Leopard at the Door

by Jennifer McVeigh

  So he knows that I lied. “Yes.”

  “Why did you lie?”

  “Would you rather that I had not?”

  “It is not a question of what I want.”

  “I would not have lied to another officer.” I breathe out. “In the end it didn’t help—Steven Lockhart sent him anyway.”

  We are silent in the darkness. There is just the puppies stirring in the straw. The small sound of their sucking.

  “What news is there of Kenyatta?” he asks.

  “Have you heard anything?”

  “Nothing—” There is hunger in his voice. “Just men talking. I want to know what the newspapers are saying.”

  “They have a British Magistrate overseeing the trial.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “He has served the Supreme Court of Kenya since the 1930s. An old settler, living in Nairobi.”

  “One of their own. Who is defending him?”

  “An English Queen’s Counsel, with a team of Indian lawyers. The newspapers are calling the QC a communist. Kenyatta has pleaded not guilty, but they have witnesses standing against him. They are saying that he orchestrated Mau Mau. That he is a drunk.”

  “They will say what they can.”

  We sit in silence for a long while. When he turns on the torch I see that only the last puppy has not turned golden. Its fur has dried to black, and it has a patch over one eye like a pirate.

  “You should go back,” he says. “There won’t be any more now.”

  “I am scared.”

  “You don’t need to be afraid,” he says. “It is too late for Mau Mau.”

  “And leopard?”

  “There are no leopard so close to the house.”

  “I heard one—a few nights ago.”

  “I do not think it was a leopard.”

  “What else could it have been?”

  He does not reply, and I shiver, thinking of the men who come down from the forest at night.

  “Does my father know?”

  “Why do you think he moved the shambas?” The straw rustles as he gets to his feet. “I will walk with you,” he says.

  I put a hand to Juno before I go. “What a clever girl,” I whisper, kissing the soft fur beneath her ear. “What a good, clever girl.” The puppies are nestled in close to her. I will come back in the morning.

  We walk up the path to the house in darkness. Neither of us want to be seen. I feel safe walking beside him—under the mantle of his fearlessness. We stop at the pale papyrus grass, whispering silver in the blackness. I reach out to touch his arm, a gesture of good-bye, but my hand touches nothing but air—he has already gone.

  When I turn on the torch and shine it at my window, the white gleam of a face looks out at me. I jump, taking in breath.

  “Rachel?”

  It is Harold.

  “What are you doing?” I hiss at him.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Juno had her puppies.” I pass him the torch, and my gun, and he takes them from me. “Help me up.”

  He reaches down a hand and I grasp hold of it, and he pulls me up so that I can slide myself over the windowsill.

  “Who was the other man? The African?” he asks, turning the torch on me in the room.

  “It was Michael.” I swallow, looking for his reaction. “He was helping Juno when I got there. He walked me back.” I put my hand out and touch the edges of his pajamas. “You won’t say anything to our parents? They might not understand.”

  “I won’t say anything,” he says, shaking his head. “But you should be careful. You do not know who could be dangerous.”

  XVII

  Reports on the radio each evening bring bad news. The violence escalates. There are a cluster of murders in the White Highlands; thefts and arson attacks. Troops are flown in from the Middle East, a cruiser arrives with more troops in Mombasa, and the Kenyan Police Reserve and Home Guard are mobilized in greater force to tackle the threat. They say thousands of Kikuyu have fled arrest and are living in the forests of the Highlands. Naivasha police station is raided in the middle of the night; three policemen are killed and a cache of weapons are stolen, including thirty rifles and eighteen Lanchester submachine guns. There are rumors that Mau Mau have told houseboys to put razor blades under our mosquito nets, and release poisonous snakes into our bedrooms to kill us while we sleep. And the brutal murder of loyal Kikuyu who refuse to take the oath continues.

  So far at Kisima we have seen no violence, but the sense of being under siege grows every day.

