And No Regrets (3 page)

When darkness fell they ceased work. The still African night pressed in, sensuous and gripping. The beds were made up with fresh linen from the trunks, and then they ate their first real meal together in this strange abode. Tinned fish and peas, wheaten biscuits, and tinned fruit cocktail. Clare was hungry and she did credit to the meal. Ross watched her moodily over the rim of his mug.

“You’re taking all this well,” he said. “Nine women out of ten would have fumed and wept.”

“I told you I’m not the weeping sort,” she smiled, feeling rather proud of herself.

“A regular Girl Guide, eh?” he gibed. “Lucky
I
found myself such a paragon of the virtues—tears would have put the lid on things
!
”

After dinner, Clare was at the trunks again, sorting and examining clothes that
had lain away for nine weeks. In the same room Ross spoke to the native labour foreman. In his pidgin English the man explained that Mr. Durrant, who was to have taken over the managing of the plantation until the big boss-man should return, had fallen sick and gone back to Hausa country to his own plantation.

“Has the boat been bringing your wages?” Ross demanded.

The man nodded. Yes, the wages had arrived for him and the other men.

“Then why the devil haven’t you kept them working?” Ross wanted to know, his black brows drawn in a ste
rn
line above his flashing grey eyes.

They had been working, the foreman hastened to explain, but there were not so many now. Some men and their women had gone back with Mr. Durrant
... but the men would work hard, now the big boss-man was back.

“You can bet your gravy they will,” Ross crisped. “I’ll be with you at sunrise. Now cut along, man.”

The foreman, grinning his relief at having got off so lightly, nodded at Clare and hurried out of the house. “They’re like big kids,” Ross grunted, shoving a cigarette into his
mouth and snapping a match at the tip.
“
You’ve got to be around all the time, or they just play about and everything goes to
pot—
as you can see!”

“Sit down and smoke your cigarette,” she advised.

“It’s that guy Durrant who gets my goat,” he fumed, prowling the room. “If he’s taken half my labour, then he’ll have to hand them back pretty dam quick—I’ll lay he only picked the skilled ones! Isn’t this a grand
world we’re living in, Clare? Every man for himself—” There he broke off and shrugged, as if recalling that his own philosophy was not much better than Durrant’s.

Clare, her sorting finished, sat on her trunk and decided that one of the first things she would do for this somewhat uninhabitable home of hers was make cushions for the chairs. She had a long ruby red evening skirt which she wouldn’t be likely to wear out here, and ruby cushions would brighten up the place no end. She smiled to herself and stretched her aching limbs.

“We’ll decide on houseboys tomorrow,” Ross remarked, as though he had been sharing her thoughts about making the place more like home. “My old ones were good.”

Clare nodded and scratched a pink bite on her arm. She badly wanted a bath. There was an outhouse with
a
huge tin bath, but the boys had not got around to cleaning it yet. A bowlful of water would help allay the irritation of her skin, and languidly she slapped at
a
mosquito on her face and missed. Somehow she got to her feet.

“Tell me if there’s anything you need,” he said quietly. “We’re starting with a frightful handicap, but we’ll get through. Go to bed now.”

She nodded and picked up a folded pile of clothes.

“Take the larger room, Clare,” he added, at the table now, his head bent over papers he had taken out of his suitcase. “The roof and windows are in better shape on that side of the house. Goodnight honey.”

“Goodnight, Ross.”

Alone in her room, she undressed tiredly, her eyes fixed on the lamplit wall where
a
lizard clung like
a
small green ornament, motionless but for the rapid beating of its throat. So did her heart beat, with the exhaustion of travel and the tension of wound up emotions. She slipped at last under the pale green netting over her bed, and was lulled to sleep by the
strange, primitive night noises all around this House in the bush.

The next few days revealed further ravages. The small lorry which Ross had bought new on his first trip and had relied on for travelling the red beaten-earth tracks was now unusable. The shed in which it had been stored was overgrown with liana, whose
v
ines had crept through the widening crevices and festooned the lorry itself. The engine had to be taken out and removed to the house for repair.

A recent tornado had taken the roof from the sawmill. The blades were rusted and caked with red earth, so here was another job of dismantling, cleaning, greasing, and reassembling.

The drying and sorting sheds were in a ramshackle state, the sacks rotting in the open air, and the low timber-rollers overgrown with vegetation. Under Ross’s iron hand the natives were set furiously to work, wearing wide-brimmed hats to keep off the rain. Yet they whistled and sang and quarrelled cheerfully as they worked, as though Ross’s vigorous bossing about invested them with new purpose and will. Clare heard them as she bustled about in the house.

Two of the original houseboys had gone off with Durrant, but one remained, an agile boy called Johnny. The names of the two new hoys being unpronounceable, Clare named them Mark and Luke. Mark was the chief boy and looked after the house generally, while Luke did most of the cooking. It was also the duty of the three to dig and replant the compound with vegetables. Their wives worked alongside them in the compound in order to earn an extra ration of rice, and Clare often stood in the open door of the house watching the three women hoe between the young trees and rows of sprouting green-stuff. The straight length of cloth which they wore tigh
tl
y bound under the armpits impeded their movements. Looking at them, Clare would marvel at their impassive servility, wanting but not yet daring to go down and talk to them.

They lived in a nearby village, whose circular palm-thatch roofs showed through the palms and plantains that fringed the compound. It was rather exciting, Clare thought, listening to the drums on feast nights and visualising the native dancing. Ross did not encourage her to go down there very often; he was worried in case she should pick up some kind of infection during these early days. Later on, he said, she would become hardened to the climate and the various germs flitting about in the hot, steamy air.

