Bonds of Matrimony (18 page)

'Oh no!' she gasped. 'Not after my beautiful bath!'

Benedict laughed. 'They haven't any confetti to throw, and no doubt they have high hopes for the fields as well as for you!'

Hero was rooted to the spot. 'You mean - your son?' she breathed.

'Our son,' he corrected her with a smile. He touched her scarlet cheek with his forefinger, looking amused. 'Ah, I see I have your whole interest now!'

Yes,' she admitted. 'But I refuse to discuss it in the middle of the street. In fact I refuse to discuss it at all!'

'Very proper,' he conceded. 'There is, after all, nothing to discuss, is there? Like you, I have old-fashioned ideas about these things —'

Perversely, Hero could now think of half a dozen things they had to discuss. He had been high-handed enough for one day, arranging everything behind her back. It was just like that first meal they had had together, with him ordering for her as though she had no ideas on the subject herself.

'So have I!' she announced. 'I like people to say please and thank you, and - and all the common niceties.' She brushed the last of the grass seed out of her collar.

'If you look over there,' he said mildly, 'you'll see the rain coming.'

She whirled round, and discovered for herself that Mount Kenya had disappeared behind a wall of cloud that was moving rapidly across the foothills towards them.

'And will it come here?'

'Today anything may happen,' he answered, giving her a studied look which brought the colour to her

cheeks. 'It's that sort of day!'

The Africans, too, fell silent, watching the clouds coming spinning towards them. In the distance a drum could be heard, and then another, and then a third, all of them beating out the same message, that the rains were coming, that this year they had not failed.

'We ought to go home before the road becomes a quagmire,' she murmured. 'We haven't any chains. Benedict, are you listening? Please let's go!'

'Don't you want to stay for lunch?' She shook her head urgently. 'We'll be stuck here for goodness knows how long if we do. You don't understand ! The water fills up the river bed in no time at all. It comes rushing down, taking everything with it, and there may not be a road to go on by this evening.'

'It had better not take my topsoil!'

Hero shrugged. 'We've done what we can to prevent it, but it builds up a tremendous force. Darling, would it be so terrible if we had to start all over again?'

'You get in the Land-Rover,' he suggested, not answering her questions, 'and I'll say good-bye to the good fathers. We'll ask them out for a meal some other time. Right?'

She nodded. 'Thank them from me too, won't you?' she called after him.

The Africans were looking anxiously towards the approaching rain too. They began to shout to one-another, holding out their hands to feel the first of the heavy drops of rain that might fall.

'We too shall be going back to the farm, memsahib/ they shouted to Hero. 'This time the rain is coming for sure!'

They threw themselves into the back of the lorry, holding some old, tatty sacks over their heads and, as the lorry pulled out in a cloud of dust, they began to sing, the sweet cadences of their song rising and falling above the roar of the engine. One straggler was grasped by his two hands and his torn shirt and pulled up into the already overcrowded well of the lorry amidst a great gust of laughter.

It could have been a stranger who swung himself into the driving seat beside her. 'What's the matter?' he asked.

'Nothing.'

'Take off your hat and say that again,' he commanded. 'I want to see your eyes when you say it.'

Her hands were trembling so much that she could hardly manage the pin that had been holding the offending hat in position. 'Nothing,' she repeated.

'I thought so!' He took her hand in his, threading his

fingers through hers. 'Can you wait to be reassured until we get back to the farm, or shall we let the rain go hang and —'

'We can't!' She pulled hard on her hand, but he paid no attention at all. 'We'd never get home at all!'

'And you want to go home?'

She nodded her head. 'The new bank might give way. Anything might happen! And we - we might be able to stop it happening if we're there.'

His eyebrows rose. 'I shall love to see you throwing yourself into the breach, of course, but that's not why I want to take you home.'

She pulled again on her hand with as little success as before. 'I think the rain is circling round us!'

His grasp on her fingers tightened. 'Don't try and change the subject,' he said. 'Don't you want to hear about why I want you all to myself for a while?' He glanced across at her, but it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. 'Why did you fly up with me, Hero, rather than come up on the train?'

