The Gabriel Hounds (38 page)

Our turn came next. We had answered the first round of questions this morning, and now the police were down on the plateau where the palace ruins stuck up on their crag like a blackened tooth, still idly smoking. From the height where we sat we could just see the gleam of the lake, calm and jewel-like, with its unburned frame of green. The plateau and the charred ruins scurried with movement, like a corpse full of maggots, where – presumably dodging the police with some ease – looters prodded about the wreckage.

At length I stirred. ‘I wonder if she’d have liked to know we were here?’

‘From what I remember of the old dear,’ said Charles crisply, ‘she’d have been delighted to know she’d taken the whole place up with her – and laughed like a banshee to see you and me scurrying about in the lake with the rats and mice. Well, at least those hounds of hers put a nice flourish on the end of her legend. Talk about a funeral pyre. Nobody in the Lebanon will ever forget her now.’

‘It certainly looks as if most of the local households will have a souvenir or two,’ I said dryly. ‘And your own “Gabriel Hounds”, Charles? If the storerooms didn’t burn they may still be there.’

‘They’d hardly survive that.’ He nodded at the scene below us. ‘Anyway, I’m damned if I’ll compete with those jackals and go raking among the ruins. Some day I’ll find another pair, and buy them in memory of her. Ah, well …’

Some children, too small to be in the schoolroom or the looting party, came running by, kicking a tin, and stopped to play in the dirt under the graveyard wall. Two or three thin dogs skulked by, sniffing for scraps. A three-year-old boy threw a stone at the smallest of them, and it swerved automatically and dodged behind a rusty oil drum. A dirty white cockerel padded past, intent on a tattered brown hen.

‘Love is everywhere,’ said Charles. ‘Which reminds me, Christy love—’

What it reminded him of I never knew, and have never asked him. With a gush of diesel smoke and a squeal of brakes, a tourist coach drew up not fifty yards from where we sat, and the driver turned in his seat to point across to the ruins of Dar Ibrahim before he killed the engine and dismounted to open the door. The passengers piled out, English, a party who knew one another and talked and laughed as they trod forward in twos and threes to the edge of the valley and stared down at the smoking ruins. Cameras clicked. I could hear the driver telling someone a version of last night’s story. The legend was on its way.

Charles and I sat still. The children, retreating from the strangers, backed till they stood right beside us. The small dog, its long hair filthy and tousled like a wilting chrysanthemum, crept out from behind the oil-drum
and watched with bright avid eyes a biscuit which one of the women was eating.

Her friend, a stout lady in a wide straw hat and sensible jersey suit, lowered her camera and looked about her.

‘A pity it’s not a more appetising village.’ She had a splendidly carrying middle-class voice. ‘The mosque’s quite pretty, though. I wonder if they’d mind if I took a photograph?’

‘Offer them something.’

‘Oh, it’s not worth it. You remember how horrible that man was in Baalbek, the old chap with the camel?
He
looks as if he could make himself quite unpleasant, too. Look at the way he’s staring.’

‘Layabouts, the lot of them. It’s a wonder she isn’t slaving in the fields to keep the children. Look at them all, and hardly a year between them. Rather revolting. He’d be quite good-looking, too, if he were clean.’

It was only then, as I felt Charles quiver beside me, that I realised who they were talking about. Actually he was as clean as cold water and a gourd full of Omo could make him; but he hadn’t shaved for two days, and he still only wore the grubby cotton trousers girdled with a cheap and cracking gilt belt, and a shirt which exposed more than it covered of his brown chest. My frock had dried remarkably filthy, and my bare legs were scratched and bruised and hadn’t answered terribly well to the Omo. The dip in the lake had done my sandals no good at all. The red checked
kaffiyeh
Charles had given me last night covered what was left of my very Western hair-do, and Great-Aunt
Harriet’s ruby looked like Woolworth’s last word on my hand.

I felt my mouth drop open, but Charles said under his breath, ‘Don’t spoil it,’ and the women were already turning away.

