At that moment, Keith bounded in wearing pyjamas, his face shining with soap beneath a tousle of straw coloured hair. "It's always bedtime," he groused, straddling the arm of Mark's chair. "Do stay till morning, Mark."
"Can't be done, I have to sleep at Grassa tonight."
"Grassa's grand . . . and that cunning little house. I built some of it,"
he told Karen. "It's wattle-and-daub and I sloshed on chunks of the daub." "I'll say you did," from Elizabeth, who was at the door. "We had to lever
it out of your ears with a pick-axe. Say good night and come along." "Will you be here again soon, Mark?" Keith begged.
"Sure to. You're my nearest neighbour. Don't try any stunts on the pony unless your daddy's with you."
"Karen wants a horse."
A tiny pause. "Does she? We'll have to find her one."
"She can't ride yet."
"Then we'll have to look for an affectionate little filly with dainty legs and good mariners." The laconic tone seemed to add, 'Just like herself.' He patted the boy's shoulder. "Cut along now. Good night, old son."
Keith leapt to the floor, flung a defiant glare at Karen which dared her to kiss him, yelled a swift good night, and bolted.
Justin came in, called for his customary glass of beer and lit a pipe. During the ensuing conversation, which was mainly of crops and the market, Karen was silent, and inevitably, like steel to a magnet, her attention was drawn to Mark. His fingers, curved around his glass, were thin and strong. His brows were thick and straight, and several shades darker than his hair. He was a study in browns, his skin a mahogany tan, his hair a rich chestnut, those dark brows; and his eyes . .. a nut-brown, Karen decided, flecked with green. For all his easy charm, there was a lone-eagle element in him. When Elizabeth announced that dinner would be served in twenty minutes, he got up and said he must go.
"Not before dinner!" exclaimed Elizabeth.
"I'm afraid so. It's seven miles of tricky road in the dark."
"It won't be any darker in an hour's time."
He smiled. "I left instructions for someone to fix my meal. I intended to bring Keith and go straight back."
"I believe you're downright glad to have a house of your own," she accused him.
"I believe I am," he said. "You mustn't mind. I'm that sort of chap."
He paid Elizabeth a couple of compliments on the way she had cared for him, cast Karen a slightly ironical bow, said good night, and left them.
After dinner, when Karen went to her room for the gifts she had unpacked earlier, she hesitated in front of her mirror and peered at her reflection in the lamplight. A clear skin, steady blue eyes, a short nose, pale hair that sprang back from a broad white forehead, and a wide red mouth that curved generously and was sensitive. Moderately good-looking, in a sweet way—but she knew that so far as men were concerned she could use no tricks, for she had never learned them. And she had gathered from the men she had met on the voyage out, especially the older, travelled type, that they liked tricks. Even plain women managed to interest and attract men by a practised laugh or the subtle touch of cool fingers.
The younger men at the shipping-office where she had worked had liked her. They had confided to her their ambitions and love-affairs, but that only meant she was a sympathetic listener. Her upbringing, an only child living alone with her mother since her father's death when she was five, had prevented the sort of experience which might have endowed her with the sophistication that a man like Mark Howard looked for in women.
A slow flush crept up from Karen's neck. What was wrong with her? Why on earth should her thoughts run on such lines? What did it matter if there were nothing about her to attract that cool, charming egoist?
SET lessons with Keith were not due to start for a week, so for the next few days Karen familiarised herself with the lay-out of the farm and
helped Elizabeth in the dairy. As farms go in Kenya, Justin's was not much of a proposition. Five hundred acres, of which three hundred were planted with coffee, about a hundred under maize, and the rest given over to a medium-sized herd of native cattle. Living was fairly cheap, for they produced most of their own food and entertained only desultorily.
"For the first five years," said Elizabeth, her sleeves rolled high while she skimmed milk, "our finances looked sick. Then the coffee trees came into full bearing and prices were good, so we began to pull round. This is our third successful season, and for the first time we're completely solvent."
"Didn't it worry you during the early years?" asked Karen.
