And she thought he must also be sad at leaving. Fifteen years is not a small period of one’s life and God, I don’t make it easy for him. She was filled with sudden compassion. She made sweet, pious resolutions. I’ll try to understand him. For a start, I’ll open my heart to him, tonight. Now she walked up to his side, placed her left hand on his shoulder: ‘Come to bed, you must be tired, all that noise at the party.’
He put down his cup and patted the hand on his shoulder, before removing it gently. ‘Go. I’ll soon join you.’ She felt a suggestion of impatience in his voice. And he was angry because his hand was not steady.
My hands are losing their firmness, he was thinking. Or did I drink too much? No, my hand suddenly became weak, so weak. She was laughing at me. Was it my fault, what, what fault? I didn’t mean to do it. I couldn’t have meant it, he insisted harder, now addressing himself to his absent wife. He drove me into it, he whispered uncertainly, going to the low cupboard by the wall, and taking out the only remaining bottle of whisky. Scotch, Johnnie Walker born 1840 and still walking strong. He laughed a little. He poured himself a glass, and gulped it down, poured another, drank and then went back to the seat keeping the bottle beside him. Why then should a thing that never happened – well – perhaps it did happen, but he never meant it – how could it come to trouble him?
He had forgotten about the incident until these, his last months in Africa. Then he had started re-enacting the scene in his dreams, the vision becoming more and more vivid as days and months whistled by. At first the face had only appeared to him by night. His bed held terror for him. Then suddenly, these last few days, the face started appearing before him in broad daylight. Why didn’t he get visitations from all the other Mau Mau terrorists he had tortured and killed? Except the man, that!
Yet he knew the man was not like the others. This man had worked for him as a shamba boy. A nice, God-fearing, submissive boy. A model of his type. He loved the boy and often gave him presents. Old shoes, old clothes. Things like that. He remembered the gratitude in the boy’s face and his gestures of appreciation, a little comic perhaps, and it had made giving them worthwhile. It was this feeling of doing something for the people here that made the things you had to put up with bearable. Here in Africa you felt you were doing something tangible, something that was immediately appreciated. Not like in Europe where nobody seemed to care what you did, where even the poor in the East of London refused to seize opportunities offered them. The Welfare State. G-r-r-r-r! Such thoughts had made him feel that the boy was more than a servant. He felt somehow fatherly towards him … responsible, and the boy was his. Then one Christmas, the boy suddenly threw back at him the gift of a long coat and ten shillings. The boy had laughed and walked out of his service. For a long time, he could never forget the laughter. This he could have forgiven. But the grief and the misery in his wife’s face at the news of the boy’s disappearance was something else. For this he could never forgive the boy. Later when the Mau Mau war broke out, he, as a screening officer, was to meet the boy.
He drank steadily as if in vengeance for years of abstinence and outward respectability. The ceiling, the floor, the chairs swam in the air. I’ll be all right if I go for a drive, for a small drive, he suggested to himself, and staggered out daring the man to appear before him with that sneering laughter.
He got into the car. The headlights swept away the darkness. He did not know where he was going, he just abandoned himself to the road. Sometimes he would recognize a familiar tree or a signpost then he would go into a blackout and drive blindly. In this way, dozing, waking, telling himself to hold on to the steering wheel, he swerved round sharp corners and bends, down the valley, avoiding, miraculously, one or two vehicles from the opposite direction. What am I doing? I am mad, he muttered and unexpectedly swerved to the right, leaving the road, and just managing to avoid crashing into a passing train at the crossing. He drove through the grass into the forest; he hit into bumps, brushed against tree stumps, again miraculously avoided hitting the tree trunks. I must stop this, he thought, and to prove that he had not yet lost his head, he braked the car to a sudden standstill.
