Fair Horizon Read online

  Fair Horizon by Rosalind Brett

  Karen had come to Kenya ready and eager to fall in love with this exciting, dramatically beautiful country. This was where her much-loved cousin Elizabeth had come to live with her husband Justin, and it was at their coffee farm that Karen was to stay as

  governess to their small son Keith. What Karen hadn't bargained for was falling in love with Mark Howard—brilliant, charming Mark, a dedicated engineer. Bridges and roads were his dominion; always building, always moving on to new, untamed territory, he had very little time for the quiet, settled life of the farming community. And it was to this man that Karen gave her heart, knowing full well that with her lack of experience, her gentle, unsophisticated approach to life, she stood no chance of winning his love.

  CHAPTER I

  THE best feature of driving in an ox-cart," remarked Elizabeth, "is

  the rhythm. After an hour or so, when your bones have loosened up, you sway with the oxen. You might be in a ship."

  Karen failed to see any connection between the sea-voyage which had ended at Mombasa four days ago, and the pitching of the little wooden cart which she shared with her cousin and two large trunks, behind a sextet of hefty brown beasts whose aroma was decidedly of the earth. The small dusty boy at the head of the ox-team, hurling blood-freezing imprecations to encourage speed, was part of the unreality of this startling land of Kenya.

  "Will Justin be annoyed that we didn't wait at Guaba for the car?" she asked.

  "Justin's never annoyed," Elizabeth reassured her comfortably. "Mind you, there are times when a philosophical husband can be more infuriating than a plague of ants, but, on the other hand, he's quite often a blessing in a country like this, where you're at the mercy of the climate and the geology. You'll find he hasn't changed much since you last saw him."

  That was the spring, reflected Karen, when she herself was thirteen. She had stood on the quay at Southampton, between her own mother and Elizabeth's, who were sisters, staring up at the two faces which even at that distance had appeared to smile through tears.

  Elizabeth and Justin had married only a month before, and their wedding gifts, packed in tin boxes, lay in the ship's hold, solid adjuncts for the home they intended to create in the tropics. Karen remembered slipping a hand into her mother's and another into Aunt Mary's, and feeling both the larger hands tighten over hers as the ropes were cast off and the great ship began to move. Fiercely, she had fought down the lump in her own throat. She had always been fond of her cousin Elizabeth, and she was glad for her to be happy with Justin . . . But she did wish they would take her with them to the coffee farm in Kenya, even if life was going to be a struggle for them at first.

  As soon as letters began to arrive, the household of three cheered up and when, about a year after their departure, news came of the birth of Elizabeth's son, Keith, Aunt Mary looked only for the time when she would see her daughter again and the little grandson. But, before that could happen, poor Aunt Mary died, and Karen and Mrs. Ainsley were left to carry on communications with Elizabeth Paterson.

  At that time and until a week before she had left England, Karen was a secretary in a shipping-office and doing spare-time duty in the hospital staff-restaurant which her mother superintended. When Dr. Marsden, the elderly house-surgeon of the hospital, paid more and more social calls to their little flat in Maida Vale, Karen hoped and suspected that his interest in her comely mother might develop along more than friendly lines. Their marriage announcement coincided with a long letter from Elizabeth, asking Karen to come out to Kenya.

  Jolting along in the ox-wagon, Karen smiled at the recollection of her own sudden, intense excitement on that day four months ago, when one

  climax had followed the other; in a mood of deep and grateful happiness for her mother's remarriage after so many lonely years, she had slit open the letter from Elizabeth, and the tenuous dream which she must subconsciously have cherished ever since that day at Southampton eight years ago, took definite shape in her mind.

  "Don't worry about how you're going to earn your keep, my dear," wrote her cousin. "Keith is a little barbarian with too much intelligence, but at seven he can't read a word. You'll have your hands full knocking the alphabet and multiplication tables into him, I can tell you. But, if you should find an hour to spare at any time, Tustin will shamelessly heap his office-work upon you. I expect you wonder what I do with my days, and all I intend to answer is—come out and see. You'll love this country, Karen. Do come."

