The Gabriel Hounds (3 page)

But the auntly cooings over the two charming children (as I believe we were) had gone on, and Charles and I had listened, fought, hated and defended one another, and stayed together. It had occurred to neither of us in actual fact that we could be the object of one another’s sexual stirrings – it would, at sixteen or seventeen, have indeed been incest. So, as much proof against one another as brother and sister, we had watched with equal amusement and derision each other’s first romantic adventures.

The affairs were brief, and inevitable. Sooner or later the girl would start assuming a claim on Charles, and
be dropped without trace. Or, somehow, my own pinup would lose his gloss, Charles would say something less than forgiveable about him, I would retort furiously, then laugh and agree, and life would be whole once more.

And our respective parents bore with us lovingly through it all, took off the leading strings, gave us the money, listened to what mattered and forgot the rest, possibly because they wanted freedom from us as urgently as we thought we wanted freedom from them. The result was that we went back to them at intervals like homing bees, and we were happy. Perhaps they saw more clearly than could Charles and I, the basic security in our lives which made his restlessness and my indecisiveness nothing more than the taking of soundings outside the harbour. Perhaps they could even see, through it all, the end that would come.

But here we were at the beginning. A young Arab in white had brought in a tray holding an elaborately chased copper urn and two small blue cups which he set on the table in front of me. He said something to Charles, and went out. My cousin came quickly up the steps of the divan and sat down beside me.

‘He says Ben won’t be in just yet, not until evening. Go on, you pour.’

‘Is his mother away, too?’

‘His mother’s dead. His father’s sister runs the place for them, but she lives retired, as they say. No,
not
a harem, so don’t look so curious and hopeful; she merely has a long siesta and won’t come out till dinner-time. Smoke?’

‘Not now. I don’t much, as a matter of fact, only now and again for effect, rather silly. Good heavens, what are those? Hashish or something?’

‘No, absolutely harmless. Egyptian. They do look awful, don’t they? Well now, tell me what you’ve been doing.’

He accepted the cup of strong black coffee from me and curled back on the silk-covered seat, waiting expectantly.

Four years of gossip is a lot to catch up on, and we had never been letter-writers. I suppose more than an hour had gone by, and the sun had moved over to leave half the court in shadow before my cousin stretched, stubbed out another Egyptian cigarette and said: ‘Look, what’s all this about sticking with your group? Won’t you change your mind and cut loose now? Stay till Sunday, and I’ll drive you up – the Barada Valley’s lovely and there’s a good road.’

‘Thanks all the same, but I’d better stay with them. We’re doing that run by car in any case, and having a look at Baalbek on the way.’

‘I’d take you there.’

‘It would be smashing, but it’s all fixed, and as a matter of fact I’ve packed, and you know there’s all that silly business with visas here. Mine’s dated tomorrow, and there’s this business of a group passport, and there was such a hooha anyway about my staying behind after the group leaves for England on Saturday that I can’t face it all over again. I think I’ll just go.’

‘All right, then, I’ll see you in Beirut. Where are you staying?’

‘I thought I’d move to the Phoenicia once I’m on my own.’

‘I’ll join you there. Book in for me, will you? I’ll telephone you before I leave Damascus. What had you planned to do with the extra time, apart – I suppose – from going up to Dar Ibrahim?’

‘Dar Ibrahim?’ I repeated blankly.

‘Great-Aunt Harriet’s place. That’s its name, surely you knew? It’s on the Nahr Ibrahim, the Adonis river.’

‘I – yes, I suppose I knew, but I’d forgotten. Goodness, Great-Aunt Harriet … I never thought … Is it near Beirut, then?’

‘About thirty miles away, along the coast road to Byblos and then inland into the mountains, up towards the source of the Adonis. The road runs up the ridge on the north side of the valley, and somewhere between Tourzaya and Qartaba there’s a tributary river called the Nahr el-Sal’q that goes tumbling down to meet the Adonis. Dar Ibrahim’s in the middle of the valley, where the rivers meet.’

‘Have you ever been there?’

‘No, but I’m planning to. D’you really mean you hadn’t thought about it?’

