Chapter 8: Pauline

A fortnight after the precipitate departure of her boyfriend to attend his grandfather's funeral, Pauline was just beginning to worry about David's continued absence when the 'phone call came through. At first she demurred at the idea of flying thousands of miles into the Middle East to see him, but the idea of a free holiday appealed and when David said they could stay in what she thought he described as "my grandfather's place" and that his grandfather had left him "some money" so that he could afford her tickets, she finally agreed. It was arranged that the Kobekistani Embassy in London would send her the tickets.

A courier service brought the tickets the next morning and all was set for her to travel by train from Oxford to Paddington and then on the Heathrow Express to the airport. An airline ticket specified the outward flight for three days' time and was an open return. There was a seat reservation on the Oxford train, which she noticed was first class. Shrugging her shoulders at David's 'squandering' of his inheritance she took two weeks' leave from her job and set off to join her wandering boy-friend.

Her first surprise was at Paddington where her luggage was collected by a Kobekistani and she was carefully escorted to the Heathrow Express and settled, again in first class, for the fifteen minute journey to the Airport. There another Kobekistani in an airline uniform met her and took her and her baggage to the terminal building, where they went through an unmarked door into a lounge she did not know existed.

The next surprise came when looking around she recognised a well-known pop star making a fuss because his flight was delayed, and realised that this was the VIP lounge. An attendant came up and asked if she wanted a drink, or anything else before her flight.

Politely she replied, "No thank you. When does the flight leave?"

She was could not believe her ears when she was told, "Whenever you wish, Your Highness."

"I'm in the wrong place," she said, "I'm not a Highness. Look, here's my ticket and please can you show me where the ordinary departure lounge is?"

The attendant looked worried and glanced at the ticket, then with a conspiratorial smile she replied, "No, Highness. This is a VIP ticket and your aircraft is just waiting for you to be ready. Then it can leave."

"But I thought that all flights had set times?"

"Not this one, Highness. Oh, no, of course not."

The attendant laughed as though she was joining in some joke of Pauline's. Escorted by the attendant and the Kobekistani who had her bags, she was taken to an aircraft which was waiting on the tarmac.

"What about customs and check-in and passports and so on?" she asked the girl attendant.

"All taken care of, Your Highness," came the perturbing reply.

The aircraft seemed quite large and to have no passengers on it yet. She was shown to her seat by a steward who made sure she was comfortable and then said, "May we leave now, Highness?"

Dazed by this treatment, Pauline just nodded and within a few minutes they were airborne.

As they were preparing to land the steward brought what looked like a small tent to her and said, "If the Highness would please dress, we shall be landing in a few moments."

"What is that?" asked Pauline.

"It is purdah. In Kobekistan it is necessary for any lady who leaves her dwelling, while travelling in the street. Do not worry, we shall only be ten minutes after landing before we arrive at the Palace."

Shrugging her shoulders at one more oddity, Pauline slipped it on, thinking that it would at least keep the fierce sun off her skin.

Only moments after the aeroplane stopped, Pauline was escorted to the steps down from the door, just having time to notice that there were, indeed, no other passengers. At the bottom of the steps was a limousine with blackened glass windows, into which she was shown.

There was nobody else in the car, except the driver who was beyond the forward glass screen. The streets seemed strangely free of traffic also; though she saw vehicles waiting in side streets for the traffic lights to change, all the ones they met were green. Ten minutes later, they drew in to the gardens of a huge triple building which was red, gold, and green in the three sections of its façade. Turning in to a doorway which had clearly been built for horse-drawn carriages they stopped and the door opened.

"Welcome, Highness Pauline," said a tall distinguished-looking Kobekistani, "Please come this way."

Only slightly reassured by the fact that he knew her name, she followed him along a corridor panelled with pale cream wood and lit only by its glass ceiling, into a large ornately furnished anteroom where there were three chairs placed in the middle of a superb Persian rug, round a low coffee table. As she sat down she realised that there were two fat black men in some sort of uniform by the inner door, clearly guarding it. The outer doors closed behind her escort and one of the fat men came over towards her.

