Makeshift Marriage

by Marjorie Lewty

  'No,' he said.

  'Then—then why?' Something in his face frightened her.

  'I'm going back to see Fiona,' he said. 'And also to see my solicitor. I shall get him to start proceedings immediately for an annulment of this intolerable marriage.'

  CHAPTER FIVE

  'I just don't get it,' grumbled Nicholas Grant. 'I don't get it at all.' He ran his fingers through his thinning fair hair, scowling. 'The damned fellow's just married the prettiest, most delightful girl around, and he spends the first night of his honeymoon gambling in the Casino! I know he did, because I was there myself until five this morning. And I'm feeling the effects just now.' He sketched imaginary dark circles under his eyes. 'I wasn't cut out to stay up gambling all night. But I was lurked into it by my pals.'

  Nick and Maggie had got right away from the gaudy hotel that looked rather like a huge ornamented tea-caddy from the outside. Blake had left on the first jetroll with hardly another word to Maggie; he had merely come to their room, collected his luggage, said, 'I'll see you when I get back,' and departed. .

  Nick had been waiting for Maggie when she came down to the hotel lobby, wan and pale after a sleepless night, but smiling resolutely. Neither had felt like breakfast and they had had coffee and rolls, and now they were walking along narrow cobbled streets between overhanging houses, their balconies draped with flowers and trailing greenery.

  'This is rather like Spain, isn't it?' said Maggie, hoping that Nick wasn't expecting a reply. 'I had a holiday once in—'

  'Come on, love,' Nick broke in, 'don't evade the issue. You know I'm not given to prying or interfering—or I hope you do—but Blake's taken himself off and left me responsible for you, and I think I ought to know at least part of the score.' He kept his eyes straight ahead as he added, 'And seeing that Blake Morden stepped in and pinched the girl I'd picked out for myself I think I'm owed that.'

  Maggie came to a sudden halt, tilting her curly brown head. 'Nick—you're joking, aren't you?'

  He smiled down at her wryly. 'Never more serious. I suppose I wasn't quick enough off the mark, that's the story of my life.'

  They turned out of the narrow street and came upon a small wooded park, rioting with tropical flowers whose names Maggie didn't know: huge trailing blossoms in swathes and ropes of crimson and gold and blue. A heavy scent filled the air beneath the trees.

  They sat down on a carved wooden seat that looked as if it had stood there for centuries. Maggie laced her fingers together. 'Nick, I—I don't know what to say.'

  'No need to say anything, my deal. I'm not trying to play the lovelorn rejected suitor.' He looked away through the trees to where an ornate Portuguese building gleamed white and pink through the leaves, like sugar icing on a cake. 'I think,' he said slowly, 'that maybe you've guessed that I'm still in love with Dora, in spite of everything that's happened, but—well, I suppose I have to admit that it's over for good, and I don't want to live alone for the rest of my life.' He turned to her and his look was gentle. 'I think you're a grand girl, Maggie, and we seemed to get on well, so—I began to think of a future we might share.'

  He shrugged. 'That's the whole story, but you mustn't let it embarrass you or spoil our friendship. I'm very, very fond of you, and I want to see things go well for you. That's my excuse for butting in, so—forgive me?'

  He spoke with such simplicity and sincerity that Maggie suddenly gulped. How easy life would be if everyone could talk to each other like that. She couldn't imagine Blake doing it. Blake would put up a high wall of pride and anger and you had to guess what he was thinking.

  She touched Nick's arm! It felt solid and reliable beneath his thin shirt. 'Thank you for telling me, Nick, and if things had gone differently—well—who knows?'

  'But you fell in love with Blake Morden?' he said quietly, and she nodded.

  'A long, long time ago. I didn't think I stood a chance with him, but then—suddenly—' She stopped. That was as far as confidences could go. She said wryly, 'About your question—all I can say is we had a—a slight difference of opinion last evening.'

  Nick lifted a sceptical eyebrow. 'Slight?'

  'The mother and father of a bust-up,' Maggie admitted. She improvised quickly. 'I didn't want him to go back to England, you see.'

