by Lara Blunte
The farm was a beautiful place, a mixture of nature and human order, and the climate was more benign than near Bwindi. I saw people tending the land and looking up at the car to wave at Chris. Some, closer to the house, came running and he stopped the car to shake hands. They all threw me curious, wide-eyed looks.
"Do you think the mzungu is beautiful?" he asked a few boys who hung from the car window. They only laughed and ran away. He looked at me with a smirk. "Guess not!"
Finally we were climbing; soon enough there was a garden with strong trees and colorful flowers. A house made of stone appeared before us.
It was an elegant construction, sprawling sideways rather than up, with a shingled roof that probably provided coolness in hot months. It had foliage climbing on the walls and bursting into shocking pink flowers. A wide covered verandah with a red tiled floor stretched across the front.
As we got out of the car, I saw a great number of yellow and blue butterflies in the garden. With the view of the valley and the mountains in front, the place was breathtaking.
I had no time to notice anything else, because a woman in her mid-fifties was coming out of the house and walking towards Chris with a smile. She was slim, with shoulder-length brown hair full of silver strands and beautiful blue eyes.
She and Chris embraced briefly and he kissed her forehead. She stared at him a while longer as he introduced me.
"This is my mother, Karen. And this is Roberta."
I am fairly sure I did a bad job of looking casual as Karen moved toward me, kissed my cheek and held my hand.
"I'm so glad you came," she told me, sounding sincere.
"Look who is here, look who is here!"
A tall, strong black woman started laughing and clapping as she walked toward us. She was eventually enveloped in Chris’ arms. It was a warmer embrace than he had given his mother, I noticed, and Karen looked at them almost with longing.
"Lillian," Chris said, "I brought you someone to feed. Look how thin she is."
I think that Karen had caught me looking at her for a moment, because she brightened up and told me, "Be careful, Lillian thinks everyone is thin." She turned to Chris. "How long can you stay?"
"Three days," he said.
She nodded and I saw that she was disappointed, but hiding it with another smile.
A while later we were having lemonade on the verandah. Chris answered questions from Ben and Karen about the hospital while my eyes couldn't stop roving over the view that continued far into the distance, all the way to mountains that seemed blue. The garden had strong trees and a manicured lawn, with a hammock dangling in an inviting way. I watched Karen, but saw little of Chris in her.
Eventually she said, “I thought you would prefer to stay in your house, as you spend so little time there…”
“Oh, that will be fine!” Chris said.
Once again I had the impression that she was disappointed, that she had meant the opposite of what she had said; Ben also fidgeted a little in his chair. I had learned during the conversation that he had his own house elsewhere in the estate, where he lived with his wife and two sons.
Karen said we should go to the house to rest and refresh before dinner. She was going to be in the kitchen helping prepare a roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and everything that Chris loved.
We jumped into the jeep and he drove up for about ten minutes. His house was the old servants' quarters, built by his great-grandparents when they arrived in Uganda. It was a sturdy construction, as they mostly were then, whitewashed, with a verandah that had the same red tiles on the ground as the main house. Nowadays it would qualify as a very beautiful and spacious home and I was suitably impressed.
Karen had obviously had it cleaned and aired and inside it was spare, with old paintings, African cloths and objects on the walls and good antique colonial furniture. The bedroom had a large four-poster bed surrounded by a mosquito net and this is where Chris took me. The windows were closed, but after we made love and slept a little, he opened them and the view was magnificent — it was as if the land unfolded itself in tiers, going down. It was lush, strange and beautiful. We could hear the noise of the night creatures replacing the day ones.
"In the past we could see elephants going by," he told me, pointing below. "Even leopards. Now they stay inside the park.”
The savannah elephants in Mount Elgon, it turned out, were quite special: whole groups of them went hundreds of meters deep into caves to find salt seams in the rocks, as their herbivorous diet was low on sodium. They excavated the rock with their tusks to be able to get to the salt they craved.
All that Chris was telling me and more that I read about later on my iPad, made me keen to go and see Mount Elgon: the salt elephants, the dramatic caves, the waterfalls and hot springs, the great variety of butterflies and birds, as well as monkeys, antelope and leopards; but we had no time to trek in the park.
“Another time,” he said.
What other time? I thought. I would be leaving Uganda soon.
We got ready for dinner and returned to the main house. The night had become a little chilly and the air was very clean. I could smell the cooking and a wood fire somewhere. Though the mosquitoes might be kept away by the cold, we didn't eat outside but in the dining room, which was large and tastefully furnished with antiques. The table had been set with fine linen, crystal and china and there were bouquets of flowers in gleaming silver vases.
"Good God, is a magazine coming to take photos of the house or something?" Chris asked as we walked in.
His mother said almost shyly, "Well, what better occasion do I have for all this stuff to come out than that my son has brought a girl to meet me?"
I almost said, I thought everyone met everyone's parents here, but Chris was smiling as if he had tricked me. He actually winked. I realized that people probably do meet each other's parents easily in Uganda, but not if they live in the middle of an estate and one must arrive by plane.
