“Kenya is changing whether we like it or not.” Gerald leans back in his chair. “They say this country will be unrecognizable in ten years. No unchartered land, no swamps and tsetse flies. There’ll be tarmacked roads into the farthest corners of the country, designated game parks for tourists. Nairobi will only be an hour or two from Nakuru by car.”
“God save me, I hope I never see the day,” my father says.
“But surely that’s what we should all be praying for,” Sara says. “Just think—Kenya might begin to resemble somewhere actually civilized.”
“And I suppose that would be a good thing?” my father asks, in a quiet voice. “If it were ‘civilized’?”
“Don’t take your frustration out on me, Robert,” she says, her voice tipped with condescension. “It’s hardly reasonable to expect me to embrace living here—” And she opens her arms at the expanse of bush which stretches out on all sides into the distance.
—
JIM TAKES LONGER than usual with the pudding, and Sara smiles apologetically. “I’ve had my hands full with the servants here. You’d never guess how badly things were being run before I came.”
“Oh, I don’t remember things being so bad,” Lillian says, giving me a quick, kind look, and I know she wants to protect me from Sara, but there is nothing she can do to help me.
Another five minutes pass, and the pudding still hasn’t arrived. Sara drops her napkin on the table and goes to the kitchen to see where it is. She comes out again a few minutes later, with her mouth turned down, carrying a tin plate. On it sits a half-eaten chicken leg. Jim hovers on the veranda behind her, holding his hat.
Sara drops the tin plate down beside my father so that it clatters on the table.
“What is it, darling?” my father asks, looking up at her, and then beyond at Jim. I hear in his voice that he wants to avoid a scene, and this seems to rile Sara.
“You know full well what it is. I caught him red-handed. Pulling it from the joint with his fingers.” I look at Jim, then look away. I hate what she is doing. Dragging his humiliation onto the table in front of all of us. It has always been accepted that Jim and the kitchen boy will eat some of what we have not finished, though it has never been explicitly stated.
“It’s a dirty, disgusting little habit. Who knows where his fingers have been. And it isn’t his to take.”
“Surely taking a little is all right?” Gerald says, looking between my father and Sara.
“A little is what got us to where we’re at now. Next he’ll be wanting a place at the table, then our house, then our land. We had servants who were just the same at the Norfolk and it never ended well.”
I can see Gerald and Lillian out of the corner of my eye, frozen in their seats, watching the scene unfold. Sara is looking at my father, and when he doesn’t speak, she says, “Robert—it is simple disrespect, can’t you see? And I shan’t stand for it. What kind of example does it set—if you won’t discipline the boys in your own house?”
My father’s eyes are hard and staring, like a jackal cornered. I want to scream at him to tell her to be quiet. The table is silent, waiting to see what he will do.
“Jim—” he says. “Come here.”
Jim steps down from the veranda and walks across the lawn to the table. He looks at his feet. My father says in Swahili, in a low voice, “You’re not to eat the food. It is not yours. And it angers the memsaab. Do you understand?”
“Ndiyo, Bwana.”
I think that might be the end of it, but she beckons to Jim with one finger. “Come along,” she says in English, as she might to a naughty schoolboy. He walks a few paces closer.
“Show me your hands,” she says, and he holds them out, palm upward, years of cooking for our family bending them into cups.
“Turn them over,” she says, and he does, slowly.
Then she slaps the backs of his hands, with both of hers.
“Next time I catch you eating anything from our kitchen, you’ll be gone.”
“Yes, Memsaab,” Jim says, his big head bowing in a gesture of humility. And he retreats back to the kitchen.
“I don’t see why I should have to do all the dirty work around here,” she says, with a deprecating smile, but no one at the table smiles with her.
—
LILLIAN HOLDS ME CLOSE in the shade of the acacias in front of the house. Gerald is waiting in the car. I shut my eyes. All around is the throbbing, grating call of the cicadas. “Christ, I miss her.” Her body rocks from side to side. “And you, baby girl. She loved you.”
