And No Regrets (6 page)

“
You mean she’d think it funny if I made up a camp-bed in the living-room,” Clare murmured, her heart pounding. “Your room is small, Ross. We can make the excuse that we’d stifle in there together.”

“
It could be stifling, all right,” he muttered, kicking at a tussock of weed near the steps. “I hope they don’t stay more than one night—and now I’ve wasted
long
enough!”

W
hen he had gone, she had the boys freshen up the bedroom in which the Pryces would be sleeping. Even the new mosquito nets and flowered bedcover, she reflected, couldn
’
t entirely eliminate the severely monastic appearance of the room. There was nothing, she thought, looking round, that revealed here the presence of a man. Would Mrs. Pryce notice? Would she guess that this was virtually the bedroom of a single girl? Clare frowned at herself in the mirror of the dressing-table, and her fingers played with her jade and gold wedding ring.

R
oss’s bride of convenience. Still that, and half a year of their tune together had already flown by on wings.

S
harply she turned and went out to the living-room. She called Luke from the kitchen and spent with him an edgy half-hour planning a dinner worthy of the house of Brennan.

CHAPTER FOUR

MRS. PRYCE was small and tough. Her thin face and neck were leathery and lined, and a fan-shaped set of wrinkles sprang out beyond rimless glasses from the
corner
of each eye. She wore shirt and breeches, and her voice was rather nasal. It was her habit to rub her left forefinger over the bridge of her nose when she was talking, as though speech let loose an irritant in the bone. It was this mannerism, displaying at frequent intervals her heavy gold wedding ring, that helped tighten Clare’s nerves to such a pitch that she was developing a headache.

The Pryces were deeply grateful for a real bedroom and meals to which one might dare bring an appetite. As practically all their travelling was by the river they had to travel light, and their usual food consisted chiefly of baked beans and meat concentrates, a diet which their complexions
alone proved utterly unwholesome in the tropics.

But it was fun having visitors, and being able to converse with a woman, even one as far removed from social contacts as Mrs. Pryce. Although her own dress never varied, she worked up an enthusiastic
i
nterest in materials and styles, and was ravished by the elegant, simplicity of the flowered frock which Clare wore.

“It’s lovely to see a woman dressed so prettily,” she smiled. “The few wives I meet in the bush dress as I do, mannishly.”

“Much more practical,” Clare agreed. “But I find breeches too hot.”

“Your houseboys are admirable,” Mrs. Pryce said at the end of the meal, being now alone with Clare while
the men smoked cigarettes on the veranda. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen bush boys respond so well to training.”

Clare gave a little pleased laugh. “Ross barks at them, and I laugh at them, and I suppose you could call them tolerably obedient. I’m very fond of Johnny, the little one. I’d like to keep him for life.”

Mrs. Pryce said gravely: “I hope you won’t allow that liking for him to persuade you that he might be happy in an English household. The bush is his home. Why, it even grows on white people to such an extent that they can’t stay away from it. Look at your own husband, my dear. I can’t say I’m surprised that he returned but I must add that it was wise of him to bring back a wife. Life in the bush can be unutterably lonely for a man, and though the life can be extremely trying to a woman, she has the compensation of knowing that she is making her man’s life a
little
!more comfortable and happier.”

T
he missionary quizzed Clare through her rimless glasses. “Do you find the lonely life here very trying, Mrs. Brennan? You are a smart, pretty girl, and few
o
ther white people pass this way.”

“
More coffee, Mrs. Pryce?” Clare bent her head over the pot
a
s she poured out. “In a strange way,” she said quietly,
“I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life before.”

“I am glad to hear you say that—thank you, my dear!” Mrs. Pryce added sugar lavishly to her cup. “Some of the bush wives I meet—well, the lonely life leads to wrangles with their husbands. The monotony gets on their nerves, and they have to take it out on someone, and human beings have an unhappy way of taking out their grievances on those they love the most.”

“Ross and I try not to argue,” Clare murmured.
“
He works so hard on the plantation, and the heat gets at his nerves and his vitality—luckily I have the
piano,” she gestured to it with a smile. “I employ music to soothe his savage breast.”

M
rs. Pryce laughed appreciatively. “The bush can make or break a man—he is, I must add, looking better than the last time I saw him. There had been an accident with a tree, his boys had to pull him out from under it. He’s strong and luckily he sustained only severe bruising, but when a man is laid low in this climate it takes its toll of him.”

C
lare caught her breath. Ross had never mentioned anything about an accident
...
dar
n
him, he talked to her so little about himself!

