She sailed quite a way up-river. There was an old bridge further up, beyond which she couldn’t go without taking down her mast. She meant to anchor below the bridge. She wouldn’t land—not on Eric Gore’s property. She would swim from her boat and have her lunch on board.
She could see, away up on its eminence, Eric Gore’s stone house. She grinned to herself, ironically, thinking how little she cared if he should be looking through his telescope and should see her boat. She wasn’t trespassing, as long as she stayed afloat. There was nothing he could do.
She began thinking about him, then decided that there was no need; he was unlikely to trouble her again.
There was one little matter she would have to clear up. The piece of land she had been going to rent for her plant nurseries was on his property. She hadn’t cared for the idea when it was mooted, but land was difficult to find and she had been jockeyed into accepting. He had wanted to let her have it rent-free, but she had insisted on a properly business-like arrangement, and he had given in, though with rather a bad grace. He rather liked himself, she thought now sardonically, in his role of King Cophetua to the beggar-maid.
She would have to see that the arrangement, which luckily had not yet been finalised in writing, was cancelled.
That would mean looking round again. She wondered now if she was being wise—if this district was big enough, thickly populated enough, to give her red scope. She thought rather regretfully of Salisbury, then put it out of her mind.
She thought of Richard—how odd it had been, last night, that he hadn’t tried to introduce a personal note. Owing to the rather romantic nature of the circumstances—his rescue of her, a maiden in distress as it were—she had half expected—half hoped? No, of course not—that he would tell her again how much he loved her.
Then she remembered his ultimatum. He wouldn’t tell her again till she had sent the other fellow away—well, she had certainly done that—and begged him to take her with him when he went. Did he still mean to hold her to that? It looked as if he did.
She tried to sort out her feelings for him. She was thinking about that as she dropped her anchor, lowered her sails and stowed them, dived overboard into the deep still reach of the river below the bridge.
She thought, I’ve never liked any man more—so much. She thought that she liked his looks and his voice and his laugh, the things he said to her, the feeling of security he gave her, the way he cocked an eyebrow at her, the way he always seemed to manage to be there just when she needed him most.
Was that love?
She didn’t think so.
Love ought, surely, to be rapture and thrill and excitement and a leaping of the heart and a rushing of the blood in the veins.
She hadn’t felt that for Bernard—she realised now that she hadn’t, in fact, loved Bernard. Not really loved.
But she would like to love someone that way. It must be a grand and glorious thing to feel like that about another human being.
She decided she would wait until she did...
The river water was colder than that of the lagoon. It was deep and very green, especially near the bank. She swam hard till she was tired, then pulled herself over the stern of her boat and sat on the thwart in the sunshine and breeze, towelling and drying her hair. She felt as if she had washed quite a lot of her troubles away, even though she didn’t seem, actually, to have settled her future very far ahead.
Exercise had made her hungry. She opened up the picnic basket, spread a cloth on the seat in the stem, set out the chicken, salad, eggs and rolls. She poured coffee from the flask, sweetened it, and began to eat and drink.
It was very quiet. A couple of kingfishers kept her company—the local brown and white variety, not so beautiful as the blue ones she had known at home. But there were other blue birds, and a scarlet-breasted honey-catcher; and once she saw a loerie, that rare and colourful bird, special to those parts.
On the banks, beyond the big patches of reed that fringed them except in a few places—the places where Eric Gore had put up his notices—the arum lilies clustered thickly, waxy white against the green. A pale leaved tree with fluffy yellow blossom drooped over the water. Higher up was a clump of enormous weeping willows. Coots swam and dived; herons and egrets appeared and went away again. Alix went on thinking, but soon she stopped; there were too many little things to watch and wonder at.
After a time she lay down in the bottom of the boat and snoozed. It had been a late night and she hadn’t, anyway, slept very much.
She woke some time later and looked at her wrist watch. She saw that soon the tide would be turning and would help her on her way back. She packed up the debris of her lunch, first finishing the coffee, then made sail. By the time she had got up her anchor and was ready to move she saw that the tide had turned. Leaves on the water which had been floating up-river were now floating down. It was time to be off.
It wasn’t till she reached open water that she realised that the wind had changed direction too. It was much more in the south now—no longer a soldier’s wind to take her on an easy reach home. She would have to beat. And it had strengthened, surely, quite a lot. Some sort of eddy, still on her beam, had helped her out of the river. She had lost that now, and began to feel the full force of quite a strong southerly blow. She looked a little anxiously ahead. The water looked dark and troubled. Small waves were breaking in white crests where wind met tide. She wished she had left earlier. She had a long way to go.
She started to make tacks, short or long according to the channel. Though the tide was with her, she didn’t make much headway. The lagoon was very wide here, very spread-out over the country. She wondered if she ought to try to run ashore, but there were too many reeds. Perhaps if it got worse she would do well to run into the reeds, down sail and wait. But for how long? It might blow all day, all night even.
