Tree of Paradise

by Abor, Jane

  'Not a clue. He could be living it up anywhere in the town or at any other of the hotels. No message then to say what you want him for? Where are you ringing from, anyway?'

  'From the 'bungalow, from Louvet. I'm alone here, and I need Bran to get back here—now.'

  'Alone?' Elyot's echo was sharp. 'Where is Juno, then? And your uncle?'

  'Juno is at the Carnival, and Uncle Wilmot drove down to Soubion, saying he would be back before dark. But he hasn't come, and I'm worried. Something must have happened to him, and that was why I was calling Bran. But if he isn't there—'

  Considering the bitter tirade she had hurled at Elyot the last time they had met, she hadn't meant appeal to sound in her tone. But she couldn't 'keep it out, and when he responded to it she was ashamed.

  `Soubion? That's all of thirty miles!' he exclaimed. 'Why there?'

  'He's on one of his nature forays. I know the area he'd be making for—I've been there with him. There's

  a point where he leaves the car on the road—it's a terrible one—and walks up into the forest. And supposing he had had an accident, fallen perhaps, and couldn't get back to the car, or—' Now her defences were down and though she had thrown away the right to expect Elyot's willing help, she was openly begging that he wouldn't grudge it to her.

  He didn't. He said, 'Right. Stay where you are. He may turn up yet, and you could be panicking without cause. But I'll leave straight away and drive up.' He rang off and she replaced her own receiver, looking at her watch then, wondering how she could fill the many slow minutes until he arrived. By now she didn't expect Uncle Wilmot to confound her fears for him. Her only lifeline to hope had to be Elyot.

  He came in his estate car, which seemed to be loaded with an assortment of gear at the back—two powerful torches, an axe, a banana-worker's cutlass, a thermos flask, a bottle of cognac, a first-aid kit, a blanket, pillows and a stretcher—all the latter, he explained, borrowed from the Red Cross post in the town which planned to be open for carnival casualties all night.

  'A useful tool, a stretcher, when you can command four hands and you don't know what you're going to find,' he remarked, which afforded Donna the wry satisfaction that he took her fears seriously.

  'You'll have to come with me to show where he's likely to be if he isn't held up on the road,' he told her. 'Of course.'

  'Then get a warm coat and stout shoes; we may have to stay out and to climb.'

  She joined him in the car after fetching the topcoat and lace-up shoes which had been comfortable autumn wear on her journey from England as far as Antigua, though not beyond. As he drove he put one or two questions as to times and Wilmot's habits of movement

  on his forays, and Donna broke the ensuing silence by apologising, 'It was good of you to come, when I couldn't contact Bran. I don't know what I should have done—called the police, I suppose.'

  He shrugged. 'You would have preferred Brandon, naturally. But you should be glad it was only the shank of the evening as far as my carousing went; I hadn't got down to any serious debauchery. The police, yes, perhaps. Or did you think to try the hospital? No? Well, I was intent on getting up here, so neither did I. But we go through Anse Lima; I'll ring from a kiosk there.'

  But the casualty ward had only the occasional punched nose and small fracture to report; nothing from farther afield than the town. When he returned to the car, presently Elyot asked, 'How is it you weren't doing the party round yourself with Brandon?'

  'He didn't ask me. We aren't—exactly—speaking.'

  `No? Sounds childish, that. Since when? Or needn't one ask?'

  Donna said uncomfortably, 'I'm sure you know. Bran didn't like the home truths I came out with that night. But they had to be said.'

  'On the evidence you thought you had against all of us?'

  'On the evidence you'd all admitted to,' she retorted with spirit.

  'On which you set up as prosecuting counsel, judge, jury, the lot. Though you could have allowed your cousin the point he made for the defence—that the end sometimes justifies the means.'

  'That's just a cynic's excuse! The thing people always say when in their hearts they know they're in the wrong, or are being shabby at least. And in my opinion nothing justified those means, nothing at all.'

  'As you made abundantly clear at the time,' Elyot

  agreed, paused, then added, 'I was glad.'

  `Glad?' Utterly surprised by the admission, warmed by it, given hope, she turned to him. 'But I'd trounced you all, and meant to. How could you have been glad? Why?'

