They Met in Zanzibar (5 page)

When she got back to the house a
Landover
stood outside, and inside the living room stood a young man in khaki slacks and shirt. He was of sturdy build and average height, sandy-haired and fair-complexioned. He gazed at Peg, blinked and went an endearing scarlet.

She smiled at him cheerfully. “You’re a refreshing sight
-
the first under-thirty I’ve met. I’m Peg Maldon.”

“Are you?” he said inanely, then laughed. “I’m sorry, I did hear that Mr. Maldon had brought his daughter home with him, but I didn’t
think
she’d be like you. You’re not a bit like him. I’m Steve Cortland’s assistant - Michael Foster.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard of you. I suppose you came to see my father?”

“He asked Mr. McTeale to tell me to come over. I expect it’s just a matter of form because Steve’s away. I don’t want to trouble him if he’s resting.”

“I’ll take him some tea and find out. Sit down, and I’ll bring you a cup too.”

“Please don’t bother.”

“I like bothering. I can’t leave you alone in here. Do come into the kitchen with me, and we can talk. Do you have to work a lot harder when Mr. Cortland’s away?”

Michael followed her without a second bidding, but he didn’t go far into the kitchen. It was too small. “I do work harder, but some things get left. Steve pays me a bonus - saves it for me till I go on leave myself. McTeale told me you and your father met Steve in Zanzibar.”

“Yes, we did.” Peg was oddly reluctant to dwell on it. “Do you know anything about shopping here? My father sends the boy for everything and I haven’t yet got round to finding a shop.”

“Good heavens, haven’t you been to the town at all?”

“No. Terrible, isn’t it? I ordered a new mattress through the boy, but I need a dressing table and a bedroom chair.
A mirror, too, if I can get one. My father says I must go to a man named Adamson.”

He said hesitantly, “I’ll take you, if you like. Adamson has a sort of warehouse where he stocks everything from a kettle to a divan. I bought new lamps from him last week.”

“Paraffin? It’s fun, isn’t it, using paraffin lamps?”

“I never saw it that way, but you make it sound as if it could be. Don’t you mind using that paraffin stove?”

“It’s a bit slow, but it works. I suppose you have a boy to look after you?”

“Yes, we all do.”

“Do you live at Mr. Cortland’s house?”

“Good lord, no,” he said boyishly. “Steve doesn’t mind having a guest now and then, but he wouldn’t share his house. I have a small place of my own about two hundred yards from his; we can’t see ea
c
h other for palms.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Just over two years. This is Steve’s second leave since I’ve been with him. I first knew him about five years ago when he spent a couple of weeks in Singapore. My father’s an official there and he invited Steve to stay with us.” His smile was apologetic. “As a matter of fact I think my sister was the reason Steve remained with us for two whole weeks.”

“I can imagine,” said Peg with reserve. “So eventually you applied to him for a job.”

“He mentioned that he was getting established and might need a junior and I was so keen that he promised to get in touch with me. He didn’t want anyone under twenty-four, and I actually arrived here the day after my twenty-fourth birthday.”

“Good for you, if you wanted it so badly. That makes you twenty-six. We’re actually of the same generation!” He watched her make tea, seemed to be magnetised by
the deft movements of her smooth brown hands, the slant of her corn-coloured head. When she carried the tray through to her father’s room Michael backed quickly into the living room. He didn’t want to touch her, only to look at the unfamiliar sight of a long-limbed girl in a planter’s bungalow.

She brought him a cup of tea. “My father’s not getting up for another half an hour, but when you’ve had your tea you can go in and see him.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to
...”

“Don’t be silly, he loves talking to people, but he feels lazy.” She sipped from her own cup. “You don’t seem to have caught anything from Steve Cortland. He’d stalk in anywhere at the most sacred hour of the day and get away with it.”

He sighed. “He was probably that way when he was my age, too. Most of the men get bored and fretful once in a while, but not Steve. He knew exactly what he wanted when he came to Motu.”

“And he’s got it - but getting your own way isn’t everything,” she said disparagingly. “It boosts a man’s ego but dries up his heart. I’m glad nothing of Steve has rubbed off on you; you’re much nicer than he is.”

Patently, Michael did not believe that. “You only met him for a day or so and you
c
an’t really know him. All the women here are married, but somehow Steve can kindle something in them by merely walking into a room where there’s a party. My sister thinks it’s not that Steve says anything more than another man might say; it’s his manner, his way of conveying a sort of he-man chivalry and a devastating frankness. And he makes every friend a personal one.”

“You mean he seems to - that’s part of his stock-in-trade. I may not know him so well as you do, but I’m a great believer in first impressions, and my first impression of your boss was unfavourable. Selfish charmers give me the pip.”

“Have you known many?”

She laughed at the joke against herself. “He’s the first. Like some more tea?”

“No, thanks. You’re sure Mr. Maldon wants to see me now?”

“Of course. Go right in.”

A pleasant young man, she thought, as she washed the teacups. And if he’d been here two years and still retained a gentle outlook he hadn’t been strongly influenced by Steve Cortland. Steve Cortland ... she stopped wiping sa
u
cers and looked out of the little kitchen window at the mammoth weeds between the rootless potatoes. When she actually thought about him there was a funny, urgent little
ache in the middle of her chest. I
t actually made her feel a little sorry for herself because she knew she had to fight him, for Jim’s sake, and she didn’t want to.

