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Charles had decided to linger on among the revellers at the club. The noise and the demand for conversation were a necessity in his present mood. He had eschewed his reserved table for two, and inserted a chair between Mrs. Kevin and young Boyd at a larger, more central, one. Near by, Jan Bridges scintillated among her group of friends. At forty, she must be nearly the oldest woman in the room, yet her sparkle was undeniable and attractive. The other women seemed content to be members of the pursued minority.

The music from the salon teased his nerves. The saccharin sweetness, all rhythm and no body, penetrated the clatter of dishes and gossip like a cloying liquid. The earlier diners were dancing in there, revolving like puppets, yet he felt an urge to join them.

Though he was only half-way through dinner when Jan’s party trickled out he followed. He danced, and later merged with a gang who were throwing dice. The game palled and he edged round the dancers towards the vestibule. In the wide archway he stopped, for standing at the bar, his beige suit conspicuous among the white evening wear of the other men, stood Julian Caswell. Charles was impelled forward.

Without expression, Julian made room for him. “What will you have, Metcalfe?”

“Whisky and water.”

To the barman Julian said, ‘Two more whiskys,” and he drained the glass he was holding.

“Staying overnight?” asked Charles.

“Several nights, probably. I’ve booked a room here. Is it always like this on Sundays?”

“Generally it’s dead, but we’ve been having tournaments in every sport you can think of and this is an all-round victory celebration.”

The drinks were brought and Charles filled up his. tumbler with water. Julian, he noticed, was swallowing his neat. To end a silence, he pointed out one or two local characters.

Julian shrugged. “The mixture as before. Polo players, poker fiends, playboys and heat-drugged women. Got a cigarette? I left mine at . . .” he let it tail off.

Charles placed a packet between the glasses. He looked round, spotted Jan and beckoned. Smilingly, she detached herself and came over. .

“Jan,” said Charles, “this is Mr. Caswell. He’s a planter at Valeira island. . . . Meet Mrs. Bridges.”

Julian nodded. “How d’you do? Have a drink?”

“Thanks. Grenadilla—if they can run to it—with
a
splash of gin. What do you plant Mr. Caswell?”

“Cacao and oil palms.” He spoke with a trace of irritation, his brows a thick, dark line.

“I ought to be horsewhipped for commencing an acquaintanceship so tritely,” Jan answered equably, “but you must make allowances. We’re all a little high this evening. If you’ve nothing better to do, come over to dinner tomorrow and see us in our normal state.”

“I didn’t quite complete the introduction,” Charles inserted hurriedly. “You see, Caswell, Phil is living with Mrs. Bridges. It was Jan’s house you visited an hour or so ago.”

“Really?” demanded Jan, delighted. “Are you a man from Phil’s brief past?”

“She’s my wife,” he said, and called a passing waiter. Jan muttered something inaudible. Aloud, with the breeziest of smiles, she said: “Well, I shall have to leave it to you whether you come to dinner. I hope you will.”

He instructed the waiter to take a hundred Turkish and a bottle of whisky up to Room Fifteen, signed the chit and finished his drink.

“Will you excuse me? I have to get my bag from the boat before I can turn in. Good night.”

They watched him stride out on to the terrace. Then Jan exhaled deeply.

“So he’s one of the ‘few knocks’.”

“He’s all of them,” Charles sighed.

“You knew he existed?”

“Yes, but not much more. She’s turned him down or he wouldn’t be here. I expect she’s gone to bed.”

“He’s in love with her.”

“With a man of his type you can’t be sure, but I hope he’s in torment.”

Jan lifted her glance to his face. “That’s not like you, Charles. Even without complications, love can be torture.” Studiously inconsequent, she fell back on flippancy. “Did you hear him order a bottle of whisky. D’you suppose he’s going on a private bender?”

Charles envied her knack of assimilating startling news with equanimity. However he tried to obliterate Phil, she kept insinuating herself into his thoughts. As if he were in her room, a detached and silent observer, he could see her writhing and sweating in her bed, turning her pillow for the balm of cooler linen, fighting the nightmare of revived pain.

