by M. M. Kaye
She turned to speak in trenchant Swahili to Zacharia, who was peering into one of the cupboards, and added crossly: ‘He’s getting too old for the work. That’s what it is. I shall have to pension him off.’
‘What’s he been doing now?’ enquired Eden perfunctorily.
‘Lost a pair of my red dungarees. And as one pair hasn’t been ironed yet and another is in the wash, and the pair I wore yesterday are filthy, I’m reduced to wearing a pair of your father’s old corduroys. Sheer carelessness. Oh, do stop rootling round in that cupboard, Zach! If they weren’t there five minutes ago they aren’t there now. Here, take these ones away and get them washed at once. You’d better boil them. And see that they’re dried and ironed by this evening.’
She reached down and picked up the discarded dungarees and blouse that she had worn on the previous day, and making a bundle of them, flung them at the old Kikuyu who caught them deftly and carried them away.
Eden put a coaxing arm around his grandmother’s shoulders and said: ‘Snap out of it, Gran. You can’t tear a strip off everyone in the house on Victoria’s first day here. It’ll give her a wrong impression. Don’t be cross, darling. It’s bad for the blood pressure.’
‘I’m not cross. I’m furious! Zach thinks that Kamau went off to meet that ndito of Lisa’s last night instead of waiting for me. If he did, then of course she would have told him that she’d talked to Lisa, and naturally he wasn’t going to face me after that. Just wait until I get my hands on him, that’s all! I gather he’s gone to help cut lucerne in the east field this morning; thinks he can keep out of my way, I suppose. I’ve told Zach I wish to see him the moment he gets back.’
Em pinned on a diamond brooch and catching sight of Victoria in the looking glass, turned about to study her approvingly.
‘How nice you look, dear. I’d forgotten that you were so pretty. Have you had some breakfast? Good. Well now I’m going to show you the office and give you some idea of what there is to do, and then we’ll do a tour of the house and the gardens, and after luncheon——’
‘After luncheon,’ cut in Eden firmly, ‘I am taking her out in the launch. Unless you propose to keep her nose to the grindstone from the word “Go”?’
‘No, of course not. I want her to enjoy herself. Certainly take her out on the lake. She will like that. And we must arrange a few expeditions – picnic parties, so that she can see something of the Rift. I see no reason why we should mope indoors. Let me see – you are going to take a look at the new bore hole this morning, aren’t you? Then we shall see you at luncheon. Come along, dear.’
She swept Victoria out, and the remainder of the morning was devoted to the programme she had outlined. Eden had been delayed, so luncheon was late, and young Mr Hennessy of the police, accompanied by two police askaris, arrived halfway through the meal, and was kept waiting. ‘It will do him no harm to cool his heels on the verandah,’ observed Em tartly; and she had lingered over the coffee until the hands of the grandfather clock pointed at twenty minutes to three, before going out to see him.
‘I wouldn’t be in Bill Hennessy’s shoes this afternoon for all the coffee in Brazil!’ said Eden, taking Victoria’s arm and hurrying her down a path that wound between a colourful wilderness of plumbago and wild lupins towards the lake. ‘She can’t forget that she knew him when he was a sticky little schoolboy, and to have him questioning her servants in the name of the Law is adding insult to injury. Look out for those thorns.’
He opened the gate into the shamba and ushered Victoria into a lush, green wilderness where the warm air was heavy with the scent of orange blossom and drowsy with the hum of bees, and the damp ground squelched under her sandalled feet.
‘I suppose that’s the trouble with Gran,’ continued Eden. ‘When you get to her age there’s hardly anyone left whom you didn’t know when they were children. Makes it difficult to take them seriously. She must feel like a governess in a schoolroom full of irresponsible brats. All the same, I get a bit tired of being treated as if I were still in the Lower Fourth. If Gran would only realize that I was now an adult she’d put me in as manager in place of that waster, Gilly. Damn it all, I may as well learn how to run it, considering that I shall own the place one day. That is, unless Gran cuts me out of her will and leaves it to you instead.’
‘To me?’ exclaimed Victoria, startled. ‘What nonsense! Why should she do any such thing?’
