Authors: Kathryn Blair
Mrs. MacLellan’s gaze veered once more towards her own end of the road, and something inside her gave a peculiar leap. Stuart Conlowe, intent upon the lighting of a cigarette, was striding towards her. He flipped the match into the road, drew on a cigarette, and saw her. His speed slowed slightly, and by the time he reached her his face wore a conventional mask.
“Going for a walk?” she enquired. “May I join you? I’m tired of sitting on someone else’s doorstep.”
He swung back the gate for her to come through, and fitted the length of his step to suit hers.
“Smoke?” he said.
“I do occasionally, but not outdoors. How do you like Newlands?”
“Charming ... for a short visit.”
“How very unkind. It’s one of Cape Town’s finest suburbs. We love living here.”
“Sorry. It’s home to you and the reverse to me. Where does this lead?”
“To the Zoo, eventually.”
He laughed briefly, but refrained from comment. What had he done with Lindsey? she wondered.
“When will you return to Port Acland?” she asked.
“Today, I hope, in the plane that brought me.” He threw her a quick sideways appraisal. “How much of what you snapped at me this morning was true?”
He was rewarded by a distressed flush.
“Most of it,” she said. “I hated having to lie—it never does any good—but I tried to save Lindsey from more knocks. She’s endured such a lot.”
“Not very clever, are you? I don’t hold it against you—I dislike clever women. But I’d have thought one of your disposition would have weighed Lindsey up at once, concluded that I was
an insensitive brute unfit to have a wife, and left me to stew.”
“Frankly, that was my reaction—but not till I’d heard some of the facts from her yesterday afternoon.”
At that he was silent, and she divined that he was calculating how much Lindsey had confided. How he detested this inspection of his private linen. Had he appeared more approachable she would have liked to reassure him that Lindsey had disclosed the
minimum
of information.
“Where is she, Stuart?”
“Locked in her bedroom, with the windows shut and the curtains drawn.” Explanatorily, he tacked on: “She’s just divorced me.”
Mrs. MacLellan gave a deflated sigh
.
So it was over and Lindsey was fighting through another phase of heart-break. Young people seemed unable to avoid flinging
themselves from heights and sustaining concussion. Yesterday, she had fired with anger over Stuart, but now, aware of hurt and restraint underneath his negative manner, her antagonism hardly smouldered. He had set out to help Lindsey, not to wound her, and he was still fond of her. Yet Lindsey’s viewpoint was poignantly clear. “Divorce is nasty, but it’s the only way out,” she said.
“Divorce is acknowledgement of failure,” he answered. “Lindsey’s not getting one from me.”
“You must be fair to her, Stuart.”
“Heavens! Haven’t I been fair all along
...
” He checked himself. “A few minutes ago I told her she was going back to Port Acl
a
nd with me, on her own terms. Her reply was to offer me my freedom. Freedom!” he echoed, as though the word had a reptilian flavor.
“I had to clear out to cool off.”
“Oh!” ejaculated Mrs. MacLellan, suddenly happy. “Is that what you’re doing?”
“She’s still going back to Port Acland,” he said, “but on my terms.”
“She will,
”
affirmed Mrs. MacLellan evenly, “so long as your terms coincide with hers—to love, honor and cherish. The last two are pretty helpless without the first, you know.”
He did not look her way again, but he wheeled, so that she had to perform an about turn and two quick steps to keep up with him, and increased his stride.
“The trees smell grand since the rain, don’t they?” she remarked conversationally. After a silence, she added, resigned and breathless: “Go ahead. Don’t wait for me.”
This was one of the times when Lindsey wished she could ride a horse or drive a car, or even swim more than the half-mile which was her limit. Something that would absorb all her senses till she was exhausted. Then she would not have to sit here wondering about Adrienne and Tony and Mrs. Conlowe to keep her
min
d from wallowing in futile tenderness over Stuart.
Now that their relationship was plainly at an end, he would not withhold the passport nor refuse to send on her trunk. There would be no difficulty about booking a passage to England. She might even get there before Christmas.
Impossible that a mere couple of months or so should contain the climax of all her hopes and longings and their destruction as well. No place, from now on, for his photograph on her mantelpiece.
She swished back the curtain—closed this morning against the early sun—and opened the window. Between the trees shifting, dun-colored blobs drew her attention. In the next garden a donkey-team of four were dragging a primitive plough, loudly encouraged by a piccanin wielding a tattered
sjambok
. A
spaniel flung himself round the donkeys’ hoofs in frenzy, then dashed off to bark at an object in the grass. The sight awakened memories of Brutus and the tortoise, and led back to Stuart—as everything led back to him. The duty husband and charming companion—who had never been her lover.