‘Not a flicker of a thought. I’d certainly intended to go up the Adonis Valley and see the source where the cascade is, and the temple of Whoever-it-is, and the place where Venus and Adonis met – in fact I was thinking of hiring a car for the trip on Sunday, after the group go … But to be honest I’d forgotten all about Aunt H. I hardly even remember her, you know, we were in Los Angeles when she was home last, and
before that it was – heavens, it must be all of fifteen years! And Mummy never said a thing about this place of hers – Dar Ibrahim, was that the name? – but that’s probably only because her geography’s about on par with mine and she’d never realised Beirut was so near.’ I put down my cup. ‘Right in the Adonis Valley? Well, I might go with you, at that, if only to see the place and tell Daddy what it was like. I’m sure he’d think there was hope for me yet if I told him I’d trekked up there to put some flowers on the old dear’s grave.’

‘She’d probably kick you in the teeth if you tried,’ said Charles. ‘She’s very much alive. You really are a teeny bit out of touch, aren’t you?’

I stared. ‘Alive? Aunt H? Now who’s out of touch? She died just after the New Year.’

He laughed. ‘Not she. If you’re thinking about the Last Will and Testament, that’s nothing to go by, in the last few years she’s sent them round about once every six months. Didn’t Uncle Chris get the famous letter renouncing her British nationality and finally cutting everyone off with sixpence? Everyone except me, that is.’ He grinned. ‘And I was to have the Gabriel Hounds and her copy of the Koran because I showed signs of taking a “reasonable interest in the real civilisations of the world”. That was because I was learning Arabic. In some ways,’ added my cousin thoughtfully, ‘she must still be very innocent if she thinks Mansel and Mansel takes an interest in anything whatever except for the basest of all possible reasons.’

‘Look, come off it, you’re kidding me.’

‘About the Wills and so on? Indeed I’m not. She
renounced us in beautiful round early-Victorian terms – her letters were period pieces, you know – the family, Britain, God, the lot. Well, perhaps not God exactly, but she was going to turn Mohammedan, and would we please send out a reliable English stonemason to build a private cemetery where she could rest for ever in the peace of Allah among her beloved dogs, and would we also inform the Editor of
The Times
that the paper of the overseas edition was too thin to allow her to do the crossword puzzles properly, and she would like it changed.’

‘You can’t be serious.’

‘As an owl,’ said my cousin. ‘I swear to every word.’

‘And what in the world are the Gabriel Hounds?’

‘Don’t you remember them? I suppose you don’t.’

‘I seem to remember the phrase, that’s all. Wasn’t it something in a story?’

‘A legend in that book we had called “North-Country Tales”, or some such title. The Gabriel Hounds are supposed to be a pack of hounds that run with death, and when someone’s going to die you hear them howling over the house at night. I think myself that the idea must have come from the wild geese – have you heard them? They sound like a pack of hounds in full cry overhead, and the old name for them used to be “gabble ratchet”. I’ve sometimes wondered if the “Gabriel” doesn’t come from “gabble”, because after all Gabriel wasn’t the angel of death …’ He glanced across. ‘You shivered. Are you cold?’

‘No. One of them gabbling over my grave, I expect. What have they to do with Great-Aunt Harriet?’

‘Nothing, really, except that she had a pair of china dogs I lusted after, and I christened them the Gabriel Hounds because they were like the illustrations in the book.’

‘A pair of – oh, no, really, you must be out of your tiny mind. That’s schizophrenia, or is it skitso? Nobody in this world can want to own a white Porsche with one hand and a pair of china dogs with the other! I don’t believe it.’

He laughed. ‘Real china, Christy love, Chinese china … They’re Ming as ever was, and probably museum pieces. Heaven knows what they’re worth now, but since I had the good taste to fall flat in love with them at the age of six, and Great-Aunt Harriet with even better taste fell flat in love with me at the same time, she promised them to me. And stark raving bonkers though she undoubtedly is now, she seems to have remembered.’ He made a restless movement. ‘Oh, don’t you see, it doesn’t really matter about the dogs, they make a good excuse, that’s all.’

‘For going to see her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Family feeling cropping up a bit late in the day?’ I said it derisively, but he didn’t laugh or disclaim, as I had expected. He gave me an odd, slanting look from under the long lashes, and said merely: ‘I don’t want to pass up the chance. It sounds such a damned intriguing set-up.’

‘Well, of course I’ll go with you, out of sheer roaring curiosity, and let’s hope she does remember you, because I’m darned sure she won’t remember me. She must be at least a hundred.’

‘Not a day over eighty, I swear, and active with it by all accounts. She’s a local legend, goes galloping about the country-side on horseback with a gaggle of hounds and shoots whatever there is to shoot for her own dinner.’

‘Gabble, you mean. I remember that about her, who could forget? When she stayed with us that time she brought eight King Charles spaniels.’

