“But Sara didn’t approve?”
“His mother wants him to be what all mothers want their children to be.”
“Which is what?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He knocks back the last of the whiskey. “He’s all she has. I suppose she just wants him to be a regular boy. Equipped for a good shot at happiness. Someone she can be proud to call her son.”
Silence falls between us.
“When were you going to tell me—about Sara?” I ask eventually.
He looks up. “There was no time—you were on a ship to Mombasa before I could reach you.”
“But before that. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I would have done if I had thought you needed to know. But what difference did it make when you were in England? It might only have upset you.”
“I had a right to know,” I say, hearing my voice shake with the courage of saying it. “The truth is still the truth even if I wasn’t here to witness it.”
My father looks at me, his eyes lit with a weary impatience. “I warned you not to come, Rachel. Don’t blame me for what you see now that you are here.”
—
I RISE AND GO into the hall, where I stand with my head against the tall mahogany bureau, listening to the ticking of the grandfather clock, breathing to steady myself. When I think there is no longer any danger of my crying, I open the bureau drawers and find what I am looking for—a pair of steel scissors, a cloth and a tin, and a screw-top bottle of paraffin. I go back into the sitting room. My father isn’t there. I crouch down next to Juno and begin cutting the burrs from her fur, as my mother used to. It takes time, and her coat is rough and uneven when I have finished. Then I pour the paraffin into the tin and dip the cloth into the cool liquid, rubbing it onto the ticks to loosen their grip.
“I didn’t want to upset you, Rachel.” He is standing in the doorway.
I don’t trust myself to speak.
“I’m happy to see you. Of course I am. But I am worried too. You asked earlier about the violence in Nyeri. The truth is I cannot pretend that I’m not concerned. Men from Nairobi have stirred the Kikuyu’s imagination with talk of land restitution. There is a discontent in Kenya that I have not seen before. Perhaps it will all blow over—but I don’t want you getting caught up in any trouble.”
“I have nowhere else to go, Papa,” I say, looking up at him. “This is my home.”
“I know,” he says, hovering above me. “I know.” I catch the note of something desperate in his voice. I think he might drop his hand onto my shoulder—I anticipate the weight of it, the breadth of his palm, the strength of his fingers gripping me, but it doesn’t come, and I feel its absence just as strongly as if it were there. After a while he moves across the room, and I hear him checking the latches on the windows, bolting the door.
I work on removing the ticks, tight and fat, nestled in Juno’s coat. Her skin twitches, and she lifts her head to watch me, but the stillness of her body speaks her gratitude. I pull out the last one, grasping it between my thumb and forefinger, watching it for a moment—its legs crawling on air, before flicking it into the fire. Then I gather up the handful of matted hair that I have snipped from her coat, and throw it onto the flames. The hairs curl and singe—a thousand red filaments dissolving into a sharp acrid smoke that coats the back of my throat and makes me cough.
—
MY FATHER WALKS ME to my room. I am aware of the house very quiet around us, and the knowledge that soon I will be left on my own at the end of this corridor.
“Are you all right down here?” he asks as we reach my door, the floorboards creaking under our feet. “Sara thought you might be happy to have a bit of privacy.”
“Yes, of course.”
“You’re not still scared at night?”
“A little,” I say, smiling in the dark and he reaches out and squeezes my hand, an acknowledgment of my old terrors, the nights when I crawled into their bed, scared of the moon’s shadow on the wall. The sudden intimacy of the gesture—the rough graze of his hand closing over mine in ownership and protection—shocks me. I want to turn to him, but I do not dare; he might not pull me into him as I need him to.
When he drops my hand, I reach for the door handle, but do not turn it. I want to hear him speak my mother’s name. I want—just for one moment—to resurrect the past. For things to be the way they were before. But I find I can’t articulate any of this—I am worried he will not understand. So I say instead, “Where are Mama’s things?”
“We saved the bits and pieces that we thought you might want.”
I have an image of her wardrobe full of cotton trousers, hats, jodhpurs and dresses where I used to sit and read under the window as a child; her books; her collection of fossils and stones. “We?”
“Sara and I. They’re in boxes down at the stables, in the barn.”
“But what about you? What did you keep?” I ask, wanting to believe that he held on to something for his own sake. That he hasn’t so completely renounced the past. I want to know that it was difficult for him living here after my mother died. That he struggled to cope without us. I need to know that it meant something, the life we had here. That it cannot be so easily forgotten.
“Oh, I don’t know, darling.” He draws a hand over his face and breathes out. “It was all a long time ago. I don’t like to think about it.” He leans down to kiss me on the cheek, and says, “Good night, my love.” But I am not sure, as I close the door of my room, that the word has any meaning.
—
JUNO SNIFFS THE CORNERS of the room, then—satisfied—flops down on the floor beside the bed. I change into my nightdress, check that the two curtained windows are closed and latched, then slip between the cool sheets.
I hear Harold walk past my door, from his room along the corridor, see the glimmer of his lamp, leaving behind him darkness and silence.
