Love This Stranger

by Rosalind Brett

  “Tess ... don’t. You’ll make yourself ill. It’s all right now. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Tess, please.” He slipped an arm under her and held her trembling body.

  Luke stooped beside him, offering a blanket. “She’s had some breaks, lately. Shall I fetch a doctor.”

  “It isn’t necessary. It’s nerves.” Dave s voice sounded harsh and strange. “It’s hell to listen to, but she’s letting the tension out of her system. Put some towels in her cabin, will you, and prepare hot milk and whisky. I’ll bring her along.”

  A beam of light filtered through the porthole. It lay in a bar of silver across the foot of the bunk and diffused enough radiance to awaken Tess. She remained still, while noises and a new day seeped into her consciousness. Memories crept back, distant and vague. Her hand rested on the bruised rib and her mind shied away from its implications.

  Carefully Tess sat up and slipped undone the top button of her pyjama jacket for coolness. She lowered her feet to the floor and only then realized that the steady throbbing came from the engine. The Bondoa was at sea.

  With caution she planted her feet and stood up. From here she could see the streaked grey water bouncing by and the thin dark line of the coast. The sun was coming up like a flight of flamingoes across a wash of lavender.

  She heard steps on the companionway and snatched up her dressing-gown from the back of a chair. She was scarcely into it before the door opened and Dave came in carrying a tray. He smiled, drummed a belated tattoo on the inside of the door and placed the tray on the small, built-in dressing-table.

  “You look better for the sleep,” he said. “No head?”

  “Nothing that fresh air won’t dispel.” She tied the belt of the wrap. “Where are we going?”

  “To the next port.”

  “Have we been sailing long?”

  “About seven hours.”

  She drank the tea he brought her, put down the cup and went nearer to the porthole. Her hair flew back in the breeze and a fine spray met her skin. The bones of her jaw and chin visibly sharpened, and she spoke almost inaudibly.

  “Why do such horrors have to happen? There was no link at all between that woman and me, vet as long as I live she’ll haunt me.”

  “She won’t, Tess. There’ll be too many other things, and soon you’ll feel nothing but pity for a creature with a contorted outlook.”

  Her hands clenched in her pockets. “From the moment she touched me I knew she wanted to die. What made me dash into the harbour after her?”

  “It was a natural reaction, though I wished to God you hadn’t.”

  “I’m sorry I behaved so noisily after you hauled me out.”

  “So am I,” he said. “I had to keep telling myself that a storm on top of such an incident was the best outlet but I’ll admit to being unnerved. You can’t even cry without going the whole hog.” He came behind her. “You see it all now, don’t you, Tess? I’d always got along with Redding, and it shook me a bit when you described him as the man who made you drink the dope, but I had to get him just the same. I suspected that Avia knew more about the guns than she confessed to at the enquiry, but after Redding’s death she wilted badly and I arranged for her to be taken to the coast. I’d crippled her husband in the first place, and I felt responsible for her. You didn’t tell me you heard a woman’s voice in that house.”

  “You questioned me at Dr. Greaves on the evening of the day you found me. I told you all I remembered, and after that you always avoided discussion about it. Somehow, I didn’t regard the woman as the man s wife. He must have been very much in love with her.

  “The marriage was headed for trouble from the beginning, but no one foresaw such a sticky end to it. His voice lowered. “It’s past, Tess, but were still here.”

  Gently, he twisted her towards him. There was no arrogance about him, not even the usual amount of self-assurance. The events of the past day or two had left an imprint which Tess longed to obliterate.

  ‘Tess, have you ever thought that if you’d married me when I asked you, none of these ghastly things would have happened? We’d have gone to Lokola for a visit and returned to our home at Zinto. By now we might even have been expecting a youngster.”

  She whitened to the lips. “It’s cruel to talk that way.”

  “I don’t mean to be cruel. More than anything I want you to understand my side of it.” He dropped his hands from her shoulders and leaned back upon the end of the bunk. “From the day we met you had a profound influence upon me. For the first time in my life I was a victim of all those instincts which are supposed to be dying out. I wanted to protect you and cherish you, and I wanted you to belong to me. But you were independent and a spitfire, and just a bit highly strung, so that any clear-cut procedure I may have had in my mind needed to be flexible. Perhaps I’m to blame that it wasn’t. I’ll never be able to explain just how I felt those last days before I left Zinto — as if all heart and reason had been torn out of me, as if the most splendid thing in my whole existence had been dragged through slime.”

