by Isobel Chace
Sara was so tired that she was almost asleep on her feet when the baby finally made his appearance. He was a little smaller than the average new-born infant, but he was perfect in every detail. Sara gave him to his mother and went to tell the two men still waiting outside.
Joe Halifax broke down completely when he heard that his wife was waiting to see him. His great shoulders hunched up, he cried as he had not done since he was a child. Matt slapped him on the back and congratulated him, and everyone was very emotional until Halifax junior made himself felt by screaming at the top of his minute lungs.
‘That sounds like a Halifax,’ Matt said critically. ‘You’d better go and show him you’re still master in the house!’
Joe smiled bashfully and went into the bedroom.
‘Is Marjorie okay?’ Matt asked.
Sara nodded and before she could stop herself yawned.
‘She’s fine! All she wants is Joe to tell her how wonderful she is and she’ll be fully restored — after she’s slept!’
Matt grinned. ‘And you? Could you face the flight back in an hour or so?’
Sara looked as shocked as she felt. ‘And leave them to it?’ she demanded. ‘Certainly not! I’m going to bed and then I’m going to see to Master Halifax until Marjorie’s nannie arrives!’
Matt made a face. ‘I’ve got to get back today,’ he said. ‘Where is this nannie?’
‘At Tanga.’
She yawned again and swayed slightly on her feet. ‘You’d certainly better get to bed,’ Matt agreed. ‘You’d better use the other bedroom here because you don’t look as though you could walk as far as the house.’
Sara walked sleepily to the door he pointed out.
‘Why do they put guests in the garden?’ she asked in muffled tones. ‘Isn’t there room in the house?’
Matt pushed her through the door.
‘Just an old East African custom,’ he answered. ‘Ask me again when you can take in the answer!’
Sara chuckled as he shut the door behind her, and walked over to the bed. It was cool and inviting. Quickly she threw off her outer clothing and lay down.
‘I must remember the time for Marjorie won’t be able to manage alone,’ she told herself sternly, but as soon as her head touched the pillow, she was fast asleep.
The sun was right overhead when she woke up. She could hear someone mowing the grass just outside her window and remembered the beautiful scent they had walked through the night before. She wondered if the garden could possibly be as beautiful in reality as it had seemed then.
She dressed rapidly and wandered out to take a look. The gardener saw her and grinned. She watched him idly as he pushed the mower slowly up the lawn and then back down towards her again. The flowers were truly magnificent. Huge blooms, so heavy that they pulled their stems downwards towards the ground, were everywhere she looked. It was lush and full-blown, but very beautiful.
‘Are you truly awake at last, or am I dreaming?’ a voice asked from one of the windows of the guest-house, and Sara saw Matt leaning out of it, watching her.
‘I’m truly awake,’ she assured him. ‘I was just going in to see Marjorie, but I couldn’t resist coming out for a moment to look at the flowers!’
It was incredible, she thought, how quickly she had fallen into the local habit of calling everyone with a white face by their Christian names. She opened her mouth to say, ‘Mrs. Halifax, I mean,’ but Matt cut her off.
‘I’m going to start clearing the air for our return now, nurse,’ he said in brisk, businesslike tones. ‘Joe’s sent the ayah a wire telling her the baby has arrived, and in the meantime he’s found a neighbour to come in and help. She used to be a nurse before she married, so you needn’t look so affronted!’
Sara licked her lips and swallowed. Affronted indeed! She was merely astonished at the speed with which everything seemed to happen out here.
‘I — I—’ she began.
‘Joe didn’t know about her last night,’ Matt continued, quite unperturbed by her attempted interruption. ‘I’ve had him phoning up everyone he knows this morning, though. It’s imperative that I get back to Kwaheri today!’
Because of Julia? she wondered. He might deny that she meant anything to him, but everyone else thought that there was something between them.
‘What time shall we be leaving?’ she asked, hoping that he would know nothing about her bitter disappointment at being torn away from this other half of the estate so quickly, before she had had time to even see it. But Matt appeared to have no difficulty in seeing what she was thinking.
‘We’ll be coming back, nurse,’ he said more gently. ‘You’ll get to know it almost as well as you’ll know Kwaheri, so there’s no need to look like that!’
She gave him a mutinous glance. It was one thing to be snatched back to Kwaheri, but it was quite another to be treated like a spoilt child.
‘I’ll be ready to go in half an hour,’ he told her. ‘I’ll meet you at the aeroplane.’
She nodded her head, not trusting herself to speak. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he could have sacked her on the spot, she comforted herself, she would have had plenty to say.
It wasn’t until she had gone back into the guest-house that she wondered just why it was that she should be so angry. He had not said anything so very much. Why then should she have been so prickly? She went over his words in her mind and came to the conclusion that it had been a certain something in his face. Whatever it was, she knew that she wouldn’t dare keep him waiting at the aeroplane.
But from then on everything began to go wrong. Master Halifax had been allowed to over-eat and was feeling extremely sorry for himself. Marjorie was convinced that her baby was dying, and the neighbour, who professed to have once been a nurse, was quite helpless in the face of such a crisis. It took Sara all of three-quarters of an hour to get them straightened out and to make sure that such a thing would not happen again and she arrived at the airstrip breathless and dishevelled — and very definitely late.
