Winds of Enchantment (5 page)

From the blunt arrogance of his phrases, the cool assurance with which he described difficulties met and conquered, she knew him to be a man used to command. Oddly, she resented his mastery of himself.

“Don’t you ever long to go back to England, even for a visit?” she probed.

“I did go back for three months when I’d finished surveying,” he told her. “But I’d lost touch with civilization—the jungle had got me.”

“But you can’t stay in Africa for ever,” she argued.

“Why not?” he asked lazily.

“No one does. It—it’s inhuman.”

He gave a little jeering laugh and looked at her sideways. “You couldn’t be expected to understand, Pat. The way I see it there are three things to contend with here: heat, fever, and loneliness. The heat troubles me less than most, precautions largely deal with disease. I may strike an occasional patch of boredom, but I’m never lonely.”

“Never?”

“Never!”

“Then why do you come to Kanos?”

The broad shoulders moved slightly away from her. He let the seconds tick by before he answered. His tone was light. “At Makai, I can go months without thinking of women, but when I eventually get around to it, they’re always fair-skinned, dainty and cool. I come to Kanos to disillusion myself.”

Pat looked away from him. Inexplicably it hurt that he should dislike women so much.

“Has Bill told you that he’s going up to the coast for a few days?” Nick asked, after a couple of minutes.
“He’s going to look at a couple of freighters that he’s heard are for sale.”

“He mentioned it,” she replied tonelessly. “Are the boats for you?”

“For the Farland-Brading Rubber Company,” he said. “I’ve already taken steps to register the name.”

“Then it wasn’t a joke?”

“Why should it be?”

“I can’t see you with a partner. You’re too—independent.”

“This will be different. Bill won’t have any say in production, and unless we’re unnecessarily held up for transport, I shan’t butt in on Bill’s end.”

“You won’t get the better of Bill,” she said with confidence.

“This is a partnership, Patricia,” making her name a long-drawn taunt, “not a ten-round contest.”

Even as he spoke, the night had gone very black. “The lights are out!” she exclaimed.

“Moths, da
rn
them.” He started the engine, but it had no effect, and he had to get out and swipe the thick clusters of huge-winged moths from the beams. They were settling back even before he reversed, but the rush of air cleared them and the car swept back down the road as a clashing of branches heralded still more rain. Soon the car windows were running with water, and Pat watched the frantic agitation of the windshield wiper and the bob of the car lights through the thick curtain of rain. “How long does this go on?” she asked.

“Days,” he said cheerfully. “Then it’ll fade away and we’ll have heat. Quite a country, isn’t it? How long d’you reckon you’ll be able to stand it?”

“As long as Bill needs me,” she replied.

“Do you think Bill needs you?” His tone was quizzical. “He strikes me as pretty self-sufficient.”

“We all need someone,” she asserted, “even those who put up a front that looks as though it could never be dented.”

“Do I detect a dig at my front?” he said drily. “I assure you, young Pat, that it’s test-proofed steel. There’s no way through it, for I don’t intend to have any of my plans spoilt by rents in the old armour.”

“I believe you mean that, Mr. Farland.” She shot a side glance at his assertive profile, and her eyes dwelt on that bold underlip of his. “Do you intend to follow in your uncle’s bachelor footsteps?”

“I may do,” he drawled. “Women are dispensable if you fill your life with other things.”

“And that’s what you’ve done, Mr. Farland?”

“That’s what I’ve done, Miss Brading.” The car swooshed to a halt outside the house, and he flung open the door beside him and took a look at the path. Then he reached over to the back seat for his stormproof and caped it around her. “Move over into my seat as I get out,” he ordered. “I’ll carry you to your door.”

She did as he ordered and felt his arms close round her as he lifted her out of the car and over a kerb that was swirling like a stream in spate. “You’ll get soaked,” she gasped.

“I’m used to it,” he grunted, and sloshed at a run up the path to the front steps of the veranda. Under its cover he set her down on her feet and wiped the water from his face with his jacket sleeve. “Thanks. Here’s your coat.” She handed it to him, and when he started to put it on, she added: “Come in for a drink and a dry-out.”

“I’ll take a rain-check on that.” She saw the white flash of his teeth in the semi-darkness. Then he held out a hand and she put hers into it. “Goodnight, Patricia. I’m the perfect gentleman, you see.”

