by Anne Mather
But now she said: ‘I’ve read books. And I know what your daddy has told us when he’s been home on leave. Besides, if you knew a little more about the climate you’d realise that things don’t stay the same here as they do back home.’
She saw that Miranda was frowning at this and as they traversed the wide corridor to the lifts she tried to explain how lush and luxuriant was the vegetation that could overnight undo the work of the day. In truth, she found it hard to accept herself. She had never witnessed the destructive power of liana creepers, strangling the life out of struggling undergrowth, entwining trees together into an impassable living mesh that had to be hacked away with machetes. And yet it did happen, and the children were morbidly fascinated by her revelations.
Downstairs, a wide hall with an enormous revolving fan opened into the various public rooms of the hotel. Flowering, climbing plants rioted over low ornamental trellises, while huge stone urns spilled exotically coloured lilies and flame flowers over the cool, marble-tiled floor. It was obvious that no expense had been spared in making the Hotel Ashenghi as attractive to its guests as was humanly possible in a climate verging constantly on the unbearable.
As Caroline paused to get her bearings she encountered the eye of a man who appeared to be the head waiter standing in the arched entrance to the restaurant, keeping his waiters under surveillance. He bowed courteously as she approached him, and asked if she required a table. His English was quite good, so Caroline thanked him, and after he had shown them to a table set in a window embrasure, she said:
‘Mrs. Lacey—the children’s mother—is not feeling well. She’d like some coffee in her suite, and would it be possible for her to have some toast?’
The head waiter smiled, his teeth startlingly white in his black face. ‘Of course, madam. I will see to it myself. Now, what would you and these children like to eat?’
Caroline had coffee, but David and Miranda chose fruit juice, and they all tried the warm rolls spread with conserve. The butter that was provided in a dish of ice cubes wasn’t to their taste and David, with his usual lack of discretion, said in a clear, distinct voice that it was rancid. Of course, it wasn’t, but even Caroline preferred to avoid it. There was a dish of fruit on the table, too—mangoes and bananas, pawpaws and oranges, but Caroline advised the children to wait before trying anything too unfamiliar to their stomachs. All in all, it was an enjoyable meal, the fans set at intervals about the room creating a cooling draught which was most acceptable. Clearly, the air-conditioning kept the temperature down, but the fans helped to disperse the flies.
Judging by the number of used tables it appeared that by this hour of the morning most of the hotel’s guests had already partaken of breakfast, and Caroline and the children were the last to leave. They were walking towards the lifts when a man who had been talking to the receptionist turned away from the desk and saw them. He was a tall man, lean and muscular, dressed in narrow fitting mud-coloured pants and a cream bush shirt, but what attracted Caroline’s attention was the man’s hair. It was corn-fair, streaked with a lighter shade, as though the sun had bleached it, and it was startling against the dark tan of his skin. She had only known one man with hair like that, one man whose ice-blue eyes could turn to green when he was emotionally aroused, one man who had once asked her to marry him, and she had turned him down because she had youthfully asserted that she didn’t intend to marry a penniless engineer and go and live in some awful, Godforsaken, undeveloped country. How stupid she had been, how careless with the one thing in her life she had ever really wanted…
The man was standing quite still now staring at her, and she moved uncomfortably under that intent scrutiny. But for a moment she had felt as shocked as he must be at seeing her here. What could he be thinking? What kind of a coincidence did he think this was?
Realising that it was up to her to make the first overture, she took a few steps towards him and said: ‘Hello, Gareth. This is a surprise, isn’t it?’
Gareth Morgan seemed to recover admirably quickly from his momentary pause. In fact, he didn’t seem too shocked at all. It was Caroline who could feel the tremor of this encounter rushing through her veins, moistening her palms, sending a rivulet of sweat down her spine. She had not realised until then just how much she had wanted to see him again, and she had the most ridiculous impulse to run to him, to press herself against him, and beg his forgiveness for what happened seven years ago.
