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!