And No Regrets (16 page)

“Come along then, fidget,” she called out, and with
a
bound of delight the dog, who was now quite big, leapt into the canoe and almost tipped Clare into the water in his eagerness.

“Do you think it quite wise to take him along?” queried Mr. Pryce. “He’s a frolicsome animal, and we don’t want him tumbling into the water.”

“I’ll watch him,” Clare smiled, and made the dog lie down. “You going to be a good boy, Lucky?”

T
he dog regarded her with mischievous eyes, and though Clare sat down with some misgivings, she was too fond of her leggy pet to put him out of the canoe now she had invited him in. They set off, Johnny breaking into one of those tuneless chants that were strangely good to listen to, while Mr. Pryce sat at the other end of the canoe In topi and short-sleeved drill jacket, looking, Clare thought impishly, oddly at variance with the gum-blue, chanting bush boy who moved his paddle with a rhythmic ease.

“We’ve chosen an excellent morning,” remarked Mrs. Pryce. “Rather a pity your husband couldn’t come
along.”

“He’s terribly busy right now getting everything as smoothly in order as possible for Mr. Humphriss.” Clare ran a hand over Lucky’s rough coat. “I suppose you know that Ross is staying on at Bula a further three months?”

“And you don’t fancy staying that long?” Mrs. Pryce glanced at Clare, then away towards a brilliant clump of orchids growing at the river bank.

“Ross thinks I should go home in March—and there’s no arguing with Ross.” Clare conjured a grin. “He worries about my health.”

“An excellent sign in a man who once struck me as—how shall I put it—completely wrapped up in his own concerns. He’s a changed man from the one we knew as the boss of Bula. Much more human, thanks to you, Clare.”

They tied up and picnicked upon a deep bank where there were ferns like umbrellas of green lace. Overhead monkeys swung through the wild banana trees and the
mangroves, and deftly caught the pieces of fruit which Clare and Mrs. Pryce tossed into the trees. There were more orchids here, looking like enormous butterfly wings, and Clare was reminded vividly of her birthday party and the orchid which Ross had pinned in her hair. What would have happened, she wondered wistfully, if that darned leopard had not chosen that particular moonlit night to go nocturnal wandering? Would Ross have succumbed to his mood? She had felt poignantly that evening that he was in the mood for love; it had been in the warm strength of his kiss, in his hands as they caressed the soft skin of her arms....

Oh, forget the kissing, she told herself tormentedly. A kiss never indicated anything, least of all affection. She was a woman grown. She knew that men
had bodies wrapped round their principles, and that bodies had wills of their own.

Lucky, who had been barking madly at the monkeys, suddenly came and flopped down on the edge of Clare’s groundsheet. His tongue lolled, his eyes were fixed bright and loving on her face. “Have you stopped playing the ass with those monkeys?” she asked him. “Going to have a snooze?”

He gave her arm a lick, and the picnic party, replete from their lunch, fell silent and somnolent as the big insects hummed in the forest and created an organ
-
drone that was curiously peaceful. A deep green twilight lay beyond in the forest, with great ropes of vine slung round the trunks of trees, and bamboos thickly curtained with wide-spread ferns.

The party stayed in that spot for several
peaceful hours, but at last they had to make a move. Mr. Pryce and Johnny carried the depleted hamper and ground-sheets to the canoe, and Clare lingered a moment to pluck herself a cream orchid spotted with gold.
“
To think how expensive these are in a London florist’s shop,” she said. “Here they grow wild and abundantly.”

“I’m not keen on them,” Mrs. Pryce wrinkled her nose. “They’re too lush for my taste. They make me think of nightclubs and lives lived without purpose.” They made Clare think of something else, but she couldn’t say to her missionary friend: “An orchid was my hope of love, then a leopard cried through the night and as my husband turned eagerly to fetch his gun, his foot crushed the orchid which his lips had only just unloosed from my hair.”

