Welcome to Paradise

by Jill Tahourdin

  Alix didn’t wait to hear more. She was busy pushing her way through the crowd. She could feel the heat of the fire—‘Laguna’ was beyond saving, she could see; the roof had fallen in, they were getting things under control, but it was too late.

  She ran on, looking wildly around her. She saw two men, tall men in their shirt-sleeves, with blackened faces and hands, who seemed to be organising the work.

  Andrew Herrold. And Richard.

  She ran to Richard. She gasped, “Richard! Nelson was inside the house. Did anyone...?”

  He turned round, saw the white face, the wide eyes. He took both her hands in his. She didn’t notice till a moment later that one of his hands was bandaged. He said, “It’s all right, darling. Nelson’s quite safe. I got him out myself.”

  She said, crying with relief, “Oh, Richard, it would be you. Bless you. I must go and tell my aunt.”

  She pushed her way back through the throng, and ran to Lady Merrick.

  “Nelson’s safe,” she cried. “Richard went and got him out.”

  “Oh, thank God, thank God!”

  As she spoke Christina came waddling up to them. Her face was blubbered with tears.

  “Meddam, meddam, it was that Francis,” she cried. “He been drinking, smoking dagga, meddam. He came and said, ‘Christina, you coming with me.’ When I say ‘No,’ he say, ‘Then we have a braavleis too.’ He make a fire right by the myrtle hedge, meddam, and tell me to bring meat for he to cook. And then the hedge was on fire, and it shoot up, right to the thatch, and Francis run away. I run too, got the big Master, he made everybody come help. And the young Master went for Nelson and bum he’s hand.”

  She stopped for breath. Her eyes rolled moonily in the dying glare of the fire. The workers were still passing buckets of water from hand to hand, still throwing them at what was left of the fire. But it was burning itself out now. Luckily there was no wind—the night was quite still.

  Over Lady Merrick’s face a strange expression had come. She said to Alix, “I must speak to Andrew Herrold.”

  “I should wait a little. He’s very busy, keeping them all at work. Your friends, Aunt Drusilla. They’re all there, working with the blacks and coloured. But I’m afraid ‘Laguna’ has gone.”

  When the helpers called a halt at last, it was plain that that was so. Only the shell of ‘Laguna’ now stood. The roof, crashing down as the rafters gave way, had set everything inside the walls alight. Nothing was left but empty, gaping holes that had been the long windows, blackened walls, charred and blackened wood.

  A few pieces of furniture had been salvaged, right at the beginning. But it had soon been impossible to go inside.

  “You hurt your hand,” Alix said to Richard. “How did you do it?”

  “It’s nothing. I scorched it a bit, putting Nelson out. A curtain was ablaze near him, and he was trying, the old fool, to pull it down. He’s a bit scorched too, but nothing to matter.”

  “Take me to see him, Richard.”

  “In a minute, darling. Here’s your aunt.”

  Lady Merrick was holding out her hand. Richard took it.

  “I want to thank you for saving Nelson,” she said. “This—the house—I shall get over losing that. But I should never have got over losing Nelson. I can’t thank you enough.”

  Richard smiled down at her. His smile was very charming.

  “I’m glad I was in time, Lady Merrick. I’ll get him for you just now. I had to tie him up in the estate office—he wanted to help fight the fire.”

  Lady Merrick smiled too.

  “Bless him,” she said. “And bless you.”

  Now Andrew Herrold joined them. He looked like a sweep, but his eyes were bright. It was plain that he had enjoyed fighting the fire. He enjoyed any kind of fight.

  “Well, Lady Merrick, this is a bad business,” he said. “My sympathies.”

  She held out her hand to him too.

  “I believe I’m greatly in your debt, Mr. Herrold,” she said on her lowest register. “And I want to apologise. I thought—for a short time until my cook told me how it all happened—that this was doing. Remember, you’d said you would have me out if it was the last thing you did.”

  Mr. Herrold’s eyes began to twinkle. He looked at Lady Merrick for a long moment without speaking. Then he burst into a huge guffaw of laughter. He threw back his head and roared. Tears ran out of his eyes and made clean furrows down his dirty cheeks.

  “By heavens, you must have a wonderful opinion of me, my lady,” he bellowed. “I meant to get you out—but even I never thought of burning you out. Haw, haw, haw!”

  Suddenly Lady Merrick began to laugh too. She said, gasping, “Well, at least that problem is solved. I’ll have to let you have the place now, m’mm?”

  “It looks like it, my lady.”

  “That is,” Lady Merrick added with quite an impish grin, “if that offer of yours is still open.”

  “It’s still open, by golly it is,” Andrew Herrold said. People were crowding round now, exclaiming, sympathising, offering hospitality to their poor, dear Drusilla. A dozen friends begged for the pleasure of putting her and Alix up. But Andrew Herrold said, arrogantly, “Lady Merrick and Miss Alix are coming in to Edward to stay with my family. It’s all arranged. Isn’t it, Lady Merrick?”

  To Alix’s astonishment her aunt said docilely, “Why, yes, I believe it is, Mr. Herrold. And thank you very much indeed.”

  Alix said faintly, “I think this is where we go and fetch Nelson, Richard—don’t you?”

  He took her by the elbow, and led her across the road, under the big archway, along the row of Spanish-style cream-white buildings and the patios with their orange trees in tubs and their bright pots of flowers. The scene was deserted, though the ashes of the fires on which the meat had been cooked still glowed dully. Everybody had gone over to the big fire, to help or to gape.

  Richard unlocked a door. He called out, “Nelson, boy. Come on!”