“Goodnight, Mr. Farland. Thanks for the drive.” “Thank you.” He dived back into the rain and as
she watched him race up the muddy path to his car, she still felt the tingling warmth of his handclasp. A man’s hands were always much warmer than a woman’s, she found herself reflecting. She watched the car buck away into the tumbling rain, and pondered the complexity that was Nick Farland as she made her way indoors.

CHAPTER FOUR

BILL had arranged that while he was away Pat should sleep in the Barkers’ spare bedroom. She would have preferred staying on in the house alone; there was the dog, and the boys were trustworthy. But Bill was adamant and the Barkers keen, so she used their room at night, returning to her own house for breakfast Nick came for news of her father, and invited her to picnic with him up the river next day.

The
rain
had kept off for nearly a week, but it was windless and the mist wreathed the shore till swallowed by the sun. Pat dressed in a flowered print to await Nick’s arrival. The morning passed, and with lunchtime approaching a growing anger surged against him for not sending word that he was held up. But when at about two the car pulled into the kerb at the bottom of the shorn grass, relief quietened her rage and she smiled a quick welcome.

“Had a message from Makai,” he explained. “My assistant is down with malaria. He gets it badly, so I shall have to go back.”

“At once?”

“Tomorrow. I’m sorry about letting you down this morning.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Don’t be stiff, Pat. I promised, and you said you’d like to go up the river. Why not go now?”

“It’s too hot—”

“It’s cool on the river. Go on, get your helmet. I expect the boys are still waiting with the canoe at the
stage. Boy!” he strode to the kitchen door. “Hand me out some bottles of lime.”

The river twisted between high jungle walls that met ahead and behind, while directly above arched a strip of steel blue sky. Pat drowsed in the canoe beneath an awning of palm-thatch. The boys paddled without much energy, and they also had to resort to frequent thirst-quenching.

Nick sat at the other end of the boat, contentedly viewing the scene. He tossed her a packet of shelled nuts and chewed a few himself, moving his strong white teeth with mechanical precision as though mentally far away. He had discarded his jacket and his throat showed brown and hard at the open neck of his white silk shirt
.

Through lowered lashes she watched him. The dark point of hair at the top of the square tanned face seemed exactly related to the cleft in his chin. By a trick of light the hazel was washed right out of his eyes, leaving them green and watchful, like a leopard’s.

Then he looked at her, pinned her glance. “Still glad you came to Africa?” he asked.

She nodded. “I wish I were a man, though.”

“You wouldn’t be nearly so popular. How many men have asked you to marry them?”

“It isn’t me they want—any woman would do!”

“That’s true. You’re the first unattached woman I’ve seen in Kanos. An unmarried girl is enough of a magnet. When she’s pretty, too...” He let it trail off at that.

It was an unexpected compliment and she coloured, and covered it by slapping flies from her face.

“Don’t get caught by any of them,” he went on, still smiling. “The sort of feeling you might have for a man out here would bear no relation to that enduring stuff you women read about in books.”

Her glance carefully on the awning, she asked: “You’ve no belief in the endurance of—love, then?”

“Not out here,” he answered laconically.

“What about elsewhere?”

“Still a debatable point. Life is life, and books are for reading and for being set on one side when you’ve done with ’em.”

“And even you, Mr. Farland, could not set a—woman on one side?”

“I haven’t been put to the test,” he tossed a nut into his mouth and crunched it. “It wouldn’t be something I’d enjoy.”

“But I believe you’d do it.” She idly threw a nut into the water. “You’re a ruthless person, aren’t you?”

“You don’t have to let it worry you.” He grinned wickedly. “I shan’t put you out of the boat and leave you to get eaten by jungle leopards.”

“Thanks for the reassurance.” She smiled, and yet at the same time felt a cold little shiver run over her. Then she added lightly: “A girl isn’t very safe in Africa, is she, with wife-hungry men roaming the city, and leopards stalking about in the wilds?”

“She’s okay while she has a keeper standing by,” he drawled. “Do you miss Bill?”

“He’s one of those people you do miss.” She shrugged. “I love him a bit too much, perhaps.”

