Darker Side Of Desire

‘Meaning that they know their place and are kept in it,’ she taunted back. ‘Bought and paid for, so that they are easy to discard when you are bored with them, is that it? Or is it they who grow tired of pandering to your vulnerable ego, Raoul? It takes a very special sort of man to accept a woman as his equal in life, capable of thinking and functioning for herself; a man who can appreciate what a woman must give up when she…’

‘Gives herself to her lover? In the East we have a saying that man and woman are food and drink, each enhancing the other. In my country a woman is not ashamed to be a woman. She is content in her own role and does not seek to usurp that of the male.’

They had joined the main stream of traffic and Raoul broke off to ask Claire for directions. She told him where they were heading and kept silent as he manoeuvred the large car through the ceaseless flow of traffic. He drove well, neither uncertainly nor aggressively, and his consideration for other drivers and pedestrians was something that surprised her. He had been so arrogant and contemptuous where she was concerned that she had expected him to betray the same traits towards others.

It wasn’t until they had left the London traffic behind them and were heading out in the direction of Teddy’s school that Raoul picked up the threads of their earlier conversation. ‘As my supposed “wife” a certain standard of behaviour will be expected of you,’ he began without preamble, and without taking his eyes off the road, ‘and now is as good a time as any to speak of this. In the East…’

‘A woman is a man’s possession?’ Claire interrupted furiously. ‘But you are forgetting that you have been forced to “marry” me by your uncle. We will lead completely separate lives, or so you told me. Feeling the way you do, I’m surprised you aren’t already married. To some dutiful, biddable Muslim girl brought up to think of her father and then her husband as her master.’

Dead silence filled the car, and a quick glance into Raoul’s face showed Claire a look of such brooding bitterness that her heart quailed a little. It was too late now to regret her lack of tact, and she was surprised when, instead of changing the subject, Raoul said curtly, ‘There was to have been such a marriage, but it, required that I should change my religion.’

‘And you would not? But why? You obviously consider yourself more Eastern than Western. You were brought up there.’

‘Sometimes a man needs to be accepted for himself alone,’ was all Raoul would say, but it gave Claire something to think about as the powerful Rolls gobbled up the miles.

His comment pointed to a far greater sensitivity than she could ever have imagined he would possess; a need to be accepted that gnawed at her thoughts as she tried to fit together the complicated pieces of the puzzle that went to make up the man seated at her side. The Sheikh had warned her that Raoul found his dual inheritance a difficult one and for the first time she began to appreciate what the older man had meant. To the casual onlooker, Raoul was completely of the East, but that was merely the outward covering; what about the man inside the tawny skin, the man whose father had so contemptuously rejected his mother—so much so that she had returned to her own people, taking her child with her?

It was only as they neared Teddy’s school that Claire ceased tussling with the problem, turning her thoughts instead to Teddy and how she was going to stop Raoul and her brother from meeting.

She and Teddy were very close, a result of their parents’ death, and Teddy was intelligent enough to suspect the truth if she did not take great care to hide it from him. She had no wish for her brother to grow up under the burden of knowing she had sacrificed her pride and self-respect so that she could pay his school fees, and so she had already decided to tell Teddy that she loved Raoul. There would be time enough later to worry about explaining to him why she had returned to England, her supposed marriage over, but that was something she wasn’t going to think about right now. Her first problem was to get rid of Raoul.

In the end it was surprisingly easy to arrange her ‘escape’. Raoul insisted that they stop for lunch five miles outside the village, at a hotel Claire remembered being taken to with her parents. It was a large country house set in its own grounds, and ordinarily she would thoroughly have enjoyed the treat of eating there, but on the pretext of wanting to tidy herself up she slipped away to telephone for a taxi, nervously dreading Raoul’s appearance with every second that passed as she waited for it to arrive.

Only when she was finally inside it and speeding away from the hotel, did she expel a sigh of relief, hoping that the note she had handed in to reception would find its way safely to Raoul. In it she had told him briefly that she would be gone for a couple of hours. If he did not choose to wait for her she had sufficient money to get herself back to London and, feeing more confident than she had done since leaving London that morning, Claire settled back in her seat, watching the familiar countryside flash past.

Teddy’s school had once been the country seat of a wealthy Victorian landowner, and Claire was warmly welcomed into the Headmaster’s panelled study by that august gentleman. She had told him briefly on the telephone of the reason for her visit, and after exchanging pleasantries with her, he suggested that she might like to join Teddy in the small sitting-room off his study where they could have some degree of privacy.