Winds of Enchantment (16 page)

“No, we mustn’t let the soup get cold,” he agreed drily.

CHAPTER TWELVE

WITH only a week of the three months at Makai to go, Pat was superintending the cleaning, polishing and provisioning of Madden’s bungalow. She put up new curtains and re-covered the cushions, replaced the worn grass mats and a worm-eaten chair. The books and gramophone records she had brought were transferred to his shelves. She had meant to do so much for Madden, but her good inten
tions
had had to fall back on superficial improvements to make the house more homey.

A boy brought over the lunch she had ordered. Wheat biscuits with tinned butter, soft cheese, a few raisins and lime juice. When she had eaten she lay in Madden’s lounger staring at the damp stains on ceilings and walls, wondering yet again that men could bear to tuck themselves away for solitary months in the jungle. One could willingly face it for a year or two, but to go on and on surely required a peculiar outlook and boundless stamina.

Her ear caught the irregular thud of hoofs and she raised herself to listen. A horseman meant Nick, but he had particularly stated this morning that he was unlikely to be back before sundown. She stood up and as she looked through the window the horse appeared from the trees and she recognized the thick young figure of Cole. He swung down from his horse and spoke to a boy, and a minute later the native came running to the bungalow.

Pat went out to meet him, and Cole, seeing her, threw the reins across the saddle and came towards her.

“Hullo, Mrs. Farland,” he smiled. “Working a few of your feminine miracles on Madden’s domain?”

“Something of that sort.” She smiled back at him. “Have you eaten?”

“I had a break mid-mo
rn
ing. I could go a drink and a sandwich—after I’ve had a wash.”

“Go ahead and clean up, Mr. Cole. I’ll put you out some eats.”

“The fact is,” he told her over the drink, “my mail came up yesterday and I want to ask Nick a favour.”

“He’ll be late back. Would you prefer to leave a message?”

Cole’s rather heavy features broke into a smile. “I don’t think he’ll mind my staying the night
.
”

An hour later she persuaded him to take a walk down to the river, and they talked about England, and Pat sensed a simmering excitement in this otherwise plodding young man. But she didn’t probe. Nick was the boss and he must be the first to hear what Cole had to say.

When dinner was over that evening, Pat said brightly: “You two men can talk business while I take my coffee on the veranda.”

“Please don’t go,” said Cole. “It isn’t business, and I’d like to unburden to both of you, if I may.” He leaned forward, more young and eager than she had known him. “I’m going to ask for a short leave, Nick—about a fortnight, starting the day before the next liner gets in.”

“That can be managed,” Nick said at once. “Got relatives on the boat?”

“My
fiancée
.”

“I didn’t know you had one. What are you going to do—marry the girl?”

“Yes, at the church in Kanos.”

“And then what?” Nick’s brows lifted enquiringly.

“Your house wasn’t meant to be a cottage for two.” Cole hesitated. “I know that. Helen and I weren’t engaged when I came out two years ago. She was only nineteen and her parents wanted her to wait. I thought they were right. You see, I’m eight years her senior.”

“A frightful discrepancy,” smiled Nick. “I suppose you proposed by letter? But tell me—you’re not really thinking of taking her up to the plantation with you?”

A dark flush stole up from the young man’s collar. “Only a short stay—a sort of honeymoon. Then she’ll go home and I’ll join her when my time’s up.” His voice lowered. “I’m sorry, Nick. I shan’t be renewing my contract with you. I’ll go on and finish the three years, but that’s all.”

Nick’s tone hardened. “We talked this over a year ago. You promised to carry on.”

Cole threw out a hand. “The fact that Helen has consented to come out and marry me alters everything. She’s relying on my finishing when my contract expires. You see that, don’t you, Mrs. Farland?”

“Yes, I think I do,” Pat replied quie
tl
y. “But I hope your
fiancée
will like Africa well enough to stay a long time.”

“
She writes of seeing out my time with me, but I won’t have that. I’m afraid I’m one of those fools you sometimes read about—Helen comes first.”

Nick shifted. “It’s disappointing,” he said. “I had you lined up for a good job. Still, a man straining after England is no good to me. I’ll have to fix up someone else.” He took a pull at his cigarette. “If that’s your decision, we’ll make the best of it. I’ll give you the finest wedding that’s ever been seen in Kanos, and be your best man, too.”

“Will you, Nick?” Cole was beaming. “I hardly dared ask that.”

