They Met in Zanzibar by Kathryn Blair Page B

clearly. “Both of us.”
    “And you’re looking forward to getting married?”
    “Yes.”
    Steve opened the car door, drawled quietly, close to her ear, “Be careful, young Peg. At his age he’s either had affairs you don’t know about or he’ll be a weak lover - which wouldn’t suit your temperament a bit. You can’t have it all ways.”
    Peg did not answer. She starte d the car, waved perfunctorily and drove away. She didn’t have to look back to know that Steve had sent a mocking glance after her and gone about his business.
    Over lunch she told her father, carelessly, that she had run into Steve and he’d said the company were allowing a month for Jim’s decision. There was no talk on the subject. Jim shrugged as if he couldn’t take the trouble to think about it, he ate his lunch and wait to his room for a rest. At four, when he decided to drive down for a swim, he seemed as cheerful and confident as ever. He dived through the rollers, competed with Peg on a surf board and benignly smoked a cheroot as the sun swiftly dipped behind the palms. It was dark when they got back to the house and he took his shower. Peg heard him singing in the bathroom, and she wondered why Steve took it all so seriously. Her father didn’t care a bean about the others on the island.
    It was a couple of days later, while she was following Dr. Passfield’s instruction that she dab antiseptic into a certain child’s ear each morning, that Peg heard discontented murmurings among the people seated outside the house. She pressed a scrap of clean cotton wool into the ear she had cleaned, found a sweet for the child and led him out to where two or three women were seated in the shade of the house. The babble ceased as she appeared and the women slowly got up, as though to leave.
    “Weren’t you waiting to see me?” Peg asked one of them.
    The woman lowered her head shyly and began to walk away. But Peg called quickly, “What is it? Would you rather I took your baby to the doctor?”
    None of the women answered. In their faded sarongs they almost bus tl ed away through the trees. Peg wasn’t perturbed. Someone must have called them to a meeting of some sort; perhaps they were going to stage one of those dances Nosoap had told her about. He’d know, anyway.
    But when Peg questioned the houseboy he was evasive. Yes, he thought there had been a meeting, but he didn’t know much about it. No, it had nothing to do with the mem’s little clinic. The tuan would know.
    Actually, Jim heard about it the following day, when his head man demanded a separate house for each worker. Jim came into the house shaking a fist, but he was good-humoured about it.
    “I told them they’d get what they want, but they’ll have to wait. I feel a bit mad that I didn’t put it over to them first, when you mentioned it, Peg. That would have taken the wind out of their sails!”
    Nothing catastrophic after all, it seemed. Peg’s patients drifted back next morning, and that afternoon she drove a prematurely-born baby up to the Passfields’ house, for incubation. She had just got back when Michael Foster arrived.
    Michael looked trim in fresh whites, his fairish hair sleek and shining. He grinned self-consciously. “I’ve even had two shaves today,” he confessed. “For Lynette, a man has to be impeccably turned out - even her brother.”
    “Oh, is she arriving today? Haven’t you time to drink a cup of tea?”
    “ I hadn’t better. It might make me sweat. But go ahead and have yours. I came to ask if you’d drive up to Motu town with me, to meet Lyn.”
    “I’d like to. Are you sure of what time she’ll get in? My father and I were on a ship that was two days late.”
    “Lynette is too impatient to travel by ship. She’s coming on the government service plane.”
    “V.I.P. treatment. Very nice.” Peg offered him biscuits and took one herself. “Have you fixed up her bedroom?”
    “She won’t be satisfied with it - she has a sort of