by Abor, Jane
She did not want for volunteers. Though the stories, charactered for the most party by over-proud cockerels, villain snakes and mild-mannered cows, were only a few sentences long, each was followed by a clamour of 'I tell now!'—`I tell 'bout-!' and the narrators had to wait their turn.
During the recital the apparent babe of the party, a chubby brown ball with a curly black cap of hair, climbed on Donna's lap and went to sleep there, and she was still nursing him when she was aware of Elyot standing behind the group, watching and listening, not interrupting the stories. Her glance met his. He signalled a thumbs-up and smiled, then came across to her. `Nursery session over,' he said. 'Thanks a lot.' He patted the sleeping boy's head, his touch gentle. 'The girls have finished, and we shan't be long. Would you like to deliver this one to his mother, or shall I?' he asked.
'I will.' The mother came to meet Donna, clucking her thanks and inviting Donna's admiration for her son's ability to sleep wherever he found himself. `Dis one—he good boy, sleep proper in bed. But papa say, put him in coop wid chicken, peg him on line wid washing, he sleep jes' same,' she claimed as she tossed him up to her shoulder and bore him away.
Emptied of the chattering women, the big store quietened. Both the manager and Elyot had disappeared; men were loading the last of the cartons, and Donna stood alone, irresolute as to whether she ought to see Elyot before she left. Then the telephone rang in the office near which she was standing. No one was in there, and no one came to answer it. Donna let it ring for a time, then decided it had better be answered, as a call here was sure to be a business message which ought to be passed on.
She picked up the receiver. 'Marquise store office here. Yes?' she said.
There was silence. Then Margot le Conte's voice came, sharply questioning. 'Who is that, then? Who is speaking?'
'Donna Torrence.'
Another silence. Then a smothered exclamation,
.'What the—? What are you doing there? I'm calling
Elyot. Choc said he was down there. So where is he?'
Donna said, 'I don't know for the moment. He's been here
'And left you in charge of his telephone—how cosy! '
'I've been watching a shipment at his invitation. The last of it is just about to leave, as I am myself. I was alone in the store when the telephone rang, and as no-body seemed to be going to answer it, I did. And I daresay I can find Mr Vance for you if you'll hang on,' Donna offered coldly.
'No, I can't wait. You can give him a message instead,' said Margot ungraciously. 'Tell him, will you, that Ella and George Martin—have you got that, the Martins?—are going back to England by the banana ship tonight. I'm seeing them off, and I want him to join us in their cabin for drinks as soon as he can get here.'
'And where is "here"?' Donna asked.
'On board. We're waiting. He's coming down to see the shipment loaded, I daresay?'
Donna had wondered whether she might be asked to watch the loading, but if Margot was to be there, she felt nothing would persuade her to accept the invitation. She told Margot, suppose he will.'
'Well, just give him my message, will you?' Margot replied without, Donna was thankful, the extravagant gloss of endearments which, from almost the beginning of their acquaintanceship, must have been false. The hostility which had been none of Donna's making was open on both sides now.
She was replacing the receiver as Elyot and his manager came back. 'I took a call for you as you weren't here,' she explained, and gave him the message as she had had it from Margot.
He nodded. 'Right. Thank you. Then let's go,' he said.
The three of them went out of the big main doors, which Maurice Couseau locked behind them. It had stopped raining, but between them and the men's two cars there lay a quagmire-cum-lake of richly churned mud and water. Elyot looked at Donna. 'We can't ask you to ford that,' he said.
'I could. I borrowed some overshoes from Juno.'
'All the same—' An arm went across her shoulders, another behind her knees and before she could protest he was cradling her and squelching out across the morass, Couseau following. Setting her down beside his car, he tapped the glass of his watch and said to the other man, 'We shall have made it, after all.' Then he opened the passenger door for Donna, who shook her head and stood back.
'I'll walk home,' she said. 'It's a lovely evening after the rain. And thank you very much—' she shared a glance between both men—'it's been a fantastic day.'
