered. “Making beds is something I have always hated doing ever since I was in my preparatory school and matron said that I was the worst bedmaker in the whole dormitory. I’ve had a complex about it ever since!”
He turned back into the small sitting room where he had spent the night and Melina, knowing the narrowness of the couch he had made his bed into, felt somewhat guilty as she tucked in the blankets and then disarranged them again to look as if someone had just got out of bed.
“You’re up early,” she commented.
“We have a great deal to do today,” he replied, coming back into the doorway to watch her finish the bed.
It was then that she remembered that she was wearing only a nightgown and dressing gown and that she had not arranged her hair or powdered her nose since she had risen.
“Oh, goodness!” she said in sudden confusion. “Don’t look at me. I’ve forgotten, in the excitement of seeing the view outside the window, what I must look like.”
“You look very fresh and young,” he said in a tone of voice that somehow did not make it a compliment.
“You make me feel like a beatnik,” Melina answered scoldingly.
She crossed the room to the dressing table and was relieved to see that her hair, because it curled naturally round her forehead and over her small head, did not look unattractive. She ran a comb through it and powdered the tip of her nose.
“And now,” she asked, “What are the plans for today?”
She saw with almost a feeling of chagrin that he was not listening to her nor, indeed, looking at her. He was staring past her through the open window towards the roofs of the City below them.
It was funny to remember, now, she thought, how apprehensive she had been of staying with him in a hotel.
He had made it very easy, demanding a suite as soon as they arrived and paying no attention when the receptionist told him that owing to the influx of tourists and the fact that there was a big dance in the neighbourhood the following night, there was no chance of their being accommodated with anything of the sort.
“I like a sitting room to myself,” Bing had asserted in the nasal accent that somehow seemed to make him sound richer and more important than if he had spoken naturally.
“Even if I am on holiday I have business to do and my wife doesn’t like my papers cluttered all over the place in her bedroom. Find the Manager.”
The Manager appeared and Bing reeled off a list of influential Americans whom, he said, had recommended him to this particular hotel. Finally, someone had been moved from the room they now occupied and the Manager’s private office, which happened to be next door to it, was put at their disposal.
“You cannot sleep in there,” Melina had said half in a whisper, when finally they were alone in the bedroom together.
“It’s a jolly sight better than most of the places I have to sleep in,” Bing said with a smile. “And I’m quite used to the floor, it doesn’t worry me. I can sleep on anything.”
Fortunately, however, there was a small couch in one corner on which Melina suspected the Manager took his siesta. It was hard and not very comfortable, but Bing pooh-poohed the idea of moving the mattress from the bedroom onto it and, taking only the sheets and the blankets, assured her that he would be all right.
They had locked the door as soon as they came into the room and Bing had already warned Melina against talking about anything that mattered except in a very low whisper.
“To say the walls have ears is literally true when you are in any Eastern or Middle Eastern country,” he explained. “The natives know everything. Nothing is too small to escape their notice, nothing is too insignificant to be remembered and relayed on to someone else.”
“I remember my father used to say the same thing,” Melina said. “It frightens me at the moment.”
“With reason,” Bing answered in all seriousness.
Long after he had closed the door between them and for all she knew was sleeping soundly, Melina had lain awake thinking over the events of the day and feeling herself bewildered, fascinated and, at the same time, scared by everything that had occurred in such quick succession.
How could she have imagined, when she had woken up that morning, that she would lose her job, a nice, safe, secure one, she had thought, and find herself re-engaged and taking part in an incredible crazy adventure with implications which even now she found hard to believe.
There were so many questions, she thought, that she had wanted to ask Bing, and yet somehow there was something about him that made it difficult to encroach on his reserve or those things that he was quite determined to keep secret.
Melina had always been sensitive towards other people’s feelings and now she knew that it was impossible to probe too deeply or to try and force his confidence. He was a strange man, she had thought a dozen times during the long drive to Fez, and she thought it again now as she watched him looking out of the window and having, for the moment, apparently forgotten her presence.
“Bing, is anything the matter?”
She asked the question almost apprehensively and then with a little start he turned towards her and a smile flickered over his face.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I was planning something. Get dressed. I’ll order breakfast in our sitting room. They will expect us to do so as I made such a fuss about having it.”
He walked out of the room, closing the communicating door behind him.
