Sally Wentworth - Conflict In Paradise

by Sally Wentworth

  Sally Wentworth - Conflict In Paradise

  The tiny, unspoiled Pacific Island of Aparoa had been a paradise home to Tansy for years; it was primitive, but neither she nor any of its inhabitants would have changed it in any way. But now, it seemed, they were going to have no choice. The Australian government had decided that it would make an ideal fuel base, and had sent Major Blake Aston out there to survey it. And Blake Aston was just the kind of hard, unfeeling man who would make the recommendation despite Tansy's feelings - or the feelings of anyone else, come to that! She just had to stop him - but how?

  CHAPTER ONE

  The muscles of the four native rowers rippled beneath their bronzed skins as they sent the wooden outrigger canoe racing across the ocean, their paddles leaving a swirl of phosphorescence in the boat's wake. Above their heads the white, triangular sail took advantage of every puff of breeze to send them scudding towards Aparoa, the small Pacific island that had been home to Tansy Harland for as long as she could remember. Ordinarily she would have enjoyed the voyage, would have been absorbed in watching the skill of the men as they avoided the dangerous coral heads that lay just beneath the surface, or in looking out for the sea creatures visible from her seat almost level with the water; sea turtles that swam hastily away at their swift approach, shoals of brilliantly coloured fish, and often the dark fin of a basking shark that would come curiously up to them and then go off to look for easier prey. Once or twice Tansy had been lucky enough to sight a whale, but that had been many years ago, before man had hunted them in such numbers that they were now virtually extinct. Just as men were now coming to her beloved island and threatening to tear it apart! Tansy thought grimly.

  The news that Aparoa was being considered as a site for a refuelling base for a combined NATO force in the South Pacific had come as a bombshell only a few weeks ago. Tansy had been quietly eating breakfast on the veranda of their house, one of the few two-storied buildings on the island, while her father, Dr David Harland, had been listening out on the radio transmitter in the remote chance that any of the news items might possibly affect the island, when the operator gave their call sign. Dr Harland had taken the message down and acknowledged it without really taking in its full import Rather dazedly he held the notepad out for Tansy to look at Quickly she read his sprawling writing and then stared at her father with equal incredulity.

  'But there must be some mistake. They can't possibly mean Aparoa,' she said in astonishment. 'The lagoon isn't deep enough to take big boats any more, and there isn't anywhere for a plane to land. Are you quite sure it was meant for us, Daddy?'

  'Quite sure, my dear. The operator repeated our call sign twice.' Dr Harland re-read the message with a worried frown on his face. 'They ask me to give every assistance to the army survey team that will be coming here to report on the suitability of the island,' he murmured. 'You know, Tansy, I don't like the look of this. We certainly don't want a fuel base built here if we can possibly avoid it. I'd better go and have a word with Tupuhoe and Ruari; see what they think about it. Will you take the clinic this morning, my dear?'

  'Yes, of course.' While her father had gone off to the headman's house to acquaint him and his "Son, Ruari, with the news, Tansy had collected her medical bag and made her way uneasily to the small clinic in the nearby village that fringed the sea shore. She tried to tell herself that the whole thing was quite ridiculous; that Aparoa was entirely unsuitable for the government's purpose, and that the survey team would take one look at the island and go elsewhere, but somehow she couldn't shake off the nagging doubts at the back of her mind. Her patients were unused to seeing her without her bright smile and started asking curious questions; having known her since early childhood they felt no more reticence in questioning her than they would have felt towards any other islander. Besides, they were like children in their avid curiosity and liked to know everything about their neighbours' business.

  Tansy pulled herself together and laughingly parried their questions, but was just as eager in putting her own when her father at length returned from Tupuhoe's house with Ruari at his side. Ruari smiled reassuringly at Tansy as, the last of the patients gone, they returned to the doctor's house and sat round the table on the veranda with a fruit juice for Tansy and bottles of beer for the men.

