And No Regrets

by Rosalind Brett

  “We’ll see.” She flipped open the book, and heard Ross go from the room. Mark came in with her tea-tray, and after pouring herself a cup, she sipped it and resolved to be very snappy and bright until Ross had gone off with Bill to check up on the rubber trees.

  They left early the following morning, Johnny and Mark having been given firm orders to sleep in the kitchen while the little missus was here on her own.

  “We’ll be back as soon as possible,” Ross assured her. “Rest that foot, and don’t brood.” Then he broke into a wicked grin. “Of course, I’m forgetting, you’ve got dear Simon’s novel to keep you entertained. I hope he hasn’t revealed too many secrets of your adolescent romance.”

  “Sometimes, Ross,” she said in exasperation, “I could throw something at your head.”

  Bill, who had gone out discreetly on to the veranda, obviously thinking they wanted to indulge in a ‘fond’ goodbye, now poked his head round the door and remarked that the sun was getting up “It looks a bit smoky,” he added.

  “I daresay it’ll rain before we reach the canoe,” Ross said, carelessly. “Got your oilskins?”

  Bill nodded, and smiled at Clare. “I’m sorry you’ve got to stay behind, Clare,” he said. "Still, a rubber forest is hardly the place for a woman.”

  “I’d have enjoyed seeing it. I hope the rains keep off,” she added anxiously.

  “Tuck your head under the cushions if the lightning gets bad,” Ross advised, shouldering a heavy rucksack.

  “But you taught me how to face it like a real scout,” she reminded him pertly. “I’d hate to go soft now you’ve toughened me up.”

  “You’ll never be tough, my honey.” He bent over her and unexpectedly kissed her nose. “Be good. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  He strode out after Bill, and a minute later she heard the lorry start up. She hobbled to the veranda and stood watching the lorry out of sight. The sound of it died away, and her glance lifted to the sky. A smoky ribbon tied the blackish clouds in an untidy package, and she knew that it would rain heavily very soon. Her breath caught on a sigh. He had said not to brood, but she would be bound to. Despite the excellent writing of Simon’s novel, it couldn’t enthrall her half as much as sitting and going back over the events of the past eighteen months.

  She withdrew into the living-room and curled herself into a ball on her favourite lounger. There was a tin of nuts and raisins on the bamboo table beside her, and a jug of grapefruit juice, and feeling almost cosily isolated from the world of people, she let her thoughts drift back to Ridgley and those short weeks of getting to know Ross—as well as anyone could know him. Those few short weeks that had woven the first threads of what was to lead her into a web of strange, tormenting enchantment

  Once a year Ridgley held a race meeting, and Clare had gone with Ross. It was raining when they had set out in the sports coupe he had on hire, but by the time the course was reached, the sky had brightened and racegoers were discarding their mackintoshes and opening out their sports seats. Ross, fingers under Clare’s elbow, led her to his place in the stand, dropped her bag and gloves upon his own seat, then used the glasses to scan the course. In tweed jacket over dark-brown slacks, he had seemed to Clare the best-looking man at the meeting. A mounting excitement had coursed through her veins ... then had come the first intimation that what she felt was more than physical attraction.

  She loved horses, and had a small bet on every race, amusing Ross intensely because she would ignore his advice and backs the horse which most pleased her eye. “You’re asking for trouble, betting with your heart instead of your head,” he had jibed.

  Considering him from beneath lowered lashes, she knew that she could only see him with the eyes of her heart. Narrow-hipped, his long bones sparely covered, his face arresting at all angles. Once or twice he had smiled amusedly in her direction, showing boyish teeth, and crinkling the corners of his eyes.

  That was the way his eyes crinkled when she played the piano for him. Her gift was a natural one, which her aunt had wanted trained, and which her father had paid for. When she played, a new, troubled emotion got into the music. Ross informed her that she played remarkably well ... up to a point “You think I need to grow up, is that it?” she said to him.

  Whenever he talked about Africa, she felt an odd, inward tremble. The tropics ... and Ross. This man with the controlled restlessness and the natural assurance. A man who had schooled himself always to get what he wanted; whose vitality was the more forceful for being restrained.

