ROSALIND BRETT
And No Regrets
Her only guide was her heart
The conditions under which Clare agreed to go to Nigeria with Ross Brennan were unusual.
Faced with an assignment in the desolate heart of the country, Ross needed a companion. His terms were simple: eighteen months of marriage, then a parting with no regrets on either side. Loving him as she did, Clare accepted, confident that it would workout.
But her confidence was shattered the moment the glamorous Patsy Harriman triumphantly announced to Ross that she was free of her husband at last....
CHAPTER ONE
CLARE stood in the shadows of the Macleans’ veranda, listening to the end-of-party chatter behind her in the bungalow, wincing a little as Patsy Harriman’s laughter was answered by a deep-toned, unmistakable voice. The voice of Clare’s husband.
She moved sharply to the veranda rail and heard all around her the night-time sounds of West Africa. The queer calling of tropical birds, the rustlings in the undergrowth; sounds both primitive and strange, and far removed from anything she had known in England. Clare had never been out of England in her life before, and right now she was clutched by panic, by a sharp sense of unreality ... everything had happened almost too quickly.
Most girls these days laughed at the idea of falling madly in love with a stranger, yet when it had happened to Clare there had been no laughter in her. She had lost possession of herself ... been swept by emotions so blinding that she hadn’t wanted to see the hint of mastery lurking about the mouth of the stranger, or the lack of love in his grey eyes when he had asked her to marry him.
Her hands clenched the rail of the veranda and there sprang into her mind a clear picture of her first meeting with Ross Brennan.
Another party, the place a house in Ridgley. Most of the other guests had already drifted homeward, and Clare, an acquisition to any party because she played the piano so well, stood in the hall trying to fasten the tricky clasp at the throat of her lambswool coat. An exasperated, “Dash the thing!” escaped from her, and in that instant she caught a further glimpse of the face that had disturbed this party for her. Its owner stood tall and lean in the shadows behind her, and his reflection was shared with hers in the mirror. It was a hard, tanned face; there was a certain charm about it, and also the arrogance of someone who had gone through life getting exactly what he wanted out of it.
He came and stood behind her. “Here, let me have a go,” he said, and she turned like an obedient child and lifted her pointed chin. His steel-grey eyes met hers, and his knuckles pushed into her throat. She caught her breath, and he said heartlessly: “I’ll get this thing fastened if I have to choke you in the process.”
Such a ruthless remark warned her that she ought to flee out of the door away from him. But instead she let him walk her home to the bank-chambers where she had lived since a small child with Aunt Letty and Uncle Fred Burgess. The tanned stranger was tall beside her; he walked as he talked, arrogantly.
He made no secret of liking her company. He took her to London and to Warwick; they picnicked by the river and bathed in it. She learned that he had just returned from three years in Nigeria and that he had an option on returning there for a further eighteen months, or waiting on half-pay for the retirement of the superintendent of the Cape Town branch of the company. He said Cape Town was his fancy; he had had more than enough of the tropics. Yet when he described the heat and the rains, the appalling dampness and the frightful monotony, his tone was nostalgic.
From the beginning, Aunt Letty seemed not to approve of him. He was too full of worldly know-how, she said. His opinions were ruthless, his cynicism too ingrained. Perhaps life in the tropics had made him that way. At any rate, she considered him the wrong sort of companion for Clare.
It was his difference from the men of Ridgley that set him apart for Clare. There was a boldness about Ross that excited her in a new and rather alarming fashion. When she lay in bed at night, she found herself thinking about his lean dark face ... she wanted to touch it, to smooth the cynicism from it.
Clare had lived all her life over the bank which her uncle managed. Her mother had died at Clare’s birth, and Aunt Letty, her mother’s sister, had taken the baby while her father went abroad. Upon his return to England he had lived a bachelor’s existence, and Clare had stayed with Aunt Letty and Uncle Fred.