What was he doing?
Ben wasn’t coming because one of his children had a fever. I saw that as Karen passed her son’s chair, she let her hand rest on it for a moment, almost as if she had wanted to caress his shoulder or his hair and did not dare to.
Their conversation flowed but again I had the impression that there was much that was left unsaid between them, almost as if they were still British instead of African.
After dinner, Chris built a fire in the living room and I stood talking to Karen as she showed me the many photographs on the wall.
"All our history is here," she said, “This is my husband, Paul.”
The photographs showed a man with dark hair, whose craggy face seemed kind. I knew that Chris’ father had died of cancer at the age of fifty-eight, only seven years ago, but we had never talked a lot about our families.
We moved along the wall to find Chris' great grandparents on Paul’s side, arriving in Uganda during World War I. Karen explained that they had taken all their money and moved to Africa because of the fortunes to be made from coffee, at a time when people were losing all they had in Europe.
There were photographs of the house being built, of the newly arrived Europeans next to the native inhabitants of the region, who were half naked and adorned with rows of necklaces.
Then there were the first children born in Uganda: Chris' grandfather and great-aunt, their childhood going through the 20s and 30s. His grandmother, a girl who had also been born in Africa to Danish parents, looked beautiful in her 40s hairdo, dressed in Jodhpurs, as she stood next to her horse.
But Chris clearly took after the handsome army officer who had been Karen’s grandfather and who had married a great English beauty from India. The beauty looked like Ava Gardner, with lustrous dark hair and almond shaped eyes of a startling color, if the black and white print were anything to go by.
There were also photographs of the 70s, when the whites of Uganda had left as the economy collapsed under Idi Amin Dada. Chris’ birth, his first steps, his child
hood till the age of seven, had all taken place in England. The return had been a hard time for the family, as photos of the mid-80s showed. The very house we were in was ruined in the images where Paul, Karen and Chris stood outside, beginning their lives anew.
Then Ben appeared, looking much smaller than his brother. As they grew up, the land and the house changed for the better; I could imagine the effort and sacrifice the turnaround had required, yet Chris's smile was infectious in all the photographs, even the ones where he wore braces; he had been a happy kid. He often had his arm around Ben’s shoulder, as if he were protecting him. Photos of Chris and Karen showed them laughing, throwing buckets of water at each other, holding hands.
Finally there was Chris as a young man and the happy smile had turned into a brooding face or a frown. He already looked beautiful, like he did now. I pointed, laughing, “Here is the angst of youth!”
I looked around and Chris wasn’t there, though the fire was burning brightly. Karen didn’t laugh, she only looked at the photos for a moment, almost pensively and then we sat down to finish our glasses of wine.
Laughter was coming from the kitchen: Chris must be there with Lillian. Karen and I were set to continue our conversation about the history of her family and her husband’s, but suddenly there was a power outage.
“Oh, heavens!” Karen said in the dark.
"Don't turn on the generator!" Chris cried from the kitchen.
Karen found a flashlight and we walked outside. The sky was a dark vault peppered with bright stars. It almost felt as if we were in space.
We stood looking up, hearing the animals in the distance and human voices nearby. The smell of wood burning had intensified and we moved around the house to a courtyard that led to another house. I could hear dogs and they came running to be petted by Chris, who was already sitting by the fire.
"No TV, no mobile, no computer," he said with a big smile.
It was just as he had once told me. People arrived from the darkness to sit around the fire: Ben with his son Paul, a boy about six years old who ran to his uncle and sat on his lap, Lillian, other house employees and children. Chris took hold of my hand and made me sit next to him and we all talked, laughed and even sung.
Eventually the power came back and there was a cry of disappointment from the group— the spell was over. Much as they had liked the moment, it was gone.
We said goodnight and thanks to Karen and Lillian, returning to Chris' house, sleepy from the wine, our faces warmed by the fire and then cooled by the crisp night air. Chris didn't wait till we were ready to sleep like a married couple, he laid me down in bed, under the mosquito net and got in with me.
"So this land is yours?" I asked him. "You weren't lying? You are Lord Bumbleworth, then?"
He laughed. "Yeah, but more bumbling than worth anything."
I thought of the plantation, which continued through a good deal of land. "It looks like a lot!"
"There is money," he told me. “I don’t consider it mine, as I don’t work with them.”
“Well, I can understand that, but if you need funds for the hospital…”
“I take what they can spare. It costs a lot to maintain all this and I wouldn’t want to leave them with no emergency funds.”
I was silent for a moment, then asked. “It’s beautiful here, do you never want to come back?”
He looked a bit troubled at the question. "I suppose, one day."
“It must be hard for your mother to run it all…” I began.
“She has Ben,” he said curtly.
I guess then he wanted Reporter Roberta to stop asking questions and he had a very good method of silencing me. It worked every time.
But as we lay together in silence afterwards, I could tell he was thinking, not sleeping. And I was thinking as well.
I was thinking that I had found out who he was a dickhead to: his mother.
The Prodigal Son
The next morning, when I woke up, I was alone.
