She had met an angelic older woman, Mrs Milbank, widow of one of the top men in Mackenzie King, and a Miss Greene who was Secretary at the hospital and a Miss Ball who worked in a government office; they made a bridge four. She had taken up needlepoint and was stitching away on darling patterns for footstools at Fairview. The shops were lovely, all the little things one needed, and a tiny bookstore with a lending library, the latest novels from England. Sometimes she went with Mrs Milbank to the pictures in the afternoon though she wouldn’t budge at night but the hotel was very gay and lively, always someone to talk to or play cards with. She hoped Ian wasn’t too lonely and advised him to be careful.
Ian was not careful. If his watu went crazy and decided to slit his throat, then they would. He saw no reason for them to do so and certainly wasn’t going to take precautions. He hated the whole thing, he wanted no part of it and he wasn’t on anybody’s side except the victims. After there had been enough killing all round, enough Oflags for Africans, enough general misery and waste and ruin, the British politicians would give the African politicians whatever they asked for; it worked like that every time. He detested the lot of them but since he could do nothing to save this beautiful country he meant to withdraw and save Fairview.
When a young British officer from the Kenya Police Reserve came to Fairview for a routine check on African staff, Ian went to meet him before he could get out of his car. Ian said stiffly, ‘There are no Kikuyu on this farm. I vouch for the others. They’ve worked here for years, they’re family men, not lunatics. My herders and I are all over the place all the time, we’d know if any strangers moved in. Besides this isn’t Mau Mau territory. We won’t have any trouble at Fairview and the best way to see that the work goes on sensibly is to leave us alone.’
He didn’t offer a drink or future hospitality, like all the other farmers who welcomed their compatriots and their protection. The young officer, much put out by Ian’s manner, made inquiries and learned that Ian was known locally as an odd fellow and a hermit by choice. No doubt, the young officer said, he’ll be more cordial if the Mau Mau attack him, more cordial or dead.
Ian’s watu were terrified by the news that flowed over the bush telegraph. Mau Mau murder victims were mostly African; European soldiers took Africans away and locked them in camps for no reason; there were rumours of torture. They knew Ian had protected them. Ian thought he was probably being foolish but it seemed as if the watu were now at last as fond of him as they had been of Luke.
In Karula on Fridays, Ian listened with sorrow to his neighbours telling each other horror stories. Simon Farrell had shipped his wife and daughter home to England. The Ethridges barricaded themselves at night in the style Grace had wanted. Helen Gordon said she wasn’t going to abandon her garden just because some insane Kikuyus were drinking blood and swearing oaths. All carried handguns in their cars and slept with them at their bedsides. The farmers pointed out that war was straightforward, why didn’t the bastards fight honestly, this way was indecent, you didn’t know who the enemy was or where, any African could be a killer. Even your own servants after all you’d done for them. Obviously no one was happy.
Except Ian. Since Grace had gone he was happy again, a free man. He ordered Luke’s furniture to be brought from the workshop and Grace’s twiddly junk stored there instead. The house felt like its old self, happy too. Beda and Mwangi sang and gossiped at their work. Fairview was all right; Fairview had declared a separate peace.
Beda and Mwangi were as shocked as Ian when Grace returned suddenly after three months’ absence, calling, ‘Ian, come here, look what I’ve got.’
That voice again, spoiling the pleasure of his midday beer. He walked sadly to the kitchen door.
‘I knew you wouldn’t mind,’ Grace said. ‘Morrie was on his last legs.’
A new blue Volkswagen shone through recent dust.
‘I left Nairobi practically at dawn and drove like the wind,’ Grace said. ‘It’s safe if you go fast on the roads in daylight. I can only stay two hours, I must get back before dark. But you never answer my questions and I know how careless you are about business. I decided I had to come and make sure everything is in order.’
Ian brightened at the news of her departure but nerved himself for a scene when Grace saw the house. To his astonishment she said, ‘Quite right, Ian. No sense using my good things when I’m not here.’