Hemmed in by the rather prim environment which surrounded her aunt and uncle, it was no wonder that Clare yearned to escape from Ridgley to the colour and romance of faraway places. As she grew up and began to earn her own living as secretary to a busy local woman, her desire to travel strengthened into an obsession, though it was impossible to voice her longing to Aunt Letty. In her aunt’s opinion Clare had everything a nice girl should want, and like other nice Ridgley girls she would eventually marry a local man and stay here for ever.
That was not Clare’s idea. She knew what she wanted ... Ross Brennan’s entry into her life had shown her that a girl’s shadowy dreams could materialise into substance.
There came a blank week while he was away in London, and the evening he returned, as though Fate set the scene, Aunt Letty and Uncle Fred went out to dine with friends. It was quiet in the lounge as Ross stood lighting a cigarette, his sleek brown head slightly bent. Then he raised his head and blew out a stream of smoke.
“My chief at head office has asked me to go back to Nigeria for that further eighteen months,” he said.
Clare was half turned to him on the piano stool, her hands unconsciously gripping the sides of it. “To the plantation in the wilds?” Her voice was strangely calm. “You’re going?”
“I don’t know.” He studied the tip of his cigarette. “At first I refused point-blank. He wanted reasons for my attitude, and we talked them over for hours. He left me with only one leg to stand on—the shattering loneliness. And he suggested a remedy for that.”
She gave a brittle little laugh. “Marriage, I suppose?” He lounged against the table and his eyes, flicked her face as he nodded. He wore grey. He always looked good to her in that particular shade, for it threw into relief his look of lean, dark distinction. Suddenly her heart was torn at the thought of his going, and she swung sharply to the keyboard of the piano and ran her fingers along the keys.
“For heaven’s sake!” He strode over furiously, and his hands hurt her shoulders as he swung her to face him. “Aren’t you interested in what I’ve got to say?” he demanded.
“I know what you’re going to say,” she threw back at him. “Marriage is out. Even to get back to Nigeria, you won’t marry. I wonder why you’re so down on marriage.”
“A lifetime’s a long while to spend with one woman, honey.” His tone of voice was hard.
“Not if you ... love her. Most men prefer to spend their lives with an understanding woman.”
“There’s no such thing as an understanding woman.” His smile had a twist to it. “I speak from experience, Clare. I’ve met all the types in my thirty-one years.”
“You’re a cynic,” she accused.
“No, a realist,” he argued. “And that’s why I can say what I’m going to say. Clare, you’re mad to get away from this small, slow town for a while, and I confess that I wouldn’t mind going back to the tropics for a spell. We could go together.”
His words seemed to float around the room before she caught at their significance. “No!” She threw the word at him. “I’m keen to get away from Ridgley, but not to the extent of living in sin with a tropical planter!”
Even to herself her rejection sounded unbearably prim and proper, and she wasn’t surprised when he put back his head and roared with laughter. “Oh, come over here and sit down, Miss Prim!” He near enough lifted her off th
e piano stool and gave her a gentle push to the settee. He sat down beside her and, still chuckling, flicked his eyes over her face. “Your aunt did a wonderful job on you, didn’t she?” he mocked. “But then I guess she had to, for you’re not a bad-looking kid with that cloudy hair and those near-violet eyes.”
“Oh, stop it, Ross, and tell me what you’re getting at.” She could feel herself flushing under his scrutiny.
“Can’t you guess?” he teased.
“A—are you asking me to marry you?” she faltered.
“In a way.” He bent to a low table and stubbed out his cigarette. Her eyes flicked his profile and she could see a small pulse hammering in his temple. He had adopted a light tone about all this, but she guessed that it wasn’t coming easy to him, having to propose to someone for the sake of furthering his career.
“You’re not in love with me, are you?” he demanded.
Instinctively she hung on to her pride. “I ... don’t think so.”
“Good. If you were, it would complicate matters. My suggestion is this—that we become husband and wife for eighteen months.”
“And when the eighteen months come to an end?”
“A clean cut, Clare, and no regrets.”
