Winds of Enchantment (17 page)

There was a tap on her door and the houseboy announced that the car was ready.

She was dining with Nick at Winterton Terrace, and she was filled with reluctance to see him, frightened lest her manner would betray her to him. She knew, now, what had hit her like a blow under the ribs. She realized fully why she felt so miserable—she loved Nick! And her heart was beating suffocatingly as she entered his house, and she clothed panic in cool words that immediately set them at a distance with each other. In his instant withdrawal she read all her fears and agonies of the afternoon
!

After dinner he drove her out along the jungle highway, but the tall trees, solidly shutting out the stars, were oppressive, burdening her mood.

“Was that charity thing very tiring?” he asked.

“No.” She felt her fingers clenching hard on her beaded purse as he rested an arm on the wheel and faced her in the glow of the dashboard. “Why—do you ask?”

“You look a bit whacked.”

“That’s typical of a man.” She heard the sha
r
p note in her voice, hated it and couldn’t suppress it. “If I don’t set out to amuse you, I must be tired.”

“No tantrums, child,” he adjured her lazily.

Child! She wanted to flare out that she was no such a thing—she was a woman. A woman, moreover, who had discovered that evening that she was crazily in love with him. She locked her teeth against the clamouring, unwise words and asked him back to the villa for a drink.

He followed her into the lounge and filled huge glasses with single fingers of tawny brandy. She drank slowly, letting him talk on his favourite subjects— rubber, horses, the new commission to investigate native lore.

She accepted the cigarette he lit for her and her senses were conscious of him beside her on the divan.

A stillness began, and spread over several minutes. The cigarettes were smoked through and disposed of.

She tensed as his fingers touched the ends of her hair, then closed over the back of her head, forcing her,
gently
enough, to face him. The fine upper lip and the lower one, of which she had never been quite sure, were parted to show the closed edges of his teeth. The clean cool scent of him was strong in her nostrils, and her heart bounded, liquid and hot, into her throat. His hand upon her waist was hard and compelling—he was taking in each detail of her face, his own face hacked out of brown stone, lines biting the skin beside his mouth.

Her sensitive mind swung back to that overheard conversation of the afternoon—yes, he had a ruthless face; it challenged, and it denied what she longed to see there.

She sat forward abruptly, drawing herself away from him. He made a little scoffing noise and kept hold of her hair, so that it hurt.

“Don’t!” she cried sharply.

He brought his hand down to her arm. The faint alarm and enquiry in his eyes steadied her. “I’m sorry, child. What
is
the matter?”

“I-I’m hot,” she faltered.

“You don’t feel hot to me.”

“Well, I am.”

“All right, child! You’re hot, and disliking me again.” He stood up, hands in his pockets, shoulders well back. “Do you want me to go?”

“Now you’re the injured male.” She fought to sound flippant.

“Not a bit.” But his tone was crisp and his mouth hardly moved. “You’ve been odd all the evening. Is there a reason?”

“Need there be—apart from the climate?”

“The climate?” He looked down at her, frowning. “I’ve never heard you have a go at the climate before.”

“Perhaps it unnerves me—now I’ve had fever,” she evaded his eyes, her gaze fixed on the statuette of the Bantu woman on the coffee table.

“Look at me, Pat,” he commanded, and when he used that tone she always obeyed him—like a child. Her gaze lifted, amber and misty. Something groped for her heart—love!

She watched his face, the thick brows contracted, the cleft very apparent in his chin. “You’ve been edgy ever since that bout, haven’t you, Pat?” His eyes had softened into hazel. “Believe me, you may never have it that bad ever again.”

“Did I—talk during my delirium?” she asked.

“Oh, you said one or two irrational things, mainly connected with your childhood.”

“That means I mentioned Steve?”

“Yes, you mentioned him. He taught you to swim, eh? And to handle a boat?”

She nodded. Steve had taught her a lot, but it had been Nick who had taught her how to love—and suffer for it. The suffering was inevitable from now on; he didn’t love her, and a barrier was building between them.

“Pat,” he sat down again beside her and took hold of her hands, “regretting how I whisked you to the altar?”

“We were married in front of a desk in a book-lined office,” she reminded him. She gave a cool
little
laugh. “Being whisked to the altar makes me think of a gooey egg going round and round in a plastic bowl.”

At once his hands clenched hard on hers. “Did Cole’s big white wedding hurt you, Patricia?” he demanded.

“Not really, Nick.” She shook her head. “Helen and
Cole were marrying for—love. Our kind of marriage had the correct setting.”

“Quite so.” His tone was harsh. “We were not marrying for love, were we? Organ peals and bells and a choir, and you in white lace would have been a bit much in our case.”

“A farce,” she agreed laughingly. “We might have felt that we owed it to each to—to stay married. As things are—”

“Y
es, as things are, Patricia, we are not bound by church vows, or any other kind.”

When he had gone, back to Winterton Terrace, Pat sat on slackly in a chair, aware that her head was throbbing tiredly. She closed her eyes and saw Nick’s hard, sun-bitten face. How would that face look if love ever softened it to tenderness? Her breath caught in her throat. Soon she would have to come to grips with their eventual parting, but tonight it hurt too much to even think about it.

In panic, in relief, she let her thoughts run to England.

England, where flowers did not drape white walls like gay scarves, huge, sun-fed. There you had the stinging confetti of snow, the bridal blossom of the orchards, and silver fingers of moonlight thrusting down between beech boughs. There were shady nooks and lovely cool gardens. Buttered muffins, flame-lit logs, and sof
tl
y falling rain for walking in...

