by Неизвестный
A faint breeze tinkled the wind-chimes. ‘I didn’t hear you,’ he said, frowning.
‘I’m barefooted.’
‘What foolishness! Have you been down to the beach like that?’
‘I had a pair of sandals, but I mislaid them.’
‘You could collect jigger worms in your toes, or the septic spines of a sea-urchin. I thought you had more sense than to go walking about on the sands like a foolish girl!’
Her hands gripped the veranda rail at those words. ‘The sands are so white and warm, and the island people go about with bare feet.’
‘Their feet are hardened to the place, but even they get jigger worms under the skin and the things hurt when they’re extracted. Lon or one of the boys would have to extract the things if you picked them up, for you do realise that my operating days are over?’ His hands were holding a mandarin orange and suddenly his fingers tightened and the fruit was squashed and oozing juice over his skin. ‘Damnation!’ He flung the fruit across the veranda rail in the direction of the trees. ‘Each day I tell myself that I won’t let it eat into my brain like a worm, but today, as you see, the worm bit.’
Merlin watched him as he dragged a handkerchief from his pocket and dried his hands ... how strong those hands ... they could break a woman’s neck if he really let go and lost control of himself.
‘I think there’s a wind getting up.’ He raised his voice to a shout. ‘Ramai, will you come here this instant!’
The boy evidently thought the tuan was impatient for his breakfast, for he arrived with a laden tray and apologies that Paul waved aside. ‘Do I hear and smell a big wind?’ he demanded.
‘The palm fronds are restless, tuan.’ Ramai put down the tray and glanced towards the left of the house, where the trees thickened and the jungle began. ‘We will know in an hour or so, if the devil starts drumming in the forest.’
‘Typhoon?’ Paul asked, his face raised as if he were testing the wind against his skin.
‘Could be, tuan, this time of year.’
‘Damnation.’ Paul glanced about him in a sudden lost way. ‘This is when I start feeling like a useless log—still, it might only be the threat of a storm, but go find Lon and tell him to get in radio contact with the mainland. We had better be prepared for the worst.’
‘Ja, tuan.’ The boy nodded, as if Paul could see him. ‘Your makan pagi on the table. Mevrouw will pour coffee, eh?’
‘Ja, she will see to things. Scatter and find Lon, and if the news is bad, then get down to the village and warn your people. They know what to do better than I, but it will help if we get confirmation by radio in advance.’
The boy darted down the veranda steps and loped off in search of Lon, who for the past weeks had been assisting with the supervision of the tea valley, Paul’s cousin not being due back for a fortnight. Merlin dreaded his return ... unlike Lon he wasn’t an Indonesian who rather liked intrigue; nor was he Ramai, a boy who could be talked into playing a game of makebelieve. Paul’s cousin was Dutch like himself and he’d want to know all about her, or as much as she liked to tell him, and if anyone was going to let out to Paul that she was a girl in her twenties and not a woman in her forties, then the cousin was the most likely candidate.
‘Come, let us have breakfast,’ Paul said, and he gestured in the general direction of the table. ‘I hope we haven’t unnerved you with our talk about a typhoon? You mustn’t worry. This house is built to withstand a strong blow and the houseboys will bring back their families here, or take them down to the valley.’
‘I should think it would be safer, mynheer.’ She lifted the coffee pot and poured for both of them, adding sugar to his cup and just a dash of thick cream. She placed the cup exactly where he could reach it without knocking it over, and felt an inward tightening of her nerves as she heard for herself the restless fluttering of the palm and casuarina leaves. She had learned since coming here that those trees were invariably planted in pairs as they represented the male and female principle, the palm towering and strong, the casuarina graceful and somehow compliant in its aspect.
‘Ja, the valley is safe, mevrouw, if this should be only a big wind, but if the sea should throw a tidal wave then it isn’t so good. We stay here at the house. Do you mind?’
