Mrs Midnight and Other Stories

by Oliver, Reggie

  We said little while Jumbo drove hard along dusty, bumpy roads north from Nairobi into the Aberdares or the White Highlands as they still were sometimes called.

  ‘Can’t see anything now,’ said Jumbo at one point, ‘but you’ll love the countryside when you see it in the morning. Like Scotland only a damn sight hotter. Eh? Eh?’

  He laughed and I laughed with him. I saw Freda’s lips twist into a tight smile. It was obviously a remark she had heard him make many times.

  It was a long journey during which I think I must have dozed off several times despite all the jolts. Finally we were coming down a long gravel drive towards a building that looked like a gigantic suburban bungalow built out of yellow stone.

  ‘Welcome to Cloud’s Hill,’ said Jumbo.

  As we came to a halt in front of the house, a Somali servant who had been sitting on the steps of the front porch rose to greet us. Like most of his race, he was a tall, dignified looking man, very smartly turned out with a spotless white tunic and a green fez. I felt decidedly underdressed in his presence. He took my miserable little holdall and carried it in as if it were a precious cargo. I began to wonder desperately if they still dressed for dinner here.

  While the Somali stowed my bag, I was shown into a long low sitting room where, from in front of a blazing log fire, two huge tawny Rhodesian Ridgebacks rose lazily to greet their master and mistress. The decor was almost aggressively English and Home Counties: glazed floral chintz on the sofa and armchairs, Persian rugs on polished floorboards, coloured prints of racehorses and hunting scenes on the walls. Apart from a couple of small hunting trophies there was nothing of Africa in the room. Presently, another Somali, attired like the first, brought in a tray of sandwiches and a soda syphon to accompany the whisky, a decanter of which was imprisoned in a Tantalus on the sideboard.

  While Freda was making a fuss of the Ridgebacks, Jumbo took a key on a chain out of his shorts to unlock the Tantalus. Meanwhile the first Somali, having rid himself of my bag, entered the sitting room and took his place patiently beside the other servant.

  ‘You put it in the back bedroom?’ asked Jumbo. The Somali nodded and I noticed that Freda looked up, startled. ‘All right, you two. Thank you. That will be all for tonight.’

  I heard the two servants leave the house. Evidently they did not live on the premises.

  There were a lot of sandwiches, very good ones too, but we managed to consume them all, Jumbo and I doing most of the work. In the whisky and soda stakes, however, I lagged far behind my hosts. They were both in their sixties and seemed in good condition, he beefy, she lean with a remarkably good figure for her age. She was wearing an immaculately cut cream trouser suit, and pearls did their best to cover the wrinkles at her throat. Her eyes were hazel, deep set, heavy lidded, watchful, enigmatic. To call them ‘bedroom’ eyes would be crude and misleading, but there was a strong sexual allure about them which hinted at the ‘history’ Samantha had alluded to.

  Jumbo was good at overcoming my shyness and Freda showed a genuine interest in my descriptions of theatrical life in Nairobi. Two hours went by very cheerfully and there was only one mildly awkward moment. I had started to talk about the eccentric Mrs King when I saw Freda look away from me and start to clink the ice in her whisky. Jumbo said: ‘Yes, we know all about Sabrina King,’ and then abruptly changed the subject. Not long afterwards Jumbo said:

  ‘Well, I don’t know about you chaps, but I’m for my bed.’

  This call to order was welcome because I was beginning to feel very tired. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. Jumbo led me to my room at the back of the house. I had expected ‘the back bedroom’ to be rather small. On the contrary it was almost as spacious as the sitting room with a double bed and an en suite bathroom. Metal framed French windows opened onto a veranda. It looked to me like the master bedroom. My pyjamas had been neatly laid out on the bed and my other clothes hung up in the wardrobe.

  ‘Well, here we are. Hope this suits,’ said Jumbo.

  I expressed my admiration and thanks at which Jumbo seemed rather embarrassed.

  ‘Yes. Well . . . we’re down the corridor at the front of the house. If there’s anything you need, just holler. Sleep well. Lie in as long as you like. I’m around fairly early, but Freda’s a late riser. ’Night, old chap.’ With that he left.

