Winds of Enchantment

by Rosalind Brett

  Down on the beach the native workers lumbered from shed to shed, no longer singing. The jungle that enclosed the city pressed in and wafted its cloying, overripe breath.

  In common with the other gardens, that of the villa was burnt brown by the lethal sun. The compound boys reported for work each day, received their rations and went home again. The channels between the nearest sandbanks were black with natives fishing with their wide baskets, and cooling their bodies at the same time. The whites had no such remedy. Mostly they stayed within the thick walls of their houses and offices, ears perked for the wind that would cut short this inferno.

  Preoccupation with her own problem, Pat found, robbed the heat of its deadliest effects. She felt it and to some extent was laid out by it, but the temperature was incidental, a matter of damp hair and clinging clothes, a continuous thirst, and a disinclination to stifle under her bed-netting of a night.

  Too often she thought of the situation between herself and Nick; she tried to believe that by some miracle, some wonderful sign on his part that he cared for her, they would settle down into the illusory happiness of married life in the tropics. And then, suddenly, anger would rise in her against his invulnerability and dominance. There ought to be weakness in him somewhere.

  She thought of Christine, her mother, who had loved Bill in a way it is given to few women to love, selflessly, from the spirit. Pat remembered her father’s last visit to Christine; when after a while he had grown restless and Christine was certain of losing him again, her serenity had not been impaired. To use Nick’s expression, Christine was rare. She, Pat, would be broken by the heartbreak of such an existence.

  Throughout three glaring, breathless days she pondered, while a headache reminded her of the fever which hung over her like a threat. Then Nick came and drove her swiftly back to his house for tea. He shucked his jacket, whipped off his tie, and they both stretched out in long chairs. Pat’s was turned at right angles to his, a convenient position, for he could only see the whole of her face if she deliberately turned it to him.

  He drank a glass of iced tea, his eyes slitted against the sun. A pair of sun-specs increased the triangular delicacy of Pat’s face.

  “This heat,” he muttered. “Worse than I ever remember. How are you standing up to it, Pat?”

  “I-I haven’t quite your capacity for sticking the climate,” she replied.

  “Sleeping badly?”

  “Sleeping hardly at all,” she admitted.

  “It’s getting you down?” he demanded urgently; and when she made no answer, “Why didn’t you tell me? It isn’t fair to keep such things to yourself.”

  Her hands gripped the rails of her chair until her knuckles whitened as she waited for him to say more, to give some sign that it troubled his heart, not just his sense of responsibility, that at last the climate seemed to be getting her down.

  “Do you want to go home—to England?” he asked.

  Her whole body slackened, her mouth twisted. He had said it so casually. It wouldn’t concern him at all whether she went home or stayed here. “Yes, I think the time’s come for me to go,” she said.

  He crossed his arms under his head and said no more, and presently she got up and went indoors.

  In Nick’s dining-room she poured a glass of water and drank it slowly. She might have been more eloquent and used all the weapons at a woman’s command to try and win him. She might have said that she wanted a real marriage, and children, as many as it would take to bind him to her for ever and ever. Human saplings, growing up in a temperate climate, more interesting and productive than any stick of wood spouting latex.

  Pride had riveted her tongue. She wasn’t begging. She was too much a Brading to do any begging—even of Nick.

  She edged round the table towards the window. From here she could see the top of his dark head and his tanned wrists under it, the jut of his nose and chin. He seemed not to have moved since she had left him, relaxed in the sun as though he had nothing more on his mind than the indolence induced by the heat. Pain wrenched her heart, and there swept over her the despair of loving this man who cared only for his work.

  As she turned away, he got up and came in. His eyes were expressionless as they took her in. “I’m not yet ready to leave this place,” he said. “You must go home alone, Pat.”

  “I didn’t imagine you would desert the plantation to come with me.” Her voice was hard. “I knew you would agree to my going.”

  “I’m not all that happy about it,” he jerked. “But it would be best for you—the more sensible course.”