"Not deeply. Justin had it all planned—hand-to-mouth for five years and then gradual expansion. I always said that I'd celebrate our first profits by indulging in an evening-dress, but I never did."
"Not much use for one here."
"I don't know. We have a few neighbours, most of them in our own financial category. They give occasional parties, and every year when the coffee's picked and despatched we go down to Nairobi for a week or two. The Winchesters are next to us—we passed their farm on the way up from Guaba. I think I'll ask them over for dinner on Saturday. We mustn't let you get bored."
"No chance of that. Everything's so new and startling."
"Still, you're young and used to office life. Besides, you must meet plenty of men. If Kenya really gets under your skin—and I rather think it will—you'll want to marry and settle here. There are lots to choose from. It wouldn't be a bad idea," she added laughingly, "to ask a married couple and one bachelor each weekend. Be rather fun sorting the possibles from the not-on-your-lifes!"
Just then Keith came tearing along the path to the dairy. "Mark's here!" he sang out. "He's been to Guaba to collect supplies, and he's staying to lunch. Daddy asked him."
"Oh dear," groaned Elizabeth, starting off, "and I'd planned ham and eggs for three and a half. I must run."
Karen had paused, and Keith stopped, too, eyeing her curiously. "What's the matter? Don't you like Mark?" he demanded.
"I hardly know him."
"Then why have you gone huffy-looking?"
"Have I? Perhaps it's the sun. There, is that better?" Her smile drew an answering grin.
"C'mon," he said. "I'm hungry."
But Karen let him race on without her. An extraordinary lassitude seemed to have entered her bones. Almost, she turned and slipped back through the gate into the pasture. But, as she neared the house, another sensation ousted the reluctance. She heard his voice, lazy and sardonic, and her heart quickened. So did her footsteps .. .
AFTER a couple of false starts, Keith settled into a routine. From nine till twelve each morning, with a ten-minute break for milk, he sat on one
side of the veranda table and Karen on the other. From the first she set a timetable. The primers which Elizabeth had ordered from Nairobi were modern and well illustrated.
Naturally, Keith enjoyed the afternoons most. It didn't occur to him that when he and Karen wandered among the wild figs, chanting multiplication tables or discussing the origin of coal, he was still learning. He took her down to his beloved Snake Hole and made her lie flat and hang over the edge of the huge green bowl and search for grass-adders and hissing yellow-backs. He probed a tussock of bog myrtle with a stick till a brown spider the size of a man's hand ambled out to see who was disturbing him.
"His name's Caesar," Keith told her. "I christened him once with a drop of lemonade. He was cross over that."
He was exactly the normal, healthy son of Elizabeth and Justin one would have imagined, for which Karen was thankful. A gift for teaching was not a strong part of her equipment, and a problem child would have worried her. As it was, she saw the time approaching when Keith would be setting the pace, not she. It was a subject she often debated with her cousin, but Elizabeth shrugged it off with a laugh. "You'll have to get together with Roy Strasmore and work something out."
Karen liked Roy Strasmore. He was fair and slim and young, equally enthusiastic about his work as district education officer, and making the most
of his leisure. He was stationed at Guaba, in a little white house with an iron roof, beside which stood a single sere palm, the only tree in miles. Small wonder that his weekends were spent with the Winchesters or the Hardings or the Patersons.
"I never thought about trees till I came to Guaba, where there aren't any," he confessed to Karen, after dinner at the coffee farm one evening. "In the same way, I never cared a hoot that the farm youngsters were growing up little barbarians till I was put in charge of a group of schools. It's ageing to try to coax money for new schools. They just haven't any."
"Timber's cheap enough, and I'm sure the parents would lend their own workmen to do the building. They'd buy the books, too. You'd only have to get Government sanction and a teacher."
"'Only'," he groaned. "My poor, sweet innocent. You remind me of the girl I left behind me—you're so naïve."
`The girl I left behind me' was the one dark thread in the bright pattern of Roy's existence. To Karen he had confided that Glenys was the spoilt darling of rich parents. He liked Kenya so much that he wanted her to come out and marry him, but she wouldn't.