  I did not immediately shut my bedroom door, so I was able to hear Freda and Jumbo talking at the other end of the house. Their tone was urgent. I could not catch all they said, but I heard her say:

  ‘Why did you put him in there, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘He’ll be fine, old girl,’ Jumbo replied. ‘Didn’t you notice? The poor chap looked all in. He’ll sleep like a log.’

  There were further urgent mutterings which I could not make out, except that I thought I heard the name ‘Sabrina’ mentioned once or twice. I closed my bedroom door gently.

  Jumbo was right: I was ‘all in’. As soon as my head touched the pillow I was asleep. It was a dead, dreamless sleep, so that, when I woke suddenly, I had no idea how much time had elapsed, but it was still dark. The room was stiflingly hot which was odd because it had been a cool night when we came in, and there was no radiator or heater that I could see in the room. I put on slippers and a dressing gown and went to the French windows that opened onto the veranda. They were locked and the key was nowhere to be found. I then tried the window which was a metal framed casement and opened outwards.

  Though the air was cooler outside it did not seem to permeate the room, so I climbed through the window and onto the veranda. The sky was clear and moonless, the stars were out and there were odd patches of mist which covered the lawn in front of the veranda and even one end of it. Its roof was supported by brick pillars but the rest of it was of some dark, stained wood, cedar perhaps, or teak.

  It was quite silent. For the first time since coming to Africa I heard nothing. The mist at the end of the veranda seemed to be moving and forming itself into something, but, as it dissipated again, I persuaded myself that I had been the victim of an illusion. Just then I heard a muffled cry which sounded as if it were coming from the other side of the house.

  My senses by this time were fully alert and I felt no urge to return to my bedroom. Quietly I descended the steps of the veranda and began to walk round to the front of the house. At one corner of it I saw a lighted window. I moved a little away from the house so that there was less likelihood of my being seen from the window and observed.

  It was, as I had expected, Jumbo and Freda’s bedroom. I nearly turned away then and there, but something about the scene I saw held me. The only excuse I have is that it was not quite real to me, like watching a film or a peep show. I moved closer.

  Freda was kneeling naked by the bed, her back to me, like a little child saying its prayers. Jumbo stood over her in his blue and white striped flannel pyjamas. In his hand was a long bamboo cane with a split at the end of it. He was beating her, on her bare back, not in a frenzy, but pausing very deliberately between each blow while she sobbed at the pain of it.

  After each blow she cried out. It was not an inarticulate noise: she appeared to be shouting out a word or a name. I thought at first it might be ‘stop!’, but it sounded more like ‘shock’, or perhaps ‘Jock!’

  I sensed that I was witnessing a fairly regular occurrence. Her white back was criss-crossed with red weals. After the sixth stroke Jumbo said: ‘All right, Freda old girl, that’s enough for tonight.’ Freda, still kneeling, turned her weeping face towards Jumbo and kissed the cane in his hand. Jumbo went to a drawer in the bedside cupboard, took out a tube of ointment and rubbed some of it into her back, then he patted her gently on the bottom, at which, quietly and humbly, she got into bed. Jumbo then went to a wardrobe and put the cane in it. I noticed that there were several such instruments in there, all arranged in an orderly row. Before he turned round I had slunk away quietly. I crept round the house and returned to bed.

  Despite not having had much
sleep I awoke refreshed. I told myself that I had witnessed nothing the previous night and almost believed it. I dressed and as soon as I had left my bedroom I was greeted by the Somali who been on the porch the previous night. He bad me good morning and told me his name was Abdullah. Then, silently, by means of gesture, he showed me to the dining room where on a sideboard under covered silver dishes, breakfast had been laid out. There was the traditional, almost Edwardian fare of devilled kidneys, bacon, sausages, scrambled eggs. There were also glass bowls full of fresh slices of pineapple and papaya.

  Jumbo was seated at the head of a long dining table making his way through a heavy plate of eggs and devilled kidneys. He waited until Abdullah had left the room before addressing me.

  ‘Morning, young feller-me-lad! Sleep well?’