Melina hurried to have her bath and put on one of her prettiest cotton dresses, which she had remembered to ask the maid to press the night before. She arranged her hair, powdered her face and put on a little lipstick. It was already beginning to grow hotter and she knew that in the heat the less make-up she used the better she would look.
She had hurried, but it was nearly nine o’clock before she opened the door and went into the sitting room. The waiter, wearing the traditional long white cotton robe, a spotless, cleverly turned turban, and with bare feet, was bringing in the breakfast – long glasses of fruit juice, eggs with tiny curls of crisp bacon, fresh rolls and butter which looked delicious, but which Melina already knew tasted slightly rancid.
“I am just hoping, honey, that the coffee is drinkable,” Bing said as she came into the room. “I haven’t had a decent cup since we left New York.”
“You must learn not to fuss so much about your coffee,” Melina said, thinking as she did so that they sounded exactly like a comfortably married couple who had grown used to each other’s likes and dislikes.
The waiter left them alone and Melina raised her eyebrows.
“Eggs!” she said. “Isn’t it too hot for eggs?”
“You may not get any lunch,” Bing warned her.
She smiled at that and ate her eggs with enjoyment, finding, as she had expected, that the butter was nasty and the jam, made from tiny strawberries found at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, was delicious. The oranges, which had obviously been picked locally, were small and sweet.
They ate in silence for some minutes and then Bing said,
“I have decided the best thing we can do today is to go and reconnoitre round the house where the party is to be held tonight.”
“I was expecting you would say that,” Melina answered. “I should like to see where Moulay Ibrahim lives.”
“It isn’t the sort of place where he ought to be living or where he would feel most at home,” Bing replied. “He was born in the desert. His father was a small Sheik who, owing to his ambitions, rose to be a senior one. He made a great deal of money cattle dealing and also, I am convinced, by slave trading and the smuggling of drugs.”
Bing made a gesture of disgust.
“Anyway,” he went on, “the old Sheik became so rich that he grew bored with the company of his tribesmen and of his innumerable wives. He went on a trip to Paris taking his eldest son with him. His extravagances there, the parties he gave, his excesses, his vices and his general behaviour are still talked about and have become almost a legend.”
“It must have been fun in a way,” Melina laughed.
“Dope peddling is a dirty business,” Bing answered, “but it pays. The Sheik renewed his efforts when he returned home. He also required extra cash for his son’s education because he left him behind in Paris. Unfortunately the boy was far too imbued with his father’s mentality to learn much that was any good to him. Nevertheless, after a few years he came back to take over the chieftainship from his father who was sinking into premature old age, due mostly to the effects of drink and disease.”
Bing paused to drink his coffee.
“Moulay Ibrahim had no intention of ruling as his father had ruled,” he continued as Melina did not speak. “He had far greater ambitions and he started to enlarge his tribe in every way he could, to make his possessions larger and even more impressive than those owned by his father, and to do what had never been done by his ancestors before, to cultivate the friendship of the Europeans.”
Melina had put her elbows on the table and was listening intently. She was seeing, as Bing talked, the commanding figure astride the black horse, his dark flashing eyes that looked up into hers.
“Moulay Ibrahim did not only crave money, he wanted power,” Bing went on. “And he found that one of the first ways to get himself known was to entertain. He built an enormous villa on the foundations of an old Palace, which I hope we shall see tonight, outside Fez. He built another in Casablanca and also purchased property in Marrakesh.”
Bing’s voice altered and became cynical.
“It is never difficult to get people to accept invitations to a superbly organised party,” he said. “The French citizens of every town which Moulay Ibrahim patronised were only too willing to dance to the orchestras he had flown from France and enjoy the expensive cabarets, which were even sometimes brought from as far as New York.”
“I don’t blame them for going,” Melina said quickly.
“Neither did anybody else,” Bing said. “But it was not generosity that made him play host. It was something quite different.”
“What was it?” Melina asked, then sat up suddenly, surprised by the expression on Bing’s face.
She could see that he was listening, tense and still, with his ears strained. She listened, too, but could hear nothing.
Then soundlessly he rose to his feet, walked to the door and jerked it open. The waiter was standing outside very near to the door. If he was surprised he did not show it.
“What do you want?” Bing asked sharply.
“If the gentleman has finished with the breakfast, I will take away the tray,” the waiter said submissively.
