by Isobel Chace
HOME IS GOODBYE
by
Isobel Chace
When Sara arrived to work at the hospital at Kwaheri in Tanzania, she found that Matt Halifax believed she had come only because of a family manoeuvre and that he doubted her abilities.
She would show him what it meant to have a nurse on his sisal estate, she told herself grimly. And what was sisal anyway?
CHAPTER ONE
The train from Dar-es-Salaam was pulling into another halt — it was too small to grace with the name of station — and Sara Wayne watched with amusement as the inevitable crowd of African children ran excitedly down the train begging for coppers.
‘Bananas, memsahib?’ one of them asked her, grinning all over his face. ‘Bananas for prettiest lady on train?’
Sara shook her head, wondering where he had learned that particular brand of flattery. He looked so dejected at her refusal that she very nearly relented, but a second later she saw him employing the selfsame tactics on another woman a little farther down, and such were her features that the little warm glow that the boy’s words had given her died an abrupt death.
‘Ah well,’ she told herself philosophically as the train came to an abrupt halt, ‘men were deceivers ever!’ And then she laughed at herself for making so much of the incident.
She heard the door of the next-door compartment open and glanced up to see a tall young man fling his suitcases into it from the corridor. He was so enormous that she wondered almost inevitably whether he was a Rugby footballer. His suit was well-cut and obviously expensive, too expensive, she reflected, for him to be in anything but the upper income brackets!
She watched him jump down on to the hard sun-baked ground that served as a platform and disappear into the crowds. Curious, she went out into the corridor and waited for him to come back. This was all part of the game she had been playing with herself ever since she had embarked on the Union Castle liner that had brought her out to Africa. The game consisted in guessing the occupations of her fellow-travellers, and she was becoming quite adept in the art.
She caught a glimpse of him, some way off, and noted with satisfaction the way the African porters treated him with a deference not accorded to all the other passengers. She had been right so far, she told herself. He was used to giving orders and obviously expected them to be carried out promptly and well. He was a very good candidate indeed for her game!
She lost sight of him then, for an anguished shout followed by twenty voluble voices all talking at once caught her attention at the other end of the train, where they were endeavouring to unload the new car of a portly and harassed-looking Greek farmer. There was a brief anxious moment as the car was poised perilously several feet off the ground, and then miraculously it was lowered down the two planks of wood to the earth amidst a further discussion as to its size and beauty.
Sara breathed a sigh of relief at its safe delivery and began to look for the young man again. He was walking towards her now, with an older woman beside him.
‘—How on earth did they talk you into it?’ she heard him ask. He had a pleasant speaking voice, she noted.
The older woman looked at him a little anxiously. She was tall, too, and very good-looking, though the heat was already spoiling the effect of what looked to be a brand-new perm, and the sun had etched in little premature lines around her eyes and mouth.
‘They didn’t talk me into it, dear,’ she said a little dryly. ‘They bludgeoned me into it with a hurt silence! And you never know, she just may be possible. After all, she is his niece, not hers!’
He looked down at her with a mixture of impatience and affection.
‘Really, Mother, we can’t take the girl on as a nurse when all we know about her is that Mrs. Wayne thinks that she must have passed her State Registered exams by now!’
So he was a doctor, Sara hazarded. It was rather a disappointing conclusion to come to — not that she had anything against doctors, but he looked so tough, and of the great outdoors, and not in the least like any of the doctors she had ever known. Then, like a blinding flash, the rest of his conversation came to her. Mrs. Wayne! Not my aunt, oh, please God, she prayed, not my aunt!
But it seemed more than likely that that was exactly to whom he had been referring. Her aunt Laura, whom she had never met, but who had been so anxious for her to come out to Tanzania, partly as a companion to her cousin Felicity, and partly to work as a nurse on the huge sisal estate of which her uncle had been the manager before his untimely death in an accident.
Sara’s mouth tightened a little, for no one could have said that either of them had sounded as though they cared for her aunt, and it was just a little daunting to be faced with such hostility before she had even begun her new job. Though he needn’t have worried about her qualifications, she reflected bitterly, for she had not only passed her examinations extremely well, but had also won the gold medal for the best nurse of her year. She would show him what it meant to have a nurse on the estate, she told herself, and thought grimly of the positions she had turned down for the privilege of burying herself alive, miles from nowhere, in this heat-hazy land. And what was sisal anyway?
The train gave a sudden jolt and subsided again. She glanced at her watch and saw that there was only one more hour to go. Automatically she took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. That would just give her time to go along and have something to eat before she washed and re-packed her suitcase.
The heat in the station was quite appalling. Almost everyone had a wilted and rather dog-eared appearance, and nobody minded at all when the African porters strolled towards their luggage rather than ran.
Sara gazed round her rather vaguely, wondering whether her aunt or her cousin had come to meet her. She saw her future employer and his mother already vanishing into the distance and was rather glad. It would have been embarrassing if they had noticed her and suggested that she drove on with him, and they could hardly have missed her, for it was obvious that they knew everyone else who had got off the train.
