Plantation Doctor by Kathryn Blair Page A

alongside.
    “That’s the Denton fleet,” Claud said. “I have to send my quota by the coastal service whenever they have space to spare. That’s why it often spoils before it gets away.”
    “ Couldn’t you sell your bales to Denton and let them handle them with their own?”
    His glance at her was smiling and indolent. “My stuff doesn’t rise to the Denton quality; they wouldn’t touch it. I’ll take you round the place one day. We’re not averse to a sprinkling of vine flowers and orchids among the trees.”
    “One day,” she echoed. “Are you breaking it gently that you can’t fix a passage for me to Akasi?”
    “Of course not. I wasn’t thinking.” He smoothed her hand as it lay between them. “I put out feelers in a few directions this morning, but being Saturday I couldn’t get far. I’m hoping for results on Monday.”
    “But that will be too late. I can’t risk passing Mrs. Latimer on the way.”
    “We’ll arrange something. Don’t jitter — it makes lines in your face.”
    She had to be satisfied with that and go on hoping. Claud pulled up at the club and they had lunch in a nearly empty dining-room. He ordered wine, but when she refused it he did not insist that she take some. He was setting himself out to please her, and she was grateful. Claud ’ s personality was light and entertaining, but just a little obscure. He gave the impression of yielding part of himself and being willing to yield more. And he had the way — all too rare among men — of making her feel that there was no one else in the world with whom he would rather be. With him Lyn felt mature and happy.
    He took her into the club library and showed her specimens of African carving and leatherwork, old stuff which differed tremendously from that turned out for tourists. On the wall was an aged framed chart of the West African coast, and he confessed to an ambition for a study of his own, where the seventeenth-century maps he had collected and sent to England for safe keeping could be hung and treasured. On the back of an envelope he sketched for her the cottage in a backwater in the north of London which was his and his sister’s.
    “Hazel uses it occasionally at week-ends, but most of the time she shares a flat in Notting Hill with another stage aspirant. Budding actresses always cling together. She’s twenty-four, and sick with the longing to get into a good repertory company.”
    “A dramatic actress?”
    “That’s her aim.”
    “You’re fond of her,” said Lyn sympathetically.
    “I am,” he admitted. “If I could afford it I’d put on a West End play with Hazel in the lead. She’d make a go of it, too and bring me a fortune. You’d like her,” he finished. “She’s all that I’m not — a sticker, and terribly sincere.”
    The hours passed quickly. There was much about Claud Merrick that roused an instinctive wariness in Lyn: his worldliness and look of dissipation, the case with which he conveyed compliments and his open distrust of the professed principles of other men. But the wry softness with which he spoke of his sister’s yearnings, his affection for his maps and the family cottage — they were qualities which she understood and cherished.
    It was after half-past four when he returned her to Denton, and when they parted he had her promise to spend Sunday afternoon with him, viewing the Merrick plantation and the teeming river which snaked along its boundary and was used by his latex-laden canoes.
    As soon as he had gone Lyn hastily changed into a pleated tennis frock, and got out the racquet which Roger had lent her. A dusting of powder did not disguise the fact that she was perspiring, but she was too late to subside into an easy chair and cool off.
    She crossed the clearing diagonally, passed between two of the houses and came to the beautifully kept hard courts which were covered about twenty feet up by a thick red roof that was supported all round on slim tree logs. Both courts were