  I was at the sideboard helping myself from the silver dishes. When I turned to face him, I saw a searching, penetrative gaze. I told him I had slept very well. After a moment’s pause he nodded curtly.

  ‘Well, then, tuck in! Tuck in! Afraid Freda’s feeling a bit under the weather this morning, and she’s having a lie in. So you’ll just have to put up with me. Like a tour of the estate?’

  Jumbo farmed sheep and cattle over a considerable acreage. The night before he had said that the Aberdares were like Scotland; and I suppose there was a certain similarity, the same expansive and slightly hostile grandeur. I thought rather of the Wiltshire Downs magnified to a surreal scale, under a dome of sky, intensely blue, in which a few clouds floated unnaturally far above. It looked to me that morning like a paradise, but a dangerous one.

  As he drove me round Jumbo explained the management of his estate and the tribal differences between the Kikuyu and the Masai who worked for him. The Somalis, he told me, made the best indoor servants: they were nearly all Moslem, intensely proud and considered themselves far more civilised than the native Kenyans. Often Jumbo would stop the Landrover to talk, in fluent Swahili, to individuals or groups of people. It was clear that ‘Bwana Daventry’ was immensely respected, and if I felt slightly uneasy at the unembarrassed way in which he accepted deference and humility, then perhaps my prejudice rather than his was at fault. However, I was surprised that such feudalism had survived independence. I think I managed to ask some oblique question about the Mau Mau and Kenyan independence because I remember Jumbo’s comment which was typically laconic and forthright.

  ‘Most of the people who had behaved well managed to get through the crisis pretty well intact.’

  I noted that Jumbo had used the phrase which was a favourite of my father’s: ‘behaving well’. To me it had always seemed inadequate, even slightly cold; but I was beginning to wonder if it was simply used to disguise something more profound to which people like Jumbo and my father would be embarrassed to lay claim. Then I remembered what I had seen in the night: had that been ‘behaving well’?

  We returned to Cloud’s Hill at lunchtime and found Freda looking as svelte and soignée as she had been the previous day. We lunched in the dining room off a selection of cold meats and the usual papaya and pineapple. I wondered why we were not eating on the veranda with its splendid view of the garden, but I did not ask. When lunch was over Jumbo announced that he had business to attend to that afternoon and that he was leaving me ‘to the tender mercies’ of Freda.

  When Jumbo had gone Freda said: ‘Now you’re going to go on my tour of inspection’ and rose abruptly from the table. She did not look to see if I or her two Ridgebacks were following, but we were. She marched out into the hall, picking up a riding crop from a side table as she went, and led the way out into the gardens that surrounded Cloud’s Hill. ‘They’re my pride and joy,’ she said to me in an unexpectedly mournful tone. I expressed my admiration as they were indeed magnificently laid out. Freda explained that because the earth was rich, and there was no dormant season, the garden could always look at its best, ‘so I have no excuses’. She needed none. The lawns were immaculately green, the wide borders a riot of scarlet canna, frangipani and bougainvillaea. There were beds of subtle, tender English roses, long-stemmed lilies and fuchsias. In the air was the scent of jasmine, mimosa and hibiscus.

  As we went on our tour I noticed at least half a dozen boys at work, watering, clipping, weeding. She spoke to one or two of them, but in a markedly different manner to the way Jumbo addressed his tribesmen. Her orders and admonitions were harsh, and mostly delivered in English. To one of them who appeared to be idling she gave a smart tap on the shoulder with her riding crop. The boy reacted, but silently and I saw fear on his face.

  At first I felt uneasy in her presence, but when she found I was able to share her enthusiasm for gardening, her manner became less brittle. Our stroll through the shady avenues of jacaranda slowed to a leisurely pace while the Ridgebacks gambolled around us. Freda’s conversation looped away from garden matters towards Kenya in general and Kenyan society on which she made a number of trenchant comments.

  Suddenly she asked: ‘How well d’you know Sabrina King?’

  ‘Not very.’

  ‘Has she said anything to you about me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t want to believe a word she utters. She’s a terrible fibber. According to her, she’s had everyone from the Governor General downwards. Mind you, that may well be true, but the rest is lies.’