Roy was not downcast for long. "We'll call a parents' meeting," he said. "D'you think Elizabeth would arrange tea for about thirty next Saturday? That's a convenient time for most people."
Elizabeth, her eyes amusedly aware of the two young heads bent close together over a matter of mutual interest, thought it might be arranged. "Not only parents," she amended. "Everyone should be hooked in, even temporary residents like Colonel Williamson and Mark Howard—especially Mark."
Karen, a sudden quick beat in her temple, looked up. "Why Mark Howard?"
"It's his glorious country, isn't it? We settlers are sinking our all to cultivate his precious soil and give point to his roads and bridges. Besides," she added illogically, "someone ought to relieve him of a little cash. Wealthy bachelors always annoy me."
"Elizabeth's right," Roy said seriously. "Quite apart from his money, Mark has power in Nairobi. But he's impatient of settlers and their problems, and I rather think he'll refuse to take part in anything so inconspicuous as an infants' school."
'We can ask him, anyway," Elizabeth concluded. "I'll send a note down telling him we need his advice on an important issue. That ought to fetch him."
Early the following week the note was despatched to Grassa, and the boy returned to the farm—without an answer. A little depressed, Karen helped with the ironing and mending. Mark hadn't been up since the day he'd dropped in for lunch, three weeks ago. Keith had ridden down with Justin and reported that the steel was going up for the bridge and that Mark had shot jackals and hyenas from his doorstep.
The Indian fundi who had supervised the building of Mark's house and made the furniture, had now fixed a small log room in the branches of a gum-tree near the river, which gave an uninterrupted view of Mount Kenya. The view made no impression on Keith, but the log-room, he sighed blissfully, was a dream hidey-hole for adventures.
Karen was beginning to realise that she, as a relative of the Patersons, belonged to the farming, rather than the sporting element in the district. The distinction was a clear-cut difference in outlook, leisure and income. Mark chose his friends from among the Government forestry men and the game hunters living in the surrounding hills. His weekends were often spent on safaris into the forest below Grassa. The Patersons gleaned this news from returning parties who occasionally stopped at the farm for the loan of petrol.
One bush-car outfit had included two very pretty girls who had subsided into grass chairs on the veranda and demanded drinks. Karen, standing nearby, heard one say to the other, "Mark's exasperating; terribly exciting and charming—but exasperating." To which came the reply, "I know. He simply jibes at emotion. You just can't stake a claim on him."
A remark which pleased Karen, yet at the same time tinged her thoughts with despair. If these girls, with their expensive good looks and glib assurance, could make no inroads on Mark's self-sufficiency, he must be the most hopeless of confirmed bachelors.
Today, as she ran the old-fashioned flat-iron over numerous small shirts and drill knickers of Keith's, she could almost see Mark's face before her, mocking yet kind as he listened to her replies to Keith's questions about London and the River Thames. "Why is it," Mark had inquired during a pause, "that settlers are so steeped in sentimentality and nostalgia for England? How can one hope to be entirely successful if half one's being is left in the old country, pulling all the time? Kenya's Africa, not England with an African background. I believe that all settlers should be compelled to take an oath of allegiance to the country before being admitted."
Though his nose had crinkled in a smile, Karen had known he was not joking. His love of his country struck deep into his roots, and, rather naturally, he considered that only the best in the way of men and material should be used for its expansion. It was an aspect of his personality with which she could readily have sympathised had he given her the chance.
WHEN Elizabeth yawned and said it was time she took a bath and changed, Karen slipped out for a walk with Tuppence, the terrier.
"You can take the car if you like," her cousin called after her. "Mid-week is a good time to practise on the brakes. You're less likely to meet other traffic."
Just as Elizabeth had thought it necessary for Karen to gain experience in the dairy, Justin, in his solid fashion, had more or less insisted that she should learn to drive. Both stated that the more one knew of the ordinary tasks of life, the better one was able to cope in emergencies. The bush-car was not an ideal learner's vehicle, but Karen was getting used to its idiosyncrasies.