  Elizabeth had met the ship. For a long, astonished moment, she and Karen had stood a yard apart, the dark, placidly smiling woman with good features hidden beneath a sun-toughened skin, and the fair girl in a natural linen suit, her lips slightly parted, her eyes wide and blue as the Kenya sky.

  Karen knew that where men were concerned she could

  use no tricks — no guile ... for she had never

  learnt any! Her affair of the heart held all the

  bitter-sweetness of uncertainty .

  Why do nice girls fall in love so unsuitably?

  Then each had cried the other's name and wholeheartedly and unaffectedly they had hugged one another.

  After that, neither could talk fast enough. They spent a day in the sticky heat of Mombasa and another in cosmopolitan Nairobi, before taking the branch-line to Guaba,' the nearest point to the coffee farm, where Justin was supposed to have met them. But apparently since the Patersons had last had occasion to use the train from Nairobi, the timetable had been overhauled, and the two women found themselves with two and a half hours to kill at a wayside halt in the middle of a plain burnt brown by a merciless sun.

  "Oh, heavens!" said Elizabeth. "If we wait here, Justin will find two tidy heaps of bones in a large grease-spot and a couple of cabin-trunks. I'm going to ask that boy to conjure me a conveyance."

  Karen stared to the right and to left, backwards and forwards. It looked as though there were no habitation anywhere within a hundred miles. She listened to Elizabeth practising first a mixture of Swahili and English and then a spatter of Kafir on the porter, and was amazed, within ten minutes,

  to see emerging from a cloud of red dust a primitive wagon and team led by a small boy. It was as if the message had gone out over invisible wires and the reply to it had risen straight up through the earth.

  THE country had changed since Guaba. Although the road had risen slightly the whole way and outcrops of pink granite scarred the earth,

  trees grew fairly thickly and, where they were densest, a lush, dampish smell pleasantly tinged the atmosphere. Already Karen was beginning to appreciate moisture in these arid lands.

  "I hope they've made a good job of your room," commented Elizabeth. "Mark had cleared out most of his things before I left but he was sleeping there till last night, which means that the final polish had to wait till today. So long as the bed-linen is fresh and there's a bowl of flowers, you won't mind, will you? That's about as much as Justin and Jimmy, our houseboy, will rise to."

  "Of course not. Who's Mark?"

  "Mark Howard. He's been staying with us for about six weeks surveying a bridge site over the river and building a house near it. Our offspring adores him; when Keith grows up, he's going to build bridges as big as Mark's all over Kenya, irrespective of railway lines and rivers."

  Karen smiled. "Are they building a bridge near the farm?"

  "No, it's down at Grassa, but ours is the nearest place to his site. Mark's built bridges all over South Africa, and several on the Continent, too. He's quite a big noise in the realm inhabited by civil and structural engineers. I should imagine his brain is beautifully marked out and measured, like a blue print. For all that, he's a bit of an enigma. Gives you the feeling that he's been everywhere and seen everything
. . . If he dislikes you he weighs you up in a glance that makes you feel as big as a sixpence."

  "He sounds a little unpleasant. How did you stick him for six weeks?"

  "It's funny, but he grows on you. He's very charming to me, and he and Justin get on well. Keith, without awe of anyone, has annexed him as an only uncle, and I must say that Mark is long-suffering with the little monkey. As a parting gift, he's bought Keith a pony."

  They reached a slight eminence and she tugged down the brim of her hat to shade her eyes, and gazed in front, pointing. "There's Justin, bless his heart, pelting along in the oil-burner—that's the bush car, a box on wheels," she explained in parenthesis. "I wonder if Keith is with him?"

  But Keith, Justin informed them, when he had given Karen a bone-cracking handshake and his slow, endearing smile, had attached himself to Mark for his last day. They'd both be back at about six. Less than half an hour later the car drove past a short belt of orange-trees ending at a five-barred gate which creaked somnolently to and fro in the breeze. Karen saw a log-house embedded among masses of brilliant bloom, a rich thatch of banana leaves protruding a couple of yards all round to give ample

  shelter and coolness to the veranda, and a background of thick, dark-leaved trees.