  She just couldn’t resist questioning him about West Africa, and he answered gravely, still betraying by those crinkling eyes a faint enjoyment in her naive thirst for information. Those weeks of Ross’s leave had been curiously exciting, and unsettling. She felt stripped of all resistance, yet he did not try to batten down her will, or expect her to be a little yes-woman.

  Clare had to invite him home. Aunt Letty showed surprise but did not flutter, placing him several places along the dinner table from Clare. Afterwards they all played bridge, and Clare smiled inwardly as he seated her aunt and walked lazily round the table to his own chair opposite. “I admit he’s charming,” Aunt Letty said later on. “I played atrociously this evening, but he wasn’t a bit put out. There’s something about him, though—he isn’t our sort, Clare. He’s been around!”

  “That’s what makes him an interesting fellow,” spoke up Uncle Fred. “And I’d say his motives are absolutely above board where our Clare is concerned. Straight eyes, the chap’s got—did you notice?”

  “A straight eye for a pretty girl,” snapped Aunt Letty. “Clare, I don’t think you ought to see him any more. I’ve a feeling—well, I think he’s capable of making you very unhappy.”

  “Auntie dear,” Clare laughed, “he’s just a friend.”

  “I wonder if Simon will think so,” said her aunt tartly.

  Simon and Ross were like chalk and cheese. One was as fair as the other one was dark; and the planter, unlike the writer, was not a man to accept the thrusts of fate without fighting back instead of probing their inner meaning. He boldly took the course of his life into his own hands.

  She knew he found her a likeable companion, and she had no intention of wrecking their friendship by demanding more than he was prepared to offer; yet to be with him was at once a delight and a terror, and an exquisite anguish. She enjoyed dancing with him best of all, though he was no Gene Kelly on the dance floor. After a foxtrot or a quickstep, they would stroll out on to the terrace of the country club. As it was summertime, the sun went home later, dropping down below a distant line of trees, leaving a spread of gold that paled into saffron splotched with the mauve of high, still cloud. The scent of roses and stocks came up from the garden below. From nearby, came the long, deep note of a blackbird, that evening they sat on a bench and he asked her, a smile on his lips, what sort of a little girl she had been.

  “All pigtails and prim obedience,” she had grinned. “I’ve always been, terribly grateful to Aunt Letty and Uncle Fred for having me live with them.”

  “They should be grateful to you for being such a dutiful child,” he had said, a thoughtful smile in his eyes.

  “How does it feel ... small-town England after the vast tropical jungle?” she wanted to know.

  “Nice, calm, nerve-soothing.” His fingers played with the ends of her fine-textured hair. “There’s not much that’s glamorous about West Africa, you know, but I was always keen to go and I enjoyed it as much as any man could.” He threw up his head and light shone on his firm, arrogant jaw. “The place can be hellishly lonely, and I wasn’t built for stupendous loneliness. You haven’t any conception of it, Clare. My nearest neighbour was thirty miles away, and he a man.”

  Then Ross had left her for a week, to go to London. Left her to see Simon occasionally, and to wander in imagination through the places she ached to visit, noisy bazaars, forgotten villages, and raw jungle. She visualised giant trees and astonishing, dank green vegeta
tion, and over all the torrid heat of the African sun. She hadn’t dreamed that Ross would return from London to put to her a suggestion that would make her dreams come true ... almost.

  Light and shadow played over Clare’s face as her thoughts chased one another, then with a start she realised where she was. In the jungle, with Ross nowhere nearby, and rain hammering down outside.

  She uncurled her cramped legs and hobbled to a window. The skies were emptying themselves without restraint, battering down the flowers and spattering the flame and gold petals with dirty-red mud. The garden paths were rivers, and there was a constant lap of water from the overflowing water-butt.

  Clare traced profiles on the steamy glass of the window—beaky, firm-chinned profiles. The world was shrouded in greyness, and she felt acutely alone, and deeply anxious for the two men who were paddling upriver in a canoe in this tropical downpour. She went to the kitchen to ask Johnny how long he thought the rain would last. “Three-four hours,” he said.