Nick poured drinks and they toasted Cole and his
future wife. It was nearly midnight when the young man went off to spend the night at Madden’s bungalow.

Pat glanced at Nick now they were alone and saw a rather grim set to his mouth. Nick didn’t like other people spoiling his plans, and she wished she dared ask him to hand over this place, lock, stock and barrel to the rubber pool.

“You look ready to strangle someone,” she said lightly.

His jaw snapped audibly. “People are unpredictable, that’s the trouble,” he said. “You think you know them—then you’re face to face with the fact that you don’t.”

“May your child-bride say something?”

His grin flickered. “Go ahead.”

“People never really come to terms with each other, Nick, until they’ve hurt each other and scratched below the surface. It
has
to hurt, the learning of another person.
”

Nick shot a look at her, a keen, penetrating one. The fact of Cole had receded; they both knew that they were talking personally.

“Has knowing me hurt you very much, Pat?” he asked.

“I know only a part of you, Nick.”

“The part you’ve wanted to know.” His tone had grown harsh. “Well, I don’t think I’ve managed my responsibilities too badly, for a man who never saw himself as a father.”

She caught her breath, sharply, as pain squeezed her heart. “I’ve always been aware that you classed me as a responsibility, Nick. I’m sorry the situation grew so out of hand that—that gossip started and you felt you had to take the drastic step of marrying me.”

“Pat—” he took a step towards her and in the gleam
of the lamp she saw the shine of perspiration on his upper lip. His eyes were entirely green, leaping and lambent as they always were when anger or any other emotion was gripping him. She stood there, slim and tensed, ready to do bat
tl
e with the emotions that were urging her to him—to Nick who had married her out of a sense of responsibility, and because Bill had been his closest friend, and she, Bill’s daughter, so alone in Kanos three months ago.

She turned away from him, and swallowed the bubble of emotion in her throat. “I’m glad these three months are almost up,” she said. “I shall be glad to get back to Kanos.”

Next morning Cole returned to his plantation, and Nick stayed away from the house all day. In the evening he was his mocking, saturnine self again, and he mercilessly beat her at cards, and had saffron whisky decorated with lemon at his elbow more than once.

Pat motored to Kanos two days before Madden was due. Once more he came to dinner at the villa, a fitter, happier-looking man, carrying hosts of snaps and many gifts, including a chewed mouth-organ donated by his small nephew. He said he felt good for a spell at Makai.

Then Nick returned to Kanos, staying not at the villa but at Winterton Terrace. There was comment, but Pat chose not to care—or rather she told herself that she didn’t care. He came to dinner now and again, and they danced together at the club. Let people assume that they were drifting apart in a civilized manner, he said lazily. The final break would surprise no one.

Cole came down to meet his Helen, a girl with a perfect complexion and sleek
black
hair parted in the centre and drawn back in a chignon that suited her pale, oval face and rare smile. Nick called her Mona
Lisa,
and told her charmingly that he was glad he
hadn’t been picked on to give the bride away.

They were married in the white church on the Boulevard in the presence of about a hundred people who were there because Nick had invited them. Helen was lovely in bridal dress, Cole the correct nervous bridegroom. Nick stood tall and lazily smiling, his hard frame shown up to advantage by the muted beams through the high windows of the church.

Pat watched the ceremony from the first row, and as Nick produced the ring her eyes smarted with quick tears. Through the blur his smile was tinged with cynicism, and she knew he was thinking of
their
marriage, that quiet, unceremonious tying of a knot that he had never meant to be a lasting one. Already it was slipping undone and, knowing he didn’t love her, there was nothing she could do to stop those tenuous bonds from slipping out of her grasp.

She smiled all through Helen’s reception, drank champagne and looked outwardly composed in her blue suit, Nick’s silver bracelet shining on her wrist, and his gold ring still looking so very new on the third finger of her left hand, accompanied by the square-cut topaz he had insisted upon giving her. “To match your eyes,” he had said. “They have a topaz glitter at times.”

He rented a room at the club for a fortnight and lent Cole the house at Winterton Terrace. Pat went there for dinner, and Helen’s serene happiness in those familiar surroundings was a fresh twist to the knife.

It was absurd to compare herself with Cole’s wife. That young woman could be happy and confident in the future. Even if the climate forced her to leave her husband she would be certain that within a year they would come permanent
l
y together in England.