  “Of course,” she agreed dutifully.

  “Don’t look so stricken! I know you’re fond of Africa, but three years is a long time here for any woman and—”

  “You would like me to go,” she finished for him. She straightened and her chin went up. “Very well, Nick, I’m going home. England may help me to forget the jungle—and all that has happened to me here.” She moved towards the door, afraid to look at him lest she weaken and seek his arms—his arms that did not want her.

  Swiftly she left the house. It was faintly cooler. Dust rose in small eddies and settled again. A few houses were already hopefully shuttered, awaiting the blow and the rain. The brassy sky was deceptively benign. Pat, the heart squeezed out of her, felt the first tentative trickle of the wind, and shivered. As soon as she reached the villa she ordered the cleaning of her trunks and cases. She was in a tearing hurry to be done with pain.

  Kanos had never looked so lovely as during her final ten days. True the earth was scorched and flowerless, but a breeze stirred in the casuarinas, and the palms gently jostled their plumes from the first wash of dawn, through the molten day to the prodigal splendour of sunset and into the gilded moonlight. The green islands beckoned, the sea rolled sensuous and ceaseless, and the air was spiced.

  By the last of those ten days, Pat was dry of all emotion.

  A month later, when she landed in England, she at once went to Torquay in preference to the vast unfriendliness of London. At the station she called a taxi and told the driver to make for the Weldon Bridge Hotel. It was the only hotel in Torquay whose name she remembered, and it couldn’t be so bad if Steve had lived there for a year.

  The next stop was to find Steve. He owned the cottage and she had to buy it back. He was also her only friend in the whole of England. The hotel manager could tell her nothing; Mr. Holman had simply checked out. Neither was she any luckier with the firm of architects in which he had been a partner. Stephen Holman had left the business fifteen months ago.

  Pat was reluctant to get in touch with Celia Mellors, and outside the village she knew practically no one. But the thought of the cottage pulled; it was home. She had once been happy there, and might again find a shadow of her former happiness.

  The weather was fickle and she was always cold. A fire was lit in her sitting-room at the hotel and she sent out for magazines and crouched over the blaze with them. It was a picture in one of the journals that sent her wild with hope.

  It was a serial illustration—and Steve’s name was at the bottom of it!

  Quickly she got out notepaper and an envelope, and she wrote to Steve care of the editor of the magazine.

  A week passed and her spirits drooped. Her letter could not have been forwarded. She walked steep roads and stood up the cliff top, a desperate hollowness in her chest. It is a frightful thing to be sad and alone.

  By the middle of the following week Pat had decided to brave London and if that, too, proved a failure, she would try Hereford where her mother’s people lived. She was actually shaking out her clothes ready for packing, when Steve was announced.

  “Show him up here!” she cried gladly.

  He came into the little sitting-room, tall and smiling, disreputable in stained slacks and a green shirt—it might have been the old green shirt he used to wear at weekends so long ago. His brown hair was rough and curly, and too long.

  She laughed with sudden exuberance. “Y
ou look so Bohemian,” she said. “Oh, I’m so glad to see you, Steve!”

  “I’m glad to see you,” he answered quietly. “Feeling fit?”

  “Quite fit,” she answered briefly.

  An awkward brimming moment came between, then she was smiling again. “Have some lunch up here with me, Steve, and tell me what you’re doing.”

  His whole manner was changed. He was as she remembered him in his twenties, carefree, lazy, traces of boyish merriment in the nut-brown eyes. “I didn’t find your letter till this morning,” he said. “The office sent it on last week in a bunch of stuff to be illustrated. I kicked myself when I happened on it.”

  “And came straight to Torquay as you were?”

  He glanced down at his clothes. “I do look pretty awful, don’t I? And you so neatly tailored. It’s good to see you, Pat—more than just good. How long are you staying here?”

  “I don’t know.” She started to twist her wedding ring, then remembered that she had removed it on the boat and put it away in the little heart-shaped box with the square-cut topaz. “Until I can move into the cottage, I suppose. I—want to buy it back, Steve.”