MONDAY was one of Phil’s days at the Institute. She awoke with a clamped head and the unpleasant taste of hunger, but neither deterred her from dressing and spending the usual fifteen minutes over her toilet. From habit, the house-boy had placed her breakfast-tray on the veranda table, and she poured some coffee and lit a cigarette while waiting for the box-car.

The jeep, with its native driver, appeared on the road, and it was with a sense,, of release that Phil ran out to it. All the way down the avenue and along the Marine Drive she stared through the window at the gardens and the whitecrested sea. Odd, how greedily the mind fastens on externals in times of stress.

The day lulled with its ordinariness. Phil sterilized and measured, entered records and consulted files. During the afternoon a couple of former patients looked in and Charles called her out to the terrace to have tea with them.

Both had been cured of recurrent fevers yet neither had made haste to leave swamp country. In fact, their errand today was to beg certain serums for their medicine chests. They were going up-river for a spell with the intention of ultimately working towards the Cameroons to collect ivory. They were aware that this part of West Africa did not abound with elephants, but no matter. Ivory was only an excuse, anyway.

With Charles, Phil wished them luck. As she re-entered the building a clock struck five, and the remnants of this morning’s confidence seeped away. She almost expected Charles’ detaining hand, his quiet, “You know he’s staying at the club, Phil?”

“I. . . thought he might.”

“If you’re still in love with him, don’t let pride keep you apart.”

“He hasn’t altered,” she said. “There’s no piercing him.”

Charles was not surprised. “But he came here meaning to take you back with him?”

“He’s never yet shirked a responsibility. That’s why he won’t remain here long. There’s the plantation.”

“What if you have to meet him every day for a week?”

Her shoulders lifted. “I’m prepared for it. I’ve only to be as hard as he is.” A treacherous tremor came into her voice as she added, “Will you drop me at Jan’s house on your way home?”

To be tensed against shocks is not to obviate the chance of their happening. When Phil walked up Jan’s path that evening she saw men and women gathered on the veranda for sundowners. Julian appeared, and in her tiredness he seemed disproportionately tall and broad, and his touch on her arm burned.

“Come indoors for your drink,” he murmured. “It’s less hot and noisy.”

Already he was accepted by these people. They used his Christian name and winked as he appropriated the only eligible girl and pushed her in front of him into the lounge.

Phil took the cocktail he offered and tasted it. She said, “I like to have it in my bedroom.”

“I don’t blame you. This is the sort of hayride I escaped from when I left Kenya. Down that one, and I’ll get you something else to drink while you’re dressing.”

She sipped, looking past him. “When are you going, Julian?”

“To Valeira?” he queried politely. “As soon as you’re ready.”

“I told you last night ”

“I remember every syllable, but you were strung up and I was naturally on edge myself. Any time during these last months you could have found me at Valeira, but for all I knew you might have been at the other end of the earth.”

“It would have been kinder had you stayed on the island and acquiesced to the divorce.”

“Kinder to whom . . . Charles Metcalfe?” he enquired, still pleasant, but keen-eyed. “Tell me something. Why did you choose to acquaint him with our marriage—him and no one else?”

“It slipped out in the early days, when I was unhappy.”

“You haven’t been unhappy since then?”

“I was getting along nicely, till yesterday.”

“When I turned up and jerked you back to essentials. Charles Metcalfe isn’t an essential ... is he?”

“Not in the way you mean—no man is, not even you.”

He relieved her of the glass and rocked it between finger and thumb. All traces of his smile had gone. “You haven’t lost all feeling for me—you’re not the type. You’re afraid to come back in case I hurt you again. There’s one thing you don’t realize, Phil. I’m in your hands. I’m beginning to appreciate just how you felt when everything sweet in your life depended on me.”

Phil had started to say, “You can never go back . . .” when Jan came in from the veranda, her brow pleated with preoccupation.

“Oh, hello, you two. Phil, do you know what happened to that pocket chess set? Jack and Clive are going on tour and they want to borrow it.”

“It’s probably in one of the drawers.” Phil searched and produced the red leather case.

“Thanks.” Jan grinned at them. “Did I interrupt an argument?”

“Certainly not,” he said.

Her head went critically to one side as she surveyed them: Phil pale and defensive, Julian aloof, his mouth, for some reason, sarcastic.

