Ian celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday with an extra whisky. He lay on the sofa by the fire, balancing the glass on his stomach, and thought of Fairview. Five years ago he had been a hopeless ghost in Aylesbury. Now he was a man with a mission and the mission filled his days and would fill the rest of his life. Time didn’t cure the old sorrow that remained like an ache in his bones. When he imagined his parents and Lucy here with him, he was close to tears; his father taking over the business end, proud as he was to see this small industry galloping along; his mother making a beautiful garden; Lucy gay and noisy in the house, riding beside him in the pick-up, loving the land, mad about the totos. It was useless to cry for what might have been. He missed three people, no others could take their place. Without them, he knew he would always be alone but alone in this peaceful room on this marvellous farm. That was the way accident had shaped his life. He didn’t have the happiness he would have chosen; he had a different happiness and enough to keep him going.
Except for Ian, all the Europeans knew that Miss Grace Davis has arrived in Karula. Miss Davis came from England to teach spelling, grammar, penmanship, composition and reading to small girls at a small boarding school, Heather Hill, outside the town. Advance news of a young woman fresh from a fashionable school at home secretly worried most of the Memsaabs. They foresaw a peach complexion, the latest hair-do, and the sort of smart clothes bought in a city for country wear. Africa was unfair to European women, as the Memsaabs frequently said. The sun struck straight down from the equatorial sky and ruined their skin. The men’s faces were like cordoba leather, which was becoming, but the Memsaabs finally looked like withered apples or, if they fled the sun, grey-white mushrooms. Their figures did not survive too well either, growing stout like Mrs Ethridge or skinny like Mrs Gale. The exceptions were Helen Gordon who exercised by gardening and preserved her skin by magic, and Rose Farrell who exercised relentlessly in her bedroom, watched her diet, creamed her face and bought the best clothes she could find in the best shops in Nairobi, but was the most worried Memsaab in the area due to Simon’s wandering eye.
Women who feel they have lost or are losing their looks tend to be nervous about their husbands. Miss Davis posed no threat to anyone and was therefore an instant hit with the Memsaabs. She was invited to all the farms and to the Karula Sports Club; she met everyone, she went everywhere. The Memsaabs were bursting with cordiality. Almost at once they seemed to know the story of Miss Davis’ life. She had been engaged to a wonderful man, a bomber or fighter pilot, in the R.A.F. or the American Airforce, who was shot down in flames over Berlin or Hamburg or some other place. The wives passed this sad tale on to the husbands.
‘You must be getting barmy, Rose,’ Simon Farrell said. ‘Do you mean to tell me that any pilot, and they were the glamour boys and in a hurry too, would go for those specs, that awful crinkly mud-coloured hair, and that body. I can’t look at her without thinking of a Dover sole.’
‘Eight years ago, perhaps ten years, she might have been very pretty,’ Rose said, delighted.
‘Balls. All you can say about her face is that she has the usual number of features and none are actually deformed.’
Mark Ethridge said, ‘Well, Maggie, since men are known to copulate with sheep, I am ready to believe anything. Though I’d rather have a nice warm soft sheep than Miss Davis any day.’
The wives soon tired of Miss Davis. She had an affected voice, she was so ladylike you wanted to kick her, and she gushed. ‘Drowns you in syrup,’ Mrs Gale observed. Miss Davis, they agreed, was a typical spinster schoolmistress and fine for the children but they had done their duty and that was that.
During her popular period, Miss Davis met Ian Paynter at the Karula Sports Club. She had no idea that this was a unique occasion. It was a Friday before Christmas and Ian had been doing business with Simon Farrell in the bank, relative to a sale of heifers. Simon Farrell said, ‘Come and have a drink at the club, Ian, Christmas cheer and all that.’ When Ian began to mutter excuses, Simon Farrell said crossly, ‘Oh stop being such a blushing violet, nobody’s going to eat you.’ Ian’s war victim act had gone on long enough; Ian was a mental hypochondriac. Simon Farrell had had a whizz of a war, chasing the Wops out of Ethiopia, but thought that good or bad wars were ancient history.
