Rapture of the Desert: Stuck in an elevator

Chrys and her sister Dove leave the hotel and Chrys is glad to get away from the burning gaze of Anton de Casenove, a gaze which “makes her feel that she was  girl of sixteen again, who had never been out of England, and never been kissed” (15). And we learn that she has in fact never been kissed except in the context of a ballet. I really, really hope she still gets to be a ballet-dancer at the end of this book… I’m worried about this.

In any case, Chrys has to return to the hotel because her sister has forgotten her wedding shoes inside and has to rush off to another appointment. Prince Anton, of course, is there and takes over the search in the guise of being helpful. She gets the shoes and then they get in the lift together (a lift rather than an elevator since this is from the age of almost entirely British-penned Harlequins). Which proceeds to stop between floors, throwing her against his manly chest.

Thus begins a period of banter/really, really uncomfortable conversation. Chrys tells Prince Anton she certainly didn’t come back just to see him and in fact she couldn’t care less about men. He asks her if she’s frigid. Anton suggests she might get some risqué press if it gets out she was stuck in a lift with such a well-known rake. Apparently he was once shot by an angry brother. And then he proposes a bet: if they’re trapped in the elevator until midnight, she’ll go out for dinner with him.  He’s wearing her down, and I’m finding it exhausting.

Chrys seems to find it a mixture of annoying and exciting.  She “flashes” that Prince Anton must be “accustomed to the type who fall at [his] feet like harem slaves, hair unbound and eyes pleading for the thousand delights of the Khama Sutra!” (27).

This book is really interesting in the way Winspear is connecting Russia and other parts of the world classified as ‘the East’: India, the Arabian deserts, North Africa. Russia has often sat in-between Europe and the East in the Western European imagination – and in its own (this book review from the Times Literary Supplement gives an interesting insight into the subject).

Prince Anton’s role as the ‘sheik’ in this sheik romance is ambiguous, but also over-determined.  So his foreign-ness is attributed to his Russian ancestry, in particular an ancestry of the steppes, Cossacks and Tartars: “dark, courtly, demonic attraction of this foreign prince, with Cossack instincts smouldering in his eyes, and there in the sculpture of his cheekbones and his lips” (26). But Chrys is also obsessed with the ideas of the harems he might have (not a typically Cossack thing, I think). To make him really a sheik (but still only partially a sheik, after all), Prince Anton’s father was raised by a Sheik in “a desert province called El Kezar” (29).

It’s a long story, but basically his grandfather was a Russian prince who saw his grandmother, a simple village girl, dancing, and enabled her to become a ballet dancer. Then they married in secret. During the Russian Revolution (or ‘uprising’ as Prince Anton describes it), his pregnant grandmother fled Russia and his grandfather was killed. Somehow she ended up in this ‘desert province’ of El Kezar (not a real place according to my googling skills, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise) and was taken in by a Sheik, who treated her son like his own (like The Sheik, women always seem to be wandering into deserts pregnant). So that makes Prince Anton kind of foreign in a couple of ways. Romantic ways. 

Chrys loses her bet, as the lift keeps them trapped until after midnight, and the next chapter finds her heading off to dinner at a club with Anton. Not just any club, but the Adonis club, apparently “rigged out just like those clubs of the Georgian era, where Beau Brummel and the other rakes used to dine in alcoves with their ‘ladies of the night’” (35) according to Chrys’ sister. The patrons have to wear masks. I was curious and looked it up: there is a place called “Adonis Cabaret” right now in London which runs hen nights (aka bachelorette parties). Similar?

Chrys and Prince Anton dine in their masks and converse. He orders in impeccable French. Prince Anton raises the obligatory comparison of women with horses: “I grew up among Arabs, who regard women as mettlesome as horses. It does only harm to feed a woman and a horse with too much sugar” (48).  Mmm...sugar.... They dance the foxtrot, and Chrys is carried away by the music and the dance and Prince Anton's skill. And then Prince Anton carries her away in his car…to where?

Next time…grandmothers and travel!

