And No Regrets

by Rosalind Brett

  “Come up for breakfast in the morning, Mr. Carter,” she smiled. “You don’t want to commence your journey on beans and biscuits.”

  “That’s kind of you. Thanks a lot.” He bade Ross goodnight, then herself, and made his way out of the bungalow and across the compound to where his tent was pitched.

  “I seem to have quenched the festivities,” Ross said, picking up a drumstick and taking a hungry bite out of it. “You were really letting yourself go, weren’t you, sweetheart?”

  “I was just being hospitable, is there anything wrong with that?” she asked. “Don brought us some letters, and a box of rum truffles from your friend Patsy Harriman.”

  “My friend?” His glance flicked like steel. “You employ a funny tone, sweetheart. I might even say a suggestive one.”

  “Well, you’ve always been pretty friendly with her, haven’t you? I could see that for myself when we were at Onitslo.” Clare perched on the arm of a chair and hoped she looked nonchalant. Darn him for coming back unexpectedly, maybe in a softened mood which she, unintentionally, had hardened again into a steely one.

  “I have got myself a clever little woman, haven’t I?” he gibed. “No wonder I’m the envy of all the planters along this part of the coast. That lucky Ross Brennan, they’re all saying. His missus is a real little angel ... only angels don’t accuse their husbands of having affairs with the wives of other men!”

  “You mentioned the word affair,” Clare flamed, jumping to her feet. “I was ready to believe it hadn’t gone beyond a few kisses in your car.”

  And with those words hanging between them, he gazed at her in that uncannily still way he had, as though she were something under a microscope. Then: “Go to bed,” he said. “The excitement of dining and dancing with Don Carter has gone to your head.”

  “I do hate you!” she flared. “You’re arrogant beyond words!”

  “You told me that once before,” he quizzed her over the rim of his whisky glass. “I’m beginning to wonder if you really believe it—emphasis is usually a sign of woolly reasoning.”

  “Does it disturb you, Ross, that I might hate you? Is that why you’re arguing against it?” she asked. “Well, it’s a hopeful sign. It even suggests that you might be human. I thought you kept your human emotions under lock and key.”

  “Clever, my dear.” He executed a gnat with his fist in a rather meaning way. “Watch out that you don’t get too clever. I might have a remedy for it which you wouldn’t like at all.”

  “You mean you’ll send me home to England?” she said coldly.

  One of his dark brows quirked into a peak, then after a moment he said: “You regard that as the worst punishment I could hand out? To send you home to England—and Simon?”

  “Let’s leave Simon out of it,” she said, spirit sapping away, tipping her out of sparkling temper into dull apathy. Why must it always be the hurting kind of fireworks between her and Ross, never the kind that preceded a blaze of love? She turned towards her bedroom door. She would go in and read Simon’s letter ... to the devil with Ross and whether or not there was a key to the locked-up heart of him.

  “Goodnight,” she said. “I hope the rubber trees are not beyond saving.”

  “Few things are beyond saving, if you’ve got the will to do so,” he rejoined. “Goodnight, Clare. Perhaps we’ll both be feeling a little more civilised in the morning.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, and went from the room feeling as though she left her heart behind. A tear dropped to her cheek and slanted to her lips, for another bright flame of hope had been doused by the ice of his uncaring. His annoyance at finding her with Don stemmed from the arrogance of being her owner, not her lover ... did he love her, then it would be an agony and a heaven to see jealousy flare in his eyes.

  She sagged into a chair and closed her eyes, suddenly overwhelmed by fatigue. After a while she prepared for bed, then sitting under the netting with the lamp glowing beside her, she opened her father’s letter, slitting the top of the thick envelope with the nail of her forefinger.

  The first part of the letter was concerned with his own marriage, and he seemed quite happy, then he went on ...

  ‘How does it feel to have got what you wanted? It was honest-to-God living with Nature in the raw that you were after, wasn’t it? I hope, my dear, you are taking every care of your health, and that Brennan is being as kind to you as it is in his nature to be. I will not repeat the doubts which I expressed before you sailed to Africa with him, but there is always a home for you with Elizabeth and myself should your precipitate marriage not work out....’

