When she opened his robe and lowered her head to his lap he was no longer even astonished at the frequency with which she could arouse him. She stayed there, and drew the lightning out of him like drawing a wasp’s sting out of one’s flesh, and then they both fell asleep in that position, awakening much later, cold and stiff and giggling, the fire nearly out. Laughing and touching one another, they made their way upstairs to bed, and awoke to a wonderfully sunny Sunday. “Now,” she said, “I’ll take that walk in the woods.”
In the mud room by the rear door he had an assortment of Wellingtons, knee-high lined rubber boots. She found a pair that fit well over her walking shoes, and they tramped through the spring-boggy woods hand in hand. She kissed him as a reward for finding a sweet-singing bird whose name he did not know.
They went for a drive in the afternoon, and stopped in a pub where the mackintoshed locals clearly couldn’t tell whether they should be astounded by the black woman herself or by her choice of companion. That was funny, too, and on the drive back they made up the dialogue that must have taken place around that bar after their departure.
There was a restaurant in a town fifteen miles away—good plain food—where once again they were a sensation, but the proprietors and other customers were too well bred to make an obvious fuss. Returning to the house after dark, the black sky flung with high tiny stars and a gibbous moon, they found that the unseen Kenwyns had set a new fire in the living room that awaited only Sir Denis’s match.
Patricia had completed her business at the American Embassy on Friday—the permission, about which there would be no problem, would be forthcoming to the computer supplier in the States—and would be taking an afternoon plane Monday to Rome, transferring there to an overnight flight for Tripoli and Entebbe. All her luggage and her new purchases (including a third suitcase, as threatened) were with her now, and Sir Denis would drive her straight to Heathrow tomorrow. In bed tonight he already felt her loss, felt nostalgic for the weekend even before it was over, and he slept with her head nestled on his shoulder, his arm curled around her back.
They were in the process of loading the car and closing the house on Monday morning when the phone rang for the first time all weekend. There was only one phone in the house, in the kitchen, and Sir Denis was a bit out of breath when he got to it.
It was Bentley, one of the men from the International Coffee Board’s London office. “Forgive my calling you at your weekend retreat,” he said, “but I wanted to get hold of you before you made any plans.”
“Of course. Not to worry.”
“The fact is,” Bentley said, and Sir Denis could hear an uncharacteristic awkwardness in the man’s voice, “you won’t be involved with the Uganda transaction any longer.”
His heart seemed to stop. In the other room, Patricia was humming some tune as she made a last stroll around the house. I’ll lose her, he thought (not acknowledging to himself even then what the thought implied, what knowledge about her he was denying), but he kept his voice steady when he said, “I won’t? Why on Earth not?”
“Um,” Bentley said. “I’m supposed to fob you off with some sort of answer, you know, but I can’t help asking a question of my own. What’s the relationship between you and Emil Grossbarger?”
“Emil—? I—I hardly know how to answer that. We get along; we work well together.” I’ll lose her. “What are you trying to say, man?”
“You didn’t hear it from me,” Bentley told him, “in fact you don’t know this at all, but you’re out at Grossbarger’s request.”
“That’s impossible!” But even as he said it he could feel the floor of the world shift beneath his feet, could sense the stage sets of reality being reordered into a new perspective.
“I can tell from your voice,” Bentley said, “that you don’t know what this is all about.”
“Am I that obvious? All right, then, I don’t know what it’s all about.”
“Grossbarger went out of his way,” Bentley said, “to assure us that he had no fault to find with you, either personally or professionally. He said he wanted to make the change for reasons of his own, and would always be happy to work with you again in the future.”
“Then it makes no sense,” Sir Denis said. I’ll lose her. “Who’s replacing me?”
“Walter Harrison.”
Sir Denis knew him; an American, with a special interest in the Mexican coffee business. “Still someone from the Bogotá Group, then,” he commented.
“I was rather hoping you could explain it.”