“Yes, we have finished,” Bing replied abruptly.
Melina rose to her feet so as to allow the waiter access to the table.
“Get your things,” Bing said. “We have a lot of sight-seeing to do. The sooner we start the better. Don’t forget the guide book.”
“No, I won’t,” Melina replied.
She was aware, as she went to her bedroom, that her heart was beating a little quicker. Had the waiter been listening to what they were saying? And if he had, did it matter? Bing had been speaking in a very low voice and yet even a low voice might have carried as far as the door.
They had been speaking in English, but who was to know whether the waiter could understand English or not?
There was no reason why they should not talk about Moulay Ibrahim, and yet, at the same time, it was unlikely that an American would have known so much about him.
As she put a clean handkerchief into her bag, she began to feel frightened again. She and Bing were so vulnerable. Two English people alone fighting against inconceivable odds and without the slightest knowledge as to who and where their enemy might be or what he would look like should they find him.
‘The child! Remember the child!’ she told herself fiercely.
That was what mattered. It was no use getting frightened, no use getting panicky. It was the child who mattered and it seemed that very soon they might be at the end of their quest.
Her bag was ready and she picked up her sunshade. She had brought only two hats abroad with her, but she had not been foolish enough to underestimate the sun or to imagine, as so many Europeans do, that her hair would be enough protection. She slipped the hook of the sunshade over her arm and remembered that Bing had said, ‘bring the guide book’.
She did not have one, but she had in her case a paperback novel that she had been reading. She thought she had better carry that and make herself look as much like the usual tourist as possible.
Bing was waiting for her in the sitting room.
They went downstairs, which were of the cool stone of the old Moorish Palace, but were highly polished so that Melina held tightly onto the banisters for fear she should slip.
There was a crowd round the reception desk talking about rooms and excursions and Melina waited while Bing bought two highly coloured postcards of the hotel.
“We must not forget to send these home,” he said and, demanding loudly two stamps for the United States of America, he then stuck them on the postcards.
“Put these in your bag,” he told Melina, “and we’ll write them when we’re in the Sultan’s Palace. They’ll give the folks back home a real thrill.”
“I’m sure they will,” Melina said, longing to laugh but realising that all this was too serious to be really funny.
Having established his American identity, Bing then walked with Melina through the hotel and out into the courtyard.
Their car was parked where they had left it the night before, in a row with a number of other cars. But now, where the courtyard had seemed quiet and deserted in the darkness, it was alive with people, movement and colour.
The hotel servants were busy bringing out the luggage for a bus load of tourists who were leaving for their next beauty spot, with the usual number of twittering excited ladies carrying guide books and souvenirs, accompanied by tired rather bored husbands, who would much rather have spent their holidays at home working in the garden.
Melina was not really interested in the tourists, but looked beyond them to where, through an arched courtyard, she could see a number of natives peering in at them, apparently trying to excite their attention.
“What do those people want?” she asked Bing.
He glanced towards them as he helped her into the car.
“Oh, they are guides,” he said. “At least, the ones in the black and white striped cotton nightshirts are. The others are beggars, fortune tellers, snake charmers and Heaven knows what else. They are not allowed in the hotel courtyard, thank goodness, but we have to run the gauntlet to get through them. Shut your window and leave it to me.”
It was really quite an ordeal, Melina thought, as Bing, driving the car very slowly, refused three or four guides in succession, a man who wanted to sell him a raffia hat, another with leather bookmarkers and a third with children’s windmills. Pushing behind them, shouting, waving, screaming their wares, were a large number of other natives and several women with tiny babies who held out their hands and begged for money.
“I feel we ought to give them something,” Melina said with a sigh as at last the car was free of the encroaching crowd and they moved away swiftly, blowing up a cloud of dust over those who petitioned them.
“If you give once you have to give again,” Bing said. “The word goes round. They know at a glance if you’re a sucker, then they never leave you alone. They are professionals. You cannot shake off a professional whatever you say to him.”
Melina laughed.
“It’s all so exactly as I thought it would be. The beggars, the people selling their goods, the dust, the palm trees – oh, everything! I think I should be the happiest person in the whole world if it wasn’t that we have to find that child.”
“And quickly!” Bing added quietly.