  Three or four hours, and Ross and Bill would be sitting in the canoe on the open river all that time. They’d be soaked by the time they reached the rest-house—if it was still standing!

  Her heart was shaken by anxiety, by love, by all the emotions women have to bear alone, more often than not.

  She made herself an omelette for lunch, and ate it without much appetite. The lonely hours dragged by and an early dusk came down over the bungalow. Clare lit the lamps, and for something to do went to change her blouse and slacks for a dress. She even applied make-up to induce a more cheerful feeling, and noticed in the mirror how thin her cheeks had grown. She had never been all that buxom, but it looked at last, as though the tropics had got to her and were wreaking a certain amount of havoc. Inner torment was helping as well, of course.

  The thought of facing the empty months ahead, when no more would Ross stroll into a room, bush hat pushed to the back of sweat-tousled hair, a smile on that faintly rakish face of his. When no more would she see him stretched out lazily in a veranda chair, smoking a cigarette with a tranquillity she often longed to shatter with something like: “I’ll be leaving my heart behind in your keeping when I go, though I know you’ll be too occupied with Patsy Harriman to care. You’ll have set me adrift without purpose, without the will to fight any more against the set pattern of life Aunt Letty has laid down for me. I want to travel, but I know I shall give in this time to the desires of other people. To those of my aunt and my father; to those of Simon ... whom I can never love because I love you.”

  Love! How you could hate it for taking away your independence and leaving you so at the mercy of your own emotions, and the unknowing cruelties of the one you loved!

  She returned to the living-room to eat her solitary dinner, and to drink a gin and lime in order to subdue the quake of her nerves as lightning split open the sky beyond the unshuttered windows and thunder rolled and rumbled, and seemed to shake the house.

  Johnny padded in. Was the little missus all right? She nodded, determined not to give in to her nerves. “I’m going to play the gramophone,” she smiled. “Leave the door open so you and Mark can hear the music.”

  They liked it when she put on records, and she knew the two boys would gyrate happily to the music out in the kitchen.

  It was fairly late, gone nine o’clock, when Clare heard someone cross the compound outside and mount the veranda steps. Her heart leapt uncomfortably into her throat as she hastened to a window and peered through the slats of the blind she had long since let down. It was no longer raining, and she made out the figure of a man in oilskins that glimmered ghost-like. Suddenly he took hold of the handle of the locked door and gave it a rattle. Clare could feel her heart pounding near her throat ... the man wasn’t Ross, he wasn’t tall or wide enough. Nor was it Bill Humphriss, who was stockier than the man standing out there on her veranda steps. Then as though a faint light through the blind slats caught his attention, he turned from the door and came right up to the window. He stood there a moment, and he seemed to look right through the slats into Clare’s fear-widened eyes. Then she caught her breath as fingers scraped against the window. “I know you’re standing there,” said the man. “I can just make out your shape.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE voice, and the choice of words, were instantly familiar, and Clare released her breath with relief. Don Carter!

  Don? What was he doing here this time of the night? She hastened to let him in, and grinning, he tossed his wet oilskins to a veranda chair then his overboots, and followed her into the living-room. He carried a suitcase, and when she cast an enquiring glance at it, he said: “I’ve quit Kalai. Had a row with the D.O. and came on here in a canoe.” He glanced round. “Where’s Ross? I’m hoping he’ll let me stay here until the steamer comes on Friday.”

  “Ross is away with the new man. They’ve gone off to check up on the rubber trees,” she said. “You’re really leaving Kalai?”

  He nodded, set down his suitcase and slicked the fair, wet hair back off his forehead. She went to pour him a whisky and water.

  “That place has grown unbearable,” he accepted the tall glass and smiled his thanks. “Earle wasn’t too bad while his missus was there, but since she went home he’s been like a bear with a sore head. Living in the wilds is bad enough, but when a quartet of men start fighting among themselves ... well, I walked out after a terrific row with Earle. The fellow’s developed into a tyrant, and Noel and Jeffreys are welcome to tolerate him. Not me!”