  “Dave,” she whispered.

  “That’s what I meant that day at Badoun when I said you didn’t understand me yet.” He paused. “Back in Lokola, I did my best to view everything objectively. You were only twenty; how could you possibly realize that you stood for so much in my life? It was up to me to show you how deeply you had penetrated, and to give you time. I’ve told you why I didn’t come for you, but I could never put into words the bitterness and hate which decided me to sink back into Lokola. I knew from experience that the tropics have a deadening effect on the emotions.”

  Her fingers were tightly entangled with her girdle, her eyes had gone huge, and extraordinarily dark.

  “To a great extent,” she said with difficulty, “the tropics succeeded, didn’t they?”

  “You’ve never been a man in love, so you can’t appreciate the sensation of having your inmost being written off as worth a jade ring or a dilapidated store. We began all wrong, but it went too deep with me for that to matter much. What did matter was that we should belong together in every way as soon as possible.” He breathed rather heavily. “Yes, the tropics helped me to slip into a consistently black mood, so that whenever I thought of you I could remind myself that you were no more to be trusted than the rest. I got into a peculiar state of mind in which I hadn’t even the most primitive use for a woman, and I told myself that if I were to meet you again you’d affect me no more than the sight of a native woman passing the house.”

  “But when I did turn up it wasn’t like that — was it?”

  “No it wasn’t.” He shifted his gaze from her face to the cream-painted wall behind her. “In almost your first breath you flipped a cheque at me and announced your intention of marrying Barnwell. After that, I had to punish you as I’d been punished. It all appears foolish and unnecessary now, but I didn’t know then that you’d clear off on a freight train and get yourself nearly murdered.”

  Tess gave a broken little sigh. “Ever since that happened, you’ve hated me.”

  “No. I’ve only wished that I could hate you.” On a swift note of savagery, he demanded: “Why the hell didn’t you marry me a year ago? Don’t you see what a difference that year makes? I’ve been hating you, and you’ve let another man make love to you.”

  “No Dave! It was because I couldn’t allow that that I went to England. I would never have come to Lokola — I wouldn’t be here with you, if I didn’t love you.”

  He spoke more calmly, though the chiselled mouth was still compressed. “It’s what we’ve lost that hurts,” he said, and walked out.

  What they’d lost. As Tess reached for a chair and sank into it, her brain reiterated the words. Only now was she beginning to appreciate the full depths of Dave’s personality. How young and blind she had been at Zinto, how thoroughly unfledged; yet their love had been fresh and adventurous, and, for her, a wondrous melting of the bones at his touch, a strange sweet ecstasy of giving till she was drain
ed dry. Maybe she had not entirely fathomed his mentality, but surely that would have come, in time?

  They had lost nearly a year, a loss which Dave resented with disproportionate bitterness. He was upset over the business with Mrs. Redding; they both were. It was that which had brought their own affairs so precipitously into the open before either of them was quite ready for it.

  She remembered the tenderness with which he had helped her out of her sodden garments last night, His repeated: “Don’t cry so, darling. You’ll make yourself ill,” and the gentleness with which he had persuaded her to swallow luminal. He loved her, and how could anything be wrong if they were in love with each other.

  A little wearily, she accomplished her toilet. She put on white linen shorts and a blue silk shirt, and used a trace of lipstick. The blue eyes which stared back from her mirror still had too much grief in their depths. Futilely, she wished that Dave had kept away from the cabin this morning. They both needed time in which to recover from yesterday’s tragedy. They should have been wordless, but close, for a while — at least until it were possible to exchange a spontaneous smile.

  Tess thrust shut a drawer in the dressing-chest, and slowly let herself out of the cabin. She mounted to the deck, answered the deck-hand’s, “Bom dia, senhora!” and stood for a moment in the breeze which blew down the coast. The sky had the translucency of early morning; the horizon was screened by a wide, milky vapour; the sails belled with the pink of sun behind them, and the rigging creaked comfortingly.

  The cook came along and told her that breakfast was ready in the main cabin, and soon she made her way there.

  Dave was sitting in a chair beside a bunk, upon which an open deed-box spilled envelopes and loose papers. He looked up, nodded, and went on with his search.

  “Isn’t Luke about?” asked Tess.