  There was a rush of padded feet as the light went on. Nelson saw Alix, rose up on his hind legs, put his paws on her shoulders and licked her face. His own was one huge grin of delight. She said, “Nelson, darling. Where is he hurt, Richard?”

  “Here, on the shoulder. Just his hair, luckily. Nothing to worry about. The old silly had pulled the blazing curtain down on top of him. But only just.”

  “Oh, Richard. You would be there, wouldn’t you? You always are, somehow, just when you’re wanted.”

  Richard brushed back his rather tousled hair with a dirty hand. He said with his engaging grin, “I hope I always shall be. Wanted, I mean.”

  Alix looked at him. She thought, Now.

  “I—you...” she began.

  He cocked his eyebrow at her.

  He waited.

  “You were saying...” he encouraged. He was looking at her in that half-humorous, questioning way, waiting for her to go on.

  She said in a desperate, breathless rush, “I’ve got something to tell you. You said it was over to me. That you would wait till I told you—didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did. Well?”

  Colour tinged her face to the hue of that rose Richard liked so much.

  “I—I’m afraid—I think I’ve fallen in love with you,” she said, very low. Her eyes fell. Richard put a finger under her chin and lifted it. But she kept her lashes down; small dark curtains hiding her tell-tale eyes.

  “You think!” he repeated. “You’re not sure?”

  “I think I’m sure.”

  Richard put both arms round her. Bending his head, he kissed her on the mouth. It was a very gentle, rather tentative kiss—but it did something to Alix. Her arms crept up and round his neck. She tilted her head till her eyes met his.

  “I love you so much that if you don’t take me with you when you go, it’ll break my heart entirely,” she said bravely. “There, I’ve said it. Is that enough?”

  “It’s everything I wanted to hear,” Richard said, and kissed her again.


  This time there was nothing tentative about the kiss. It was rapture and excitement and thrill, and a leaping of the heart and a rushing of the blood in the veins. It was grand and glorious, as Alix had known it ought to be...

  When he stopped kissing her she drew a deep breath. She said with a shaky laugh, “I suppose now I’ve got a dirty face too. Oh, Richard, I do love you—dirty face and all.”

  He said, “My darling girl.”

  “If I hadn’t told you—before you left,” Alix asked a little later, “what would you have done?”

  He flashed a smile at her.

  “I was going to cheat. I was going to say you’d already told me. Do you remember at the Ball, when I found you with Gore, you said, ‘Take me away, Richard?’ I was going to hold you to that.”

  She began to laugh, shakily still.

  “So I needn’t have proposed at all?”

  He ruffled her already ruffled hair.

  “You’ll never know how happy I am, Alix, that you did,” he said.

  Nelson, thrusting a cold nose into her hand, brought them down to earth.

  “Good lord, I promised to take him over to Lady Merrick,” Richard exclaimed. “We’d better take him now.”

  Alix’s laughter was gay, bubbling, no longer shaky, as she took hold of Nelson’s lead.

  “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, don’t they say?” she said as they left. “If it hadn’t been for this fire, should I ever have dared to tell Aunt Drusilla that I was going to marry Andrew Herrold’s?”

  Richard’s right arm clipped her slender waist and held her close to his side. She saw that he was laughing too.

  “Let’s go and break the news to her and my father now, my sweet,” he said; and bending, kissed her again, on the tip of her nose—for love and for luck.

  Postscript.—Six months later. Letter from Lady Merrick, of Paradise, the Cape, to Mrs. Richard Herrold, of Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia.

  My dearest Alix,

  Here I am, back in Paradise after a wonderful six months with the family at Home. Devonshire was delightful—even in winter, with occasional snow. Your mother and Daphne were delighted about your marriage, and still more when your news came, just before I left, about the expected babe.

  I’m staying temporarily—would you believe it?—in a de luxe caravan in the Park. This while the land is being cleared and the new house built. I had lots of offers of hospitality—but you know how independent I am. And I never cared much for hotels.

  I’ve got news for you, my dear, that’s going to shake you to the core. I’m getting married too. No, not to dear old James Gurney, though he asked me again, bless him, just after the fire. No—It’s to—hold your breath, Alix, this is something you’d never have expected to happen in a thousand years—it’s to Andrew Herrold. Tornado Andrew himself. We found out, after you two left, how very much we were each other’s kind of person. And he says he feels the need of a wife in his home—and I told you before, didn’t I?—that I felt the need of a man about the house. And Valerie and the two boys seem to like the idea, so everyone is pleased.

  It caused a sensation in Paradise, as you can imagine—but Paradise has grown used to sensations by now.

  Andrew has managed to change all my ideas about that too. I’m growing as keen on the new Country Club, the Lido and even the floating restaurant for the gourmets and connoisseurs, as Andrew himself.

  And I can’t wait to live in the new home that Richard so cleverly designed.

  You’ll have heard, I suppose, that Eric Gore got a long sentence, with deportation at the end of it. One realises now, of course, why he didn’t want an invasion of visitors in Paradise—afraid somebody might stumble on his secret. Which you and Richard so fortunately did! But we don’t—do we?—want to think about Eric Gore any more..

  My love to you both. I’d like to be godmother; and if the baby is a girl, it would be nice if her middle name could be Drusilla. If a boy—well, isn’t Andrew about the nicest name a male child could have?

  Next time I write, dear, I shall be your mother-in-law as well as your aunt. Nelson, who was watching as I wrote that, seemed to think it very funny. I suppose it is—but nice too. Bless you both,

  Your ever-loving,

  Drusilla.

  THE END