But of course the very fact that it was seven years ago precluded any show of emotion. Seven years was a long time, and a lot had happened—to both of them. Why else had she waited so long before making any attempt to contact him? Even now, facing him, the width of the years stretched between them, made even wider by the cold detachment on his face.
‘So you really came, Caroline,’ he remarked at last. ‘I never believed you would.’
He made no attempt to take the hand that she had tentatively offered, and awkwardly she allowed her arm to drop to her side. She was aware of Miranda’s speculative interest, of David’s curiosity, and gathering all her composure, she said: ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
Gareth looked sceptical. ‘No? Oh, well, never mind.’
Caroline frowned. ‘Did you know I was coming, then?’
‘Know? Of course I knew. I thought that was the general idea. I just can’t imagine why you bothered.’
Caroline coloured. ‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken if you think I supplied advance notice of my arrival—’ she began hotly.
‘Am I?’ Gareth’s tone was mocking. ‘Didn’t you expect us to meet?’
Caroline bent her head to the children. ‘Look!’ she said. ‘There’s a monkey hiding in that tree just outside the window. Why don’t you go and see what it does?’
David looked at Caroline and then at the tall man standing nearby. ‘You’re just wanting to get rid of us,’ he declared, with his usual candour. ‘Why? Who is this man? Does he work for Daddy?’
Caroline straightened, her cheeks burning now. This was hardly the way she had envisaged her first meeting with Gareth Morgan. She had thought to surprise him, and if she had hoped for any reaction from him it had not been this mocking derision and scarcely concealed contempt.
‘Are these Lacey’s children?’ he asked now, and David said:
‘I’m David Lacey, and this is my sister Miranda. Who are you?’
‘My name is Gareth Morgan,’ replied Gareth, his expression changing somewhat as he went down on his haunches beside them. ‘I suppose you could call me a friend of your daddy’s.’
‘Do you live at La Vache, too?’ asked Miranda.
Gareth shook his head. ‘No. I live at a place called Nyshasa, but it’s not far from La Vache. I live near the river.’
David’s eyes were round. ‘Are there crocodiles in the river? My teacher at school said there were crocodiles in Africa.’
‘Oh, there are. But they prefer calmer waters than where I live. We do have hippos, though, and they’re quite interesting.’
‘How super!’ David was enthralled. ‘Do you think my daddy would take me to see them—’
‘And me,’ piped up Miranda, when Caroline interrupted them.
‘Not now, children,’ she exclaimed, realising the sharpness of her tone had less to do with them than with the man talking so casually to them. ‘Er—I’m sure Mr. Morgan has more important things to do than waste his valuable time talking to us.’
Garth straightened, flexing his back muscles, unwillingly drawing Caroline’s eyes to the broadness of his chest. He was leaner than she remembered, but no less attractive because of it. ‘On the contrary,’ he was saying mildly, ‘I came here to meet you and take you back to La Vache.’
‘What?’ Caroline gasped, and then quickly tried to hide her astonishment. ‘But—but I don’t understand—’
‘Nicolas Freeleng and I are old friends. Lacey told him that an old—acquaintance—of mine was coming out here with his wife to help her with the children. Then, w
hen they ran into some trouble at the mine, and it was going to be difficult for Lacey to get away, Nick asked me whether I’d do it—seeing that we were old acquaintances.’
‘I—I see.’ Caroline digested this with reluctance. ‘Well, I’m sorry if we’re being an inconvenience to you.’
‘Did I say you were?’
‘No. No, but—’
‘But what?’ Gareth’s eyes narrowed to thin slivers of blue ice. ‘Wasn’t this the way you intended us to meet? What did you hope to do, Caroline? Disarm me with surprise—and seduce me with what might have been?’
Caroline was shocked at the bitterness in his tone. ‘Of course not,’ she denied defensively. ‘Surely after all these years we can meet as—as friends.’
