Ian would come home, soaked by the erratic rain of that winter, to find Miss Davis curled up on the sofa, saying, ‘I hope you don’t mind. It was so gloomy at school. I thought I’d just drive up and beg a cup of tea.’
‘I’m delighted,’ he said, meaning it. ‘Give me a minute to change.’ He shouted to Beda to bring tea and raced through his bath and thought how agreeable this was, someone to talk to at the end of the afternoon. He couldn’t of course knock off work so early as a regular thing. Normally he would dash in for tea and dry clothes and dash out again to oversee the last milking and catch up on paperwork. But as a surprise and special treat, Grace’s visits were lovely and it was sporting of her to make the trip in such weather.
Sunday had become a fixed engagement; Ian never knew how but certainly didn’t object.
‘See you next Sunday,’ Miss Davis would call gaily as she drove off in her Morris. Once, Miss Davis suggested staying on for dinner but Ian would not hear of it. If your car broke down at night on the appalling roads, either you were a competent mechanic or you slept on the back seat. It took Miss Davis three months to steer Ian into an invitation for the weekend: arrive Saturday afternoon and have the whole of Sunday to themselves. If she wouldn’t mind the walk, Ian said, he knew a pretty spot at the top of the farm for a picnic. Ian did not consider gossip, being pure in heart. Miss Davis had already considered and devised a plausible lie about meeting friends from England at the Lake Hotel in Naivasha.
Any risk was worth it. Ian must become used to seeing her at all hours, dependent on her presence in his house. Miss Davis was not in a hurry. Her contract with the Misses Ferne ran until the end of the school year late in June, and it was only April now. Besides Ian never went to Nairobi or Mombasa or anywhere that he might meet other women.
Mrs Ethridge had a chat with Mrs Farrell in front of the post office, among the dusty farm cars and the shoving Africans.
‘Seems Miss Davis has got off with Ian Paynter,’ Mrs Ethridge said. ‘Can you beat it?’
‘Poor brute,’ Mrs Farrell said.
Mrs Ethridge giggled. ‘Mark says it gives him a cold sweat even to think of Miss Davis in bed.’
‘Bed’s not everything,’ said Mrs Farrell, who had surmounted Simon’s various infidelities.
Mrs Ethridge was prematurely grey and overweight and drank too much but she knew what she liked. ‘Maybe not everything,’ said Mrs Ethridge. ‘But quite a lot.’
At the petrol pump, Mark Ethridge had a thoughtful discussion with Charles Gordon about tyres, then gave him the latest bulletin on Miss Davis and Ian Paynter.
‘My God,’ said Charles Gordon. ‘He must be barking mad.’
‘He’s got his head screwed on right when it comes to farming. But if he falls for that piece of old rope I’ll think he’s the biggest clot from here to the Zambezi.’
‘He’s an odd chap, isn’t he?’ Charles Gordon said. ‘I don’t mean queer or anything like that but you know what I mean.’
For many reasons Grace did not speak of her life, past or present. Instead she listened. Ian saw that he had hungered for company without knowing it. He was starved for praise, starved for concern, and needed to talk about Fairview as a lover needs to talk. With Grace, he felt almost as if he were talking to his mother again, sure that she wanted to hear, was never bored, and shared his enthusiasm. Words poured from him, he could tell Grace all he had done and all he planned to do. As soon as the profits justified it, he meant to clear a thousand acres for arable land; he foresaw waving wheat fields, barley, oats, lucerne, his pasture enriched by sowing better grasses. He dreamed aloud of overhead irrigation. He showed her, as if showing art works, the catalogue pictures of combine harvesters, tractors, seed drills, road scrapers. Grace applauded his past achievements and his future schemes and said he was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Ian ate it up.
At first, he refused Grace’s generous offers of assistance. She was run ragged during the week at school and deserved a rest at Fairview. But he was always behind on paperwork and Grace said she loved helping him with the cattle records and the muster roll books and the accounts. Coming from the same background as Ian’s in a small English town, Grace said, she had always thought of farmers teetering on the edge of bankruptcy but here they were, with their heads together over the big dining table, seeing in clear figures just how well Fairview paid.
