Home is Goodbye (7 page)

‘Oh, good lord, I have dozens of second cousins! So you can see why you have to be worthy of your hire, Nurse Wayne,’ he said sternly. ‘Fifteen hundred a year takes a
lot of explaining!’

‘Fifteen hundred pounds!’ Sara repeated. ‘But I’ve never been paid anything like that in my life!’

The size of the figure momentarily stunned her, for she knew that on top of that the entire Wayne family was receiving free board and lodging from the estate.

‘It’s the customary figure for an experienced, fully qualified sister around here,’ he said, in a voice that brooked no argument. ‘You can be worth every penny of that to us in preventive medicine too. Karim Cengupta has all sorts of schemes in that direction.’

‘I should think so!’ Sara agreed in shocked tones. ‘You would need to get something for all that money!’

He grinned at her, amused by her thrifty reaction.

‘It’s not so very much when you’re dealing in hundreds of thousands,’ he said dryly. But to Sara it was more money than she had ever dreamed of possessing and she sat in silence mentally deciding how she was going to spend such vast wealth.

She was still half dreaming, half sleeping, when the little aeroplane began to lose height and Matt prepared for the touch-down. She struggled up in her seat so that she could press her nose to the window, but there was nothing very much to see. Then suddenly, beneath her, she saw the two lines of flares that had been lit for their arrival.

Matt spoke quickly into his microphone and they went down a
little
more quickly, causing Sara to swallow hard to keep her stomach from rising. It was very like the sensation of going down in a fast lift and she clutched the edge of her seat and shut her eyes.

But then, before she was ready for it, she felt the wheels jolt against the ground beneath them, and she knew that they had safely landed. They taxied forward towards an
African waving two torches and came to a stop just beside him. He hurried forward and opened the door on Matt’s side.

‘
Jambo
,
bwana!
Jambo
,
memsahib!’ he beamed, and went on in a stream of Swahili that Sara had no hope of understanding.

‘We must hurry!’ Matt told her. ‘The child’s coming! Damn and blast Joe! Why couldn’t he have sent her down to the coast as it was planned!’

Sara picked up her bag and straightened her shoulders, allowing her professional self to take control. Often, in London, she had done this very same thing when she had been afraid or doubtful of her own skill, and it had never failed her. She became a machine
—
a well-trained machine capable of human effort, but not subject to human emotions and such things as fatigue.

Then she was ready, and without another word, she followed Matt into the house.

Perhaps because of the much higher altitude there were still some embers burning of a wood fire in the grate and they both automatically gravitated towards it.

‘I wonder where Joe’s got to,’ Matt said, almost as though this was a normal social call. ‘He might at least be here to offer us a drink!’

Sara shivered. It was ridiculous, she thought, to feel cold when she had braved many, and far worse, temperatures at home, but the cold clung around her, cooling her flesh into goose-pimples.

‘I’ll get the boy to make up the fire anyway,’ Matt decided firmly, ‘and while he’s about it, I’ll find out where everyone is.’

He went out of the room and Sara was left alone. There was complete silence in the house and she was unexpectedly nervous, listening intently for the slightest
sound.

An African came in and bent over the fireplace. Sara was horrified to see that he had brought in a live coal in his bare hands and was busy blowing life into it, before he added other scraps of wood to make the fire blaze.

‘Your hands!’ she exclaimed, and seized them to make sure that he was unhurt.

The African laughed, a great belly laugh that released all the tension in the room. He picked up the coal and showed her that it was quite cool to the touch, not hotter than the soup plates her mother handled at home, even though she, with her more tender skin, usually found it wiser to use a cloth.

‘
Hapana moto
,
memsahib,’ he grinned. ‘Not hot!’

Sara smiled back at him and he went back to his ministrations to the fire.

Upstairs she could hear Matt walking about and smiled to herself. This was a most unexpected family, she thought. Nothing was ever quite as she expected it to be. Certainly she had not expected to be flown hundreds of miles to find that her patient had disappeared and that there was nothing for her to do!