“Don’t go,” I say to her, my voice breaking for the first time. I press my forehead against her shoulder. I was all right before she came, but now that she has dragged up the ghost of my mother I can see how changed my father is, how far he has fallen under Sara’s influence and how cut off we are here. As I hold on to her the sobs tear through me. Lillian is not bound by the spell that grips my father, and when she goes I will feel more alone than I did before.
“There is nothing I can do, Rachel,” she whispers in my ear, rocking me. “We all make choices in life. Your father has made his.”
Afterward, I stand with my father and Sara, watching the Markhams’ car disappear into a cloud of dust, feeling more trapped than ever.
XIII
The news is full of Mau Mau. The violence escalates. Then—at the end of the week—there come reports of Mau Mau attacks against Europeans. Although we have been expecting it, we are all shocked; a line has been crossed. A settler farmer and his family are assaulted and seriously wounded, and—a few days later—an elderly English couple, about sixty miles from Kisima, are beaten up in their own home. The Times in London describes Mau Mau as “a primitive underground movement immured in barbaric rites, a sharp reminder that fifty years are but a moment of time among the African peoples.”
The next day a loyal Kikuyu chief—a supporter of the British presence in Kenya—is ambushed in his car and killed on the road in cold blood. Harold and I stay up late into the night listening to the news. The new Governor calls the chief “a great man, a great African and a great citizen of Kenya, who met his death in the service of his own people.”
There is an expectation now that more violence against Europeans will follow, and we listen with dread to the news each night.
—
AT THE SHAMBAS the little girl I am helping has recovered. Her wound has dried up, and she is eating well. I am relieved, and I know my mother would be pleased if she were here.
One morning when the children are chanting letters—A is for “apple,” B is for “boy,” P is for “pen,” V is for “victory,” Q is for “queen”—I see Michael out of the corner of my eye, watching. The children finish and he talks to them in Kikuyu, asking them questions. I watch him, the intentness of his gaze, his loose, easy posture, both strange and familiar. I have missed his company, and I am pleased that he has come down to see what I am doing here.
“What do you think?” I ask, when he turns to look at me. His eyes settle on mine, and I see that he knows what I want him to say—and all of a sudden I wish I hadn’t asked. A deep flush rises up my neck.
“You don’t approve?” My voice is quick with anger. I have worked hard here, and I do not see how he could criticize what I am trying to achieve.
His dark, heavy-lidded eyes hold mine. “I think that they look like good little missionary children.”
I stand there, biting the soft inside of my lip, watching him walk away.
Missionary children. Learning by rote the message of their teachers. Was all the work I have put into the shambas just a glorification of my own pride? Somewhere at the back of my mind is Sara’s voice calling me a sentimentalist.
—
NJERI IS INSIDE her hut covered in a film of sweat. Her skin is wet to touch. Mukami walks with her around the small room, one arm braced
around her back, taking her weight. She does not respond when I ask her what she feels, and I feel useless standing there, unable to help. The following morning I get up before the sun has risen, worried that something might be wrong. She is no older than me and does not have her mother to help with the birth. When I reach the shambas dawn is breaking. The grass is covered in a gauze of silver dew, and the cattle—not yet released from the boma—are bellowing in the cold, early-morning air.
The shambas look deserted; just a few hens pecking at the soil in the half-light. Outside Njeri’s hut is a pile of leaves, smeared dark with blood. My heart beats a little faster. I push open the door. Mukami is squatting down, blowing at the red embers of the fire until yellow flames catch at the sticks. She scoops out grain into a large pot. The goats behind their railings sneeze, stirring from sleep.
In one of the alcoves I see Njeri. I blink in the near darkness and move closer. There is the smoke, the smell of the goats, of oiled human skin, and another smell, warm and close. She is holding the baby wrapped in a goat’s skin. “Muiretu—” she says in Kikuyu, a girl. She offers her to me, and I sit on the sapling mattress and take the small, warm bundle from her. I look down. Her eyes are open, shining in the dark, staring at me. I touch her smooth, warm cheek. I do not think I have ever seen anything as beautiful. She opens her mouth and cries, a desperate sound that snatches at the core of me, and Njeri takes her in her arms, her cries growing louder, until they stop suddenly in a quiet, wet sucking.