“Suppose we do find him tonight,” Melina asked. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Bing answered. “It’s impossible to make plans. One can only pray that something will turn up at the last moment and that somehow, by some extraordinary and unexpected miracle, one can achieve the impossible.”
There was something in his tone that made her look at him quickly.
“You don’t think we are going to find him, do you?” she said.
“I don’t know,” Bing sighed wearily.
She felt he did not wish to talk about it anymore and contented herself in watching the road ahead.
They were climbing steadily and now the country was green with trees and the cultivated slopes of the hills and on the road were white bullocks being led along by a very small child on a donkey, laden with what seemed an almost incredible load of straw and green bushes but which seemed to trot beneath them jauntily and unconcernedly,
“Is this the way to Moulay Ibrahim’s house?” Melina enquired.
“It’s not the direct way to it,” Bing answered. “I want, if possible, to get a little above it. I cannot remember quite how high up the hill it is.”
After a mile or so he turned off the main road on to what was little more than a cart track winding between great boulders, which looked as if they had been thrown there by some giant and stunted trees with thick trunks and strange, flat, wide branches.
On they climbed until finally Bing stopped the car under a tree and climbed out. He opened the door for Melina and then produced two cameras from the back seat.
“One for you and one for me,” he said. “We have to do the thing properly.”
“Where did these come from?” Melina said.
“Rasmin provided them with our other purchases,” he said. “They are jolly expensive ones, too, so we must not forget to return them.”
“Who is Rasmin? You must tell me about him,” Melina insisted. “And you haven’t finished your story about Moulay Ibrahim.”
“It was very foolish to speak as I did,” Bing said.
“Do you really think the waiter overheard?”
“I don’t know,” Bing answered. “But one thing is quite certain, he was trying to. It may have been just routine as all the native servants spy for somebody. If it isn’t for the Government or those who are against the Government or for the police or for the hotel proprietors, it’s for the shopkeepers who want to know how much money the tourists have and if it’s worth their while sending a free gift or something that will attract them to their shops.”
He sighed.
“No native boy can resist the excitement, the intrigue, of knowing a little bit more than his friends know, of having some titbit of information to impart that somebody else wants.”
“I can see it’s a kind of game,” Melina observed.
“It is, unfortunately, something that they as a nation are very good at and we, as reserved inhibited British are very bad at,” he answered.
He took Melina by the arm and started to lead her up a steep incline through the trees to what was obviously the summit of a little hill. Her feet slipped in the sand and it filled her sandals, making it hard for her to walk but, finally, with Bing’s help, she reached the top.
Then she gave a little gasp.
The view was magnificent. It seemed to stretch out on the right to a shimmering heat-laden horizon where the land merged into the sky. A little to the left of them was the City of Fez with its great high walls, its spires and minarets, its palm trees and beyond it the white modern buildings of the French quarter.
Just below them, brilliant in the sunshine, glittering, shining almost as if it was a glorious jewel, lay the villa they had come to seek.
It was surrounded by a wall, although at first Melina’s eyes were only for the glimpses she could see of shining fountains, of dark cypress trees, of great splodges of colour, so vivid, so breathtaking in their loveliness that she felt as if she looked at a picture painted by a Master Impressionist who had used every colour on his palette.
The villa itself was enormous. She could see the long wide rooms with their low parapets, she could see the windows, iridescent in the sunshine, which opened onto the gardens. There were dozens and dozens of them and yet the whole scene was so perfectly proportioned that one felt that it might have been built by some Grecian architect rather than that it belonged to this century.
There was a swimming pool, blue as the Mediterranean as it reflected the sky above it. And then, as if her eyes were satiated with so much luxury and beauty, she looked a little closer to what she saw was preoccupying Bing – the wall round the villa,
The ancient people who had built the City of Fez had built it to keep their enemies out. Moulay Ibrahim had done the same thing. The wall was not so high, but it was equally unclimbable. Of local stone, it surrounded the whole villa save for the entrance at the far end where two great iron gates were guarded by sentries.
Although the wall was not abnormally high, it was ornamented all along the top with great spikes set at strange angles, which would have impaled anyone mad enough to attempt to scale it.
Suddenly the beauty and the colour in front of her seemed somehow sinister.
“It’s – it’s a prison,” Melina whispered almost beneath her breath.
