Tree of Paradise
Page 8
She shook her head. 'I know it is, but not why.'
'The reason is a bit involved, but it's picturesque. The plant's botanical family is Musacce, which derives from the Arabic Mouz, and the banana, probably in its wild state one of the oldest plants known to man, appears in the Koran as the Tree of Paradise. When it first came to Europe the name held and, by association I suppose, it became the fig-tree of our Christian Garden of Eden. The Caribs are still reluctant to hear it called anything else.'
Donna murmured, 'Tree of Paradise—I like that.'
'Yes, it appeals to the romantic Eve in most women,' he agreed, then indicated the lengthening shadows cast by the plants upon the road. 'Time for sundowners, I think. Change places now, and I'll take you up to the house, where you'll meet my Maria and Choc, your Juno's relations who do for me, as Juno does for you.'
'I must deliver the car back to the hotel,' Donna reminded him.
'No hurry. When I've given you a drink, I'll take you home in it, deliver it myself and collect my own which I left down there. How's that?'
At the top of its winding driveway Marquise, unlike
many houses in volcanic Laraye, was two-storied, with wide balconies to each floor, looking down over dipping lawns fringed by palms, and in the distance across to the sweep of the estate. Such of the interior of the house as Donna saw was beautifully furnished and be-flowered; obviously the house of a bachelor who need deny himself nothing, but still a house which any woman would be proud to be asked to share.
Choc was a mountain of a man, a full Negro. Maria was tiny, with a voice so small that Donna could hardly hear her when she asked what `Missus' would like to drink `Missus' chose a fruit punch, but was persuaded by Elyot to a daiquiri. He had one too and as he took the long chair beside hers on the lower balcony, asked, `Don't you want to know how I shall report on you to Margot?'
'Why, how will you ?'
'Very favourably, I think.'
'Thank you. I've had some good teachers—Bran for the geography and Uncle Wilmot for the flower names, not to mention Juno for the Caribbean proverbs.'
'Don't I get any marks for the Tree of Paradise bit? Your passengers will fairly eat that. But it's evident that, as they say in the theatre, you're a quick study.'
'When one wants to learn anything enough it comes easily,' Donna said sincerely.
'How sententious of you! That sounds like a maxim from a copybook. But you mean Margot didn't pressgang you into it?'
`No, I'm grateful to her. I should never have got around as I wanted to, in any other way. I shall go back as full of impressions and memories as I hoped I might before I came.'
`Only to be rather let down by the reality of Louvet?' He had no right to be so shrewd ! 'A bit, perhaps,' she admitted.
'But now you'll go back happier? And you'll go back?'
'Of course. I've a job in England, and I shall be going home.'
'And so? Girls of your age have been known to leave home—quite a lot of them to marry in "furrin parts". Laraye, for one. I could point you to a dozen English and American girls who've married happily and successfully here.'
'I daresay. But I don't happen to have marriage in mind, here or anywhere else.'
'Oh, come! Don't tell me, when you knew you were coming to Laraye, that a tropical island and a rich planter who couldn't resist you weren't synonymous in your dreams?'
'They certainly weren't. And if they had been, they would have taken a knock. I don't know any rich planters
'You know me.'
'You?' Donna sat upright in such blank surprise that she spilled her drink. Elyot laughed, reached for the jug and refilled her glass.
'Take it easy. No need for a double-take of that intensity,' he teased. 'I wasn't springing a proposal of marriage, even on a couple of daiquiris. I was only quoting myself as an example of several quite well-to-do planters on Laraye who aren't married. One or two of them would like to be, I know.'
'Thank you. When I find I'm in need of a marriage bureau, I think I'll go to a real one, licensed by the London County Council. Meanwhile—'
'Meanwhile, you'll thank me not to tread on your dreams. And you are in a huff.'
'I'm not,' she denied, wishing he hadn't said that about treading on her dreams It assumed too much, it was emotive and for some reason it hurt. She went on,
`This has become such a silly, hypothetical argument
that it isn't worth getting huffed about, would you say?'