Elyot stared, his expression hardening. 'You're seeing it through? You're coming to watch the loading?'
'No. I've seen that part before—from the dockside. I'll walk back now, if you don't mind.'
He compressed his lips. 'Very well.' He took his own seat, said, 'Maurice, see Donna back to Louvet, will you? She isn't walking, after being on her feet since heaven knows what hour this morning. I'll go straight on down. See you there ' and drove away. Away to join Margot at Margot's imperious invitation, leaving Donna to guilt at having rejected him and with nothing for comfort but the memory of the smile he had sent her across the heads of the children and of the too-brief experience of his carrying her across the mud. The former had been no more than approval of her role as nursemaid; the latter merely a piece of male chivalry.
But her imagination needed to see them both as his willing bridging of the rift between them. For they were all she had to set against her jealous mind-picture of him and Margot together, laughing, drinking, making love ... All.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HOWEVER exaggerated had been Margot's taunt that Wilmot scarcely noticed Donna's presence, he was certainly the last of anyone close to her to realise that she no longer had Melford Drinan's escort, nor kept any appointments at the Allamanda.
Even Juno had commented with a hearty, 'You stay home more now, Missus Donna. That good. F' one ting, feed better here wid Juno's cooking, and maybe make the Mister eat proper, you feed wid him.'
And Irma Hue had been quick to see Donna as a now leisured special pleader of her own cause with Wilmot. 'You spend more time together now. So—just a hint here and there that you are surprised he doesn't get rid of Louvet and feel free to do his own thing, as you young people would say. Or tell him perhaps how much you admire my work and how well you think he and I could collaborate on a book. Nothing too blatant, you understand, child? Just the odd word in his ear which should keep me in his mind,' she urged, happily blind to the fact that Wilmot's sales resistance to the mere mention of her name was absolute.
But though Wilmot's reaction was tardy, when it came it was unexpectedly compassionate. A propos of nothing, he said one morning, 'That fellow who used to call for you, take you out—you don't see him any more? Why not?'
Donna said, `Melford Drinan? He was only on a business trip, as I think I told you, Uncle. And he's gone back to America now.'
' "Gone back"—just like that? Amused himself, then
took off—was that it?'
She shook her head. 'It wasn't like that. He already had a fiancée—'
'Was frank about having-one? Told you so straight away?'
'No,' she admitted. 'In fact, I didn't know he was engaged, 'until his fiancée and her mother came down to Laraye, and they all went back together later.'
'Jilted you, eh?' Wilmot took a long draught of coffee and wiped his lips. 'Well, it happens,' he said.
'Yes ' Expecting that to be the sum total of his sympathy, Donna was about to assure him of how little but her pride had been hurt, when he went on to repeat,
'Yes, it happens. But when you're young and it does, it seems to split your world apart, eh?'
When the man you love doesn't want you, it stays apart, was Donna's swift thought, though not of Melford Drinan. Aloud she agreed, 'Yes, I suppose so.'
'And yet—' Wilmot paused. 'Well, if it's any help, there's a Larayan saying that you might do well to think of and remember. You wouldn't understand it in patois, but its gist is, "One 'ship gone to the bottom won't prevent another's sailing." Yo
u understand how its meaning could relate to a broken love-affair. It makes its point?'
'Yes indeed.' Donna knew she ought to disillusion him as to how little she had been hurt at Melford Drinan's hands, but her thoughts were racing in another direction. She had never talked on any intimate level with Wilmot before, but it sounded as if he were trying to console her from his own experience, and if that meant he had realised at last the futility of enduring bitterness over the might-have-been, could she hope it had dispelled at least one cause for his hostility to Elyot?
In face of his own ineptitude, he might still resent Elyot's success, but if he had rid himself of the deeper canker of holding Elyot's mother's faithlessness against her son, wasn't that one step towards a tolerance which might make them, if never friends, something less than the open enemies they were now?
