They Met in Zanzibar

CHAPTER ONE

From D
ar-es-Salaam it is only
a
twenty-minute hop by air to Zanzibar. You leave behind the hot little town on the East Africa coast, skim over a sea that is so clear that you can see the sand bars, and land on a field which is a vast clearing amid coconut palms. In the Arabic airport building you pass through a few formalities, and when you emerge into blinding, grilling sunshine you are beset by taxi-drivers who beg you to use their rackety transport into town. Which you do.

To Peg, the whole procedure was fascinating and amusing. To her father, though, nothing was strange. Jim Maldon knew the tropics far better than he knew present-day England.

“The western world is suffering from an acute form of civilisation and has lost its character,” he had complained at the cottage in Kent. “If you go down to the Anchor for a drink you can hear the juke-box in the new cafe up the street, and instead of fishermen on the beach you have girls in shorts with painted toenails. Give me a coral beach where islanders sleep, and a jug of palm wine; then I’m complete.”

It was probably true of him, Peg had thought affectionately. She couldn’t remember his being at
home for more than three months at a time and there were always a couple of years between his visits. Last time, nearly three years ago, her mother had been alive, but this time there had been only Peg. For his sake she had kept on the cottage he had given her mother - that darling, curly-haired creature who would have gone to live with him on Motu Island if she’d been strong enough. Divided though they were, her parents had loved each other tremendously. Peg could remember the brief months of fun and excitement, her mother’s quietness after Jim had gone back to his plantation. The house would be full of his gifts - exotic shells that whispered hollow invitations to the South Seas into Peg’s ear, a length of tinsel-edged sari silk that she draped about herself and dreamed in, magic boxes made by oriental craftsmen, beaten silver trinkets, a necklace of pearls so genuine that you could smell the sea on them.

This last homecoming had been much less fun but much more important to Peg. He had taken some time to get round to it, but eventually he had told her flatly that she had better go back with him, at least until she was twenty-one. Unsentimental, awkward in his affection, he had said,

“While your mother was here you belonged to her. She needed you. You’ve no one now but me. Let’s stick together for a couple of years and see what we make of it. You’ll like Motu, Peg; there are a few white people at the other end of the island, as well as a planter or two on the adjacent plantations, so there’s company when you need it. You want to go, don’t you?”

She wanted it so much that her throat had dried up at the very thought of it. It would be sad leaving her job at the convalescent home, but maybe she would be able to use her nursing experience down there in the South Seas. It
would b
e even sadder leaving Paul, but—

Her father, bewildered and unhappy in the cottage that no longer held his wife, had said, “We’ll leave in about a month, Peg. An agent can handle the letting of this place. And I tell you what - we’ll travel by ship part of the way and call in at Zanzibar. A chap who owns a plantation near mine at Motu is just about going on leave, and I’ll bet he’ll be either at Zanzibar or Sri Lanka. He has islands in his blood. We’ll meet up with him.”

“It sounds odd - to meet someone in a place like that without arranging it.”

“That’s the beauty of living the way we do down there. You know one another’s habits so well that you can even weigh up what a man’s doing at a given time. Steve’s an individualist who never travels further north than Mombasa when he’s on vacation. He hasn’t been back to England since he left, eight years ago.”

“I believe he’s only an excuse, so that you can visit Zanzibar and Sri Lanka yourself!”

“Maybe I like Steve because I was a bit the same way when I was his age. And maybe you’re right. I shan’t mind passing a day or two in Zanzibar and chowing with my old friends in Colombo. You’ll need plenty of thin cotton clothes. No one here you mind leaving, is there?”

Jim Maldon was not perceptive, but Peg, in her hypersensitive state, had wondered whether he guessed how she and Paul felt about each other. In a way, the two men had got on well together, though there was an enormous difference between the thickset,
ginger-haired Jim
Maldon, who had wide green horizons in his blue eyes and a fund of coconut island stories, and Paul Lexfield of the aquiline features and long slim frame. Paul owned Berners End, with its
mag
nificent seventeenth-century farmhouse and acres of parkland, and he dabbled in the fine arts.