  'My father, too, is greatly worried by this piece of news,' he told her. 'It will be a very bad thing for the island if they build a fuelling station here.' Ruari spoke English with a slight Australian accent, being one of the few islanders who had been educated in that country. Of the others, some were still completing their education, but two had chosen not to return to the narrow confines of Aparoa, a fact which had greatly saddened the chief and David Harland, who had himself contributed quite a large part of his government salary to help send the children to school.

  'Is there nothing we can do to prevent it?' Tansy asked them.

  'We've been talking about that,' her father told her. 'We think that perhaps the best thing would be for me to go to Australia myself and find out exactly what's going on, and see if I can't pull a few strings to make absolutely sure that they don't use Aparoa as a base. Not that it's at all likely,' he added optimistically, 'but it's just as well to point out to these government bods just how mad they are to even contemplate it.'

  So Dr Harland had gone to Australia on the next inter-island schooner, a decision which greatly underlined his own misgivings, for he left the island as seldom as possible, and Tansy, herself a fully qualified doctor, had been left to take care of the sick on Aparoa and on the many scattered volcanic or coral islands in the vicinity, the more outlying of which took two to three days to reach by sailing canoe, stopping at night at the nearest convenient island. Tansy had been visiting one of these when she received word by radio from Ruari that the survey team had arrived, despite all her father's efforts to prevent it in the short time he had been in Australia.

  Now the high central mountain of Aparoa, forced up out of the sea long ago by volcanic action, appeared on the edge of their limited horizon, and, as if the sight of their home had given them added strength, the men sent the paddles dipping even faster into the sea. Soon the tops of the coconut palms that stretched for over a mile inland came into sight and Tansy could make out the high grey walls of the old prison buildings on the west side of the bay, just below the head of the long plateau where the palm trees grew.

  Skilfully the natives steered the canoe through the gap in the outer coral reef, kept open by the surge of fresh water that flowed from the river mouth, across the lagoon and into the open sea. As coral cannot five in fresh water this channel was one of the few places where a boat could always approach the island in safety. The army boat, too, had come this way, for Tansy could see it moored at the crumbling old stone jetty below the prison; a powerful, shallow-drafted vessel, purpose-built for negotiating this kind of island. Tansy looked at it longingly, thinking how quickly she could answer an emergency call if she had such a boat at her disposal. Admittedly they had had a motor-boat once, but it had broken down and, although Ruari knew quite a bit about engines and could have repaired it, the government suppliers had sent the wrong parts, and then sent the right parts to the wrong group of islands. They were probably now lost deep in the hold of some island schooner being ferried continuously about the South Pacific, despite David Harland's urgent messages asking for replacements. It seemed priority was given to men of war rather than men of peace, Tansy thought bitterly as she gazed across at the graceful vessel.

  The shore came up to meet them now, a strip of white sand slipping into blue water, and then Tansy was jumping out of the canoe to wade the few steps to the beach. Immediately
she was surrounded by a group of eager children until she picked one bright-eyed child to carry her medical bag up to the house. This was deemed a great honour and the bag was carried with extreme care and self-importance, rather as if it was some kind of idol; often Tansy thought that the islanders, although all devout Christians, still showed some traces of their old pagan ancestry in the way they looked upon the 'magical' cures that came out of her medical bag.

  Several adults had also come to meet her; they talked softly in their lilting Polynesian tongue, telling her of the soldiers' arrival, that they had taken possession of the old prison. These grim, fortress like buildings had originally been built as a convict colony in the days when British prisoners, who were too dangerous to be transported to Australia, had been sent to Aparoa instead, but they had stood empty now for over a hundred years. As Tansy looked towards them she saw a jeep emerge and drive down towards the jetty where, despite the gathering dusk, supplies were still being unloaded from the boat. The noise of the jeep's engine made a harsh, alien sound on the island, for there were no motor vehicles on Aparoa, only horses and bicycles to get about on.