Eden shrugged his shoulders and preceded her through another gate into a shadowy forest of banana palms. ‘Ask me another. Why does Gran do anything? Because she wants to. Besides, she’s a bit of a feminist, our Em. She may think you’d do more for Flamingo – and for Kenya – than I would. The female of the species being more deadly than the male – and all the rest of it.’
‘Rubbish!’ retorted Victoria. ‘You know quite well that she adores you. She always has. She only snaps at you to try and disguise the fact; and fools nobody.’
Eden laughed. ‘Perhaps. All the same, it’s quite on the cards that she may have thought that I was taking my responsibilities as Heir to the Throne too lightly, and doesn’t think it will do me any harm to realize that if I don’t watch my step she can nominate another candidate. She’s a Machiavellian old darling.’
‘But you don’t think that?’ said Victoria, troubled. ‘I mean, even supposing she did – and she wouldn’t! – you don’t think that I’d do you out of Flamingo, do you?’
Eden stopped, and turned to smile down at her, and her heart did a foolish check and leap. He said: ‘Wouldn’t you, darling? I wonder. You might think that it would serve me right.’
A tide of colour rose to the roots of Victoria’s brown hair and she said confusedly: ‘Don’t be silly, Eden! I never thought – I mean – Well, we made a mistake. That was all. But we’re still friends.’
‘Are we?’ asked Eden soberly. ‘Are we really, Vicky?’
‘Of course,’ said Victoria, making a determined grab at lightness. ‘I’m like Aunt Em. I can’t forget that we were allies against Authority in the days when you were a beastly little boy with scratched knees and a dirty neck.’
But Eden refused to follow her lead. He said, unsmiling: ‘Thank you, Vicky.’ And reaching out he took her hand, and before she realized what he meant to do, he had lifted it and kissed it.
Victoria fought down a strong impulse to snatch it away and run, and an even stronger one to stroke his bent head with her free hand. Heroically resisting both, she said briskly: ‘Do you think we could take some of these bananas on the boat with us? It’s years since I picked one straight off the bunch.’
‘They’re not ripe,’ said Eden a shade sulkily. He turned and walked on down the path, only to stop again a few minutes later with an impatient exclamation. ‘Damn! The hippo have been in again. It’s just ruddy idleness on Gilly’s part; he won’t see that the fences are properly made. What the hell’s the use of a single strand of wire, even if you do run a mild electric current through it? It hasn’t apparently even stopped the remnants of the Mau Mau gangs from keeping open an escape route round the lake!’
Victoria said: ‘Do you think there’s anything in it? Gangs hiding out in the marula, I mean?’
‘No. Though I suppose it’s just possible that the odd man who is still on the run spends a day or two there. There couldn’t be a better hiding place, could there? Just look at it!’
He waved a hand in the general direction of the papyrus swamps that reared up like a solid grey-green wall between the shamba and the Lake. A weird, waving jungle, so dense that a man forcing his way through it, his ears filled by the noise of his own passage, might pass within a yard of another who stood still, and never know it. It stretched for miles along the lake shore, and during the Emergency the gangs had cut their own secret paths and built solidly constructed hides in it.
Years earlier Gerald DeBrett too had cut a wide pathway through the papyrus, and laid down a duckboard to the lake edge where he had built a wooden boat-house supported on piles an
d sheltered by the reeds. It was weather-beaten now, and ramshackle, but Em had kept the approach to it in tolerable repair, and it housed a small rowing boat, a battered punt and a neat white motor launch.
‘We had to have a guard on this all through the Emergency,’ said Eden, casting off and poling the launch down a narrow channel between shadowy walls of papyrus. ‘Damned nuisance it was too. Greg got pretty crisp about it. He wanted it pulled down and the boats holed or dragged up somewhere where they couldn’t be used, to prevent the Mau Mau using them. But Gran wouldn’t hear of it. She fixed up a roster of guards. Myself, Gus Abbott and half a dozen of the loyal Kikuyu. Even poor old Zach was pressed into service, but he was far more afraid of handling a gun – and of the hippo – than he was of being murdered. Kamau refused to take a gun at all. He pinned his faith to a panga; and got a chap with it, too! Caught him trying to cut a boat loose, and slashed at him in the dark. Cut his head clean off, and carried it triumphantly up to the house in the morning. Alice fainted all over the coffee cups, but Gran didn’t turn a hair.’
