They Met in Zanzibar Read Online Free PDF Page A

heartache of saying goodbye to the place. You don’t know what heartache is, Mr. Cortland, and I don’t suppose you ever will know. You have no love for your plantation; it’s just something that has brought you in a good supply of cash and now looks like putting you on easy street. When you’re superintending your own estates as a section of some soulless company’s copra estate, I hope it hurts - unbearably!”
    He had drawn in outside the hotel, but as she made to spring from his car his fingers gripped her wrist. “Just a minute. I admire your spirit, but your reasoning is rickety. You’ll feel differently after you’ve thought it over. And don’t start blaming the younger men for taking jobs with the company. They’re doing what’s best for themselves.”
    “Including you?” she asked shakily.
    “Yes, including me.”
    She pulled her hand away from him. “You’re actually going to work for the company, after owning your own plantation? An hour ago I wouldn’t have believed it.”
    “You can,” he said, his expression dour. “They’ve asked me to be general manager of the whole set-up.”
    Peg felt an odd tightness in her nostrils as she took a deep breath, a roughness in her throat. She looked at his grey eyes, narrow and glittering a little, at the strangely straight line of his mouth. She ran the tip of her tongue along dry lips. “So you’re the enemy,” she said. “It’s as well to know.” Before he could move, she slipped out of the car and ran, her head thudding, into the hotel and up the stone staircase to her room. Inside it, she locked the door and laid hot hands along her cheeks, and after a minute she went into the bathroom and splashed tepid water from the tap over her face.
    She didn’t go down to dinner that evening, said it was too hot and she would prefer a salad in her room. No, there was nothing wrong with her, she assured her father, but she understood they had to leave for Mombasa tomorrow morning, and after such a day she would rather rest up. She had a couple of letters to write anyway.
    But Peg didn’t write the letters. She paced from the room into the ba l cony and back again, wondering just how the proposed changes would affect her lively, one-track father. The island was his home, his plantation was a part of him and he’d have to keep it, whatever the cost. To lose it would be worse than losing a limb.
    It would be easy for Steve Cortland and the other young men to adjust to a new regime. They were in copra for the profits, but her father wasn’t. His crops had bought the cottage in Kent and comfortably kept the three of them in two different establishments. They had paid his fare home, and covered the cost of dozens of expensive gifts, and made sure there was always a comfortable balance at the bank. But for Jim Maldon they had done much more; they had given him a reason for living.
    He had loved her mother; of course he had. But he would only have been half alive without the plantation. Her mother had known it, suffered perhaps, but placed his happiness above the pleasure of having him always near.
    But if Jim lost his plantation, all his wife’s willing sacrifice went for nothing. He might as well have given up long ago, and spent the years, albeit less excitingly, in England. There had been times, since she had grown out of her girlhood, when Peg had questioned her parents’ relationship. If you loved a man you wanted him near, within touch. You had to watch his movements, listen to the cadences of his voice, smell his tobacco and tweed, cherish his scuffed slippers lying beside his chair, become exasperated with his calm maleness but dependent on it. And you had to feel the physical pangs of need and satisfaction. It had seemed impossible that Jim, of the abrupt and loving letters, should have found it necessary to place his plantation above his family.
    Now, though, she was beginning to understand him. For him, too, life was meant to be lived; but he was