Nick didn’t return a comment and when she looked at him, his eyes were fixed broodingly on her face. “You’re nothing like him on the outside,” he said. “Even to the hair. What colour do you call yours—to me it looks like honey with the sun striking through it.”

“What a pretty speech for a rubber planter.” She smiled gaily. “I look like my mother, but inside I’m a Brading. I can understand exactly how Bill feels about Africa.”

“I doubt it,” Nick drawled. “The place is his mistress.”

“He said that about you.” She stared at Nick. “You and Bill are akin, aren’t you? You think and feel alike. It’s—uncanny.”

“Not really, if you stop to think about it.” He gave a stretch and turned his gaze skywards, lithe and lazy as a sun-indolent leopard. “Africa’s a man’s country,” he murmured.

“Not a woman’s?”

“Not a woman’s!”

She was growing used to his manner of repeating her last words in a tone calculated to clinch argument. After a while she enquired: “How far is Makai?”

“A day and a half up the river.”

“This river?”

“This, and a branch of it.”

“Will it be long—before you come to Kanos again?”

“Depends on whether Bill can put things through without me. I may be back in a couple of months; maybe six. Look, there’s a small clearing. Like a rest?” They lazed for a while on ground-sheets, quenching thirst with the remainder of the lime juice and not talking much. Then all at once Nick sat up. “There’s something wrong!” His eyes had narrowed. “I don’t like it.”

The atmosphere seemed burdened, noticeably; the drone of insects and the jungle chatter had lessened. “Rain?” Pat asked.

“More like a squall.” He leapt to his feet and pulled her up, then grabbed the ground-sheets. “
C
ome on, child, we’ll get back!”

The sky had changed from steel to brass. It was curiously silent, but before they had been going half an hour the squall leapt upon them with a mighty stirring and blustering among the trees. Boat and water were swept against the mangroves. Nick clung to the roots, spitting oaths that would have done credit to Bill.

“Keep flat!” he shouted to her.

Cursing the hell-bent wind, he pulled himself in among the roots and weeds, then he turned, and while the boys balanced one at each end of the canoe and steadied it by grasping branches, he leant over to Pat. “Get up a little, on to your knees, and leave the rest to me!”

She moved, bracing herself against a force altogether supernatural. Thinking to help him, she tried to stand. In a second her helmet was ripped off and a branch had slashed her sleeve to the shoulder, leaving a thin, bleeding trail.

“Kneel, you little fool! You’ll be in the water.”

His feet dug well among the weeds, he reached farther down, locked an arm about her waist and lifted. For a panting moment she hung in that flailing wind and then she was crouched beside him among great soggy leaves, gulping and feeling her head to make sure that some hair was left on it.

The boys tried to manoeuvre the canoe farther down the bank, but it capsized and they, too, were forced to take shelter in the undergrowth.

Nick’s face was grim, his teeth tight. The sky darkened, and then the lightning began, an eternal fire through the treetops. The noise was tremendous, ceaseless.

“We can’t stay here,” he yelled. “There’s a path that runs parallel with the river. I’m going to find it. Keep close behind me.”

He took off his jacket and buttoned it round her shoulders, opened his knife and began slashing the great sappy stems of the weeds. His violence rose to meet that of the wind; his arm swung with the same fury. He dragged her on, fighting the jungle and the elements. His face, in the ruddy glare of lightning, had a fierce, almost exultant look.

When at last they reached the path his shirt was ripped to ribbons. Sheltering her with his body, he pushed her on among the trees, lifting his arms to take the blows from the threshing branches.

Now the sky was viridian and flame. The trees cracked and roared in a fury and an ever fiercer rush of wind. It choked her breath, whipped words from her mouth before they could be uttered.

To the right a tree shot up in a pillar of fire.
A
branch snapped off overhead with a dry rat
tl
e and was blown into the bush. The jacket was suddenly wrenched from her back and carried up into the trees. She struggled on, uncannily fearless, the rags of her frock clinging to her, her lungs bursting.

How it rained—great flickering drops that made him urge her to go faster, and faster. The heavens seemed to be emptying, turning the track into a boiling stream that surged round their ankles with the sound of the sea.

“A couple of miles,” he cried. “Can you make it?”