  Lunch arrived and it wasn’t until the waiter had gone and they were seated that Steve spoke again. He looked at her across the table. “I used to hope for this, and then I gave up hope. We’ve such a lot to talk about that I’m not sure where to begin.”

  She took a roll and broke it, eyes averted. “Some things are best left unsaid. Just go on being what you appear at the moment.”

  “What’s that?” he smiled.

  “Grubby, and bohemian, and nice. Where do you live, Steve?”

  “Along the coast, at Balcombe; the other side of Torquay from Caystor. I share a house with a cartoonist. You’ll like him, Pat. His cartoons are the funniest you ever saw—his name’s Tim Sterry.” He hesitated. “Pat, are you serious about living at Caystor again?”

  She nodded.

  He ate for a minute. “Is it wise? The cottage is so isolated.”

  “I can’t go on living here. A hotel is too—impersonal.”

  “I quite agree.” He leaned forward. “Come to Balcombe, where I could fix you up with some friends of mine. Do come, Pat.”

  After the barren weeks it felt good to have someone bothering over her, fussing in case she were lonely.

  “I could try it,” she said.

  “Come with me this afternoon.”

  She hesitated. “Steve, did you come here by car?”

  He nodded. “It’s outside.”

  “Take me to the cottage, Steve. Just to look.”

  “It’s all dismantled, Pat,” he hedged. “Stark, weeds in the garden. Wait a while.”

  Pat nipped at her lip, and because she wasn’t quite up to seeing the cottage with blank windows and an unkempt garden, she agreed to drive out to the moor, where they had tea at one of the sunken villages. At Dartmoor they rested and listened to the cool songs of the waters, and Pat smiled a little to herself. This was England. A pale blue sky, the stream babbling over the boulders, the sweet undulating grass, a black tor erupting on the horizon.

  Suddenly Steve took her hand, the left one, and glanced at it. What was he seeing? she thought wildly. The white mark against the tan where a ring had rested? But he didn’t remark on that band of white.

  “I’m sure the Mertons will be glad to have you,” he said. He gripped her hand and then released it. “I’ll telephone you tomorrow, Pat, to tell you what they say about having you lodge with them.”

  “Thanks, Steve.”

  Back at the hotel, Pat went up to her bedroom with much on her mind, most of it pleasant. She had been apprehensive of meeting Steve, afraid he would ask awkward questions, but he had been his old understanding self, and she was very grateful.

  Being near Steve, she decided, was going to help dispel the pain and emptiness of not being near Nick. Nick, who had come to the boat, filled her cabin with fruit and flowers, and coolly kissed her on the cheek before going ashore again. They had drawn up the gangplank and she had stood at the ship’s rail, waving goodbye to her heart.

  The Mertons were middle-aged, in the nicest way imaginable. They both worked in Torquay, and except at weekends, breakfast was the only meal the Mertons cooked for Pat. For the rest of the day she looked after herself, and when it got towards six she prepared vegetables and slipped them over the gas.

  The large, well-tended garden supplied the two struggling artists next door with vegetables.

  “What do you feel about art?” asked Tim Sterry, a talented cynic.

  “Art is creative, and gives lots of pleasure,” she replied. She drew up her knees and hugged them, seated on a boulder, her back to the sea and below, on the sand, Tim at work on a woodcut, a pastime to which he was addicted when nothing else offered.

  “Damn,” he said suddenly, as the tiny chisel slipped. “It might be anyone now. I’ve chipped the tilt from your nose.” He got up and spun the square of wood into the surf.

  “You might have given me a look at it,” she said lazily.

  “You that curious about yourself?” He shot her a discerning look. “Steve warned me I wasn’t to discuss Africa with you. Why is the place taboo?”

  She sat quiet a minute, listening to the whirr of grasshoppers, then, “Things happened there.” Funny, but she could talk more easily with Tim than with Steve.