  Though Elizabeth had described the interior of the house in her letters, it was not a bit as Karen had imagined it. The ceiling, for instance, immediately caught her attention. "Why canvas?" she inquired.

  "For two reasons. Canvas lets through a certain amount of air but it deters large insects and snakes. Thatched roofs have drawbacks; they constantly need repair and they harbour pests—but they're quiet during storms and wonderfully cool. This is the room in which we live, work, and have our being. I hope you won't get tired of it."

  Large and cedar-smelling, the room was simply furnished in teak and tapestry; one end of it, complete with divan suite, faced french doors on to the veranda, while a dining-suite and bookcase occupied the rest of the space. The door to the left of the back wall led into Elizabeth's bedroom. She opened the one to the right.

  "This is your room, Karen. They haven't done too badly with it, have they?"

  Karen stood in the middle of a waxed floor, surveying the white painted room and soaking in the fragrance of the vase of sweet-peas and pinks on the dressing-table. "It's lovely," she said. "I can still smell cedar."

  "I'm not surprised. Most of the house is built of it. In the first place we used it for cheapness—cedar grows abundantly in this district—and now we're glad we did. It seems that cedar is about the only timber that is disagreeable to the palate of the termites. Do you want a bath yet?"

  "I think I'll unpack one of the trunks first."

  "Good. Bathing here is a major operation, except when the river's high."

  LEFT alone, Karen forgot the trunks in her absorption with the short, multi-coloured view from the window. The garden was small but

  perfectly planned, rising in brief terraces that spilled profusions of scarlet salvia and sapphire morning-glory; pools of unidentifiable orange and yellow and white seeped along the stone walls and cascaded to the edge of the square emerald lawn.

  The garden ended at a fringe of red-hot poker aloes where spears flamed against the flawless sky. Behind them, apparently, the ground dropped away for in the distance the billowing tops of the coffee trees looked like an unending stretch of crumpled green velvet that one might dance upon in the moonlight or in the misty dawn. Karen, her perceptions new and keyed up, quivered with the strangeness and beauty of this country to which she had come to live.

  She had just bathed and changed into a candy-striped dress when sudden sounds invaded the living-room—the excited yelp of a terrier, tumbling chatter in a treble voice, Elizabeth's attentive soothing. Karen stood in the doorway, surveying the small dishevelled figure who wriggled on his perch

  at the edge of the dining-table, while his mother dabbed blood from his knee and pressed on an adhesive plaster.

  "Mark dared me, so I had to do it. He said I recovered like a gentleman."

  "Perhaps Mark will be just a weeny bit sorry if you break your neck on that pony," his mother returned calmly.

  "You've got to learn the way to fall!" came her son's reply with great scorn. "It's all a matter of presence of mind." A pause, followed by a polite query, "D'you know what presence of mind is, Mum?"

  "I can't say that I'm familiar with Mark's brand."

  "Well, Mark says that presence of mind mimi—miminises hurt." "Good heavens."

  "And that means," proudly, "that I might have broken my leg this afternoon if I hadn't used my presence of mind." Keith drew a deep, satisfied breath and raised his head. "Oh, hallo." He grinned at Karen, and nudged his mother.

  Elizabeth looked up, smiling. "Karen, meet Keith in his most typical position. He's worn a groove in this table. Get down, darling, and do take Tuppence outside and tie him up. Then ask Jimmy to carry the small bath round to your bedroom the veranda way and I'll come and clean you up a bit."

  "So long, Keith," said Karen. "See you later."

  He didn't move at once. His hands dug into his pockets, and his round face with the indeterminate nose was set in stubborn lines that contrasted ludicrously with the dusting of freckles over the upper half of his face. He regarded Karen unblinkingly. "Mummy told me that you're going to teach me to read and write, but Mark says you can't learn anything properly without wanting to. I hate books."

  "Oh. I rather got the impression that you wished to grow up like .. . Mark."

