Home is Goodbye

by Isobel Chace

  ‘You look better,’ he greeted her, when he came up to her.

  ‘I am better,’ she assured him.

  He gave her a measured look that brought the colour to her cheeks.

  ‘In that case,’ he said slowly, ‘I needn’t feel a brute if I take you to task for not obeying my orders.’

  She remembered that he had told her not to leave the compound and looked quickly down at her feet to avoid his penetrating gaze.

  ‘I came to meet you,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘So I see!’ he agreed. Something in his tone made her peep up at him and she saw that he was grinning down at her.

  ‘Has anyone come for us?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Not yet. But they will, and in the meantime we’ll have to make the best we can of the village.’

  She smiled suddenly, her whole face lighting up with mischief.

  ‘Do you think we could find something to cook, Matt?’ she asked. ‘Something solid and body-building?’

  ‘Meat,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Are you hungry, Nurse Wayne?’

  ‘I’m famished!’ she told him frankly.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The smoke from the fire gave out a pleasant odour that tickled Sara’s nostrils and made her sneeze.

  ‘You’re burning my steak!’ Matt told her indignantly. ‘I like them rare and full of good red blood.’

  ‘I just want to eat!’ Sara replied with determination. She fished a charred potato in its jacket out of the coals and handed it to him. ‘It doesn’t seem to want to be cooked all over,’ she said sorrowfully, ‘but parts of it are burning.’

  Matt got lazily to his feet.

  ‘The trouble with you is that you were never a Girl Guide,’ he told her. ‘Move over and I’ll show you how it ought to be done!’

  Sara argued for a minute. She was aware of the black faces of the Sonjo women watching her, and she thought that they would think her a pretty poor sort of female if she let Matt do the cooking. She had a suspicion that Matt knew it too, for his lips quirked at the corners as he took the pointed stick holding the steak away from her.

  ‘Invalids are excused their normal duties,’ he told her smugly, and brushed a lock of her hair back from her forehead with a surprisingly gentle hand. ‘Go and take a pill,’ he suggested.

  She sat up very straight beside him and watched his competent hands turning the meat in front of the fire.

  ‘Where did you get all this from?’ she asked, glancing at all the food laid out all around them.

  Matt’s eyes twinkled. ‘I heard that you had been releasing devils and collected your fee. When we’re hungry again you’ll have to do some more surgery on some other wretch!’

  Sara giggled.

  ‘I hope he didn’t think he was being overcharged,’ she said. She picked up a com cob, stripped it of its covering leaves and buried it in the coals with the potatoes.

  ‘Much you care!’ he teased her.

  ‘Well, I’m hungry,’ she excused herself.

  He pulled the steak off the point of the stick and handed it to her.

  ‘The burned bit was your doing,’ he told her, ‘so it’s only fair that you should have to eat it.’

  Sara took it carefully by one corner and stripped a piece off it, putting it into her mouth. It tasted good, though quite unlike any other steak she had ever eaten. ‘What kind of meat is this?’ she asked.

  ‘Tommy,’ he replied briefly. His brows were drawn together with concentration as he speared another steak and held it out to the flames. She had a fine view of his profile and could see the fierce strength of his face contradicted only by the gentleness at the corners of his mouth, the only feature that he couldn’t control.

  ‘It’s good,’ she said with satisfaction.

  He finished cooking his steak and came and sat beside her, stretching his legs out in front of him with a sigh of relief.

  ‘Poor Sara!’ he said. ‘You’re certainly meeting Africa the hard way — an aeroplane crash, malaria and a picnic!’

  ‘It will be something to tell my grandchildren,’ she smiled. ‘And anyway I don’t think it was malaria, I haven’t been here long enough for the bug to incubate.’

  He screwed up his eyes thoughtfully.

  ‘You came out by ship, didn’t you? You might have picked it up in Egypt.’

  She thought back to the squalor of the Egyptian ports and it seemed only too likely. She had never seen filth comparable to the water of the Sweet Water Canal, and had been horrified when she had been told that the local peasants happily drank from it.

  She shivered. ‘I hope I never have it again,’ she said with feeling. ‘I’ve never felt so weak and weepy!’

  His strong white teeth took another mouthful of meat. ‘You’ll probably get a few headaches to remind you of it, but it wasn’t a bad dose.’ He grinned. ‘You haven’t been taking your paludrin every day!’

  She smiled softly, wondering that he should have taken her sudden collapse so calmly. If she had to be stranded in the middle of Africa there was no one that she could have chosen as a better companion.

  ‘What does Kwaheri mean?’ she asked, her thoughts going off at a tangent from the man beside her to the domain that he ruled.

  ‘It means good-bye. Long ago, before white men had generally come to Africa, there were two old missionaries. One of them, the elder by some months, decided that the time had come for him to go back to Europe to die. The other accompanied him to a certain spot, and there they said a long, heartfelt good-bye. The Africans watching them were so impressed by their oratory that they called the spot Good-bye and it’s been known by that name ever since.’

  He looked across at his listener and saw that her eyes were wet with tears.

  ‘I think I must still be a bit weepy,’ she said apologetically. ‘What happened to the two old men?’