Matt came hurrying down the stairs again and she looked up expectantly as he came in.

‘Have you found them?’ she asked.

He nodded and reached out for her bag.

‘She’s in the guest-house outside. It seems she was in the garden when the pains began. Joe’s out there with her.’

He led the way out into the garden and down a long leafy path towards a mud and wattle building in the distance. There was
a fragrant scent of flowers, mixed with moonlight and night air, and Sara wished that she could linger and enjoy this exotic peace. She had missed gardens more than she knew, in spite of the fact that her time in Tanzania could be measured in hours more easily than in days. It took a lot of effort to submerge that self beneath the mantle of her profession, but she managed it well and there was nothing to show how much she longed to be out in the night when they reached the guest house.

Matt rapped on the door and walked in without waiting for an answer.

‘Joe! It’s Matt! I’ve brought the nurse!’

A tough, ugly man came out of the inner room and grinned at the two of them.

‘I’d just about given you up,’ he said. ‘Marjorie’s in pretty bad shape.
C
ould you come at once, nurse?’

Sara followed him quickly into the bedroom,
taking
o
ff
her cape as she did so. Matt followed with her bag, which he put down on a chair beside the bed. She made a signal for the two men to leave her, and leant over the bed.

‘Hullo, Mrs. Halifax,’ she said gently. ‘My name’s Sara, I’m the nurse your husband sent for.’

Marjorie Halifax gave her a fleeting smile.

‘I should have gone down to the coast,’ she said. ‘If I’d known that it was going to be anything like this, nothing would have kept me here!’ She moaned and gripped Sara’s hand until it hurt.

‘You’ll be fine now!’ Sara said calmly. This was familiar ground to her. She could almost imagine herself back in the Maternity Ward in London, with the rain drizzling down outside, and the occasional screech of a London bus as it drew up at the stop just outside.

It was not an easy birth, but it was quite normal. In between the pains Marjorie told her about her life miles from anywhere, and Sara told her about her previous life in England.

‘
You were a fool not to stay there!’ Marjorie told her. ‘If Joe wasn’t out here, I’d go back tomorrow!’ She muttered on about the labour problems and the difficulties of retaining her British way of life, tired out by the incessant demands she had made on herself to keep her dislike of the country from her husband.

Sara tried to comfort her, but at that moment nobody could. She wanted the rain and the green fields; the well-ploughed landscape of England and the centuries-old villages, buried deep in their traditions.

‘We’re due for leave,’ she confided. ‘Six months of heaven in England! Can you imagine it?’ And then with a touch of humour: ‘After four I shall be screaming to come back again, what with the people and the lack of servants! That’s the trouble with us settlers, we’re happy nowhere!’

But some people were. Some settlers loved the land they had to
rn
out of the wilderness with a devotion that nothing could compete with. Loving each ugly, spiky plant because it grew on their land. Settlers like Matt for instance!

Sara brought her thoughts back to Marjorie and the coming child. Another Halifax, she thought. Would this one work for, or live off the estate? She hoped urgently that it would be the former. The new generation would be badly needed to carry on the tradition on the land.

Sara was so tired that she was almost asleep on her feet when the baby finally made his appearance. He was a little smaller than the average new-born infant, but he was perfect in every detail. Sara gave him to his mother and went to tell the two men still waiting outside.

Joe Halifax broke down completely when he heard that his wife was waiting to see him. His great shoulders
hunched up, he cried as he had not done since he was a child. Matt slapped him on the back and congratulated him, and everyone was very emotional until Halifax junior made himself felt by screaming at the top of his minute lungs.

‘That sounds like a Halifax,’ Matt said critically. ‘You’d better go and show him you’re still master in the house!’

Joe smiled bashfully and went into the bedroom.

‘Is Marjorie okay?’ Matt asked.