In that instant the penny dropped, and Sir Denis could have explained it, but he did not. “I’m as baffled as you are,” he said.
“As it now stands,” Bentley told him, “you can go home at any time.”
Meaning São Paulo, of course. “Thank you.” Sir Denis said. “I’ll talk to you before I go.” I’ll lose her.
Very hesitantly he returned to the living room, where the ashes in the fireplace were cold and dead. Patricia rose from an armchair, her expression concerned, saying, “What is it? It must have been bad news.”
Staring at her more intently than he realized, willing the awfulness to be over as quickly and cleanly as possible, he said, “Emil Grossbarger has asked the Coffee Board to replace me on the Uganda sale.”
“Oh, my dear.” She stepped forward, reaching out to touch his arm.
“I can see what it is, of course,” he said. “Grossbarger and Chase have come to an agreement, and they want me out of the way.”
“So it is coffee.” For just an instant her face was tense with calculation. Then she shook her head, and focused on him again, and smiled sadly at whatever she saw in his eyes. “Yes, of course,” she said. “But this won’t make any difference to us.”
“It won’t?” He was so convinced of their finish that he couldn’t even try to hope.
“There are things I wish I could tell you,” she said, her gentle hand pressing his arm. “But you’ll see, my dear, it isn’t over. Not between us.”
He didn’t believe her, but courtesy required him to pretend that he did. “Thank you, Patricia,” he said. “If for nothing else, thank you for bringing me back to life.”
“Stay alive,” she said, with that well-remembered seductive smile. “For me.”
“We should leave. You won’t want to miss your plane.”
20
Through April and into May, in the first five weeks of the long rains, Ellen flew only four round trips: three to Nairobi, and one all the way to Mombasa, seven hundred miles eastward on the Indian Ocean. Those few intervals above the clouds, in the beautiful gold of sunlight, made things not better but worse; each time, the return to Earth through those miserable clouds was an awful experience, leaving her bad-tempered for hours afterward.
The rain affected everybody. Even Frank seemed less boisterous and Mr. Balim not quite so smoothly self-assured. As for Lew, the rain and the forced inactivity were probably enough to explain his recent tension, his distracted, almost guilty manner, his impatience and suppressed anger. Still, Ellen thought there was more to it than that. She thought he was having an affair.
If so, it was the girl in Nairobi. The first flight there, Ellen’s passengers had been Balim and Lew, and afterward Lew had described to her the Jhosi family, their current plight, and their relationship with the coffee-smuggling operation. The second time, a week later, Lew had been the only passenger, bringing papers for the grandmother to sign. He had been met at the airport by the granddaughter, Amarda, who was to drive him to the coffee plantation while Ellen refueled and dealt with the airport paperwork.
Lew had mentioned Amarda Jhosi in his account of the first meeting, but had referred to her only glancingly, as though she were unimportant, thereby leaving out far too much. He hadn’t mentioned that she was beautiful, with large sad eyes. And he hadn’t mentioned that she was in love with him.
Well, men had less sensitivity about such things; it was possible he didn’t realize Amarda Jhosi
was in love with him. Still, Ellen dated his increasing testiness and irritability from that second Nairobi trip, when he had been gone with the girl for five hours—to sign papers?—and had volunteered an unconvincing story afterward about traffic jams.
Ellen’s third rainy-season flight had been the one to Mombasa, carrying Frank and two small canvas bags. Ivory or some other illegal commodity had been involved in that flight, she suspected, but she’d asked no questions and Frank had volunteered no answers. Because of the distance involved, that one had been an overnight trip, and Ellen had been fully prepared to fend off further unwanted advances from Frank that night in the Whitesands Hotel. It had been a pleasant relief when he had remained merely cheery and companionable, telling her over dinner comic or horrific incidents from Mombasa’s history, and not once making even the most oblique suggestion that they might spend the night together. Since then, she had warmed more to Frank, and even thought of him now as a friend.