  Steven drops in for lunch, full of news of arrests, violence in the forest, an attack on the Home Guard post that was forced back. When Harold walks into the room, he clasps a hand on his shoulder—“Harold, my boy, you’re in for an adventure!”

  Harold gives him a quick smile, but his face drains of blood.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Hasn’t he told you? He has volunteered to a police post near Gilgil. He’ll be patrolling with the big boys. Right where all the action is.”

  “Is he old enough?”

  “He’s old enough to hold a gun—aren’t you, my boy?”

  Harold nods, his cheeks breaking out in a rash of color. I wonder why he has agreed. Unaccountably—I feel my heart break.

  “We’re all so proud of you, darling,” Sara says, leaning over to kiss his cheek, and I realize that she has orchestrated this.

  There is talk at lunch of my father volunteering for the KAR. They need men who know the land, and they can’t train up the troops from Britain fast enough. I cannot imagine how we would cope without him.

  —

  “WHAT I CAN’T BEAR,” Steven says at the end of lunch, spooning sauce over his crème caramel, “is these young, jumped-up kids from England, who haven’t a clue about natives, whining on about the exploitation of the African. There was a boy shipped in with the troops a month ago—a correspondent. Kept harping on about land rights for the Kikuyu.” He slides his forefinger and thumb into his mouth and sucks off the caramel. “Taking all the wrong sorts of pictures.”

  “What sort of pictures?” Harold asks, and I glance at him.

  “Oh, you know—Micks with their hands cut off, village raids.” He spoons the white custard into his mouth, dripping dark with caramel. “Things that don’t look good in a British newspaper.”

  I think about Harold’s photographs—the brutality implicit in some of the shots he took at Nyeri. Has he shown them to Steven? Is this a warning? I have the sense that there is a silent struggle being waged between Nate Logan and Steven Lockhart, over Harold’s soul. Harold eats slowly, his face closed.

  “What did you do?” Sara asks, taking the dish and serving my father.

  “The boys called him a negrophile. Took him out on patrol. Spooked him up a bit. Kid got stuck in an ambush with a gang of Micks. He was given a gun—had to shoot his way out.” Steven laughs, turning over his spoon and cleaning it with his mouth. “In the end he notched up a greater head count than the rest of our boys put together. That was the last we heard of him saving the African.”

  “Do you think the boy was entirely wrong?” my father asks, glancing at his plate. I can see he has no appetite.

  “Is that a serious question?” Steven asks, looking at him closely.

  “Yes. It’s a serious question,” my father says, meeting his gaze.

  “Without us the Africans would still be eating posho in their huts, performing clitoridectomies on their women and gazing at the sun and moon as if they were gods.” Steven wipes a drop of dark caramel off his mustache with the corner of a white napkin. “Of course he was wrong.”

  Harold sits with his eyes to the table, saying nothing. He is under Steven’s jurisdiction now, and the less he shows of himself, the safer he will be.

 
“I wish it were that straightforward,” my father says.

  Sara looks at my father. “Robert—eat up. You sound terribly maudlin today. Almost as though you feel guilty.”

  My father turns his spoon end over end on the table. “Not guilt, exactly. Perhaps it’s just a sense of futility. That what is good for me may no longer coincide with what is good for the Africans.”

  “Well, that’s absurd,” Sara says, giving a stiff laugh.

  “Is it?” my father asks.

  “Look—” Steven says, casually helping himself to another spoonful of white custard. “If the African—either through ineptitude or laziness—has failed to cultivate the land that surrounds us—then what right have they to say it is theirs? If they have proved themselves incapable of lifting themselves from barbarity, then what is it but a gift if we teach them the principles of Christianity?”

  “And what are the principles of Christianity?” The words come out before I can stop them. It is the hypocrisy in his voice. I do not believe that anything Steven Lockhart teaches could be Christian.

  They all look in my direction. The blood beats thickly in my head.