“Give me five minutes’ notice if you decide to move in with us, Julian.”

With a wicked smile Jan went out to rejoin her friends. Phil could not look at Julian. She felt his hate of his position, his savage aversion from Charles and Jan, who, in the midst of a curious audience, were knowledgeable and avid for signs and hints.

She said, “My bath will be ready at five-thirty. The water will be covered with insects.”

And he answered, “Run along, then,” so coldly that she was annoyed with herself for crediting him with nonexistent emotions.

In her room, Phil swung back the net and sat on the edge of the bed. She was tired with heat and work, and empty but for an insupportable ache for all she had held and lost. She knew that, as she understood the meaning and necessities of love, she would never love anyone but Julian. Even in the abnormal life he had chosen for them—five days of strain and two days of joy—they had come close in many more ways than the physical. With his invasion and possession of her the years between them had dissolved. Even Julian had ceased to mention them.

During the past months she had thought of him as something that had hurt her in passing and moved on beyond her orbit. Now he had come back and she was struggling for the courage to turn away from love. No, from the semblance of love, for there is no reality in a love that is nearly one-sided and dragged all ways by secrets and withdrawals.

There came a tap at the door. Expecting the boy, she murmured a weary “Come in.” The tray entered first, carried by Julian. He sat it down on the dressing-table.'

“I’ve swiped some sandwiches and coffee for you. Later on the boy will tip out that water and replace it with fresh.”

He knelt and drew off her sandals, brought a soaked sponge and, regardless of the polished floorboards, bathed her feet, dusting them after drying with bath powder. Her will felt drugged. His crisp hair dipped near her cheek and she closed her eyes against the faint scent of it. When he had finished he poured some coffee. Phil had loosened the top buttons at the front of her dress for coolness before he came in, and now, straight and white-faced, slim legs dangling like a child’s, she caught the collar together in one hand and accepted the cup with the other. He kicked a stool close to her knees and lowered himself to it.

“That damned Institute is too much for you. From today, Metcalfe will have to do without you. Try one of those sandwiches. It’s newly-baked bread, from the freighter. That sea-cook certainly knows his job.”

Phil put down her cup and took a sandwich. Julian bit one, and smiled at her. “Not bad?”

“Quite good. But I shan’t want any more. Take them out again when you go.”

“We’ll spend tomorrow together,” he said, “just lazing and talking. The next day I’ll have the freighter loaded, and we’ll sail on Thursday. These people mean nothing to us, Phil. We shall never see them again. Why should we care what they learn about us now?”

He wasn’t going to let humiliation bite too deep, thought Phil. . . . Oh, why couldn’t she allow him one decent impulse?

“I’m not going with you, Julian.”

“You are, my sweet. If you weren’t so tired I’d show you why. Maybe tomorrow. Some more coffee?”

She shook her head. “Please take the tray.”

He leaned forward and she went rigid, scarcely daring to breathe. His forehead pressed into the flesh below her shoulder, and for a minute recollection of the old heavenly weight of him in her arms in the darkness swamped her senses.

With both hands she pushed him. Her voice almost croaked. “It’s no good. I couldn’t bear to live with you again. It took too much out of me—everything.”

“Not this time. I love you. I did before, but not like this.” His elbows dug hard into her thighs as his hands curved to her waist. His mouth spoke only inches distant from her lips. “I want you, Phil.”

Her brain groped. No depth of sorrow in him for the agony he had caused her. He’d said: “I love you. I want you,” arrogant in the assumption that the promise of renewed remorseless love-making would conquer.

“I’m finished,” she said dully. “Go out and find some other woman.”

He moved backwards, stood up and thrust aside the stool. He seemed to fill the room.

“All right,” he said. “Maybe I will!”

With fatal quietness the door snicked behind him. After a few seconds Phil pushed over the catch and undressed. She scooped the scum of insects from the tin tub with her washbowl and stepped in. The tepid water rose over her hot skin with a slight, salutary shock.

She used a towel and drew her dressing-gown around her, knotting the girdle. While she was hanging up the dress she had taken off Jan knocked, and she had to unfasten the door.