They Met in Zanzibar (15 page)

“I’ve taken this on,” he said, “and I’ll stick with it - quite apart from the fact that I want to come in and see you. Anyway, there’s something special this morning. I have to have your signature on a couple of papers.”

“The sale of the plantation?”

“Yes.” He was taking a bulky envelope from his pocket. “You’ve seen that statement of your father’s asking me to act for him, if it became necessary. It makes me his executor. This first paper is just a legal
thing
in which you state you’re Margaret Maldon, daughter of James, and so on. The other is the preliminary agreement to sell out, and we both have to sign it.”

“Now?”

“Here’s a pen. Feel shaky? Practise your signature on the envelope a couple of times. I’m afraid you’ll have to sit up.”

He pushed another cushion behind her, made room on the bedside table. She leaned over and wrote slowly in a schoolgirl hand, didn’t look at the content of the papers at all, but sank back and half closed her eyes.

He slipped the envelope back into his pocket. “I had a word with Passfield last night,” he said. “He thinks you’ll be able to leave this place in about a week.”

“I don’t have a home any more,” she said lifelessly. “I’d rather stay here till the suite is needed for someone else.”

“You could stay with Fellowes and his wife till we decide on a place of your own. You do have some money, Peg, and more friends than you
think
. We all want you well and happy.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said wearily. “You’ve got what you most wanted - the plantation. Now leave me alone.”

Not the smallest twitch of a muscle revealed how Steve took this. He sat back, threw one long leg over the other. “For a Maldon, you’re pretty weak-kneed,” he said. “Jim wouldn’t care much for the look of you, if he could see you now. I know you’ve had it bad, but you’re young and your life is still to come. You take hold of yourself, young Peg. I’ll help you.”

“I don’t need your help, and don’t give me pep talks. Just go away.”

“I’ll leave you alone when you’re fighting fit and slanging me as you used to, not before.” He had spoken almost casually, and he went on in the same tones, “You haven’t thought about those people who depended on your pills up at the plantation, have you? They were very upset about your accident, and Nosoap has been offering little sacrifices to his gods for your recovery. He wants to be your servant, wherever you decide to live. The labourers are carrying on as usual, and I’ve put Michael Foster in charge of them. The official take-over date of all the plantations was the day before yesterday, but we’re all carrying on as usual for two weeks. That’s the deadline for the older men to leave. I have to continue living in my own house till they build me a new one - it’ll take some time. They’ve chosen a site on the edge of town, and there’ll be special helicopter facilities nearby so that inspection will be easy.”

He went on talking in level tones but with an increasing urgency, as if he were trying to infuse some of his own strength into her. Peg did not listen, and when he got up to leave she was glad. Almost at once she was heavily asleep.

Shock had had an almost lethal effect on Peg. The suddenness of her father’s death and the manner of it seemed to have paralysed some of her nerve centres, so that she couldn’t even
think
back over that evening. Just once, in a moment of brutal clarity, she had seen Jim’s bulk slumped on the wheel and felt her fingers wrenching; the next moment her head was thudding against a terrible compression and for two days after that she had looked and felt more dead than alive. Dr. Passfield had murmured something about hypersensitivity and doped her liberally. Since then she had avoided thinking. Even Steve’s persistent but casual references to Jim Maldon left her unmoved.

It was much easier to lie on the divan and look at the stark white ceiling or examine, at a peculiar angle, a print on the grey walls. They altered her position, so that sometimes she looked straight out at the hot blue sky and a sheaf of palm tops, and at othe
r
s she saw her bed, with the neat blue silk bedspread Netta Fellowes had lent her smoothed over the blanket and curved snugly about the single pillow she was allowed.

Her second visitor of the day generally varied. Netta didn’t count; she stole in and out, placing a basket of fruit in a bewitching position or bringing a luncheon tray because, she said, the island servants weren’t quite up to serving a sensitive invalid. Netta had a soft and gentle voice, a hesitant smile, and a look of utter astonishment if someone told her she was good and kind. She was the sort of woman you’d imagine ministering to aged parents and quite missing the marriage bus; but apparently her parents had been healthy, for Netta had hooked a very likeable man in Dick Fellowes.

Everyone was kind, too kind. The abnormality of lying there and being smiled at and whispered about had a drugging effect. Peg crept further and further inside herself, and almost unconsciously she kept the door of her heart securely locked.

Each morning she got slowly out of bed and took a bath, put on clean pyjamas and one of the three wraps which Netta had got for her, and lay down on the divan. Some afternoons she put on a dress and dark glasses and sat in an armchair in the balcony. There she could hear the patients below, chattering away in their mixture of Malay and Polynesian, most of them happy-sounding even though they were ill. Dr. Passfield insisted that she return to bed at six and have supper there. At eight o’clock she had to lie flat with the light out. If she was still awake at ten she was given a sedative. It was easy, Peg found, to yield oneself to a doctor’s orders; it almost saved one the trouble of living.

It was Steve, of course, who decided it was time she re-assume the true identity of Peg Maldon, and the step he took was drastic. By then, Peg had been five weeks in the bare, highly-polished suite above the clinic, and she was
paying
an apartment rent for it. The headaches were rare now and Netta looked in only once a day, and though Peg did not go out except into the balcony, she did dress before lunch and try to read a little.

That day Steve did not come at eleven. She looked at the watch which was now loose about her wrist, and shrugged. Her inertia was wearing him down at last. Just as well. Only yesterday he’d told her she wasn’t eating enough to keep a bird alive and was smoking too much; as if it were his business.

Peg walked about the room, lingered in the adjoining dressing-room, and came back to stand near the divan and look out of the window at the sea, where a freighter was unloading into barges. A dark-skinned nursing assistant brought in her tray and set it down, but Peg only glanced at it. She wasn’t hungry. She put on a cigarette, picked up a magazine from the pile on a stool and leafed through it.