Ian never spoke to Grace of Oflag XV B. He blotted out that memory except when it overwhelmed him in nightmares. On the third of the now regular weekend visits, he told Grace about his family. Grace said nothing but put her hand on his and Ian saw tears in her eyes. Then she said quietly, ‘I am alone too.’ That was another bond of another kind. Hard enough for him, a man, how much worse for a woman, with no one to care for her, no home as a refuge. That night Ian began to feel pity for Grace and the tenderness of pity.
Yet it did not occur to Ian to think of Grace as a woman who could be a wife. He thought of Grace with gratitude as his friend, someone like him too old for that romantic part of life and uninterested as he was. They were lucky to have found this companionship; they were both content in it. Years ago as a schoolboy before the war, Ian had imagined that he would meet a beautiful Aylesbury girl one day and fall in love with her and marry her in the same church where his parents were married: a nice boy’s standard dream of the future. It had not been an urgent dream and was long forgotten, lost with the rest of his past.
The precepts of his school and family on the subject of sex were daunting; Ian had no urge to go forth and sin. He was a virgin when he joined up and on the rare days of leave from his training camp he went safely home. In France there was neither time nor opportunity for an experience which he didn’t anyway crave. He still had a known future then which included the beautiful Aylesbury girl, virgin like himself.
After that there was Oflag XV B. The other nine men in his room were married or engaged; they wrote their weekly permitted letter card to these girls, they read their mail in longing silence. They talked of their wives and fiancées but not of sex, perhaps from discretion, perhaps from being too hungry to yearn beyond food. Something that had not waked in Ian stayed dormant. He wasn’t suppressing desires, he did not feel them. And when all the people he loved died, the concept of loving died too. He was still a virgin, without sexual curiosity or need. The idea of marriage never crossed his mind.
The idea of marriage never left Grace’s mind. Sex was the horrid part and she avoided thinking of it. She saw marriage as wifeliness and constantly demonstrated her talent in this role. She sewed buttons on Ian’s shirts and darned his socks. On Saturday afternoons she made goodies for Ian, crusted apple pies and sponge cakes and oatmeal cookies and caramel custards. She bought Mr Jivangee’s best fake cut glass flower vases and filled the house with bouquets from Ian’s garden. She tidied his clothes in drawers and cupboards and arranged his bills and accounts and records in admirable order. Ian said, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’ Grace held her breath, but nothing came of it.
Stretched on separate sofas after Sunday lunch, digesting and reading, Grace murmured, ‘Oh how I wish I could stay here always.’
‘I wish you could,’ Ian said absently and turned a page.
It was now May.
By June, Grace had dark circles under her nearsighted eyes. Her voice not only whined but lashed at the unfortunate girls in her charge. She was smoking heavily and often had to clasp her hands to hide their trembling. The Misses Ferne, though fluttery and not very bright, had observed exactly what Miss Heyworth observed before them. They might not be able to lure another trained teacher from England but a pleasant amateur from Kenya would be better than Miss Davis. Their Kenya girls were more high-spirited than the inmates of St Mary’s had been. They protested to their parents.
‘She’s an old cow,’ Jenny Farrell informed her mother. ‘No, she’s a damn old bitch, that’s what she is.’
Grace knew that her next year’s contract should already ha
ve been discussed. She also knew that the Memsaabs had been watching her throw her cap, as if it were a hand grenade, at Ian Paynter. She felt rejected, mocked, isolated and terrified; and time was running out. All or nothing, this Saturday night.
Ian’s best hour was before dinner over drinks; he became annoyingly sleepy afterwards, having been up and on the go from five thirty in the morning. Grace had taken on the service of drinks and learned to swallow gin without making a face when Ian remarked that he wished she’d join him, he felt like an old boozer drinking alone. Two whiskies were Ian’s evening ration. Grace said she was a bit weary, let’s have another. Ian’s drinks were strong while hers were mainly water. Grace had worked on her face and hair and left off her spectacles. She was wearing a new long loose housecoat from the Asian tailor in Karula.
‘I’ve got to make up my mind,’ Grace said.
Ian looked interested.
‘I don’t think I can bear another year at Heather Hill. All work and almost no pay and it’s so frightfully boring.’