  An officer, tall in tropical kit, got out of the jeep and looked across to where the natives were still gathered round her. He hesitated, as if about to come across the beach to them, and Tansy hastily drew back among the others; she had no wish to speak to the soldiers until she had learnt what she could of them from Ruari. Then she realised how senseless it was to try to conceal herself; her long blonde hair, bleached to platinum by the sun, made her stand out like a beacon from the dark-haired Aparoans around her. But one of the soldiers must have asked the officer a question, for he turned back and Tansy was able to hurry along the road to the village and Ruari's house.

  News of her arrival had, as always, travelled ahead of her and she had not gone very far before she saw Ruari coming to meet her. Like all the male islanders, he wore European clothing, but where most of the others wore loose-fitting cotton trousers and shirts, Ruari had progressed to denim jeans and a tee-shirt that failed to hide the strong shoulder muscles gained from years of diving for mother-of-pearl mussels and trochus shells. He was twenty-seven years old, a handsome young man who was working hard to bring all the benefits of progress to Aparoa without any of its disadvantages, an aim in which Tansy sincerely believed and gave her wholehearted support. Among the single girls Ruari was considered a great catch, but as yet he had shown no preference for any particular maiden. Having been brought up and encouraged to look upon him almost as a brother, Tansy was always on completely easy terms with him.

  'Have you spoken to the soldiers yet? How long do they intend to stay? Have you managed to contact Daddy and tell him?' Anxiously Tansy questioned him before he had even had time to greet her.

  Ruari held up his hands in laughing protest. 'One question at a time, and I'll take the last one first. Yes, I've talked to your father over the radio and he's managed to get in touch with some old friends who may be able to help. He'll be away for another few days following up that lead, but he advised us not to worry too much; it seems that survey teams are also looking at two other islands and no definite choice has been made yet. Now, what were your other questions? Oh, yes. We don't know how long they will stay, probably only a week or so, I expect; and no, I haven't spoken to them. No one has.'

  He emphasised the last sentence and Tansy grinned back at him delightedly. It was an old ploy of the islanders towards unwelcome strangers to pretend that they couldn't understand English, although most of them spoke a fair amount of the language, and all of them spoke excellent Pidgin and some French as well as their native Polynesian.

  Ruari's teeth gleamed in his brown face as he continued, 'First of all the officer, a Major Aston, tried to find your father but failed to do so, of course, then he came to my house and tried to talk to my father, but Tupuhoe can be very deaf when he wants to be, especially when he isn't wearing that hearing aid that Dr Harland obtained from Australia for him.'

  Tansy gurgled with laughter. 'He must have been furious! Then what happened?' she asked eagerly.

  'Then he went to the prison and found it all locked up. Old Amaru has the key, of course, and won't give it up to anyone because she keeps her pigs in the courtyard there where no one will steal them. Well, by now the whole village had gathered round and, as the walls are too high and steep to climb, the officer had the lock broken open. Immediately the gates were opened the pigs came squealing out and everyone started trying to catch them, the soldiers too. Then Amaru started screaming that the soldiers were trying to steal her pigs and all the villagers joined in the melee until the whole place was a riot of squealing pigs and shouting people.'

  He stopped for breath and Tansy wiped tears of laughter from her eyes. 'Oh, how I wish I'd been there to see it! But how did it end?'

  Ruari's face sobered and he became serious. 'The officer stopped it. He simply fired his pistol in the air. Everyone was immediately shocked into silence and then he gave several biting orders and, how I don't quite know, suddenly everything had sorted itself out. We were moved out of the way, the soldiers began to take their equipment in, and the children were sent off to round up the pigs. Even old Amaru was quiet for once.' He looked at Tansy. 'The officer is a professional, Tansy. It may not be so easy to convince him that Aparoa is unsuitable for a base.'

  'Nonsense,' she returned determinedly. 'We just have to play for time, that's all. If Daddy is successful with these friends of his the soldiers will probably be recalled in a few days anyway, but in the meantime it won't do any harm to let the army see just how little co-operation they're going to get from us.'