‘It’s not worth it anyway,’ the thin one was saying, ‘there’ll be better places. Oh, look, they’re going. Well, what a stroke of luck seeing that! What did you say the place was called?’

She put the last of the biscuit into her mouth and wiped her fingers on a handkerchief. The children looked disappointed, and the small dog’s ears sank, but she never noticed. The coach drove off. The children threw a few stones after it, then turned on the small dog again, till Charles clicked his fingers and said something to it in Arabic, and it came slinking to hide behind his legs.

‘And they were dead right,’ I said indignantly. ‘Layabout’s the word. Sitting there laughing! You might at least have
begged
or something! We could do with some cash! If the police don’t give us a lift after all—’

‘Then we’ll walk, you trailing suitably in my wake with your children. Hullo, here’s another car coming. More police, do you suppose? It can’t be for us, it must be a top brass, a car like that.’

‘It looks like a taxi. Do you suppose they’d take us on credit if we told them we were staying at the Phoenicia?’

‘Not a chance. The way we look they wouldn’t let us set foot in it.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, you’d be quite good-looking if you were clean.’

‘My God.’ Charles, who had been in the act of rising, sank back on the wall. At the far end of the village street the big glossy car had slid to a stop behind a gaggle of police vehicles. The driver dismounted to open the rear door, and a man got out, a tall man, unmistakably English as to tailoring, and unmistakably self-assured as to bearing.

‘Father!’ exclaimed Charles.

‘Daddy!’ I cried at the same moment.

‘It’s my father,’ said my cousin, ‘not yours. After I telephoned home from Damascus he must have decided—’

‘It’s not your father, it’s mine. I telephoned from Beirut, and he must have caught last night’s plane. D’you think I don’t know my own father when I see him?’

‘Want a bet? Hullo, Father!’

‘Hullo, Daddy!’

The newcomer, for his part, had identified us even at that distance with unerring eye. He came our way, not hurrying. We stayed where we were.

He stopped in front of us, surveying us. ‘My God.’ The intonation was so exactly Charles’s own that I was shaken, and screwed up my eyes against the sun to see him better.

‘Give you twenty to one?’ said Charles in my ear.

‘N-no.’ Whichever it was, he had come. It was absurd and un-adult to feel such a pleased rush of relief and pleasure.

He was still surveying us. If he felt the same way, he concealed it very well. ‘My poor children. Well, I’m very glad to see you. I won’t say it’s a relief to see how well you’ve brushed through what’s happened, because I have never seen you look worse, but I take it it’s nothing that a bath won’t put right? No?’ His eyes went beyond us, to Dar Ibrahim across the valley. ‘So that’s the place?’ He watched the distant scene for perhaps half a minute, without comment. Then he turned back to us. ‘All right, you can tell me the whole thing later on, but I’ll get you back to Beirut now, and into those baths, before I do anything else. I’ve squared the police; they say you can come, and they’ll see you again later.’

‘I suppose you know what’s happened?’ said Charles.

‘Roughly. Nobody’s talking about anything else in Beirut. I gather you two young idiots got into some nasty doings up to your necks. What the devil were you about to let Christy in for, Charles?’

‘Unjust, unjust,’ said Charles, without heat. ‘The stupid girl got herself into a jam and I rescued her. Wait till her own father hears the story, I’m demanding a hero’s welcome and his half of the kingdom. Incidentally, you might settle a bet for us, and tell her it’s only you.’

‘It’s a wise child.’ He smiled down at me, lifting an eyebrow. ‘Actually, I don’t think I particularly want to lay claim to either of you at the moment.’

My cousin uncurled from the wall. ‘You’re going to have to lay claim to both. One of us wants your consent
and the other your welcome or blessing or whatever, you can take your pick which.’

‘So? I’m very glad. Welcome, darling.’ He put an arm round me and hugged me to him, reaching the other hand to my cousin. ‘Congratulations, boy, we were beginning to think you’d never make it. Certainly far more than you deserve.’ And he kissed us both in turn.

My cousin grinned at me. ‘Well?’

