Authors: Kathryn Blair
She found Stuart in the back stoep, leaning against a post, the inevitable cigarette between his lips. She noticed that his face was paler than usual and drawn into hard lines, and the last shred of hope died.
“I promised to go early to ‘Komana’ and stay there for most
of
the day,” he said. “I take it you prefer to remain here?”
“I haven’t much choice, have I?” she replied, and slackly slipped into a chair. “Please tell your mother that I
...
No; leave it. Try not to hate me, Stuart.”
“I’ve been trying all night, but it hasn’t got me far. I wish I could feel as cold-blooded about this as I did about marrying you!”
“You will,” she told him thinly—when I’m no longer here to remind you, she might have concluded.
He went without another word. Lindsey heard the car back at breakneck speed and slide out on to the Beechwood road. Only too well did she understand his aversion from taking her to “Komana” today; he could not trust
himself to treat her with the suave courtesy which everyone expected of him. In time it would return; whatever he decided, she could count on his staunchness and consideration. Bleak consolation, had she intended availing herself of it.
She went indoors. To Meta, washing the breakfast dishes, she said, “When you’ve finished that
job, you may go home for the day, Meta.”
The girl gave a huge smile which became
trium
phant
as it left Lindsey and sought Daniel.
“Would you, too, like the day off, Daniel?”
“
No, madam,
”
he said stolidly. He seemed to have no home but “Elliotdale,” no ambition beyond this kitchen.
“Very well,” Lindsey said. “I shan’t want lunch. I’m going out.”
So far only one
thing
was clear in her
mind
, She had to leave Port Acland while Stuart was with his mother. You couldn
’
t discard pain, but you could shed associations by retreating from them. She wasn’t a coward, Lindsey assured herself. Had Stuart shown the smallest sign of loving her—real love, not the warm affection which had made exciting their first weeks together—she would have stayed and fought Adrienne, though she was no match for the other woman. Clever, how she intrigued and at the same time managed to remain unobtrusive, a solicitous, sympathetic figure in the background.
To Lindsey, Adrienne’s motives were obvious. She had
n
ot overlooked the light touch of blood-red fingertips on Stuart s wrist, the s
l
an
t
ing of dark eyes and provocative flashing of white teeth. She could be certain that Stuart had been aware of them, too, and possibly compared Adrienne’s responsiveness with Lindsey’s withdrawal. He needed the sort of wife who would imperiously subjugate that other disastrous love affair. Lindsey loved him too much ever to reach complete happiness as second best.
That was why she had to go away. Not so much because of recent upheaval—which truth and sincerity
could have overcome—but because all Stuart could offer was loyalty. Adrienne wouldn’t mind that
...
Lindsey pulled up. Was she seriously considering that poisonous creature as a wife for Stuart! All Adrienne wanted was his name and position, and an elastic banking account, and what could she bring
him
besides good looks and a flair for enhancing them with expensive artifice?
A chill swept along Lindsey’s spine. Stuart with Adrienne in his
arms
?
His mouth seeking hers in a climax of passion such as Lindsey had never dared admit to her dreams! It was unthinkable. Yet ... yet did it matter whom the woman, if she were not Lindsey?
Feverishly, she packed a case, carefully avoiding contact with the numerous new dresses and coats acquired since her arrival in South Africa. From the long rail near the floor of the wardrobe she selected a stout pair of walking shoes to go with the suit she had bought in London. How st
iflin
g and clumsy were tweeds after the flimsy silks to which she had become accustomed. She was perspiring already. Madness to set out carrying the suitcase herself.
Nothing mystified Daniel. The case shot up on to his head and he set out. He would wait for Madame at the bus stop.
Now came the worst moments. Lindsey’s pen—a gold one Stuart had bought her in Cape Town—trembled as it hovered above a sheet of notepaper.
“
Please forgive me for running away, Stuart, but it is best. I will communicate with you through a lawyer
.”
What more was there to add? She creased the note and took it to his bedroom, put it beside the blue leather case containing his brushes and laid the pen across it. She had intended to place her wedding ring there, too, but all her
instinc
ts
revolted against such complete finality. The ring, if nothing else, she was entitled to cherish for ever.
A further minute’s laceration, while she looked round the unfamiliar room, impersonal and scrupulously neat. Then, mechanically, she closed the lid of an onyx and silver cigarette box, unnecessar
i
ly straightened a mat on the dressing table, and came out.
Unreality engulfed her. She said goodbye to Daniel and got on the bus. When she left it at the market square people stared. A white woman carrying a suitcase—and in such heat!
A native sidled up. “Job, please, missus?”
She gave him the case. Again it was swung up on to a tough black pate, and the boy loped ahead to the railway station.
Lindsey made her enquiries and discovered that, owing to the long distances, rail travel in the Union has its complications. One can’t set about it in a hurry. The next train to Cape Town was due to leave tomorrow, Saturday morning, but it was fully booked up. There were, however, a few seats on Monday’s train. She sat down in the dim waiting-hall to think.
A mass of natives seethed by, chattering in Kaffir, and an Afrikaans family group round a heap of trunks made a great noise with gutturals. She felt hot and helpless and terribly alone. Heartache was deepened by the dread of remaining in Port Acland for even a few hours.
At any time from lunch onwards Stuart
might
go to “Elliotdale” and find her missing. Immediately, he would get in touch with the railway station and airport. Was there no way of departing without leaving behind a record of one’s destination?
The Afrikaans family were moving away in the wake of a trolley loaded with their luggage. Other people hurried into the station. A train was expected. Lindsey jumped up and took her turn at the booking office. This, apparen
tl
y, was a short-distance train, stopping at
many
stations. A woman with a precise English accent bought a ticket to Carvan Kloof, so Lindsey did the same.