Peg had known Paul Lexfield since she was a child. At fifteen he had yanked her out of a pool which was filling with the tide, and after that he had taken a proprietorial interest in the golden-haired child who was more at home on the beach than anywhere else. Even when he was twenty-five and she about twelve, he’d found a sort of enjoyment in exchanging chitchat with the long-legged girl who was always messing with shells and ever eager for a flip in his sports car. He’d even occasionally dropped in
for tea with Peg and her mother.

Then she hadn’t seen him for a long while. In fact, she was eighteen before she met him again, to speak to. And Paul had changed. He was past thirty and engaged to a beautiful, marble-like girl named Vanessa. He no longer wore corduroys and flabby jackets, but dressed in smart sports or lounge suits, and he didn’t
hop
down to the beach from his car for a bathe; he drove Vanessa to a beach which was regularly washed all over by the tide and did not smell of fish.

For a year, Peg carefully thought about him only when she saw him. If they were alone, he was companionable and big-brotherly, but when with Vanessa he treated Peg with polite friendliness. Peg wished they would get married. Until the day arrived when Paul came to the cottage and told her he’d made a mistake and was going to put it to Vanessa that they weren’t suited to each other. He hadn’t gone further than that; only squeezed Peg’s hand.

It was at this point that Jim Maldon had dropped his bombshell, and Peg, surging with emotions she couldn’t analyse, had said yes, she would love to go back with him to Motu, while deep down she had felt an ungovernable urge to stay with Paul. Only two days after that Vanessa had been thrown while out riding. She had broken her back, and it was said that it would take two or three operations and many months of therapy to get her back to normal. Peg had felt dreadful. She had hated herself because her
own
feel
ings had swamped the compassion she had felt for Vanessa.

She had prepared to leave the cottage, bought clothes in London and packed up her treasures for storage. A tenant had been found and Jim Maldon had given a stag party at the Anchor. During those weeks, she had seen Paul only fleetingly. He had looked pale and detached, but he had smiled at her in the special way which had always been his,
and Peg knew that he shared her pain and frustration.

Then, on their last day, Paul had come to the cottage. Jim was away, making some last-minute purchases and procuring his traveller’s cheques, and Peg, with everything ready but her own person, had just washed the hair which had recently been trimmed short and curly. She was in the small garden, rubbing it dry, when Paul opened the white gate and came up the path.

She tossed back the damp strands, allowed the towel to droop from her hand. “Hello,” she said, not too steadily. “How is Vanessa?”

“The same.” His face was tightened up. “All ready to leave?”

She nodded. “We’ve ordered a taxi for seven o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“Looking forward to Motu?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go inside.” He picked up her hairbrush from the garden table and gave it to her, but they were in the little sitting room before he added, “I had to see you alone. There are things that have to be said between us before you leave.”

“No, please don’t speak about them,” she begged tremulously. “Don’t say anything except... just goodbye.”

“I’m not saying goodbye. I can’t.”

She turned from him and dropped the towel and brush on to a table. She couldn’t see for tears, couldn’t hear for the thickness of tears close to her eardrums. She felt his fingers on her shoulders as he turned her. The tears overflowed and she was drawn swif
tl
y into his arms. Something hot and undeniable rose in her, something so entirely new in her experience that she could only cling. His heart beat against her, his arms tightened and he kissed her as gen
tl
y as he was able, because this was the first time.

He drew back his head and looked at her cloud of hair, her dark blue eyes. “I love you, Peg. Wait for me.”

“Of course!” she whispered. “I’ll
wait for ever.”

He managed a strained smile. “It won’t be that long. But you do see that I can’t end the engagement while Vanessa’s broken up? As soon as she’s fit and can take it, I’ll be frank with her. You do understand?”