She tried to nod, and saw him glint down at her with a clamped, devilish smile. He hauled her closer, half
lifting her along with him, pulling her aside from the path of gale-driven saplings. In swirling, roaring blackness they reached the sea road, no longer the familiar sunbaked track but a red torrent. Here, he swung her up into his arms and bat
tl
ed the last few hundred yards to the house.

Inside the living-room he set her down. She heard the scrape of a match; the lamp flowered. She stood quite still, eyes huge in her streaming face, the tatters of her dress plastered flat against her body, her hair like tow.

“You’d better get changed,” he spoke without emotion. “Give me some shorts and a singlet of Bill’s.”

Twenty minutes later she came back in linen slacks and a shirt. He was dry and brushed. Bill’s shorts showed a ring of white above the brown knee and the jacket pinched, but he said they felt good.

“I expect the car’s flooded,” he jerked. “I’ll have to borrow some oilskins and walk it. What have you got to eat?” He seemed quite unperturbed, but his eyes did not meet hers.

“It’s very late—the boys have gone.” She, too, tried to sound casual. “I’ll get you something from tins.”

They sat down to a cold meal of chicken and vegetables, fresh pineapple, hard biscuit and coffee.

There was a queer look about him, and something that she thought was controlled violence smouldered in the depths of his eyes. She had never seen him like this before, and the curious sadness that she had felt since early afternoon deepened into a positive ache.

She cleared the table and gave him a pile of magazines that Steve had sent. While he read she moved uneasily about the room.

“Give your legs a rest,” he grunted suddenly, without looking up. “They’ve earned it.”

She was standing behind him in the alcove made by the bookshelves and the gramophone. He had taken off the tight jacket and she could see the powerful moulding of bone and muscle across his neck. “Nick, if—if you stay at Makai six months, I may not see you again,” she got out.

Fully a minute passed. He thumbed a few pages.

“Planning to go home?” he asked of a sheet of print.

“I may be.”

“I thought you were staying unless the climate got you down. That’s what Bill said.”

“One doesn’t tell one’s father everything.”

Another long pause. Then
:
“Why tell me?”

“We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“You’re tired,” he set aside his magazine. “I ought to be going.”

As he said this Pat was highly conscious of tension between them. She took a step closer to his back, looked down and saw the livid depression that began on the point of his shoulder, slipped under the strap of the singlet and ran several inches diagonally down his chest. She touched the scar, unthinkingly, and at once she felt him stiffen. “Does it hurt?” she asked huskily.

“No,” in a sharp undertone.

She drew her fingers away, and stood taut against the bookshelves as he got quickly to his feet. He turned, stared coldly into her eyes for a long moment, then he crossed towards the kitchen and when he came back into the room he was wearing Bill’s oilskins. “Goodnight, Pat.” His glance swung round the room, as though his mind was fixing details. “Don’t dream about the storm, and that muddy trek of ours.”

“I shan’t” She watched him go to the veranda door. “Goodbye, Nick.”

There was a rustle of oilskins, then the decisive slam of the door.

Bill returned jubilant and full of plans. He had bought the two freighters and as soon as the Farland-Brading sheds were up on the new concession along the shore, the vessels would be towed in and slicked up. He was full of ambitious ideas.

He grinned affectionately at Pat. “We’ll build our own house farther up, nearer the nobs. A storied affair with a double veranda—as good as the best you’ll see in the port. We’ll even fit out a bathroom or two. We’re going up, kitten. Your father’s a company director now.” He gave a gusty laugh. “Bill Brading, gone all brandy and cigars. I shall have to look out my white ducks.”

His enthusiasm was infectious. Pat went with him to choose a site for the house, an eminence above the belt of casuarinas that cut off the beach. A squad of natives cleared the trees, drove in the mighty piles, prepared the vast quantities of cement and mud to build the two-foot-thick walls. Apart from an occasional squall—the rains were nearly at an end—nothing but the natural indolence of the labourers stood in the way of the rapid completion of the house.

The other traders were sceptical and envious. Whoever heard of a man of fifty starting a new sort of life in the tropics?

Pat discussed the house with Cliff Grey, who smiled cynically and said he was all for people
believing
they could find happiness, anywhere. The trouble was, realism had a way of overcoming idealism; out here, perhaps, more than anywhere else.