  'I should jolly well think you didn't! He—'

  'But you know Blake,' Maggie went on firmly. 'His work means a terrific lot to him and as his wife I accept that. I've got to, haven't I?' She grimaced. 'It's rather like marrying an artist or a musician. You never quite come first.'

  If only it were as simple as that, she thought unhappily. But Nick seemed to accept her explanation.

  He said, 'Well, I still think his new wife should have come first, but no doubt I'll hear in due course what the great work crisis was, and until then—' he looked down at her, smiling, '—I'll reserve judgment.'

  'Thank you, Nick, you're a real friend,' said Maggie.

  He got to his feet and took her hand to help her up, drawing it into the crook of his arm.

  'Then as a friend, may I be permitted to show you round Macau? I'm not expected back at the office in Hong Kong until Monday, and I don't suppose you're expected there at all just now, so we have the rest of today and tomorrow here.'

  'Thank you, that would be lovely,' Maggie said. She would make it enjoyable for Nick; she wouldn't mope and if she felt dreary she would do her best to keep it to herself.

  He patted her arm as they started to walk again and said quietly, 'I'm sorry you'll be seeing Macau with the wrong man, but perhaps we can pass the time pleasantly enough.'

  In a spurt of gratitude Maggie said, a little incoherently, 'You're not the wrong man, Nick, only a different man.'

  Very different, she thought, with a sudden piercing need to see Blake, to see his tall, arrogant form and the way his grey-green eyes would meet hers with the faintest of twinkles, acknowledging a secretly shared joke. But that wouldn't happen again, she knew with a terrible pang of anguish; she had forfeited the right to share a joke with Blake. Or to share anything else. He had gone home to start annulment proceedings and she would be his wife for a very short time—and that in name only. It seemed as if a long, dark tunnel were ahead of her—but she refused to let herself stare into it.

  She gave Nick's arm a little squeeze. 'Let's go, then,' she said. 'Where do we start?'

  'At the tourist office, I suggest. They'll be able to give us all the gen, so we won't miss anything.'

  That was the beginning of Maggie's two days in Macau. Two days when she hovered on the brink of tears so often that she had to turn her head away quickly from Nick so that he shouldn't see how she was feeling. He was such a delightful companion, so kind and considerate, that she felt guilty because she couldn't manage to enjoy anything. It was a long weary charade when she had to be on her guard all the time.

  After something of a search they found the tourist office, tucked away in a back room of an old house on the waterfront. Here they obtained maps and a guidebook.

  'What a fabulous house!' Maggie exclaimed as they made their way back through graceful, high-ceilinged reception rooms, full of heavy carved furniture, with doors opening out into intimate little courtyards, where tropical flowers tumbled about in profusion and mosses crept through the cracks in the crumbling stones of the walls. 'It all seems so old and full of history.'

  'It probably is,' Nick told her. 'Macau has a distinctly racy and somewhat disreputable past. I'll tell you what I know about it when we've seen the sights.'

  In the end they decided that it was much too hot for any serious sightseeing. They wandered in a leisurely way through the quiet old cobbled streets with their faded facades of Portuguese buildings, some of them colour-washed in pink and lime and pale yellow which, Nick told her, were the typical Portuguese architectural colours. They sat under the trees outside a cafe on the avenida and drank lemon tea, and Nick recounted what he had learned about the history of Macau, when it served as an international port for t
rade between China and Europe.

  'Until Britain blotted her copybook in the last century,' he added, with a grin, 'by shipping huge quantities of opium from India and Turkey into China, through Macau. Naturally, the Chinese objected. They didn't want all their workers living in a perpetual opium-haze. Eventually a war was fought over it—two wars, in fact. France joined in the second one. It's a long story, but in the end the West won, and Macau stayed a Portuguese province. That was more or less when Britain gained a long lease on Hong Kong, too.'

  'It's fascinating,' said Maggie. For a few minutes she had managed to lose herself in the story that Nick was telling, and to put the thought of Blake out of her mind. But inevitably it came back, like a solid lump inside her that wouldn't move. He had gone and he had taken her life with him, and it was just a ghost that was walking about Macau with Nick, smiling and laughing and listening to his stories.