She wondered if Eric Gore had seen her through his telescope, and was enjoying her predicament. There was no real danger, she told herself; she had a sturdy boat and good gear. But she felt very lonely; all the other small boats seemed to have gone, perhaps for shelter.
She seemed to have been tacking fruitlessly back and forth for a long time before she saw the small craft, powered by an outboard of no great strength, making towards her. Its pilot shouted, “Alix! You all right?” and her heart gave a great leap of relief.
She thought, I might have known. Richard. He saw my red sail. Or Valerie got home and told him. He came after me—he always does come and look after me. It’s all right. He’s here.
She took the rope he threw her, and he started to try and tow as soon as she had lowered and stowed her sails. But that his small two-and-a-half horse-power outboard was unable to manage, even with the help of the tide. The wind was hardening all the time—it howled up-laggon now. The day had darkened. The water was indigo-dark.
After a time Richard called, “’It’s no good, she won’t take it. I’m going to turn. We’ll run up the river into shelter, and wait for a bit. All right?”
“All right.”
It was easy now. Wind and tide were helping; wind was no longer the enemy.
“We’ll drop anchor here,” Richard called. They were out of the wind too now, though there was a rustling in the reeds and the trees.
Richard transferred himself into Alix’s boat and offered her a cigarette.
She said with a smile, “It’s like magic, the way you’re always there.”
He grinned.
“Like that chap—the genie, wasn’t it?—that used to pop up when Aladdin rubbed the lamp. Actually, I saw your red sails going up-lagoon, and when the wind piped up and I hadn’t seen them come down, guardian angel Richard thought he’d better come and see. D’you mind?”
“Mind? If you knew what a flap I was in ..!”
“Poor Alix. Having quite a weekend, aren’t you?”
She said yes, she was, and a little constraint fell between them. Alix didn’t quite know what to say to dispel it.
/> After a while Richard said, “Let’s start up the outboard and run down in the dinghy to see how it looks now. If it seems to be moderating, we’ll come back and pick up your boat and try again.”
“Yes, let’s do that.”
But now the outboard, with the fiendish perversity that can manifest itself in such contraptions at the least convenient moments, refused to start. In vain Richard wound the cord, took hold of the toggle, and pulled. There wasn’t a flicker of life. Muttering at it, he set about the thing with spanner and screwdriver, and cleaned this and blew through that. He tried all the tricks he knew. Finally he looked at Alix and shrugged.
“No good?” she asked.
“No good.”
“We could try to sail.”
“We’d never get out of this reach now.” She knew he was right. The favouring eddy, the last of the southwest breeze, had died away. Without a tow they wouldn’t get out.
“So what do we do?”
Richard studied their surroundings. Northolme, Eric Gore’s house, and its lands, were in sight. The house was in fact directly above them, but some distance back on the hill-slope. The banks were thickly fringed with reeds.
“There are landing places further up,” Richard said. “I know. We’ll make everything shipshape on your boat and leave it on the anchor. Then I’ll row us in mine to some place where we can land. There’s sure to be a path of sorts, and any path is likely to strike the road leading from Gore’s house, at some point. We can walk from there to the main road. Are you a good walker, Alix? It isn’t likely to be more than a couple of miles before we can hitch a lift.”
“Yes, I’m a good walker. I suppose it’s all right to leave the boats?”
“It’ll have to be. There’s nobody much likely to come up here during the week anyway. I’ll borrow a tow and collect tomorrow or the next day.”
“All right, then.”
When they were ready they transferred into Richard’s boat and he took the oars and pulled a little way upriver. Soon, on the right bank, they found a landing place. Richard grinned when he saw Eric Gore’s “No Landing” board.
“Sorry,” he said. “Necessity knows no law, as they say.”
They scrambled ashore on to the short turf, and Richard made his boat fast to the branch of a tree.
There was a little narrow path running into the bush and across a bit of open grass. But it petered out at a spot where somebody had once built a fire among some stones.
Alix looked round. She said, “Wait a minute, Richard.” She had seen something she thought she recognised. A thick thorn hedge, running roughly parallel on this side with the river, with three other sides enclosing a large paddock. The largest of a series of paddocks. The one furthest away from the house, at the very outskirts of the farm lands. The one in which Eric Gore kept his fierce Jersey bull. She said, “I remember the layout here. I looked at it through Mr. Gore’s telescope—did you know he has a telescope for keeping an eye on things? For all we know he may be keeping an eye on us now,” she added with a laugh—not really meaning it. “We can’t cross over to meet the road here—there are paddocks all the way. There’s a bull in this one—a bull that’s a divil to handle.”
“The road comes round the far side of the paddocks, you mean?”
“Yes. I think we must go round the outside of this top one, behind the thorn hedge, and we ought to strike it.”
“Let’s go, then.”
They turned left-handed and made their way over rough grass and through thin bush, parallel with the upper end of the thorn hedge. When they reached the point where the hedge turned a comer, they turned too, right-handed this time.