Next day Michael Foster drove Peg into the town of Motu. It was a sleepy
little
port with a small central block of white buildings which comprised government offices and premises occupied by shipping agents, a lawyer and a wholesale merchant. The houses and other shops spread out behind this slightly pretentious little block, and from the sea the town looked like a huge scatter of thatched buildings with rich tall palms crowding between them. Adamson’s stock-room was a barn-like structure close to the stone quay, and though, as Michael had said, the man stocked everything, the choice offered in each item was limited. Peg bought a raw-looking chest of drawers and a badly-marked mirror (“You won’t find a sound mirror on the island, Miss Maldon”); a long yellow rug and some yellow and turquoise
m
aterial for a bedspread and curtains. It was on her wa
y
back to the plantation that she picked up a long grass stool and a low matching table at a village; they weren’t handsome, but they would make coffee in the living room more of a social affair.

She became busier. All the floors were scrubbed and waxed, her cupboard converted into a wardrobe, her bed and the chest painted pale grey and the walls the same colour, with white woodwork. Nosoap’s wife, or it may have been his cousin, machined the curtains and bedcover, and Peg tidied them up and ironed them. When a rattan armchair was added her room took shape and colour, not perhaps the colours she would have selected had she had a wide choice, but the pale grey and white, the turquoise and yellow, with a splash of scarlet in the lamp-base and in the gay picture of peonies she had brought from England combined to make a fresh and pleasing impression.

When she invited her father in, he stared. “Looks fine,” he said, as though at a loss. “Wouldn’t suit me - I’d wake up each morning wondering if I’d gone cuckoo
-
but it’s certainly something. That yellow’s a nice colour.”

Which was as much praise as she could hope for from Jim Maldon! Peg thrust him out of the room and threatened to do his bedroom out in pink. Actually, she only gave him a new woven bed-cover to replace the threadbare colourless thing he had been using and had Nosoap dull the shiny varnish with wax; the room, cluttered with male odds and ends and by no means showy, suited her father as it was.

Apart from the coffee table and stool, the only things Peg added to the living room were a set of bookshelves and a flower vase she had brought out from England. The vase was quite out of place, but Peg loved it - a beautiful imitation Etruscan that could convert a single spray of flowers into a lovely picture. It had been her mother’s favourite, and for Peg, who had grown up knowing its every curve, no living room could be complete without it.

By Motu standards there was not much rain during those weeks. Sometimes, at about four in the afternoon, a minor tornado would sweep along the coast and inland, threshing the palms and ripping away coconuts which fell with an occasional hefty clunk that could be heard in the house. Lightning would flicker among the fronds and at the first huge splashes of rain Nosoap would lethargically rest planks against the outer wall over the windows. Light was shut out and all sounds were lost in the roar of the torrent. By seven the sky was a clear indigo, studded with stars, and the atmosphere smelled of mud and swift tropical growth.

Later, when Peg looked back on them, her first five weeks on Motu were some of the happiest she had ever known. She learned the island ways of cooking and living, and she studied elementary tropical medicine with Jean Passfield and started a small treatment centre of her own. She went down to her father’s copra station where, near a low mountain of coconuts, boys were engaged in smashing the nuts on a spearpoint that protruded from the ground, and others wheeled the halves away to the big drying sheds, where the crop was spread on a huge wire sieve over a ten-foot square charcoal fire. Some of the husks were used as mattress stuffing and to make coir mats, and the rest were burnt. The coconut shells, after the copra had dried off them, were scattered on the tracks and rolled in; it was the only way to keep the paths roadworthy. To Peg, copra was the most exciting and absorbing crop in the world.

She wrote all about it to Paxil. She thought of him at Berners End, overseeing the farm on the estate and regularly attending the council and hospital meetings. She thought of his graceful rooms, with their fine old furniture and collector’s items. Berners End was a glorious bit of England, and the briefest thought that she might one day belong there made Peg feel reverent and unworthy. She had never even dimly contemplated herself as part of that beautiful estate until she was right away from it, here on the other side of the world.

Paul’s letters came as regularly as one could expect in such a place. Every fortnight or so she was gladdened by the sight of his fine, regular writing on an airmail envelope and just a little apprehensive of what she might find within it. Paul wrote tenderly, and always assured her of his love. No change yet in Vanessa. She had had the one operation, but its success could not be gauged till she had the second, for which the hospital was now building her up. Paul reported that he visited her twice a week for half an hour, but seldom spoke to her alone. “I know now that I never loved her. If you were injured only slightly I’d go out of my mind with worry. Yet, helpless though she is, I can look at Vanessa with the sort of compassion one has for a stranger laid low. You can be sure that as soon as she is quite recovered I will ask her to release me. I love you so much, my dearest Peg.”

As she finished reading his letters she always felt near to tears. Her father made only one comment about them. “I’m glad Paul keeps writing to you,” he said. “This place is apt to push a woman a little off beam, and regular news from England will keep you level.”

Peg didn’t tell him how she felt about Paul. It was something precious and secret, for the present, anyway. She told herself she ought to have had qualms about Paul’s breaking his engagement to someone he’d been tied to for over a year; but then she remembered Vanessa’s cold good looks, the thin elegant mouth, the look of distaste when Peg, in stained denims and shirt had hailed them as she came out of the hardware shop carrying an unwrapped tin of paint. The woman was a chilly fish, incapable of loving. She had become engaged to Berners End, not to Paul Lexfield.

It was about the middle of her sixth week on Motu when Peg attended her first party. It was at the house of Mr. and Mrs. McTeale, which stood about four miles down the plantation road, and Peg drove there with her father in the old station wagon he used about his own roads. She was wearing a filmy pink and white patterned dress and had combed her light hair carelessly about her face, giving it a gay look. Jim had reluctantly got into a white linen jacket and put on a flamboyant tie.

“We have dinner at home in shirt sleeves,” he groused. “Why do we have to dress up like a bunch of dummies when we eat together? In this climate it’s unnatural.”

“Don’t be stuffy. I like dressing up.”