Finally, three days ago, there had been the third trip to Nairobi. This time, Mr. Balim was along as well as Lew, and from the conversation in the plane Ellen understood that Balim was bringing money to the Jhosi family to be used in connection with the smuggling. They would have to order and pay for thousands of sacks with their own plantation’s imprint. They would have to arrange for transportation of the resacked coffee from the plantation, as well as for storage during the time the coffee was in their care.
The girl Amarda was at Wilson Airport again, to chauffeur them, and it seemed to Ellen the girl avoided her gaze. And this time, when the two men returned after four hours, Ellen thought there was a new amused twinkle in Balim’s eye, the look of a man holding tight to a delicious and diverting secret.
During this period of rain-caused idleness, Ellen had taken to hanging out at Balim’s place of business, where there was at least usually some sort of activity to watch, to distract herself. And she did enjoy talking with Isaac Otera, a decent and very sad man. Of course, Frank was always enjoyable to watch, crashing from wall to wall.
Today, arriving in midmorning, she found Frank dressed like some demon out of Kabuki, all swathed in shiny black raingear, stomping out of the office. Seeing her, he said, “You busy? Wanna go for a ride?”
“In the rain? Where to?”
“A town that never happened,” he said. “Come on along.”
“What the hell,” she said, and went with him.
“Port Victoria,” Frank said, squinting like a gargoyle through the wet windshield. “It was gonna be the champ, and it wound up a bum.”
They were driving northwest out of Kisumu on the B1. The rain was in its medium stage—relentless but not a downpour—and Frank had covered the front passenger seat with a blanket to eliminate the traces of Charlie, so Ellen could ride beside him. She felt unreasonably happy and light, as though some stuffy, constricting woolen overcoat she’d been wearing for months had at last been flung off. Settling herself comfortably on the blanketed seat, smiling in anticipation at Frank’s craggy profile, she said, “What happened to Port Victoria?”
“The British, to begin with,” he said. “When they were building the railroad, they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. They had four surveys done, and no two of them agreed, but of course back then a successful survey was one where nothing or nobody ate the surveyor. About the only thing they all agreed on was the place where the railroad should meet the lake.”
“Port Victoria,” she suggested.
“Wait for it.” He liked to tell his stories at his own pace, without being interrupted.
“Sorry.”
“This place—okay, Port Victoria—it’s up on the northeastern shoulder of the lake, with fairly high land right behind it. No swamps, see, but no mountains, either. It’s at the outer southern point of Berkeley Bay, so the lake is right in front of it, with a natural deep-water harbor, and Berkeley Bay around to the side for protected mooring.”
“Sounds good,” Ellen said.
“It is good. It’s terrific. That’s why they named it Port Victoria, right? It was supposed to be the major port on Lake Victoria, both of them named after that queen.”
“Something went wrong.”
“Something always goes wrong,” Frank said. “What happened this time, the British knew they were gonna end the railroad at Port Victoria, and they knew they were gonna start the railroad at Mombasa, but the seven hundred miles in between they were kind of fuzzy about.”
Ellen laughed, saying, “Because of things eating the surveyors.”
“Sure. It was so bad, they were still surveying out in front of the railroad while they were building it. And of course, the more detailed the survey, the closer they got to the reality on the ground, the more expensive it was. Like, a team would go through in the dry season and say, Fine, we got solid ground, just lay your track right down and zoom. Then the rains come, and it turns out there’s absolute rivers there, the track washes away, and all of a sudden for every ten miles you’ve got to do six miles of bridges.”
“Expensive,” Ellen agreed.
“The British Parliament was paying for all this,” Frank said, “and right from the beginning there was a strong minority that didn’t want to build the railroad at all. They were the anti-Imperialists, called the Little England group, and they didn’t want the interior of Africa opened up and colonized and made part of the British Empire. After ten years, when the cost of the railroad was just about doubled from the first estimate but they were actually getting close to the lake, the Little England bunch finally got their way. The money wasn’t shut off entirely, but the faucet was turned way down.”
