Lucy Gordon - The Sheikh’s Reward

‘Ali, there are some laws that even you cannot ignore. I won’t ask what you’ve done, because it might be better for me not to know. But I expect you to bring this young woman to meet me tomorrow.’

‘Yes, Mother,’ he said meekly.

ELISE’S apartment was a clever combination of royal luxury and English comfort. She was immediately above Fran’s own rooms, looking out onto the Peacock Garden, and her sitting room was filled with light. Long net curtains filled the floor-length windows and wafted gently in the faint breeze.

She rose, a tall, graceful figure in white robes, and embraced Fran warmly.

‘I have longed for this meeting,’ she said, adding mysteriously, ‘I’ve heard so much about you that it has made me most curious.’

Tea was served. It was good, solid English tea, because, as Elise explained, ‘After thirty-five years in this country I still can’t do without my cuppa.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Fran said, sipping gratefully.

They made polite small talk, with occasional interjections from Ali, until Elise said with a touch of exasperation, ‘My son, I’m sure you have affairs of state to attend to.’

‘No today,’ he said, smiling at them both. ‘If I leave you may talk about me.’

‘Certainly we are going to talk about you. Please go away at once. Can’t you see when you are not wanted?’

He gave a wry glance first to his mother, then Fran, before reluctantly leaving.

When they were alone Elise kissed Fran on both cheeks and smiled.

‘I knew you would be beautiful,’ she said, ‘from the effect you have had on my son. But you are more than beautiful. Speak to me quite frankly, I beg you. Are you here of your own free will?’

‘No,’ Fran said, and Elise’s face darkened.

‘We will talk of that later,’ she said heavily. ‘For now, tell me how you met.’

Fran described the first evening, and what had happened subsequently. When she came to the part about the cheque, Elise said, ‘Ah! Now I understand something that has been puzzling me. Come with me.’

She took Fran’s hand and led her into the next room. Fran stopped dead on the threshold. This room didn’t belong to a female forced to live in retirement. This was a business office, complete with desks, filing cabinets and all the latest equipment.

Two young women were busy at computers. They rose and bowed when the princess entered, and she waved them lightly away. Under Fran’s astonished eye she went to a third computer and began to tap in some figures. A file opened on the screen and Elise beckoned her to look.

‘Normally Ali gives the ICF one million a year,’ Elise observed calmly. ‘When he suddenly added another hundred thousand I couldn’t understand it. He never does such things without first consulting me.’

‘A million?’ Fran echoed in dismay. ‘And-consulting you?’

‘I handle all his donations to foreign charities.’

‘All his-?’

‘About twenty million a year.’ Elise gave her lovely smile again. ‘My dear, have you fallen for the legend of the playboy who spends every penny on himself? How unwise of you!

‘Ali maintains this grandiose palace because it’s expected of him, but the oil revenues are spent first on his subjects, and only afterwards on himself. I must show you some of our hospitals. They are simply the best equipped in the world.’

‘But why didn’t he tell me this instead of just saying loftily that he wouldn’t discuss it?’ Fran said in frustration.

‘Because he is a prince,’ Elise said, amused. ‘He doesn’t feel he has to explain himself to anybody. You take him on his terms or not at all.’

‘And all those things he told me about not discussing serious things with women-’ Fran said with mounting indignation.

‘He was probably trying to annoy you. And it’s true that he wouldn’t talk with a strange woman, nor does he appoint women to his cabinet. He makes an exception for me because I am his mother. In this country, a man who does not respect his mother is considered a disgrace.

‘I remember years ago, in England, my own brother once quarrelling with our mother and telling her to shut up. No Kamari man would speak like that to the woman who gave him life.’

She gestured towards the computer.

‘He takes his charities very seriously indeed, and they are all in my hands. If people wish to solicit donations they come to me, not to him. I visit them, and advise Ali according to what I discover. That is why I have been out of the country recently.’

‘And I thought it was a shopping trip.’

‘Well, I indulged myself with a little shopping as well.’

‘I can’t take all this in,’ Fran said, dazed.

‘Then I will give you some more.’ Elise pressed a buzzer on her desk and spoke into an intercom. ‘Be good enough to have my car brought around to the front.’

Ten minutes later the two women were seated in the back of the princess’s personal limousine, gliding into the heart of town. They stopped outside a huge white-walled building, which Elise explained was the city hospital.

‘We shall have to go through the private part first, but quickly.’

The private section was much like a private hospital anywhere, but it was the public wards that alerted Fran.

‘These are for people who cannot afford to pay,’ Elise explained. ‘The money comes from state funds, or, in other words, Ali.’

Everywhere she looked Fran saw spotless cleanliness, the finest equipment and a high ratio of staff to patients. She had to admit that the place shamed a good many western hospitals.

‘The people with money are charged heavily,’ Elise said, ‘and they partly pay for the poor patients. But only partly. The rest of the money comes from the royal coffers.’

‘From the oil,’ Fran mused.

‘Not just from the oil. The casinos make a handsome profit.’

‘Casinos? Plural?’

‘In almost every capital city in the world, and several in Las Vegas. We need all the profit we can make because Ali has some very expensive ideas for irrigating the desert. So far most of the money has been soaked up by the sand, but he keeps trying one experiment after another.’ Elise smiled fondly. ‘Sometimes there’s a touch of the mad professor about my son.’

She saw Fran craning her neck out of the window. ‘Something interests you?’