Ian hurried to the farm office to collect the papers and ledgers Grace wanted. She ate a snack lunch at her desk, having no time for talk.
‘You’ve done splendidly, Ian, to keep things going in these dreadful times. But you are careless about money. Have everything ready for me, I’ll pop in once a month and go over the books and take the chits back to Nairobi and send out the bills from there. Really, you needn’t bother with the accounts. I can manage easily.’
Ian scarcely had a chance to speak before Grace whisked off in her blue car. He could bear a few hours once a month, especially since Grace would be too busy to trouble with him or the house.
On these blessedly brief visits, Ian began to notice that Nairobi agreed with Grace. He had the vague impression that she looked better and was more amiable. Grace saw herself, with ravishment, as a new woman. Mrs Milbank was responsible. Mrs Milbank’s hairdresser cut Grace’s shapeless crinkly hair short and dyed it so that it resembled a cap of some unknown auburn fur. Mabel, the beautician, prescribed a peach-toned foundation, a touch of rouge, blending powder, and showed Grace how to draw an outline around her narrow lips with a red crayon and fill in a wider softer mouth. Mabel said specs were no reason for a girl not to make the best of her eyes. Grace became adept with mascara and eye shadow. Mrs Milbank and Mabel together had the real brain wave: specs with pale blue tinted lenses so Grace would seem to be wearing stylish sunglasses. Finally, Mrs Milbank led Grace to a lingerie shop where Grace was introduced to the wonders of modern technology, a padded brassière.
New clothes completed the transformation. Feminine, floating, fragile, all shades of peach as advised by Mrs Milbank. ‘Peach is your colour, dear,’ Mrs Milbank said. ‘You haven’t done yourself justice. I can see you’ve been too busy taking care of your husband but an attractive woman should never neglect herself.’
Grace did nothing to correct the assumptions of her darling friends at the Dorset. Somehow the idea had grown that Grace’s was a war-time marriage to a man rather older who’d been turned into a neurotic recluse by his dreadful experiences in a German prison camp. Grace was the ideal of a devoted wife and of course her husband adored her, but still life must have been hard for her all those years alone on an upcountry farm. It was a joy to see the dear girl bloom before their eyes, so sweet in her manner, the youngest resident and everyone’s pet. The older gentlemen were in the habit of saying, ‘How’s our pretty Mrs Paynter tonight?’ The slightly less old gentlemen were more reserved in their gallantry but Grace sensed their admiration. Her middle-aged lady-friends were charmed by Grace’s thoughtful little gifts and her deference and her pleasure in their company. At the Dorset, the whine almost vanished from Grace’s voice.
Grace had waited in vain for Ian to speak of her appearance. Her pilot would have told her he had to fall in love all over again with a bewitching new woman. Her pilot would have noticed each small detail, from the pearls in her ears to the high-heeled sandals, and kissed her saying she looked her true irresistible self. Ian was blind, deaf and dumb. She burned with anger against the cold unnatural man who cared for nothing and noticed nothing except his farm. Her lifelong belief that a wedding ring guaranteed happiness had been crushed by Ian in less than two years of marriage. He could never make any woman happy. His wedding ring only guaranteed release from genteel poverty and rasping work but Fairview was as dull as any boarding school. Now, for the first time, she knew what happiness meant. She had everything she’d always wanted: this chic pretty person in the mirror, this delicious city life surrounded by doting friends, and the status of a married woman. Yet how much
better to be a widow, all the advantages without the fearful drawback of Ian and Fairview looming ahead.
Partly because he knew all the totos and partly because he had to account for any new face or new absence, Ian spotted the little greyish, big-eyed creature at once.
‘Ndola,’ Ian said, ‘Where did you get this baby suddenly?’
Ndola was an old man in his fifties who cleaned the dairy; his wife Sita was an old woman with breasts like leather saddle bags.
‘It is the child of my daughter. The one who works in the house of Asians in Kericho.’
‘She looks sick,’ Ian said.