'I'd say not,' he agreed. 'But—' He didn't finish as Choc came out on to the balcony.
`Missus le Conte on telephone, suh. Want speak to you.'
'Coming.' Elyot excused himself to Donna and went back into the house.
She sat on, sipping her drink, watching the crimson-purple of the clouded sky clear slowly to the pale lemon it took on at full sundown. She knew she was a little too relaxed, not thinking very clearly. The time, the place, an early evening drink with a man had all the makings of a flirtation, she supposed hazily. So that was all their verbal sparring had amounted to—flirtation. Nothing to take seriously nor in offence. Nor even to mull over later, making more of his brittle interest in her than it deserved. They would have talked just so at a drinks party in all probability. But she still wondered why he had bothered to spare her the afternoon from his busy schedule. She would have liked to ask him, if she couldn't already foretell his bantering reply.
He came back and sat down again. 'Margot, after a nasty session with her dentist and faced by a lonely evening, in need of sympathy and moral support,' he said.
'Did you give it to her?'
`To the best of my ability from this distance. Poor Margot needs the direct touch; she suffers her own company only by dire necessity. She wanted to know whether I had done my duty by you; I reported on you as I told you I should, and said I was giving you a drink before taking you home.'
'Thank you.' Donna put down her empty glass, and then with a recklessness which only the unaccustomed drink could have encouraged, said lightly, 'Well, at
least no one could accuse you of being cinq a sept with me.
She was totally unprepared for his sudden start and the dark frown he turned on her. 'Of being what with you?' he demanded.
`C-cinq sept,' she hesitated.
'And how on earth do you come by such a phrase?'
'I heard Miss—I mean Margot le Conte—tease you with it at her party at the hotel. I didn't know then what it meant, but I asked Bran, and he told me.'
'Well, forget it.' His tone was terse. 'Even in joke, as Margot would have used it, it hasn't the most tasteful of implications, and with reference to our afternoon together, it makes no sense at all.'
Feeling like a small child under reproof, Donna protested, 'But that's precisely what I said just now—that it couldn't apply. It was only a joke anyway,' she added, aggrieved.
'As was Margot's. All right, leave it.' He let the silence lengthen into one minute, two. Then, just as Donna was about to suggest she would like to go home, he voiced aloud the question she had been asking herself. 'Haven't you wondered why I volunteered to act as Margot's standin today?'
Her eyes met his frankly. 'Yes,' she said, 'I had. It seemed so unnecessary that you should.'
He shook his head. 'I needed to talk to you, and since I'm persona non grata in your uncle's house, this was the first chance I'd had of getting you alone.'
`To talk to me?' Donna's mouth went dry and there was a flutter of excitement in the region of her heart. 'What about?'
'This,' he said. `Listen—'
CHAPTER FIVE
For a long time afterwards Donna was to cringe inwardly at the thought of her hope that it was some personal confidence, some small intimacy, which Elyot had wanted to share with her alone. For what he had to say was so much an anti-climax that she wondered with shame whether her disappointment had shown in her face.
'It's about the Dial House,' he said.
'The—Dial House?' She knew her surprise so
unded blank.
'Yes. My ultimatum fell flat. Your uncle hasn't done anything about it, has he?'
'About repairing it? No. After the way you and he parted, did you expect him to?'
'Frankly no. That's where you come in, and why I needed to get you alone.'
'I can't force him,'
'I realise that, but I want you as a fellow-conspirator. I suggest that you make an urgency of it to your father, asking him that the Company should bypass your uncle and make a direct ruling as to the repair of the place.'
'But in writing home I haven't mentioned it at all.'
'Why not?'
'Because—well, I suppose I was ashamed of my foolhardiness that first day, and I didn't want to worry them.'
'Nor admit to the hornet's nest you stirred up, Louvet versus Marquise-wise?'
- 'That too, though they know something about that.
But if I did appeal to Father, and the Company did act,
Uncle Wilmot would guess what I'd done, even that you'd put me up to it.'