There came the familiar clicking of fingernails on the door panel, and because she knew who it was Peg didn’t even answer or look up ... till the door had opened and a complete silence in place of the usual stride forced her attention. She stared at the man in the doorway, saw Steve just beyond him, watching her. Then Steve was gone, the door closed.

The man advanced, but only a pace or two. Tallish, very dark, aquiline-featured, his face drawn with tiredness and emotion. “Peg, darling,” he said hoarsely.

“Paul,” she whispered, her face curiously pinched. “How did you get here?”

He put gentle arms about her. “Oh, my dearest. I’m here, with you, and it’s all that matters. Poor sweet little Peg. I’ve been in torment ever since I had Cortland’s cable - couldn’t get here soon enough. You look so worn and ill, Peg; as I came into the room I hardly recognised you. It’s all right now, though. I’m going to take care of you.”

Peg didn’t want his arms; she didn’t want to be touched. Somehow, she got away from him. She turned and pressed out her cigarette on the ashtray which stood on the table.

“This is quite unbelievable,” she said, a
little
jerkily. “You should have let me know you were coming.”

“I did telegraph Cortland. He arranged for me to get a government plane at Singapore and met me only half an hour ago. He told me that
...” he h
esitated, perplexed, because this hollow-eyed creature was so
unlike
the loving, high-spirited, confiding girl he had known. “It seems he thought the surprise would be good for you.”

“Would shake me, you mean,” she said. “I’m sorry to be so unwelcoming, Paul. I just have to get used to the idea of your being here. Please sit down.”

But he came beside her as she stood near the door to the balcony. “I know how you’re feeling,” he said tenderly. “It must have been an appalling experience, and the kind of injury you suffered always leaves a frightful sense of oppression. Cortland’s explained everything, and he’s been very thoughtful. He’s fixed me up at the hotel and managed to borrow a car for me, so that I can take you out and get you interested in things. You know, even before I knew what had happened I was getting frantic. I’d written as usual, but you hadn’t replied, and I’d even got as far as making enquiries about putting through a telephone call to the government office here. I didn’t know then that something had happened to your father, of course. Peg, you mustn’t let things slide. I won’t let you.”

Peg felt uneasy yet quite unstirred. Paul Lexfield should be at Berners End, arranging for his tenants’ cottage repairs, sitting on the local council, backing charity drives. That was where he
had
been, three or four days ago; he wasn’t wearing tweeds now, but he smelled of them, and of the lanes, and of oak beams and objets d’art. The suit he wore was heavy and dark, his collar stiff and white, his tie conservative. He was as out of place on Motu as a coconut palm in a London square.

She shook her head numbly. “I don’t know what to say, Paul. If I’d known Steve
w
as contemplating getting in touch with you I’d have cabled you myself. I wouldn’t have brought you half across the world.”

“But, darling, I’ve come to take you home!”

“Home?” she said, and looked at him curiously. “I don’t have a home now. I couldn’t ever live in the cottage again - it’ll have to be sold.”

“You’ll live with me, Peg. We’ll get married at once.”

She rubbed thin fingers along her cheek. “I couldn’t marry - not now.” She looked at him again, remembering dully. “Have you broken right off with Vanessa?”

“Not in so many words. She does walk a little, but she still has to spend a good many hours in a wheelchair. I did tell her that I was coming out here for you, and she seemed to understand. She doesn’t want me or need me, any longer. We haven’t spoken intimately since her fall, not once.”

Peg didn’t try to analyse anything. She stood near him, yet withdrawn; in a dispassionate way she felt sorry for him. “For your own sake,” she said, “I wish you hadn’t come. I can’t return to England yet, and you’ll be wretched if you stay. I don’t want you hurt, Paul.”

“I shan’t be hurt. Things will come right now that we’re together. You’ll see.” He ran a finger round his collar. “How do you stand this heat? It’s devitalising.

“You do get acclimatised.”

“I’d better buy something thinner and get into it. Will you go for a drive with me this afternoon? You can show me the island.”

Something shrank within Peg. Go out of this apartment into a world she hadn’t looked at since ... but he’d come so far, for so little.

She moistened dry lips. “Yes, all right. After four it cools down. Come at four-thirty.”

There was a long hesitant moment, when he did not know how to leave her. Then he turned towards the door.

“Yes. Four-thirty,” he said in strained tones, and went from the room.

Peg leaned against the wall of the balcony and closed her eyes. Steve and his shock tactics, she thought tiredly.

Motu, and her own lethargy, were hard on Paul; Peg admitted that. He drove the borrowed car over roads that made him sweat, in a heat that made him sweat more. He tried as hard as he could to get her back into the old mood of joyous abandon and even attempted canoeing as far as the reef in order to recapture the days when he had loped down to a Kentish beach and swum and played with her. They picnicked, she even swam a little with him, and took him through the coconut plantations.

And inevitably there came a moment, in the dim greenness, when he held her. “I do so want to make you laugh and be happy again. We can’t get back to it here, Peg, but we could in England. You must detest this place even more than I do. It took your father, it’s injured you so badly that you’ve forgotten how to care. Darling, come home with
me ...
please!”

He waited for a tremor, for sweet raised lips. She kept her head down and said, “Each time I see you I wish more desperately that you hadn’t come. I don’t know if
loved you in England - I think I did - but here on Motu it’s difficult to love at all. I’m not what you really want, Paul. I didn’t have conventional parents and I’m not conventional myself. I seem to feel I belong here.”

“But that’s absurd. What are a few months out here compared with a lifetime in Kent? This place was important to your father, bu
t
that doesn’t make it important to you. You’re a woman and you don’t even own the plantation now. There’s nothing to keep you on Motu!”