would have delighted her; one who worked hard at school and went off to university intending to train as a librarian had not. Chris, two years her senior and already enrolled in medical school, had been the only person to understand and support Polly’s academic aspirations.
Loving Chris had been so easy. If she had a problem he was always ready to listen. From adolescence Polly had innocently assumed that she would eventually marry Chris. When her puppy fat had melted away and she miraculously blossomed into a slender young woman with a cloud of pale hair and flawless features, she had shyly awaited the awakening of Chris’s interest in her as a girlfriend. It had never happened, she reflected painfully.
A year ago at her nineteenth birthday party she had been forced to accept that her dreams were that—just dreams. Chris had lightly introduced her to his current girlfriend as ‘Polly, my honorary kid sister,’ affection and warmth in his manner and no hint of any other form of feeling. She had stopped living in her imagination.
Returning to university, she had sensibly thrown herself into the dating scene that she had scrupulously avoided during her first two terms. But the dates she had since ventured out on had without exception turned into disastrous grappling sessions concluded by resentful and bitter accusations that she was frigid and abnormal. Her efforts to forget Chris had got her nowhere. She still loved him; she was convinced that she would always love him.
Since she would never marry Chris, did it really matter who she married? Reasoning on that coldly practical basis, she had agreed to marry Raschid and solve her family’s problems. And once she had agreed, everybody had forgotten the financial bribe and had begun to behave as if she was being singled out for some great honour.
Unfortunately a decision forged in the valiant heat of the moment was tougher to sustain in the hard face of reality. Reality was the arrival of that car outside and the awareness that downstairs was a stranger who was to become her husband, no matter what he was like and no matter how he behaved. She had given her word and she could not go back on it now. Why would she anyway? A spinster in the family would break her mother’s heart. It was ironic that for the very first time she was shining like a bright star on her mother’s ambitious horizon.
‘You’re not dressed yet!’ Anthea’s harassed lament from the door shattered her reverie. ‘You can’t possibly let Raschid see you looking…’
‘The way I usually do?’ Polly slotted in drily. ‘Well, he might as well see what he’s getting, and I’m no fashion-plate.’
‘Don’t be difficult, darling,’ Anthea pleaded, elegantly timeless in her silk suit and pearls. ‘You simply must get changed!’
‘Where is he?’
‘In the library with your father. We discussed the wedding arrangements. St Augustine’s of course, but apparently there’ll have to be a second ceremony after you fly out to Dharein. We had a very interesting chat before I left them,’ she confided with an almost girlish giggle. ‘Do you realise that Raschid didn’t see his first wife’s face until after the wedding? Evidently that’s how they do it over there.’
Polly shuddered. She hadn’t even met Raschid and already the wedding was fixed! In addition her mother was managing to behave as if this peculiar occasion was quite commonplace. ‘It’s barbaric!’ she protested.
‘Now, darling!’ Anthea reproved. ‘At least he’s broken with tradition to come and meet you properly. What may seem strange to us is perfectly normal to him.’
‘You think it’s normal for a male of thirty-two to let his father pick a foreign bride sight unseen?’ Polly exclaimed helplessly. ‘You think he’s doing me a favour in even coming here?’
‘He is a prince, Polly.’
‘I don’t care!’
‘Parents often do know what’s best for their children,’ Anthea was beginning to sound shrill. ‘Remember what your father said—the divorce rate on arranged marriages is very low.’
In receipt of that grim reassurance, Polly was hurried down to her bedroom where the dreaded dress hung on the wardrobe door—powder-pink georgette. She would look like a little girl in a frilly party dress. What flattered Anthea at five foot nine did considerably less for a daughter of five foot one. Outright panic suddenly seethed up inside her. ‘I can’t go through with this…I can’t!’ she burst out.
‘Of course you’re nervous—that’s only natural,’ Anthea soothed. ‘Raschid’s bound to be staying for a few days, and you’ll get over that silliness. You really don’t seem to appreciate how lucky you are.’
‘L-lucky?’ gasped Polly.
‘Any normal girl would be thrilled to be in your position,’ Anthea trilled irritably. ‘At eighteen I was married and at nineteen I was a mother. Believe me, I was a lot more happy and fulfilled than you’ve ever been swotting over boring books. When you have your first baby you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about.’
The threat of future offspring turned Polly as white as a sheet. ‘A baby?’
‘You love children and he doesn’t have any. Poor Berah must have been barren,’ Anthea remarked cheerfully. ‘Raschid’s father will be very anxious to see a male grandchild born to ensure the succession. Only think of how proud you’ll feel then!’
Her mother was on another plane altogether. Children…intimacy…Polly was feeling physically sick. The prospect of being used to create a baby boom in Dharein did not appeal to her. No wonder King Reija had decided she was suitable! She was one of five children.
‘He’s wonderfully self-assured for his age, so charming and quite fabulously handsome. One can tell simply by looking at him that he’s a prince. He has an air,’ Anthea divulged excitedly. ‘His manners are exquisite—I was very impressed. When one considers that he wasn’t educated over here like his brother Asif, his English is excellent. Not quite colloquial, but…’
The rolling tide of her mother’s boundless enthusiasm was suffocating.
‘I’ll put your hair up—you’ll look taller.’ Hairpins were thrust in with painful thoroughness. ‘He has the most gorgeous blue eyes. Can you believe that?’ Anthea gushed. ‘I was dying to ask where he got those, but I didn’t like to.’
What the heck did Polly care about blue eyes? Her mother had fallen in love with her future son-in-law’s status. He could do no wrong. If he’d been a frog, Anthea would have found something generous to say about him. After all, he was a prince, wasn’t he?
‘I’m so happy for you, so proud.’ With swimming eyes Anthea beamed down at her. ‘And it’s so romantic! Even Princess Diana was an earl’s daughter.’
In appalled fascination Polly stared while Anthea dabbed delicately at her eyes with a lace hanky.
‘Polly!’ Her father’s booming call, polished on the hunting field, thundered up the stairs. ‘Where the devil are you?’
She could practically hear the tumbril pacing out her steps to the execution block. But when she froze at the top of the stairs, only her father’s impatient face greeted her stricken scrutiny.
‘Come on…come on!’ He was all of a fluster, eager to get the introduction over with. That achieved, he could sit back and pretend it was a completely ordinary courtship. Clasping her hand, he