Goaded and indignant, Ian followed in his brand new cherished Landrover, a Christmas present to himself. The club room looked even nastier decorated with artificial holly and mistletoe. Miss Davis was sitting with Mrs Farrell. Pink gin for Mrs Farrell, orange squash for Miss Davis. Miss Davis wore a blue linen dress and looked like a hospital nurse in uniform. As a favour to Helen Gordon, Mrs Farrell had collected Miss Davis at Heather Hill, which was on her way to Karula. Mrs Farrell was now thinking that the claims of friendship and motherhood were both excessive. She was bored rigid by Miss Davis. She had been buttering up Miss Davis on behalf of Jenny, her ten-year-old daughter, but this was her last effort and Helen Gordon could jolly well drive an extra eight miles in future.
As soon as she saw the men, Mrs Farrell said, ‘Simon, you have time for a very quick one, you know I’ve got a mob of little girls to lunch.’ Before Simon could protest, his wife gave him a fierce wink. She was in such a hurry to leave that she didn’t remark on Ian’s presence. ‘You’ll take care of Miss Davis until Helen gets here, won’t you Ian?’ Mrs Farrell said, beating a fast retreat.
This was much worse than Ian had expected. He could already feel the silence that would lie between him and a woman he had never even seen before. He asked if she’d have another drink and Miss Davis thanked him for more orange squash while he downed a strong gin and french. But then, to his amazement, there were no silences; Miss Davis chattered and he only had to say Yes or No, and with two big gins under his belt and this easy conversation he found he was quite enjoying himself. Miss Davis had ascertained cleverly that there was no Mrs Paynter. Just as cleverly, she led Ian to invite her for lunch at his farm the next day. Ian gathered that this was how Miss Davis lived; on weekends and during holidays she lunched around the countryside.
When Helen Gordon arrived to pick up Miss Davis, she couldn’t believe her eyes. ‘Why, Ian,’ she said in a wondering voice and Ian immediately became all stumbling feet and stammers. On the way back to Mastings, Helen Gordon said, ‘You’re a wizard, Miss Davis. You must be the first woman Ian’s ever talked to. He’s so shy it’s like a disease. The men say he’s perfectly normal with them, but he has St Vitus’ dance with the ladies. I think he’s sweet though I can hardly get a word out of him. Oh, he’s about twenty-nine or thirty. Yes, he lives alone at Fairview and he’s made it clear to all of us that the last thing he wants is company. He’s in love with his farm, he doesn’t need anything else, and I’m convinced he’s going to be the best farmer around Karula. A born bachelor, I’d say; what Charles calls more steer than bull.’
With her eyes on the road, Helen didn’t see the prim tightening of Miss Davis’ mouth. How long can I dish up this babble, Helen thought, and how on earth will we get through lunch?
‘Not that he’s unattractive,’ Helen went on. ‘Except for those teeth. No, his family doesn’t come out to visit. I don’t know anything about them but Lady Lavering is such a cracking snob that she wouldn’t let old George hire anyone who hadn’t been properly vetted. Oh yes, Ian worked for the Laverings before he settled here.’
Miss Davis was restfully silent during lunch. Helen sent Miss Davis back to Heather Hill with the driver; one personally escorted trip was all politeness required.
‘You see, Charles, you didn’t have to raise such a hellish row. It wasn’t that bad. Poor thing, I do feel sorry for her, she’s so wildly unappealing.’
Ian was stunned by his invitation. In almost four years, four years next month, he hadn’t asked anybody to Fairview, and was greatly relieved when the Memsaabs stopped inviting him. Miss Davis seemed to think that he would naturally have people for lunch and this assumption was flattering though he couldn’t explain why. Miss
Davis’ lack of looks was an advantage. Ian didn’t see her as a woman. She was a nice person who gave him the happy impression of being easy to talk to. He didn’t know about women or think about them; they did not exist in his life.
All the twenty-three bumping miles home, Ian fretted over food. What to give Miss Davis? He was both nervous and elated. He never planned meals, that was Mwangi’s business; but for this special event he would make suggestions. Friendly, nice, about his age; roast chicken with bread sauce, mashed potatoes, peas, brussel sprouts, tinned fruit salad with cream and a bunch of roses on the table.