I suppose it’s true that sitting by a fire will make you sleep deeply, because I normally could tell when Chris got up, always slightly earlier than me— I liked to linger in bed a little longer, turn from one side to the other, stretch and only then get out of bed.
But as I moved around the house, I couldn’t find him. I went into the bathroom to shower, comb my hair and brush my teeth. Then I heard his voice outside calling,
“Lady Bobbie!”
It sounded more like Laydeh Bobbay! And he called once more before I opened the front door and found him on a horse in front of the house, wearing black boots over white riding breeches and a white shirt. His horse was black and he was holding another horse, a white filly, by the reins.
He stared down at me, looking handsome as all hell and said in a ridiculous upper class British accent, “Laydeh Bobbay, I have come to show you my vast estate…”
I started to giggle.
“Oh, Lord Bumbleworth, without a chaperone?” I asked, hands to my cheeks.
“Your chaperone has been smitten with the smallpox,” he said, fully in character. “And therefore you must trust my honor…How long before you’re in your riding habit and readaay?”
I ran into the house and since I didn’t possess a riding habit, I’m afraid I wore jeans and Converses, a long-sleeved buttoned shirt and looked nowhere as perfect as Lord Bumbleworth, who seemed every inch a nobleman about to inspect his land.
He had dismounted to help me onto the filly and my breasts ended up on his face as I climbed on the saddle with no great agility.
“Cover those bosoms, or I shan’t answer for my actions,” he said as he mounted his horse again.
Off he went at a gallop and I kept up with him. The doctor looked relaxed in the saddle, probably used from infancy to riding, while I hung on to the reins a little nervously, until I ascertained that the filly was calm and obedient.
We rode over green slopes with the mountain in the distance. The sky was blue and pink, and the sun warm but not hot. The air smelled wonderful, and by the time we got to the plantations and were greeted by the workers there, my stomach had started to rumble.
Chris jumped down, helped me off my horse and led me to a small whitewashed house. The delicious aroma of fresh coffee reached me.
“Any breakfast for us?” he asked, sticking his head inside.
Laughter greeted him and two women came to the door to take him by the hand. He motioned toward me with his head. “I have a very important guest. A princess of Italy.”
They covered their mouths and laughed as he translated what he had said into Mabasa for them. Soon they had set a table outside and brought us all sorts of delicious things: warm banana cake, hot coffee, fresh eggs and bacon.
I took a sip of the coffee with eyes closed and soon my eyelids were fluttering and I made a noise deep in my throat.
Chris broke character to say, “I never get that noise from you…”
I opened my eyes and smiled at him. He knew he did and more; and I was very much enjoying my morning with Lord Bumbleworth, who walked with me through the rows of coffee shrubs, showing me the berries. We stopped to talk to the men gathering them, many of whom laughed upon seeing Chris and shook his hand for a long time, exchanging pleasantries. Women came to chat as well, one of them with a baby tied to her back. Chris took it, kissed it, caressed its fat cheeks and made it laugh, and if he had been a politician he would have gotten every last woman’s vote and mine.
On our way back we passed another whitewashed house, standing alone on a green slope. Chris looked around and then dismounted, helping me down once more.
“Let me show you my Greek pavilion,” he said, pulling me by the hand.
I had already begun giggling, because he was obviously making sure that no one was around and leading me into the house and to the back, where a big container stood, filled to the brim with coffee beans. He threw me inside and I shrieked as I landed on the beans. He climbed in after me, removing his shirt.
“Our voices carry here,” he drawled. “So no matter how exquisite the pleasure I give you, you must do no more than gurgle like a dove, Laydeh Bobbay.”
I pulled him down toward me as the beans made a moveable but rather comfortable bed for us.
“Someone is going to have their coffee with a difference,” I said, laughing between kisses.
“You must take this seduction seriouslaay,” he said, kissing my neck. “And be vigilant against the deadly African coffee-bean scorpion…”
I clung to him and was of course going to shriek at that as well, but he put his hand over my mouth, laughing. He suddenly stopped and raised his head.
“Shit!” he said.
“What?”
He jumped down, his shirt and breeches open and lifted me out of the container. I could hear people walking into the house and talking. Chris had managed to close the buttons of his trousers and moved to the door, buttoning his shirt.
He walked out and I heard him talking to other men just outside. I finally emerged, running a hand over my hair. One of the men widened his eyes and the other covered his mouth to laugh in the corner.
Chris pulled me out of the house in a hurry and we got back onto our horses to explore more of his land — and none of our bodies.
"You have such a beautiful estate,” I told Karen in the afternoon.
An elegant table had been set in the garden for early dinner and we were having chilled champagne on the verandah. I thought with embarrassment that Chris must have told her how much I liked it.
He was with Ben, looking at accounts, to see how much of his money he could take without feeling guilty.
"Oh, it isn’t really my doing," she said. "I am also a farmer's daughter, but we planted sugar cane. I didn't know anything about coffee. It was Paul who kept it like this.”
“It looks so…tidy!” I said. “Did Chris never want to be a farmer?”