Donna said again, 'Yes,' and treading warily, added, 'are you telling me, Uncle, that you yourself have found it to be true—that in time one gets over anything and is able to—to set sail again?'
He sighed. 'In time, yes. Though it can sometimes take a lot too long. You shouldn't let it rankle too long for you.'
'I won't,' she was able to promise frankly. 'In any case, my affair hadn't gone very far. But you're telling me that at some time there was someone for you whom you had to "get over", and that you did in the end?'
'When I was a young man, yes, and my affair had gone deep. But I married your aunt Winifred, didn't I? And it's she whom I've missed since she died. Not the —other one.'
Donna said warmly, 'I'm glad you were happy with Aunt Winifred, but thank you for telling me as much as you have.' It occurred to her that here Irma Hue would expect her to dash in with a suggestion that, hav-ing known contentment in one marriage, he might be prepared to consider another. But for Donna by far the more important issue was the possibility of the end of Wilmot's cold war against Elyot; Louvet, cultivated arid fruitful once more; Wilmot himself with cause no longer for his sour frustration; Elyot's ambition for Marquise and Louvet fulfilled.
When she went back to England she would go heart-empty. But at least that was a picture she would be glad to remember she had left behind. None of it would be her doing, of course—simply a change of purpose
and direction on Wilmot's part. And if he were already on the way to that—?
But that he was not, at least in the matter of the sale of Louvet to Elyot, was evident from his reception of her tentative suggestion of how much she would like to see Louvet in as full production, comparatively speaking, as Marquise.
'As conditions are, that's impossible,' he snapped.
'I know. For one thing, without Bran's help, you've had no choice but to neglect it,' she soothed. 'But isn't that an argument for getting rid. of it while you can, before it deteriorates so far that nobody will buy it? And if you were prepared to sell it, you must know the Company would back your decision, surely?'
'Just so—expecting me to take the offer of the highest bidder! '
Though fearing what was coming next, Donna said, 'Well, naturally. That's business.'
'With which I'll have no part, while that fellow Vance is in a position to be able to outbid anyone else.'
Deadlock. Donna tried another tack. 'Bran says,' she remarked, 'that your real ambition is to set up a reserve in the rain forests for all the native Larayan flowers and shrubs. Will you ever be able to do that?'
'No money to buy the land.'
'Who owns the land?'
'It's mostly Government owned, and it would require acres.' Wilmot paused, then, as if making the offer were an effort, added; 'If you're interested enough, I could drive you over the area I have in mind—down south, inland, where a lot of the soil would be virgin and ideal.'
'I'd like that,' Donna told him. And it was from that talk and his keeping of that promise that she was able to date a closer understanding with him, confirming her earlier guess that it was the commercialism of
Louvet which irked him. He loved all nature for its own sake; trading in it was obnoxious—a principle which admittedly wouldn't have got humanity far on the way to civilisation, but which she supposed the few eccentrics like Wilmot must be allowed to indulge and live by, as far as they could.
At least Madame Hue claimed to take hope for her own plans from his airing of his ambition to Donna. Nodding thoughtfully as she worked it out, `So that if he could get the land for his old reserve, he might be willing to let Louvet go,' she pondered.
'Not, I'm afraid, if it meant Elyot Vance could buy Louvet,' Donna warned.
' 'Bah, the stubborn old mule!' Madame Hue exclaimed disgustedly. 'Here you have one man with his hand in his pocket, ready to buy, and another who should have sense enough to sell something he doesn't value. But put them each side of a table to discuss a deal, and where are you? Why, exactly where you were before, my friend! And yet ... and yet,' thoughtfully again now, 'there must be ways. Yes, indeed there should be ways. One must just continue to work on it, that's all.'
Changing the subject, she reported that Elyot himself had had enough sense to listen to her plain words on the subject of Margot's threat of dismissal to Choc and Maria. When she had taken her painting of the Dial House up to Marquise, she had, made it her business to question them, to hear—as Donna had already heard from Juno—that he had no plans at all for getting rid of them; that Miss le Conte had made a mistake in believing he had.