  He wound up with his love, and Clare gave a painful little sigh as she returned the letter to its envelope. The letter had depressed her. It underscored too darkly her own fears regarding her future with Ross ... Ross, who tried now and again to be kind, but who didn’t love her.

  Her aunt’s letter was a document of grievances, and she turned to Simon’s with the frowning hope that he hadn’t written to near enough say, ‘Come home, leave your folly behind you.’

  But no! Simon’s letter wasn’t in the least solemn. He had had his first book published, and it had created quite a stir among the literati. He was now in Norway gathering material for a second. He was quite happy and hoped most sincerely that Clare was. He finished with the hope that she would write to him, and he was sending along to her a signed copy of his novel. He rather thought she would like it. It wasn’t exactly romantic, but then he had never been that way inclined.

  He could say that again, Clare thought, refolding the letter and putting it away.

  The next evening, as Clare and Ross sat on the veranda watching the moon spread its milky glamour over the jungle, he said; “I had a letter from my father.”

  This gave her a jolt of surprise, for he talked so rarely about his vicarage home in England and his widowed father. “What did he have to say?” she asked.

  “That he hopes when I return to England that I shall take you to see him.”

  And will you? she wanted to ask. Will you take me as your wife to see your father, or will our marriage be wound up with no regrets?

  “Who were your letters from?” he wanted to know.

  She told him, and saw him kick at the lower veranda rail as she mentioned Simon Longworth. “The guy who put you up on a pedestal, eh, Clare? Was it he who planted the travel bug in your young brain? Writers are notorious for spinning golden cobwebs over the realities and making them seem rosier than they are, or ever could be.”

  “Don’t be cynical tonight, Ross,” Clare suddenly pleaded. “I didn’t come to Africa expecting Shangri-la. I just wanted—”

  “Adventure?” he murmured.

  No, love, she thought wistfully. Your love, Ross. Your arms, and tenderness in your grey eyes instead of indifference.

  “You silly, sensitive little idiot,” he teased beside her. “I was thinking while I was up among all that rubber and chaos that it might be a good idea to send you to Onitslo for the rains. There’s more to do there ... after seeing you with Carter last night, I guessed that you were missing civilised people and the gaiety of a few parties. The Macs would be pleased to have you.”

  She felt her hands clenching together in her lap. “Do you want me to go?”

  “You haven’t smiled much lately, honey, and misery doesn’t become you.” He rose and crossed to the: veranda rail, where he turned and leaned there looking at her in the moonlight.

  “Do you want me to go?” she repeated.

  “I wouldn’t dance a jig of joy if you went,” he admitted.

  She got up and slowly crossed to his side. A pulse beat suffocatingly in her throat. “I’m sorry about last night,” she said shyly. “I acted like a little pig, when you were feeling tired and dispirited. Then to come upon me dancing the light fantastic with Don Carter ... I’m not bored here, Ross. Really.”

  “I thought you might be.” He flicked a finger at her cheek. “Say now if you want to go to Onitslo. I’ll take you
tomorrow—”

  “No,” she broke in, curling her fingers about his arm. “I’d be lost at Onitslo without you.”

  “There’ll be more storms, honey,” he warned. “Bad rains, fierce lightning—”

  “I can take it now,” she assured him. “You showed me that lightning can kill, but so, can lots of other things, and I’m growing up.”

  “If you think so, my baby.” He bent over her, a rare boyish smile on his lips. She could see the white .edges of his teeth as he added: “Come in and play to me. Some Gershwin. I’m feeling nostalgic.”

  A few days later a heavy storm broke in mid-afternoon. Ross came in from the sheds and peeled off his jacket. “As good a time as any for getting in a report on the rubber,” he said. “Do you want the shutters closed?”

  “I ... don’t think so.”

  “Make sure. I don’t mind parboiling if you’re happier shut in.”

  “No. I can sit with my back to it.”

  He spread his sheets of figures on the table, drew foolscap paper in front of him and sat down. “What’s the date?” he asked.

