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Her rubber-soled feet padded away over the stone floor and a door clicked. Phil indulged in some painful deep breathing. It was horrible to be alive and wish you weren’t. Again the snap of a door and Julian came to the bedside. Odd, but she had never before noticed how high and bony was his nose, how straight and white the edges of his teeth. But he had never looked at her like this before.

“It’s good to see you in a real bed with a nurse to attend you,” he said softly. “How do you feel?”

“I... I can’t move.”

“You’re frightened. Haven’t they told you what’s wrong?” He dropped a knee on the seat of the nurse’s chair to lean nearer. “It’s nothing dreadful after all. Two ribs fractured and multiple bruises. Sounds grim, doesn’t it, but I’m so relieved I can even smile. Bones mend, especially in a girl of your age. As we came over in the boat I visualized every internal complication there is, but the doctor here assures me you’re a hundred per cent whole. He showed me an X-ray photograph.”

“How long will I have to stay here?”

“In three or four weeks, you’ll be back in circulation.” Back where? She contrived a smile. “You must be worn out, Julian. Have you had any food?”

“They’re getting me some breakfast. You’ll be all right here. The doctor’s a great chap and the nurse knows her job.”

“You’re returning to Valeira today?”

“I wouldn’t, if you needed me. But your best medicine is rest.” He hesitated. “You won’t get it with me around. I make you unhappy.”

She did not refute it.

“I’ll come out again on the next boat,” he added, “in a week or so—and bring you some books and clothes. We’ve a lot to talk about... some time.”

But not now. He lifted the grass mat at the window and described to her the wide sweep of bare earth down to the river, the palms, and a huge, ancient baobab with buttressed roots.

“This is the mouth of the Goanda river,” he said. “There's nothing here but a native village and these buildings, but the hospital is quite famous, and a good many people come for treatment. Dr. Grenfell has devoted his life to tropical sickness.” And so on.

All very interesting and laudable, but Phil was too low in mind and body to care about anything beyond the fact that soon she would be alone and suffering torments that no doctor could assuage.

The nurse knocked before entering. She came to the other side of the bed with a spurious verve which Phil later came to admire.

“I bet you didn’t expect to see her looking so bright, Mr. Caswell. That bruise on her cheekbone will soon wear off, and next time you come we’ll have her sitting up.”

“I hope so, but don’t let her persuade you to give her pillows before she’s ready for them.”

“You can trust me. There’s a meal waiting for you in the doctor’s dining-room—next to the lounge where you were before.” She stepped back and smoothed the colourless hair that was worn in a roll round her cap. “The doctor wishes Miss Crane to have complete quiet till he comes to see her, so perhaps you’ll say goodbye now.”

Phil tried to meet Julian’s eyes, but they were averted towards the nurse. She heard him murmur something and felt the pressure of his hand on hers. His stride receded. Then the nurse made her take more liquid from the repulsive spout, after which she slept.

On her sixth day Phil graduated to two pillows. On the tenth she was given a back-rest and allowed to brush her own hair. She was sitting up, wearing a faded pink dressing-jacket of the nurse’s, when Julian came in with Dr. Grenfell. He smiled at her with a warmth in his eyes that set her humming. Careful, she told herself, you’ve still got a bandage round your ribs.

At last the doctor nodded and went out. Julian hooked forward a chair with his foot, but she patted the bedcover, and with a tight smile he lowered himself to her side.

“You’re a bit of a fraud,” he said, “much too well to be in bed. Has it been rotten?”

“Ghastly, but this makes up for it. Tell me about Valeira.”

“Things have happened since you left. After a fortnight at the Novada Crawford came and asked to be taken back, but I refused, and got him shipped home right away. The man I told you about, from Lagos, arrived a few days ago and is shaping nicely.”

“Where is he living?”

“With Drew, but we’re building another bungalow on Daker’s old site. Soon I shall be ready to expand the oil palm acreage, so I’ve written to London for a third overseer. They take a couple of months to engage and despatch anyone.”

With a fingernail she traced the red stripe on the blanket. “Is your house repaired?”

“Practically.” He paused. “I gave your box of goods to the nurse.”

“You’ve stripped the cabin?”

“No,” he said non-committally. “But I told Matt that you wouldn’t be coming back and to take whatever belongs to him. When the sea is less choppy he’s coming over to see you.”