She gave him a sudden, mischievous look. 'Fishing does seem to be a common interest of both of us,' she said, 'and it looks as though the season's just beginning,' she added, as the first drops of rain began to fall on the roof of the Land-Rover, a sound to stir the blood of anyone who spends the greater part of every year waiting for the brief wet season that could make or break the efforts of a lifetime.

The mother giraffe, feeling as skittish as her young one in the rain, began to run as soon as the Land-Rover came in sight. Despite the apparently awkward motion

and the stately swaying of her neck, she kept pace with them for more than a quarter of a mile, before turning away from the road and disappearing into the bush away from their sight.

'Wasn't that marvellous!' said Hero.

'Does it make up for not having a honeymoon?' Benedict asked. 'We'll have one soon enough, and I'll take you to England as I promised, but it won't be yet!'

It didn't matter at all! Hero sat back in her seat and smiled to herself. It certainly wouldn't be this year that they went to England. Next year? Well, maybe. She would prefer to have their son in England, she thought, so that there was absolutely no doubt as to his nationality.

'Don't you believe me?' he demanded.

'Oh, yes, of course!' she said at once. 'I was just thinking that I think I'd rather go to Scotland after all.'

'Are you trying to butter me up?'

Her mouth quivered into a smile. 'I've never seen the Gorbals,' she said.

'If we didn't have to get home —'

'But we do!' she insisted. 'We can't stop now!'

'Can't we just?'

'No, I promise you! I'm in no mood to ruin my best dress trying to shove the Land-Rover out of a ditch, and I can feel the wheels slipping every now and again now!'

He grinned. 'Just you wait, my love, until I can deal with you as you deserve! Flirting with your husband,

of all things! Whatever next?'

'It was not!'

'It's what it looked like from where I'm sitting!'

It seemed to her that the air itself was charged with a delicious, spicy excitement such as she had never known before. It was the rain, of course, and the relief of having got rid of Betsy and, more than anything, the wonderful knowledge that she was Benedict's wife.

'Would you mind very much if I did flirt with you?' she couldn't resist asking him.

'I think I could come to terms with the situation,' he drawled.

The moment he drew up outside the house, she was out of the Land-Rover and running into the house.

'I want to go and see how the banks are holding! And how the donkey is getting on, FulanV.' she told him, rather breathlessly, over her shoulder. 'I'm going to change and go down to the river.'

She didn't dare meet the look in his eyes. She made a dash into her room, tearing off her pink dress and her high-heeled shoes as fast as she could go. She felt more normal altogether in her usual cotton trousers and a checked shirt; more normal and a great deal safer too.

It took her some time to find her mackintosh and the Wellington boots she had last worn about two years before. She banged the boots on the floor to make sure that no insect had made its home in the toes and then stuffed her feet into them, and threw the mackintosh around her shoulders.

Benedict was still waiting where she had left him in the Land-Rover. 'Hop in!' he commanded, but Hero felt she had to argue.

'Aren't you hungry?' she asked him. 'Koinange will make you a sandwich —'

'No, he won't.'

'But Koinange —'

'I've given him the day off. If we eat at all, I'm afraid you'll have to get the meal. Now, do you want to go down and look at the river or not?'

She got cautiously in beside him. They would never make it, she thought. The murram was already wet through and as slippery as a skating rink. She wondered if she should tell him to go round the long way, but the expression on his face kept her silent. Besides, if anyone could drive them there and back, it would be Benedict, she reasoned. He drove as well as he did everything else, with flair and good-tempered ease.

The river had only just begun to fill up. The water, thick with red mud, moved slowly past them, gathering momentum even as they watched.

'You see that mud?' Benedict broke the silence. 'That's someone else's topsoil!'

'The elephants like it,' Hero said. 'They blow water, the muddier the better, all over their backs to keep away the flies and other insects. They come up out of their baths as pink as you could wish for.' 'Do they come here?' he asked.