  He threw her a brief glance. 'Because, I suppose, it showed you were prepared to stand by your principles, and one has to admire that.'

  Hope died. 'Glad' was a friendly, olive-branch word. `Admire' was cold, impersonal. She said, 'Oh. You admired my standing up to you, but you didn't agree I was right.'

  `The scheme wasn't pursued any further,' he pointed out.

  `Only because I'd warned you what would happen to it if it had been!'

  `More likely because we weren't in unanimous voice about it.'

  `But you were! Mine was the only odd voice out

  Donna broke off and sat forward, peering. 'That—that

  shape ahead at the roadside—it's Uncle Wilmot's car! '

  Elyot nodded and slowed down. 'It's certainly a car.'

  `It's his. But it isn't where I expected. Not as far.' She looked about her in bewilderment. 'I don't know this part.'

  Elyot stopped, reached for his torch and went forward. The other car had no lights, showing it had been where it was since before dark. 'The key is in the ignition and it's not locked,' he reported.

  `No. Uncle always says someone would have to need a car very badly to steal his.' Elyot got in, switched on, and the engine purred sweetly. He examined the petrol gauge and got out again to turn his torch on the tyres. `No reason for abandoning it,' he mused, then pointed the, beam on a path leading up into the woods. 'That's a well-trodden path, and he may have used it. Come on,

  let's go!'

  He gave her the other torch and led the way up the path, holding back branches and entangled lianas for her. At what seemed a long way into the jungle of giant ferns, wild banana and trees whose tops were invisible in the darkness, the track branched. 'How is your hailing voice?' Elyot halted to ask. 'Or shall I try?'

  But only silence answered his prolonged Hallos, and with a 'This one first,' he started off on one branch of the track. 'Needle in a haystack, but one can but try,' he was saying over his shoulder to Donna when he suddenly stopped, directed his torch downward and stooping, picked up something from the path.

  'Recognise this?'

  Donna reached for the square of linen he held from one corner. 'It's a handkerchief!'

  'And ten to one it's his. Look—reasonably clean, dry —which means it hasn't been here long enough to be trodden in by any creatures or birds. Come on. We could be right.'

  They were. A turn or two in the path further on they were in a small clearing and at the foot of a giant tree, face downward head resting on his arms, lay Wilmot.

  `Uncle! ' He gave no sign, and Donna's heart beat achingly as they both knelt beside him. 'Is he—is he—?' She choked on the dread word, but Elyot, feeling for a pulse, shook his head.

  `No. There's not much more than a flutter, but it's there. Has he any history of heart trouble, do you know?'

  'Not that he or Bran have ever mentioned.'

  `Lying fairly naturally too—doesn't seem to have broken anything, but just collapsed.' Without attempting to move him Elyot examined the inert form, gently touching here, lifting there, and raising each eyelid, turning the beam of his torch on each pupil.

  'What is it?' Donna breathed.

  He sat back on his heels, pulling at his underlip. 'Don't know for sure—'

  'But what do you think?'

  'Could be—' He paused. 'Can you take this? I've seen a case before, and it could be—snake-bite.' 'Snakebite? Oh no! '

  'M'm. Ever hea
rd of the fer-de-lance?'

  She nodded, aghast. 'But it's extinct on Laraye. 'The mongooses you imported accounted for them all '

  Elyot sighed. 'The brochures again! No mosquitoes, no fer-de-lance—which means we aren't plagued by them, but the odd few survive.'

  'But the bite is quite fatal—there's no hope! '

  'Used not to be, but with modern serums used in time, only the very young and the very old are at the greatest risk, and your uncle seems to have been pretty wiry.' He stood up. 'But we're wasting time, and speed is of the essence. We've got to move him, get him down to the car. Will you stay here while I bring up the gear, or do you want to come with me?'

  'I'll stay, of course. I couldn't leave him now.' 'Not too scared?'

  She suppressed a shudder. 'No. I'll stand, and keep my torch alight and moving all the while. I couldn't bear Uncle to come round and find himself alone—'

  'Good girl! ' Elyot's hand pressed her shoulder and 'then he was gone, the nimbus of his torch receding, leaving blackness behind.