‘I do whatever you think is best, mynheer.’ She served him with the delicious coconut jelly, after which there were fried oysters and rice balls. ‘It will be a new experience for me to see a typhoon.’
‘It is more to the point to say that you will hear it, mevrouw. At its height the big wind sounds like an express train rushing through a tunnel, a long, long tunnel that makes the noise seem endless. Are you feeling afraid? It would be perfectly natural.’
‘I’m nervous,’ she admitted, ‘but not terrified.’ It was somehow impossible to feel as frightened of the elements as she felt of Paul himself if he should suddenly change towards her, revealing the black hatred that gnawed at his heart and would go on gnawing until he could assuage it.
‘Now you know, mevrouw, why I wished to have a sensible woman here and not a romantic girl. Islands are not always idyllic places, such as they are made out to be in the travel brochures, and I really don’t fancy a frightened young thing on my hands if we are in for a typhoon and the winds starts ripping trees out of the ground and causing quite a bit of hell to break loose.’ He pronged oyster on to a fork and gave his twist of a smile. ‘I’m not exactly equipped to play knight errant, and that is what romantic girls expect, chivalry and the firm arm of protection. You are a woman past all that, eh?’
‘Of course,’ said Merlin, and gave him a petrified look. It was all too tragically easy to fool a blind man, to assume the serene manner of an older woman, and a more deliberate way of walking. Of having flowers about the house, and making sure the boys kept the rooms free of dust—something they had not been too scrupulous about before her arrival. Also those old songs she played for him helped a great deal to establish her as a woman long out of touch with the modern trends in popular music. She had, to put it crudely, pulled the wool over his eyes, but when his cousin returned from Holland ... oh God, she didn’t want to think about that, but if she were exposed then she could only pray that he would accept the explanation that she had wanted the job so much that she hadn’t thought it would matter if she let him believe that she was in her sensible forties. They had now been working together for several weeks and it would delay work on the book if he angrily dismissed her and sought another secretary.
She didn’t want to leave him ... that was at the heart and root of everything. Life would have no meaning at all if she couldn’t see him each day, hear his voice and do his bidding. Stolen fruit, both bitter and sweet, and which he’d choke her with if he ever learned the real truth of her identity.
‘You have gone very quiet, mevrouw, and the foliage of the trees is rattling all the harder. Or is it your knees knocking?’
She smiled. ‘I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t got the jitters, mynheer, but this is a soundly built house and I’m ready to face what the fates have in store for me.’
‘Fatalistic, eh? You believe, do you, that is what is written on your scroll will assuredly come to pass? It’s a view I find hard to swallow.’
‘Why is that, mynheer?’
‘I don’t happen to find it terribly amusing that it was written I should come to this, cut off from my life’s work, unable to function at what I did best, and all because of some damned little nurse who thought I should be taught a lesson for not taking sufficient notice of her.’
‘Oh, do you really believe that?’ Merlin’s face was a picture of pain. ‘I’m sure it must have been an accident— no one—no woman would be that cruel!’
‘You weren’t there!’ he said curtly. ‘How would you know? You are a woman who has kept apart from the complexity of passions that certain other people indulge in. I once had the task of trying to restore a face at which a woman had flung a kerosene lamp ... impossible to imagine, is it not,
and yet it happened. Passion can be a force motivated by the devil himself ... I wanted to destroy that woman as she destroyed my eyes, and that was one of the reasons why I came halfway across the world to live ... to try and forget. It isn’t easy. I am not Saint Paul.’
He rose to his feet as he spoke and went to the veranda rail, where he stood in a listening attitude, his brows drawn together as he took out his cheroots and lit one, taking in a deep lungful of the smoke and expelling it through taut nostrils.
‘Ramai should be back soon,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if certain facts of life strike you as harsh, mevrouw, but you haven’t had a lot to do with men, have you? I’m not belittling you for that, but I actually think it praiseworthy that a woman should be serene and not a hell-cat who lives only to torment other people. There is a great deal of serenity in you, but you are probably unaware of the fact. There is modesty in you as well.’