Pat put her hands over her eyes and suddenly she was weeping; weeping at last for Bill, and for the love she had discovered today in pain.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

KANOS was held in the breathless thrall of the most terrific heatwave the residents could remember. The sun had reached a violent zenith from which, it seemed, it would never budge, and everyone sighed for the rain that was not yet due. The occasional breeze that came off the shimmering sea was hot, sticky, hardly a relief for stifling lungs. Brows contracted into permanent creases against the impossible glitter of the sun on white buildings and the beach. Tempers grew raw, and nerves were tensed and on edge.

Down on the beach the native workers lumbered from shed to shed, no longer singing. The jungle that enclosed the city pressed in and wafted its cloying, overripe breath.

In common with the other gardens, that of the villa was burnt brown by the lethal sun. The compound boys reported for work each day, received their rations and went home again. The channels between the nearest sandbanks were black with natives fishing with their wide baskets, and cooling their bodies at the same time. The whites had no such remedy. Mostly they stayed within the thick walls of their houses and offices, ears perked for the wind that would cut short this inferno.

Preoccupation with her own problem, Pat found, robbed the heat of its deadliest effects. She felt it and to some extent was laid out by it, but the temperature was incidental, a matter of damp hair and clinging clothes, a continuous thirst, and a disinclination to stifle under her bed-netting of a night.

Too often she thought of the situation between herself and Nick; she tried to believe that by some miracle, some wonderful sign on his part that he cared for her, they would settle down into the illusory happiness of married life in the tropics. And then, suddenly, anger would rise in her against his invulnerability and dominance. There ought to be weakness in him somewhere.

She thought of Christine, her mother, who had loved Bill in a way it is given to few women to love, selflessly, from the spirit. Pat remembered her father’s last visit to Christine; when after a while he had grown res
tl
ess and Christine was certain of losing him again, her serenity had not been impaired. To use Nick’s expression, Christine was rare. She, Pat, would be broken by the heartbreak of such an existence.

Throughout three glaring, breathless days she pondered, while a headache reminded her of the fever which hung over her like a threat. Then Nick came and drove her swift
l
y back to his house for tea. He shucked his jacket, whipped off his tie, and they both stretched out in long chairs. Pat’s was turned at right angles to his, a convenient position, for he could only see the whole of her face if she deliberately turned it to him.

He drank a glass of iced tea, his eyes slitted against the sun. A pair of sun-specs increased the triangular delicacy of Pat’s face.

“This heat,” he muttered. “Worse than I ever remember. How are you standing up to it, Pat?”

“I-I haven’t quite your capacity for sticking the climate,” she replied.

“Sleeping badly?”

“Sleeping hardly at all,” she admitted.

“It’s getting you down?” he demanded urgently; and when she made no answer, “Why didn’t you tell me? It isn’t fair to keep such things to yourself.”

Her hands gripped the rails of her chair until her knuckles whitened as she waited for him to say more, to give some sign that it troubled his heart, not just his sense of responsibility, that at last the climate seemed to be getting her down.

“Do you want to go home—to England?” he asked.

Her whole body slackened, her mouth twisted. He had said it so casually. It wouldn’t concern him at all whether she went home or stayed here. “Yes, I think the time’s come for me to go,” she said.

He crossed his arms under his head and said no more, and presently she got up and went indoors.

In Nick’s dining-room she poured a glass of water and drank it slowly. She might have been more eloquent and used all the weapons at a woman’s command to try and win him. She might have said that she wanted a real marriage, and children, as many as it would take to bind him to her for ever and ever. Human saplings, growing up in a temperate climate, more interesting and productive than any stick of wood spouting latex.

Pride had riveted her tongue. She wasn’t begging. She was too much a Brading to do any begging—even of Nick.

She edged round the table towards the window. From here she could see the top of his dark head and his tanned wrists under it, the jut of his nose and chin. He seemed not to have moved since she had left him, relaxed in the sun as though he had nothing more on his mind than the indolence induced by the heat. Pain wrenched her heart, and there swept over her the despair of loving this man who cared only for his work.

As she turned away, he got up and came in. His eyes were expressionless as they took her in. “I’m not yet ready to leave this place,” he said. “You must go home alone, Pat.”

“I didn’t imagine you would desert the plantation to come with me.” Her voice was hard. “I knew you would agree to my going.”

“I’m not all that happy about it,” he jerked. “But it would be best for you—the more sensible course.”

“Of course,” she agreed dutifully.

“Don’t look so stricken! I know you’re fond of Africa, but three years is a long
ti
me here for any woman and—”

“You would like me to go,” she finished for him. She straightened and her chin went up. “Very well, Nick, I’m going home. England may help me to forget the jungle—and all that has happened to me here.” She moved towards the door, afraid to look at him lest she weaken and seek his arms—his arms that did not want her.

Swif
tl
y she left the house. It was faintly cooler. Dust rose in small eddies and settled again. A few houses were already hopefully shuttered, awaiting the blow and the rain. The brassy sky was deceptively benign. Pat, the heart squeezed out of her, felt the first tentative trickle of the wind, and shivered. As soon as she reached the villa she ordered the cleaning of her trunks and cases. She was in a tearing hurry to be done with pain.

Kanos had never looked so lovely as during her final ten days. True the earth was scorched and flowerless, but a breeze stirred in the casuarinas, and the palms gently jos
tl
ed their plumes from the first wash of dawn, through the molten day to the prodigal splendour of sunset and into the gilded moonlight. The green islands beckoned, the sea rolled sensuous and ceaseless, and the air was spiced.