T
he Pryces retired to their room, and Clare moved round the living-room straightening cushions and picking up dead flower petals. The boy, Mark, had blithely made up a camp-bed in Ross’s bedroom, and now she didn’t know how to ask her husband to bring it out here to the living-room. What was she afraid of? he would ask, sardonically. Hadn’t he proved in the six months they had been together that he was immune to-her charms?

“
You’re mooning about like a cat who wants someone to open the door so she can streak out of it.” Ross closed down the piano lid with a sudden snap. “If you’re like this because we’re about to spend a monastic night together, I dread to think what you’d be like if my intentions weren’t strictly honourable.”

“
Don’t be so sarcastic.” She gave him a glare. “I—I want the bed brought out here.”

“
And I refuse to bring it out here.” He sat on the piano bench and gave her a steady, almost impudent look. “I don’t want it all along the bush grapevine that my marriage is strictly a platonic one.”

“
Frightened of spoiling your virile image?” she jeered.

H
e stood up then and she saw the violent bunching of his hands in his pockets. His eyes narrowed to metalli
c
slits, and Clare’s heart gave a jolt of apprehension beneath the thin flowered chiffon of her dress. Ross was not a man you could try too far, yet something was driving her to try him. She realised with a pang that she was provoking him to a quarrel because she wanted to shake him out of his indifference to her as
a
woman.

She saw him cast a glance at the door behind which the Pryces were sleeping—or listening—and suddenly he was standing over her, catching at her arm and marching her forcibly into the other bedroom. With his foot he kicked the d
o
or shut behind them.

“If we’re going to argue, then let’s do it in privacy,” he crisped. “Look, don’t you think you’re being a shade on the melodramatic side over all this? These people will be gone in a few days—”

“I like privacy,” she broke in. “It isn’t much to ask, that you carry my bed out of your room to the living-
r
oom.”

“
Curse it all
,
no!” The words thumped at her like small blows.

“I shouldn’t have thought you cared two hoots on
a
tin whis
tl
e what people thought or said, about you,” she scoffed. “Just shows how wrong a girl can be about
a
man.”

“And vice versa,” he snapped. “I thought you a girl with some control over female hysterics, but you’re rapidly proving me wrong, aren’t you? First the
storm, now this virginal display of modesty. I noticed you spilled the salt pot at dinner—what’s up, did Auntie once warn you that to spill salt means your chastity is threatened?”

“You sarcastic bully!” Clare could feel herself panting. She wanted to reach out and claw that brown, taunting face. “Why did you choose to bring
me
out here to this nerve-racking wilderness? Why me?”

“Maybe I’m an impulse buyer,” he drawled. “I could
be regretting the bargain as much as you, you know.”

“Regret
i
s the word,” she agreed recklessly. “Your bossy temperament is pretty harrowing to live in close proximity with, but as for sleeping near you—”

“
You’re going to have to, baby!” Suddenly he had lunged
a
way from the door, seized her slim shoulders and dragged her close to his white jacket. As her head went back, he pushed his fingers through her hair and next moment had a thick strand wrapped about his hand. Like that, she was at his mercy, unless she fancied the agony of pulled hair.

“
Let me go!” she gasped.

“
The classic female plea, my dear.” His grey eyes mocked her helplessness. “If you were smaller, I’d spank you. As it is, big girls get kissed.”

H
e bent his head, brought her face close to his and possessed her lips, crushing her to him from her shoulders to her hips. When after endless, savage moments body and mouth were free of him, when at last he moved away from her, all she could do was look furious and fluffed. Her lips stormed with colour, her eyes with the rage of abused love.

“
Go ahead,” he leant against the chest-of-drawers, looking aloof and unmoved, “call me a brute. It’s another classic from you females.”

T
he rage running in Clare’s veins had to find expression, and she heard herself choke out: “Never, never touch me again. I know why you brought me here, because it pleases your cast-iron conceit to have a bunch of natives and a woman at your mercy. All right I was crazy enough to come here because I wanted to get away from Ridgley, but you can’t stop, me hating you. Hating the sight and touch of you!”

For
a
few minutes he stood staring at her, breathing heavily, his nostrils curiously pinched. Then he turned away and pulled off his tie with a sharp jerk. “I don’t go back on anything I say or do,” he said heavily.
“We’ll share this room as we’ve shared the house, impersonally, unless you want it clacked all round Onitslo that our marriage is already on the rocks. The Pryces are making for there.”