Rapture of the Desert: Half Russian prince, half man of the desert

I’m back with a fabulous new (that is, new to me) Violet Winspear novel, Rapture of the Desert, a Harlequin Romance from 1972.  Violet Winspear (who you may remember as the creator of the fabulous toffee baron heiress ) does not disappoint in this one.  

It’s interesting that the two covers (linked from Fictiondb because my picture uploading is not working right now) are both desert-y, but vary in their dress for the hero: djellabah versus suit. But nothing that says Russian to me…

Our heroine, Chrys Devrel (short for Chrysanthemum), is a young ballet dancer who has recently danced in Russia at the Bolshoi Theatre (this will become relevant soon). She is passionate and single-minded about dance. Unfortunately, she’s also very unlucky. Chrys fell down some steps in London (my perpetual fear about any metro stairs), seriously injuring herself. She’s recovering, but she’s been told that she must not dance for the next year if she wants a full recovery.

Chrys is not very enthusiastic about this, given that a year away from dance could permanently stall her career. Her doctor gives her some advice that would annoy me if given to me by my doctor and not, say, my mother: “You have, perhaps, never tried to love anything else because to dance was all-sufficing.  Now you have to face an alternative. Now you have time and leisure…” (6). Chrys counters with the fact that her operation has taken most of her savings, so in fact she will not have leisure, she will have to work.

Anyway, Chrys has a sister, Dove (their parents were very poetic with their name choices), who is the complete opposite of her. Dove “took life as it came and had never bothered about a career.  Dove had wanted only to marry” and she’s about to get her wish, as she’s engaged to a young executive (7).  

 

Dove and Chrys have tea and cream cakes together at a hotel after Chrys’ appointment with the specialist and Chrys debriefs her about the situation. Dove, like pretty much all of the other characters in the book so far, predicts that one of these days Chrys is going to fall in love. Everyone is sure of this.  It’s like Chrys’s cool interest in nothing but dance is a challenge.  And of course, it’s a challenge to us the readers as well, since we know that as a heroine in a romance novel she cannot avoid falling in love, despite her statements to the contrary:

“I just love to dance, and can’t believe that any man could offer me the delight I feel when I spin across a stage and stretch my body to the very limits of its endurance.” (10)

But Dove does have some more helpful suggestions going beyond 'find a man', which is that her fiancee’s aunt needs a travelling companion. She’s travelling to ‘the East’ and her usual companion has bailed. The aunt, to be frank, sounds like more fun that Chrys: "she once wrote a thriller about the tomb of that Egyptian boy king – king of the moon, wasn’t he? It was a best-seller, I believe.  And she knows lots of interesting people, and helpd to get refugees out of India not so long ago” (11).

Chrys is reluctant, and uses the opportunity to make a vaguely homophobic remark about a choreographer, a “butch with bobbed hair,” who made a pass at her and who held a grudge against her after she was rejected.  She mentions this because she wouldn’t want to work for someone like that. Or what she calls a “fluffy type of employer” (12). Lesbians are usually completely absent from (straight) romance novels of this period, so this is an interesting reference, but I don’t think it’s going anywhere.

But now we meet our hero, sitting across the hotel lounge staring at them.  He is well-dressed, handsome, and intriguing: “the very perfection of the dark grey suit he wore made him seem illimitably foreign” (13), meaning, I suppose, that British men are not well-dressed? Dove knows who he is, as he was written up in the paper the day before, as someone who “only cares about horses, cards, and fine living” (13).  He is Prince Anton de Casenove and he has “Russian royal blood in him, and they say he attracts women like a magnet” (14).  Casanova!

A marathon staring session follows. Chrys doesn’t have a good impression of Prince Anton (she thinks he’s interested in harems and card-sharping), but she really is quite attracted to him, although she denies it. I think we can all see where this is going. Anyway, Chrys and Dove scurry out of the hotel and Chrys hopes to never see Prince Anton again.

But will she? I predict she will take that job with the aunt and she'll run into Prince Anton somehow due to that...