  ‘The twenty-eighth of April,” she replied, and pressed out on her knee the small mat she was embroidering.

  “Let’s see,” he shot her a thoughtful look, “haven’t we a coming-of-age within the next day or two?”

  “I had my birthday while you were away,” she said quietly. She had been in bed, lightheaded with fever, and had felt a hundred instead of a mere twenty-one.

  “Oh!” He carefully cleaned the nib of his pen, dipped it into the bottle of ink and worked the plunger. His expression was an odd blend of mockery and regret. Her heart beat fast as she watched him, wondering which would win; would his heart speak before his head had a chance?

  But he took his time before adding: “Well, even if the day has passed, we can still celebrate. There’s champagne buried somewhere, and I can present you with the key of the bungalow.” He laughed. “Let’s make it tonight, shall we?”

  The house trembled from a particularly violent crack of thunder. The room was brilliantly illumined. She dug her nails into her palms as the thunder crashed again.

  “After all, a girl is only twenty-one but once in a lifetime,” he flashed a smile at her. “We might as well have the best of everything we’ve got”

  “It will be fun to have a party,” she said, wincing from the lightning. “We’ll have fireworks to go with it, from the look of things.”

  But not those from the night of his return, she prayed. Let everything be wonderful for her party. Let the bluebird of happiness fly in from the storm for a while.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A PARTY. Her birthday party with Ross. Clare went eagerly to the kitchen to take a look at their food supplies and to see whether she and Luke could dream up a real feast. The party would be as much of a break for Ross as it would be for herself. His trip to the rubber plantation had plainly let him down, and he was, as Don Garter had said, such a devil for making raw land yield dividends that he wouldn’t be satisfied until the rubber trees were really flourishing, Luke had an abiding admiration for Clare’s husband (Ross seemed to possess that special half masterful, half fatherly attitude which these bush people responded to almost with affection) and under the little missus’s direction he set to with a will to whisk eggs for a cake while she sorted and cleaned the dried fruit. Chicken would have to be the inevitable main dish, but this time Clare had Luke cut it in sections and after boiling she braised the legs and wings to a golden brown. Yams and peppers set round with golden corn looked appetising—but oh, for some lovely roast potatoes! One of the things Clare missed most out here was potatoes. Mashed with butter. Chipped, baked in their skins, boiled with hot dark gravy. “Now stop it,” she told herself firmly. “Be thankful for what you’ve got.”

  Tonight, despite, the storm, she was very thankful. She would make her belated twenty-first birthday party one to remember.

  Entree, she thought, patting a finger against her cheek. There was that pot of goose liver, and with thick golden slices of toast—yes, Ross would enjoy that! She went eagerly to the pantry and sorted out the pot.

  For their sweet, she decided on orange baskets made from the fruit Don Carter had brought her. Halved, jellied and topped with cream and bottled cherries they looked delectable. She had made extra for Luke’s piccans, who were often in the house now Ross had relaxed his rule that Clare avoid the chance of infection as much as possible. You couldn’t bottle yourself in disinfectant, she thought, and Ross, like most men, worried unduly over germs.

  With preparations in the kitchen well on their way, Clare grabbed Ross’s oilskins and dived round in the rain to bang on the door of the bath-house. “Oh, don’t be all night in there,” she carolled. “I’d like to have a bath.”

  “Leave a guy in peace, woman,” he laughed. “My, there’s a dusky brute of a spider crouching in a web in here. You’re going to love his company.”

  “You dare to leave him in there,” she gasped, wrinkling her nose as a great blob of rain splashed off the bath-house roof and landed on her face. “You know spiders give me the horrors.”

  “They eat the flies, and those darned things carry more germs than anything else,” he said lazily, and she could hear him splashing about in the tub of water. “But as it’s your birthday, bar a few days, I’ll send Beelzebub scuttling back into the jungle when I come out.”

  “Thank you!” she said. “The storm seems to be lessening, Ross. The thunder’s moving further along the coast.”

  “I can still hear the rain—cut along indoors, honey. You don’t want to catch a chill.”