Nick drove the young couple up to the plantation. He came back to the villa to
describe the settling in. “Helen’s not like you, Patricia,” he said mockingly. “She
showed a genuine and respectful awe of our trees.”

“She hasn’t had to eat and drink them for a couple of years,” Pat retorted, stung.
“Besides, a woman’s outlook is tempered by her private content.”

“What am I to infer from that?” His tone was peremptory. “Pat, don’t shut me out. What is it?”

“I’ve felt low a few times since the fever,” she replied evasively. “It will pass, I expect.”

It was usual, during the dry season, for a charity bazaar to be held in the club grounds. The wealthy not only financed the stalls, but were expected to turn up in droves to buy. The funds, which finally amounted to a considerable sum, were handed over to the Kanos Research Institution for Tropical Diseases.

Previously, Pat had given a cheque and bought several oddments, but this time she furnished a whole stall with goods brought in one of the Farland-Brading vessels from Liverpool. Lengths of fine cloth, necklets of cool jade and amber, embroidered blouses, hair ornaments, and a range of pretty, ridiculous parasols. The most colourful array on the vast, sun-baked lawn. For two hours Pat and the doctor’s wife traded briskly. Then came the teatime lull. Pat persuaded her companion to go off for refreshment and herself retired to a seat in a dark
corner
of the tent-like structure at the back of the stall, from which a stray purchaser would be visible.

Music drifted from the pavilion, mingling with the distant clatter of teacups and talk. Through the canvas Pat could hear the two women at the next stall counting their takings.

“Twenty-five pounds, fifteen shillings. Not bad, for small goods,” one of them said.

“If someone doesn’t buy that little clock, then I might have it,” came the second voice. “It’s quite a nice
-
looking thing, isn’t it? Ah me, I’m so thirsty. I hope we sell out soon.”

A boy brought Pat a tea-tray. She poured and took her cup back with her to the seat in the corner. It was restful here. The two at the next stall were still talking, but in more subdued tones.

“I wish I could afford boys dancing round me with tea-trays—what say you, Ida?”

“I expect Nick Farland sent it over. Funny marriage, that.”

Pat sat motionless, her teacup suspended halfway to her lips—lips that had gone suddenly dry.

“They’re more partners than anything else,” came the reply. “I believe she has quite a lot of money in the company.”

“
You think that’s how she got him?”

Pat was trembling, her whole body tense, awaiting the reply.

“It’s probable. She’s not bad-looking, but a man like Nick Farland can take his pick, and I’ve always heard that he’s not the marrying sort. Money might sway him. After all, he’s only human.”

By now Pat was trembling so violently that the tea rocked over into the saucer and ran over her hand. She put down the cup and wiped the damp, cold palms of her hands. She was sickened by what she had just heard, though for weeks, ever since the return from Makai, she had been aware, from knowing glances and sudden silences, that the gossips were busy—busy calculating just how long her sudden marriage to Nick would last. But she hadn’t thought them so envious of her money that they would think Nick had married her for it.

Knowing that it was untrue did not help. Nick had money of his own, he had no need of hers. Except—except for the expansion he was so keen on, the new forests of those blasted trees and more and more plant to process the rubber, with an ever-increasing fleet to handle it.

She gave a little shudder. The heat and torment between them had brought on a headache. She wanted to sit in a chair and weep—do nothing but weep, but another hour had to pass before she could leave, and by that time she was sufficiently recovered to smile as she passed a record sum to the bazaar treasurer and received his thanks.

It was not till she reached the solitude of the villa that the torture began again. She bathed and changed into a fresh white dress
...
then found herself gazing dispassionately at her face and figure in the mirror. Pat had never deluded herself that she was more than a clear-skinned, fairly attractive woman with rather unusual eyes, but as she bent a little nearer to the mirror and ruthlessly examined each detail of her face, she saw that the fever up at Makai had driven the sparkle from her eyes, reduced the lustre of her hair. Fever did that—particularly to women.

But the trace of bitterness at her mouth was new, and when she suddenly glanced down at her hands, feeling pain, she saw white half-moons where her fingernails had bitten into her palms.

It was madness to let the empty gossip of a couple of women torment her like this. Hadn’t she always known that Nick had taken her on because—because—

She backed away from the mirror and what she saw reflected in her own eyes. Supposing it were true, what they had insinuated about the money? For had she ever really known Nick and what motivated him? Hadn’t he always been an enigma; lazy-eyed, giving nothing of his inner self away to anyone—anyone?