"Please, the abaya?" he asked.

Pauline did not understand until he mimed undressing and then she slipped out of the tent she had been given on the 'plane.

"Where is David Ransome, my boyfriend?" she asked, but the fat man either didn't understand or wouldn't answer.

Much to her relief, David came through the inner doors only a moment or two later and sat beside her.

Looking across to one of the fat men he ordered in Kobekistani, ~Coffee. Her Highness likes it as I do.~

Turning to Pauline he said, "Did you have a pleasant journey, and was everything done properly?"

She hardly knew what to say. Eventually she managed to stammer, "Yes, but I had the 'plane to myself and ... and what is going on, where are we?"

David smiled, and said, "Nothing is going on. The 'plane was part of my inheritance and it costs little more when it is flying than when it sits idle. This was my grandfather's palace."

"Part of your inheritance?" she exploded, "An airliner was part of your inheritance? What else did you inherit? A few oil wells? The whole country, perhaps?"

"Yes, the whole country," said David.

Just then David's mother came into the room and joined them. She was closely followed by another fat black man carrying the coffee on a tray.

"Please, Mrs. Ransome, David is pulling some kind of practical joke, I just know he is. What is going on?" asked Pauline, "He says he inherited the whole country?"

"Nothing is, as you put it, going on," Amelia replied, "He did inherit the throne, and here that means the whole country. While I am in Kobekistan I am called Princess Zubeydeh, and my son is normally addressed as Master and referred to as the Emir. You are staying here in the Golden Palace in the harem during your visit. The Emir hopes you will like it here and possibly consent to return one day as his wife."

"His wife?" Pauline almost shouted.

"Well you have been sleeping together for a year or so in Oxford, so perhaps you know already whether you like, or even love, him. If you like the country, and could cope with being a wife of the ruler of this land, I think he would be pleased."

"Can't he ask me himself?" demanded Pauline looking straight at him.

"My dear, Emirs do not ask, they command," said Princess Zubeydeh, "and he does not want to command you to stay and marry him..."

"Well thank you David for not commanding me to be your wife!" Pauline interjected.

"As I said," Princess Zubeydeh continued, "So, I was the only possible go-between. All of the other advisors are men and would expect to negotiate with your father, and certainly would not expect, or even countenance a refusal. When I married the late Prince, the Emir's father, it did not occur to him to tell me of our engagement and impending marriage, because he had agreed it with my father and he assumed I would be told of it that way."

David got up and his mother stood also. Then he left the room without speaking. After he had left she sat down again and the two women continued their chat.

"He thinks he loves you," said Amelia, "and wants to resume where you left off in Oxford a fortnight ago. Specifically, he would like to sleep with you tonight. You do still want him, don't you? You wouldn't have come here otherwise?"

"Well, I was looking forward to..." Pauline started, but broke off when she remembered she was talking to her boy-friend's mother.

She had never dreamt of doing anything but hide their actually having sex together from her own mother.

"Come through to my suite, my dear. All this must be new and strange to you," the older woman said, consolingly.

After some real heart-to-heart woman talk Amelia was very doubtful whether Pauline would be suitable for an Emir's wife. Nevertheless she resolved to give the girl every chance.

"So you will sleep with him tonight then?" she asked.

"If he loses his temper with me what will he do?" Pauline wanted to know.

"What will he do or what could he do?" countered the older woman.

"Both," Pauline replied carefully, "I would like to know the risks."

"He could do anything, up to and including having you beheaded in the public square, and it would be legal here, and it would not be reported in the west," Amelia said, trying to be honest, "If you ask me what I think he would do, I think he would send you home. If he were very angry he might send you tourist class instead of private jet. A woman in tourist class on Air Kobekistani does not enjoy the journey."

"May I think about it for a while, please?" the younger woman asked with a pleading tone in her voice.

"Of course, it will be ages yet before they start to prepare you," replied Princess Zubeydeh, then seeing Pauline's face she added, "I don't think you will dislike the preparation. Think of it as a beauty treatment by the best experts in the world and just be glad you don't have to pay for it."