  “Luke,” said Dave, “is still in Kanos. One of us had to stay and see the police, and he volunteered. He was nearly as worried over you as I was, and just as keen that you shouldn’t wake up this morning to find the Bondoa still moored at the jetty. He won’t hang on there any longer than necessary.”

  “Where are we picking him up?”

  “We’re not,” he said. “When Walt’s finished in Kanos he’s going to make his way to Durham. I’ll get in touch with him through the bank — we both use the same one.”

  “Oh.” Tess drifted over to the table and rearranged a knife. “Is Luke definitely going to buy a native store?”

  “That seems to be his idea.”

  Dave lit upon the envelope he had been seeking and set it aside. The rest of the papers were shovelled into the box and the lid was snapped down upon them. He came over and pulled out her chair.

  “Let’s eat,” he said. “I detest cold eggs.”

  It was an almost silent meal, and neither had much appetite. Armando arched his brows sorrowfully as he lifted the cover from the metal dish before transferring it to his tray, and clearing the rest of the table.

  Tess had moved to the chair. She was sitting close to the bunk which held the deed-box-and, unintentionally, she read the scribbled words on the foolscap envelope which lay beside it.

  Dave said: “Yes, it’s my birth certificate. I’d like to have yours, too.”

  “Mine? What for?”

  “It’ll be less trouble to get a licence if I can produce them both at once. We’ll be tying up at a fairly large mission settlement before lunch, and lots of these missionaries have the power to perform the ceremony right away.”

  Tess had nothing to say.

  Dave sat on the edge of the hunk, at her side. “In Kanos, before Mrs. Redding crossed our path,” he said quietly, “I’d arranged with Walt that we should part at the next stop. I believe he realized that I had to have you to myself. He and I talked over the future and decided that Natal would be a good place to settle. I suggested that he inspect all the larger farms, that might be for sale, and if there were one with a store on the property, he should at once take an option and let me know.”

  “Why did you leave me out of the conference?”

  “Too much depended on you. Everything was left fluid because a farm would be no good to me if you weren’t there.”

  “But I’m going to be there.”

  He nodded, his manner still dry and unemotional. “We’ll keep the boat, too — sail her round to the nearest coastal town and use her when we need a change from farming.”

  She smiled, rather tremulously. “Dave, have you ever heard of a place called Hermanus?”

  “No. Where is it?”

  “On the Coast at the Cape. There’s wonderful rock fishing and bathing, and profusions of wild flowers. We can rent a bungalow overlooking the sea. Will you ... can we live there till Luke hits upon a proposition?”

  “If you like.”

  With some of her former impulsiveness she leaned over and caught his hand. “Please be happy, Dave. We have to make up for that year. I’ll never forget how you feel about it, and I’ll try so hard to erase it for you. I’ll do whatever you wish — always.”

  He smiled slightly. “Don’t be too rash with your promises — and don’t worry about me. I’ve known for a long time that I love you more than you love me, but I don’t intend it always to be so.”

  So that was it! Tess released his hand and lay back quite stunned for a second. Again it was humiliation, of a kind, which made a stranger of him. But this time he was going to submit to it rather than lose her. Tess wanted to cry out that there was no need for him to feel let down, almost defeated, in finally acknowledging how much she meant to him. But she was checked by a swift recollection. Hadn’t Dave been kinder to Mariella in the long run than she had to Martin? He had not bolstered the girl’s hope with half-promises, or allowed her private affairs to impinge upon his own — because already he had been falling in love with Tess. She could not say the same for herself, with Martin.

  Dimly, it came to her that back in Zinto, Dave’s love had been definitely greater than her own; ruthless, consuming and one-track. She had been too young in such matters to comprehend its magnitude. Suffering, not so much one’s own as that of the beloved, made one wise. How could she convince him that at last she perceived how harrowing pain had prompted his cruelty, at last she was fit to be loved as he loved her? It would take months, possibly years, of constant proof. She was equal to it, of course, but what a waste it was going to be, what an appalling, heart-wrenching waste.

  Dave had stood up, and was looking down at her uplifted face mirrored the sweetness and poignancy of her thoughts, her eyes were lustrous with an unbearable yearning. He drew a sharp breath and pulled her up into his arms.

  His mouth warm against her cheek, he said thickly, “This is worth it, Tess ... this is worth the agony of the last year.”