She straightened her dress, used a rub of lipstick and smoothed her hair. Chrissie must be somewhere about to point out which house Mrs. MacLellan was visiting. Perhaps they could go into town together and wake up the lawyer who was dealing with Aunt Kitty’s affairs. Anything was preferable to inaction.
The front door gave a jarring crash agai
n
st the doorstop. Firm steps thudded through the polished hall. Her heart vaulted, while her clenched fingers pushed hard into her dress pockets.
A peremptory tattoo on the door panel.
“Lindsey! Open the door.”
A feat of which at that moment she was entirely incapable.
Th
e hand rattled. “D’you hear me, Lindsey? I’ve got to talk to you. For Pete’s sake, open the door.”
She took a couple of paces.
“Are you there, Lindsey?”
“Yes.” Quite a creditable monosyllable considering the nervelessness of her body.
“Then open this door or I’ll force the lock.”
It was no more than two yards to the door. If he’d allow her a minute more...
Exasperated, he pleaded: “Listen, Lindsey. This isn’t our house. You wouldn’t have me smash the door, would you? Come on, darling, open up.”
Had she heard right, or was her imagination playing its wicked games again? Sudden impact shook the whole wall. She plunged forward and snicked the key.
The door flung open and Stuart came in, his hair ruffled, his eyes glittering. They seemed to measure one another like old opponents.
Carefully, he grasped the handle of the door he had so nearly cracked, and slipped the lock back into place. Then he took a very deep breath, gave her a gentle push on to the studio couch, and sat down beside her.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
HE raked back his hair into a semblance of its customary sleekness; the point showed nearly black in the centre of his forehead. A muscle worked in his throat; she saw it the more plainly because his head was held very erect, his gaze on the window across the room.
A butterfly had come in and clung to the wall, delicate blue in color with a five-inch wing span. Lindsey would always remember the blue butterfly painted on the cream wall.
“How soon can you be ready?” he demanded.
“Ready for ... what?”
“You know well enough—go home to Port Acland. You won’t be scared to travel in the
small
plane? Bill’s a
first rate pilot.”
“Stuart, what are you talking about?”
“Us—goi
n
g home. Just for a day or so. Then we’ll start a honeymoon. Kimberley first, and on to Rhodesia. You’ll like the Victoria Falls, and there’s a place not far from Umtali which must be the most peaceful and lovely in the whole universe. I’ve got to have you to my
s
elf, Lindsey.”
“Have you?” she whispered. “Why?”
His hands slid up to her shoulders and he looked into her bright, unbelieving eyes. His face was the drawn, passionate face of a lover, darkly shadowed, his mo
u
th compressed at the
corner
s with undeniable need and pain. “This is why,” he said, and took her into his arms. Lindsey drowned in his bruising, desperate kisses. She clasped the back of his head and closed her eyes while the hot tide engulfed them.
At last his embrace slackened. Lindsey still held his face, questioning it, her regard unsteady.
“Stuart, that was
...”
“Love,” he said indistinctively. “I’ve waited too long. Kiss me again, Lindsey.”
She drew back. “There’s so much I want to know. How did it happen, and when?”
“I don’t know how it happened—the way such things do, I guess. And as for when ... I seem to have been living with it all my life, though it can only be a matter of a couple of months.”
“You mean you’ve loved me all this time, and said nothing? Oh, Stuart!”
“It’s all very well to exclaim about it now. Till Mrs. MacLellan hinted at it half an hour ago, I had no idea that you considered me as more than a
...
boy friend.” She laughed, a tear spilled over and he dealt with it. Her nostrils tensed to the delicious male fragrance of tweed and tobacco.
“I couldn’t get near you,” he said, “and at times—when you thought you were not being watched—you trembled like a beaten child. Obviously you were frightened
of
the whole business, so what was there for
me to do but to take care of you and show you some of the other qualities of love? It answered, for a time, till
m
y own feelings began to get out of control. It was then that I decided to go to Johannesburg.”
“You insisted several times that we were mad to marry.”
“Not to marry,” he took her up. “It was our mode of living that I called insane, and so it was. But it was forced upon us. Just before the ceremony on the boat, both the Bishop and the Captain impressed upon me the necessity for a civil marriage as well. I didn’t tell you because your nerves were already haywire. You can imagine how I sweated that first morning in Cape Town, when I was told that we couldn’t register the marriage till the following Friday.”
“You came back in a poisonous mood. I wish you’d been frank with me.”
“That’s your opinion now, with the correct ring on your finger. You gave me some bad times, Lindsey.”
“And you me,” she said soberly.