There was no bush here. Instead, a big space in the bush seemed to have been cleared and planted. The crop was three feet or so high, and might have been tomato plants or something of the sort. They began to walk through it. Whatever it was must have been planted broadcast—there were no regular rows between which to walk.
Richard was ahead. They had gone some fifty yards when he stopped dead. He pulled a plant and looked at the leaves. He said in a voice of utter astonishment, “Good lord!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Any idea what this is, Alix?”
“No. What?”
“It’s dagga.”
Alix stared at the harmless-looking crop.
“You mean...”
“It must be worth a fortune. Hidden away here—behind all that paraphernalia of paddocks, and a fierce bull, so that nobody’ll come here unless they have to. My hat, is that one of the sources of our Midas’s money?”
“You mean to say you think Eric Gore is growing and ... selling dagga, making money out of a drug ...?”
“Well, perhaps it’s somebody else. Perhaps he doesn’t know anything about it, somebody’s pulling a fast one on him, using his land and the shelter of his bull-paddock. We don’t know, of course. What do you think, Alix?”
Alix didn’t know what to think. But she believed Eric Gore to be capable of pretty well anything. Still, no man should be found guilty without proof, she reminded herself.
The proof, had she known it, was on its way even now. As she and Richard stood together, heads bent over the incriminating bit of greenstuff that Richard had plucked, something whined in the air like an angry bee. Something knocked the soft fishing hat off Richard’s head...
Richard made a grab at Alix and flung her without ceremony down on to the ground, crushing a whole lot of dagga plants as she fell, with him beside her. He said, “My God, someone’s shooting at us. Gore, I don’t mind betting. He must have been watching us—through his telescope as you said. He shot because he knows we know.”
“But you can’t just shoot people,” Alix gasped. “You can’t get away with—murder,” she protested, trembling all over.
“Can’t you?” Richard said grimly. “He’s well known as a buck-hunter. He could say he thought he saw buck among his crops—if ever there was an inquiry. If he’d succeeded, I mean. He could arrange to move—whatever he had shot—into his com or his alfalfa or what-have-you. Or there’s the river—so why should anyone need to know?”
Alix nodded. It was true. This was Sunday, and there were no workmen about the place. There would just, perhaps, be the cowmen who looked after the milking of the Jerseys in the automatic milking shed.
Richard said, “Let’s try something.”
He crawled to where his hat was, pulled another plant, and set the hat on top of the stems. He raised it at the stretch of his arm above the plants. At once the angry bee whined again. The hat fell to the ground.
“He must be crazy,” Alix said. “Do you think—does he use dagga too? You said he looked peculiar last night—sort of all lit up, you said, but not drunk.”
“It could be. And he’d said he would kill me—remember?”
Oh, but it was all too melodramatic and impossible to be true. But it was true. Or something was. Here were two sane people, Richard and herself, lying flat on the ground on a patch of illegal dagga, not daring to move or get up and walk away for fear of being potted at like bolting rabbits by a madman with a rifle. It didn’t make sense.
And yet, if you accepted Richard’s theory—and her own—perhaps it did. Perhaps Eric Gore not only grew and sold dagga, but was an addict himself. In secret, of course. Perhaps that explained the way she had felt about him from the very first—that there was something wrong, frightening...
“So what do we do now, Richard?”
“I think we make our way back to the river. Like this—crawling. Do you notice the wind has dropped a bit? It often does as the tide goes down. We’ll row downstream, see if we can make headway against the wind on the lagoon. We’ll have to hug this bank till we’re out of sight of Northolme. If we can’t make much headway, we’ll try to find a place to land, and walk along the shore road till we meet the main road and can get a lift. All right?”
“All right.”
“Who was it said fact was strang
er than fiction?”
“I don’t know, Richard.”
“But he’d got something there—hadn’t he?”
Alix laughed, though she couldn’t have been enduring greater discomfort. Richard loved her for laughing. He loved her for taking this fantastic adventure the way she had. He loved her utterly, the adorable, obstinate, maddening little thing...
They crawled on diligently, avoiding showing themselves. There were no more shots. They found Richard’s boat. Richard tried the outboard engine once more, just for luck. The perverse thing fired, died away. He rewound the chord, pulled the toggle; it fired again, and settled to a steady put-put.
“Well, would you believe it?” Alix cried happily “What wonderful luck!”
They had a very wet trip down-lagoon, though the wind was dying away to a moderate breeze now. Wet—but strangely exhilarating, Alix found. She even enjoyed herself. She said once, after a period of thought, “Are you going to—do anything about Eric Gore, Richard?”
Richard said, not smiling, looking sterner than she had ever seen him, “You bet I am, my sweet.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“IT’S like a tidal wave, isn’t it?” Lady Merrick said.
She meant the scandal about Eric Gore, which had broken over Paradise a fortnight after the discovery of the dagga field by Alix and Richard, and left it gasping.
Welcome to Paradise Page 18
