HF - 05 - Sunset (57 page)

'Want you?' he said, and this time he proved too strong for her, brought her down on to his chest. 'Want you? I was angry today. Angry, and miserable. Because I thought I had lost you. But I did some thinking too, you know. And I realized my mistake. You cannot be changed. You cannot be otherwise than as you are. As you know. As you told me, that day in the cabin of
Margarita.
You came to me in defiance of every convention, because you were Meg Hilton. You could not come to me as anything else. And even should you live on the other side of the earth, you will always be Meg Hilton, and the first news of a crisis in the affairs of Hilltop will bring you charging back to its rescue.'

She allowed her body to relax, he
r cheek to rest on his, her
hair to fall across his face and neck. 'And what will you do then ?' she whispered.

'Come with you,' he said. 'I can do nothing else.'

She closed her teeth on his ear, gently. 'Will you marry me, Alan?'

'Meg
..;

'Will you marry the relict of a condemned murderer?' 'Meg
...'

'Will you marry the mistress of a black man, Alan?' 'Meg
...'

'Will you marry a Hilton, Alan?' He kissed her, held her close. 'I'll marry
you,
Meg. Whatever comes with you, I'll accept.'

Meg awoke to a greater feeling of well-being than she had ever known. Suddenly she was no longer tired, no longer tormented by doubt. No longer even conscious of her aches and pains. She was merely relaxed, and happy, only mildly concerned to find herself alone in the bed. As it was a single bed, she was the more comfortable for that, and she no longer had any fears that he might not come back. They had ridden their last hurdle together.

She sighed, and stretched, and rolled over, looked at the blinds, at the brilliant light behind.
It
must be very late, she thought drowsily. He had let her sleep and sleep and sleep, and she was the better for it.

Yet there were things to be done. She sat up, her brain teeming with memories, with ideas, with problems to be solved. But they were, now, this morning, no more than problems.

A knock, and the door swung inwards. 'Alan,' she cried. He was fully dressed in his sea-going gear. And he was smiling at her.

'I've lunch with me.'

She pulled the sheet to her neck, and the Negro waiter rolled the trolley in. 'Lunch?' she asked. 'My God. What time is it?'

'Just gone one,' Alan said, and tipped the waiter.

'One ? Good lord. Do you think I could have a bath ?'

'Oh, yes, Mistress Hilton. The bathroom is right at the end of the corridor. There ain' goin' be no one usin' that now.'

At the end of the corridor. Even Bladings' Hotel. 'Thank you,' she said.

The man closed the door, and Alan sat beside her, kissed her hair, her forehead, each eye, her nose, her mouth, her chin. 'I thought it best to let you sleep.'

'And I feel much better for it. But where have you been?'

'Down at the docks.'

'But
...'

'Life must go on, my darling.
Dreamer
must be loaded, or we'll never get to sea.' He kissed her again. 'Or have you changed your mind again ?'

She rolled away from him, got out of bed, stretched. 'I haven't changed my mind, Alan. I'll never change my mind again, I promise you. But there are one or two things to be done.'

'Of course.' He sat at the table, served cold chicken, poured champagne.

She sat opposite him, as she had done in her bedroom at Hilltop, naked. 'I have to find an attorney to manage Hilltop.'

'Courtney is expecting you at four. He has a short list made out. I had a word with him this morning. If you want someone from England, why at least he'll supply a chap to hold the fort until you can advertise properly.'

She sipped champagne. 'I like being looked after,' she said. 'It is the first time it has ever happened, except when I was a prisoner.' She bit her lip.

'Meg
...'

'Oh, no looking over shoulders for Meg Hilton. Time for that when I'm dying. But Alan
...
I must see Billy.' He frowned at her.

'I must. He is my husband. And
...
if I can help him, I must do so. You do understand that, Alan?'

The frown lasted for a moment longer, then disappeared in a smile. 'I'll speak to Courtney. Or better yet, you can do so yourself, when you see him.'

'I wonder he still wishes to speak with me at all.'