Matt was already seated in the pilot’s seat, and he didn’t even glance at her as she scrambled in beside him.
‘I’m terribly sorry, Matt,’ she stammered. ‘It wasn’t my fault, really it wasn’t!’
His glance swept over her then, cool and a little disdainful.
‘Nurse Wayne, it was not just personal spite that made me decide that I had to return to Kwaheri today, whatever you may be thinking. When I give an order I expect it to be carried out promptly and efficiently, not when it suits your convenience and accompanied by feminine pouts and tears. Is that quite clear?’
Sara nodded, quite unable to speak in the face of such injustice. It really had not been her fault that she had been late and she felt that he could at least have asked her why she had kept him waiting before being so unpleasant.
She pulled at the webbing straps and fastened herself into the seat, blinking hard to keep the tears out of her eyes.
They were airborne within a few seconds, the drone from the engine sweeping over their senses and numbing their brains until they became more accustomed to the steady noise.
‘Now, suppose you tell me what happened?’ Matt said kindly, relaxing in his seat now that they were high above the acres of soya beans beneath them.
But Sara only smiled and shook her head. If he wanted efficiency, that was exactly what he would get from her, but she had no intention of allowing herself to be seduced from her anger by such a careless sop! Instead she looked determinedly out of the window, pressing her nose against the plastic glass and wondering why his displeasure should have taken all the delight out of the trip.
Matt shrugged his broad shoulders indifferently and concentrated on the business of flying the Auster. He was a bit worried about the little aeroplane, a nameless fear caused only by the fact that James had been using the plane in his absence, and he knew that his brother had none of his devoted care for his possessions, often neglecting them until they were quite useless. In t
his instance he had no reason for thinking that the Auster had not been properly maintained, but nevertheless he kept his ears tuned for the slightest misfiring in the engine.
To Sara it seemed as though the silence between them was going on for ever. One conversational opening after another passed through her mind, only to be rejected, and her eyes searched the landscape below them for something to distract her from her own thoughts.
The great Masai steppe lay beneath her, Africa as she had always been, vast and untamed, with few signs that man had ever crossed her dangerous territory. A herd of zebra, showing up only because they had moved away from the protection of the trees in a moment of safety. Elephants, enormous and yet nimble for their colossal size, moving in families; the only animal sure of his own life, and able to ignore the panics of the lesser breeds all around him. A pride of lions, replete and sleeping in the hot sun. Buck, wildebeeste, rhino, almost any animal that she could put a name to, came into sight at least once as they flew overhead.
‘You can’t see them well from up here,’ Matt said at last, having watched her out of the corner of his eye for some time. ‘One day I’ll take you to one of the national parks and do the thing properly!’
His eyebrows quirked with amusement as he waited to see if Sara was going to stay in a huff with him. She knew it, but could not resist the offer he held out to her.
‘Would you really?’ she demanded.
‘I don’t see why not. We could make up a party one week-end. The best one is Ngorogora crater. You ought to see that! We might easily go there one day. Would that suit you?’
‘Oh yes, anywhere at all! Oh, look, there’s a giraffe! They’re so much more brightly coloured in real life — at least, I mean than they are in the zoos at home. Do you suppose they fade in the cold weather?’ She cast him an anxious glance and was rather annoyed when he laughed at this ingenious theory.
‘Just because you’ve been brought up with them, there’s no need to be superior,’ she told him with a quaint dignity. ‘Why don’t you impart some of your stores of knowledge?’
Matt grinned. He needed no second invitation to talk about the land that was so dear to him. Animals, he told her, were societies of people, each with their own customs and patterns of behaviour. Learn the customs and you were reasonably safe with them, ignore them and you were heading for trouble. He told her stories of the truly pioneer days of Africa and of the men who had opened up the country.
He got so carried away with his own delight in the legends that it was she who first heard the grinding noise in the engine.
‘Matt!’ she exclaimed. ‘Can you hear that noise?’
He listened intently and his lips tightened as the joystick began to pull against his hand.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘Is it anything serious?’
He shook his head.
‘No, nothing serious, but, Sara, I’m going to take her down. We shall be quite all right. When they don’t hear from us at the next checkpoint, they’ll send someone out to look for us—’
Her eyes searched his for reassurance.
‘Very well, Matt,’ she said at last, and he smiled at her, a warm, intimate smile that brought the colour to her cheeks and made her look away.
‘Right, we’re going down — now!’ Matt warned her, and they swooped earthwards with the sudden violence of a fast lift. Sara shut her eyes and held on to her seat.
We’re going to crash, she thought, and was surprised that she wasn’t more afraid. Then she felt the wheels hit the ground and they had landed. The engine gave a final cough and died and she heard Matt breathing heavily beside her. The little Auster slewed round and jolted to a stop, throwing Sara forward so hard that her safety-belt cut into her.
She felt Matt’s hands lifting her down to safety and then they stood hand in hand gazing at the little plane.
