And No Regrets (23 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LUNCH next day dragged interminably. Clare could not eat, and even Ross pushed aside one dish and left it untasted. She knew that it was not in his nature to allow evasions for long, so braced herself for the coming onslaught when, after lunch, he told Bill to go down to the sheds without him.

When he and Clare were alone, he took out his cigarette case and extended it. She shook her head. She was quivering inside with nerves, and felt curiously cold, despite the fact that the sun had broken hotly through the clouds and was filling the air with its false gold.

“I’m not going to question the wisdom of your decision to go home with Carter,” Ross spoke in a clipped voice, one elbow resting on the back of a chair near where she sat. “There’s just one thing I’d like to know, though. Had that message from Patsy Harriman anything to do with your decision?”

“Not really. Should it have?”

He leaned forward, and the cigarette between his fingers dropped ash on the cretonne cushions. “I wouldn’t want to think that Patsy Harriman was driving you into this guy’s arms.” His voice was grimly mocking.

She flared, “What do you think I am?”

“Since you ask,” he said softly, “I think you’re a little fool. I saw up at Kalai that the guy was trying to get at you—are you the reason he’s quit his job?”

“No, I’m not!” She was pale, her knuckles gleaming whitely as she clenched the arm of her chair. “Don, like me, wants to get back to civilisation.”

“And when he turned up here, the pair of you made this
cosy little
p
lan to go together, eh?” He drew hard on his cigarette. “I did a lot of hard thinking last night, Clare.
”

“Really?” She had wondered if it were he or Bill pacing the veranda in the small hours. “You shouldn’t waste any sleep over me. It will interfere with doing your job efficiently.”

“You must have had Patsy on your mind for some time?”

He was merciless, and she was afraid
... deeply afraid of what he might draw out of her.

“
Does it matter?” she asked, fighting to sound casual. “I’ve never been a real wife, it’s true, but discovering you’d already chosen my successor was a trifle shattering.”

“Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Clare.” His grey eyes had that glittering look again.

“All of us haven’t your godlike capacity for taking everything in their stride,” she rejoined. “I suppose my pride was flicked, or my vanity.”

With a grunted oath he straightened and crossed over to the bookcase. He fingered an ornament on the top of it, then swung to face her. “I’m disappointed in you, Clare,” he said. “I thought you had more grit than to let wounded pride lead you into a—situation with a man you don’t love.”

“You seem very sure that I don’t love Don,” she flung across the room.

“You’re just using him.”

“Oh, you would say that,” she said bitterly. “You’ve never had an emotion yourself that wasn’t rooted in self-interest. Thank heaven I’m getting away from you!”

He stared across at her, then a cloud of cigarette smoke obscured his face.

“
Thank goodness I’ll be getting back to a normal existence,” she added.

He came back and stood above her, one
h
and thrust hard into a pocket of his working breeches. “Go with Carter, go back to normality, and for God’s sake,” he added savagely, “give yourself time to see the guy properly before taking on any more girl-scout stuff. D’you hear?”

“I hear,” she said tiredly. “Ross, please don’t let’s quarrel for the last few days.
I ...
I can’t bear that.” She stood up and pushed shaking fingers through her hair, then she slowly left the room, taking up her topi and going outside into the sunshine. In the compound everything had suffered the violence of rain. She wandered down the path, telling herself with hazy insistence that she was glad to have reached the verge of goodbyes to the jungle and its chattering inmates. Willingly she acknowledged defeat
... and told herself the intolerable ache at heart would grow dim in time.

The rain held off long enough for their trek to Onitslo. They took things easily, Clare carried for the most part in the ‘chair,’ while Ross walked ahead, aloof and distant. They had not quarrelled again, but had been very polite to each other. Bill had been puzzled, and Clare had not been able to keep back her tears when she said goodbye to him. “I’ll send those books,
”
she promised. “You’ll be a medicine man yet, Bill.”

It had been long arranged that Clare would stay with the Macleans at Onitslo, before she sailed for home. Ross put up at the Planters’ Club; he said he had confidence in Bill’s ability to manage things at Bula; but Clare knew he had business here of a personal nature. She merely smiled and shrugged when he said he’d wait to see her sail away.

Mrs. Maclean had not been too well, but all the same she planned to give a farewell part
y
for
C
lare.

“You don’t have to bother,” Clare protested. “I don’t expect a party.”