‘You win, of course. You always do. Oh, Uncle Chas, its wonderful to see you!’ I hugged him again. ‘Thank you for coming! Couldn’t Daddy make it?’

‘Afraid not. He sent me as deputy. You look a bit battered, child, are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Oh, yes, truly! And it’s true Charles looked after me. Real hero stuff, too, wait till you hear!’

‘This seems the right moment to tell you,’ said Charles, ‘that I lost the Porsche.’

‘So I gather. It’s at the Phoenicia.’

‘Efficient devil you are,’ said his son admiringly. ‘How did you do that?’

‘Christy’s driver brought it back.’

‘Hamid!’ I cried. ‘Oh, thank goodness! What happened to him?’

‘The man who had stolen Charles’s car was a bit too zealous with it, and ran it off the road at a bend. No, Charles, it’s all right, a scratch or two, that’s all; it simply went wide into the shale and bogged down. Hamid was right on its tail, and managed to lay the man out before he’d quite realised what had happened. You’ll be able to thank him yourself – he’s here, he drove me up.’

‘Is that his taxi?’ I asked. ‘They all look alike, I didn’t recognise it. Oh, that’s marvellous! Do you think we could go now?’

‘Why not?’ He turned to look again, a longer look this time, at Dar Ibrahim. There was a pause. It was very quiet. The children had long since abandoned us to go and talk to Hamid, and now the little dog, perhaps encouraged by the silence, ventured out of hiding and crept across the space of dust to my uncle’s feet. At length the latter turned. ‘Well … that’s the end of a long story. When you’re both rested you can tell me all about it, and Charles can come back with me when the excitement’s died down a bit. For the moment, you two had certainly better try to forget it. Leave it to me.’ He stretched out a hand to me. ‘Come along, child, you look tired out … What in the world—?’ As he turned to go, he had almost tripped over the little dog, tangled and shapeless as a dirty mop, crouching flat at his feet in the dust. Through the filthy hair an eye shone out eagerly. An apology for a tail wagged furiously. ‘Not yours, surely?’

‘Good grief, no,’ said Charles. ‘It’s one of these miserable village dogs.’

‘Then do you mind discouraging the poor little beast? I’m afraid we can’t – what is it?’ This as Charles, who had stooped obediently to pull the dog aside, let out an exclamation.

‘Believe it or not, it’s got a collar on’ – I peered over my cousin’s shoulder as he disentangled the collar from the dirty hair – ‘and a label. Yes, there’s something printed. Its life hath had some smatch of honour in it
… If there’s an address, then it’s genuinely lost, poor little beast, and perhaps we can return it. Any dog in this country that achieves a collar must be one of the aristoc—’ He stopped dead.

‘One of the what?’

Then I saw the name printed on the collar.
SAMSON
.

Charles looked up. ‘He knew our voices.’ His voice was so dry that I knew he felt as I did, absurdly moved. ‘He recognised us, me and Father. Some smatch of honour, by heck. He must have run away after she died, or more likely that little swine threw him out to starve.’

‘Do you know the dog after all?’ asked his father.

‘Indeed, yes.’ Charles had swung the little creature up, and now tucked him under one arm. ‘And quarantine’ll seem like the Phoenicia to him after this.’

‘Quarantine? You’re surely never thinking of taking that living mophead home?’

‘Mophead nothing,’ said my cousin. ‘Don’t you remember Samson? This is Great-Aunt Harriet’s wedding present to me. Father, My personal Gabriel Hound. We can hardly leave him here to fend for himself; he’s one of the family.’

Hamid, all smiles, was at the door of the car. I got into the back seat between the two men. Charles’s arm held me close and my head went down on his shoulder.

The little dog and I were both fast asleep before the car had covered the first mile to Beirut.

Mary Stewart, one of the most popular novelists, was born in Sunderland, County Durham and lives in the West Highlands. Her first novel, Madam, Will You Talk?, was published in 1955 and marked the beginning of a long and acclaimed writing career. All her novels have been bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. She was made a Doctor of Literature by Durham University in 2009.