Lunch was a strange mixture of western and eastern food; some lamb chops were served with several vegetables which Pauline could not identify and some succulent Brussels sprouts.

"How do they do that?" she asked, "I normally hate sprouts but they were lovely."

"David likes them, so somebody was sent to learn how to do it from a top chef in England," Amelia explained.

The dessert course arrived and consisted of a selection of pastry rolls apparently filled with Shredded Wheat and liberally soaked in honey.

"These are lovely, but I dread to think what they will do to my figure," Pauline remarked as she ate her third.

"That is the idea. The Chief Eunuch evidently thinks you are too thin. After coffee we can stroll out in the gardens and you can see what they did to Davina's figure. She looked a bit like you when she first came here I understand."

In the harem, Pauline marvelled at the beautiful gardens with trees, fountains and birds flitting among the branches, all under a high glass domed roof.

"It's just like the Eden Project in Cornwall," she said to Amelia.

"Yes, I know what you mean, but this has been here for two hundred years or more. I think this might be what the Hanging Gardens in Babylon were really like."

"Where do these women come from and how do they pass the time all day?" she asked when they came across another two women sitting doing nothing by one of the pools.

"They are bought for the harem, or given by their fathers or others who want to impress the Emir. They don't really do anything much all day," Amelia explained, "Of course, they can eat sweetmeats all day if they want, but those lovely rolls at lunch soon become boring. Mostly they just sit. Sometimes two will pair off for a session on a bed somewhere, but the eunuchs discourage it."

"A session on a bed?" Pauline asked, "You mean with each other? Lesbians?"

"They aren't really lesbians, just bored," Amelia said sadly, "Don't forget most of them will be lucky to spend more than one or two nights a year with David."

"With David?" Pauline sounded shocked.

"Pauline, this is David's harem now. He can sleep with whom he likes when he likes. He always has one or other of them in his bed. Tonight it will be you, last night it was Maryam, tomorrow night it could be any of these."

"But if I marry him... ?"

"Then you bear his first child, if possible, and preferably a boy. If that goes to plan that child becomes Crown Prince and you become queen bee in this little hive. I move out of the suite and it becomes your private realm. Even the Chief Eunuch has to be polite to you."

"But I get to sleep with him all the time if I'm his wife, don't I?" asked the troubled girl close to tears.

"I have to be honest," said Amelia, "I slept with David's father once after he was born, and that was in almost four years. But please don't reject it out of hand. Sleep with David tonight and discuss it with him; maybe an English upbringing will have made a difference."

Privately Amelia knew that her reaction to him as Emir was very different from her reaction to David her son. She was very frightened of where all this was leading, frightened and yet curious and excited. She had all but forgotten the high spots of harem life in her humdrum existence in England.

Pauline was off on another tack now, "Why are these women willing to give up a normal life, outside, for this life of utter boredom. Don't they even go shopping?"

"There is no such thing as what you call a 'normal life' in Kobekistan for a woman," Amelia explained, "This harem, or another one, is all they have and for most of them it is all they can imagine. They have no contact with what you think of as civilisation, no cinema, no TV, no radio. If you took Maryam and put her down in Harrods dressed smartly she would probably die of fright."

"Every woman in the country is kept in like this? In what is virtually a prison?" persisted the younger woman.

"Not all," said Amelia carefully, "Some are in brothels, and some work as draught animals in the farms."

"But do they all dress like that? All the women in the country?" asked Pauline, horrified.

"There are variations, my husband's women wore only skirts made of inch wide strips of chiffon hanging about twelve inches from a waistband; my brother-in-law's tastes, I am told, ran to totally sheer smocks. David is thinking of changing to silk shorty dressing-gowns."

"But don't the women mind?"

"Nobody asks them that question, and if they complain they are whipped. Those whips the eunuchs wear are not for show," the older woman commented wryly.

"Have you been whipped?" asked Pauline, fascinated and horrified.

"Years ago, when I first arrived here and refused to be shaved, I was whipped," came the reply.

"Shaved?"

"Look between their legs!"

"Oh. It looks so odd. What did it feel like?" inquired a fascinated Pauline.