Zarif's Convenient Queen

They landed in the desert, the real desert, which she had only seen in pictures, a place of deep rolling golden dunes and grey rocky outcrops, and it was like stepping out into a cocoon of unbelievable heat. ‘Where on earth are we?’ she asked as Zarif lifted her out of the passenger seat.

‘Honeymoon Central,’ Zarif quipped as he tucked something that might have been a book under one arm.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Ella gasped, her head whipping round as she stared in disconcertion at the great steep-walled and turreted grey fortress built on top of the stony hill that lay directly ahead of them.

‘The Old Fort, once used as a hunting lodge, latterly as my grandparents’ holiday home. It was a special place for them,’ Zarif told her. ‘There’s a long route in by road and our luggage will be coming in that way tonight.’

‘We’re going to stay here?’ Ella queried in bewilderment, worry stirring that this could be the first step in his threat to lock her up and throw away the key. Would he really maroon her in this remote place on her own?

‘Yes, until we get everything ironed out between us. It’s peaceful here and there are no distractions,’ Zarif pointed out smoothly as he stood back for her to precede him up the flight of steps carved out of the rock face. ‘You go first and take your time because it’s a long climb. We’re not in a hurry.’

She was so out of breath that he had to carry her up the last flight of steps. At the top she found herself in a surprisingly pretty cobbled courtyard. Urns overflowed with colourful flowers in the shade below the arches. An old gardener was watering the plants in a corner bed and he greeted Zarif with a toothless smile and a very low bow.

The solid wooden doors of the entrance already stood open on a wonderfully cool blue and white tiled hallway. ‘This is very pretty and not at all what I expected from the outside of this place,’ Ella confided.

‘My grandmother renovated it. I’m afraid it’s a little old-fashioned now,’ Zarif warned, urging her into an elegant salon furnished very much in the British style. The curtains and the paintings and the wallpaper all looked sadly faded but a gracious atmospheric charm remained.

‘You never told me how your grandmother met and married your grandfather,’ she remarked, perching on a window seat to catch her breath.

‘She and her father were hired to conserve the library at the old palace where we used to store many very old and valuable documents. Now they’re in the latest temperature-controlled environment in the new palace. For my grandfather, Karim, it was a case of love at first sight. Her name was Violet,’ Zarif divulged. ‘But Violet refused to have anything to do with him because he kept a harem full of concubines.’

‘Oh, my word, even I didn’t have an excuse to say no that was that good!’ Ella could not resist gasping.

‘He offered to reduce the harem by half.’

‘Whoopy-do!’ Ella carolled, unimpressed.

‘Then he endowed all his concubines with dowries and found them husbands and thought that Violet would finally agree to be his.’

‘And she didn’t?’

‘No, she wanted the assurance that she would be his one and only wife because, of course, the Qu’ran allows a Muslim four. The council were very much against him giving such an undertaking before there was proof that Violet could give him children but Karim rebelled and went ahead and married her.’

‘And were they happy?’ Ella prompted.

‘Very much so and that, you must understand, is the example that I grew up with. A happy loving marriage conducted very much in the Western style. Violet was a daredevil. She jumped out of aeroplanes, raced camels and deep-sea dived. She would have driven that car today just like you did. And she would have stopped for the same reason.’ Zarif’s lean dark face shadowed. ‘Yet she and Karim, who had such a caring relationship, thrust me into an arranged marriage as a teenager. It was a done deal to unite the two different factions in Vashir. Those who preferred Halim’s conservatism to the risk of the unknown rule of a young man, who was the son of an absentee Vashiri princess and an Italian playboy.’

Ella was tense and afraid of saying something that might offend but she was finally beginning to suspect that Zarif’s marriage had not been as idyllic a match as he had led her to assume. ‘But your marriage worked, didn’t it?’

‘After a fashion,’ Zarif conceded uncomfortably. ‘It was far from ideal.’

‘But you loved her,’ Ella reminded him staunchly, not wanting him to try and deny that truth for the sake of soothing her feelings of jealousy.

‘Not in the way Azel wanted me to love her. I loved her as a childhood playmate, a cousin.’ His expressive mouth curled and he lifted his hands in a sudden violent gesture of frustration. ‘How can I tell you the truth without betraying her memory?’ Zarif spun away from her before continuing harshly. ‘To me, she felt more like a sister than a wife because we spent too many years being raised together in her father’s home. There was no chemistry, no romance. I didn’t want to marry her but I did my duty to the best of my ability.’

Ella was so shocked by that admission that she literally stared at him with wide incredulous eyes. ‘I thought you adored her...’

‘She was my best friend and very supportive,’ Zarif hastened to assure her. ‘But I could not return her idealised feelings for me and that made me feel very guilty. I felt as though I was taking all the time while she did all the giving.’

‘But if she gave that was her choice,’ Ella whispered. ‘And if she loved you she may well have been content.’

‘She was content but I was not happy with her,’ Zarif confessed in a ragged and reluctant confession. ‘I hid it as best I could. I would have done anything rather than hurt her. But I was always aware that there was a big empty pit of nothingness at the centre of our marriage and the one thing we could have shared...our son, she preferred to keep to herself.’

Ella stared steadily back at him. ‘So, if you weren’t that happy with her, why did you go out of your way to stress how much you loved her three years ago?’

‘Blame my guilty conscience for that piece of foolishness. I was sincerely devastated when she died. That was the main reason why I left Vashir to study abroad. I needed a change of scene and the chance to occupy my brain, but that is not what I ultimately found there,’ Zarif told her flatly.

‘I don’t think I want to talk about the past any more,’ Ella admitted ruefully. ‘I think our current troubles are very much of the present.’