  She glowed as she ran indoors. Ross in a gentle mood was a man to grab the heart right out of her. Tonight she adored him, and when he came in from his bath looking sleek and silvery-eyed, she wanted to bury her face against him and breathe the scrubbed skin and hard bone of him.

  “Beelzebub has been sent packing,” he grinned, lighting a cigarette. “You may go and wallow in peace, wife of mine.”

  Wife of no one else, she thought, as she towelled down and talcumed off, slipping into a lacy confection of a slip with matching panties. Oh, the unimaginable desolation of facing life with anyone but that tough-fibred, teak-skinned Roman! She stared at herself in the spotty mirror on the bath-house wall and saw her eyes grow dark with pain at the thought of parting from him. Husband and wife for eighteen months, then a parting and no regrets.

  Could he, after these seven months, sever what they had built together here in the jungle? It was true they wrangled now and again, but all husbands and wives did that. They did not agree about a lot of things, but surely to agree all the time made for dullness? There was a hardness in him against which her sensitivity was often thrown and bruised, but he was a man undertaking a tough task in the bush and she didn’t ask for tenderness all the time, only to have it in blazing doses now and again.

  Hate Ross? She smiled wryly at her reflection and slipped into his oilskins which she had borrowed again. They hung round her to her ankles, and were redolent of tobacco, jungle rain, and a whiff of male perspiration. He knew she didn’t hate him, but did he ever suspect that she loved him with every piece of her heart? Probably not. And perhaps it was just as well that he didn’t. He didn’t want complications, he had said at the beginning, when he had proposed to her.

  Had he meant the kind that would make it impossible for him to end their marriage, when their eighteen months were up?

  She gave a sudden shiver, then braced her shoulders and went back into the house.

  She had a dress of lavender chiffon which almost exactly matched her eyes, and tonight she put it on. She applied Wild Violets to the crooks of her elbows and behind her ears—the centres of enticement, as she had once heard them called—made up her lips very carefully and fixed a little silver bow in the side of her hair. She stood a moment, nervously tensed as a bride, arms close against her body like a butterfly on the verge of taking flight, then she turned and head held
high, walked out to the living-room.

  He was there, standing tall by the lamp in his white jacket over narrow dark trousers. Clare felt a jab as she flicked her eyes over his jacket, then she withdrew the dart and tossed it out of sight. Nothing must spoil this evening. As Don had said, girls like Patsy were dangerous because girls like herself took them far more seriously than men did.

  “Wow!” Ross had glanced up from the champagne bottle he was examining. “My girl, you look like a spray of Persian lilac.”

  “What a pretty compliment, Ross.” She smiled at him. “You look rather handsome yourself.”

  Their eyes met for moments in the lampglow, then he set aside the bottle of wine, picked up something else from the bamboo table and came with his long, indolent stride towards her. Fingers clutched her heart as, smiling, he pinned into her hair with the silver bow a real jungle orchid which, he said, he had gone out into the rain to fetch. He bent his smooth brown head, still damp from the rain and redolent of it, and placed a kiss against her cheek.

  The smoky warmth of his breath drifted across her closed eyelids as she surrendered to his momentary embrace; she tingled to feel the strength of his hands on the slenderness of her bare arms. “Congratulations on your coming-of-age, Clare,” he murmured. “How does it feel to be a woman?”

  It felt marvellous, and she wanted so much to clasp her hands about the warm nape of his neck and hold him close for ever.

  “I see you unearthed the champagne,” she smiled. “The last time we had it was after our wedding.”

  “Seems a long while ago, doesn’t it?” He looked thoughtful, then with a little shrug he walked away from her and picked up the champagne bottle. Luke had laid the table, and Clare put the finishing touches by adding candles and a bowl of jungle camellias. She stood back to admire the effect, then went along to the kitchen to help with the dishing up.

  When she came back into the living-room, followed by a grinning houseboy with the first course, Ross had put out wine glasses, and the lamps. The room flickered cosily with candlelight; outside in the night it still rained heavily, but the thunder had rolled away into the jungle taking the lightning with it. Clare slipped into the chair which Ross held for her, smiling, suspended on the rim of a heady anticipation.