  “Why, Rachel,” Steven says, smiling at me, licking at his spoon. “I would have thought they taught them to you at school. Why don’t you tell them to us?”

  “Love. Charity. Humility,” I say, staring at him, the dislike open in my face.

  “Very good,” he says, putting down his spoon and pushing away his plate. “Anything else?”

  “Whoever says he is in the light and does not love his brother is still in darkness.”

  A silence descends on the table. Steven looks at me, a half smile on his face, unabashed, almost as though he is pleased, and I wish I had said nothing. I had forgotten that he enjoys resistance.

  “But what of the future?” my father asks Steven, and I feel his gaze shift away from mine.

  “We should aim for a dual society in Kenya, founded on the principles of Western Christian civilization.” He lights a cigarette and draws deeply on it. “One in which the educated African is allowed to participate and profit alongside Europeans, whilst acknowledging that the Europeans are the backbone of this country—economically and spiritually. Of course this Mau Mau debacle has set the Africans back a hundred years. They have proved that they are unable to stand up to the pressures of modern civilization . . .”

  I have no sense of Steven’s words; all I know is that if he is the spokesman for empire, then empire is an ugly, dissolute thing. His voice is like the whisper of the devil. Sugarcoated words, designed to make what is evil palatable so that more evil can be committed. Listening to him is like listening to the clean, efficient turning of the wheel at my uncle’s bacon factory.

  “Come, Robert. That’s enough of politics,” Sara says, and she eases herself over the table, picks up his spoon and pushes it deep into the pure, soft white custard, golden caramel sliding off the top.

  “You need to think less and eat more.” She raises the spoon to my father’s mouth and I see his eyes steady as they lock onto hers. He opens his mouth like a child and she slides the spoon in, and I see my father swallow the sweetness, all thought of the farm, of politics, draining from him.

  —

  IN THE NIGHT I hear crying from the room at the end of the corridor. I light the lamp, walk down the hall and push open the door.

  Harold is sitting on a corner of the bed by the wall. He looks up when I come in, then presses the palms of his hands against his eyes to stop the tears. He takes a ragged breath. “I did not mean to wake you.”

  I put down the lamp and sit on the edge of the narrow bed, the metal frame cold through my nightdress.

  “What is it?” I ask, but he does not answer me.

  “Are you scared of going?”

  Still he says nothing.

  “Harold, tell me, why did you agree?”

  “My mother—she needs me. I have to try. For her sake—” His voice breaks off.

  “Try to do what?”

  He doesn’t reply. Eventually I lean forward and put my arms around him and he rests his head against my shoulder, his chest rising and falling silently against me. I feel his tears wet against my shoulder and smell the boyish warmth that rises up from his body. I want to protect him, but I cannot.

  —

  JUNO’S PUPPIES BEGIN to sprout ears, and their eyes open. She is a good mother, and she cleans them, and suckles them often. They are all golden, except for Pirate who is gleaming black with a golden patch over one eye. He is the longest at the nipple, until she nips him away, and I see that he is growing stronger every day. I love to sit in the dim light of the stable, warm and drowsy with the smell of milk, and watch them nestle in under the solid warmth of their mother.

  My father is short of labor now that so many of our Kikuyu have left, and Michael is away from the garage, supervising work at the dairy and the cattle dip. I am alone in the yard except for Juno and her puppies. When my father passes his copy of the Standard to me, I read it, then bring it down to the stables and leave it there for Michael, thinking that he will see it when he passes through the yard on his way to his hut. A small betrayal, but he has a right to know what is happening in his country. The next day it is always where I left it, folded neatly on a milking stool, just outside the stable door, and I cannot be sure if he has read it.

  —

  STEVEN LOCKHART ARRIVES in the evening to collect Harold. He will spend the night and take Harold away with him the following morning. When I come through to the sitting room they are all there, having drinks.

  Steven is telling a story, but he stops when he sees me.