Phil’s teeth had clamped. If only she had let him sit in the chair with two or three yards between them, instead of inviting him so close that she was aware of his slightest muscle-twitch and could smell the smoke on his breath.

“You were sparkling when I came in,” he said, “and in a few minutes you’ve gone dreary. I’m not good for you, Phil.”

With the courage of desperation, she asked: “Are you trying to convince me or yourself? Weren’t you doing your damnedest to make me hate you before the wall of your house knocked me out, and aren’t you reverting to the same tactics in gentler form? You don’t have to be gentle with me, Julian. I can take it.”

“I’m not sure you can,” he said calmly, “but, if you could hate me it would simplify the problem considerably. I’m not going to discuss it with you till you’re on two feet and can pack a punch again, but meanwhile it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to weigh it up from my viewpoint, remembering that I’m thirty-six and still have four years of my contract to go.”

Phil was silenced. He was making it unendurably clear that whatever hope had sprung within her from his assumption of responsibility on her behalf could have no permanent fulfilment.

“I’m not the Roger Crawford breed,” he went on reasonably. “I shall work through my contract and perhaps renew.”

“So from now on,” she said, her chin up, “we’re enemies. It’s a relief to know where we stand.” That evening Julian had dinner with the doctor, and later used the studio couch in the lounge as a bed. At daybreak he came in to wish Phil goodbye.

She had awakened in the dark and lain steeped in an agony of fresh disillusionment. The early daylight possessed a quality of sadness that hurt deep in her breast. She threw back the clothes, carefully lowered her feet to the floor and stood up. Her knees sagged, but with the support of the small table she reached the high window and shifted the mana mat on its string, so that more light came in. She was just tall enough to see out. She did not hear the door open.

“Phil! What are you doing?”

Strange, but she was scarcely moved by Julian’s sudden appearance. She didn’t care about the washed-out cotton nightgown and her tumbled hair. She leaned with her hands flat against the cold wall behind her.

“I thought you’d gone.”

A couple of strides brought him near. “Get back to bed, there’s a good girl. You knew I wouldn’t go without seeing you. Come on, now.”

“Don’t touch me!”

“All right!”—angrily. “But get back to bed.”

Her breathing was playing tricks and queer sensations were attacking her legs, but the wall remained a solid and assuring support.

“What I have to say will come easier if I stand, Julian. I ... I’d rather you didn’t come again. We haven’t anything to discuss. Nothing’s changed. When I can travel I’ll go to the Cape and see the lawyer. Promise me you won’t come again.”

“I’ll promise nothing, you crazy little fool,” he said harshly, and the next minute she was lying on the bed, with Julian holding her shoulders and staring into her grief-dark eyes.

And then he kissed her. Not with the brutal force of that other kiss; nor tenderly, with compassion and understanding. It was a kiss so hard to analyse that hours afterwards, when Julian was back on Valeira and Phil was sitting on the dim balcony picking over a cold lunch, she was no nearer a solution.

AS soon as Phil was allowed up all day she had her meals at the house with the doctor and Nurse Briggs. Never did she hear them address each other except as “Doctor” and “Nurse,” yet the bond between them was intimate and durable. How intimate she learned by degrees.

When she discovered that the woman actually lived at the house it did not strike Phil as peculiar. Rather, she congratulated them in her mind on an utterly selfless relationship, typifying a great nobility of spirit.

There came an evening when she wandered back to her room at the end of the main building rather later than usual, and sat in the dark balcony smoking a cigarette. The only lights were those in the house she had just left and the eternally red brazier near the river. Through the open windows of the hospital issued the murmur of natives and Katie’s musically strident injunctions. Between times, Phil caught the zing of mosquitoes.

She saw the doctor’s houseboy extinguish the veranda lamp. One by one the other lights died till only one was left, that in Nurse Brigg’s bedroom. Phil thought it was the woman’s bedroom because it had a french window which the nurse always used in preference to the front door. Dr. Grenfell never went in that way.

Now the french door opened and Nurse Briggs, in a dressing-gown, stood framed in the rectangle of light. Pityingly, Phil watched the no-longer-youthful movements as the mousey hair was unpinned and shaken out. How drab and futile her existence must often seem, yet there was no escaping it. She had stayed here too long.