‘It’s Tibetan terriers now, and salukis – Persian greyhounds, the dogs the Arab princes used for hunting. Oh, she’s gone the limit, I gather – turned Arab herself, male at that, dresses like an Emir, smokes a hubble-bubble, never sees anybody except at night, and lives in this dirty great palace—’

‘Palace?’ I said, startled. ‘Who does she think she is? Lady Hester Stanhope?’

‘Exactly that. Models herself on the story, one gathers. Even calls herself Lady Harriet, and as you and I well know, we’ve had a lot of queer things in the family, but never a Lady.’ He stared, not flatteringly. ‘What do you know about Lady Hester Stanhope?’

‘Didn’t I tell you? When we spent last Christmas at your house they put me in your room, and I read some of your books. You’ve an awful lot about the Middle East. Have you really read all that Arabian poetry and stuff? And the Koran?’

‘All through.’

‘Well, you might say it was your library that gave me the idea of seeing this part of the world in the first place. We always did go for the same things, didn’t we – or maybe you’d say I tagged along where you
went …? I’d always had vaguely romantic ideas about Petra and Damascus and Palmyra, but never thought about really coming here; then I saw the advert for this package tour, so I thought I’d join up, find my way about, then stay on after they’d gone and take my time filling in a few extras. One of them was Djoun, Lady Hester Stanhope’s place.’

‘It’s a ruin.’

‘I know, but I still thought I’d like to see it. She was quite a girl, wasn’t she? I read everything you had about her, and nice snappy reading it was, compared with some of those tomes of yours. I had flu just after Christmas and was stuck indoors for a fortnight, and Mummy hadn’t time to rake round the bookshops for something more my weight.’

He grinned, undeceived. ‘Don’t work so hard at not being clever. I’m not one of your muscle-bound blonds.’

‘Neither you are,’ I said.

Our eyes met. There was a tiny silence, in which the fountain sounded oddly loud. Then my cousin got up and reached a hand. ‘Come and see the water lilies now the sun’s gone. They shut while you watch.’

I followed him down into the now coolly shadowed court. The lilies were pale blue, held on stiff stems a few inches above the water, where their glossy leaves overlapped the still surface like tiles of jade. Gold fins winked here and there below them, and a gold bee sipped water at a leaf’s edge. A powder-blue petal shut, and another, till one by one the lilies were turbaned up, stiff and quiet for the night. Another late bee, almost
caught by a folding flower, wrestled his way angrily out of the petals, and shot off like a bullet.

I watched half absently, my mind still busy with the recent fragments of information Charles had flung at me, the intriguing picture of the eccentric old lady who had dropped so long ago out of family reality into family legend. The picture Charles had just given me of her blurred and blended in the imagination with the vivid mental pictures I had built up during that Christmas period of enforced reading. It was true that I had found some of Charles’s books heavy going, but the accounts of the eccentric Lady Hester had been extremely readable, not to say racy.

She had gone out to the Middle East in the early eighteen hundreds, an Earl’s daughter in the days when rank counted for almost everything, a masculine peremptory woman who, as Pitt’s niece, was also accustomed to political consequence. After travelling round in considerable state with a retinue which included lover, slaves, and attendant physician, she had decided to settle in Syria (as it then was) and eventually purchased for herself a mountain-top fortress near Djoun, not far from Sidon. There she had lived in Eastern state, dressing as a Turkish Emir, and ruling her household of servants, Albanian guards, Negro slaves, companions, grooms and personal doctor with a rod of iron and at times, literally, a whip. Her fortress, perched on a hot bare hilltop, was described by a contemporary as ‘an enchanted palace’, and was a world in itself of courtyards, corridors as complex as a Chinese puzzle, walled gardens approached by
winding stairs, secret exits cut in the rock where the Lady’s spies came and went, the whole exotic with murmuring fountains and luxuriant gardens. It was a deliberate re-creation of an Arabian Nights’ wonderland with all the fantastic properties of Eastern fairytale solidly at hand. Roses and jasmine, mute black slaves and nightingales, camels and sacred cats and Arab horses, she had them all. Fearless, utterly selfish, arrogant and eccentric, and growing with the years beyond eccentricity into megalomania, she meddled in local politics, defied the local Emirs, and placed herself – with some success – above the law. She finally seems to have believed in her own mystical destiny as Queen of the East who would one day ride crowned into Jerusalem at the side of the new Messiah.