‘Friends?’ There was pure contempt in his voice now. ‘Caroline, you and I can never be friends, and you know it. Now, I don’t know what you hoped to achieve by coming here—I imagined you’d be happily married to some comfortably-off business man by now. That was your intention, wasn’t it?’ His lip curled. ‘I might even be doing you a disservice by suspecting that I figure in any way in your plans. But I’m giving you fair warning, if you have any foolish notion of entertaining yourself while you’re here by trying to rekindle old fires, you’ll be wasting your time!’
CHAPTER TWO
THE heat in the station wagon was intense, but to wind down the windows was to invite clouds of choking dust into the car, and therefore the heat was the lesser of the two evils. All the same, Caroline felt as though every inch of her body was soaked with sweat, and she wished David would stop bouncing about from side to side in his determination not to miss anything. Even Elizabeth, more comfortably ensconced in the front of the vehicle beside Gareth, fanned herself constantly with her handkerchief, and could no longer keep up the inconsequent chatter she had bubbled with when first they started off. Elizabeth was invariably at her best when in the company of an attractive man, and the fact that Gareth made only monosyllabic replies to her inane questions seemed to bother her not at all.
But the afternoon was wearing into early evening now, and the shadows were lengthening beside the mud-baked track. There was a dank smell of rotting vegetation from the jungle-like mass that encroached on the narrow road, and from time to time the shrill cry of some wild animal rent the dying afternoon air. Miranda had long since passed the excitable stage and now curled into her corner, persistently sucking her thumb in spite of Caroline’s reprovals and David’s jeering.
Caroline herself felt that her awareness of everything around her had been sharpened by the tension between herself and Gareth. Not that anyone else appeared to be aware of it. On the contrary, from the moment Elizabeth was introduced her only interest had been to draw his attention to herself.
Gareth had accompanied Caroline and the children up in the lift to Elizabeth’s suite. After making his shattering statement in the hall of the hotel, he had diverted his attention to David and Miranda, and while Caroline had burned with resentment and a painful kind of humiliation, he had talked casually to the children about safaris he had made into nearby Tanzania, and the dramatic nature reserve of the Ngorongoro Crater. By the time they reached the suite David was completely won over, and Caroline did not have to introduce her employer to the tall, lean stranger: David did it for her.
Elizabeth’s headache seemed to miraculously disappear. She immediately left her bed to seek the bathroom and when she emerged at last she had looked cool and feminine in a pale pink dress that clung to her shapely figure.
Caroline had spent the time that Elizabeth had taken to get ready standing nervously by the window, staring down desperately on to the yard below, willing the whole scene that had just taken place to have been some awful nightmare. But of course it was not. Gareth was there in the room with her, apparently indifferent to her presence, showing a boyish interest in the toys that both David and Miranda had produced for his inspection.
When Elizabeth finally had joined them, it had been worse. Caroline had had to listen to the other woman laughing about the fact that only that morning she and Caroline had been talking about him, and what a lovely surprise it was to find he was working in Tsaba now.
Gareth had responded courteously enough, but Caroline had sensed his desire to get away. He had advised them to have an early lunch, then rest on their beds, and he would come back for them at about four o’clock when the heat was beginning to wane. He cleverly evaded Elizabeth’s suggestion that he should have lunch with them, saying that he had business to attend to in Ashenghi, and then he left them with a polite smile, and a casual salute that was meant for David.
After he had gone, Caroline had had to face Elizabeth’s questions. Had she known he was working in Tsaba? How had he reacted when he had found her in charge of the children? And what exactly did he do?
Caroline had parried them as best she could. Fortunately for her David was not paying a great deal of attention to their conversation. It was boring stuff after what Mr. Morgan had just been telling him, and so Caroline did not have to suffer his recollections of her confrontation with Gareth. Instead, she had allowed Elizabeth to assume that it had been as much a surprise to her as to anyone else meeting him like that, and therefore she was no wiser as to his present activities than she had been before. It had been a cowardly little subterfuge, she thought now, disgusted at her own duplicity, but the last thing she wanted was to give Elizabeth any reason to suspect that she had come here for any other reason than to help out a friend in need. What small portion of pride that was left to her must remain intact or she might be tempted to funk the whole thing and take the next flight back to England.
