They Met in Zanzibar (11 page)

Her eyes darkened, but this time she spoke without a tremor. “You’re going to be the boss round here, and I asked my father why we couldn’t get you to help us. He said you were too strong on ethics and all that, that if you worked for the company you’d never do anything against their interests. It’s a fine point - whether a man owes more loyalty to a friend than to the company he works for.”

“It’s nothing of the sort,” Steve said roughly. “Jim’s standing out because he can’t imagine living any other way than he lives now.
You’re
the only one who can change him.” He took in a sharp breath and said tigh
tl
y, “I’ve been able to manage just one concession as far as Jim’s concerned. The company is willing to keep the cash offer open for a month. I want you to tell him that, and when it’s had time to sink in I’ll come and see him.”

In low tones she said, “I think
i
t would be better if you put it into writing.”

“And have it acknowledged in a polite schoolgirl hand? I
think
not. I haven’t yet recovered from that last note of yours, turning down my invitation to supper here in the Club!”

“You’re getting sensitive, Steve.” She lifted a clear unsmiling gaze to his. “All right, I’ll tell him, but I know what his reaction will be. He’ll go straight out for a swim and keep at it till he’s tired. Then he’ll drink whisky and tell me about the old days, after which he’ll go to bed and sleep heavily. And tomorrow he’ll go right ahead with his own plans.”

“And in the evening,” Steve said crisply, “you’ll remind him about the month’s grace,
a
nd keep on at him, day after day. It’s the only way. You’ve got to do
i
t, Peg. I’ll do all I can to help you.”

She pushed the glass away from her, passed a hand round the back of her neck in a youthful, nervous manner, and smiled. “I’ve said I’ll try. I think you’d better stay away from us.”

Steve sat silent for a moment, looking withdrawn and intent. Then:
“
All
right,” he said. “I’ll leave you to it for a week, but you must let me know how things are going. If you can’t get Jim to come over to my place at least send me a word of some sort, but I won’t come to your house till the week is up. Like another drink?”

“No, thank you. I must get back.”

“Weren’t you just coming from the clinic when I met you?”

“There was a child with severe stomach pain; I drove him in.”

“You feel fit yourself?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, don’t get the idea that you’re immune from all the germs about you. It’s not a very bright notion - a girl like you dealing with people who live in primitive conditions. Whose was it?”

“Mine, and Dr. Passfield’s.”

“Had a check-up recently?”

“I’m fine,” she said briefly, and stood up.

Steve had got to his feet too, and he looked down at her with a vexed half-smile. “Why do you two Maldons bother me so much? I believe
it’s because there’s one way in which you’re both so darned young that you feel you can fight the world. You get after Jim, there’s a good girl.”

Ahead of him, she walked out of the stone-coolness of the Club into the stored heat of the street, and he came beside her as she turned towards the station wagon. His fingers on the door handle, he asked softly:

“What is he like - your Paul? Besides being very sweet and too old for you, I mean?”

She let out an audible breath and shrugged. “He’s everything you’re not, Steve.”

“That’s interesting - yet he’s still a bachelor, like me. How come he didn’t marry you and keep you in England? Weren’t you certain?”

“We were very certain,” she said clearly. “Both of us.”

“And you’re looking forward to getting married?”

“Yes.”

Steve opened the car door, drawled quietly, close to her ear, “Be careful, young Peg. At his age he’s either had affairs you don’t know about or he’ll be a weak lover - which wouldn’t suit your temperament a bit. You can’t have it all ways.”

Peg did not answer. She starte
d
the car, waved perfunctorily and drove away. She didn’t have to look back to know that Steve had sent a mocking glance after her and gone about his business.