“I?” He tilted her chin, his expression grave. “You mean that miserable affair with Loraine and Adrienne?” She shook her head, twisting it at the same time so that she need not look at him. She believed he loved her, but she dare not see the faintest resurrection of that other love.
“Let’s be quiet for a while,” she begged.
“No more of that,” he said, “Out with it.”
It was one of the hardest tasks with which Lindsey had ever grappled. The blue butterfly winged to the window, got drawn into a current of air and was borne back again t
o
the wall.
Haltingly, it came out. The first evening in Port Acland when she had met his mother; her mistaking Lindsey for the woman he had loved in England.
“I let her go on
thinking
I was that woman. During those weeks at ‘Elliotdale’ I wasn’t frightened, Stuart
.
Only hopeless.”
“You sweet idiot,” he said huskily. And for a few moments that had to suffice.
Then he shifted, withdrew the arm which had lain along her back, and leaned forward, an elbow resting on his crossed knee. His interest seemed concentrated on the tip of a dusty brown shoe.
“I think in the circumstances I owe you an
e
x
p
la
n
a
tio
n
Lindsey—not that there’s really such a great deal to explain. It was being in the Navy, I suppose—I never felt any sort of urge to settle down: it suited me very well to roam all over the world. If I’d had you then, things would have never got to that pitch. Anyway, my father died then, and someone had to take over the
family
business, so I more or less had to get out of the Navy, hoping that business life would agree with me. It didn’t work, so
I
came out here for a short visit. I just couldn’t decide what to do, and by that time had decided that the whole world was against me.” He paused and bit at his lip. “My mother saw I was fed up and restless and she kept
saying
I needed a wife to worry about, and after I’d gone back she kept it up every mail, till I began to admit there was something in it.
“Well, all last summer I went out to my uncle’s country house at the weekends. There were other visitors, and one of the most frequent was a girl I’d met in London some months before. My relatives threw us together and chanted her praises—she was quite presentable, but much too blonde.” He turned upon Lindsey a sudden grin:
“
Not nearly so pretty as you, redhead.”
Lindsey returned a contracted little smile. “And then?”
“Nothing tangible developed, but my people over there, backed up by letters from my mother, pressed for an official engagement. The girl was expecting it, too.” He shrugged. “I was over thirty and I’d met a good many women without being floored. I’d given up hope of falling headlong for someone, and she was a suitable choice. But before I’d thrown in the towel and proposed, I found myself being congratulated. She had anticipated
an event which was never likely to happen, after that.
”
Slowly, Lindsey said, “You must have been a little in love with her.”
“I wasn’t even infatuated. We were close friends—no more. From then onwards I stayed in Town the whole time, arranged to leave the business in my uncle’s charge, and put in for a priority passage, hoping that a couple of weeks at sea would dispel the bitterness that I was feeling with the entire human race, including myself. It certainly did.”
Lindsey let a minute travel by before reminding him: “It was in the same sanguine mood that you married me.”
‘I deny that. If complications hadn’t arisen, I’d have lost my head the same as any other man who’s just married, but I had to think for both of us. From the evening we met, when you swayed against me with the roll of the ship and laughed at me with eyes all soft and
shining
, I knew I’d saved myself just for you. You made me happy in a way I’d never experienced before, the foolish, stupendous happiness that you handle gently for fear it might snap. I’m not pretending that I’d got round to considering marriage when you had the cable about your aunt’s death. We were only at the blissful stage of utter friendliness which precedes more passionate contacts.”
“But you resented the marriage.”
“Yes; more so later on. I felt cheated of the understanding that comes through the intimacy of an engagement, however brief. We’d lost it, yet somehow the chasm between early friendship and marriage had to be bridged, and it seemed as though I should have to do it without any help from you. But I couldn’t have acted differently.
I had to take care of you.”
A small silence settled between them. Neither heard the grand threats of the piccanin in the next garden, or the fretful rejoinders of his donkeys. A tremulous breath from Lindsey was stifled in Stuart’s shoulder.
“Don’t,”
h
e entreated. “There’s nothing to cry for. We’re going home. Tell me where your bag is and I’ll tip the things in for you. Here, use a proper hanky.”
He dabbed at her eyes and nose, and kissed her. Crouching on the floor with her case open in front of him and a drawer protruding from the dressing table, he filled one from the other.
“
This is about all we can take. Mrs. MacLellan will despatch the rest.
T
idy up, darling—you look terribly kissed—while I telephone for a taxi and tell the pilot we’re on our way.”
“Stuart.”
“What’s fretting you?”
“The property transfer
... your mother’s. Why did you include the divorce clause?”