He had heard of rituals in the dark. He had even read somewhere that some of the early European settlers used to go to African sorcerers, to have curses lifted. He had considered these things opposed to reason: but what had happened to him, the visions, surely worked against the normal laws of reason. No, he would exorcise the hallucinations from his system, here, in the dark. The idea was attractive and, in his condition, irresistible. ‘Africa does this to you,’ he thought as he stripped himself naked. He now staggered out of the car and walked a little distance into the forest. Darkness and the forest buzzing crept around him. He was afraid, but he stood his ground. What next? He did not know anything about African magic. At home he had heard vague things like faerie folk, rowan trees, stolen babies and kelpies. He had heard, or read, that you could make waxen images of somebody you wanted to harm and at the dead of the night stick pins into the eyes. Maybe he ought to do this; he would make an image of that man, his former shamba boy, and prick his eyes. Then he remembered that he had not brought any wax and danced with fury, alone in the forest.
‘No, that’ll never do,’ he thought, now ashamed of things of the dark. ‘I want to know what went wrong that even my wife laughs at me.’ He went back to the car, hoping to find out why things in Kenya, everywhere, were falling, falling apart. He had never thought a day would come when a government would retire him and replace him with a black. The shame of it. And his wife looking at him with those eyes. Another idea more irresistible than the first now possessed him. ‘I’ll write to her. I’ll write to the world.’ He fished out a notebook and started writing furiously. Inspiration already made him feel light and buoyant within. The light in the car dimly lit the pages, but he did not mind, because words, ideas, were all in his head, he butchered his life and tried to examine it, at the same time defending himself before her, before the world.
… I know you have seen me shake before that face. You have refused to comment, perhaps not to hurt me. But you laughed at me all the time, didn’t you? Don’t deny it. I’ve seen it in your eyes and looks. I know you think me a failure. I never rose beyond the rank of Senior D.O. Africa has ruined me, but I never got a chance, really. Oh, don’t look at me with those blue eyes as if you thought I lied. Maybe you are saying there’s a tide in the affairs of men. O.K. I neglected it. We neglected it. But what tide? Oh, I am tired.
He stopped and read over what he had written. He turned over another page. Inspiration came in waves. His hand was too slow for what begged to come out.
… What went wrong, I keep on asking myself? Was it wrong for us, with our capital, with our knowledge, with our years of Christian civilization to open and lift a dark country onto the stage of history? I played my part. Does it matter if promotion was slow? Does it matter if there were ups and downs? And there were many moments of despair. I remember the huts we burnt. Even then I did ask myself: had I fallen so low? My life reduced to burning down huts and yet more huts? Had my life come to a cul-de-sac? And yet we could not let atavistic violence destroy all that had taken so many years and so many lives to build. When I had reached the nadir of my despair, I met that man – our shamba boy. Do you remember him? The one who spurned my gift and disappeared, maybe to the forest? He stood in the office with that sneer in his face – like – like the devil. The servile submissive face when he worked for you had gone. He had that strange effect on me – when I remembered the grief he caused you – well – made me boil inside – I felt a violent rage within such as I had never felt before – I could not bear that grin. I stood and spat into his face. And that arrogant stare never left his face even as he cleared off the spit with the back of his left hand. Isn’t it strange that I forget his name now, that I never really knew his name? Did you? I only remember that he was tall and there in the office I saw the violence in his eyes. I was afraid of him. Can you believe it? I,
afraid of a black man? Afraid of my former shamba boy? What happened later, I cannot remember, cannot explain, I was not myself, I only saw the face of the man. At night, in the morning, I saw the grin, the sneer, the arrogant indifference. And he would not confess to anything. I gave command. He was taken to the forest. I never saw him again …
He wrote in fury; images flowed, merged, clashed: it was as if he had a few days to live and he wanted to purge his soul of something. A confession to a priest before the gallows fell. He was now shivering. But he was still possessed … I’m writing this to you, I am alone in the forest, and in the world. I want to begin a new life with you in England, after saying goodbye to Africa…. And now he discovered he had no clothes and that he was shivering. He felt ashamed of his nakedness and quickly put on his clothes. But he could not continue with his confession and he feared to read it over in case he changed his mind. He was now almost sober, but very excited at the prospect of giving his life to her, tonight.
