Table Of ContentDEAR ADVERSARY
Kathryn Blair
The Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia, where the primitive still exists alongside
the ultramodern, and fabulous natural beauty alongside industrialization, forms
the background to the story of Morny Blake and Grant Randall.
Morny was a young schoolteacher, Grant head of an important mining
syndicate. He was used to managing people and things, and assumed that he
could manage Morny too.
But she instinctively resisted his too-hasty domination, for a woman likes to be
mastered only when she can feel that she is also loved—and Morny was all too
certain that Grant had given his love elsewhere.
CHAPTER ONE
T C ! It had a round, sultry sound. One imagined an aerial view of a
HE OPPERBELT
vast strip of jungle splodged here and there with vine-smothered mining gear, a
baked-up town where technicians lived with their families or with other
technicians, and a dim wooden office on a dusty street in which Uncle Luke
prepared, printed and published his newspaper. At least, that was how Morny
Blake had pictured this part of Northern Rhodesia. Uncle Luke had occasionally
sent her a copy of the Singana News, and she had never missed an item in the
six small sheets; from them she had gained her conception of the place.
Sitting beside him in the old tourer, Morny began with some excitement to
realize that the weekly newspaper had presented only half the scene, the half
which interested the community itself. It hadn’t mentioned that the town was
situated on the side of a hill whose base was washed by a curved blue lake, that
upon the hillsides grew Rhodesian teak, cotton, tobacco and tea; nor was it
necessary to print descriptions of the spacious residences which looked down
over the lake and across to the little jade hills and mauve peaks of the Chungwa
Mountains. Its readers knew such facts already.
“Big, isn’t it?” said Uncle Luke with some satisfaction. “The finest bit of
country between Victoria Falls and the Congo border, and the best of it is, the
Singana Mine can’t be seen from anywhere in the town. It’s round the corner of
the hill, in the valley.”
“But why didn’t you tell me in your letters it was so lovely!” she exclaimed.
“I wouldn’t have had the least doubt about coming, then.”
He nodded his fluffy grey head at the windscreen, his expression wise. “I
wouldn’t have you taken in by the beauty of the place—that wouldn’t have been
fair to you. I wrote to you that it’s not uncommon to find lion spoor in one’s
garden on a morning, that you’ll often be bored, that there’s hardly anyone else
of your age. Those things are still true, my dear.”
“But you’re here, Uncle Luke. We hadn’t much outside entertainment on the
Yorkshire moors, but we had wonderful times!”
Luke Penrose gave her an affectionate sideways glance. Morny wasn’t pretty
in the accepted sense, but in his opinion she had something far more valuable
than prettiness. She had a deep, intelligent brow, smoky, grey-blue eyes and
fine, mahogany-colored hair with yellow streaks in it. And in spite of (or
because of) being more or less stranded in the world at an early age, she was
sweet and courageous. She didn’t know it, but she made his life complete, gave
point and substance to living. There was hardly a thing he wouldn’t do for his
niece.
Morny at that moment was staring out upon the approaching township of
Singana, and thinking back upon the years she had spent with Uncle Luke in
Yorkshire. Her mother had been his younger sister, and when both her parents
had died in a car crash there had been no one but Uncle Luke to take care of the
young Morny. So, with a housekeeper, they had lived in a stone cottage within
sight of the moor, and Uncle Luke had edited the local biweekly newspaper,
while Morny attended high school and, like all young things, set about growing
up.
The break-up of the home had happened devastatingly but not suddenly.
Confronted by the necessity to choose a career, Morny had shown a preference
for schoolteaching, but a reluctance to enter a training college and leave her
uncle alone. For a whole summer they had cheerfully argued, and at the end of it
the situation was partly resolved by the marriage and removal from the
neighbourhood of the housekeeper. Uncle Luke could not face settling down
with someone new and unused to his ways, nor would he countenance Morny’s
suggestion that she take a post near by and keep house for him. She had her own
life to live. With all the determination of which he was capable he had sent
Morny to do her training in London, sold the house and moved himself to a
private hotel.
Recalling her last meeting with Uncle Luke in London, Morny could still feel
the twinge of shock at his news, the inward panic at the very mention of being
severed from him. He had sat smiling gently in the dour hostel lounge.
“It isn’t for long, Morny, so you musn’t be upset. I’d take you with me now,
but it’s best that you complete your training—to student-teaching standard, at
any rate. By then I’ll know whether this new venture is going to be successful,
and either you can come out to Rhodesia or I’ll come home. The colonies are
crying out for schoolteachers, you know, and Rhodesia prefers people from
Britain.”