“We
can’t
possibly let you go without
a
send-off.” Mrs. Maclean eyed Clare very keenly. “You’re thinner, my dear. A little older, and wiser, eh? I’m so sorry my nephew and his wife are staying here at the present time, and we can’t run
to a
room you could have had with your husband.”

“He doesn’t mind staying at the Club.” Clare felt her smile wavering on her mouth. “And I certainly don’t mind sharing a room with Janet.”

Janet Maclean was a nurse at Lagos, and she was home on leave for the present.

“Have things gone all right for you and Ross, way out there in the bush?” Mrs. Maclean took and squeezed Clare’s hand.
“I’m old enough to be your mother, and I’m sure you don’t resent such a question from me?”

Clare shook her head. “Ross is staying on those extra three months at the request of the company, though the new man they sent is a stable, reliable sort. Ross is extremely satisfied with him.”

“That’s certainly saying something.” Mrs. Maclean gave a laugh, and lay back against the cushions rather tiredly. “He’s an exacting man, but I must say you appear to have borne up quite well, Clare. What are your future plans—another plantation?”

Steel fingers seemed to close over Clare’s heart. “Ross is going to Cape Town for a couple of years, then another plantation
... his own,” she said.

“How exciting for you.” Mrs. Maclean beamed. “You’ll lo
v
e the Cape. So civilised in comparison to Bula.”

“Yet I loved Bula,” Clare spoke nostalgically. “I shall never forget the place as long as I live.”

Ross had insisted that Clare accept the money for some new clothes, and Janet Maclean went with her on a shopping tour. Janet was a plain, serious-minded
girl who insisted that she wanted nothing more than
to
be a Staff Sister, and eventually a Matron.

“Marriage is overrated,” she said, after she and Clare had shopped and were sitting over tea and buttered scones in a remarkably English-looking teashop. “Look at some of the women out here and what they’ve turned into. They’re either tropic-wearied, or so tired of being bush-widows that they start affairs with other men. Do you know Patsy Harriman?”

Clare felt herself lose colour. “Yes—vaguely,” she said.

“She led her husband a real dance, then finally got a divorce. I expect she has some other man in mind for the role of second husband.” Janet lifted her cup and sipped at her tea. “She’s quite attractive, of course, in a slinky way. The kind men go for, the fools.”

“Has there been any talk about the—the other man?” Clare managed to ask quite casually.

“Well, they say he’s a planter.” Janet’s eyes met Clare’s across the table. “She used to hang round Ross quite a bit, before he went home on his last leave
...
and came back with a wife.”

Clare conjured up a smile. “Ross is attractive
to
women,” she said. “Haven’t you noticed?”

“Not particularly.” Janet sat looking at her most prim, her hair cut short but not shaped, no lipstick to brighten her mouth, and that turned-down look to her lips that indicated an inner discontent. Clare guessed that Janet was not particularly attractive to men, but .then she didn’t seem to put herself out to be so. She had plainly disapproved of some of the dresses Clare had bought, creamy floating things
... which Ross had always admired.

Clare wore one of them the evening of her farewell party. Ross had not yet put in an appearance, and after dancing with a shipping clerk to the bellow of the gramophone, Clare was seized upon by two women
in their early thirties. Both were bush-widows, the fair one unwillingly. She madly wanted to go into the bush to live with her husband—as Clare had—but Jimmy wouldn’t have it. He couldn’t have borne watching her fade beneath his eyes, she declared, staring at Clare. Blondes always did fade fast in the tropics. Was Clare’s silver streak
natural
? she suddenly asked.

“That’s a memento of life in the bush,” Clare informed her ironically.

“Glad to be going home?” asked the brunette, who had just whisked another drink off a passing tray.

“Well, I’m not sorry,” Clare said, rising with a smile to dance with Doctor Maclean.

At eleven o’clock a sandwich supper was served. Those who could not find chairs squatted on the floor
.
Clare was among them. Someone pushed her down on to a cushion, and her hand caught at a white jacket. She turned her head and looked up
.... and there was Ross.

“Mrs. Brennan should have a chair,” someone said.
“
After all, it’s her party.”

“I’m quite comfy,” Clare said, tho
u
gh inwardly she wasn’t now Ross had arrived. She was afraid all the time that they would betray themselves to other people, and these people so loved scandal.

Ross leaned forward and drew her to her feet. “Change places with me,” he said. “I was lucky enough to grab a chair.”

“You’ll be far less comfortable on the floor than I am,” she protested.

“Change places just for the sake of peace and quiet
.”
His voice was quiet but insistent.