“But they still reached the lake.”
“Sure. At Kisumu. Fifty-five miles closer than Port Victoria, a swamp next to a stagnant gulf, and it’s another forty miles across the gulf to the regular part of the lake. The British were just like anybody else: they spent like idiots when they didn’t know what they were doing, and as soon as some ready cash would have helped they got stingy.”
“So Port Victoria never happened.”
Nodding, Frank said, “It would have been what Kisumu is, a rich trading town with tourist hotels and its own airport and all that shit. Instead, it’s got a population of maybe a hundred, a little open-air village market, and that’s all. Also, the last twenty-five miles in is dirt road.”
“Dirt! In this weather?”
“It’s not that bad,” he said. “Most of it is rock. The way they build that kind of road, they just come in with bulldozers and scrape the topsoil away, and underneath you got rock. Anyway, back to the story. There’s a kicker in it.”
“A happy ending for Port Victoria after all?” Oddly enough, she had found herself sympathizing with the town, as though it were a person who’d been unjustly treated.
“In a way,” Frank said. “All the regular commerce went to Kisumu, but that left Port Victoria with all its natural advantages and nobody to use them. The natural harbor, the firm uphill land, the protected bay. And besides that, you’ve got Uganda just ten miles across the water.”
“You’re going to say smuggling.”
Frank laughed; history delighted him. “Sure, it’s smuggling. The biggest smuggling port on the lake. The straight world got the swamp and the stagnant gulf and a town called Kisumu, sounds like a sneeze. The underworld got Port Victoria.”
What Frank had called “mostly rock” turned out, in Ellen’s opinion, to be mostly mud. When they turned left off the B1 at Luanda—the sign pointed toward Siaya and Busonga, without mentioning Port Victoria at all—they were almost immediately half-mired in a broad lake of orangy-red mud. The road was very wide, probably three lanes (if it could be said to have such things as lanes), with high mud walls on both sides to channel the rain and keep it from running off. Those walls were undoubtedly the topsoil that had, according to Frank, been scraped off when this “road” had been built.
They passed a group of schoolgirls in bright pink jumpers and white blouses, a
ll carrying gaudily colored umbrellas. A few glowered at the truck in sullen suspicion, but most showed cheery smiles under their umbrellas, and many waved.
Everywhere she went, Ellen saw these groups of schoolchildren, the girls in bright-colored jumpers, the boys frequently in short pants and white shirts and blue blazers. The strangest thing was to see a group of neatly dressed teenagers walking at the end of the day across the stubby fields toward their homes; a cluster of low mud huts, lacking electricity or running water. How do they get up in the morning in such hovels, she wondered, and manage to turn themselves into clean, pressed, shining-faced students? How far they were traveling to reach the twentieth century, and how quickly and surely they were making the journey.
Their own journey, on the other hand, was rather slower and more uncertain. The Land-Rover slithered and slued along this endless rice paddy, the wheels throwing mud in all directions. (Frank had slowed down when they passed the schoolgirls so as not to splash them.) Here and there a solitary person walked, occasionally someone was to be seen hunkered under a large umbrella by the roadside waiting for God knows who or what, and once a dangerously skidding blue bus crammed with passengers came lurching the other way, the driver madly honking his horn in lieu of attempting to control the wheel. Frank eeled by him, and Ellen stared back at all the white-eyed black-faced passengers seen through the steamy windows frighteningly close.
There were no more history anecdotes on this part of the trip. Driving took all of Frank’s attention and, as usual, most of his muscles. Keeping clear of the flailing elbows, Ellen sat close to the door and watched the muddy world go slowly by.
Frank had said Port Victoria was fifty-five miles from Kisumu, and at the rate they were going, it was beginning to seem it would take a week, when all at once the road made an abrupt right-angled turn at a village—not even a village; not anything at all that Ellen could see—called Busonga, and directly in front of them was a narrow, fast-running, muddy river and a small open ferry. “Good God!”
Kahawa Page 20