'He wishes to speak with you very much. You are due to appear in court tomorrow morning, you know.'

'Me?' she cried.

'To answer the charge of contempt. You
had
forgotten, hadn't you?' 'Oh, my lord.'

'I have it from Courtney that Sir Harry intends to administer a wigging and a fine. Nothing more.'

'Oh, but
...'
She stared at her plate, then tossed hair from her eyes. 'Well, then, I'll have to listen to him, won't I ?'

'That's my girl. Now eat up. We've a lot to do.'

She was surprisingly hungry. Alan had finished long before she had, and was sitting back smoking a cheroot and drinking the last of the champagne before she swallowed her last mouthful.

'That feels better. You'll come with me, to Courtney?'

He shook his head. 'He wants to see you alone. Who knows, maybe he wants to talk about Billy.' He smiled at her. 'Don't forget, if you do manage to get him reprieved, you'll have to arrange a divorce. Anyway, sweetheart, I must get on with it. I've arranged to change to a double room, so I'll meet you back here at six o'clock this afternoon.'

'Oh, but
...'
She bit her li
p again. Did she want to go back out to Hilltop ? Would it not be better never to see it again? 'All right,' she said. 'Six o'clock, in the lounge downstairs.'

He leaned across the table, kissed her on the forehead. 'You know, at last I feel we're almost married.'

'We've been married for nearly twenty years,' she said. 'It just took us that long to realize it.'

'Then I must set about getting you a ring.' He saw the shadow cross her face, and kissed her again. 'All in good time. See you at six.'

She leaned back in her chair and finished her champagne. Only problems, from now on. Even her appearance in court could be only a problem. But it would be discourteous to keep Courtney waiting; it was already past two.

She wrapped herself in her towel, cautiously opened the door, peered into the corridor. How quiet it was in the middle of a Jamaican afternoon. Hotheaded Englishmen like Alan might still be rushing around, but the major part of the city were either in bed or in the cool of their offices, waiting for the heat to begin to leave the sun. Even the faint breeze which filtered in the bedroom window was warm.

And the hotel itself was silent, save for the faintest of tinkles from downstairs where the kitchen staff were no doubt washing up the last of the lunch dishes. She stepped outside, hurried along the corridor, reached the safety of the bathroom. She soaked in the tub, dreamily resting her head on the bath itself, playing with the taps with her toes. She did not wish to think coherently, so instead she daydreamed, of herself and Alan on the deck of
Dreamer,
running north east before a westerly wind, three weeks at sea with not another white person to speak to, with just themselves.

The notes of the cathedral clock rumbled through the afternoon, reverberating in the bathroom. Three o'clock.

'Oh, lord,' she muttered, and leapt from the tub to towel herself and hurry along the still deserted corridor to her bedroom. She'd never make it. She dropped her shift over her shoulders, buttoned her blouse, walking to and fro in her anxiety, stepped into her skirt and fastened her waistband, used Alan's hairbrush to drag some order into her hair, gazed at herself in the mirror and attempted to smooth her eyebrows, pulled on her bolero and stood back to admire the whole; looked around the room in an attempt to remember if she had brought a handbag, turned to the door, and found herself unable to move, as the room, the hotel, the afternoon, suddenly filled with a long, high yet soft sound, as of the strongest hurricane wind the world had ever known sweeping across Jamaica.

Meg turned to face the window, expecting to be blown across the room by the force of the wind. But the breeze if anything had died; the curtains hardly moved. Immediately outside her window there was a breadfruit tree, and this too was quiet. But as she watched the sound of the airless wind was replaced by something far more terrible, a growing, searching rumble, a swelling paean of noise as if every coach in the world was being driven at breakneck speed down the mountains to converge upon the city.

In that instant Meg knew what was happening. A million memories, locked in the recesses of her mind, of the stories told her by Percy, of that night in the mountains when the fowl cock had escaped her grasp, careered through her brain and seemed to galvanize her muscles into action. She turned again, and threw herself across the room, even as the floor beneath her feet began to move.