“I knew you’d feel this way and it’s right that you should.
Paul
...
write to me, and I’ll come back the minute you’re free.”

“No, I’ll come out for you. It may be six months, or even longer. But wait for me, Peg. Please wait.
Promise me
.”

She had promised, with kisses given wistfully and with awakening passion. He was the first man she had kissed, and he’d be the only one. She had decided to make the most of Motu, to be happy, as Paul wanted. During the long days on the ship she had thought of him often, with a soaring heart. In a year’s time, when she was twenty, they would be married!

As the creaking old taxi ran into Zanzibar town, Peg gazed delightedly down the streets which were so narrow that one could have touched the walls on either side. There were a few dark men of Indian or Arab cast, who lounged in doorways or looked out from the dim recesses of a tiny shop, and most of them wore the long white kanzu with headgear that ranged from an ordinary turban to a fez-shaped white cap covered with eyelet embroidery.

“The Overseas Club, bwana?” demanded the driver gaily as he swung the car round a bend and brought up beside an open doorway. “It is here!”

“You stay in the taxi while I make enquiries, Peg,” said her father. “You can look round later, when it’s not so hot.”

The taxi was like an oven. The driver stood outside, in
a tiny block of shade, and he looked willing to spend the whole day chauffeuring the mad English. Myopically, Peg gazed at the great beautiful doors of the Club. Only in Zanzibar, so she had heard, could you see these huge antique Arab doors with their pointed brass bosses and carved lotus blossoms in a delicately patterned frame of sesame wood; the size and condition of the door of a building indicated the dignity and standing of the occupant.

It was said that if you approached Zanzibar by sea you could smell the cloves a mile away. Peg was right here on the island, but she wouldn’t have said the smell was exclusively clove-like; it was spicy, sea-tinged and laden with heat. She felt drugged.

Her father appeared from the great dark doorway. His smile, as he got back into the taxi, was jubilant. “Told you so,” he said. “Steve is right here in Zanzibar, staying at the hotel. We’ll spend a night or two there ourselves and then get back to Mombasa and fly to Bombay.” He breathed deeply. “Get that atmosphere? It seeps right through to your marrow.”

Blithely, they spurted along the streets, past the unpretentious post office and up towards the hotel. The taxi-driver carried their bags into the dim regions of the thick-walled building, bowed happily over the handful of coins and fervently desired the bwana to consider the taxi at his disposal for the duration of his stay.

Peg was shown to an upper bedroom which had a cool spacious balcony and a chaise-longue as well as a large bed. An outsize ceiling fan whirred gently, and a white-clad servant placed her overnight bag on a stool and asked if the memsahib needed a drink.

“Please,” she said. “Lemon, with lots of ice!”

She went over and leaned on the balcony wall, felt it hot to her skin, though it was shaded. The heat was so intense that the sky was hazed, but narcotic though it was, Peg almost crooned with the blessed satisfaction of seeing this place which so many people hardly knew existed. Zanzibar, crammed with Indians and Arabs and Swahili, who dealt in silks and ivory, camphorwood chests and Shiraz carpets and grew cloves and copra, cassava and citrus fruit, and goodness knows how many other things.

She saw a bearded,
turbaned
man leading a hennaed donkey which pulled a small cart loaded with cinnamon bark. As it passed below she could smell the cinnamon; it never smelled so exhilaratingly fresh when powdered and tinned! She sipped her lemon juice, clinking the ice each time she raised the glass, for the sheer pleasure of hearing the cool sound. How far, far away everything but this island seemed. No problems, nothing except herself and her father, in this historic, tropical island. Leaning there, she almost dozed, but at last she stirred herself to unpack the case.

She laid her thin flowery cotton pyjamas on the bed, shook out a dress and found a shirt of her father’s inside it, a wispy drip-dry thing that he might want to change into now. She went out on to a lit
tl
e landing which was open to the sky on one side. There was only one other door, so she rapped on it and walked into a room that was very like her own but seemed empty.