Sara nodded and before she could stop herself yawned.

‘She’s fine! All she wants is Joe to tell her how wonderful she is and she’ll be fully restored
—
after she’s slept!’

Matt grinned. ‘And you?
Could
you face the flight back in an hour or so?’

Sara looked as shocked as she felt. ‘And leave them to it?’ she demanded. ‘Certainly not! I’m going to bed and then I’m going to see to Master Halifax until Marjorie’s nannie arrives!’

Matt made a face. ‘I’ve got to get back today,’ he said. ‘Where is this nannie?’

‘At Tanga.’

She yawned again and swayed slight
l
y on her feet. ‘You’d certainly better get to bed,’ Matt agreed. ‘You’d better use the other bedroom here because you don’t look as though you could walk as far as the house.’

Sara walked sleepily to the door he pointed out.

‘Why do they put guests in the garden?’ she asked in muffled tones. ‘Isn’t there room in the house?’

Matt pushed her through the door.

‘Just an old East African custom,’ he answered. ‘Ask me again when you can take in the answer!’

Sara chuckled as he shut the door behind her, and
walked over to the bed. It was cool and inviting. Quickly she threw off her outer clothing and lay down.

‘I must remember the time for Marjorie won’t be able to manage alone,’ she told herself sternly, but as soon as her head touched the pillow, she was fast asleep.

The sun was right overhead when she woke up. She could hear someone mowing the grass just outside her window and remembered the beautiful scent they had walked through the night before. She wondered if the garden could possibly be as beautiful in reality as it had seemed then.

She dressed rapidly and wandered out to take a look. The gardener saw her and grinned. She watched him idly as he pushed the mower slowly up the lawn and then back down towards her again. The flowers were truly magnificent. Huge blooms, so heavy that they pulled their stems downwards towards the ground, were everywhere she looked. It was lush and full-blown, but very beautiful.

‘Are you truly awake at last, or am I dreaming?’ a voice asked from one of the windows of the guest-house, and Sara saw Matt leaning out of it, watching her.

‘I’m truly awake,’ she assured him. ‘I was just going in to see Marjorie, but I couldn’t resist coming out for a moment to look at the flowers!’

It was incredible, she thought, how quickly she had fallen into the local habit of calling everyone with a white face by their Christian names. She opened her mouth to say, ‘Mrs. Halifax, I mean,’ but Matt cut her off.

‘I’m going to start clearing the air for our return now, nurse,’ he said in brisk, businesslike tones. ‘Joe’s sent the ayah a wire telling her the baby has arrived, and in the meantime he’s found a neighbour to come in and help.
She used to be a nurse before she married, so you needn’t look so affronted!’

Sara licked her lips and swallowed. Affronted indeed! She was merely astonished at the speed with which everything seemed to happen out here.

‘I
—
I—’ she began.

‘Joe didn’t know about her last night,’ Matt continued, quite unperturbed by her attempted interruption. ‘I’ve had him phoning up everyone he knows this morning, though. It’s imperative that I get back to Kwaheri today!’

Because of Julia? she wondered. He might deny that she meant anything to him, but everyone else thought that there was something between them.

‘
What time shall we be leaving?’ she asked, hoping that he would know nothing about her bitter disappointment at being torn away from this other half of the estate so quickly, before she had had time to even see it. But Matt appeared to have no difficulty in seeing what she was thinking.

‘We’ll be coming back, nurse,’ he said more gently. ‘You’ll get to know it almost as well as you’ll know Kwaheri, so there’s no need to look like that!’

She gave him a mutinous glance. It was one thing to be snatched back to Kwaheri, but it was quite another to be treated like a spoilt child.

‘I’ll be ready to go in half an hour,’ he told her. ‘I’ll meet you at the aeroplane.’

She nodded her head, not trusting herself to speak. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he could have sacked her on the spot, she comforted herself, she would have had plenty to say.