  "I do."

  "Ask him how old he was when he started school."

  "I have. He was seven, like me, but he went to an exciting school, where his father was the teacher. He learned enough in Nairobi to go to an English university when he was big."

  Karen was growing a little tired of the infallible Mark Howard. "Let's start on a matey footing, shall we?" she said. "We'll read and write together in the mornings and, in the afternoons, you can turn professor and show me how to know an eland when I meet one."

  He stared. "Don't you really know?" She shook her head and he grinned, displaying an engaging gap between his top teeth. "I'll take you down to Snake Hole if you like, and show you a crab spider as big as Tuppence. He lives under a rock and I reckon he's a million years old."

  "The bath, darling," Elizabeth reminded him patiently.

  Obligingly, Keith unbuttoned his shirt. "Can you ride a horse?" he asked of Karen.

  "Not yet, but I mean to learn."

  "I'll teach you," he said, at last obeying his mother's injunction and making for the door. "One of the first things you must practise is how to fall."

  KAREN, amusement accentuating the faint dimple at the left corner of her mouth, shook up a plump cushion and sank into a chair opposite

  an open window. Already dusk was closing in, cooling the air and releasing a blend of tantalising scents. A tall figure paused outside on the veranda, his back to the room. For some reason Karen stayed very still, watching the exceptional width of shoulder in the light khaki jacket, and the economical action with which he smoothed the hair back from his temples.

  That swift twilight was almost gone. Night sketched in, purple shading to black, and one by one the night sounds stole in from the thickets and hills and from the garden below. The shrill chirp of cicadas, the hoarse note of bull-frogs, the metallic whisper of the flying beetle; then the wailing of distant hyenas, and an intermittent prolonged roar which Karen apprehensively attributed to a lion. They were noises which she was eventually to become as accustomed to as the withering sunshine.

  Behind her Jimmy brought in the lamps.

  The man turned from the veranda into the room. "Well, well!" he said in a pleasantly mocking voice that seemed to pluck a string somewhere in Karen's heart. "A gazelle in the lounge. I've seen less probable sights in Africa. How do you do, Miss Karen Ainsley."

  Karen fought an annoying impulse to stammer. "How do you do .. . Mr. Howard."

  While he
called the boy and asked for drinks, she stole a long glance at him. A face not so much strange as different; very lean, the skin stretched tightly across his cheekbones to accentuate the framework of his jaw and the longish, slightly humped nose. A Roman sort of nose, all arrogance, spiced with a trace of contempt.

  There was only charm in his attitude as he took the twin chair to hers and faced 'her across the window space. "Let me see. You're related to Mrs. Paterson, aren't you?"

  "Elizabeth and I are cousins."

  "Oh, yes. She used to take you to school each morning. You sat astride the back of her cycle and once got your scarf chewed up in the spokes." He smiled—a faint lazy movement of chiselled lips. "Most young things go in for hero-worship. Was Elizabeth the object of yours?"

  "To some extent," Karen admitted. "I always wanted to do the things she did, and no one else's opinion meant so much to me. But all that came to an abrupt end when she married Justin and sailed for Kenya."

  "Not quite; you followed her—but without the husband. That was a rather serious omission. This side of Nairobi young men are many, but hard up." As Jimmy brought in the tray, Mark uncrossed his long legs. "Martini, or a long drink?"

  "I'd prefer lime."

  Expertly, giving the task serious attention, he mixed a small fruit cocktail and topped it with the sweetened juice of fresh limes. "Harmless and invigorating," he commented. "I drink half a dozen of these in the course of a day." With studied indolence he reseated himself "I suppose your first reactions to our country match everyone else's . . . superb, thrilling, marvellous, and all the other adjectives?"

  "Yes, but I climbed down a few steps this afternoon. Your roads are terrible, and an ox-cart is not the best means of travelling along them."

  He laughed outright. "Did Elizabeth do that to you? That was wicked of her. In a year's time, possibly less, you'll have a fine metalled road into Guaba, and probably right through to Nairobi. That's part of my contract."