The House on Flamingo Cay (7 page)

“That was before I found out that he was just as—big a sham as we are,” Sara said bleakly. “Now suppose you get on with your schemes for landing poor— Connie, and leave me out of the marriage market.”

CHAPTER THREE

ANGELA’S mouth tightened and she crushed out her cigarette with a couple of angry jabs. Without speaking, she got up and began to collect her things for the fishing expedition.

It was not until she was ready to rejoin the Stuyvesants that she said, “If you aren’t going down for a hairdo, what are you going to do this morning?”

“I expect I’ll find something to occupy me,” Sara said stiffly. She knew what would happen if she told Angela that she was meeting Peter Laszlo. They would have a full-scale row.

After her sister had left, she put on her swim-suit and cotton shorts and a skirt, packed her beach-bag and went down to the waiting-room. There, after scrunching up several sheets of the hotel’s expensive cream writing paper because of false starts, she finally composed a note to Stephen Rand. In polite apology, but giving no explanation, she informed him that she would not now be able to drive to the pine barren with him.

The receptionist smiled at her as she approached the desk. “Good morning, Miss Gordon. Can I help you?”

“Yes. I wonder if you could have this delivered to Mr. Rand, please.”

“Why, certainly—but he’s in the hotel now if you’d like a word with him.”

“Oh, no, thank you,” Sara said hastily. “It isn’t anything important.”

Much to her relief, Peter was prompt in arriving. Waiting on the terrace, she had been afraid that Stephen might spot her and come out. It would have been difficult to fabricate an acceptable excuse for breaking their date.

Peter’s speedboat was a sleek powerful craft with
Watersprite
lettered in black on the silver bows. A lanky West Indian in a jauntily-angled yachting cap was at the wheel and, beside him, beaming shyly at Sara as Peter handed her aboard, sat the boy who paid out the tow-lines.

As they left the harbor and headed along the coast, Peter showed Sara the skis. They were much like the blades used for snow-skiing, he explained, but instead of being attached to heavy boots, a pair of loose rubber mules fitted over the feet so that they could be easily kicked away if a skier overbalanced.

“If you do take a fall, the main thing to remember is to let go of the tow-line. You’ll land with a mighty splash, but you certainly won’t get hurt, and we’ll soon fish you out,” he said cheerfully. “You don’t have to worry about the skis. They may get swept about a bit, but we can soon retrieve them for you. The reason I mention the tow-line is that we did have one pupil who hung on to her line after she’d fallen and took a bit of buffeting. She wasn’t pulled very far because George here could see what had happened but she was very indignant with us.”

“How fast does the boat go when she’s towing a skier?” Sara asked.

“About thirty knots for adults. Of course with children, who are lighter and on smaller blades, one can tow more slowly.”

“Thirty knots! That sounds positively jet-propelled. I’m beginning to feel rather nervous,” Sara said wryly.

He grinned at her. “Don’t worry. I’ll be right beside you, and once you’ve got the knack, you’ll want to do it all day.”

By this time they had reached the skiing ground, and after they had swum round the boat for a few minutes to limber up, the boat boy handed out their skis.

“Now, are you ready?” Peter asked, when they were both in their starting positions.

Sara nodded and tightened her grip on the wooden handle of the tow-line. They were in fairly deep water and she was doing her best to keep in a sort of sitting position with the curved tips of her skis breaking the surface in front of her and pointing slightly inwards.

“Good! Now, knees together, remember, and off we go!”

In spite of her prowess at swimming, Sara could not help feeling a slight tremor of apprehension as the boat began to move away and the boy paid out their lines. Her fingers clenched round the bar and her toes dug into the ski-shoes as she braced herself for the take-off. And then, so suddenly that she gave an involuntary yelp, the line snapped taut, the speedboat roared away and she found herself hurtling forward in a blinding cascade of foam.