She was not yet asleep. She too was determined to wait for him to come back so that they could share their last night in Africa. In bed, she allowed her mind to glance backwards over her life, over her relationship with him. At first, in their early days in Kenya, she had tried to be enthusiastic about his civilizing zeal and his ambitions. She too was determined to play her part, to give life a purpose. She attended a few meetings of African women in the ridges and even learnt a smattering of Swahili. Then she wanted to understand Africa, to touch the centre, and feel the huge continent throb on her fingers. In those days she and he were close, their hearts seemed to beat together. But with the passage of years, he had gone farther and farther away. She lost her original enthusiasm: the ideas that had earlier appeared so bright faded and became rusty in her eyes. Who were they to civilize anyone? What was civilization anyway? And why did he fret because he could not climb up the ladder as quickly as he wanted? She became slightly impatient with this rusty thing that took him away from her, but she would not disturb him, ruin his career. So she went to the parties, did her share of small talk, and wanted to cry. Ought she to have spoken, then, she wondered now, wriggling in bed, puzzled by his late-night drive. She gave up meetings in the villages. She wanted to be alone. She did not want to understand Africa. Why should she? She had not tried to understand Europe, or Australia where she was born. No. You could never hope to embrace the meaning of a continent in your small palms, you could only love. She wanted to live her own life, and not as a prop to another’s climb to a top that promised no fuller life.
So she went for walks alone in the countryside: she saw children playing and wondered what it would feel like to have a child. When would her first arrive in this strange world? She was awed by the thick crowds of banana plants, the thick bush and forests. That was just before the Emergency when you could walk down alone anywhere without fear.
It was during one of her walks that the boy had first made love to her among the banana plantations. Freedom. And afterward their fevered love-making had finally severed her from the world of her husband and other District Officers.
Arriving home, he found she was not yet asleep. He went towards her, riding on low exciting waves. He did not put on the light but sat on the bed without speaking.
‘Where have you been?’
‘I went for a drive – seeing the old place for the last time.’
‘Come into bed then. God, how cold you are! And here I was waiting for you to give me warmth.’
‘You know it’s always chilly at night.’
‘Come on then.’
She felt she had to tell him now in the dark, about her lover. She did not want to look into his face in case she changed her mind. She put out her hand and stroked his head, feeling for a way to start. Now. Her heart was beating. Was she scared?
‘I want to tell you something,’ she removed her hand from his head, and paused, the next words refusing to come out. ‘Will you forgive me?’
‘Of course I will, everything.’ He was impatient. What could she tell him greater than what he had written, reel-hot, filling the notebook. He wanted to tell her how he had exorcised the ghost of the shamba boy from his life. He waited hoping she would finish quickly. He meant to give her the notebook and withdraw to the bathroom to give her time to see his bare soul.
‘Of course I can forgive you anything,’ he said by way of encouragement. ‘Go on,’ he whispered gently into the dark room.
She told him about the shamba boy – her lover.
He listened and felt energy and blood leave his body.
Would he forgive her? She only wanted them to – start a new life. She finished, her voice fading into dark silence. She listened to her heart-beat waiting for him to speak.
But he did not speak. A kind of dullness had crept into his limbs, into his mouth, into the heart. The man. His shamba boy. For an answer he stood up and started toward the door.
‘Darling, please!’ she called out, for the first time feeling dark terror at his lack of words. ‘Don’t go. It was a long way back, before the Emergency.’
But he continued walking, out through the door, into the sitting room. He sat on the sofa exactly where he had earlier. Automatically, he started fingering the unfinished cup of coffee.
For all his visions of moral ideals in the service of British capitalism, he was a vain man: he never really saw himself in any light but that of an adequate husband. He had no cause, within himself, to doubt her fidelity to him as a man, or a husband. How then could this woman, his wife, bring herself to sleep with that man, that creature? How make herself so cheap, drag his thousand-year-old name to mud, and such mud?
