Singing in the Wilderness Read Online Free PDF Page A

wait!’
    She devoutly hoped that he was wrong. ‘You’ll have to wait a long, long time!’ she told him.
    He smiled at that. ‘Not so very long,’ he said, ‘not for what I want. I always get what I want in the end, one way or another, and so I warn you!’
    She ought to have been shocked. At the very least she ought to have been afraid that he might be right. But she was neither of those things. All she felt was a wild, exultant glow of happiness that he still meant to take her out to dinner. After all, she told herself, he wasn’t to know how seldom she had been asked out by a man before, and she wasn’t entirely averse to the spice of danger that he had added to the occasion. Far from it! She could have hugged herself with glee that he should actually want to kiss her!
    She looked up at him and grinned, laughter lighting her eyes. ‘You’ll have to marry me first!’ she teased him. ‘And so I warn you!’
    There was no answering smile on Cas’s face. ‘I’ve already thought of that,’ he said.
    ‘Isfahan is half the world,’ Stephanie quoted, looking round the fabulously ornate dining room of the Shall Abbas Hotel.
    C as nodded. ‘I suspect there’s been some European influence brought to bear here, though,’ he remarked. ‘It’s too symmetrical—too perfect to be wholly Persian.’ Stephanie eyed him across the table, liking him very much. ‘You’ll love the Friday Mosque,’ she told him. ‘There must be hundreds of arches there, all the same, but all a little bit different. I defy anyone to get bored with looking at it. One day we must go there.’
    ‘We will!’
    Something in his tone of voice reminded her of their final exchange in the apartment. She had been trying not to think about it because it did funny things to her inside, almost as though she were housing a wild animal in there. She felt very strange and not at all like herself.
    ‘They say,’ she said with a touch of desperation, ‘that Isfahan is the meaning of the world; “World” is the word and “Isfahan” the meaning.’
    ‘Who says?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I read it somewhere.’ She abandoned her attempt to make conversation after that. She allowed her eyes to wander over the decorated panels that decorated the walls of the room, and upwards to the balcony overhead. Persian paintings fascinated her at the best of times, especially the older ones. Strongly influenced by both China and India, or was it the other way round, they obeyed few of the known rules of perspective, and yet were easy to interpret, the horses thundering over the ground, the carpet canopies swaying with motion, and the rich and successful easy to tell from the poor and captive.
    Most of the dishes on the menu were of the usual international kind, but Stephanie was delighted to see one or two which were re ally Persian and after some con sideration chose to have a dish of rice with chicken and a pomegranate sauce. She had already discovered that the long, curly-grained Iranian rice was one of the most delicious varieties she had ever eaten, and she was curious to discover if their sauces, which she knew they favoured eating with huge piles of rice, were equally good.
    When she had finished her discussion with the waiter, she was embarrassed to find that Cas had been watching her throughout the time it had taken to make up her mind and she wondered if he resented her speaking directly to the waiter without waiting to make her choice through him.
    ‘It seems to be called Khoreshe Fesenjan. Khoreshe must mean sauce. What are you having?’
    Cas smiled at the note of apology in her voice. ‘I’ll have the same. And a good local wine, if there is one ? ’
    The waiter explained the Iranian system of calling all their wines by numbers, recommending a light claret type wine that was produced by the Armenians who had been brought to Persia many centuries before.
    ‘I didn’t know there were Armenians in Iran,’ Cas said when the