Victoria said shuddering: ‘You don’t mean he actually showed it to them?’
‘He certainly did. He was as pleased as Punch about it. And with reason! For it turned out be one of the top Mau Mau brass, “Brigadier” Gitahi, no less. There was a nice fat price on his head too, which was duly handed over to Kamau, with the result that the entire labour force of Flamingo were beautifully tight for at least a week afterwards. Now let’s see if we can get this engine to start.’
The launch glided free of the papyrus and the floating weed beds, and they were in hot sunlight again, with the wide expanse of the lake spread out before them. Bright blue lilies spangled the water, and there was a continuous quack and ruffle of birds: stately white pelicans, numerous as swans on the Liffey; spoonbills, dab-chicks, cormorants, wild duck and herons.
A huge head adorned by two wildly agitated ears rose up on the port bow, regarded them with austere disapproval, and sank again. ‘Too many hippo in the lake,’ observed Eden, frowning. ‘It’s quite time we shot some. One or two make rather pleasant local colour, but twenty or thirty of them can do as much damage to the lakeside shambas as a plague of locusts. Look – there are some flamingo. They must be on their way to Elmenteita. They don’t often come to Naivasha. Beautiful, aren’t they?’
‘Lovely!’ said Victoria on a breath of rapture. ‘You know, I used to think of all this, and wonder if it could possibly be as beautiful as I remembered it to be. But it is. Every bit as beautiful!’
‘So in spite of everything,’ said Eden, ‘you’re glad you came back?’
‘What do you mean? “In spite of everything”,’ demanded Victoria defensively.
‘Me – Alice – Gran rapidly going off her rocker. A resident poltergeist, and the police almost permanently on the premises,’ said Eden bitterly.
‘Oh, Eden, I’m sorry!’ Victoria lifted a flushed and contrite face. ‘I keep on forgetting about Alice. I’m a selfish pig!’
‘No you’re not, dear. You’re refreshingly normal. And thank God for it! To tell you the truth, Vicky, I can’t quite believe it myself, and when I’m away from the house it all seems like a nightmare that I shall wake up from. It’s only when I get back to the house that – Oh, hell! Let’s talk about something else, shall we?’
‘Yes, let’s!’ said Victoria gratefully. ‘Where are we going, by the way? And whose is that house up on the hill over there?’
‘Drew Stratton’s. Chap who collected you from the Airport yesterday.’
‘Oh,’ said Victoria in a repressive voice, and after a moment or two of silence enquired: ‘Do you mean his house, or where we are going?’
‘Both.’
‘Oh,’ said Victoria again, betraying a marked lack of enthusiasm.
Eden threw her an amused glance. ‘You don’t sound wildly enthusiastic. Didn’t you take to our Mr Stratton?’
‘He didn’t take to me. In fact I rather think that he went out of his way to be rude. Is he a confirmed misogynist, or something?’
‘Not that I know of. And as everyone in Kenya knows everyone else’s innermost secrets, you can take it that he is neither.’
‘Merely mannerless, I suppose,’ said Victoria with some acidity.
‘You have got your knife into him, haven’t you?’
‘I have never,’ said Victoria with dignity, ‘taken kindly to being disliked and disapproved of at sight and for no reason.’
Eden laughed. ‘Don’t tell me it’s ever happened to you before, because I won’t believe it! You must have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Everyone likes Drew.’
‘I can’t think why, when he’s obviously conceited and egotistical, as well as being boorish and entirely lacking in manners, and——’
‘Here! Hi!’ said Eden. ‘Give the poor chap a chance! You can’t knock our local hero-boy, you know. He’s one of our leading citizens. In fact we point to him with pride.’
‘Why?’ demanded Victoria frostily. ‘Because he lounges around with a gun on his hip and drives too fast, I suppose?’