In the end—despite the dark, and my unease—I fall into a deep sleep, and when I wake it is morning. I lie in bed watching the light filtering through the edges of the thatching. Outside I can hear the rhythmic sound of a broom being swept over the dry earth. The cattle bellow as they are led down to the dairy, and—far off—I can hear women singing as they collect water from the dam. Juno sniffs wetly at my face and I slide a hand through her warm fur. It is hard to imagine that anything could be wrong on the farm.
VI
Mungai is laying the breakfast table when I come out onto the veranda.
My father will be at the dairy checking the milk yields. He won’t come back for his eggs for another hour or so. I slip round the back of the house to the kitchen. Juno follows me, waiting at the open door—she knows not to step over the threshold.
I gulp down a cup of tea, and Jim gives me a bread roll spread thickly with butter, a wedge of cheese in the middle. I take it gratefully, heading off down the track.
“Where are you going?” a voice behind me asks. I turn and see Harold watching me from the back door. His face is pale and there are dark rings around his eyes.
“I’ll be back in time for breakfast—” I call out, leaving him standing there. It is my first morning home and I don’t want company.
I take the route I have always taken. The earth is soft and damp, and dust rises in heavy plumes from the soles of my shoes. The sun has only just risen, and a jackal barks somewhere in the bush. A moment later something moves ahead of me in the thorny scrub, and I stop—my heart in my throat. All I can hear is the chattering of the weaver birds making their nest in the tree overhead. A buffalo charge is dangerous. My father calls them the “black death”—they have gored more white hunters than any other animal. A sudden explosion of sound, and a flock of guinea fowl burst out of the bushes, running down the track in front of me, cackling at each other. I laugh softly, my heart rapping against my chest. Where the large old olive tree stands, casting its
black seeds onto the earth, the track splits. I head left down to the stables.
If the house was where I spent my evenings—the place I came back to at dusk, my legs scratched, and my hair stuck full of thorns—then this was where I spent my days, in the stables with the horses.
In a clearing are three outhouses built around a courtyard. On the left side is a mechanic’s garage, and on the other—facing it—four loose boxes. The center section is a storage barn, with large sliding doors, where my father keeps the tractors he imports from England. The stable doors are closed, top and bottom, and I feel a pang of disappointment. My pony was sold years ago—my father had written to tell me—but he hadn’t mentioned the horses: the black, long-legged thoroughbred that had belonged to my mother, and the neat, sure-footed Abyssinian horse with his soft, velvet nose who—though his withers were taller than my shoulders—let me slide onto his back in the stable, and slip my arms around his neck. There is still a scattering of old straw on the stable floor and the faint smell of sweat and leather. Without a horse I will have less freedom. I won’t be able to roam so far from the house, and I will be more reliant on my father.
Everything is quiet in the garage, and I wonder if anyone still works here. A jacaranda tree drops its soft violet flowers like blossom over the dusty earth. Then I hear the clink of metal, and see an African pull himself out from underneath one of my father’s jeeps. He is lean and tall, and moves with a supple strength that is familiar.
“Michael?” My voice is tentative. I had not expected to ever see him again. His sleeves are rolled high on his long forearms, and he cleans his hands on his overalls as he walks across the yard toward me.
“Memsaab—” His wide eyes settle on mine and I feel a gladness rising inside me, as it did when I was a child and he came to take my lessons. He represents something of my old life here, the way it was when my mother was alive.
He crouches down, giving a short whistle through his teeth, and Juno pads over to him, ears back in pleasure, pushing her nose into his dark, slender hands. He was a farm boy whose family had managed to raise enough money to send him to school. He had done well. So well that he had been accepted into high school, and when he returned from the war, my mother, defying convention and unable to find a governess who would live in so remote a place, had taken him on as a teacher. For a year he had given me classes on geography, English history and mathematics.
“She knows you,” I say.
“She comes down here sometimes, when I’m working.”
“She’s grown.”
“So have you,” he says, standing up, his gaze holding mine, unembarrassed by the truth of it though I find myself reddening at this unexpected turn of attention onto me. “I was sorry to hear that your mother had died.”
He is the only person to have said it, and I realize how much I have wanted someone to talk about her. Grief turns in my chest like an animal shifting in its nest; stretches its needle limbs into the corners of my body, into the backs of my eyes. I want to tell him what it was like—losing my mother, leaving Kenya so suddenly, about how strange it is to be back, and how much has changed, but six years is a long time. I am no longer a child. Instead I say—only now remembering—“I saw you the day she died. At the factory—”
“Yes—” he says, and I catch the flicker of something in his eyes. “I was staying with a cousin who worked there.”
I would like to ask him about the man who was killed in that upstairs room; for him to say something to soften the horror of what took place, but he has closed down the conversation, and I do not know how to open it again.
“Why did you come back to Kisima?”
“There was too much violence in Nairobi, too much unrest. When I wrote to your father a year ago he offered me work.”