‘The Sahar Palace. Ali told me how it was built and then abandoned as not being big enough.’

‘Did he tell you what it’s used for now?’

‘No, I thought it was just standing empty.’

‘And he let you think that,’ Elise said with motherly exasperation. She said something in Arabic to the driver, and the car turned into the palace entrance.

As they went through the main gates the big front door opened and two women came hurrying out, smiling as they saw their visitor. They were followed by a stream of children who engulfed Elise, with scant regard to her royalty.

‘They all love it when Her Highness visits us,’ one of the women confided to Fran. ‘They have no mothers of their own, so in their hearts she is their mother.’

‘This is an orphanage?’ Fran asked.

‘Of course,’ Elise said. ‘Ali insisted that this place must be put to good use, and what better use can there be than the future of our country? Come inside. I think you will see things that will surprise you.’

But Fran was no longer surprised by any revelation. The home clearly had a generous budget and was well staffed and equipped, but it was the place’s warm atmosphere that delighted her. She had begun to realise that she knew nothing about Ali and the way he ran his country.

At the rear of the orphanage were the classrooms. Girls were taught apart from boys, but Fran’s alert eyes noted that their science equipment was equally good.

‘My husband was an enlightened man,’ Elise explained. ‘Which is to say that he listened to me,’ she added with a twinkle. ‘I made him see the need for women to be properly educated. My son is the same. His ideas are old-fashioned, but the right woman could make him listen.’

She smiled, apparently not needing a reply to this, which was lucky because Fran was far from knowing what to say.

‘Do the casinos pay for all this?’ she asked, changing the subject.

‘No, this is the London property portfolio.’

It wasn’t until they returned to the palace that Elise demanded full details of Fran’s presence in Kamar. She listened composedly, only a small furrow on her forehead betraying any sign of disturbance. When the story was finished she simply said, ‘How charming.’

They had tea together, then Elise declared that she was tired and needed to lie down. But as soon as Fran had departed Elise picked up the phone and demanded, in a voice that promised trouble, to be connected to her son.

He arrived to find her pacing the floor, and her first words contained no welcome, and certainly no respect.

‘My son, are you quite mad? This young woman is a writer for several internationally respected publications. She has friends in high places, and you have simply kidnapped her. Are you asking for an international incident?’

‘There will be no incident that I can’t smooth over,’ Ali said arrogantly. ‘They need our oil.’

‘I like you least when you talk like that,’ Elise snapped, and he had the grace to blush.

‘You don’t understand, Mother,’ he said at last. ‘Fran and I-understand each other. We have done so from the first moment when I met her in the casino.’ His eyes kindled. ‘At least, so I thought. Later I discovered that she went there on purpose to find out about me.’

‘And so you fell in love with her and took her home,’ Elise said wryly.

‘Certainly not. I took her home but there was no question of falling in love. She was a pleasant companion for a night.’

‘Really,’ Elise said with a touch of scorn. ‘Continue. I am agog!’

‘When we talked-something changed. Her mind enchanted me. She took me back to my childhood, and the magic stories I loved to read. She knew them too. I could talk to her. We felt so close, but she wouldn’t tell me her name.

‘Then I was summoned away, on business, and when I returned she had gone.’

Elise’s lips twitched. ‘She just walked out on you?’

‘Yes!’ Ali’s voice had an edge. ‘But she returned two days later, as herself. I’d agreed to see a journalist; I was expecting a man. Naturally I refused to talk to her.’

‘Naturally,’ Elise murmured.

‘While I was away, she gained entry to my house, pretending to be a maid.’

‘And so you decided to teach her a lesson. For what, I wonder? For her methods, or for daring to reject you?’

Ali flung her a dark look, but made no comment.

‘So,’ Elise continued thoughtfully, ‘if you’re not afraid of an international incident, it seems that all you have to worry about is Mr Howard Marks.’

‘Who is he? I’ve never heard of him.’

‘I gather he is Miss Callam’s fiancé.’

‘Impossible,’ Ali said at once. ‘If that were true she would never have-’ He stopped. His mother was looking at him with eyes raised. ‘Never mind.’

‘Perhaps I should have spoken of this last night, but first I wanted to meet this young woman, and see what kind of person she is. Now I think I know. Mr Marks is a banker. He has been going out with Miss Callam for some time, and has it in mind to marry her. He is evidently an extremely good match. Of course, I’ve been out of England for some time, but in my day a good match was the kind of thing a girl had to think of very seriously.’

‘Then why did she never speak to me of this man?’

‘From what I can see, you haven’t given her much chance to tell you anything.’

‘Then she can tell me now,’ Ali said grimly, rising to his feet.

Fran was lying down with her hands clasped behind her head, brooding on what she had learned that day. Her picture of Ali as a self-indulgent playboy had been wrong all the time. That was merely what he allowed the world to think. Behind the scenes he was a true father to his people. She felt happiness stealing over her at being able to think the best of him.

She wondered when she would see him. He would probably want to devote some time to his mother, but later perhaps he might come to her. She was eager to see him in this new light, and to let him know how her heart had warmed to him.

At last she heard his footsteps outside, and sat up eagerly as he came into the room.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about-?’ they both said together, and stopped.

‘I’ve been talking with my mother,’ Ali said. ‘Why did you never speak to me of Howard Marks?’

For a moment Fran had to think who he meant. Howard and the life he represented was so far away.

‘Ali-I don’t understand-’