‘Then you suppose wrong. To start off with he’s Kenya-born, and his grandparents were two of the real pioneers – like Delamere and Grogan and old Grandfather DeBrett – and in a young Colony that means something! He lost both his parents before he was twenty, and having copped a packet in the way of wounds and decorations during the Normandy landings, came back to find that his manager had let the place go to rack and ruin, and there was a load of debt instead of the fat profits that other farms had been making during the war years. A lot of men faced with that sort of mess would have sold up and got out, but Drew flatly refused to part with a single acre of his land. Said he knew he could pull it out of the red. And did. He must have lived on cattle food and posho for God knows how long, and he worked like ten men. And then just as things were really beginning to look up, the Mau Mau business broke…’
Eden looked broodingly out across the lake and was silent for so long that at last Victoria said impatiently: ‘Go on. What happened to him then?’
‘Who? Oh Drew. Nothing much, if you mean to his place. The Strattons have always employed Masai, and Drew was practically brought up in a manyatta. He’s blood-brother to every ochre-painted moran in the Colony, and so the Mau Mau gave him a wide berth. But he’s one of the “My country, ’tis of thee”, brigade, and he handed over the management of the estate to old Ole Gachia, with instructions to keep it on an even keel, and offered his services to the Security Forces. He ended up by more or less running his own show, and used to go out with a pseudo gang, despite the fact that he’s as blond as a chorus girl.’
‘What’s a “pseudo gang”?’ asked Victoria, intrigued.
‘Didn’t you ever read your papers? They were the boys who pretended to be terrorists. Learnt all the jargon and dressed themselves up for the part – and blacked themselves all over, if they were British. They used to push off into the forests to make contact with the gangs. Drew had a hand-picked bunch of his own. Pukka devils, from all accounts. They pulled off some astonishing coups, and had a pleasant habit of cutting a notch in Drew’s verandah rail for every kill. It made an impressive tally, and I am credibly informed that although the Emergency is officially a thing of the past, there is still an occasional new notch there. We’ll take a look and see. Here we are. Stand by for the bump.’
He switched off the engine, and as the launch lost speed, manoeuvred it expertly alongside a small wooden jetty that thrust out into a narrow bay whose steep banks blazed with flamboyant and vivid cascades of bougainvillaea. A long flight of steps wound upwards from the jetty and passed between banks of roses and flowering shrubs, to come out on a gravel path which followed the curve of a stone wall buttressing a grassed terrace in front of a long, low, single-storeyed house whose wide verandah was shaded by flowering creepers.
Mr. Stratton might employ Masai on his estate, but his house servants were coast Arabs, and a dignified white-robed fi
gure, whose face might have been carved from a polished chunk of obsidian, greeted the visitors, and informed them that the Bwana should be immediately notified of their arrival.
‘What a heavenly view!’ said Victoria, leaning on the verandah rail and looking out across a vast panorama of lake and tree-clad hills and far rolling grassland ringed by blue ranges that shimmered like mirages in the afternoon sun. Her eye fell on a long row of notches cut into the wood of the rail, and she drew back sharply, the pleasure on her face giving place to disgust.
‘What did I tell you?’ said Eden, following the direction of her gaze. ‘Quite a nice line-up.’
‘Nice! You call that nice? Why, it’s appalling! And – and barbaric! Chalking up a record of dead men!’
‘Of dead murderers,’ corrected a dry voice behind her.
Victoria whirled round, her cheeks flushing scarlet. Mr Stratton, dressed in impeccable riding clothes, was standing in the doorway of a room that opened on to the verandah. He was looking perfectly amiable, and his bland gaze travelled thoughtfully from Miss Caryll to her cousin.
‘Courtesy call, Eden?’
‘Business, I’m afraid. Those Herefords of yours. Gran wants me to have a look at them before we clinch the deal.’
‘Of course. She said something about it yesterday. They’re in the paddock just behind the house. You’ll find Kekinai out there. He’ll tell you anything you want to know. I’ll entertain Miss Caryll until you’re through.’
Eden looked doubtfully at Victoria, and then all at once a malicious smile leapt to life in his eyes, and he said: ‘Good idea. I won’t be long.’ And left them.
Victoria made a swift movement as though she would have followed him, but Mr Stratton, either by accident or design, had moved forward in the same moment and barred her way. ‘Cigarette?’ he enquired, proffering his case.
‘Thank you; I don’t smoke,’ said Victoria curtly.
‘You won’t mind if I do? Tea will be along in a minute. Or would you rather have a cold drink? It’s quite a pull up from the lake on a hot day.’