Then Phil’s heart gave a jump, for two figures were pasted where one had been. The doctor was there, his stoop grotesque in silhouette, his hand on the nurse’s arm. They went inside, and the screen was drawn. Phil was trembling and heartsick. Instinctively she knew all about those two over there, their struggles and needs. If their nobility had slipped in this particular it was only because they were human, like everyone else. Everyone but Julian.

Towards the end of her fourth week Matt came round the bend of the river from the sea in a rowing-boat. The coaster in which he had crossed from the island lay at anchor in the river mouth.

“I reckon this is the wrong way round,” he complained. “You could stand the sea better than I do, lovey.”

“Oh, Matt!” she squeezed his arm. “If only I could come over!”

“If you’re pining for us,” he demanded in astonishment, “why don’t you?”

She shook her head. “Julian wouldn’t have it. I hope you brought your own drink. We use it here by the thimbleful for medicinal purposes.”

“I was afraid of that,” Matt grunted as he stepped over the low balcony wall.

Phil laughed. “It’s like home to hear you again. Before you sit down take a look at my room. Enchanting, isn’t it?”

Matt’s thick nose wrinkled. “They trying to make a nun out of you?”

“It’s just a small ward. Open the packets, Matt. I’m dying to see what you’ve brought.”

He seemed to have concentrated on food and drink, though books and cigarettes had been remembered.

“Julian chose the books,” he said.

“He sent no ... message?”

“Nothing special. He’s busy with this new fellow, Davenport. Julian’s due for his annual three weeks’ leave, but he can’t be away that long. He’s talking of spending some days in Lagos.”

“Oh.” She made a sudden wild decision to transfer herself to Lagos and as quickly cancelled it. “I hope he’ll put in here on the way.”

Matt tasted his neat whisky and gazed speculatively into the glass. “I wouldn’t bank anything on Julian if I were you, Phil. He likes you—he suffered quite a bit when you got yourself smashed up to save his house—but that sort of suffering isn’t enough to change a man. He does his best for you, turns you over to a hospital and dips into his wad for your wants, but almost any man would do that. He’s case-hardened. It would take the deuce of a blast to shake him.”

“I know,” she said quietly. “Except when he’s angry he’s entirely without emotion.”

But in anger he could grip and leave bruises, and crush her mouth in a climax of self-scorn. Matt wasn’t aware of that.

“Shall we have lunch here?” she asked, “or would you like to meet the doctor?”

“If it’s all the same to you, lovey, I’ll postpone a word with the doc till I’m ready to go. Medicos make me too conscious of my overworked liver.” After lunch he snoozed, and when he awoke he had another drink to fortify himself for the interview with Dr. Grenfell. At the wooden landing-stage, an hour later, he patted the top of Phil’s head in farewell and thrust something into her dress pocket.

“Give it to the doctor,” he said, “to convince him I’m not the rogue I look.” It was a cheque for a hundred pounds.

Watching the boat vanish between the mangroves, Phil felt her courage dwindle. Wherever she looked there were barriers; only here could she slip into a niche originally meant for a qualified self-sacrificing nurse. She would go on from day to day, existing on crumbs of gratitude, yet intensely aware of the pulsing, vivid life she might be living. Phil cleared the tea-cups and glasses from her balcony and emptied the ashtray. She flicked through a glossy-leaved magazine which Matt had brought Perhaps it was coincidence that every other page pictured a man with Julian’s distinctive features looking purposefully at a series of lovely women.

She went inside to arrange the books at the bottom of the wardrobe cupboard and presently her eyes began to sting and bum. She sat on the floor with her knees drawn up, wrenched by the difficult, aching sobs of hopelessness.

Saturday was “medicine day.” From early morning, bush natives who had trudged from villages many miles inland lined up at the dispensary. Each one could recite a list of his own and his family’s ailments, but had no money for the medicines doled out to him. The more grateful brought a few eggs, mostly addled by the sun, or a chicken or a stem of bananas. This Saturday Nurse Briggs was laid out by dysentery, and Phil stepped in to hand out bottles, pills and bandages for the doctor. The windows were wide and a boy outside kept the mat fans slung across the room working frantically, but the reek of rank wounds was inescapable. Several times she rushed to the back door of the dispensary to gulp in the hot, spice-laden breeze. Sweat coursed down the sides of her cheeks and gathered beneath her chin, her dress clung from shoulder to thigh, and a river ran from each armpit.