Unknown by Unknown Page B

a month away. I’ll get you some silk.”
    “Damn the party,” she answered. “I just want to be independent—not tied to that log cabin and Julian’s bounty. You’ll let me pay a little of what I owe, but he never will. I hate him.”
    “Your perspective’s all wrong. He’s the big boss and you happen to be one of his minor responsibilities,” Matt told her, brutally casual. “Count yourself lucky that he’s treated you so well. Here, take this bundle of magazines and let me have them back when you’ve finished with them. And stop wanting to alter Julian. He’s set too hard.”
    Phil climbed the steep rut from the waterfront. Reaching the shade of the trees, she dragged the wrapper from the roll of papers and opened one. Dawdling, she arrived at the clearing as the post official in his bush car was leaving. His head bobbed through the window-space.
    “Pardon, senhora. There is one letter for you, but one —a small envelope among Senhor Caswell’s mail. He will give it to you. Many apologies!”
    Phil nodded to him and ran across the grass and up the steps to Julian’s veranda. He was perusing a note in the living-room when she burst in, and he looked up to indicate her letter, which lay apart from his own.
    “There’s your cheque,” he remarked with a half-smile.
    “If you like I’ll change it for you. I’ve plenty of currency in the safe.”
    She used his paper-knife. “I hope the old boy has been generous. I framed my request in a way to wring his heart.”
    But no pink slip was attached to the letter, nor did her panicky tearing of the envelope dislodge a cheque. So she flattened the paper and read most of the closely typed wording before raising her head to encounter Julian’s questioning gaze.
    “What’s wrong?” he demanded.
    Bewildered and fearful, she said: “Maybe I’m dense. Read it, and tell me what he’s getting at.”
    He came and looked over her shoulder, and in a minute he took the letter from her and went through it again.
    “God, what a let-down!” he said. “Your mother must be a bitch.”
    “Looks like it, doesn’t it?” she managed thinly. “He says she was never divorced from my father and has only recently married again. The money is legally hers, not mine. It’s . . . horrible, Julian.”
    “You can’t get away from the law.”
    “Apart from that . . . how could she, after breaking his heart! She was the reason he stayed in the tropics. He worshipped her—Nigel told me so.”
    “Any man who idolises a woman is begging for trouble,” he commented tersely. “I suppose she and her new husband are hard up, so she tried this—and succeeded. You notice she wishes you to write to her at the lawyer’s office?”
    “Convention,” she said bitterly. “She never cared for anyone but herself. I’d rather die than take anything from her.”
    “Melodramatic, but doubtless true,” he allowed. “Well, it could be worse. For three years you’ll be broke, but at twenty-one you’ll get three hundred a year. . .
    “I didn’t see that.”
    “Here it is in the last paragraph. ‘In case this information has come as a shock to you, may I remind you of the clause in your late father’s will which provides for a sum of three hundred pounds to be paid to you on your twenty-first birthday, or on the date of your marriage, whichever comes first, and annually thereafter.’ ”
    She scarcely heard. Her eyes, large and dark, mirrored a sick despair. “I’m untrained. I shall have to go to Cape Town and find some piffling job.”
    “What would you like to do?”
    “I don’t know, except that I’m . . . scared of loneliness. Julian,” she came closer and touched the shirt-cuff rolled above his elbow, “think of something for me—some way I can remain on Valeira and earn my keep.”
    “If you weren’t a girl,” he said with unwonted softness, “I could put you to work—make a planter of you. But you’re as well aware as I am that there’s nothing here for a