Afterwards, Peter told her she had looked so comically astounded at finding herself actually riding the water that he had almost lost his own footing through laughing at her expression. But, even if he had, Sara would not have noticed. Once safely upright on her skis,
she was aware of nothing but the sheer physical excitement of racing over the sea on wings of glittering spray. It was the most exhilarating experience of her life: the salt wind tangling her hair, the spindrift tossing in the sunlight, and the skis crackling beneath her as they cut through the churning wake of the powerful speedboat.

“Well? Did you enjoy it?” Peter asked, at the end of that first run when the boat had finally slowed and they were treading water together.

Sara shook her head in a gesture of wordless pleasure. Her cheeks were glowing and her eyes sparkled. “Oh, Peter—it was wonderful! I could have gone on for ever!” she exclaimed breathlessly. “And it’s so much easier than it looks, too!”

He laughed. “Good! I thought you would like it. Come on, let’s try again.”

After several more runs, Sara was sufficiently confident to try following Peter’s demonstration of how to ride out across the speedboat’s wake. This was even more exciting as, once across the heaving billow of water to the boat’s quarter, her speed suddenly accelerated.

The morning seemed to pass very quickly and she felt a pang of disappointment when, after her first attempt at holding the bar with one hand and using the other arm for extra balance, Peter discovered that it had gone noon and was time to return to the hotel.

“Oh dear, is it really?” she said regretfully. “Still, I’ve had a lovely time, Peter. Thank you very much.”

He helped her back into the boat. “It’s been a pleasure for me. You have a natural flair, you know. Your sense of balance is excellent and you aren’t afraid of capsizing like so many people. With a little more practice, you’ll be ready to try some aquabatics.”

Sara flushed with pleasure at his praise. “Do you think so? I’d certainly like to try them,” she said eagerly.

“It is a pity you are not free this afternoon. My pupils have cancelled their lesson and we could have started a little jumping,” he said regretfully.

“I am free, as it happens,” Sara said carefully.

“You are not going to the forest with Rand?”

She shook her head. “There was a change of plan,” she said lightly. Then, to steer away from that subject: “But I can’t let you teach me for nothing, Peter. It wouldn’t be right.”

“But certainly I will teach you for nothing,” he said firmly. “One does not make a fee for one’s friends, and I shall enjoy it. Now, you are ready for another run?”

Soon it was one o’clock.

“If I had known you could stay, I would have brought a lunch basket,” Peter said. “But perhaps it is better that we go to my bungalow for lunch. There we can rest in the garden for a little while and you will not get too sunburnt.”

His bungalow was one of the many little white holiday villas dotted along the coastline, and as they walked up the beach to his garden, Sara knew that her sister would be horrified if she could see her. Perhaps, in London, she would also have been rather doubtful about lunching alone with a man who was almost a stranger. But somehow, here, in the holiday atmosphere of Bahamas, to cling primly to every convention seemed as silly as carrying round a sweater and mackintosh in case the weather changed. And besides she had an intuitive conviction that—whatever Angela might suspect of him—Peter was perfectly trustworthy.

The interior of the bungalow seemed to confirm this instinct. There was nothing of the wolf’s lair about it: no well-stocked cocktail cabinet, no cushioned divan. It had what she guessed to be the standard furniture of most of the rented villas, some cane armchairs, a coffee table, palmetto-leaf mats and a jardiniere filled with pot-plants. But the personal touches were masculine and functional, mostly pieces of skiing and diving gear, a record-player, too many books and magazines to fit on the shelves and a couple of underwater spring guns clipped to the wall.

Peter apologized for the clutter, and showed her through to the bathroom, which evidently doubled as a darkroom. There was a line of color prints drying
above the bath and some developing pans on the window ledge.

Sara washed her face and hands, applied some lipstick and combed out her damp salty hair. She returned to the living room a few moments before Peter came in with a jug of iced fruit punch.

“It’s my butler’s day off, so I’m afraid I can’t offer you a very epicurean meal,” he said, filling their glasses.

“Can I do anything to help?”

He shook his head, then smiled. “Does my bachelor disorder arouse your domestic instincts?” he asked teasingly.

Sara laughed. “Not at all. Anyway, I wouldn’t call this disordered. It’s just comfortable and lived-in.”