As the canoe made its way upstream to Bula, the sun began to spin a web of wondrous colour that played over the river and veiled its muddiness. Here the river narrowed, and they were passing an oozy bank where the log-like shapes lay under the tunnels of mangroves. Johnny cast a look in that direction, Clare saw the white flash of his eyes. She knew that crocodiles lay half-submerged there in the mud, horrible creatures who kept to themselves unless disturbed in any way. Ross had shot one the other week, when one of his boys had inadvertently trodden on a submerged snout and got trapped between a pair of tooth-filled jaws. The boy was now recovering from an amputation, and Johnny was probably remembering the incident.

Do things happen because fate decrees it so, or is life a chessboard of chance whose pieces we move by our own actions
?

Out of softness of heart Clare had brought Lucky on this trip; now the comparative peace of her day was shattered as the lively animal suddenly pounced on a la
r
ge ant on the folded groundsheets, and so rocked
the canoe enough to tip him into the river before
Mr.
Pryce and Johnny could quickly right the boat.

Lucky didn’t like water, and in his sudden fright he began to swim towards the bank. “Look, missus!” The whites of Johnny’s eyes were showing all round the irises as he pointed out a quick, alarming movement near where the panic-stricken dog was heading.

“Lucky!” she cried out, kneeling up and forward in
a
motion of supplication. “This way, boy! Swim to me—to me!”

But the do
g
was near the bank now, eagerly scra
mb
ling up the mud, and streaming water
... the crocodile lumbered out into the open, a scaly brute with tiny, gleaming eyes, and a great gaping jaw....

Clare could feel small inward coils of hysteria linking themselves together... forming into a scream. Yet she did not scream as the crocodile snapped at Lucky, she echoed the lonely whimper that came across the river, and knew dazedly that Mrs. Pryce held her arms round her as the canoe arrowed on its way. There was nothing they could do for Lucky. It had been quick, growled Mr. Pryce, and Clare shuddered against Mrs. Pryce’s shoulder and blamed herself bitterly for the accident. She would never forgive herself
... she should have left the dog at home.

Ross was home from work when they straggled into the bungalow. It was plain to him at once, from the look of Clare, that something awful had happened. Mr. Pryce did the explaining, while his wife led Clare to
a
lounger and made her put her feet up. “She’s shocked, the poor child.” Mrs. Pryce took Clare’s hands
into
her own and chafed them.
Ross
came over with
a
glass
in
which a couple of fingers of whisky glinted saffron.

“You’re taking this neat, my girl, all the way down the hatch.” His arm passed warm and hard about her, he held her and forced her to drink the stuff. She choked a little and felt it burn its way through the lump
in her throat.

“
Poor little Lucky—I—I can still hear him,” she sobbed dryly.

“My dear,
give
in and cry—
come
on, cry,” urged Mrs.
Pryce,

“I can’t—my tears have all dried up.”

“It was crazy to let the dog go along,” Ross sa
id
, his arm still across her shoulders, and his fingers pressing into her upper arm. “You know what a fidget he was, Clare.”

“I couldn’t refuse him,” she said miserably. “His eyes looked so pleading.”

“You sentimental little fool,” Ross growled. “That’s what comes of listening to your heart instead of to reason—you’ve helped destroy something you cared for.”

“I feel I could die,” she whispered.

“Die for a dog?” he scoffed. “Not you, Clare. You’ve too much spirit.”

“You wouldn’t understand how I feel!” She pulled sharply out of his encircling arm. “You haven’t heart enough!”

She was shivering, despite the whisky he had forced into her, her mind afloat with a nightmare picture of the dog in the river, and the brutish body of the crocodile sliding through the red-brown mud.

“Tea!” said Mrs. Pryce. “Hot sweet tea will help Clare snap out of her shock. I’ll go and brew a pot right away.”

Clare did feel a little better after several cups of hot,
s
weet tea. She even found the will to go and change out of her blouse and slacks into a cotton frock, but she had no appetite for dinner, and was glad at last when the Pryces retired and her own bed was made up in the living-room. Looking imperturbable, Ross tucked her in. “Try not to think about what happened,” he advised. “This is Africa, land of violence, and soon you’ll be well out of it all.”

“Yes, I want to go home,” she heard herself say. “I shall be glad to go.”