Grace Davis had always harboured great expectations. The mystery was why, exactly, on what basis, for what reason she entertained so many hopes for so long. Her father had risen from a shoe clerk, bowed forever over female feet, to part owner and still active salesman in a small shoe store in Lincoln. Her mother, by temperament a mouse, became a mouse ravaged by childbearing and housework. Her three sisters and two brothers, as plain as she was, had burrowed warm holes in the world. Grace despised them all.
She chose to be a teacher since not much training was required and a teacher was several cuts above trade, especially her father’s trade. Grace learned enough to teach young children, whom she did not care for; more importantly, she learned a refined accent and finicky manners. Her origins had nothing to do with her. She felt herself born to be a lady, her hands alone proved it; the hands of an aristocrat.
Grace was just twenty-two when the war began. For a girl whose sole ambition was to marry a gentleman, the war came as a boon. Aside from all else, war is a giant game of musical chairs. Men are seized from their homes and shunted around the world, men without women. In England, plain girls were finding mates right and left among displaced Poles, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Americans. Lonely men without women were not a bit sure they would have time to seek their true loves. Grace could not understand why she was passed over.
She had been rejected by the F.A.N.Y.s because of her near-sighted eyes. Her occupation as a teacher saved her from factory work. She volunteered for every job that brought her close to men; the canteen at the station, the N.A.A.F.I. club, the local hospitality committee. She struggled to be where she could be met, appreciated, invited out, proposed to. But she was never invited out, let alone proposed to.
She did not deceive herself that she was pretty, but girls less pretty were walking out on a soldier’s arm, or better still on an officer’s arm. She was not misshapen, she was not old, heaven knew she was eager to please. Perhaps determination to get a wedding ring and no nonsense beforehand is something men can sense or smell; and if the virtuous girl isn’t much to look at, why waste time trying to beat down her defences. Perhaps the men of all nations could not take Grace’s refinement. Perhaps it was her voice. Even when Grace was using it hopefully to charm and compliment, her voice had a thin built-in whine.
There had never been a hero fiancé, shot down in flames above a German city. Leaving Lincoln, after the war, twenty-eight years old and bitterly conscious of spinsterhood, Grace invented the fiancé, Robert, over bedtime cocoa with the geography and history mistress at a girls’ boarding school near Southampton. She was terrified by her story after it emerged in dim outline; she lay awake that night wondering if it could be checked and she prosecuted for libel, defamation of character, false pretences. The story remained fixed in its bare form of love requited and death the tragic end. Grace took strength from this myth and soon believed it. She had been loved; a blissful married future in America was destroyed by anti-aircraft fire.
St Mary’s, outside Southampton, was no academic or social pinnacle but for a while it seemed perfection to Grace. She had left for ever the insufferable vulgarity of her home. Next to the games mistress, Grace was the youngest teacher in the school. After a few years, she saw her elders as crotchety old maids, and her future like theirs. Knitting, tea parties, sensible brogues. When Grace read the advertisement in the personal column of The Times‚ offering a post for a qualified English mistress in Kenya, she wrote a letter of application that night and held her breath in hope.
St Mary’s didn’t teach much but it was a cosy little school and the old maids were fond of their girls. As a teacher, Miss Davis’ work could not be faulted; but the children hated her. She discouraged them and disciplined them with sarcasm; she was unsmiling. Even by St Mary’s standards, it was alarming to see how badly the girls got on in Miss Davis’ classes; and more alarming, for Miss Heyworth the headmistress, to see the mulish faces of the girls after an hour with Miss Davis. Miss Heyworth dreaded scenes or any trouble. She had reached the hand-wringing stage over her nightly camomile tea. ‘I can’t sack her, Hetty,’ Miss Heyworth said to Miss Burton, her second in command. ‘I have no grounds. What if she kicks up a rumpus? What am I to do? She makes the girls miserable; it’s all wrong.’ Miss Heyworth wrote a fulsome recommendation and thanked the Lord for providing Heather Hill in Kenya.