'Why should he?' Elyot parried. 'He must realise that the Company knows what property it owns, and if you enlist your father on our side, your uncle could be led to suppose it had been decided at company level that it was time the Dial was put in repair, with or without his consent.'
`Mm, perhaps,' Donna mused. 'But wouldn't that be riding a bit roughshod over him?'
'Roughshod? In the interest of my workers' toddlers, not to mention the risk of the whole crazy structure collapsing like a pack of cards, come the hurricane season? Thank you, but I'm not going to get any satisfaction from chanting "I told you so" if or when it happens. So if you won't co-operate, I'll write to your Company myself,'
'I will, of course,' Donna promised reluctantly, though having known all the time that she must.
'Good girl! I knew I could trust you. And one other thing—since I'm an extremely interested party, I'd like you to mention that I'd supply the planning and the labour, as I said in the first place I would.'
Donna shook her head. 'Uncle would never wear that.'
Elyot laughed. 'Don't put goat mout"pon it—which, on the parallel that a goat can destroy anything with his nibbling, is vulgar Larayan for "Don't crab the chances of success." If the Company accept the reason for my offer, and the whole operation comes as a directive from them, what can the man do?'
Donna smiled thinly. 'Be difficult,' she said. 'At the very least.'
'And at the very most? He's already forbidden me his house, yet I survive.'
She did not answer, not wanting to look at an im-
mediate future which Wilmot could make quite untenable for her if he chose to forbid her to see even as little of Elyot as she had done until now. To a guest, while she remained under his roof, Wilmot had the right to do that. Yet the prospect of no more contacts with Elyot appalled her. Which meant —?
It meant, she realised after they had parted that evening, that by some emotional about-face she had thought never to experience where he was concerned, his challenge to her, their frictions as well as their agreements, were becoming important, too important. And not only his challenge. The physical man himself—manner, voice, movement—all the dynamic virility she had sensed at her first stranger's awareness of him—had begun to matter too much. He was too often in her thoughts; in the expectation with which she woke each morning to the little secret question, dismissed at once, of 'Am I likely to see him today?' An on-the-brink-of love question, that. Her feminine instinct knew the signs, but hadn't warned her against caring whether the answer had to be yes or no.
How had it happened? That other time of their parting at night she had resented the spirit in which he had kissed her; this evening she would have made treasure of it, however little he meant by it. But he had not kissed her. On his own admission he had only wanted to see her today in order to enlist her help. So what had her hunger for his interest to feed upon? Just that he had said he trusted her enough to know he could look to her as an ally. But that was all. At best, 'she was only on the fringe of his life. And on the fringe of her own was where, if she were wise, she would learn to keep him If she were wise ...
She wrote fully to her father about the Dial House,
admitting now her own escapade, relating Elyot's
timely rescue of her, and telling of the subsequent violent clash between him and her uncle on the matter of its repair. She emphasised Elyot's understandable concern for it, and suggested that he be contacted directly, if the Company could see its way to falling in with his plan.
She was still awaiting a reply to this when Margot called her to her first guide tour.
Over the telephone Margot gushed, 'Darling, Elyot gave you the full thumbs-up over your driving. So gallant of him to save me the bore of going out with you myself, and sweet of you to help me out. Now I have for you an advertising woman who is collecting copy about the Caribbean; if you get on together, may I assign you to her for later trips she may want to make? O.K.?'
Though she went to her first appointment in some trepidation Donna enjoyed it herself and was thanked, congratulated and re-booked by her client, an Englishwoman intent on selling Laraye and its sister islands in rivalry to the more popular West Indian resorts.
There followed other pleasant assignments. Donna found herself in demand by the hotel's women tourists needing a guide, and she was expecting nothing unusual when she went down one day to keep an appointment with two American ladies, newly arrived overnight.
They were not waiting for her outside, nor in the foyer, which was empty but for a man who at first was chatting to the girl desk-clerk, then idly scanning the bookstand between glances at his watch. Donna returned to her car to wait for her passengers, but when they had not appeared after another ten minutes, she went back into the foyer to check with the clerk.