  “Carry on,” Sara says to him.

  Steven glances questioningly at me.

  “Oh, she can hear it.” Sara waves her hand to dismiss his concern. “We all need to hear it.”

  “It’s Eric Bowker,” my father says. “He has been murdered.”

  I feel a coldness seep like water into my veins. Eric Bowker was our closest neighbor—a solitary man who used to help on my parents’ farm from time to time. His farm borders ours.

  “Who did it?”

  “The Micks got him,” Steven says, rubbing the short edges of his mustache with his fingers.

  “He started a local store a few years ago, selling supplies, clothes, tinned goods to the Africans who worked on farms nearby,” my father says to me. “He wasn’t exactly friendly with the natives, but he wasn’t kali either.”

  “They came for him at sunset yesterday,” Steven says, taking a sip of his gin and sitting back in his chair. His eyes flicker over mine—it is just a second—but I feel my throat constrict. “He was in the bath.”

  I look away, unwilling to hear this story, but irresistibly compelled.

  “They got his two houseboys first. He didn’t even have time to get out of the bath. He was stark naked and they just went to work on him with their pangas.” He takes a long sip of his gin. “I spoke to the policemen who found him. Said he looked as though he had fallen in front of a combine harvester. They’d disemboweled him, and his entrails were floating like jelly in the bathwater.”

  And I find I can picture it with complete clarity—the blood pooling in the water, the gray hairs on his chest, the body sliced to pieces.

  “It’s a bloody atrocity,” my father says.

  “Savagery,” Sara says, “pure savagery. They ought to hang them all.”

  “Oh, I don’t know that hanging isn’t too respectable,” Steven Lockhart says, in his slow drawl. “What they need is a bit of rough justice. We ought to tie them to stakes and put them out next to hyena holes, like the old chiefs used to do.”

  He is smiling as he says it, his lips shiny with gin, and I feel a lurching sensation in my body and a pounding in my chest, as though I might be sick. Eric Bowker slaughtered, my father under the spell of
another woman and Steven Lockhart thickening this nightmare. I breathe deeply and press my hands to my eyes. I have fallen down a rabbit hole—home has been turned inside out, inhabited by ghouls and strangers who sit where my mother once sat, and the African protectors of my childhood have become killers. And somewhere at the bottom of it is a sense of forewarning, and displacement. Kenya is a black man’s country.

  That night I push a chair against my door, jamming it under the door handle. Later, I hear him walk down the corridor, his feet pressing against the floorboards, hovering outside my room. I wish Juno was here to growl a warning. A low laugh reverberates on the other side of the door. “Good night, Rachel,” he says, and to my relief he carries on down the corridor to the spare room.

  —

  STEVEN AND HAROLD are leaving just after dawn. The house is quiet when I wake, and I dress and step into the corridor. I can see Steven’s door is closed. Harold is outside, eating breakfast on the veranda with Sara and my father. I walk into the sitting room and pour myself a glass of tomato juice.

  “Sleep well?”

  The hairs prick up on the back of my neck. I turn around slowly. Steven Lockhart is standing against the doorframe, watching me, a half smile on his face. He must have been waiting in his bedroom. His eyes are cold and blank like the eyes of a fish. “Do you know how the Kikuyu make their promises?”

  He walks a little way toward me, slipping his gun holster around his waist and doing up the buckle, and I feel a mixture of fear and revulsion.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Kikuyu,” he says casually. “Do you know what they force each other to drink, during their oathing ceremonies, to ensure that they keep their promises?”

  “Blood,” I say.

  “Y-e-s,” he says, as if I am only half right. “But can you guess what kind of blood?”

  “Goat’s blood,” I say, my voice very quiet.

  He laughs and walks a little closer to where I am standing.

  “No. Not goat’s blood, Rachel. They drink menstrual blood. Taken from their women. And semen.” His voice drops to a whisper. “Do you know what semen is, Rachel?”