It was dark by the time they reached La Vache and thousands of insects were visible in the headlights’ glare, dying in their hundreds against the windscreen. An enormous moth hit the car with a sickening thud, leaving a trail of fluid to run unheeded down the glass, and Caroline felt slightly nauseated. Last night, driving to the hotel, she had been tired but excited, eager to experience the thinly-veneered primitiveness that was Africa. But tonight she felt bruised and uncertain, more convinced as every moment passed that she was going to regret coming here.
La Vache was a collection of houses, built for the white population, and adjoining a sort of village compound. In the half light thrown from lighted windows, Caroline glimpsed an open fire and a collection of curious black faces turned in their direction before Gareth swung between some trees and brought the station wagon to a halt before a corrugated-roofed bungalow. Almost before the vehicle’s engine ground to a halt a door was thrown open and a man dressed in white shirt and shorts came hurrying down the shallow steps towards them. Gareth had got out of the car before the other man reached them, but it was obvious that the newcomer had eyes for no one but Elizabeth.
Caroline levered herself stiffly out of the back of the station wagon, trying to avoid watching the languid way Elizabeth responded to Charles’s enthusiastic welcome, and was glad when the children scrambled out and broke it up, shouting: ‘Daddy! Daddy! We’re here!’
Ignoring the hand that Gareth had offered to help her out of the vehicle, Caroline stood on the hard track, flexing her aching muscles, and looking about her with reluctant interest. Her first impressions were of the closeness of the community, and a certain sense of claustrophobic unease at the encroaching forest. Was this her jungle clearing? Was this to be the romantic communion with nature which had sounded so delightful when viewed from a distance? It all seemed so different, so primitive and yet perversely prosaic somehow. And that smell of rotting vegetation—one didn’t learn about things like that from books.
Gareth was unloading their suitcases from the back of the station wagon. Caroline supposed she should be helping him. After all, that was why she was here, wasn’t it? To help! But right now, she felt as though she was the one who needed to be helped, and there was no one to do it. For the first time since leaving England she thought rather nostalgically about the comfortable relationship she
had shared with Jeremy Brent, and wondered whether he would accept the severance of their engagement as she had insisted he should.
Then Charles turned from his family and gave her a warm, comforting smile. ‘Good to see you again, Caroline,’ he said. ‘Glad you made it.’ Then he turned to Gareth: ‘I’m in your debt, Morgan. Come along inside and we’ll all have a drink to celebrate.’
Gareth made a deprecating gesture. ‘Thanks, but I can’t stop,’ he demurred. ‘I’ve got to get back to Nyshasa.’
‘Oh, must you?’ That was Elizabeth, and even the children echoed her disappointment. Only Caroline said nothing, made no effort to detain him.
Gareth shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. But I have been away since early this morning. Some other time, perhaps.’
‘Oh, yes, you must come and have dinner with us one evening while we’re here, mustn’t he, Charles?’ exclaimed Elizabeth.
‘Of course, of course,’ Charles smiled. ‘I’ll be in touch, Morgan.’
‘You do that.’
Gareth nodded pleasantly and walked round the station wagon to get into the driving seat again. He had to pass Caroline to do so and for a brief moment hard blue eyes bored into hers. Deliberately she assumed a defiant stance, returning his gaze challengingly, refusing to let him see that he could in any way disconcert her, and then he was past and climbing into the vehicle, raising his hand in farewell to the others. The engine fired, he let in his clutch, put the car into gear and it moved smoothly away. Only then did Caroline realise that she had been holding her breath for fully one minute.
‘Come along, Caroline.’ Charles ushered his family across the stretch of dried grass that formed a sort of garden at the front of the bungalow. ‘Thomas has a meal all ready for you.’