‘I’m no saint myself, mynheer!’ Merlin flushed, half with pleasure at what he said, half with dismay. She had suspected that he was forming an image of her that his Dutch cousin could blast into fragments with a few well chosen words, and quickly she went over to him and dared to touch his forearm below the short sleeve of his shirt, lightly, tentatively, with pleading.
‘Mynheer, what if your cousin doesn’t like me? What will you do if he paints a different picture of me from the one you have in mind? I—I like my job here—I wouldn’t like to be sent away—‘
‘My dear woman,’ he was gazing downwards to where her hand rested on his skin, ‘do you imagine that Hendrik dictates to me? I have formed my conclusions about you and he can’t alter them. You are a good secretary and we get along, eh?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Then why should Hendrik object to you? You do your work to my satisfaction, and keep me company in the evenings.’
‘Your cousin will wish to do that when he returns.’
‘Hardly.’ Paul gave a cynical smile and tipped ash from his cheroot with a long forefinger. ‘He has what is called an arrangement with a woman from the village—it often happens when men work away from their homeland, and loneliness can break the spirit of the hardest man, and Hendrik isn’t hard. He’s addicted to the tropics and cannot work elsewhere, and it is none of my business if he wishes to alleviate his loneliness and lighten his leisure with an attractive island girl, so long as her parents are satisfied that he treats her well. Are you shocked, mevrouw?’
‘No, I’m not narrow-minded, mynheer.’ Merlin, to put it mildly, was relieved to hear that Hendrik van Setan wasn’t the starchy sort whose back would be stiff as a board to match his principles. After all, she wasn’t deceiving Paul in a way that could hurt him and she might manage to persuade Hendrik to let the deception go on. She crossed her fingers and hoped so.
‘Are you wondering why I haven’t succumbed to the charms of a dusky island girl?’ Paul murmured, and that disconcerting blind gaze was full upon her face as if he could read her features and see her reaction to his question.
‘You strike me as a very strong-willed man,’ she replied. ‘I don’t think you’d ever give in to your own desires unless they had real meaning for you.’
‘Such as being motivated by love? Is that what you mean?’
‘Yes.’ She said it firmly, her conviction rooted in the marvellous surgeon he had been, a kind of decisive tenderness in the way he had used his skilful hands. ‘I don’t think you’ve ever had much time for empty experiences and much prefer those that enrich you.’
‘That might have been true when I had the satisfaction and enrichment of my work, mevrouw. Now, like a house without windows, I dominate an empty landscape and will gradually fall into ruin—then, believe me, I shall turn to the arms of consolation. Why not? I imagine the island girls are sweet-tempered and sweet to the touch. That’s all a man like me should want or need. A pliable affection from someone who will slip quietly away when the tiger feels like howling to the moon he can’t see.’
‘Do tigers howl?’ she asked, trying to speak lightly and finding it hard to manage.
‘If the thorn’s in deep enough,’ he rejoined, ‘and you’ve been long enough on the island to have heard the name the islanders have given me, harimau which means tiger.’
‘Sang harimau,’ she corrected him. ‘King tiger.’
His smile was brief, a trifle caustic. ‘It has something to do with a legend of theirs, that each one of us has been at some time a member of the animal kingdom and that when we take human shape certain of our former characteristics are retained. Soon after I came to Pulau-Indah I took to going into the forest at night, where I had an uncanny knack of finding my way, obviously due to increased facility to hear and sense the presence of other night creatures. Real tigers roam there, you know, and at night they’re prowling for food. The islanders first decided that I was crazy, and then very gradually they began to hint that I had an affinity with the big tawny cats and that was why I was unafraid to go where they were. The truth was I didn’t much care if one night they took me for their supper—you catch your breath with extreme sharpness, mevrouw, but a woman like you, you support the truth and dislike dishonesty, don’t you?’