“Moulay Ibrahim’s father, who built the wall round the old Palace, was reputed to have two hundred wives,” Bing answered. “In Fez I was told that they were so lovely that every young man grew up in the native City with the ambition to see at least one of them. The old Sheik made quite certain that there was no chance of their doing that!”
“If the child is there,” Melina said, “what chance do we have of getting him out?”
“That was just what I was wondering myself,” Bing said.
He threw himself down on the ground and drew from under his shirt a pair of binoculars. They were not very large ones, but Melina felt a memory vaguely stirring in her mind of someone who had talked to her about a German firm who had invented binoculars which were so powerful that miles away one could see a fly on the wall.
“Keep a look round to see that no one is watching us, there’s a good girl,” Bing asked her.
She wanted to resent his tone because it was so casual and yet authoritative, but with a mental shake of her shoulders she told herself to remember that he was her employer. If he gave her an order he had every right to do so. But somehow, in that moment, she resented his ceasing to be the charming companion and becoming suddenly aloof and nearly a commanding officer.
Then she knew that this was a Bing she had not seen before – a Bing at work, concentrating to the exclusion of all else, a man dedicated to the task that was at hand.
He kept his head down as low as he dared and the binoculars were almost against the ground. It was a wise precaution, Melina thought. Anyone approaching him, except from the front, would imagine he was resting and would have no idea of his real occupation until they were right up to him.
She looked round as he had told her to do. There was nothing in sight except some long-eared goats nibbling at the dry grass and a hawk high overhead, poised and quivering against the sky. She could see that Bing was searching every inch of the villa, window by window, door by door.
At last her curiosity could be contained no longer.
“Can you see anything?” she asked,
“No,” he said, “nothing.”
He rose and moved into the shadow of some trees. There was a clump of stones and he crouched behind it, having first looked around to see that he was not observed and lifted the glasses once more to his eyes.
Melina had followed him and now, as she watched him inspecting the windows once again, she gave a little gasp.
“There’s a man – a man in the garden,” she whispered.
Bing swung his glasses to the left.
There had only been one man when Melina spoke, but now there was another. They were both of them wearing white trousers and open-necked shirts. They looked in the distance as if they were Europeans, Melina thought, but it was impossible to judge.
Only Bing would know through his powerful glasses.
“Can you see them clearly?” she asked. “Who are they?”
Without a word he handed her the glasses and steadying herself against the rocks she put them to her eyes. They were so strong that she almost gasped when she had them first focused on the men.
It was almost as if she was beside them, talking to them, they were so vivid.
One man was standing looking down at the swimming pool. He was dark and she had the impression that he might be a Moroccan, but she was not sure. The other was undoubtedly fair-skinned and yet it was difficult to imagine what nationality he might be.
“If you are looking at the man on the right,” Bing said quietly, “do you see anything unusual about him?”
“No – I don’t think so,” Melina replied. And then she saw it – a scar running from his left eye down the side of his face!
She gave a gasp and Bing bent over and took the glasses from her.
“Come away,” he murmured. “We’ve seen enough.”
“Then the child is there! That is the man who took him,” Melina cried.
“Don’t waste time talking. I want to get away from here.”
“Why?” Melina asked. “You don’t think they have seen us?”
“One never knows,” Bing answered. “Someone might have noticed the sunshine on the lenses of the binoculars. Someone might be watching to see who visits the hill above the villa. Moulay Ibrahim has sentries at the gates, but he also has eyes everywhere.”
“But we know the child is there,” Melina said, thinking Bing was being unnecessarily panicky when, after all, they had discovered what they wanted to know.
He hurried her so quickly to the car that she had no time to say more.
He pushed in the gears and set off down the dusty track towards the main road. They reached it and he turned to the left, away from Fez, and started to drive very swiftly along the smooth well-built road.
“Where are we going?” Melina asked. “Oh, please tell me. I am so excited now that we have discovered the child. Can’t we send soldiers or Police or someone to take him away?”
“If the soldiers battered their way into Moulay Ibrahim’s villa,” Bing said grimly, “there would not be one chance of their finding anything. Small bodies are very easily disposed of.”
“Do you mean they would kill him?” Melina exclaimed in horror.
“I mean that Moulay Ibrahim would never be incriminated by being found with the evidence of the crime,” Bing answered. “He is far too cute for that. No, we have to be far more subtle, far cleverer.”
“But how?” Melina asked. “How?”