She stood for a moment on the platform wondering what was the best thing to do. Her suitcase was heavy and she was reluctant to carry it herself in the heat, but all the available porters had been grabbed, and so she picked it up and made her way towards the barrier. The young man, whose name she remembered was Halifax, had no fewer than three porters attending to him! All of them smiling broadly and suddenly active in the intense heat.
‘Do you know if Mrs. Wayne has come to meet me?’ she asked the ticket collector when her turn came to give up her ticket.
He nodded cheerfully and pointed over to a very old station wagon sitting in the yard.
‘You going out to Kwaheri, memsahib?’ he asked.
Sara nodded. It seemed odd that he should know the name of a farm some forty miles away.
‘You should have gone with Bwana Halifax,’ he told her, his eyes like saucers in his black face. ‘Memsahib Wayne very bad driver!’
He shook his head dolefully and picked up her suitcase, carrying it rapidly across to the car. Sara wondered what happened to the rest of the passengers’ tickets, but was too glad of his help to ask. There had only, after all, been about half a dozen people who had got off.
The car door swung open and a girl’s face peered round it. She looked hot and tired.
‘Are you Sara?’ she asked.
Sara took in the girl’s coppery, well-cut hair that contrasted so oddly with her old jeans and sailcloth shirt and smiled.
‘You’re Felicity?’
The other girl nodded, her mouth curling into a smile.
‘Put that case in the back, Tom,’ she called to the ticket collector. ‘And here, catch!’ She threw him a silver coin that glinted in the fierce sunlight.
&
nbsp; ‘Thank you, memsahib!’ he cried, and dashed back to his post at the barrier.
‘Tom doesn’t seem to feel the heat as everyone else does,’ Felicity explained. ‘I think he really likes to run!’
She smiled again, the same slow smile as before, and immediately looked quite pretty. It was a pity that she didn’t smile more often, Sara thought, for her face was almost sullen in repose.
‘It was nice of you to come and meet me,’ she said out loud.
‘Oh, heavens, that’s nothing! I come down once a week anyway for the post, and Kwaheri’s not so far away — not by our standards. You could have come on our local line, but I wouldn’t ask a dog to do it in this heat.’
She threw herself into the driver’s seat and reached across to open the other door for Sara.
‘I see Matt travelled up with you,’ she said. ‘His car broke down, or something. Did he make himself known? Or has he still got that pleasure to come?’
Sara thought back to the conversation she had overheard on the train and blushed a little.
‘I’m not sure that he’s going to find it entirely a pleasure,’ she said, laughing without very much amusement.
‘Why not?’ Felicity demanded. ‘Matt Halifax likes a pretty face as much as anyone else!’ She gave Sara a deep searching look. ‘And you’re not bad at all! With that skin, of course, you have a most unfair advantage!’
‘Of course!’ Sara agreed demurely. She had already learnt how much English women were envied their soft, rain-washed complexions by their expatriate sisters.
Felicity chuckled.
‘It’s going to be fun having you around,’ she said, and sighed. ‘That is, if you can put up with Mother. Most people can’t, but she’s not so bad really, if you handle her the right way.’
Sara felt rather uncomfortable. It would be much better, she thought, if she were left alone to find out about her aunt. It was rather daunting to feel that no one really cared for her.
‘If you can get on with her, I expect I can,’ she said as comfortably as she could.
Felicity looked relieved.
‘You’ll be out most of the day anyway, I suppose,’ she said.
Felicity drove the car with a reckless abandon that had made her a byword on the Tanzanian roads. Everyone they met cowered out of her way until she was safely past, and Sara, had she not seen the gleam of satisfaction in the other girl’s eyes, might have been nervous of being swept over the countryside in such a manner. But as it was, she suspected that Felicity was only enjoying herself and had driven the elderly car so many miles that she knew exactly what it was capable of doing.
There was little to see but sisal, a harsh, spiky plant with as much charm as a cactus. If you like it, you go all the way, but if you don’t, you never will see what all the fuss is about.
‘What’s it all used for?’ Sara asked, ashamed to show her ignorance so early of her new surroundings but unable any longer to bear the suspense.
‘Sisal?’ Felicity asked. ‘Rope mostly. It’s a dying crop, though. Even the Royal Navy are using nylon now.’
‘Why don’t they grow something else, then?’ Sara asked — reasonably, she thought.
‘Nothing else would grow here. It’s sisal or nothing. But don’t feel too sorry for the owners, they made a packet during the war, and most of them are still making a fair living.’
Sara lapsed into silence. The ground certainly didn’t look very fertile. It was a dull reddy colour, with occasional hillocks that were completely barren, and the grass, such as it was, had been burned by the sun until it was the colour of ripe wheat. It looked a tough country, but Sara was already beginning to lose her heart to it. This was Africa, the land where the impossible happened every day.
As soon as she saw the house in the distance, Felicity put her foot down flat on the accelerator and the car sped forward almost as though it had suddenly sprouted wings.