Over lunch she told her father, carelessly, that she had run into Steve and he’d said the company were allowing a month for Jim’s decision. There was no talk on the subject. Jim shrugged as if he couldn’t take the trouble to think about it, he ate his lunch and wait to his room for a rest. At four, when he decided to drive down for a swim, he seemed as cheerful and confident as ever. He dived through the rollers, competed with Peg on a surf board and benignly smoked a cheroot as the sun swiftly dipped behind the palms. It was dark when they got back to the house and he took his shower. Peg heard him singing in the bathroom, and she wondered why Steve took it all so seriously. Her father didn’t care a bean about the others on the island.

It was a couple of days later, while she was following Dr. Passfield’s instruction that she dab antiseptic into a certain child’s ear each morning, that Peg heard discontented murmurings among the people seated outside the house. She pressed a scrap of clean cotton wool into the ear she had cleaned, found a sweet for the child and led him out to where two or three women were seated in the shade of the house. The babble ceased as she appeared and the women slowly got up, as though to leave.

“Weren’t you waiting to see me?” Peg asked one of them.

The woman lowered her head shyly and began to walk away. But Peg called quickly, “What is it? Would you rather I took your baby to the doctor?”

None of the women answered. In their faded sarongs they almost bus
tl
ed away through the trees. Peg wasn’t perturbed. Someone must have called them to a meeting of some sort; perhaps they were going to stage one of those dances Nosoap had told her about. He’d know, anyway.

But when Peg questioned the houseboy he was evasive. Yes, he thought there had been a meeting, but he didn’t know much about it. No, it had nothing to do with the mem’s little clinic. The tuan would know.

Actually, Jim heard about it the following day, when his head man demanded a separate house for each worker. Jim came into the house shaking a fist, but he was good-humoured about it.

“I told them they’d get what they want, but they’ll have to wait. I feel a bit mad that I didn’t put it over to them first, when you mentioned it, Peg. That would have taken the wind out of their sails!”

Nothing catastrophic after all, it seemed. Peg’s patients drifted back next morning, and that afternoon she drove a prematurely-born baby up to the Passfields’ house, for incubation. She had just got back when Michael Foster arrived.

Michael looked trim in fresh whites, his fairish hair sleek and shining. He grinned self-consciously. “I’ve even had two shaves today,” he confessed. “For Lynette, a man has to be impeccably turned out - even her brother.”

“Oh, is she arriving today? Haven’t you time to drink a cup of tea?”

“
I
hadn’t better. It might make me sweat. But go ahead and have yours. I came to ask if you’d drive up to Motu town with me, to meet Lyn.”

“I’d like to. Are you sure of what time she’ll get in? My father and I were on a ship that was two days late.”

“Lynette is too impatient to travel by ship. She’s coming on the government service plane.”

“V.I.P. treatment. Very nice.” Peg offered him biscuits and took one herself. “Have you fixed up her bedroom?”

“She won’t be satisfied with it - she has a sort of flat in our house at Singapore - but I’ve done my best. I bought the bed and Steve lent me linen and a couple of blankets - a few other things, too. The room is clean and neat, anyway.”

“She’ll probably love it.”

“Steve said it was all right. I said I thought of getting you to look it over, and he thought it was unnecessary because your tastes are bound to be different from
Lynette’s. Which I suppose is true.”

“Do I have to change into a dress to meet this sister of yours?”

“No, please don’t. You look marvellous in slacks - and we ought to get moving at once. The government planes are always on time.”

They left the plantation and Peg was enjoying the rare pleasure of being driven when Michael said, almost apologetically, “The government wives will be giving a few parties for Lynette - they do that sort of thing automatically for anyone connected with the service, and my father’s quite well known. I was wondering if you’d go as my partner.”

“I might,” she said airily, “but you’d better find out first whether the Maldons are accepted in the best circles. There are whispers that we’re beyond the pale because we’re clinging to the plantation.”

“That’s not true,” he protested. “The English are a race of individualists, and secretly people admire your father for the stand he’s taken. It irritates them, but they’re not against him.”

“That’s good news, anyway. Are you looking forward to being a junior superintendent?
”

“I am, rather, particularly as Steve will be in charge. You know, since I first met Steve I’ve always regarded him as the epitome of the fine Englishman in the tropics.”