  After that the conversation reverted back to the gentler topic of gardens. On returning from our walk we had tea in the sitting room while Freda introduced me to various card games, including one called ‘Honeymoon Bridge’, a kind of Bridge for two people. As I knew Bridge I could play it, but I did not care for it much.

  It only struck me as curious much later on that, during the time we spent together, there were no telephone calls for her or talk of visits to or from other friends. Shortly after five Freda had her first drink, a gin sling, and from then until dinner she drank steadily without apparently getting drunk. When Jumbo arrived shortly after six, he observed her intake, but made no comment.

  After dinner Jumbo set up an appropriately marked green baize cloth and a half size roulette wheel on the dining room table and we played for a while with tiny stakes. The only evidence that Freda had drunk too much were the excited little squeals she emitted whenever she won anything. Jumbo did his best to keep the occasion jolly, but I found it all rather false and enervating. I could imagine how in the past there had been roulette parties at Cloud’s Hill, with dinner-jacketed men and diamond encrusted women clustered round the turning, clicking wheel, and it had all been ‘a terrific hoot’. Our game was no more than a pale ghost of what once had been.

  At ten thirty, quite suddenly and without any prior warning signs, Freda passed out onto the floor of the dining room. Jumbo did not seem too dismayed; it had obviously happened before. He said: ‘Not to worry. She’ll be right as rain on the morrow.’ Then he clapped his hands for the two Somalis who, without a word, carried her off to her bedroom.

  ‘Well,’ said Jumbo, ‘it’s been a long day. Time we all went down the wooden way to Bedfordshire, eh?’ He winked at me and I smiled back. Then he put an arm on my shoulder. ‘Never had a son myself,’ he said. ‘Rather missed out on all that. Your father John’s a lucky beggar.’

  That night I kept the window of my bedroom open and heard, as I had not before, the sound of a Kenyan highland night. I listened for a while to a nightjar and the strange musical tapping of ground hornbills, like several tight-skinned little drums being played in perfect syncopation. Once I think I caught the distant cough and roar of lions. Very soon these had soothed me to sleep.

  I woke out of a confused dream and it was still dark. I believe I had been woken by the sound of several muffled bangs, like a car backfiring, but when I was fully awake I heard no further disturbance, so it may have been an illusion. Certainly no-one else had been roused. I went to the window and looked out. All was quiet. Even the nightjar had gone to bed, but there was something on the veranda. I would investigate.

  I began to
climb through the window as I had the previous night, but some impulse told me to try the French windows. I turned a handle and the doors opened. They must have been unlocked.

  The same mist that I had seen the previous night had gathered itself on the veranda, about five yards away from me, but this time the upper part of it had assumed a recognisable form. The form was a face, a mask with eyes, no more than that; the rest was vague. It was a young woman’s face framed by a suggestion of pale, lustrous hair. The features were well-chiselled, the lips sensuously curved, the eyes heavy lidded, but it was the look that held me. Tilted downwards it seemed to stare at something that would have been at its feet if it had had them. The look itself was very particular, but hard to describe: a kind of hungry fascination, I suppose you might call it, with a slight smile on the lips as if pleasure were being taken from something that pleasure should not be taken from. The look had a certain beauty, because the features were those of a beautiful woman, and there was a rapture in it, but it filled me with fear and despair. I realise that I have been avoiding the use of the word ‘evil’ because I do not know what it would mean in this context. It is too general. This was a look that belonged to a particular person at a particular moment, a moment of ecstatic degradation.

  I could not take my eyes off it. It must have lasted no more than half a minute until it began to waver and dissipate like a blown ring of tobacco smoke. Very slowly the mist sank and seeped away from the veranda leaving behind it only a slight luminescence and a faint perfume. Jasmine, was it?

  The look was gone but it was lodged in my mind. I realised that there might come a time when I would believe, or want to believe, that I had only dreamed it, but that did not matter. The look was still the look. I could even identify the spot on the floorboards of the veranda on which the eyes had been fixed. On examination it turned out that this was where a section of the boards about five feet by three had been removed and replaced by a new segment. The substitution had been so skilfully disguised that one would not have noticed unless one had been looking for it.