Unfortunately for Donna's peace of mind, Juno's version had been slightly different. For Juno, reporting that Elyot had used a word she didn't know, but which meant Missus le Conte had been 'afore herself or 'afore-
hand' with her threats, offered Donna no comfort. If Elyot had said Margot had been 'premature', which was likely, then 'premature' was probably all Margot had been—jumping the gun of her future sway over Marquise when she was Elyot's wife, but already very sure of the rights she would demand of him and get, once she was.
Meanwhile, with no choice but to bow to the Company's ruling about the Dial House, Wilmot maintained his dignity by ignoring the fact that anything was going on there.
But something was. Donna too had indulged him by refraining from mentioning the place, but she did go down one day with Madame Hue, who, since Elyot's acceptance of her sketch, claimed a designer's right to see how her ideas were being carried out. And considering how little noted for speed Larayan artisans were, Donna was surprised by the progress the builders had made.
The walled courtyard had been repaved and a new sundial set up. Though it was still littered with builders' rubble, there were the makings of a garden; the rooms were clean and refloored; the broken stairs had_ torn out and replaced, and the balcony of embarrassing memory for Donna was sturdy and brave in its new gaudy dress of red paint, in startling contrast to the bright emerald of the main structure.
Madame Hue approved it. Elyot, she told Donna, had had to fight his architect to have it restored just so. The man had advised razing the house to the ground, rebuilding it one-storeyed and flat-roofed, the finish to be white overall. But Elyot had insisted that it be executed exactly to the sketch. "For sentiment's sake", he told the architect,' Irma reported. 'Though what sentiment he could possibly feel for a house that he didn't own and wasn't on his land, I suppose he must
have left the poor fellow to guess. But he got his way. As always.'
'Considering how everything in Laraye gets the treatment of the brightest colours anyone could dye or mix, Elyot probably meant for tradition's sake, not sentiment's,' Donna suggested. `And as I told you when you showed me your sketch, I remember this place exactly as you had it. Except—' She paused, shading her eyes as she looked up at the end gable beneath which they were standing. 'Except that there was a clock up there in the wall, just under the eaves.'
'A clock? I don't remember any clock,' Irma claimed.
'But there was. I remember ' Donna broke off and turned as Elyot's car stopped on the road and he got out and came over. -
'Donna says there used to be
a clock in this gable. But there wasn't. If there had been, I'd have remembered it,' Irma attacked him.
He looked at Donna. 'Clock—or no clock?' he inquired.
'Clock,' she affirmed with a nod.
'No clock,' Irma insisted. 'She was only a little girl when she left Laraye, and she must be mistaken. Besides,' she added with simple logic, 'if they had an outdoor clock, what did they want a sundial for?'
Elyot laughed. 'Probably so that each could shame the other into telling the right time. Irma, ma mie, don't be so innocently literal, for Pete's sake. And Donna would hardly have imagined a clock, would she?'
'She might have seen a clock on some other house-gable, and thought it was here.'
'Still, I think we'll let her have her clock,' he adjudicated. I’ll arrange to have one installed.'
Irma shrugged. thought you wanted the restora-
tion to be exact. But you'd rather take Donna's version than mine?'
'Just in case Donna is right,' he said quietly, causing Donna to wonder why he should choose to champion her in the petty argument, as if it mattered either way.
Fortunately Irma never remained ruffled for long, and when Elyot excused himself, saying he had to speak to his foreman, she stayed him.
'About our affair—are you expecting me at Marquise tonight?' she asked.
'So we arranged.' He paused. 'Does Donna know?' 'No.'
'Nor Brandon?'
'Yes. After I saw you yesterday, I rang him at the Allamanda and he promised to bring Donna along.'
Donna looked a query at both of them. 'What is all this about?'