  Matt looked surprised. ‘I’ve no idea!’ he said.

  ‘Oh!’ Sara felt unaccountably disappointed that nothing more was known of them. She rolled over on to her stomach and dug among the ashes for her cob of corn. It was hot and it took her some time to push a stick into one end so that she could hold it while she ate it. It looked very good and she dug her teeth into it with keen anticipation.

  There was nothing sweet about it. It had a dry, floury taste and was only half cooked, but she ate it happily; delighting in the hard feel of the com against her teeth.

  Then suddenly she became aware of Matt looking at her and her throat constricted and her lungs refused to function properly. She was aware of every detail of him. The creases in his khaki trousers and the criss-cross stitching on the back of his bush shirt; but most of all his face and the intent look in his eyes.

  Away in the distance she could hear the distant throb of aeroplane engines, but her mind refused to take in their significance. She knew only that Matt was coming closer and closer.

  But that was all. The moment ended as suddenly as it had begun and she was breathless and trembling.

  ‘Tripacer!’ Matt exclaimed. ‘Looks as though Halliday must have come out to look for us!’

  He leaped to his feet and rushed out of the compound, waving madly as he went. Sara stood up and gazed into the hot sky, watching for the plane. At last she saw it coming towards them. It flew down and swooped over the village and she could see the pilot waving back to Matt. They had been found.

  In the minutes that followed she had time to wonder why she wasn’t more pleased about it. The sooner she got back to Kwaheri, the sooner she would be able to get back to the job she had come all the way from England to do. Why then should she feel slightly resentful that the Tripacer should have come for them so soon?

  The village became infected by Matt’s excitement. Africans raced in all directions, their dogs barking madly at their heels, and even their inevitable goats, and sheep that looked just like goats, ran madly round in small circles wondering what it was all about. Sara saw her patient of the morning running with the
best of them and marvelled at his stoic acceptance of pain, which is one of the African’s greatest qualities.

  The Piper Tripacer came down just outside the village and a tall, lanky young man climbed out of the cockpit.

  ‘Been wanting to see you anyway, Matt!’ he shouted out. ‘ ’Bout some sisal of mine. Wondered if you could put it through your drying plant some time?’

  It was a typical greeting in a country where men changed their manners with their clothes. No one could be more formal than either of these two men when the time was right.

  ‘Did James send off the stuff yesterday, do you know?’ Matt asked in return. ‘If it didn’t go, it missed the ship Mackenzie’s bought space on.’

  John Halliday shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Ain’t seen anyone from Kwaheri recently,’ he said.

  Sara came towards them, her lips curling with amusement. She liked the look of the Tripacer’s owner. He was the friendliest-looking person she had seen for a very long time.

  ‘Ain’t you going to introduce me?’ Halliday asked.

  Matt did so with an obvious reluctance that caused both of them to raise their eyebrows.

  ‘I thought you’d be falling over yourselves to welcome me,’ John complained, his eyes dancing from one face to the other.

  ‘Oh, we are!’ Sara assured him almost too hastily. Matt frowned slightly and she subsided into silence. For a base moment she wondered whether Matt didn’t like their rescuer because of his rather odd accent, but this unworthy thought was banished in the next instant when he said: ‘My dear John, it isn’t that you’re not welcome but that you’re so long overdue!’

  ‘Overdue be damned! How was I to know that you’d trek miles? It’s taken me hours to find you!’ His blue eyes flashed in the sunlight. ‘Of course I might have taken even longer if I’d known what charming company you had!’ Sara blushed and Matt laughed.

  ‘You have to be careful what you say to Nurse Wayne,’ he warned John in a soft drawl. ‘She takes things very seriously.’

  ‘Like what?’ Sara asked indignantly, resenting what looked like an aspersion on her sense of humour.

  ‘Like Marjorie dramatizing herself as a lost soul in the middle of Africa yearning for her birthright at home!’ Sara looked at him angrily. What right had he to sneer at a woman who had been homesick while she had been in pain? Everyone couldn’t be as impervious to their surroundings as he was.

  ‘It was perfectly natural that she should think of her homeland at such a time,’ she said rather primly. Matt shrugged his shoulders. He had wanted to make her rise and she had. He wondered why he had got so little satisfaction out of it.

  ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I told you you took things too seriously and you’ve proved my point for me.’

  Where now were those few precious moments beside the fire when they had been picnicking together in complete harmony? Sara felt hurt to the quick, but she was too proud to show it. Perhaps she had been a little lacking in humour, but she hadn’t thought that Matt would be unkind. She glanced from one man to the other and saw that John too was puzzled by Matt’s remarks.

  ‘A stretch in the open doesn’t seem to have done you much good!’ he said dryly. ‘I think we’d better do something about flying you out before you develop a real grudge.’

  Matt gave him a reluctant smile. ‘I’ve never known you not take a pretty girl’s part,’ he said, ‘Or I might be more impressed.’

  He swung away from them and began to walk back to the village, leaving them to follow when they would.

  ‘You been doing something that you shouldn’t?’ John asked.