  Donna tried not to think of how long she might have to wait until he came back, hauling the stretcher and blankets up that hazardous track. The air was very still, but the essential silence of the night was punctuated by the chirr-chirr of the cicadas and the occasional startled shriek of a bird disturbed at roost.

  It was impossible not to remember and compare the

  blissful promise of her first night on the island with this one. What a lurch her personal world had taken since then ! And yet—and yet, had she been able to look ahead, would she have chosen a way, very different from that which had brought her from there to here? Knowing Elyot, loving him, caring about his approval; drawing closer to Wilmot as she believed she had done; even the challenge of Margot le Conte's hostility—all of it had been experience, and experience was something the wise ones said you must have, or become a cabbage, neither enjoying nor suffering—just being.

  So her thoughts churned as she kept on the move, patrolling the small area. Her legs ached and she would have liked to sit by Uncle Wilmot and hold his hand. But the slightly sinister stirrings underfoot kept her going, and at last she heard the louder sounds of Elyot coming back.

  His breathing was heavy with effort. 'I've hacked the way clearer as I came up, to make it easier to get the stretcher down. You'll have to manage one end of it, taking your time,' he said.

  After that it was all action, though not so difficult nor prolonged an action under his careful guidance. As Wilmot was still unconscious, neither the brandy nor the thermos were used. But when room had been made for the stretcher on the floor of the car Donna asked, `What about the other car—Uncle's? I could drive it back behind yours.'

  But Elyot would not let her, saying he had to drive fast and he couldn't afford to be concerned about her keeping up. He would send a couple of his men up for the other car in the morning.

  At the hospital Donna waited in an ante-room while he went with a doctor and nurse into a cubicle with Wilmot. When he came back he brought with him the contents of Wilmot's pockets and his shoulder-haver-

  sack containing some wilting plants which Donna found infinitely pathetic. 'What—?' she asked, her chin trembling.

  Elyot said, 'It's as I thought—collapse from snakebite. They've found the puncture marks on his thigh. They're keeping him in, of course, but they're pretty sure they can pull him through. We were in time, you and I.

  'You were in time. I mightn't have contacted Bran for hours, and I could have done nothing without you.' Donna wondered what he would say if she confessed the bitter uncharitable thought she had had while she sat there waiting. If Uncle Wilmot dies, that will be the problem of Louvet's future solved for him, and the guilt of having thought it for an instant brought tears of shame to her eyes.

  She tried to blink them back, but one or two rolled down her cheeks and she was aware of Elyot's scrutiny as she brushed them away. And then, somehow, he was holding her close, stroking her hair, and as she gained control, patting her shoulder and finally holding both her hands—none of it in the love she craved of him, of course, but in more spontaneous kindness and compassion for the weakness of her tears than she had had from him yet.

  As she stood back from him, murmuring, 'I'm sorry—' he released her hands and said, 'You're Overwrought, and no wonder. We must get you home.'

  'Yes.' But the thought of the house; empty of Bran and Juno and full of her worry for Wilmot, dismayed her, and as if Elyot read her thought, he said, 'But you aren't going up there alone. I'll take you along to the Allamanda until I can rustle up Brandon from wherever he may be.'

  'Oh—not the Allamanda, please,' she begged.

  Why not? If I can't track Brandon, it's where he

  will eventually show up.'

  'Yes, but—'

  'But!' he echoed, his. tone impatient now. 'The Allamanda is a public place; you don't have to regard it as forbidden ground, just because you chose to walk out on Margot for the flimsiest of trumped-up reasons—,

  Donna gasped. 'I gave her notice by letter, and adequate reasons,' she claimed, though realising too late that Elyot would have heard Margot's distorted version of why she had left. She hadn't convinced Margot that Melford Drinan had meant nothing serious to her life, and Margot had made petty capital out of that omission by telling Elyot that under cover of 'trumped-up' reasons, she had resigned from the job out of pique at her failure with Melford. And now Elyot confirmed her guess by saying, 'Well, Margot felt you had behaved rather shabbily for reasons which she was pretty sure weren't genuine. But that's water under the bridge and your private quarrel is no excuse for your not making use of the Allamanda tonight. So come along, don't make difficulties. You're not going back to Louvet until Brandon goes with you.'

