They Met in Zanzibar Read Online Free PDF Page B

veranda and sloping out a good three feet beyond the walls all round, to guard the stucco from rain. When Peg first saw the house the walls were red with mud to about window level. The rains did that every year, Jim explained philosophically; as the dry season began you sluiced them down and repainted them. No trouble at all.
    Inside, the house was bare and neat, though it was doubtful whether it would remain so with Jim in residence. There was a living room with a small dining table in the window and a bulgy little three-piece suite in black and red flowered cretonne which had faded to brown and plum colour. A low cupboard which no doubt held drinks and table accessories, an extra armchair and a primitive carved stool made up the rest of the room’s furnishings. There were no curtains, only a reed blind through which the air could filter day and night.
    The bedrooms held even less. Jim’s had the bare essentials in local wood which had been re-va rn ished d u ring his absence and looked sticky, and in Peg’s room there was only a wooden bed with a net spring and a coir mattress, and a cupboard full of junk and fish moths.
    As Jim said: “Never had much use for a second bedroom - just kept an extra bed here in case it should be needed. I wasn’t sure you’d be coming out with me, but you can have my room till we get things fixed up.”
    “Not I,” said Peg. “You’ll battle with that varnish yourself! I’m going to have a wonderful time furnishing my room.”
    “You do that. And don’t be stingy about it just because it may be temporary. Even if you go back to England and get married, I shall like to have the room there ready for your visits.”
    Peg answered him with a smile. With Steve Cortland and his advice five or six days away, she was feeling almost as her father did - that nothing on earth could dislodge him from his own green stretch of the island.
    And what a glorious green patch it was! The house stood in a clearing with a vegetable garden at its back and thick emerald grass in front. There were mango trees to the right, huge, thick-leaved things with hundreds of small green fruits for ming along the boughs, and to the left of the house there were thickets of bananas, a few tall papa y a trees and some orange bushes which again were laden with small green fruit. And straight behind all the fruit trees were the coconut palms, thousands of them reaching their shining green tops into the heavenly blue sky. Peg never quite recovered from her first delight in beholding the great fat coconuts clustering way up there just under the waving frond, with their little brothers a bit higher and the newest arrivals tight against the heart of the palm. Three generations on every tree, Jim said. With copra such a valuable commodity, you couldn’t lose.
    Though Peg hardly left the house and garden during those first days, she was completely enthralled with Motu. Each morning she awoke with a sense of astonishment, and gaily she went through the day, mostly in shorts and a shirt, tidying up and pl anning, cooking a bit, strolling between the potato patch, which was all tops and no potatoes, and the beds of yellow tomatoes, egg-plant and Malay beans. She got to know the houseboy and his foibles.
    His name, he told her, was Ngai, which the tuan had changed to Nosoap - he couldn’t think why, though he had no objection to the name. Privately, Jim had explained: “I didn’t name him. When he first came to see me, several years ago, he started begging - literally begged the shirt off my back. I said no soap - had to say it a good many times - and the next thing I knew he’d told everyone he was Tuan Maldon’s cook-boy, Nosoap. It so happened he did know how to cook, so I let him stay.”
    Peg laughed. Nothing was quite normal in this place and yet the men here had become so used to the abnormal that to them the outside world was lopsided. All the men she met during her first couple of weeks on the island had that one