“But I would think you are naturally fastidious—always neat and well arranged,” he remarked.

“If I am, it’s more from necessity than choice. Our flat was so cramped, one simply had to be tidy or get knee-deep in junk. Our entire living space wasn’t much bigger than this room,” she added with unthinking candour.

After lunch, Peter carried the coffee-tray on to the paved verandah that overlooked the beach and they relaxed in low-slung canvas loungers.

“This afternoon I shall take some pictures of you. Then, when you return to England, they will remind you of this holiday,” he said presently.

Sara watched him light a thin dark cheroot and flip the match into the tray. “What about you? Are you going to settle here for life?” she asked curiously.

Peter shrugged. “Who knows? I make no plans now. I like it here and I can make a good living, so the future must care for itself. I find life goes more smoothly if one does not have—what is that English expression?—a hostage to fortune?”

“That usually means a wife and children,” Sara remarked. “Are you a confirmed bachelor?”

“I don’t think so,” he said casually. “It would be more accurate to say that I have nothing to offer a woman, so marriage does not occur to me.” He gave her a rather quizzical grin. “You are still young enough to have all the illusions, so perhaps I should not express my views to you, but there are very few men who genuinely wish for marriage, you know. It is a feminine contrivance which men have been obliged to accept. It does have some conveniences but is not at all essential to them in the way that it is for a woman.”

Sara digested this for a moment. “Is love a feminine contrivance too?” she asked, after a pause.

“Ah, now that is another subject,” he replied swiftly. “But I was expecting you to counter me like that. You see, for women, love and marriage are indissociable. They must always go together. But for a man this is not so at all. He does not think of love in terms of weddings and honeymoons and a whole lifetime together. These ideas have been imposed on him by women.”

“He seems to have accepted them quite readily,” Sara returned, with a touch of dryness.

“But certainly—because it is expedient to do so. As you said before lunch, you are tidy from necessity rather than inclination, and this applies to so many things. We accept the laws of our governments or the changing of the seasons because both are necessary or inevitable. But this is not to say that we desire or enjoy our circumstances.”

Sara shook her head. “I don’t agree,” she said firmly. “I think most men want love—and marriage with it! They’re not a different species. They need attention and companionship and a home just as much as girls do. And, even if the gloss does wear off a bit after a time, I’m quite sure that a reasonably good marriage is much more satisfactory than a series of casual love affairs.”

“So at least you are a realist to that extent? You don’t expect the romance to last for ever,” he said smilingly.

Sara hesitated. “Oh, but I do,” she said gravely. “I know that it very often doesn’t, of course, but I certainly don’t think it’s inevitable. Why shouldn’t people love each other all their lives?”

He spread his hands. “No strong emotions can last indefinitely. The more passionate they are, the more quickly they burn themselves out.”

“Infatuations may—I don’t think real love does,” Sara said equably.

His mouth twitched. “So you have set your heart on a
grand passion,
a love that will never fade, eh?” he said teasingly.

“I wouldn’t say that exactly.” She was blushing slightly. “I naturally hope to be happy.”

“Ah, but these very romantic relationships are frequently most unhappy,” Peter said solemnly. “To lose one’s heart can be an extremely painful experience.”

“How do you know if it’s never happened to you?” she asked, smiling.

“Because I have observed the sufferings of those who are in that condition, and they are most pathetic.”

“Well, I should think it’s better to suffer than never feel any emotions,” Sara said reflectively. “And anyway, one doesn’t choose to fall in love. It just happens, and there’s nothing one can do about it.”

She had been thinking of Angela as she spoke, but Peter said, “You have experienced this unfortunate predicament?”

Sara shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Yet something makes you unhappy,” he said quietly.

Her eyes widened. “Unhappy?” she repeated, in surprise.

“I think so. Unhappy—or worried? There are often moments when your thoughts are somewhere else and there is a frown here.” He leaned across and touched her forehead with one finger. “I thought perhaps you were missing some boy in England,” he added gently.