And No Regrets (12 page)

“I was thinking about England,” he said moodily. “Everything looking russet in the woods, starlings over the stubble, and church bells chiming.”

“Your father’s vicarage is at Bedford, isn’t it, Ross?”

He nodded and went over to pour himself a drink. “I don’t often think about the place with nostalgia—perhaps I’m getting old.”

She gave a little hoot of laughter. “I’ll remind you of that remark one of these days,
w
hen we’re wrangling and I want to get in a jab.”

“Wrangling and marriage go together,” he said dryly.

“Pleasantly so,” she argued, “if a couple’s wrangles are based on important things like children, school bills, and where to spend a holiday.”

“The excitement of all that must make a man dizzy,” he drawled. “It’s only the few who care what they do with their lives. The rest follow their instincts—and so get landed with school bills.”

“Don’t you care for children, Ross?” It was a question she had never dared put to him before.

“They’re all right,” he said, non-committally, “apart from the possessiveness they awaken in their parents.”

“Not all parents are possessive,” Clare exclaimed.

“You had little personal experience of yours,” he reminded her, almost harshly. “But that aunt of yours was mighty clinging. She was bent on getting you settled down in Ridgley for life, and that was why you grabbed at the chance of c
o
ming out here.”

He thought it the truth, and she lowered her head over her sewing, so he wouldn’t see the quick denial in her eyes. Under her lashes she saw his large slippered feet move across the spread leopard skin on the floor. He stood tall beside her, and she fought not to tremble when his hand slipped beneath her chin and he raised her head. “What are you going to do when you get back to England?” he asked.

“Cadge some money from my father and go to Egypt,” she said, amazed at her own ability to say such things quite calmly. “I think I shall feel quite at home with the Sphinx.”

He grinned. “That a knock at me?”
he asked.

“If that’s the way you want to take it,” she returned. Then because his nearness made her restless, she set aside her sewing and jumped to her feet. “Music. I must have music. What shall it be?”

“Dance music. We haven’t danced since
a
year ago in Onitslo.”

Onitslo
... Patsy
... she wanted to take every record out of the cabinet and smash them in an excess of heartache.

She put on a blues, and stood looking down at the spinning disc with a sudden tormenting excitement running in her bones. He came behind her, put his hands on her waist and turned her into his arms. She surrendered and hoped that to him it only felt like an impersonal submittance to the music.

As they danced, he said: “Do you remember that last night at Onitslo?”

“Not the things you remember,” she said into his shoulder. “I didn’t see much of you the whole evening.”

“You weren’t neglected,” he drawled. “You must have danced with every guy at the party, then you disappeared—I guess someone took you to look at the stars from the veranda.”

Incredibly pained that he should think such a thing, she finished the dance mechanically. She went over to change the record. “You,” she said, “were turning on the famous Brennan charm for someone else.”

“Really—who?” The question sounded too casual, then: “I remember I got cornered by old Colonel Hughes.”

Yes, she thought, it sounded like Colonel Hughes giggling from where I was, alone on the veranda! She pushed a black disc on to the turntable and set the needle in the groove. “I’m going outside for a breather,” she said, and almost felt her way out of the room with tear-blinded eyes. The music followed, and she stood alone under the pagan yellow moon and saw countless stars spattering the sky, webbing the trees and the compound with pale gold. Some forest creature howled away in the bush, and one of the dogs whined a reply in his sleep.

Clare went to the veranda rail and looked down into the moon-drenched garden, her glance travelling slowly along its gilded paths to the ragged black flags of the plantains, and beyond them to the distant cottonwoods and mahogany trees. She could almost hear the rhapsody of growth. To exist was sweet torture, to love an agony sometimes beyond bearing. A wistful drowsiness stole over her. A night-moth winged against her cheek, and she started backward. The top of her head brushed R
o
ss’s chin... he had followed her out, and her heart gave a bitter-sweet leap.

“We both need to soak in a little peace,” he said, a trifle tiredly.

She dared to lean a little against him. The moon-shot intimacy of the moment struck through her, and she breathed carefully, quelling her longing for more than the long silence they were sharing. She could feel the lift and fall of his lightly-clad chest, and large hands holding her waist.

“Oh, my love,” she thought, “will I ever understand you, and what it is that drives you from security into the wilderness?”

They stood for some minutes in a shared tranquillity, then he turned her around and walked her into the living-room. “Will you have a malted nightcap?” she asked.

“Why not?” He smiled down at her. “I’ve some paper work to get through, so as soon as you’ve made the drinks, you cut along to your bed. You’re looking a bit
s
trained.”

My dear Clare (wrote Mrs. Pryce),

I am so very pleased to hear the go
o
d news about the schoolhouse. The fact that it is nearly complete will be a powerful weapon in negotiating for a master. I know that your husband has done this more
for you, than for us, though he seems a much changed man since the happy event of his marriage to you. We hope to be coming your way towards the end of January, and to stay long enough to get the school established. I do hope you are keeping really fit, and happy. The end of your husband’s time out here marches closer, and I expect you are longing for the day t
o
come
....

Clare finished reading the letter, then took a look at those for Ross. Two from London head office, two from Onits
l
o, one from Lagos. She picked up the pink-enveloped one and sniffed at it. A faint perfume; a woman’s untidy writing. Dropping it back upon the others, she saw that the square, flat parcel at the bottom of the pile was addressed to her.

Most women love parcels, and Clare eagerly snipped the string and pulled off the brown paper
... Simon’s novel! She turned it about in her fingers, and the dust jacket clung to the pads of them. Should she tell Ross about the book? She opened it, and sprawled across the white sheet inside was Simon’s wish that she read and enjoy, and know a little that their friendship had inspired some of the story.