“Good for you,” she said laconically. “Since I first met him I’ve regarded him as an overbearing, faintly charming and completely ruthless egotist. It’s all in the viewpoint.”

He laughed. “He’s said one or two startling things about you, too.”

“What sort of things?”

“The last I remembered was that he wished you were a boy. ‘You can influence a boy,’ he said, ‘or belt him one.’ ”

“That sounds friendly. I hope you defended me.”

“Of course I did.” He gave an embarrassed smile. “Steve was a bit terse; he told me to keep my mind on my work, said that you could stand up for yourself, and how.”

“I’m glad he knows.” She changed the topic, sniffed happily. “We’re near someone’s drying sheds. Don’t you love that burnt nutty smell? My father once told me that when he first came here the islanders dried their coconuts in the sun and the smell was appalling; the copra turned rancid before it dried out. For a change, they’d dry thousands of fish in the same way. They still do that, of course; I prefer the dried fish to those tubs of pickled ones you can smell ten miles away from the market. What is your sister going to think of our food?”

“She doesn’t eat much - watches her figure, I suppose. We’ll often dine out, so she won’t mind if what my boy cooks is homely. Look, there’s a blue parakeet. Don’t often see them among the palms.”

“They used to be plentiful here - my father said so.” She laughed. “I promise not to tell you anything more my father said. I used to lap it up as a child, when he came home to
England,
and I find I haven’t forgotten a thing. I feel as if I’ve always known this place.”

“In a lesser degree I feel it myself. I love it.”

They talked all the way, in a
n
uncomplicated fashion that Peg had missed since leaving her friends in England.

The airstrip lay along the back of the town, quite close to the houses. There was no organised plane service on the island and therefore no airport building, but a long ba
rn
-like structure was occasionally used as a rest-house by civil pilots from other islands, and part of it was open on one side, forming a covered veranda where those people meeting passengers off the government planes could wait in comfort, if not coolness. Peg and Michael had it to themselves. They lay back in wicker chairs and stared out at the brilliant green of the grass that ran alongside the cement strip, at the darker green of the surrounding trees and at a slice of hot blue sky. Till the plane became visible, a growing speck that threw off brilliant sunrays.

The small plane came down and ran in, flagged by a uniformed islander who also pushed a step-ladder alongside. Three people emerged; two middle-aged men and a girl in a pastel blue sleeveless dress who wore no hat and carried only a large white woven bag. She looked as if she had taken off from her own garden and landed in someone else’s, for tea.

“Wait here, Peg,” Michael said quickly. “I’ll
go out and meet her.”

Peg knew now that Michael should not have let her come to meet the plane in slacks. He ought to have let her know this morning that his sister would be arriving, so that she could have been ready when he called. Lynette Foster had the poise of a model and the figure of one as well, except that her curves were more pronounced. She was much darker than Michael, and her hair was an abundant mass of waves which she wore caught back into a coil on her nape. It was one of those studiedly careless hairstyles that are so effective, and Peg was sure that Lynette Foster knew many other ways of making the most of the rich dark hair which had a bronze sheen in the strong sunshine.

Brother and sister were about a dozen yards away when another car drew up beside Michael’s modest sedan. Peg watched Steve get out and take in the situation. The four of them met together just outside the shelter.

Michael said, “My sister, Lynette. This is Peg Maldon, Lyn.”

Artistically curved red lips parted in a smile which moved on, to meet Steve’s. It was in that moment, seeing them there with the brilliant greenness as a background, that Peg’s pulses leapt. She had seen these two meet at an airport before; at Zanzibar. Only on that occasion there hadn’t been this contrived politeness in their greeting; they’d been alone, and imagined themselves unseen.

Steve said, “Hallo there, Lynette. So good to see you again.”

The girl answered, “I had to come and see Michael before I go to Europe; you see, I may not return to the East. It’s wonderful to see you again, too, Steve. Seems quite a long time since you stopped off at Singapore when you were going on leave.”