She seized the door handle, twisted it, and gasped in sheer terror as the door would not come to her. She clung to the handle and looked up, and watched the chandelier swaying as if a giant had kicked it, before suddenly plunging down. She screamed, her voice lost in the unearthly roar which was rising all around her, deafening her. Her head flopped back and she watched the chandelier falling past her, tensed her muscles for the resulting spray of glass splinters which would tear her back to shreds, and turned her head in horror to watch the entire floor drop away so that the cascading glass fell straight through into the room below.

She fou
nd herself hanging, her hands sli
pped from the door handle, and she lodged them with frantic endeavour upon the towel rail secured to the wall by the door, gasping for breath, her legs kicking desperately while she stared at the washstand, slowly inclining towards her, the ewer starting to tilt, so that water splashed on her face, the slop bucket striking her on the shoulder as it wandered down the sloping floor before also dropping into the room below.

Was the hotel still shaking? Still collapsing? The noise still rumbled through her ears, and she knew she could not hang where she was much longer. She looked down. There would be a bed down there. But she almost choked with horror as she saw that that floor too, had disappeared, and plummeted through into the next, and down there were people, or there had been people. Screams and wails came up to her, sounds of the purest terror.

To which she would belong if she fell through there. The walls of the bedroom still stood, even if the roof was sagging where the chandelier had broken away. And only the joist in the centre of the room seemed to have gone as yet, so that although the floor under the bed had given way to send it and anything else loose hurtling downwards, the boards still clung to the edges, and the jalousies still flapped aimlessly at the windows, and beyond the jalousies there was still the breadfruit tree, the easiest of all trees to climb.

She gasped with endeavour, shook her head in an attempt to end the terrifying noise in her ears, without success, tensed her muscles and with a supreme effort dragged herself out of the pit, face pressed against the trembling walls, body racked with great gasps, fingers burning, scrabbling at the sloping wood with her bare toes and only then realizing that she had not put on her boots.

Or her stockings. Oh, thank God she had not put on her boots or her stockings. Her toes had some ability to grasp the wood, to force her upright. She reached her feet, still pressed against the wall, and the entire building shook again, bringing another rush of terror into her throat, but at the same time impelling her once again into action.

She slid along the wall, breast and belly and thigh clinging to the paper, turned as the floor seemed to steady, and threw herself at the window, even as the hotel gave another horrifying shake. She drew herself forward again, aching fingers eating into the wood of the sill, reached her knees, and then got astride the window, skirts pulled high. Still the noise ballooned in her ears. She, had no idea how long it was since the first shock, but she knew it could only have been a matter of a few seconds.

The branches were just beyond her fingertips. But she had no thought of hesitating. With a lunge and an involuntary gasp she threw herself out. The branches hit her in the face and one poked her in the stomach. She fell through another branch,
the crack echoing in her ears li
ke the report of a pistol, and then was struck a violent blow on the chest as she landed on something stronger. Instinctively her arms went round the saving wood, and her legs came up as well, kicking back her skirt to wrap themselves ankle round ankle, hugging the wood to her body and against her face, panting, looking back up at the walls and roof of the hotel, at curtains fluttering through the open windows, at bursting electricity cables cascading sparks into the air, and then seeming to contract with horror, from her toes to her brain, as the whole wall suddenly seemed to tilt above her. . 'Oh, God!' she screamed. 'Oh, God!'

There was a noise li
ke the first note of the Last Trump, and the collapsing hotel plunged into the tree, striking first of all the top branches, cutting through them as if they were grass, then breaking up itself as it struck the stouter wood farther down. Slabs of timber crashed onto Meg's fingers, forced them from their hold. For a moment she was aware of hanging upside down, because her ankles, miraculously, were still locked together. And now she was choking because of the swirling dust which seemed to rise and descend at the same moment, turning the mid afternoon into darkness, filling her eyes and her nostrils and her mouth, making her choke and gasp and retch at the same time.