She nodded. 'They used to. My father encouraged them to keep to an old walk they had going down to the river. He always said they did more good than harm. When the figures came out that they were being poached at the rate of twelve hundred a month, he nearly went mad. And that's not counting the ones who stray out of the game reserves and are killed legally by the small farmers round about. One can understand it, they do trample down the crops, and sometimes whole villages as well, but it used to break his heart. He didn't believe that people always have to come first. But they're elephants! He would say. There aren't any at all in West Africa now. Soon there may not be any here either. They're eating themselves out of house and home.'

'That I can believe,' Benedict said. 'I saw a good deal of vegetation bashing by elephants in Tsavo National Park last year.'

Hero stiffened at the mention of the year before. She got out of the Land-Rover and lifted her face to the sky, letting the rain run through her hair and over her skin, washing away the last remnants of her make-up. She hardly noticed when Benedict came round the bonnet and stood beside her, staring thoughtfully into the depths of the water, as it roared past them.

In his usual quick way he had read her thoughts at once. 'Even now, are you still wanting to make Betsy's pretty ears go red?' he asked. 'In that case, I'm afraid there's only one thing for me to do. I'm going to exorcise Betsy from your system.'

Quite slowly and deliberately he reached out for her and drew her into his arms. His lips took possession of her own, forcing them apart. She felt his body hard against her own and his arms gripping her tightly to him. Her whole being became fused with an ecstasy she had never known before. She was trembling. Then gradually he relaxed his grip, but still held her close, one hand on the nape of her neck and stroking her back gently with the other.

'Is Betsy now exorcised?' he asked.

Hero could not trust herself to speak, but he could see the answer in her eyes. He said, 'Sweetheart, we've looked at the river, we've seen that the new banks are holding, and we can be reasonably sure that the new grasses will germinate beautifully in this rain, so may we now go home?'

This time it was she who laughed. 'I haven't looked in on the donkey yet. We'll probably have to walk! You'll never turn the Land-Rover in this!'

But he did manage it. 'I thought we'd be pulling it out of the river tomorrow,' she confessed, 'It wouldn't have been for the first time!'

The donkey heard them coming and came running to the stable door, bleating a welcome.

'He's grown,' Benedict commented.

'You ought to look in on him more often.' Hero gave the donkey a warm hug. 'He belongs to both of us,' she reminded him.

'I'll give you my share,' he offered.

Hero presented him with an outraged face. 'But you can't! He has to belong to both of us!' She scratched the top of the donkey's head. 'You do love him a little bit, don't you?'

He put his hands over hers. 'I prefer his mistress,' he said. 'Come on, Hero, it's time we dried you out!'

But back at the house, he seemed a stranger again and the uncertainty that had dogged Hero all day robbed her of her appetite.

'I think I'll get us something to eat,' she volunteered.

'Oh yes?' he said. He held out his hands to her, looking right into her eyes. 'Yes, you do that, and then with any luck you won't be able to think of anything else to put between us for the rest of the day.' He touched her hair with gentle fingers and shook his

head at her. 'My drowned darling! You'd better fetch a towel too and I'll dry your hair for you. I like to see it all fluffed up and pretty!'

She couldn't find a single word to say. Even with him standing so close to her that she could feel him breathing, she couldn't quite manage to get him in focus.

'But you can't want to waste your time drying my hair!' she said. She made a last effort to pull herself together. 'If I make a moussaka, will that do for you? I

— I'm not very hungry somehow.'

'Of course I want to dry your hair for you,' he murmured. 'It's all part of my plan to spoil you for anyone else who may set eyes on you and want you as much as I do!'

'But I'm married to you!'

'Although not very sure of yourself at the moment,' he said, 'but you will be when I've finished with you!'

'I'll go and cook, if you'll excuse me.'

He let her go at once and that wasn't what she wanted either. He went over to the record-player and chose a disc at random, putting it on the turntable. As the first rich notes of Birgit Nilsson's voice spread

through the house, he followed Hero into the kitchen.

'Wagner?' he asked. 'Your choice?'

'My father's.'

He listened in silence for a moment. 'I don't recognize it. Is it one of the operas?'