  Sara looked after Matt’s retreating back with tears pricking at the back of her eyes.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Well, don’t take it to heart, he always had a raking temper! Reckon he’d be able to pick a quarrel with a corpse if he put his mind to it!’

  That made Sara laugh. She felt better and accordingly grateful.

  ‘He works so hard, though,’ she said, wondering that she should be able to confide so easily in this strange, tall man. ‘Doesn’t anyone else do anything at Kwaheri?’

  ‘Too right they don’t!’ John exclaimed.

  Sara was startled. Her eyebrows went up and she looked up at him with pleased surprise.

  ‘You’re an Australian!’ she accused him.

  ‘So I am,’ he agreed.

  ‘But — but what are you doing farming out here?’ she asked, too astonished to worry as to whether he would consider her inquiry to be impertinent.

  He grinned. ‘I reckoned we Aussies ought to help out in the Commonwealth. Can’t have you British doing all the work!’

  He looped his long arm round hers and together they strolled after Matt in the direction of the village.

  Matt had already gathered together their few possessions. Now that the moment of release had come he had bent all his concentration on to the task of getting them away as quickly as possible.

  ‘Did you have anything else?’ he asked Sara.

  She shook her head.

  John Halliday stood amiably in the doorway of the hut and watched the activity within as Sara checked her medical case and Matt impatiently ordered her to take a precautionary tablet against further trouble from malaria. Sara’s hand shook a little as she helped herself to one more of the pills. She already had the beginnings of a headache, but nothing at that moment would have made her admit it.

  ‘If you’re ready,’ John drawled, ‘I’ll see about lining up the elders to say good-bye to you.’

  ‘The Sonjo don’t have elders, they have a water board,’ Matt told him, and for the first time a trace of enthusiasm tinged his words. ‘It’s a pretty good system. They inherit certain water supplies and if anyone offends against the tribal laws, the water board cuts them off for a day or two. The system seems to work, what’s more. People don’t like being thirsty for long!’

  ‘Sounds okay,’ John agreed.

  In the end it wasn’t necessary for anyone to tell the villagers that they were leaving. Everyone had seen John’s Tripacer land and they had all gathered round to see, for them, the still rare occurrence of one of these man-made birds actually taking off into the air.

  John helped Sara into the small seat behind while Matt shook hands with everyone in sight and thanked them for their hospitality. They were still a little in awe of the woman who had cut out the devil from a man’s leg, but they waved to her cheerfully when they saw her face looking out at them through the small windows of the aeroplane.

  It was fun in a way, Sara thought to herself. I wouldn’t really have missed it. She allowed her mind to roam over the time she and Matt had spent together. It had been a precious time to her. Especially that moment just before John had arrived. She went over the moment again. Could it have been true that he had been going to kiss her, or was it just her imagination playing her tricks? He might have been angry that they had been interrupted. A little shiver of excitement played up and down her spine. To be kissed by Matt would be an event in any girl’s life. Perhaps it was as well that it hadn’t actually happened. Her aunt’s voice saying, ‘I’m sure you’ll cope admirably’, came back to her and she could feel a blush burning her cheeks. Under no circumstances could she allow Matt to suffer Mrs. Wayne’s probing tongue. It would be too much. At the thought of such a thing, she could feel herself getting all hot and bothered.

  The two men climbed into their seats in front of her and shut the flimsy-looking little doors. It was oppressively hot and she fanned herself lightly with her handkerchief. Matt said something in an undertone to John and he looked round at her with an anxious expression in his eyes.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  She nodded. She would have liked to reassure him verbally, but it had suddenly come to her that they were soon to leave the ground in this oppressive little box and she was more frightened than she had ever been in her whole life.

  John began to check the in
struments and the little propeller sprang into life. Sara could feel her body tensing, until her muscles were so taut that she could scarcely breathe. She clenched her teeth, for she knew that if she didn’t she would scream to them to let her out. She put her hands on the back of Matt’s seat and held on with everything she had.

  The aeroplane moved forward and the worst was over. She was surprised to find one of Matt’s hands covering the two of hers. He grinned at her and she smiled back, wondering at the little green flecks in his eyes that she had never noticed before.

  ‘Are you okay at the back?’ John sang out. ‘Look down below! Your last glimpse of Sonjo!’

  Obediently she looked out of the window at the fortified village beneath them. It was probably the last time she would ever see it and she felt quite sentimental about it.

  ‘How long will it take us to get home?’ she asked.

  John screwed round to look at her.

  ‘What?’ he shouted.

  She screamed her question into his ear, feeling rather foolish. John gave Matt a look of inquiry.

  ‘You’d better put me down with the Auster,’ he shouted back. ‘If you’ll fly out the spare I need, we should get her fixed up pretty quickly and I’ll fly her back to Kwaheri tonight.’

  ‘No!’ Sara exclaimed before she could stop herself. Somehow she had to prevent Matt from doing any such thing.

  He gave her a quizzical look.

  ‘What would you have me do? Fly out the whole maintenance staff?’

  ‘Yes, I would. What’s so wrong with that? It might crash again!’

  Matt’s face softened. He was secretly rather touched by her dismayed expression and her worried, anxious eyes.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ he assured her. ‘I can’t leave it out here, we need it on the estate.’