Unknown by Unknown Page A

bath and a shave, and in a few minutes Sam came to set the table. Despairingly, she wished Manoela were here with warm water, a towel and a clean dress.
    Teeth clamped, she swung down her legs, used a chair-back for support and stood up. After a moment’s vertigo she got out to the veranda and leaned against one of the posts. Sam must have called his master, for Julian strode out, mopping off traces of his shave with a face towel, which he threw down on to a chair. He sat on the rail and looked up at her, squeezed her fingers and let them drop.
    “Hell, isn’t it, being a lone woman . . . but you chose it, Phil, and you’ve no option but to take what comes. I’d drive you up to the mission if it weren’t so full of disease.”
    “I shall be all right,” she muttered. “It’s odd, but losing the house—and everything, is much harder to bear than this,” indicating her swathed arm. “I’ve no home, no clothes, and for the next six months, till my yearly allowance comes from the lawyer in Cape Town, I shall be penniless.”
    “None of which is important,” he said crisply. “I’ll provide you with food and shelter, and Matt will order you some clothes. What worries me,” teasingly, “is how to get you washed and slicked up now. The best way would be for you to have a shot at it in my bedroom, and to call me if you’re stuck.”
    His demeanour, though considerate and helpful, dared her to give in. The time for collapse was past and from now on she had to build. His attitude was: “We’ll help you, but don’t forget that you brought it on yourself.” Like everything else at the moment, it hurt.
    Matt’s mien, when he strolled in mid-morning, was more sentimentally sympathetic. He patted her head and clucked with distress, and his jaw literally slipped when he noticed the discolouration at her throat.
    He stayed to lunch, and afterwards the two men conferred over her temporary quarters and left Phil to rest. At about four Sam brought tea, and when Julian came home at dusk she was sitting on the veranda, the small capable hands locked together in her lap, her face colourless and resigned.
    He brought her gin in a lime and soda and had something similar himself, but he made no effort at conversation till the glasses were empty and Phil had returned to moody contemplation of the black outlines of the trees.
    Then he said: “Crawford’s peeved that you should have fought your way out here last night when he and Drew were only two hundred-odd yards from your house. I told him you were probably driven by an instinctive dread of passing Daker’s place.”
    “I suppose that was it,” she agreed dispiritedly. “You’re sorry you came to me?”
    “You’ve been very kind, and it’s wonderfully generous of you to arrange living space for me, but . . .”
    She halted, and Julian, apparently, had no intention of helping her out. He finished his cigarette and stubbed it.
    “Would you like to go to your quarters now?” he asked offhandedly, “or will you stay to dinner?”
    “I’ll go now,” she chose.
    He brought a flashlight and took a firm, impersonal grip of her right arm, just at the back of her elbow. They passed the fermenting sheds and the garage, a large storehouse and some smaller sheds. The last but one had three new white wooden steps leading up to a door. Julian went ahead to open up; he scraped a match and set it to the wick of a lamp.
    Light grew in the room, illumining a whitewashed wood ceiling and log walls, an iron bed covered by a large blue blanket, and a vaguely familiar Belgian rug on the new floor. The lamp stood on a lowboy, its plain cream shade reflected in a square mirror. Away in the shadows lurked an armchair, a dining chair and a small table. As she surveyed one article after another, Phil’s chest went harsh with emotion.
    “It’s crude,” he said, “but you can superintend improvements. We’ve fixed you up with an outhouse which you can use as a bathroom, and so