She put the book away, then took up her raffia hat and walked out into the afternoon sunshine, taking the long track down the plantains towards the village. Threading the trees, she came to the new, white building that was the schoolhouse, set up on neat stone piles. The outside was finished now. There was plenty of open window space with good, strong storm shutters, a roof that protruded a yard all round and wide gutters to take the rain. Solid stone steps and a short terrace at the top of them made safe by mahogany rails too close for a piccaninny to get his head wedged between them.

Inside, men were still at work, smoothing and distempering the walls and ceiling, and rigging up the partition of seasoned mahogany that was to divide the classroom from the master’s living quarters.

The speed with which the work had gone ahead had been nothing short of miraculous. Clare felt a glow because it had been Ross who had organised everything.

Clare came out again on to the steps and glanced down towards the village. She saw lines of mud and wattle huts, women grinding corn into clay bowls, and
naked brown children grubbing happily
i
n the dust. She stood for a long time, letting that picture soak into her mind, then a little sadly she returned the way she had come, glancing back along the lane of plantains at the white schoolhouse, and feeling absurdly pleased that the bell in the roof had been her idea. But she might not be here to hear it peal out for the first time, nor would she see the walls inside covered with the pinned-up efforts of the children, and tears
s
tung her eyes.

“You sentimental fool,” she scoffed at herself. "Hasn’t being with Ross taught you any better?”

Back at the house she began preparations for tomorrow’s journey; she and Ross were going up to Kalai to spend Christmas with Don Carter. Clare had received his invitation a fortnight ago, and it had pleased her terribly when Ross had agreed to the visit
.
“It will make a break for you to get away from Bula,” he had said, ruffling her hair as though she were a child. “The fellow’s a better dancer than I am.”

“That isn’t true,” she had argued, but he had pulled
a
derisive mouth and had seemed uninterested in a compliment from her.

“I dance like an over-mus
s
ed moose,” he had laughed.

Luke and Johnny were to accompany them, Mark being left to see that the house was in order for their return.

She stacked tinned food upon the floor. Bacon, rabbit, peas, spinach, carrots, fruit, and some of the prized tins of new potatoes that had just come up on t
h
e steamer. Mark began packing them into canvas hold-alls while Clare got out the few pretty frocks that still remained intact. She hoped there would be another woman at Kalai.

Ross came in while' she was still busy. He stood by the bamboo table glancing at his letters; she saw him
out of the
corner
of her eye, thrust the pink-enveloped one into a pocket as though to save it for private reading. Her small teeth bit down on her lower lip. She knew the letter was from Patsy Harriman.

They started early the following morning. The atmosphere was clear and cool, with a faint breeze dispelling the early mists. The loaded canoe, with Luke at one end and
J
ohnny at the other, cut away from the stage and entered the tunnelled mangroves. The water was thick and brown; no temptation here to trail a hand over the edge of the boat. Soon the river widened and the mangroves receded on either side, leaving the boat open to a deepening sky.

The boys sang as they rowed, never in time or tune with each other. Clare lay back upon cushions, her legs weighed down by the baggage, her topi pushed over her nose.

“If those boys were singing like Italians we might be in Venice,” she observed.

“If there were palaces all along the banks instead of mud-concealed crocodiles,” Ross commented.

Clare shot a glance at a bank where something stirred sluggishly in the sun, then she gave a yawn. She couldn’t feel really nervous with dark-tanned, hard-sinewed Ross nearby, and the hot sun was making her feel drowsy. “You got me up early. Do you mind if I sleep?” she asked.

“Sleep if you have to,” he grunted, “but a sleeping companion is annoying if one isn’t tired oneself.”

“Night-night,” she murmured, and below the rim of her topi she could just see his dark, arrogant face. She drifted off to sleep, and dreamed she was back in Ridgley
... and it was Simon, not Ross, who was with her in her dream.

A couple of hours later she was awakened by the lurch and bump of the canoe. She sat up, rather too sharply, then pressed her fists to pounding temples. The river seemed to have come to an end, mud flats stretched in front of them, rising to a silted hill about a mile away.

“This is where we get out and walk,” said Ross. With easy
s
trength he slung baggage to the boys on the bank, then he hoisted Clare and set her down. “You didn’t have to do that,” she settled her slacks and her topi.

“I thought your legs might feel cramped.” He and the two boys pulled the canoe up on to the mud, then they set out across the ooze, Ross first, Clare following in his cavernous footsteps, then the boys. From a small eminence of the silted mound they could see, beyond a further stretch of mud, the continuation of the river, swifter there and pitted with boiling white swirls and sucking streaks where stream beds lay. The boys rested the canoe between them, eyes on the river.

They halted on a sun-dried swell of sand and lunched off cold tongue and biscuits. Afterwards they smoked cigarettes in a pleasant, shared silence.

“Ross,” she said suddenly, “do I look
awful? I m
e
an by English standards?”

“By any standards you have lovely legs, when you’re not wearing trousers,” he said mockingly, “and I am able to see them.”

“No, I’m serious. Look at the skin of my face and tell me the truth about it.”

Grinning, he took a close look at her raised cheeks. “It seems all right to me, and would compare more than favourably with that of any other white woman out here. Satisfied?”

She nodded, and sat back against a rucksack, still feeling the pound of her heart from that momentary closeness to him. His smoky breath still tingled in her nostrils; he had locked one hard warm hand over her wrist, leaving a small pink mark.