Merlin put a hand to her throat and felt for a moment slightly choked by her own dishonesty. Feeling the withdrawal of her touch from his arm, he glanced downwards and she saw his eyebrows pull together. ‘Have I struck a wrong chord?’ he asked. ‘Have you some small guilty secret, Miss Lakeside, locked up in your heart?’
‘Haven’t we all got a few bones in the cupboard of our conscience, mynheer! I’m an old maid, but not necessarily a devout nun.’
‘Intriguing,’ he murmured. ‘The secrets of Ruth are always more subtle than the secrets of Jezebel. It has to do with a man, of course?’
‘That—that is always the assumption.’ she said uneasily.
‘The most logical one, unless you once robbed a piggy bank.’ Then to Merlin’s disquiet, she saw him reaching out a hand in her direction, as if sudden curiosity made him want to actually touch the object of his aroused interest. She drew away, carefully, back against the veranda rail, all too conscious that she had on a thin shirt and that although her figure was slim she had a youthful firmness and suppleness that his sensitive fingers would be aware of at once. Lon had warned her of this. That blind men could tell so much from the voice, and then came the day when they wanted to extend their research. It was perfectly natural and under normal circumstances she would have offered her face for a braille reading, though it would have touched the near peaks of exquisite agony to have let him touch her body.
‘I can hear you moving away from me,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Are you scared of being touched? I mean it quite impersonally. You mustn’t imagine that I want to take a liberty.’
‘I don’t imagine that.’ Merlin shrank into stillness, like a prudish spinster grown so out of touch with physical contact that it now took on a sinister aspect. It was better to act like that than to face the real truth, that she dreaded to be found out and yet longed to be discovered as a girl of twenty-one who could give him the sweet consolation he must hunger for in the dark depth of his days and nights. She wanted that strong brown arm to curve around her and drag her hard and fast to that tanned and sinewy body, whose skin would warmly sear her own, whose muscles would make her feel deliriously weak, whose desires would come vibrantly alive to the young female feel of her. How she longed for that ... a rage of heaven even if afterwards she had to face the hell of his anger.
He was blind, but his mind was keenly, alertly alive, and he’d guess who she was ... he’d find out, and the pleasure wouldn’t be worth the pain of his hatred.
‘You are scared out of your wits,’ he said softly. His nostrils tensed, as if he had actually caught the scent of her fear. ‘My dear woman, I haven’t been so long without a woman that I shall go berserk and ravish you the instant I get my hands on your body. I merely wished to braille you—I thought we had got to know one another well enough for that.�
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It was an awful dilemma, for Merlin didn’t dare to let his hands have contact with her face or her figure; those fingers of his had been highly sensitive and aware of skin textures and bone construction before his blindness, and if he touched her now he would realise instantly that she was not what she claimed to be ... a middle-aged woman.
Then, with a shrug and a mordant little twist of his lip, he said: ‘What made you stay single—did you never wish to marry?’
So that was what he assumed, that she was a frigid prude who shrank from physical contact with a man! Well, it couldn’t be helped if he took her for that sort, but there was something very mocking in the way he thrust both hands into the pockets of his trousers, letting her know that she was safe from their marauding ... for now.
‘I—I imagine most women like to be married,’ she replied, a burning in her cheeks.
‘So you never met the right man, eh?’
She gazed into his sightless eyes and poignant on her mouth, like a frozen kiss, was the answer she could never put into words. ‘I’m not a woman that men seem to notice.’
‘It is said in this part of the world that for every man there is a soul in the shape of a woman, that until she appears the man is without his soul. Perhaps it will yet happen.’
‘No!’
‘You sound so sure—or are you basically afraid of the idea of marriage and all it entails?’
‘I’m content with what I have.’
‘An existence all on one level, Miss Lakeside? The heights can never be reached for a woman alone.’
‘Surely that goes for a man as well, if you are talking about the emotional side and not just the physical?’
‘Ja, for a man it is also sadly true, no heights, no suspension among the stars.’
‘Are you a romantic at heart, mynheer?’