  They talked a little longer, but soon Tansy left him to go to her own house. She had lived here for over twenty years, ever since her father had brought her to Aparoa as a toddler, and she loved the old house, its mellowed stone walls almost hidden beneath climbing plants that were ablaze with colour. For a moment Tansy paused on the veranda to look out to sea to the sunset that spread itself like a peacock's tail, iridescent and brilliant, across the horizon. How peaceful and lovely the island was, set like a jewel in the ocean; silently she prayed that its peace would not be destroyed by the orders of men in faraway government offices, who could never have even contemplated such desecration if they had seen this beauty for themselves.

  Sighing, Tansy went indoors, turning on one of the lamps in the big living room before sitting down to the meal that Inara, their servant girl, had left out for her. Then she went to have a bath, the water for which flowed from a water tank on the roof, but she was still rinsing her hair when she heard a loud knocking at the front door. Thinking that it must be one of the islanders in need of medical help, she called out in Polynesian, asking them to wait, while she wrapped a sarong round her still wet body and put a towel over her hair, turban fashion, completely covering it.

  The peremptory knocking came again and Tansy started to remonstrate as she opened the door, but then broke off abruptly. No islander had come seeking her. The British officer stood in the doorway, sharply outlined against the bright, moonlit sky. He was very tall, well over six foot, and built like an athlete, broad- shouldered and slim-waisted. Beneath his beret, Tansy could see dark hair, cut short, which set off a tanned face with clean-cut features, a strong chin and a firm mouth that could probably form a pleasant smile. The smile, however, was not in evidence at the moment. The dark eyes inspected her with a gaze so cool and enquiring that Tansy instinctively drew her head back into the shadows, only her body in the damply clinging sarong revealed in the lamplight.

  'I'm looking for Dr Harland. Is he at home? Will you tell him Major Blake Aston would like to see him?' His voice was as firm as his appearance; it was also hard and unsympathetic.

  Disconcerted at his unexpected visit, Tansy didn't answer straight away, and he said exasperatedly, 'Doesn't anyone on this damn island speak English?'

  So the natives' trick had got under his skin already. Good! Then Tansy realised that in the sa
rong and with her hair hidden he mistook her, too, for one of the native girls. Impishly she tried to goad him further and said in execrable English, 'Medicine man, him not here.'

  'So he took the trouble to teach at least one of you some English, did he? Where is he? When do you expect him back?'

  Greatly enjoying herself, Tansy pretended not to understand at first and made him repeat the questions two or three times before answering, 'Him go 'way mighty canoe. He no come back many sunsets.'

  The Major moved a little to one side to look at her more closely. 'Who are you?' he asked sharply. 'You're not the servant girl I saw this morning. Are you his woman?'

  For a moment the bluntness of the question bereft Tansy of speech, and then, completely forgetting her role, she said tartly, 'I suppose you might call me that!'

  Deliberately he let his eyes wander slowly down the curves of the sarong. 'The doctor has good taste,' he said softly.

  Tansy felt herself blushing hotly. Really, the man was despicable! Angrily she retorted, 'I must remember to tell him that when he returns. I'm sure he will be gratified by the approbation of such an obvious connoisseur!' Her stress of the word obvious turning it into a deliberate insult.

  'Big words for a little native girl.' With a movement so quick that Tansy hardly realised he had made it, the Major reached across the threshold and pulled her out on to the veranda, while with the other hand he plucked the towel from her head. Tansy's hair fell upon her shoulders like liquid silver in the moonlight, framing her delicately featured face and clear, hazel eyes that were filled now with dismay as she realised that he had tricked her into giving herself away.

  'Ah, I thought so. You're the girl I saw on the beach today. Who are you?' he demanded again.

  'How dare you touch me! Please go away at once,' Tansy said angrily, ineffectively trying to shake off the hand that still held her arm in a casual grip that felt like a vice.