He had followed a dream for too long. He would not let the dream go despite the reality around him. In his colonizing mission and his zeal to reach the top he had neglected his house and another had occupied it. In this, perhaps, he was not alone. But how could he know this as he sat in the middle of the room, the bare walls staring at him? The cup fell out of his hands and broke into pieces. He stood up and walked around the room, slowly, looking at nothing, seeing neither yesterday nor tomorrow. Then he took out his notebook and opened it at random:
The white man in Africa must accept a more stringent moral code in the family and in the society at large. For we must set the ideals to which our African subjects must aspire.
He closed the notebook and walked into the kitchen where he never went before. He took a match, struck it, and watched the notebook burn. He watched the flame, saw his flesh burn, but he felt no pain, nothing. The man’s ghost would forever pursue him. Africa.
PART III
Secret Lives
MINUTES OF GLORY
Her name was Wanjiru. But she liked better her Christian one, Beatrice. It sounded more pure and more beautiful. Not that she was ugly; but she could not be called beautiful either. Her body, dark and full fleshed, had the form, yes, but it was as if it waited to be filled by the spirit. She worked in beer halls where sons of women came to drown their inner lives in beer cans and froth. Nobody seemed to notice her. Except, perhaps, when a proprietor or an impatient customer called out her name, Beatrice; then other customers would raise their heads briefly, a few seconds, as if to behold the bearer of such a beautiful name, but not finding anybody there, they would resume their drinking, their ribald jokes, their laughter and play with the other serving girls. She was like a wounded bird in flight: a forced landing now and then but nevertheless wobbling from place to place so that she would variously be found in Alaska, Paradise, The Modern, Thome and other beer-halls all over Limuru. Sometimes it was because an irate proprietor found she was not attracting enough customers; he would sack her without notice and without a salary. She would wobble to the next bar. But sometimes she was simply tired of nesting in one place, a daily witness of familiar scenes; girls even more decidedly ugly than she were fought over by numerous claimants at closing hours. What do they have that I don’t have? she would ask herself, depressed. She longed for a bar-kingdom where she
would be at least one of the rulers, where petitioners would bring their gifts of beer, frustrated smiles and often curses that hid more lust and love than hate.
She left Limuru town proper and tried the mushrooming townlets around. She worked at Ngarariga, Kamiritho, Rironi and even Tiekunu and everywhere the story was the same. Oh, yes, occasionally she would get a client; but none cared for her as she would have liked, none really wanted her enough to fight over her. She was always a hard-up customer’s last resort. No make-believe even, not for her that sweet pretence that men indulged in after their fifth bottle of Tusker. The following night or during a pay-day, the same client would pretend not to know her; he would be trying his money-power over girls who already had more than a fair share of admirers.
She resented this. She saw in every girl a rival and adopted a sullen attitude. Nyagūthiī especially was the thorn that always pricked her wounded flesh. Nyagūthiī, arrogant and aloof, but men always in her courtyard; Nyagūthiī, fighting with men, and to her they would bring propitiating gifts which she accepted as of right. Nyagūthiī could look bored, impatient, or downright contemptuous and still men would cling to her as if they enjoyed being whipped with biting words, curled lips and the indifferent eyes of a free woman. Nyagūthiī was also a bird in flight, never really able to settle in one place, but in her case it was because she hungered for change and excitement: new faces and new territories for her conquest. Beatrice resented her very shadow. She saw in her the girl she would have liked to be, a girl who was both totally immersed in and yet completely above the under-world of bar violence and sex. Wherever Beatrice went the long shadow of Nyagūthiī would sooner or later follow her.
She fled Limuru for Ilmorog in Chiri District. Ilmorog had once been a ghost village, but had been resurrected to life by that legendary woman, Nyang’endo, to whom every pop group had paid their tribute. It was of her that the young dancing Muthuu and Muchun g’ wa sang:
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