Bing did not answer and she knew that her question irritated him. She relapsed into silence, biting her lips to keep back the stream of questions that longed to be asked, but to which she knew, in all justice, there was no answer.
Bing drove on and on, then turned and dropped down from the mountains a little. There was a small village below them lying, Melina guessed, on the very outskirts of the suburbs of Fez, not really a part of the City but somehow joined to it by the encroaching growth of the native population.
“Will there be a telephone there, do you think?” Melina asked, knowing instinctively why Bing was thinking of stopping.
“Look back over your shoulder,” he said. “Is there a yellow car following us?”
She glanced back.
“Yes,” she said. “There is a car and it is yellow.”
Bing suddenly slowed down his speed.
“It was outside the hotel when we left this morning,” he said.
“You mean it might be someone following us?” Melina asked in a kind of horror.
“It’s a chance we have to consider,” he answered. “We are tourists! Think now. Where would tourists want to go? And what would they do on this particular road?”
Melina pointed below them to where, in a field, two white oxen were pulling a primitive native cart, which was being filled with some sort of crop by two women.
“I think that tourists would want to photograph that scene ahead,” she said.
“Of course,” Bing answered. “Thank you, Melina.”
He drew up on the roadside.
“Don’t look round,” he said. “Just be intent on focusing your camera.”
She watched him as he brought a light indicator out of his pocket and considered it absorbedly.
She heard the car approaching them and it was with the greatest effort that she did not look round. Instead she moved first this way and then another trying to get the oxen in focus.
The women working in the fields suddenly saw them and screamed a Moslem protest of modesty and indignation. Bing bowed to them and threw several coins spinning through the air, which they scrawled for eagerly.
Now at last they could turn away.
The yellow car was out of sight.
“Perhaps it was all right,” Bing said a little uncertainly but not, Melina thought, very hopefully.
They climbed back into their own car and drove down the road.
“I don’t think it would be safe to telephone anywhere near here,” Melina suggested. “It is what they would expect you to do.”
“You are right, of course,” Bing said. “You are quite right. I must not go near a telephone, but somehow I have to send a message to my friend. It will be something for him to know where his boy is, if nothing else.”
“Could Rasmin not do it?”
“Of course! Of course he could!” Bing said. “We will go back and complain about some of the goods we bought yesterday. Reach back and see what they are.”
Melina did as she was told. The parcels were still where they had put them last night and she opened the first one to find a pair of leather shoes with wooden soles.
“We will say they hurt your feet and we want to change them for something else,” Bing said. “I’ll make quite a fuss about it. That ought to sound convincing.”
At the next crossroads he turned the car to the right, going back towards the native town.
Then he put out his hand and laid it on Melina’s.
“Thank you,” he said, “for helping me. Somehow I didn’t expect you would.”
She felt annoyed at his words.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked.
“What I said,” he answered. “I never imagined a girl could be as helpful as you have been. You were so quick the time I jumped onto the balcony. I was hoping, almost against hope, there might be a man there, an Englishman. I felt he might understand. But you could not have been better. And now, despite all my misgivings, I am glad you are with me.”
“You seem to have a very poor opinion of the female sex,” Melina said.
For a moment there was silence then Bing took his hand away and put it back on the wheel.
“I suppose that is the truth,” he said. “Perhaps I have met the wrong sort of women, as my mother would have said had she been alive.”
“Have they made you cynical or bitter?” Melina asked.
“Both,” Bing answered.
There was a note in his voice that made her think that somehow she had struck him on the raw.
“What happened?” she asked curiously. “Did you love somebody very much and then she behaved badly to you?”
To her astonishment Bing hit the wheel with the palm of his hand with a sudden vicious blow, which made her feel that he would have liked to have hit her.
“Be quiet!” he shouted. “Don’t poke and probe. It’s what all women do. You are all the same, every one of your sex. You want to put a man under a microscope as if he was a moth impaled on a pin and then you start to dissect him. ‘Why do you think this, why do you do that?’ Shut up, damn you! Allow my life to be private and let me have some secrets that are my own.”
Melina sat absolutely still, tense with astonishment
She had never been spoken to, in her whole life, so rudely and so offensively. And yet, at the same time, she knew that underneath Bing’s anger there was pain – real pain and unhappiness. Some woman, she thought, had hit him very much on the raw.