Cautiously she backed it from the shed and out on to the road. Involuntarily she turned right, away from Guaba. The terrier sat beside her quivering with excitement and that peculiar fear which invades all little things in the presence of big, unknown ones. Tuppence adored human beings of all sizes; zebra, wildebeeste and giraffe, however, scared him silly, and even a pretty gazelle or a graceful young duiker affected him oddly.
When she had the car running as smoothly as the road permitted, between podocarpus and cedar on the one side, and Justin's coffee trees on the other, Karen reflected that it was good to drive off alone once in a while. Solitude had the advantage of giving one all the time in the world to absorb the colours of the dry red earth and the dark-leaved trees, the dappled sunlight across the track, the sudden slabs of grass mottled with pinks and splashed here and there with yellow gladioli. On lucky days, a startled herd of oryx or a disgruntled ostrich might leap into sight, and at any hour of the day you could see impudent colobus monkeys nipping along the branches or dangling for closer scrutiny.
The Paterson farm ended at a fence of wire and blue-gum wood and for a mile or two gums and palms and thorn-trees grew densely, intertwined by thick parasitical vines which sent out huge flowers of unbelievable brilliance and beauty. Then came bamboos, stiff and harsh, their roots buried in decaying moss. Suddenly there was the river, not tropical as she had imagined it, but cool and pinkish-grey, rippling over boulders and widening here and there into still pools. Not quite English, though, for the vegetation grew tall and rubbery, and the trees spread like umbrellas of green woollen embroidery. Grassa could not be far away.
Karen stopped the car, vexed with herself for having come so far in this direction. It would be difficult to turn on this narrow road so close to the river. Tuppence hopped out and darted over to admire his reflection. "Come back, you little wretch," Karen cried.
For a further entranced moment Tuppence stared into the water, before pushing off daintily to swim to the other side. Karen ran to the ledge of rock and used all the dog blandishments and endearments she had ever learned. Tuppence looked back regretfully, but kept on swimming, and she resigned herself to waiting till he tired. But he had decided to explore the other bank.
Idly, Karen followed his movements and walked with him, at intervals calling his name. The river twisted and she saw a bridge composed of four huge-girthed tr
unks lashed together and embedded each side of the river in rust-coloured mud. A much more solid affair than the suspended log bridges she had seen before. This one begged to be used.
Half-way across, the high heel of her white gaberdine sandal caught between two of the tree-trunks and stuck. It would have been easy to wrench it out, but only at the risk of ripping the material covering the heel and these were the coolest and most comfortable shoes she possessed. With a small exclamation of annoyance, she drew out her bare foot and sat down to pick away the bark that gripped her shoe.
"Hallo! There are nicer places to paddle than this." Karen started. Mark, with a couple of lazy strides from among the trees, had reached her side, and now stood above her, grinning.
"I'm not paddling. My heel got caught in these logs. Do you carry a penknife?" Karen asked.
Mark squatted, opened a blade, and began whittling away the stringy bark. She watched his hands, one using the knife and the other grasping the back of her shoe, and thought what characteristic hands they were, and how lucky that she was wearing her nicest sling sandals. But his next remark was dampening. "I know the raw material situation in England is acute, but it's worse than I imagined if they're reduced to turning out shoes like this. They let in just about everything—dust, wet, insects, and there's ample room at the toe to admit a young snake."
"The women in Nairobi wear them. That's where I bought them."
"Nairobi." He dismissed the capital of Kenya with a shrug. "Much goes on in Nairobi that wouldn't go down in the Guaba district. Here's your shoe, and you may count yourself fortunate that the heel is intact. Next time, remember that this sort of bridge is intended for lorries and bare feet."
"I think it's absurd to leave the tree-trunks rounded like that."
"You do?" he said quizzically "I've managed very well with this sort of temporary bridge all over Kenya and elsewhere, but I'm always open to suggestions for improvements."
"Oh!" Karen turned slightly pink. "Is this your bridge?"
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