Reluctantly she got up and took his chair, and he lowered himself to the cushion and edged his long legs into an inadequate
corner
of space.

With nothing much to take her attention, Clare became conscious of the brown head resting against her
knee. The blonde bush-widow had drawn him into conversation. “Jimmy wants me to go, really,” Clare heard her say. “But he says he loves me so much that he’s afraid of what the life will do to me—the heat and
flies, and things.”

“
He sounds an admirable lad,” Ross drawled.
“
Only a cad would expect a woman to live in the bush.”

“You’re not a cad, are you?” the girl asked.

“A brute,” he said dryly. “But I learned my lesson.”

“You mean you took your wife out with you? How awful of you, and how brave of her
!
” The girl sounded quite in awe.

Ross gave
a
laugh
...
one, Clare noticed, that was quite unamused. A houseboy came round with drinks, and Ross said, without glancing up at Clare: “I’ll have
a
whisky and water, honey.”

S
he lifted
a
tall glass from the tray and handed it down to him. As he took it, Clare caught the bush widow staring at her. Clare smiled, as if to say: “Yes, I’m the brave little woman who went with this brute into the bush.”

Someone said: “It’s nearly midnight.”

Mrs. Maclean rose from her chair, looking whacked out. “We’re winding things up at twelve,” she said. “Mrs. Brennan must have a good night’s sleep. Goodness knows what the accommodation will be like on the packet boat.”

Murmurs of one sort or another began to drift about Clare, and she said awkwardly: “I’d hate the party to break up on my account.”

“Oh, we’ll go on to the Richies’,” a woman laughed. “We’ll have Ross on our necks if we overtire you.” The guests began to drif
t away, most of them assuring C
lare that they would be at the boat in the morning to see her off. At a quarter past twelve Clare was in the bedroom—Janet had gone back off leave that day— and seated on the edge of one of the twin beds, feeling
weary but not sleepy. The lamp cast but a small light
,
the rest of the room was shadowy.

Clare was realising, and how it made her heart race, that the people at the party had put a very basic construction upon her departure for England. A smile distorted her mouth. They thought she was going to have a child.

As she stooped to unloosen her shoes, Ross came
i
nto the room and closed the door. “Doing a little mooning on your last night on West African soil?” he said with a touch of brusquene
s
s.

For an undecided moment he stood between the beds, and then with one of his lithe movements he sat down beside her. His palms rested on his knees, then he said abruptly: “You’ve put me in a bad spot.”

“How do you mean?” She looked at him, startled.

“
You’ve landed me with a conscience, Clare.”

“I’m sorry—” then she broke into a smile. “Oh, Ross, you’ll get over that. Remember what we said in England, that when the time came we’d part without regrets?”

“I remember a lot of things,” he growled. Then he tugged something out of his jacket pocket and dropped it into her lap. It was hand-made of metal and inlaid with semi-precious stones.

“For me?” she asked, fingering the workmanship. He nodded, and taking the box from her he turned up the lid and disclosed on velvet a thin, beaten-gold bracelet. He slipped it over her hand and secured it just above her wristbone. “Do you like it?” He held her forearm critically.

“
Yes, I like it, Ross.” She glanced up at him. “Is it my parting gift?”

He frowned slightly, then nodded. “Have you written your people when to expect you
?
”

“
Yes. Aunt Letty and Uncle Fred are meeting me.”

“What will you tell them
... about us?”

“I shall tell them the truth. They’ll understand.”

“They’ll condemn my selfishness,
C
lare, but it’s no more than I deserve.”

“You’re taking this too seriously.” She managed to smile at him. “I wouldn’t have believed it of you. In a few months the time we’ve spent together will seem like a long-drawn-out dream. We may never meet again.”

He spoke in edged tones: “Can you see us face to face in ten years’ time? I the same as now, plus a few more tropic-etched lines, you, blooming, with
a husband and a couple of children?”

His voice sharpened. “Will it be Carter, or Longworth?”

“Simon is marrying a girl he met in Norway,” she said, fingering the bracelet on her wrist, and tasting tears in her throat.

“So it will be Don Carter?”

“Why not Don?” Then she added recklessly: “He’s as good as your second choice, if not better.”

His fingers went to the knot of his tie; the stony expression of his face was uninformative, but his eyes had narrowed and his jaw was rigid.

“Goodnight, Clare.” He got to his feet. “I’ll call for you tomorrow to take you to the boat
.
”