'Mrs and Miss Bellew, Rosa—have you seen them waiting for me?' she asked.
Rosa shook her head. 'Don't know lady that name.' 'You might not. They are new guests. But anyway, two ladies whom I was to take on a tour?'
Light dawned for Rosa. 'Oh—yes, two ladies. But they go with Louis just now.'
'With Louis? But they were my passengers, and I wasn't late.'
'I send them with Louis, all same. I think that right. This gentleman for you, mebbe yes, Missus Torrence? Perhaps he wait for someone drive him,' Rosa said hopefully.
Donna shook her head. Margot had never engaged her for a man passenger; that hadn't been in their arrangement. 'Not for me, I think,' she said. But the man was already at her side, smiling and saying, 'But as there seems to have been some mix-up, you'd take me, I daresay? I'd be honoured if you would. Take pity on me, won't you, and say yes—please?' His accent was American with a drawling Southern inflection, he was darkly handsome in what she thought of as a film-star way, and his ready smile invited hers.
She hesitated, her native caution none too willing to drive him alone. In order to gain time for decision, she told Rosa, 'I'd better look at the bookings ledger' and while she did so, checking that the Bellews were indeed rightly her passengers and that no man on his own was booked for that hour at all, she sensed Rosa's worry over the mistake, and made up her mind to help the girl out.
'Very well,' she told the man. 'Since I seem to be free, I'll drive you. Where would you like to go?'
He held out his hand. 'Thanks a million. Anywhere, everywhere. I was-hoping to fix up something, but I didn't expect—' His glance was openly admiring of her as he went on, 'Names, first? I'm Mel, short for Melford. Who are you?'
'Donna Torrence.' She laid deliberate emphasis on her surname, and he laughed. 'O.K., hint taken. Mel Drinan—will that do? But does all the heavy stress mean that we're not to be Mel and Donna as we go on our way? Mr Drinian and Miss Torrence— it is Miss, and not Mrs, I hope?'
'It's Miss.' Donna relented. 'I only meant that I don't usually call people by their first names, until I'm asked.'
'As I'm asking you and warning you I'm going
to call you Donna. Pretty name, Donna, a gift. Does that mean your people saw you as rather a special gift when they named you?'
'I shouldn't think so,' she said, remembering her father's prejudice in favour of a son, but doubting whether this readily amiable young man would appreciate the Dickens reference as Elyot had done. Elyot! By contrast with his blunt demanding approach, this one's was positively honey-tongued ! 'You are American, aren't you?' she asked him.
`Uh-huh. From Houston, Texas. But to save your asking, I'm not in oil. I'm in real estate, prospecting for possible developments on Laraye. And you are English, of course?'
'Yes.' As he took the passenger seat beside her, she asked again, 'Where would you like to go? If you are interested in housing, perhaps you would like to see the development that has been done already in the north of the island?'
`No hurry,' he said easily. 'Unless of course it's on the way to anywhere particularly romantic that you fancy yourself. Take me there and let me share it, won't you, please?'
'It would help me to plan a route, if you would say how long you would like to be out,' she told him, and he waved an airy hand.
'Just as long as you can spare for me. Do you have
another fare after this?'
'No.'
`Well then, let's play it by ear. I've got all day. Meanwhile I'm counting my luck that you didn't have to pick up those two dames. Let's go.'
By no means averse to showing off her driving skill, she chose the most tortuous road into the mountains which she knew, offering him sea-views and inland panoramas and a patter of folklore in her best professional vein. She realised, from his reference to her `fares' and his questions to her about the job and whether it paid, that he thought she did it for a living, and it amused her not to disillusion him.
She lived out in the country, she told him, on a not very prosperous banana estate, part-owned and managed by her uncle. Her cousin also acted as a guide-driver for the Allamanda. And yes, she enjoyed her work, and no, so far she hadn't had any 'difficult' clients.