‘Yes.’ And if she died, Ndola thought, it would be as well. His daughter would never bring in bride money; she was sixteen and any man could have her. This would not be the last child dumped on him. If a child came, you fed it. A sick child died.
Ian studied this wizened infant who did not cry, whose face looked strangely and pitifully wise, and said, ‘Tomorrow morning I will take your wife and the baby to Karula to the doctor.’
Dr Parkinson was the Europeans’ doctor, a kind bumbling man who grew show dahlias and loved bridge and felt that people either survived Africa or didn’t. He held out little hope for this speck of black humanity. The child seemed to have been semi-starved from birth. Ndola’s wife had no information about the first three months of the baby Zena’s life but imagined that her whorish lazy daughter had not bothered to feed the child and brought it to Fairview when she saw it was going to die. It was not good to be near a death; someone might talk lies and the police would say you killed the baby yourself. Dr Parkinson doubted whether Ndola’s wife would take the trouble to mix a formula but gave Ian the ingredients and the instructions.
Driving back to Fairview with the baby so bravely silent on Sita’s lap, Ian came to a decision.
‘Sita, you know the house for the man with the hat?’ The imported houseboy, gussied up in tarboosh and white jacket, was a joke to the watu. The last of these passing servants had long since left Fairview but the rondavel, built for him, remained empty alongside the two small rondavels used by Beda and Mwangi. These round huts with their pointed thatch roofs stood forty yards behind the main house, screened out by a high cypress hedge.
‘Yes, Bwana.’
‘I want you and Ndola and the baby to move into that house. Ndola can weed the lawn, he will be a gardener. You will take care of the baby and I will see you every day when I finish my work.’
Ian was determined that this child should live. Perhaps because he was revolted by all the needless dying in the country. Perhaps from some sort of pride; the children on his farm did not die, they flourished like everything else growing here. In his kitchen Ian showed Mwangi and Beda and Sita how to prepare the first bottle. Now they had seen what they must do; no one was to forget; their most important job was to feed the baby Zena as the Daktari ordered. He would punish negligence.
Grace never knew that the unused servant’s rondavel now housed a couple of old African farm labourers and a baby slowly fattening. Ian had been perfectly understood when he told Beda it was better not to worry the Memsaab with the problem of the sick child. Dr Parkinson watched the baby’s recovery with interest. He wondered why Ian was so involved with little Zena but it wasn’t his business and he did not gossip about his patients. The baby was nine months old when he tickled it professionally and it waved its now plump legs and arms and laughed. Dr Parkinson and Ian laughed too.
‘We’re a pair of sentimental fools,’ Dr Parkinson said. ‘She’s all right now, old boy. No need to bring her in unless something goes wrong. Cod liver oil. Takes care of everything. We’d die flat out if we had half the things Africans have. Very tough people. The old woman can look after the child. You’ve done your bit.’
The watu were mystified by the Bwana’s concern for the baby Zena. The women had seen Sita’s daughter arrive one morning on the farm lorry when it returned from Karula station. The driver had a busy arm around her; he stopped to let her off at the African lines before parking the lorry at the workshop. The next morning he took her back to Karula. They remembered that girl, she’d been a whore from the age of thirteen. They also remembered that Bwana Soft Voice had never spent a night away from Fairview nor travelled further than Nakuru or nearby cattle sales. He could not have flown on wings to Kericho to find the slut girl and make the baby. They talked and talked and finally concluded that Zena was like Bwana Looki’s big brown dog with the squashed face, in the old days; Zena was Bwana Soft Voice’s pet. Nobody wanted the child so she was lucky that Bwana Soft Voice had his peculiar notions.
Every morning after breakfast and every evening when the dairy was cleared and his office locked, Ian visited the rondavel behind his house. Zena knew his voice. The large solemn eyes watched until he came close; the delicate little hand curled around his forefinger; the baby smiled. You’re better than roses, you are, Ian thought and then thought he really must be round the bend, what in hell did he mean by such an idea? Zena was fifteen months old when the Emergency officially ended.