I leave the gifts that I have brought. The jumper I have knitted, bread and milk. Outside the hut the sun is already warm. A small boy sits on the smooth ground; one of Mukami’s children. He is modeling a hut out of twigs and mud, with leaves for a roof, and a strong stick for a center post. There is already a tiny thorn boma, with clay cattle gathered inside. It is a thing of exact precision and beauty. I watch for a moment—his fingers delicately turning the tiny saplings. He does not look up as I walk past.
—
I AM SITTING with Njeri and her baby outside her hut. Mukami comes close to where we sit and says to me in Swahili, “The men are complaining, Aleela. They say you should not come down here so often. That you will curse us with your white skin.”
“What do you mean, ‘curse’—?”
“They say you spend too much time here.”
“Do you think so?” I ask, standing up, stung by her words.
She touches a hand to her cheek which is swollen, one eye closing over. “We cannot be both Kikuyu and British,” she says.
Njeri says nothing. She watches me walk away. It is not that she is indifferent. She has no say in the matter.
When I get back to the house a jeep is pulled up outside. Nate Logan is on the veranda drinking coffee with my father. “Hey, kiddo,” he says, smiling.
“Hi,” I say, pleased to see him, putting away the hurt of Mukami’s words.
“Logan wants to borrow Harold,” my father says. “He’s asked if you want to join them for a few days. Lillian is expecting you.”
“What about Sara?”
“She’s gone to Nakuru for the day.” Nate rubs his jaw, a twinkle in his eye. “Your father is signing you both out.”
“Go on and enjoy yourselves,” my father says, smiling, looking more relaxed than I have seen him look since I came home.
I grin back at them both, excited at the thought of getting away from the farm for a few days and seeing Lillian. “Let me get my things.”
I throw some clothes into a bag. When I step down from the veranda, Harold is sitting in the back of the jeep.
“Hey,” I say, smiling, and he raises a hand in greeting. I have rarely seen him on the farm during the day. Only in the evenings, when he comes to my room to listen to the news, and then we talk little; sharing the strange, quiet intimacy that comes with listening to the radio.
Nate opens up the boot for Juno. She is too heavy now to jump in. She gets her front paws up and I lift her back legs until she can scramble forward onto the metal floor of the jeep and lie down.
“Harold’s going to help me out for a few days—” Nate says, opening the front door from the inside. “I need an extra pair of hands.”
I wonder what Sara will say when she finds out.
We drive east across the farm, through deep thickets—leaning in to avoid the acacia branches which snap against the sides of the jeep, down boulder-strewn valleys, where gazelle dart away from us into the bush, until we come out onto the bottom of a valley. The grassland stretches in front of us, iridescent green from last month’s rains, zebra flicking their tails in a mirage of heat. The sun beats down, and my arm, resting on the open window, is hot against the metal.
The Markhams’ house sits at the end of the valley, where it opens out onto a long, wide plain. It is warm and homely; redbrick walls and a garden that springs up out of the earth and embraces the house with roses, hibiscus and honeysuckle. Lillian shows me to the same bedroom I stayed in as a child, a small iron bed against one wall, covered with a patchwork quilt. I watch her cross the room and stand at the window that looks out over the dam, and think as I have done before that she must have built this room for the child they never had. “God, how I have loved this place.” She turns and looks at me, and I see a momentary sadness settle over her. “Gerald says he’s getting too old for Africa.” She smiles the thought away. “Come on—I need your help with something.”