  That first day she dined with Nick at the hotel and went off to bed early, on his advice. 'You say you don't get jet-lag, but all the same you must be tired. Have a good night's sleep, and tomorrow evening we'll be wicked and go to the Casino.'

  To her surprise, Maggie slept heavily and wakened with the determination to fill every moment of the day, to crowd out of her mind her longing for Blake.

  'Let's see all there is to see,' she suggested to Nick at breakfast in the hotel.

  From the start the day was a disappointment. It was even hotter than the previous day and their thin shirts were soaked through in minutes. But at Maggie's insistence they carried on. If she could get utterly exhausted perhaps she could throw off her misery, before it overcame her and she made a fool of herself in front of Nick—which was the very last thing she wanted to do.

  Eventually, tired and hot, they came out in front of the vast, empty, vaguely menacing facade of the seventeenth-century church of Sao Paulo and found from their guide book that it was built by fugitive Japanese Christians from Nagasaki and nearly destroyed by a typhoon in the nineteenth century. The architect in Nick was fascinated and he spent the best part of an hour poking about what remained of the great building, while Maggie got hotter and hotter and more and more exhausted until, noticing her plight, he was suddenly overcome by contrition and found a taxi to take them back to the hotel.

  In the afternoon, after a shower and a siesta, they visited the Protestant Cemetery, which, the guide book told them, was a historical document in itself. They found the final resting-place of one of Winston Churchill's ancestors, and of the first Protestant missionary to China. But when they came upon the graves of the young midshipmen, some of them only seventeen or eighteen years old, who had died in Macau Roads, or of fever in the Opium Wars, it was all too much for Maggie. She was moved unbearably, and the tears that she shed for the unfortunate boys mingled with the tears for her own unhappiness.

  Nick was worried by her distress. 'We shouldn't have come here,' he said, holding her while she sobbed on his shoulder.

  Maggie lifted her head away at last, blew her nose and grinned shakily. 'Stupid of me,' she quavered. 'I'm not usually a weepy type. It must be the heat, I think.' She glanced around at the other people in the cemetery—two or three small parties who looked like tourists. One of the women seemed to be looking curiously at her. 'Come on, let's go, shall we?' she said to Nick. 'I'm just an embarrassment to you at the moment.'

  'Rubbish!' he said stoutly, but she thought his face was a shade redder than it had been before, and guessed he was the kind of man who would avoid anything in the nature of a public spectacle.

  He put his arm firmly around her. 'We'll go back to the hotel and you shall have a good long rest before dinner.' He looked down on her curly brown head, bent low as she stumbled beside him over the baked ground. 'You're missing that husband of yours, too, aren't you, Maggie?' he said so kindly that she began to cry again.

  'Is it always as hot as this?' Maggie gasped, as they left the cemetery.

  Nick mopped his brow with a damp handkerchief. 'At this time of the year, yes. We're just about in the tropics here and it's typhoon time.'

  'Oh, gosh!' Maggie grinned weakly. 'I hadn't reckoned on typhoons. Are they bad ones?' It only needed a typhoon, she thought, to add to all the other storms.

  'All kinds, but the bad ones only turn up now and again. Still, it's not, I'd say, the best time of the year to choose for a honeymoon,' he added wryly.

  'There wasn't any choice. Once we'd decided to get married it had to be now, because of the work starting in Hong Kong.' She summoned a laugh to show that she wasn't criticising Blake. 'But I didn't mind. I'm keen on the work too, you know. I'm used to being Blake's assistant, and that won't change, I'm still going to work with him.'

  But was she? As they made their way back to the hotel she asked herself that question and the answer came back like a sharp blade through her heart: Yes, of course it would change. Once the marriage was dissolved Blake wouldn't have her with him at any price. He hated her for what she had done, he'd shown that very clearly.

  Nick was saying that Blake was a lucky man to have found a wife who was a help to him in his work and was interested in it. 'It must make all the difference,' he added sadly, and Maggie knew he was thinking of his own broken marriage.

  'Nick, I—' She had a sudden impulse to confide in him, to tell him the whole story, to enlist his understanding, and perhaps sympathy.

  'Yes?' She heard a certain eagerness in his voice. Perhaps he sensed that she was about to tell him something that would draw them closer together, would turn a friendship into something deeper. Could he possibly have guessed that things were going very wrong between herself and Blake?