‘I thought we were going to crash,’ she said in a small, weak voice.
He held her close.
‘We damned nearly did!’ he said.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was Sara who first pulled away from his encircling arm. She had a sudden vision of her Aunt Laura nodding approvingly as she lay on her sofa at Kwaheri and smiled inwardly to herself. How very misleading looks could be, for she was well aware that there was nothing in the least romantic in the way Matt had held her, and yet her aunt might well have thought that there was. It all went to show how terribly careful she would have to be when they got back to civilization.
So intent indeed was Sara on her aunt’s possible reactions that, for the moment, the full force of what had happened to her hadn’t occurred to her. She could look almost nonchalantly at the useless plane, exhilarated by a faint pricking fear somewhere at the back of her consciousness, and she smiled up at Matt almost mischievously.
‘How far from home are we?’ she asked.
He gave her a rather crooked grin, amused in spite of himself by her easy acceptance of the situation.
‘Too far to walk!’ He went over to the Auster and dragged the navigation maps out of it, spreading them out on the ground at her feet. ‘We’re about here,’ he told her, indicating a spot on the map with his forefinger. ‘In the middle of the Masai country, possibly somewhere near the Sonjo.’
‘The Sonjo?’ she asked. She knew that the Masai were a tall, warlike tribe that spread over the border into Kenya, and had once dominated the whole of East Africa, but the Sonjo were new to her.
‘They live in fortified villages at the base of the Escarpment. Look, here are the Serengeti Plains. Here’s where I estimate we are, and here’s Sonjo.’
Sara followed his finger across the map with dismay. ‘But that’s all of twenty miles!’ she said.
‘At least!’ he agreed dryly. ‘I hope you brought your walking shoes with you, Nurse Wayne!’
She looked down at her neat but sensible lace-up brogues and smiled.
‘I’d hate to think how many miles this pair has walked,’ she laughed. ‘Miles of corridors and polished ward floors! Perhaps this will make a pleasant change for them!’
But for all that she sounded so confident, her heart sank within her. Twenty miles of rough country was a very long way, and she was scared that they would meet some of the very animals that she had delighted in seeing from the safety of the Auster. She was plain scared — scared of what lay before her, and scared of being a burden to Matt, whom she had no doubt would have accomplished such a walk quite easily without her.
‘The people who come to look for us will spot the aeroplane,’ he told her. ‘We could stay here and wait for them?’
It was a moment of decision. She knew quite well that he would say nothing that would give her any indication of what he would rather do. She thought that it might be easier for their rescuers if they stayed where they were, but on the other hand, she had no idea how long it would take before they were found, and it would be very much easier to walk now than hours later when they were both tired and thirsty.
‘Will they come today?’ she asked hesitantly.
‘They might, but I doubt it. We were a bit off course, you know. I’d been told that there were elephant galore around here and I thought you might like to see them.’ His mouth twisted ironically and she was horrifyingly aware of how he thought she might well see them now.
‘Is — is this grass around here elephant grass?’ she asked.
He didn’t answer her, and she was glad of his silence.
‘We’d better start walking if we’re to get there before dark,’ she said at last, pleased to notice that she had sufficient control over her voice to stop it trembling. ‘Which way do we go?’
They set out, walking side by side, with Matt carrying the maps and the other oddments from the aeroplane and Sara carrying her medical bag. The blazing sun beating down on their barely protected heads, and the constant, nagging anxiety as to whether they would make their destination made them cautious, and they checked continuously to make sure that they were going in th
e right direction.
‘I’m sorry to have landed you in this mess,’ Matt said suddenly, after they had trudged about two miles.
‘It’s not your fault the Auster broke down,’ Sara reminded him. She pressed her foot hard into her shoe and hesitated in case there was any sign of a blister forming. There was none and she sighed with quick relief, smiling reassuringly at Matt’s questioning face.
‘But it was partly my fault,’ Matt went on. ‘I should never have insisted on having the Auster in the middle of its check. I should have known that James would have done it to death!’
‘But how could you?’ she asked. Did nobody trust James at Kwaheri?
To her surprise Matt flushed and looked uncomfortable.
‘We don’t look at machinery quite the same way, that’s all,’ he explained. ‘It wasn’t really his fault either.’
It was a pity, Sara thought, that she couldn’t enjoy her surroundings more. The sun-burned grass and the flat-topped thorn trees were exciting to someone more accustomed to small tidy hills and rain-drenched fields. The hot blue sky fading into the landscape was foreign to her too. She was used to a clearly defined horizon, not this shimmering blur that made the ground dance almost up to her own feet. She squinted into the distance to try and see where they were heading for, but the glare hurt her eyes and caused her to blink hastily in the harsh sunlight. Because of that she thought at first that she had imagined the figures coming towards them. She half-closed her eyes and looked up again. This time she was sure that someone was definitely coming towards them.
‘Look, Matt!’ she exclaimed. ‘Who are those people?’
Matt followed her pointing finger and grinned.
‘Sonjo, I think,’ he said lightheartedly. ‘Too shenzi to be Masai, though the headdresses are similar. Thank God for them! They must have seen us come down.’