Half an hour later she turned her face rigidly landward as the train steamed out of the town. Through the other window the rugged brown rocks at Paynters Ridge were visible, and a
glimm
ering blue sea splintered its rollers along the glaring white beach.
Practically all Lindsey ever remembered of that journey was appalling heat, dust, and a highly-seasoned sandwich pressed upon her by a typically Dutch
huisfrou
, w
ho ate
boerwors
with rye bread and drank thick black coffee from a milk bottle.
Late in the afternoon they came to Carvan Kloof, a fair-sized dorp set in a kloof—or cleft—between too long low
hills
.
Among the half-dozen passengers who left the train Lindsey recognized the brisk Englishwoman who had stood in
front of her at the booking office. The woman relinquished her ticket and hung back till Lindsey came out to the red, beaten-earth path.
“You look lost. Can I help?”
She was a trim thirty-five, her bearing upright and commanding. Lindsey could imagine her as an efficient nursing sister or headmistress.
“
It’s kind of you to offer,” she said. “I have to get to Cape Town as soon as possible.”
“Then maybe I can do something for you. I’m going there myself tomorrow—taking my sister by car. She lives here.” Confidingly she added: “As a matter of fact, I came o
v
er from England a few months ago intending to settle at Carvan Kloof with my sister and her husband, but the monotony got in my hair. I like action, so I took on social service work in Port Acland. From today I have a fortnight’s leave and she and I are going to spend it in Cape Town.” They were following the track down to where it joined a road which was wider, but no better surfaced. “Hester may have promised the spare seats—one does in these places—but it’s a large car and you’re
slim; we should find room for you. There it is now, with a boy at the wheel.”
The boy slithered out and dragged off his cap.
“You can drive, John,” she said, and turning
a
gain
to Lindsey: “I’m Thea Ducros. Come in the back seat with me and we’ll drop you at the Kloof Hotel. It’s a bit of a roadhouse, but you won’t mind that for one ni
ght
.
It’s the only hotel in thirty miles. What did you say your name was?”
Lindsey hadn’t. She hesitated, and answered, “Lindsey. Lindsey Conlowe.”
“And married, I see,” with a smiling nod at Lindsey’s left hand. “I suppose you’re meeting your husband in Cape Town? How long have you been out here?”
“A few weeks.”
“I thought it wasn’t long. You’ve got a haunted, solitary look.” She gave Lindsey’s forearm a smart little pat. “That’s the trouble with marriage: when you’re apart from your husband you never feel whole. I couldn’t yield myself to a man like that, but it’s as well there are some who can, else where would the next generation come
from?”
She talked till the car drew in outside an odd-shaped stone building squatting among rondavels like an eruption amid toadstools.
“This is the Kloof. My sister’s place is across the valley and she hasn’t the telephone, but I’ll manage to
ring
you somehow soon after dinner. Don’t worry. We’ll fix you up.”
Efficiently, Miss Thea Ducros took over the driving, and Lindsey walked the weedy drive and up the steps to the unimpressive ha
l
l-lounge of the Kloof Hotel.
Her room was tiny and cheap, her fellow residents chiefly men down for the fishin
g
in the lovely, turbulent waters of the Carvan River. This was her first experience
of the genuine backveld, where
dorps
are scattered like handfuls of mealies over the undulating green surface of stunted mimosa and wattle and prickly pear. But Lindsey
was singularly unmoved, though she would have acknowledged that strangeness and wide spaces combine to mute unhappiness.
That evening she watched the clock. At seven she told herself: “Stuart is home. He knows.” Was he relieved that she had taken the step which, in his chivalry, he could not contemplate? Was it wrong to hope he was hurt? Her heartstrings tightened with new pain for Stuart made cynical through Lindsey.
She was glad when Miss Ducros’ message came through and she could go to bed knowing that all day tomorrow and the day after she could spend in the company of the stimulating Englishwoman.
They got to Cape Town early on Sunday evening. Blithely, Miss Ducros dropped Lindsey at the very modest hotel she had chosen.
“Well, you’re in Cape Town. If we can do anything for you, give us a ring at the Ambassadors’. So long. Best of luck.” And the valiant woman drove off.
Cape Town. Lindsey gazed down from her bedroom window, recalling the vivid, alien place it had seemed a couple of months ago, when she had loved the big date palm that ceaselessly moved and whispered in the centre of a green lawn below another bedroom window. Then, she had been alive and receptive, perpetually excited over each fresh sight and experience. The natives, particularly, some of them slick and Europeanized, and others at the opposite end of the scale, poverty-poor, yet rich in humor and zest. The juke-boxes still played in the cafes, and the boys danced and sang on the pavements; the piccanins yelled their newspapers and fought for pennies. Old men still hawked “ticky” bags of peanuts, and over at the Post Office flower-sellers splashed brilliance along the curbs and halfway into the building.
Lindsey opened the suitcase and hung out a couple of dresses. Tomorrow, thank goodness, she would have to get busy; visit the steamship office and also Mrs. Barnett, the friend of Aunt Kitty’s who knew all about the legacy.
When one possesses something under a hundred pounds., eight hundred is wealth. What a pity she could not use it as Aunt Kitty had intended: open an art and gift shop in one of the most frequented streets of the town and call it “Kitty’s.” But she knew too litt
le
of the country to plunge into such a venture, and, in any case, could she bear to stay in the Union if Stuart decided to settle here? No. Oh no. A clean cut, the voyage home, and some sort of career in England. T
h
at was her future.