“As a mechanic?” I ask, surprised. He is wearing the same overalls and sandals issued to all the farm workers. In 1945—just back from the war—he had worn his khaki uniform and army cap; it had set him apart from the rest of the Kikuyu labor; now he looks less like himself, more African; and I am aware of a different man—a stranger—who lies outside the grasp of my knowledge.
“Yes—” He turns over his black, oil-stained hands. “I trained in the war.”
I have the uneasy sensation, standing here in front of him, that I want something from him—an acknowledgment of the past perhaps—that is as meaningless to him as it is to my father.
The sun beats down on us, and I feel myself slowing, unused to the way it crushes, layer upon layer of heat. I look over at the shuttered stables. “The horses have gone?”
“Your father sold them.” His tongue flickers over his lips. “Memsaab, I have work to do—”
“Of course—” I say, letting him go, his words working on me as a kind of dismissal. He used to call me memsaab in gentle irony—I was only a child—but the title carries a different meaning now, though it isn’t as simple as my being a European woman. It reinforces the inevitable distance that time has put between us. He is no longer my teacher, and as a laborer on my father’s farm, there is little now to connect us.
I leave the yard and walk down to the dam. It is a shock seeing Michael again. I knew almost no one of my own age as a child, and when Michael returned from the war, I came to rely on the lessons he gave me; the world he opened up beyond the farm, beyond my parents. I had forgotten that I had seen him the day of the strike, at the factory; the memory lost in the events that came before, and the news that followed after. But time is unraveling, like ripples on the surface of the dam. In my mind’s eye I can see the upstairs room at the factory.
—
IT IS EERILY QUIET. I am crouched in the cupboard, too afraid to move. Eventually I let out a moan, and push open the cupboard door. The African lies a few feet in front of me. The angle of his head—so still now—articulating the outrage of his death. After a moment I run, tripping over the dead weight of his legs, wresting open the door, out into the searing light of the balcony.
I stumble down the stairs, desperate to get out of the factory, back to my uncle’s house. The blood is pumping in my head. I no longer dread the factory workers—but the officer’s men—walking up the stairs and finding me here. The white plastered walls of the building fill me with horror; the dead man, the anger of the crowd, the factory’s subtle stench of blood and death.
I turn and run, sliding down the concrete steps, into a tunnel of darkness. The voices of the crowd are a dull throb, almost as though the machinery of the factory is still turning. I swing round the corner into the corridor and run smack into a man who is coming the other way. I slam into him so hard that I slide off my feet and come down on my back, winded. He grips my arm and for a moment I struggle, not realizing that he is helping me up. We both see—in the murky light—the color of his hand against the white of my dress. I look up. Michael. He stares back at me, caught in the beam of recognition. I am catching at my breath, my chest tight and pounding.
He holds a handful of metal tools in one hand and a fold of papers.
“Who else is up there?” His voice is urgent. I am aware that we are both scared of being seen. His gaze flickers down the corridor. “Memsaab—tell me—did you see another man up there? An African?”
“He’s dead,” I say, my chest heaving with the horror of what I have witnessed, and the relief of saying it. “They killed him.”
He swears. Slams his fist against the wall.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, rooted to the spot, my breathing short. I can see the engine room door open along the corridor, and a light on inside. Michael is supposed to be in Nairobi—he left the farm a month ago to become a clerk in an office in the city. What is he doing at Uplands?
There is gunfire in the yard and we look at each other, caught—the two of us—in this strange middle world, outside of reality, where neither should be.
“Go.” He nods at the door
.
“You don’t work for the factory.” I am staring at him. His hair is no longer shaved. My eyes slip to the wad of papers he holds in one hand. They are yellow, the same color as the one the lead striker folded into the officer’s pocket. His eyes settle on mine for a moment: the teacher caught out by his pupil, a conflict of interest, dislike for me or for the situation, something inexplicable. It all flickers across his face.
“Are you going to tell your uncle that you saw me?” He glances down the corridor behind him. “I need to know—are you going to say something?”
I swallow, shaking my head.
“It’s all right if you do. But I need to know. Now. Whether you will lie or not? Maybe you do not want to lie?”
I shake my head again, sure that it is true. “I won’t say anything.”
There are voices outside, coming closer. “Go on—” he says again. His voice has that familiar American twang, picked up in the army. I slowly back up, then run down the corridor, conscious of him watching me the whole way, kicking open the steel door to reach the bright day outside.
—
I HAVE REACHED the dam, a shimmering, silver slip of water that stretches almost as far as the eye can see. White egrets float like flags over the banks, dipping their long bills into the mud. I shake off memory and walk down to the water’s edge. The women have already drawn their water and left, leaving behind them footprints on the muddied shore. I see a hamerkop sitting on a branch which emerges from the water like the mast of a sunken ship. The bird’s deep brown plumage and strange prehistoric head seem to come from a world long forgotten.
As I stand and watch, a herd of elephant emerge from the bush on the far side to drink, crowding round the water’s edge. A hippo bursts air from his nose and it sounds like a greeting.
Leopard at the Door Page 6
