They lay together, listening to the black silence. ‘Oh God, don’t say that!’ she cried at last. ‘It was so good just now, and you want to spoil everything.’
‘It was spoilt before we started. And what wasn’t spoilt, you killed off for good back at the Vereina Hotel.’
‘Oh no!’ Her hands groped for him blindly. ‘Please. Owen, that’s all past and forgotten.’
‘I haven’t forgotten,’ he said, and felt her stiffen beside him, but she did not speak. He traced her features in the dark and kissed her mouth, without opening his lips. ‘Sarah, tell me how you feel about being screwed by the Ruler.’
This time he felt her flinch away from him. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it much, either. But it’s not just personal interest — it’s business. Big business.’ He paused; she lay tense and quiet beside him, as though holding her breath. ‘How are you going to do it, Sarah?’
Again she said nothing. He reached out and felt for her chin, which was turned away from him, and yanked it round towards him, although her features were only a dim blur. ‘How are you going to do it?’ he repeated savagely.
‘I don’t know. Honestly. They haven’t told me yet.’ She suddenly scrambled up in the bed and slid off the other side. ‘I’m going to wash,’ she said. A moment later the light came on in the bathroom.
He lay back and tried to think.
CHAPTER 31
Sarah had all day with nothing to do but sunbathe and water-ski and go to parties where they ate caviar and drank champagne and danced until the dawn came up, pale pink and grey across the wide sweep of the Gulf which was flecked with fishing boats, their nets suspended behind them in the clear air like insect’s wings.
At least, that was how Mr Shiva Steiner had described it to her in Beirut, and in a manner of things he had been right. What he had not told her was that the sky was a dome of burning glass, extinguished only at night, and occasionally by the howling, biting Brown fog of a sandstorm; and tolerable only in that brief half hour after dawn and just before sunset. This was when the young and privileged of Mamounia went water-skiing; but Sarah was no better at this than at snow skiing, and had to explain to Steiner and his elegant cosmopolitan friends that she was forbidden this sport owing to a serious riding accident.
As for the parties, she had never greatly cared for caviar, and the champagne seemed to have a gritty brackish taste, as though it had been filtered through sand.
Steiner had also failed to inform her that the company at these parties, while affecting a suave Western chic, mostly looked like what her father was fond of describing, rather ambivalently, as ‘coming from the wrong side of Lombard Street’; nearly all of whom spoke languages which she had never heard before. And long before Shiva Steiner’s promised pink-grey dawn, half the men had usually offered, in broken but explicit English or French, to take her to bed — or rather, down to one of the huge American cars in the garage, where they suggested doing elaborate things to her — some of a weirdly mechanical, asexual nature which was quite unfamiliar to her; others more basic and foul, which she knew you could read about in special magazines, but had never been in the least tempted to try herself.
These men bored and disgusted her. One evening she told Steiner so, and he dismissed her remark with a shrug.
The women hated her — the older ones even more than the young. On her fourth night in the Ruler’s capital, three of them had lain in wait for her in the downstairs toilet reserved for the women, where two of them had spat scientifically in both her eyes, while the third had stabbed her in the forearm with a pin. She had staunched the blood, and slipped back to her room unseen, where she had had violent hysterics.
On the fifth day a high, hot wind had blown up, and by noon the city had grown dark with sand. That morning she had also woken afflicted by an acute stomach disorder, and stayed in her room until evening, eating nothing, speaking to nobody.
It was then that she began to feel like a prisoner. The windows were double glazed against the sand, and the air-conditioning was kept permanently on, its steady hum pitched at a note that always seemed just about to break off, but never did — blowing cold all day, hot at night.
Her mouth and lips and skin had that same parched feeling that she’d had almost from the moment of stepping out of Shiva Steiner’s twin-engined Executive jet, to walk the few yards across the bubbling shimmering tarmac to the black air-conditioned Fleetwood sedan. This had driven her to Steiner’s marble palace outside the city. The place reminded her of an old film she had once seen in which an ageing Hollywood movie queen acted out the last days of her career in a macabre setting which Steiner seemed to have copied with a demented sense of kitsch.
Sarah now lay naked on the bed, and listened to the wind booming against the glass, and shivered — perhaps with the dry chill of the air-conditioning, but more likely at the thought of this house.
She assumed it must have been built quite recently, with the coming of oil; but despite its polished floors, glossy buhl furniture and luscious indoor plants, the place already exuded a sickly sense of decay. In most houses she would have diagnosed mildew, dry rot and woodworm; but here the disease eluded her for the first couple of days, until she realized that