Ian now looked sympathetic.
‘I’ve had a good offer from Roedean. I have to let them know this week. Of course one dreads the English weather but on the other hand.’
‘Oh no,’ Ian said, startled.
‘Well, what shall I do?’ Grace peered across at the man who was a brown blur on the opposite sofa.
‘You can’t go,’ Ian said.
‘You’d miss me?’
‘Grace, you know I would. I can’t imagine …’
‘All I’ve cared about was the time with you. Working with you, trying to help you, being here with you.’
Ian looked touched. Grace waited. In vain. She didn’t know what she felt: despair, fury, for God’s sake the man was like an ox, slow, slow, slow, didn’t anything jell in his brain; she wanted to weep and hit him.
‘I can’t throw up a good job in England. I really can’t. I have to think of the future. Unless …’
‘Unless?’ Ian asked.
‘Unless you were my job.’ Grace was now peering at her hands, clenched in her lap and trembling uncontrollably.
‘You mean?’ Ian said; actually he did not understand.
‘We’ve been like partners for a long time,’ Grace murmured. ‘I hope you’ve been as happy as I … you see, Ian,’ and here it was, all or nothing. ‘I love you.’
The silence seemed to Grace endless, hours of it. She dared not raise her eyes, besides she could not have seen Ian’s expression unless she put on her spectacles.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Ian said at last. Impossible to decipher his voice; it sounded dazed.
Silence again. Grace felt cold and on the verge of hysteria; her head ached.
‘You mean you’d stay with me, live with me here?’ Still that bewildered tone.
Grace nodded, unable to speak.
‘We’re not young.’ A note of doubt had crept in.
‘Two people alone,’ Grace said hurriedly. ‘Keeping each other company always.’
Another silence. The pain in her head was blinding; her hands were ice cold but wet.
‘We could get married!’ Ian said with an air of discovery. ‘Between us, we’d make Fairview the best farm in Kenya!’
Now Grace raised her head, smiling tenderly.
‘Married!’ Ian cried and bounded across the room to kneel by her sofa. ‘Grace, what a brilliant idea, I’d never have thought of it.’
Ian took one of her ice cold hands and kissed it. He did not think of kissing her on the mouth; he had never kissed Lucy or his mother like that. Grace rested her other freezing hand on Ian’s hair, blinking away tears due as much to relief as to migraine. Close beside her, Ian was no longer a brown blur but his features remained indistinct. Grace could imagine him as she had so often imagined the man that never was, the passionate pilot on his knees begging and imploring her to become his wife …
Ian ate while Grace talked ways and means. The church at Nakuru, so much nicer than the tin-roofed cement chapel in Karula. Let’s see, we’ll invite the Misses Ferne of course and the Gordons and the Ethridges and the Farrells and the Gales and the Brands and the Parkinsons and the Barnes and the Ogilvies and … The wedding breakfast at the Nakuru Hotel, surely they can manage a proper cake. Immediately after the end of term, first week in July would be best. Lovely if Ian had a ring of his mother’s, did he, such a joy to wear his ring, she could hardly wait to tell everyone, wasn’t it thrilling. Ian smiled and nodded; he seemed to have no opinions of his own.
Grace sent notes announcing the engagement and the wedding date. She added that Ian would have written too but you know how he works himself to the bone, scarcely a minute to breathe.
Rose Farrell showed this letter to her husband at lunch. ‘I thought you said he was a misogynist?’
‘Well, my God, if this doesn’t prove it, what does? No normal man would regard Miss Davis as a woman.’
Helen Gordon said, ‘Oh Charles, do you think Eddy and Alan will suddenly tell us they’re going to marry some absolutely horrendous girl?’
‘Considering that Eddy is in his first year at Eton and Alan’s still in preparatory school, I hardly see the need to have a fit now. I’m not going to spoil my dinner just because Ian Paynter is off his chump.’
Mrs Gale said, ‘Do you suppose she’ll want to be neighbourly, Dick? Popping in for a cuppa and a nice matronly chat? I’d go out of my mind.’
Mark Ethridge said, ‘My heart bleeds for that poor sod and I don’t care to talk about it.’