  Don tossed back the rest of his drink. His eyes dwelt on Clare’s over the rim. “I was counting on Ross being here—he seems to leave you alone a lot.”

  “Not really,” she protested. “It’s just chance that he’s away this time. And, naturally, you’re welcome to stay until Friday.”

  “Won’t he mind—you being here all alone, and putting me up?” Don’s blue eyes scanned her fine-boned face, lightly made up, with, had she known It, a sad sort of charm about it tonight. “Camping out isn’t exactly congenial during the rainy seasons, Clare.”

  “Naturally I don’t expect you to camp out.” She gave him a slight frown. “You can bed down in Bill’s quarters—Bill is the man who is taking over from Ross when he leaves.”

  At that moment an anxious crinkly head came poking round the door, then Johnny showed his widely spaced teeth in a grin of recognition. “Make coffee and sandwiches, Johnny,” Clare said. “Use the tongue I opened for my dinner, and bring mustard on the tray. Also a thick slab of that pineapple pie.”

  “Me do that, missus.” Johnny glanced at Don, who was now lounging on the arm of a chair and taking out his cigarette case. “You come river, sah?”

  “By canoe,” Don nodded. “My paddle boys went back with boat to Kalai.”

  “I see, sah. I jumps quick and gets samwiches.”

  “You’re a marvel, Clare,” Don said when Johnny had departed. “You’ve a natural talent for making a house into a home, and bush boys into thoroughly reliable servants.”

  “Most women are domesticated,” she said lightly. “You’ve been out in the jungle so long, Don, that you equip every woman with wings. Back among the civilised you’d see me for what I am, a quite ordinary brunette without a halo.”

  His eyes dwelt on the silvery streak that ran through her hair. He offered his cigarette case and she took one. “Angels don’t smoke,” she laughed, bending her head to his lighter. When she straightened up he had slipped off the chair arm and was standing a little too close. She retreated, puffing out smoke.

  “If you’re going to stay, you’re going to be good, she said stiffly. “As I’ve reminded you before, I’m a married woman.”

  “A happily married woman?” he drawled.

  “Of course,” she said defiantly.

  “You don’t look it, Clare. Those violet eyes were meant to shine like amethysts, not to look like flowers in the rain. I think you’re in the mood for a sympathetic shoulder, and that it was a good thing I happened along.”


  “You’ll relieve the boredom until Ross returns,” she agreed, coolly. “What will you do now you’ve quit your post at Kalai? Isn't it breaking the company contract to walk out without due notice?”

  “I’m saying goodbye to the company altogether,” he asserted. “I’m going back to England to get a civilised job.”

  “You told me once that the tropics had got into your blood,” she reminded him, sitting down in one chair and gesturing to him to take another. He complied, and sat back, crossing his legs.

  “Loving the tropics is like having an affair with an exotic woman,” he said. “When the spell dies, there’s nothing left but an acute longing to get away from what has infatuated you.”

  “Ross felt like that after his first three years,” she said, “but he came back.”

  “He brought you as his safeguard, Clare. He brought sanity in the shape of a girl with grit and the kind of looks that put one in mind of an English flower garden. Sounds corny put into words, but that’s what our shrewd Ross did right enough.”

  It didn’t only sound corny, it sounded uncomfortably close to the truth, and Clare was relieved when Johnny came in with the supper tray and she was able to switch the conversation to a less personal topic. “What kind of work are you going in for when you get back to England?” she asked, pouring coffee and handing him the cup.

  “I might try being a car salesman,” he added sugar to his cup. “You’ll admit that I’ve got plenty of ready conversation, and the car market is booming.”

  “You’re certainly a talker,” she smiled. “Mustard?” He quirked a blond eyebrow and met her eyes, then accepted the little pot and inserted mustard into a sandwich. “D’you think my plan’s a good one?”

  “I rather think it might be. You're sociable, and the tropics can be lonely.”

  “Are you lonely, Clare?”

  “Not when Ross—”

  “When Ross is here. Be truthful, honey.”

  “Don’t call me that!” she said sharply.