She sat still and quiet, trying to take in what he was offering her. Travel at last, to a part of the world she could never hope to visit without a man. And marriage, too. With Ross.
“You’re not in love with me either, are you?” she said with certainty.
“No, there’s nothing soul-rending in what I feel for you. It’s easy to imagine oneself in love with an attractive girl, but liking your looks and contradictions is a long way from death-defying love.”
The hurt of those bald phrases. But in the silence that followed them, her thoughts leapt into the future. Married to Ross, living alone with him in the bush, she might teach him to love and need her. She turned her head to look at him. His expression was an odd blend of mockery and watchfulness. “Ross,” she murmured, “why me?”
“You’re rather sweet, and we argue ... and you’ve got grit.”
“Is that all?”
“Enough to last eighteen months,” he returned, callously.
“I’d be crazy to marry you,” she flared. “You’re cruel here, in this civilised English lounge. I dread to think what you’d be like in the wilds of West Africa.”
“Try me,” he challenged. ‘You’re always on about wanting a more adventurous life than the one you’ve got right now. Remember, honey, it will be an adventure only. You’ll be but a bride of convenience, with no heartache involved for either of us, only companionship.”
Clare stared at him. She thought of his previous womanless three years in the bush ... facing another eighteen months of such an existence might well break the discipline and hardness which she so admired. He needed out there a woman’s companionship if not her love, but was her own love strong enough to accept the little he offered for the chance of building it into something more substantial over the next eighteen months?
“Well, what do you say?” He feathered her chin with his thumb, and she tensed at the thrill that ran like brushfire through her. In these small, meaningless touches lay the danger, she realised. She might sparkle unexpectedly, or melt, and then he would laugh ... or be irritated.
“My aunt will be against the idea,” she said lightly. “She’ll cry, and I can’t bear people I’m fond of to cry.”
“Neither can I,” he drawled. “Are you the weepy sort?”
She shook her head, rose and walked away from him to the window. Love and anguish ran together in her; he had admitted, in a roundabout way, that she had made a deeper impression on him than other women he had known. He was willing to marry her, and there swept over her the old desire to feel a ship beneath her feet, alien odours on her breath, and the hot blue canopy of foreign skies over her head...
She was suddenly aware of him at her side. She caught a whiff of his tobacco, felt the brush of his sleeve, and knew that if she turned to meet his eyes she would feel that queer shock somewhere in the region of her lower ribs. No one else had eyes that could smile so lazily, or turn so hard above an arrogant jut of a nose. Ross Brennan ... a lean hard Roman with throwback tendencies!
“Tell me once more what I can expect of the tropics?” she invited, like someone needing bitter medicine in order to cure a fever.
“Ferocious heat, jigger-bugs, the chance of fever, and hours of monotony,” he listed.
“I’d be crazy to take on all that—and you,” she murmured.
Their eyes locked for a long moment, then he turned away from her and jerked the curtain aside. “Maybe it was a crazy, impossible idea,” he said crisply, staring out of the window. “Forget I ever mentioned it.”
And when he said that, Clare knew for certain that she would never forgive herself for letting him go away without her. She couldn’t do it ... she loved him too much.
Clare was only half prepared for Aunt Letty’s aversion to the marriage. Her aunt agreed that Ross could be charming when he liked, but charm, particularly the sophisticated kind, was a doubtful asset in a husband. Clare would bitterly regret what she was set on doing—besides, a young couple in love didn’t try to be clever with each other all the time!
Her niece could not explain that the bright chatter she reserved for Ross was an indispensable disguise to her true feelings. And had her father known that she was entering into a marriage which would be built on a one-sided love, he would not, she knew, have given his consent to it. As it was, he declared, she was inviting trouble by tying herself to a calculating egoist like Brennan. He didn’t mince his words and Clare had to swallow them, knowing them to be true.