‘Better to marry than to burn,’ Sam Brand said, ‘If I am quoting St Paul correctly. In some cases, any fool would choose burning.’
When the great day came, the farmers grumbled furiously about dressing up and besides it was as jolly as going to a hanging. The wives would not hear of defections. The prevailing sentiment seemed to be that they had to rally round Ian in his hour of need but at the same time Ian wanted his head examined. The congregation, assembled in town suits and hats, listened with varying expressions to that noteworthy phrase in the marriage ceremony: with my body I thee worship. At the Nakuru Hotel, toasts were drunk with grim cheerfulness. The champagne was not very good and also not very cold. The hotel dining room smelled of hotel cooking. Everyone ate cake and spoke heartily to the bride and groom, and in lowered tones to each other.
Rose Farrell sauntered over to Helen Gordon and said, ‘Your hat’s even worse than mine, I’m pleased to see. Wouldn’t it be a good thing if the new Mrs Paynter had a dear friend to advise her never never to wear yellow?’
‘I think we should all stop being mean. She looks radiantly happy. Really. And happiness improves people. Who knows, it may be a wonderful marriage.’
Mark Ethridge joined them. ‘I’ve done my best with this champagne but it isn’t having any effect. The bridegroom looks to me as if he’d been poleaxed. And he hasn’t said a word from beginning to end except “I do”.’
Coming in on this remark, Mrs Gale said, ‘The bride makes up for that. If only they could change around like Jack Sprat and his wife, if you see what I mean.’
Helen said, ‘We must break this up. Come on now, shoulder to the wheel. Let’s try to make it merrier for Ian.’
As soon as was decent, the entire company returned to Karula. A pouring unseasonal rain had not helped and Grace was cross about damage to her new shoes, dress and hat, but Ian was delighted, thinking of his pasture. The rain was really the best part of the day. There had been no question of a honeymoon; Ian could not possibly leave Fairview.
Ian had told Beda to make up the guest room and shift his clothes, so the drawers and cupboards in the master bedroom would be empty for the Memsaab. Naturally he gave Grace the best room. He had hardly seen Grace since the night they agreed to marry. She said the end of term was hectic and she had all her packing to do and she had the sense to keep to herself the fuss of the wedding preparations and her intense elation. To Ian, this marriage was a sensible arrangement for them to work together at Fa
irview, companions as before. But Grace had been unlike herself at the awful wedding party, clinging to his arm, holding his hand, smiling at him in a new embarrassing way; and he had also been shaken by the same words in the marriage service that so impressed the congregation. Now while Grace unpacked, he lounged around the house disoriented and filled with foreboding. Surely Grace did not expect … they should have discussed this before.
After a light supper, the newlyweds said in the same breath, ‘You must be dead tired,’ and laughed a little and went to bed, with perfect accord, in separate rooms. That’s all right then, Ian thought. He rather missed waking to the view from the front bedroom but would soon get used to the change.
For a week, Grace was busy dominating Mwangi and Beda. In a week they knew who was boss. But Grace started to worry because Ian showed no intention of claiming his marital rights and she wondered whether an unconsummated marriage was actually legal. She remembered something about Roman Catholics, a wisp of information from a newspaper: unconsummated marriages could be annulled, something like that. Inwardly shuddering, she held Ian’s hand as they reached her bedroom door.
‘Ian dear?’ A rising note, a smile, a special look.
Ian got the message. He couldn’t speak and his stomach clenched in nausea. Too late now to say this was no part of the agreement. Grace would be mortally hurt if he refused and how could he when there she was, gleaming at him. He undressed slowly and went to her room, well buttoned and tied in his pyjamas, to find Grace well covered in her nightdress. He turned down the pressure lamp and slid into his own bed which felt strange and hostile, with a rigid woman filling half the space. The disastrous failure left them both hot from shame and limp from fatigue. Grace blamed Ian silently and with fury. It was a man’s place to know how to handle this. Of course a man should keep himself pure for his wife, just as a girl should for her husband, but that was meant for young people and a man of Ian’s age ought somewhere to have learned whatever you had to know. She dreaded the next attempt but instinct told her that she must persevere, in her own best interests.
The Weather in Africa Page 16