  She resisted the temptation. It would raise too many questions that she wasn't prepared to look in the face yet.

  'I'll be glad to get back to the hotel and have a shower,' she finished lamely.

  He looked rather hard at her for a moment. Then he said, in his easy way, 'Me too,' and they walked on.

  As Nick had suggested, he took Maggie to the Casino that night. 'You don't need to play if you don't want to,' he promised her, 'but you can't leave Macau without seeing the one thing that keeps the place alive now-gambling.'

  'Is it very daring—what do I wear?' Maggie asked, with visions of beautiful spies in exotic gowns and elegant men in immaculate dinner jackets.

  Nick assured her that it didn't matter in the least, adding a little shyly that whatever she wore she would look delightful. 'But it's not a bit like Monte Carlo or Deauville. Not really black-tie-and-cabin-cruiser-out-in-the-bay.'

  He was right, she discovered, as they made their way through the hotel to the vast suite of gaming rooms. All the tables were packed with people playing and watching, and it looked more like a day at the races than what Maggie had imagined a casino would look like. Certainly her own casual dress of pale blue embroidered cotton was very much in the style of the rest of the company there. Some of the women wore quite elaborate cheongsams in gorgeous colours, but the tourists were dressed quite casually and the men certainly hadn't dressed formally. There seemed to be many different kinds of game in progress on the green-baize-covered tables under the brilliant low-shaded lights, and Nick started to explain them to Maggie, but it made her head spin.

  She stared round the crowded, buzzing, smoke-hazed room with its archways into other crowded rooms.

  'Where on earth do all the people come from?' she asked Nick.

  'Hong Kong mostly. There's a no-gambling law in Hong Kong, so they have to come over here at weekends for a flutter. A good many Japanese tourists patronise the place too, parties of 'em. Look at that lot over there. They seem to be enjoying themselves anyway.'

  Everybody, it seems, was having a good time, and Maggie tried to enter into the spirit of the place. Nick bought her some counters and showed her how to place them. She found herself fascinated by the tension and the excitement when the wheel spun and the croupier's long rake pushed and pulled at the little heaps of coloured counters on the board, and after h
alf an hour she found to her amazement that she had three times as many counters as she had started with.

  'Lucky girl!' Nick laughed as she piled up her counters. But Maggie was remembering something her grandmother used to say when the family gathered to play card games on a Saturday evening. 'Lucky at cards, unlucky in love,' Gran had intoned solemnly from her chair by the fire. Gran had been gone for years and years, so why did she have to remember that now?

  'I don't think I want to play any more,' she said, getting up quickly, and in spite of Nick's insistence she firmly refused to accept her winnings when he had exchanged the counters. 'Keep them and put them in the next charity box you see,' she said. 'I'm no gambler.'

  She felt that somehow her refusal to accept the money might make the old prediction untrue.

  It was as they were leaving the Casino that Nick was hailed from across the hall. Maggie looked round to see a tall man with crisply waving fair hair, and recognised the European member of the party that Nick had been with in the dining room two nights ago. He had a Chinese girl on his arm tonight, and Maggie had a swift impression of an exquisite work of art. Everything about her was perfection: the jade-green cheongsam cleverly draped, showed off the delicate curves of the lovely young figure. The glossy black hair was arranged in wings that caressed the creamy skin of the oval face. Jade rings hung from the tiny ears and the tilted black eyes were alight with fun.

  'Dietrich! Well met again!' Nick clapped the tall man on the shoulder. 'I thought you were going back this morning.'

  'We were, but Ling San thought she'd like another day here.'

  The Chinese girl laughed, a pretty tinkling sound. 'Dietrich left me alone two nights to go gambling,' she grumbled. 'I thought I should gamble a bit too.' She spoke perfect English with a faint American accent.

  'Well done, Ling San.' Nick turned to Maggie. 'Maggie, meet Dietrich Hauser, a very good friend of mine, and his wife Ling San.' He took Maggie's hand, drawing her forward. 'This is another good friend of mine—Maggie Morden. I'm looking after her while her husband is away in the U.K.'