There was a thickness
in his usually crisp tones which Clare, couldn’t help noticing, and she knew that in some way she had got what she wanted. She had hurt him. A pity there was no flash of triumph, but all her senses were still bitterly tortured by those unloving moments in his arms. Her love-hungry lips had wanted to respond to his, her throat still felt the touch of his fingers.

They had said it in Onitslo, and it was true. He had married her for a convenience. She was just here to see he got decently cooked meals and clean linen on his bed. She was no more than a housekeeper.

There had been times when she had been happy and joyous here, awake in a dream that might come true, but tonight the dream had come pretty close to shattering, and when at last she lay under the netting of her camp-bed, she let the hot tears escape into her pillow. She could not live without love; her intelligence and vitality demanded it, without it her spirit would perish.

She stifled a sigh and knuckled the tears from her eyes. She had boasted that she and Ross rarely wrangled ... well, they had had one devil of a wrangle tonight, and she had said things he might never forgive her for. He lay sleeping now, she could hear his even breathing, and he had not said goodnight before sliding the length of himself under his netting. His chin had looked like stone.

T
he Pryces spent all next day in the village, returning for lunch and again for dinner. After dinner the four of them sat out on the veranda with drinks and the gramophone going. The men talked forestry, while Clare and Mrs. Pryce yarned about England. Clare had seen several good shows in the West End with Ross, and it took her mind off her troubled thoughts to describe them to the other woman.

Back from the village, during the following week, the Pryces brought pieces of carved wood and ivory, native beadwork, and several wide, clay dishes. Some of the pieces had been given as gifts, and Clare bought several of them, though Mrs. Pryce said she would get nicer pieces in Lagos.

“But they won’t be from our own village,” said Clare.
“I
want to take them back to England.”

In the depths of her compassion for an older woman who had sacrificed so much of her youth out here, Clare went
o
ut of her way to make the Pryces
’
stay a memorable one for them. They ate the best food she could provide, had cool baths awaiting them when they returned to dinner, and slept in a bedroom as devoid of insects as her onslaughts could make it. She also had all their camp equipment, bedding and personal clothing cleaned and laundered, and substituted one of her own good trunks for a shapeless suitcase that peeped at the
corner
s.

Mrs. Pryce said: “Wherever we go, we are looked after. But no one has ever taken so much care of us as you have done. If you only knew how grateful we are.” The Pryces stayed three weeks, longer than they had ever stayed at Bula. “The house is so lovely now,” said Mrs. Pryce regretfully on her last evening. “So different from when Mr. Brennan was here alone. He is very fortunate in you, my dear.”

Clare hoped that Ross had not heard this remark, but Mrs. Pryce raised her voice and looked along the veranda to where the men sat, Ross with a cigarette and the missionary smoking the single cheroot he allowed himself daily.

“I was just saying that you’re a lucky man, Mr. Brennan,” she said, “to have picked a wife who could settle so charmingly in this wild country.”

“I could always pick winners,” he said, smiling lazily.

“And like all men,” she said, with the merest trace of acid, “I daresay you take the credit for everything. Even your wife’s good points are your own because by making her your wife you uncovered them. You wouldn’t admit that she could possibly be as good a housewife to another man.”

“On the contrary,” he answered pleasantly, “another man will have her experience with me to build upon.”

Mrs. Pryce narrowed her eyes at him, the arrogant planter who had taken for wife the delicate, rose-lipped girl with violet eyes and virginal curves. Ross shot back at the woman his dagger-like charming smile. “Summing me up as a steely egoist who carried off a girl too sensitive for me?”
he enquired.

“I admire Clare tremendously,” Mrs. Pryce shot back at him. “Nor, I think, is she so tractable that you are able to walk all over her, Mr. Brennan.”

“But had you been her mother,” he drawled, “you would have chased me out of the house with a broom rather than let me beguile her with tales of the tropics, eh? She was dying to come here. What could I do but succumb to her wiles?”

“I think it far more likely that she succumbed to your wiles, Mr. Brennan. Women are far more romantic than men.”

“And they let their dreams of romance land them in all sorts of complications, eh?” He quizzed Clare’s profile in the starlight. “Do you agree with Mrs. Pryce’s philosophy, sweetheart?”

Clare tingled at that mocking endearment. “We are fools, more often than not,” she said coolly. “But everyone has to be foolish before he can be wise.”

“You’ll be wiser next time?” He gave a short laugh, and then realising that he was perhaps going a bit far in front of the two missionaries, suggested that Clare give them a tune on the piano before they went to bed.