He gazed down a moment at her pale face against the pillow, his own face stern and unyielding, with a network of fine lines beside the crystalline eyes, and a hint of pain about the wide, hard-lipped mouth. “We all learn the hard way, Clare,” he said. “We can only hope that our lessons yield profits, and make us less inclined to errors that come close to breaking our hearts. Try to sleep. I’ll leave
m
y door open and if you want anything in the night—”

“Thank you,” she said. “I expect I shall sleep.”

“Goodnight, honey.” He gave her chin a gentle tweak, then let down her netting and lowered the lamp to a comforting glimmer. Clare heard him go out on to the veranda, and in a while the smell of a cigarette stole into the room. There was an unbearable pressure of tears at the back of Clare’s throat, a mingling of grief at the way her pet had died, and sadness that it was true at last that she wanted to leave Ross. He had nothing to give her beyond his regard for a game little pal; for the companion whose job would be at an end when Humphriss came.

Strange that someone as self-sufficient as Ross should so hate loneliness. She supposed it stemmed from his being an only child, one, moreover, who had not got on too well with his father.

She lay listening to the night wind sighing past the windows, bringing with it the queer callings and rustlings beyond in the surrounding jungle. Suddenly there rushed over her an acute longing for England. For the honey smell of pussy-willows in April, the contralto song
of
a
blackbird at s
u
nset, and the star faces of daisies in the grass—fresh green grass that a tropical sun had not drained of every particle of moisture.

She recalled the mellow evening sunshine of Ridgley, fanning the walls of the shops along the high street
a
nd catching golden in the upper windows of the
houses.

“I told you so,” her aunt would say: “I knew he was a type who couldn’t make a woman happy.”

Not my type, evidently, Clare thought, pain spiralling through her. Patsy Harriman’s type, maybe.

Clare rose early and went outside to look at the morning star, remote and glistening in the eastern sky, watching until dawn should rise. This was her true goodbye to Africa, she thought, to hopes that had buoyed up her heart when she had agreed to marry a man who did not love her. She glanced down at the ring on her left hand; the opal burned with a deep purple lustre as daylight spread and the sun sprang into the sky. Then she re-entered the living-room and glanced round at the cretonne covers, she had handworked, the ashtrays of moulded brass, the waxed gleam of the furniture, and the many well-handled books in the wall bureau.

This place had become her home, and she would die inside when she left it behind.

All that day she was jumpy with nervous strain, not sorry to be contemplating the departure of the Pryces. She knew that Mrs. Pryce was beginning to see the rents in the fabric of her marriage; and Clare wanted to hold to her, like a terrible, secret pain, the fact that when she left Ross in March it would be for ever.

It was a day of inaction. Mrs. Pryce did some reading, while h
e
r husband prowled about outside. At four o’clock Clare fetched the tea-tray herself and set it down on the veranda table. Both her guests had dropped off to sleep in long cane chairs, and after putting a cosy over the teapot, Clare wandered down into the compound for a look at her flowers. They flamed and gleamed in the sun, and once again Clare was swept by thoughts of England.

Of wet branches and shining pavements in the rain. Of a house among trees, with mossy brickwork, and a lawn dark with wormcasts. She could almost breathe the pungent odour of crushed wet leaves, and hear the gurgle of a swollen stream. For a long moment she was there, the warm rain upon her face, her mouth parted to catch the drops upon her tongue....

Dizziness sprang up like a pain from the nape of her neck. Her head was uncovered in the savage sun of Africa, and she darted back towards the house. As she reached the steps a second wave of dizziness clouded her brain. She slipped and fell with some force on her right hand. The Pryces woke, but she was on her feet before they could help her.

Shaken, she sat on a stool and sipped the tea Mrs. Pryce poured. Her wrist was swelling painfully, and the older woman insisted up
on
giving it attention. They went indoors, and Clare stood with, her hand over a bowl of tepid water while the wrist was bathed, painted with iodine, smothered in cotton wool and tightly bandaged.

When Ross came in to dinner, he noticed her bandaged hand right away. “Gosh, what now?” he exclaimed. “Are you getting accident-prone all of a sudden?”

“I slipped on the steps outside,” she said. “It isn’t much, just a sprain. It feels a lot easier now.”