‘Home!’ she explained. ‘We were lucky not to run into Matt’s dust. He really does drive at a shocking speed, but then his car has the legs and mine hasn’t!’ She grinned. ‘You can always tell who’s driving the Halifax Jaguar. Matt’s the fastest, Mrs. Halifax the slowest, and his sister the wildest! James doesn’t drive it much, he has a Land Rover of his own.’
‘James?’ Sara asked. Really, she thought, her aunt had told her very little about the estate.
‘Matt’s brother. He hates sisal and wants to write books.’
‘Well, why doesn’t he? The place belongs to Matt, doesn’t it?’
Felicity shook her head.
‘They all own it, as a limited company. There are some cousins in on it too, but they live further north, up round Arusha, growing soya beans. That was one of Matt’s ideas. As soon as he was old enough to have a say, he started telling everyone that the sisal honeymoon was over, but he couldn’t bear to leave it himself. Everyone always does what he wants eventually though, and so they roped these cousins into the company to run the beans — very profitably indeed!’
‘I still don’t see why James shouldn’t write his books,’ Sara objected.
‘You will!’ Felicity assured her.
The car came to an abrupt stop outside the house and she sounded the horn with sufficient vigour to bring Africans running from every direction. Sara got out of the car and stretched. It was surprising how tiring driving could be in the hot airless atmosphere. Ruefully she shook her skirt, but the creases were in it until it was next washed.
She would have liked to have made a better showing when she first met her aunt, but she supposed that everyone arrived in much the same condition and that it was taken for granted.
The house was disappointing. It had been built on one of those barren hillocks that she had noticed all over the country, with the result that there was little but dry dust around it. She wondered whether anything would grow there and hoped that she would be allowed to have a try. She liked to be surrounded by flowers and shrubs, and why shouldn’t she? She was English after all!
Felicity led her on to the verandah that completely surrounded the house, thus shading all the inside rooms and making them cooler.
‘Mother’s probably waiting for you in the sitting-room,’ she said. ‘You’d better go and see her first and then I’ll show you your room.’
Now that the moment to meet her aunt had come, Sara felt rather nervous and strung up. There must be something about her if everyone spoke of her with that resigned impatience — and what say she couldn’t get on with her, as Felicity seemed to think was only too likely? It would be very difficult to live in such close contact with someone one disliked.
Mrs. Wayne was lying on a chaise-longue with her eyes shut, her small, dumpy figure encased in a shell-pink satin dressing-gown, and with such a litter of sweet papers and magazines all around her that Sara longed there and then to restore a little order to the room.
‘Mother, wake up!’ Felicity broke into the rather uncomfortable silence. ‘Sara’s waiting to meet you!’
Mrs. Wayne opened her eyes sleepily.
‘Show her to her room, dear. You know I always sleep now. I can’t possibly meet anyone!’
The lids came down over her eyes again and her right hand crept out towards the half-finished box of sweets. If it hadn’t been for that, she might indeed have been fast asleep.
Felicity crossed the room and stood in the doorway.
‘I’ll show you your room,’ she told Sara in an odd flat voice, and her face was more sullen than ever.
Sara smiled quickly. She was beginning to understand Felicity’s odd warning and was determined to make things easier for the other girl.
Sara had had no preconceived ideas as to how people would furnish their houses in the tropics. She had read about such things as mosquito nets in books, but they had had little reality; now she was seeing these things for herself.
Her own room was sparsely furnished, with a bed, a table and a chair. One of the corners had been curtained off to give her somewher
e to hang her clothes, but the material was already rotting. Either it was very old, or the heat was more damaging than Sara had ever imagined.
She sat down on her bed, glad to be alone for a few moments to get her bearings. The heavy axminster carpet and the hot, woollen-covered chairs in the sitting-room had been rather overpowering. Just who could have chosen that dreadful orangey brown she couldn’t imagine. If they had been hers she would have burnt them as they stood!
She glanced up as there was a knock on her door and Felicity came in with a tea tray.
‘I hope you’ve got everything you want,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t have time to check before I left for the station, so you’ve probably been left to the mercy of the servants.’
Sara assured her that she had everything she needed. The room was pleasantly cool after the heat outside, and it was at least clean and tidy. Felicity sat down beside her on the bed, and handed her a cup of tea.
‘I’m sorry we can’t have it in the other room, but Mother’s still sleeping. She sleeps in the morning and in the afternoon and then wakes up at night when it’s cooler. You mustn’t mind if you hear her wandering about the house, she won’t disturb you in here.’
Sara said nothing. She sipped at her tea and gloried in it as it slipped slowly down her parched throat. She had never been a great tea-drinker in England, but in Tanzania she saw that it might easily become her greatest weakness. The heat from the tea was more cooling than any cold drink could have been, and it made her feel welcome too. She smiled appreciatively at Felicity.
‘Do you always have tea at this hour?’ she asked.
‘Round about half past four usually. The houseboy goes off between two and four, and everyone sleeps. Never ring anyone up at that hour, it’s the most ghastly faux pas! And that reminds me, if you want anything washed leave it on the floor. We used to have natty little baskets, but somehow or other we’ve given them up.’