She hadn’t been at all sure that she wanted to teach in Rhodesia, had even
entertained a treacherous hope that the newspaper he had been engaged to
initiate and produce in Singana might turn out a flop. After a while, though, she
had had to accept the fact that Uncle Luke was in Northern Rhodesia for good,
for his salary did not come from the threepences paid for the paper, nor from the
advertisers’ subscriptions, but from the powerful Singana Mine Syndicate. The
whole thing was subsidized by the company for the benefit of its employees,
and the managing director had so taken to the quiet, humorous, elderly Luke
Penrose that he had built for him a house and received Luke’s suggestion that a
school be started with a degree of enthusiasm.
So here was Morny, twenty-two years old and with four years’ training
behind her, hoping, apprehensively, that Rhodesian children were not too
precocious, and that Mrs. Bartlett, who had been a teacher in England before her
marriage and would be in charge of the new school, might not be difficult to
work with. In any case, there would be Uncle Luke, the mountains and that
incredibly graceful lake.
They were entering Singana now, a wide main street lined with white cement
shops and divided down its middle by a row of young, scarlet-flowering kaffir
blooms.
“There,” said Uncle Luke, indicating with a flourish the sign Singana News
over a modern entrance, “is the hub of the town, the floodlight, the inspiration.
And none of your cheap, up-country journalism, either. I write most of it
myself.”
“It’s a beautiful building—almost worthy of you. Maybe I’ll be able to help.”
“No doubt about that. The school won’t be ready till next month, and it’ll
only keep you busy in the mornings, anyway. The school hours are seven-thirty
till one in these parts; no child could learn in the heat of the afternoon. The
shops close from one till three-thirty and everyone goes to sleep. Then we start
up all over again, and that’s the grandest half of the day; everyone uses the
evenings to the utmost. You’ll love it when you become adapted to it.”
Morny laughed a little. Trust Uncle Luke to dig in as if he were made for this
type of existence; he never felt out of place anywhere. But she could not
imagine herself quickly becoming accustomed to these huge, exotic trees, the
low white buildings, the heat, the space and, above all, the hordes and hordes of
Africans.
All the way from the Cape she had been intrigued and fascinated by the
brown skins and the black, the woolly heads, the elaborate feminine
headdresses, the multicolored blankets, the bulging collars of beads upon which
the dark faces appeared to rest as if they had no connection with the swaying
hips and sturdy legs below. From the Limpopo northwards she had noticed the
dresses becoming prettier and the figures more shapely; the villages were as
primitive as one expected them to be and, once across the Zambesi, most signs
of civilization among Africans were absent.
These people who milled along the pavements were predominantly black and
male. Many of them wore the white shorts and tunic shirt which formed the
usual garb of house-servants, but the rest were half-naked or clad only in a
threadbare blanket. The women, in flowered cotton frocks, invariably had a
baby slung in a shawl at the back. Here and there a dandy lounged in
exaggerated European dress; they were probably boss-boys at the mine,
explained Luke.
Yes, this was surely Africa, breathed Morny to herself; the Africa one read
about but scarcely believed in. She was now in the Copperbelt, that fabulous
region which spreads across Northern Rhodesia and extends for hundreds of
miles into the Belgian Congo. Yet the town was more modern than the newest
garden city in England.
Uncle Luke’s house lay back from the main road on the other side of the
town. It was white and square, with a green tiled roof and a green-floored
veranda from which one surveyed two smooth lawns within brilliant borders of
cannas, giant gladioli and cactus dahlias.
Just then Morny had no time to notice more. She entered a small tiled hall
which led, through an archway, into a deliciously cool lounge. The furnishings
—tweed chairs and curtains, a plain teak table and positively not a single piece
of ornamentation—was severe and practical, but Morny could imagine Uncle
Luke buying the minimum of requirements, and keeping at the back of his mind
the thought that Morny must select all the small luxuries which transform
furnished rooms into a home. That would be typical of Uncle Luke.
She turned suddenly and hugged him. “You’re a pet. There’s not another
Uncle Luke in the whole universe!”
“That may be true,” he conceded mildly, “but there’s probably a younger man
somewhere who’ll take you away from me some day.”
“Not for years and years, and even then I’ll insist that you live with us. Is this
really your very own house?”
“Every brick, and for ever.” He let out a sigh and sank into one of the chairs
with his legs stretched in front of him. “Do you know that we’ve travelled well
over two thousand miles by road since you docked last Thursday? We’ll have
some lunch and rest. You can unpack this evening when it’s cooler.”
“Hadn’t you better introduce me to the house-boy?”