Close to the house she laid out a small garden of her own, in which she intended to grow a few flowers. With this idea in mind she had brought packets of seed from England and was planting them when Ross came striding up the path just before lunch one day.

He paused to look down at her. She smiled up at him through a tendril of dark hair, but instead of returning her smile he said crisply: “Don’t overdo the gardening in this heat, I don’t want you laid up. And do wear a hat, my good girl, when you’re out in the sun.”

“That dam topi makes me feel like a female Livingstone,” she grimaced.

“If you picked up a real dose of fever, all that black-silk hair would get cropped off,” he warned.

“I would look a picture,” she laughed.

He gazed down at her reflectively. “You wouldn’t look too bad, rather like a pretty boy with freckles.”

She ran a finger down her cheek and left a smear of red earth. “I’ll have to try lemon juice,” she said lightly, rising to her feet and letting his hard warm fingers close over hers in assistance. They entered the house together, cool and shady after the glare of the garden.

He glanced round him as he tossed off
his own topi, then sat down on the lounger to unlace his riding boots. Clare saw that his shirt was dark with sweat, and with her heart beating unevenly up near her throat, she dropped on to her knees in front of him and helped pull off the heavy boots.

“Cushions and coddling,” he said derisively. “What next
,
I wonder?”

“You’ve been hard at it since sunrise,” she said, sitting back on her heels and flushing slightly. “How’s the work going, big boss? Are you managing to straighten out some of the muddle and confusion?”

“Bit by bit.” He lay back, pillowing his dark head against one of her ruby silk cushions. “Master wants
a
drink,” he coaxed.

She went to the sideboard and poured him one. Lunch was all but ready, but he usually had a long cool drink before sitting down to his meal. “There.” She planted the glass in his brow
n
hand. “Now I’ll go and help Luke dish up.”

It was quite an appetising meal of tinned vegetable salad and tinned, sliced bacon, followed by an orange dessert. Clare had washed and put on a fresh cream dress, and she wasn’t unaware of Ross’s satisfaction with the meal and his glance across the table at her feminine freshness. Love her he might not, but she knew he appreciated her company. She tried never to grumble when a batch of bread got spoiled in the kitchen, or when the heat grew unbearably humid. Often there were ‘things’ in the tin bath, and the water was rusty. The water they drank had to be disinfected, and the new wire screening over the doors and windows didn’t keep out the smaller flies.

But Clare was curiously happy. She was with Ross, and the various tortures of living here in the wilds were sweet ones.

“I’ll get you a grass hat,” he said suddenly. ‘Your carelessness worries me.”

Her breath came faster, as it always did when he showed concern for her welfare.

“I see you’re wearing sandals with no stockings again,” he added as they went to chairs to drink their coffee.

“But stockings have to be kept up somehow,” she pleaded, “and I can’t bear anything tight round my waist in this heat.”

“You could wear knee-length socks as I do.”

“Don’t make me, Ross. I’d look frightful.”

“Who’s to see you? I never knew anyone with so much backchat as you, my girl.”

She laughed, at her ease again. “When I no longer backchat, you’ll know that my spirit is irreparably broken.”

“There are no signs of that yet, eh?” His grey eyes moved over her smiling face as he sat half-turned to her on the cane chair near the table, the small one which he used for a desk. “You’re still looking bright, though a bit more freckled.”

“When women haven’t got cake, they’re very good at making do with bread,” she quipped.

He grinned and shook his head. “I’ll say one thing about you, Clare, that I’ll never take back, no matter how the situation develops between us in the next months. You’ve got plenty of backbone.”

“Thank you, big boss-man.” She gave him a mocking curtsy. “If I hadn’t had that, you would never have asked me to come out here with you.”

“True, very true.” He sat tapping his pen on the writing table. “Are you missing England and your folks?”

“I—didn’t like the way they took—things.” She gazed down into her empty coffee cup. “Women are intuitive. I think Aunt Letty guessed that we were marrying without—being in love.”

“She guessed, all right,” he agreed coolly. “But she’d have bunged you on to that solemn Simon without hesitation just because he resided in Ridgley.
Safety before ecstasy, that’s the motto of women like your aunt.”

“Most women have a driving need to find security,” Clare rejoined, “and ecstasy, as I’m sure you will agree, is but a moment of time
.”

His grey eyes narrowed as she said that. “Was Simon less than solemn, after all?” he drawled.

“
Simon’s a writer and he used to talk to me about life.” She tilted her chin and hoped, for some absurd reason, that she looked sophisticated.
“Each human being has his or her own complexities, and fundamental needs and drives. Aunt Letty confused hers with mine—if I had wanted safety, Ross, I should not have chosen to come to the wilds with a man without a heart.”

“You’d have married Simon Longworth, eh?” He gave a chuckle. “Lovers are not friends, as someone once said.”

“Are you relieved that I’ve never had a love affair?” she asked lightly.

“To have brought here a woman with the needs of experience would have been impossible on
our
terms,” he pointed out.

“Perhaps such a woman would have been better for
you,
in the long run.” Clare made herself meet his eyes, and the strangeness of this conversation, the elements of intimacy and danger in it, had quickened her pulse-rate. They had never talked like this before— but then they had never been so alone before.

His glance flicked over her sun-honeyed skin. His masculinity reached out to touch her, though he didn’t move. Difficult, she sensed, for so emphatic a character to find happiness, and he was determined not to chance a lifetime of one woman by taking more than her company during their sojourn here.