To the Islands Read Online Free Page B

found himself resenting it, on behalf of the older man, whose simplicity made him feel fraternal.
    Behind her the altar cross and candlesticks glinted in the shadowy sanctuary. She was pretty; but at times so intensely serious that he found himself withdrawing a little. He could guess that she had been used to success, her schooldays probably a litter of trophies, so that her one failure, as a medical student, had hit her hard. And now, as a mission nurse on a salary of sixty pounds a year, she was determined not to fail again. She was perhaps a fanatic of sorts, like a nun.
    ‘You’re looking tired,’ she said.
    ‘I was up in the middle of the night,’ he said, ‘to meet the boat and unload.’
    ‘You have a hand in everything,’ she said. ‘There’s no need for you to do so much work, all you need do is run the school.’
    ‘How can you not get involved?’ he said. ‘It grows on you.’
    Sent there by the Education Department, to stay a year or two, he had never intended to be involved. But the country had taken him in. There was first of all the easy affection of the children, brought up to expect from an adult nothing else but affection. And from them his feeling had extended to their parents and older siblings, the bush nomads, the rock and waters of the land itself. The phrase ‘
gre ngaianangga
, my country’, so often in their mouths, would keep recurring to his mind.
    At times he chafed at his life there, the goldfish-bowl existence of a white man. It would be good, he thought on empty nights, to get drunk with a friend like Terry Dixon, to flirt, or something more, with a girl like Helen. But there was around them that fence of vocation. And he was being drawn within it. The country and Heriot, between them, were taking possession of him like a colony.
    Her hair would be soft to touch. He would have liked to cup his hands around her face.
    One night he dreamed that Heriot was making magic on him. And he woke rebelling. I’m too young, he was telling Heriot. I want to fool around, live the life that Terry has given up, away from blackboards and from church.
    At the camp the barking of many dogs commented on some arrival or departure. A child shouted at the far end of the village. He looked at the white goats deep in pasture, beyond them the encircling blue of the hills.
    ‘Look at Djediben,’ Helen remarked. ‘Asleep again.’
    He pushed himself off the tree and stretched. ‘I could join her, too,’ through a yawn.
    ‘Don’t go to sleep near Djediben. She murdered her second husband, or helped her third husband to do it.’
    ‘Helped Dambena?’ he asked, startled.
    ‘Dambena’s the fifth, Mabel says.’
    ‘Gosh, what a woman. No wonder Rex is no good.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice far away, ‘Rex. What now, I wonder.’
    ‘We’ll find out.’
    ‘I must go and see if Mr Heriot has any letters for me.’
    ‘Don’t tell him,’ Gunn said quickly, ‘if he doesn’t know.’
    She smiled and said: ‘I no monkey, brother,’ and walked away through the track in the grass, through Heriot’s gate, along the path bordered with pink and white vincas. She wore sandals and her legs were tanned; her dark hair was cut short around her neck because of the heat. The watch on her wrist caught the sun and flashed it back to him in time to the swing of her bare arms.
    Standing in the shadow of the baobab, feeling the bark with his thumbs, he thought: Why am I always watching them, Helen, Heriot? And where is this point of peace around which I should have my orbit?
    At his desk, behind piles of letters, Heriot sat staring at nothing with a blue, veined eye. A cigarette burned away between his stained fingers, his mouth was set in a line that somehow accentuated the unexpected sensitivity of his lips. So far away he seemed that Helen, standing in the doorway shadowed by tall poinciana trees, considered leaving and returning later when he too should have returned to the house of his vacated