She takes me by the hand and leads me to the stables, and we tack up her horses and ride out onto the farm. I haven’t ridden in the six years since I have been away, but it feels as natural to me as walking. We push our horses through herds of cattle, along the shores of the dam that sits in front of the house and up the hillside, onto the ridge. A herd of zebra scatter in front of us, and we kick our horses into a gallop, their hooves pounding on the dry earth, until we are racing side by side with the herd, the wind whipping the laughter from my mouth, so that all I can hear is the breathing of the horse beneath me, the creaking of the saddle, the thudding of my heart in my chest.
As each day passes, I decide to stay for another, helping Lillian in the dairy and the kitchen, making pickles, preserving lemons, and harvesting the vegetables in the garden. Her cheeses are sold all over Kenya, as far as Nairobi. She gives me vegetable seeds to take home and plant, and shows me how they grow, and what they need to do well. In the afternoons we ride out onto the farm, reporting back to Gerald on the cattle, the state of the dams, the herds of game that have arrived, competing with the cattle for grass. We are out of the house all day and only come home when the light is fading. The news seems far away, as though it cannot touch us here.
On my fourth evening I stand at the bedroom window. Two Africans are dragging branches across the lawn, building fires in the pits that sit beyond the veranda. From the window I can see the last of the sun’s light, reflecting like flames on the surface of the dam. A line of white birds flutters over the golden waters. I lie down on the iron bed, my legs aching from the long hours in the saddle, a deep physical contentment spreading over my body. The soft sounds of the house are like whispers at the edge of my waking mind: Gerald’s voice talking to their Kikuyu boy; Nate and Harold’s jeep pulling in just as darkness falls; Harold’s rare laugh; the chink of a bottle against a glass. Strange that I feel more at home here than I do at Kisima.
When I come down for drinks, Juno at my heels, the table is lit with hurricane lamps, glowing in the darkness. The fires are burning, and they throw out a blaze of heat into the cool night air. Beyond are the black waters of the dam. It feels as though we might be the only humans on the vast earth, our tiny place in the wilderness made more pronounced by the slow chugging of the generator behind the house and the crackling of the fires. Juno lies content at my feet. I sip at the gin and tonic that Gerald makes for me, giving in to the heat of the alcohol, firing up my stomach, making my head swim.
“You tell them
—Harold.” Nate is smiling, running a hand over his shirtsleeves which are ripped to tatters so that I can see the brown skin underneath.
Harold looks older and more assured than I have seen him. He is flushed with excitement, and he leans forward and tells us the story of the lioness who came padding through camp, just as they were packing up.
“I ducked into Nate’s tent, fast as I could, but I couldn’t do the damn zip up. And Nate—” At this point his face breaks again, into laughter, and he breathes deeply to compose himself. Nate has a wry look on his face. He brings a bottle to his lips. “Nate was in the bushes with his trousers around his ankles, and all I could see as I struggled with the zip was the lioness padding through the trees toward him. I heard a shout—and saw him leap up a thorn bush half-naked!”
“And I’ll be less of a man because of it—” Nate laughs, grimacing. I catch sight of Harold—his face radiating happiness, and I see that Nate has brought something out of him that was not visible before.
“And the lioness?” Lillian asks, wiping tears from her eyes.
“Oh, she padded straight through camp. Only once she stopped to have a look at me, stuck halfway up the tree, and yawned, and I swear I saw every tooth in her pretty little jaws.”
We eat hot lamb curry, dhal and rice, mangos and lime; their cook has trained with Indians in Nairobi. At eight o’clock Gerald gets up to switch on the radio. We only half-listen, talking over the news from England, but fall quiet when East Africa is mentioned. I see the tension in Gerald’s face, and I am gripped by a sudden sense of foreboding—something is changing; an edifice is tumbling down, but I do not know yet exactly what it is.
The newsreader introduces the Governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring. And then comes an announcement: A State of Emergency has been declared throughout the colony and protectorate of Kenya. This grave step was taken most unwillingly and with great reluctance by the government of Kenya. There was no alternative in the face of the mounting lawlessness, violence and disorder in parts of the colony, as a result of the activities of the Mau Mau movement. The government is taking drastic action in order to stop the spread of violence.
Leopard at the Door Page 13