  They were back where they started—he with no tolerance of empty qualms; she with no more than nuisance value to him. Their shared ordeal had bridged the rift between them, but even his compassion for her tears had been no more than kindness, the comforting 'There, there!' he might have offered to a frightened child. Donna's depression was complete.

  In fact Bran had been at the hotel when they arrived, and he and Donna had gone back to the hospital before returning to Louvet in his mini-moke. Juno was already there, having shared a taxi with her cousins, who had gone on to Marquise before Juno had found the house

  inexplicably empty and had suffered a crisis of nerves in consequence.

  'Me, I say to me—Missus Donna still at Carnival wid her beaux. But where Mister, dis hour of night? Tell you, young Mister and Missus Donna—till you come, feel good f'nothing; like no more dan cent's worth ice melting in de 'sun,' she had declared, and had listened in dramatic, exclamatory horror to Donna's story and Elyot's part in it before she had pronounced the unarguable truth that, 'Fact, don't know who your friends are, till you got trouble. The Mister, he say he got no friends, least all Mister Vance. But who run, like Good Samaritan in Bible, when he in need o' help? Maybe now Mister listen when I tell him Mister Vance good, kind—But maybe not,' she had concluded resignedly. 'Maybe take more dan old man snake t'make Mister Wilmot change him spots.'

  But though Donna agreed as to the improbability of Wilmot's change of heart towards Elyot, certainly his misfortune proved that he had more friends and people concerned for him than he would have claimed. During the days he was in hospital he professed indifference to inquiries made about him, but after he came home he was reasonably gracious with callers who dropped in. Donna suspected, though she was sure he would have denied it, that he was touched by the attention his accident had caused.

  Their common worry for him forced Donna and Bran to bury the hatchet of their quarrel, and Madame Hue made opportunity from Wilmot's convalescence to assume tacitly that whatever had been amiss between her and Donna was now happily resolved. She arrived, unannounced and bearing gifts, as she had done before their rift, and Donna had no choice but to welcome her, and to speed her parting tactfully when Wilmot, her captive victim, sh
owed irritable signs of

  speeding her brusquely himself.

  In fact, it was she who surprised Donna by telling her that Elyot was one of the few people whom Wilmot 'had received in his room while he was in hospital. Donna realised that Elyot would have telephoned or called to ask about him, but that they had met at Wilmot's invitation was news to her.

  'Uncle hasn't told me or Bran about it. How do you know?' she asked.

  'From Elyot.'

  'Elyot called at the hospital, and Uncle asked him to his room—just like that?'

  'Well, considering Elyot had saved his life, should Wilmot have done less? But it wasn't quite like that,' Irma admitted. 'Elyot asked to see him, and Wilmot agreed.'

  'Well ! Donna breathed. 'What did they say to

  each other? Did they manage to part amiably for once? Or did the sparks fly?'

  'Elyot wasn't telling, except that he had put a business proposition to Wilmot, which Wilmot

  'Tch ' Donna's exclamation was in utter distaste. 'Surely not another one, and Uncle still, in hospital? What was it this time? An outright cash offer for Louvet? Or another devious scheme of Elyot's own; one that didn't need partners to help it on its way?'

  Irma had the grace to look abashed. 'I thought you had forgiven and forgotten all that,' she said plaintively. 'And you did not allow me to finish—whatever was Elyot's suggestion to Wilmot, he did not turn it down, and they parted, Elyot said, with it left on the table between them. Wilmot allowed that he might be willing to discuss it again.'

  'Then it couldn't have been anything to do with Louvet,' Donna decided. 'Uncle has always been quite adamant that he would never parley with Elyot over

  that.'

  'But that would be before he had to owe Elyot his life, and might one not think that should make for a little charity between the worst of enemies?' Irma queried with reason, though Donna doubted whether either charity or gratitude stood much chance against Wilmot's deep-rooted jealousy of Elyot and his stubborn pride.