“Boys,” he corrected her heavily. “There are three of them, and two garden-
boys. Don’t ask me why it takes five to look after one white man, but I can
assure you that it does. I named them myself. The cook-boy is Joe, the one who
polishes the floors is Samson, and Thomas is a sort of butler-valet. One
energetic boy could do the lot, but they prefer to descend upon one in a bunch
and share the wages. We have a budding native village at the back of the
garden.”
Morny was aching to ask more, much more, but he looked so sleepy that she
said, “Go straight to your room, Uncle Luke. I’ll find the kitchen and tell the
boy to bring your lunch to you. Don’t bother about me. I live here now!”
“And you’re bossing me about again,” he said with a twinkle. “It’s quite a
relief—just what I’ve been waiting for.”
Just what she, too, had been waiting for, reflected Morny, as she took a breath
and plunged through the corridor to the back of the house. She had missed him
so dreadfully these last three years that it seemed impossible she could ever
want to leave him again. But Uncle Luke never let her forget that marriage was
woman’s most splendid career. Even while urging her to train for teaching
because she wanted it so badly, he had constantly reminded her that falling in
love was the best training for wifehood. And he a bachelor!
The kitchen was moderately sized and white, the house-boy, Thomas, was
large and black, very black. He gave Morny a hypnotic stare, thereby dispersing
some of her confidence. But she told him, firmly and unmistakably, to carry
lunch to the master’s bedroom, and to prepare a second tray for herself.
Thomas’s, “Yes, missus,” had a dubious note.
In the corridor she met her uncle at his room door. He waved at the room
opposite.
“That’s yours, Morny. Samson’s jut put your trunk in there. I’ll have to be up
again at three to pop down to the office, but you can snooze for as long as you
like. The rooms are thick-walled and cool.”
Morny had never felt less like snoozing. She wandered round her bare little
bedroom and thought of the happy days ahead, when she would beautify each
room at the smallest possible cost. Half the pleasure of such a task was in
determining how much one could do on limited cash.
Presently, having tried some of the salad on the tray, she opened her trunk and
shook out a patterned linen dress she had bought at the Cape. It had a low,
square neckline and deep, cool armholes; what balm to get into it and shed the
navy sport suit in which she had travelled.
Freshened, she stole out to the corridor, along to the lounge. White plastic
blinds had been drawn, but she lifted one and peeped out at the garden bathed in
sunshine, at the long hedge encrusted with purple flowers. Uncle Luke had
planned the garden with gay disregard of color schemes, but, somehow, vivid
warring colors were representative of the climate. The greenness of grass and
foliage helped them to live together.
The peremptory ring of the telephone caused her to drop the blind and swing
round in astonishment. She hadn’t thought of there being telephones in Singana;
though to be sure, if there were, Uncle Luke’s would be one of the busiest.
Swiftly, so that the noise should not disturb him, she crossed into the hall and
raised the receiver. At once a young man asked politely, “Is that the residence of
Mr. Penrose?”
Morny replied, “Yes,” and waited.
The line clanged. Then came a crisp, autocratic voice, “Is that you, Luke?”
Morny said, “This is his house, but Mr. Penrose is resting.”
“Put me through to his room, will you?”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that. He’s asleep.”
“What day does he think this is—Sunday? Put me through!”
There are some voices which become smooth and almost caressing over the
telephone, and others which are apt to make the hands clench and the
temperature rise. This one was of the latter category; it ignited sparks within
Morny.
“I’m sorry,” she said, not sounding it, “but Mr. Penrose can’t be disturbed. He
hasn’t long gone to bed, and he’s tired.”
“So he’s tired! I’m not surprised—not in the least. Who is it speaking?”
“I think I should be the one to ask that!”
An instant’s pause. “That’s fair enough. This is Grant Randall. I suppose
you’re the niece he went to meet at Cape Town—the reason he travelled nearly
five thousand miles by car to show the sights, when he could have hopped a
plane from Broken Hill and got there and back within three days. Is Luke all
right?”
His slight softening conveyed nothing to Morny. She could see him at the
other end of the line, thickset, florid, with a horrible square jaw and one of those
mouths that dip at the corners.
“He’s sleeping,” she returned stubbornly, “and I’m not waking him for
anyone till three o’clock. I’ll tell him you called.”
“You needn’t trouble,” issued calmly and coolly from the receiver. “I’ll see
him this afternoon at his office.”
She heard the sharp ping as he replaced his telephone, took a furious breath
and was about to drop her own into place when the first man who had spoken
said in hushed accents, “Are you there? I feel you ought to be told that these are
the private offices of Mr. Grant Randall, the managing director of the Singana
Mine Syndicate.” Then he, too, rang off.
Morny felt herself go hot, then clammily cold. Grant Randall, the big noise of