  “Things would happen in a place like that.” He quizzed her in the growing dusk. “The tropical tan is leaving you, Pat. Right now you look windblown, and the soft evening light is on your features and you look very young.”

  “Steve’s talking about painting me,” she said. “Should I let him?”

  “Sure. He’ll never see what I can see.”

  “And what’s that?” Her heartbeats had quickened.

  “That you left someone behind in Africa—someone you care a great deal about.”

  "You’re a bit of a warlock, Tim.” She tried to speak lightly.

  “Steve did a bit of talking about Africa when he first came to share quarters with me. He mentioned a man named Farland—he seemed mighty impressed with him.”

  “Nick—has that effect on people.” Her arms were gripping her knees, knees that had gone fluid. “Nick was my father’s best friend in Africa. He’s a rubber planter.”

  “Teak-brown and tenacious, eh?” She knew Tim was smiling, though the dusk had deepened to hide his face. “I should be the one to paint you, Pat. I know you better than Steve ever will.”

  She jumped to her feet, and stood a moment poised, gazing out across the dark sea. The months had passed, but the memory of Nick was as potent as ever. She would never forget him ... not a line, not a feature, not a word he had ever said to her. Love for Nick had her heart in a firm and painful grip.

  “I’ll race you,” she said to Tim, and they sprinted up the cliff side to the road.

  Fine afternoons were invariably spent with Steve. They bathed in the sea or took out the boat. Sometimes they drove into Torquay to the cinema.

  He had started his painting of her, and Tim criticized with a cynical glint in his eye. “You’re making her too ethereal,” he gibed. “She’s a woman, Steve, not a fey and charming girl.”

  “Go away,” Steve grunted. ‘Your opinion of women is a bit too earthy.”

  ‘You’re a dreamer, Steve,” Tim scoffed. “Too many men are. Funny, isn’t it, when everyone believes it’s the other way around and that women are the romantics. They’re the realists. Pat is a realist, you know.”

  He turned from the canvas to look at Pat. A misty ray of light caught her across the cheekbones. “That canvas is daubed with sentiment,” he hooted. “Wipe emotion right out of your mind, my lad, and take a good look at our Pat. What do you see? Not a sprite but a healthy young creature on a chunk of rock, suggesting elegant limbs through black linen slacks and a shortsleeved sweater. Go closer. The face is daintily boned but not childish. Nor are the eyes so innocent as you apparently like to think. They
hold secrets—and you are painting blind, Steve.”

  Pat was relieved when Tim cleared off. She knew he had a lot of respect and liking for Steve, and a belief in his work, and he thought she might hurt him. She would try not to.

  One evening they took a walk to the shore, where they stood braced, hair whipping back, cheeks stinging. Earlier Pat had dug three long rows of potatoes and now she felt healthily spent, and did not protest when Steve tucked an arm about her waist and drew her head against his shoulder.

  She was scarcely aware of his hold, till it tightened a little and he spoke.

  “These months have been good, for both of us, haven’t they, Pat?”

  “You were always easy to be happy with,” she replied.

  “You say that a little sadly.” He stood silent a moment. “I ran out on you that time in Africa, and I’ve never stopped kicking myself. It was—a bad mistake.”

  “You didn’t care for Kanos.” She had spoken the name at last, after all this time, though it shot pain through her heart. “I didn’t blame you, Steve. This is your land. This is where you belong.”

  “You, too, Pat. Don’t you feel that?”

  “Perhaps.”

  August ended with heavy intermittent rain. The trees were full and heavy, leaves rusted and the grass grew coarse and lost its spring. Pat went about her gardening in rubber boots.

  Rubber!

  As she pulled them on, her fingers slipped over the black shiny surface and she thought of the raw milky sheets and the bronze bodies of the natives handling them. Her nostrils twitched suddenly for the scents of palm oil and spice, and she went quickly outside and pulled beans, and sniffed the damp English air, telling herself there was nothing finer in the whole wide world. Soon—soon she would grow to believe it.