Within the month Clare stood with Ross before a registrar and changed her name from Clare Meriden to Clare Brennan. Ross slipped on to her finger a smooth oval of jade set in a thin band of gold; she loved the ring and said so. “Good,” he murmured, and kissed the finger that wore it. She met his eyes—most certainly there was some heartache ahead for her, but surely there would be sweet intervals as well? If she could believe so, life would be more than tolerable.
Clare left England for Lagos somewhat estranged from her two closest relatives. Aunt Letty preserved an offended silence right until the boat had sailed. Her father, contemplating a second marriage, had given her a perfunctory send-off and cast a hard look at Ross. She had written to both of them during the voyage out, but no replies had yet come to her letters.
She had hoped for a cable in Lagos, and for that reason had willingly agreed to Ross’s suggestion that they have some fun for a week or two. The parties had been marvellous; interesting, too, in a way. The men on leave with their wives seemed to envy Ross her youth and freshness; the bush, they loudly asserted, was no place for a white woman. The womenfolk showed plainly that they pitied her ignorance, and hinted openly that Ross had married her for convenience. No man who really cared for a woman would take her out to that monotonous hell. She would lose those pretty looks and that light step, and (casting envious glances at her smiling mouth) she would soon begin to give in to moods of irritation like the rest of them.
Clare stirred where she stood on the Macleans’ veranda, for here at Onitslo she had received similar warnings, and tomorrow she and Ross set off on the last stages of their journey. She turned and walked back into the bungalow, blinking at the bright lights and noticing almost at once that Ross and Patsy Harriman were missing from the room.
“Ross has been kind enough to give Patsy a lift home.” Mrs. Maclean approached Clare with her rather jaded smile. Years in the tropics had taken their toll of her, sallowed her face and robbed her hair of its gloss. She eyed Clare with a concerned friendliness. “How young you are,” she said. “Mike Harriman should never have brought Patsy out to this climate, then left her so much to her own resources.”
Clare, trying to look composed, perched on the arm of a chair to await her husband’s return. Patsy was attractive in a dark-haired, poppy-
mouthed way, and Clare tried not to feel hurt that Ross had not sought her out before going off with the girl.
“Well, my dear, this is your last night in Onitslo,” said Mrs. Maclean. “After tomorrow it will be a long time before you see another white woman—or white man, except your husband. I must say I admire your courage in coming out here to tackle bush life.”
With a man like Ross, Clare filled in. She smiled and pleated with her fingers a fold of her chiffon skirt. “Ross said the loneliness would be too unbearable unless he brought along a wife,” she replied.
“And the fascination of Africa has you in its grip, eh?” said the other woman, her smile a trifle wistful, as though she were remembering her own eagerness of long ago.
Clare nodded. With every fresh sight and experience her eagerness increased to get into the bush and to live alongside Ross in the real, teeming Africa. Their coming months together—even if the marriage would not be more than a companionship—would surely strip him of that defensive air of cynicism, so that when the time came for them to part, he would be unable to let her go. She clung to that hope and it buoyed her up, put a sparkle in her eye and a tilt to her chin when Ross finally sauntered into the room, looking very tanned in his white dinner-jacket.
“We thought you’d hit a tree,” Mrs. Maclean was straightening cushions and gathering up glasses. Her husband had fallen off to sleep in a chair.
“Patsy had things to say about Mike and I lent a sympathetic ear.” Ross crossed the room with a lazy stride and stood looking down at his wife. “Enjoyed the party?” he asked. “Feel like a last run round? It’s dark, but very pleasant, and I shan’t have a private car in my hands for a while. How about it?”
“Of course,” Clare agreed.
“Then tie something over your hair if you don’t want it full of aliens.”
It was a relief to be out in the air without a topi, the helmet every white person has to wear even on sunless days against the tropical heat. Clare lay back comfortably in her seat in the open tourer, watching as much of the Old Town as was visible between the palms. It was sedately English in atmosphere, a quiet game of bridge seen through a bungalow window farther on a group of white-clad men smoking on a terrace.
And No Regrets Page 1