The Misses Ferne, who owned and ran Heather Hill, were astounded and delighted to receive the letter from Miss Davis. They knew that anyone who could read and write was adequate but the parents of their pupils insisted on trained teachers from England. One letter to an academic employment agency in London had brought a lowering answer: salary too small, and where was Karula, and what was the scholarship rating of Heather Hill? In desperation, the Misses Ferne launched their need like a bottle on the sea, addressed to The Times. And got Miss Davis, whose photograph looked suitable, and whose present employer recommended her warmly. Miss Davis explained that she was leaving the congenial environment of St Mary’s because she must live in a warmer climate; she’d had serious problems with her chest the last three winters.
Beneath that healthy but flat chest, excitement began to bubble. Miss Davis was careful of money, a prudent saver. She splurged now on clothes: nothing in her life or the English weather had previously called for cotton frocks in lovely pastel colours, and two evening gowns, one of blue taffeta, one of yellow chiffon. These alluring garments were for the ship and though Miss Davis adored them she felt uncomfortably naked with her white thin arms and so much of her bosom exposed. She sailed early in September, to be ready for the October term; and was giddy with hope as she walked up the gangway of the B.I. liner.
The ship added tightness to Miss Davis’ narrow lips. There were deck games and dances and card parties, but the shipboard company divided into two worlds: welded old couples and the flirting young. The purser danced with Miss Davis once and was seen wiping his forehead afterwards. Miss Davis dressed proudly for dinner every night, alternating between hard blue and vicious yellow, and sat alone to drink coffee and listen to the band in the lounge. Every night she wept in her inside stateroom. Some of the old couples made friendly gestures and were rebuffed; Grace Davis was afraid of age now.
Karula was like the ship. There seemed to be no single people of either sex except the five spinster teachers at Heather Hill and boys and girls too young for wedlock. Evidently people could not live alone in this vast silent country; any partner was better than none. The African day was beautiful and sparkling and so was the night, but the night oppressed. The Africans shut themselves in their huts, closing doors and windows and sleeping in a huddled consoling fug. The Europeans shut themselves in their houses with the lamps lit and played their gramophones and talked or quarrelled or read together, holding the night at bay.
Miss Davis, lunching around the countryside, decided that even those couples who snarled at each other were as tightly attached as Siamese twins. At any rate, the climate was an improvement over Lincoln or Southampton, and a teacher here was not treated as a genteel hired hand but as a member of the community in equal social standing.
Ian Paynter did not appear as an answer to prayer because Miss Davis did not go in for such revealing prayers. She told herself that Ian was a dear and dreadfully lonely and she must do everything she could to be kind to him. She was thirty-three years old, with hope still, hope again, hope undefeated d
espite all the years of failure.
Miss Davis began to exclaim the minute they turned into the driveway under the arching eucalyptus.
‘But it’s heavenly!’ Miss Davis said. ‘It’s much the most beautiful farm I’ve seen!’
‘The view!’ Miss Davis said.
‘The roses!’ Miss Davis said.
‘What a divine house!’ Miss Davis said. ‘It’s so full of character!’
‘Goodness, you’ve done wonders!’ Miss Davis said. ‘In less than four years, all this! It must be a model farm, isn’t it?’
‘Do you mean to say you plan such superb menus yourself?’ Miss Davis said. ‘I always thought men living alone didn’t mind what they ate. Too delicious, I haven’t had anything like it since I came to Kenya. Well, I would love some more; I’m making an absolute pig of myself but I can’t help it.’
‘Oh it all looks so different!’ Miss Davis said. ‘I didn’t see how people could bear to put the Africans in those terrible dirty huts. But yours really look pretty enough to live in oneself.’
‘They’re positively edible, those babies,’ Miss Davis said. ‘Such dear little funny black faces. And the way they follow you around! They worship you!’
Ian asked Miss Davis to come again on Sunday next week, if it wouldn’t bore her. He’d like to show her his cattle, his shambas, his pigs and chickens and workshop and dairy. Friendly, nice, about his age: and so easy to talk to. Miss Davis decided to invest most of her remaining savings in a second-hand car. With her own car she could drop in from time to time for tea; much nicer when you didn’t have to arrange about transport. She bought the car within a week at Nakuru, an old Morris which listed slightly to the right.
‘Poor little Morrie,’ Miss Davis said. ‘It’s got a limp from climbing all these hills.’ Ian thought that funny, the sort of thing Lucy might say.
The Weather in Africa Page 15