Grace put off her return, writing that she was obliged to stay on a few weeks in Nairobi to see the dentist. Ian quickly wrote back, urging her not to hurry home. For two years and four months, they had enjoyed an ideal married life, apart. Neither of them considered the obvious solution. Had anyone suggested separation to Grace, she would have rejected the thought with fury. People would say Ian threw her out, she was a failure as a wife. Separation was as shameful as divorce. And she would have died rather than admit to her Dorset friends that Ian was not at all the worshipping husband they imagined.
Ian’s view was simple. He married Grace of his own free will. She gave him no just cause to break a contract. It would be unfair and dishonourable to deprive her of a home. If Grace had a family the situation might be different, but she had nowhere to go. He told himself to buck up, grin and bear it, and it wasn’t so bad. He felt at home with himself so it didn’t matter how he felt with Grace.
Grace could no longer spoil his delight in his farm and his life. From the moment he watched the sun lift over the rim of the mountains to the moment he stood on the verandah in the cold night air for a last look at the stars, he was conscious of happiness. Too much time had been lost during the bloody Emergency; again George Stevens’ workmen were imported to construct a second dairy, overhead piping, all the dreams Grace had listened to with concealed boredom long ago. More rondavels were built for more farm labourers, Kipsigis recruited by Simuni so that peace would reign among the watu and hopefully he would not be hiring drones. The men cleared arable land while he hurried to cattle sales, in search of grade stock for an increased herd. This intense growth of Fairview was joyful in itself but he had an extra private miraculous joy in Zena.
Zena had arrived wrapped in a scrap of dirty blanket. She was then wrapped in bathtowels from the house until Ian caught on to the idea of clothing. He drove to Nakuru and found a shop where he asked for all the clothing a baby would need, at various stages, until it was two years old. He came back with a small mountain of infant wear, a chest of drawers, a crib and a plastic tub. On a later trip he bought floor matting and an iron stove for Ndola’s hut. These luxuries, unknown in any rondavel, were due to his fear of Zena catching cold in the wet season. Every Friday, he brought gifts from Karula for Zena. Every evening, he played with the tiny girl like a kitten to make her laugh. Since he tickled her with kisses, she had learned to kiss him too. Ndola and Sita, silent and dry and old, observed these goings-on without comment. They lived more comfortably and had more money because Bwana Soft Voice was foolish in the head.
But there was one foolishness which so shocked Ndola that he always left the hut, even in rain, to smoke outside; no man should behave like Bwana Soft Voice. Ian thought Sita rough and slapdash over Zena’s bath. He rebuked Sita, but Sita was stubborn; she had washed her own children like this and resented the unnecessary work of washing Zena every night. The baby looked miserable under Sita’s hands.
Ian pushed Sita away and bathed the baby himself. This was probably the happiest single act of his life. It became a nightly game, soapy splashing and baby laughter, and the perfect end of the day.
After Ian tucked Zena in and kissed her goodnight, he walked back down the drive where he had left the Landrover out of sight of the house and drove noisily home, amused by this deception. He had not planned to keep Zena secret from Grace; there was no reason to hide her. But he realized he loved Zena too much to let Grace intrude. He could hear Grace’s voice questioning, bossing, arguing, jeering. No. Zena was entirely his; their life behind the cypress hedge belonged to them alone.
Immediately upon her return, Grace had said, ‘Well, it’s nice to be home. I’ll have this dreadful stuff moved out tomorrow and my good things brought back.’
‘Leave my big chair here.’
Grace opened her mouth to say this was absurd and would ruin the looks of the room. Something in Ian’s face warned her not to.
Next morning, she said, ‘I do hate eating breakfast on the verandah, it’s too cold. And eight thirty in the morning. It was so lovely at the Dorset, ringing for breakfast in bed whenever I woke up.’
‘Why don’t you fix that with Beda? I intend to eat here, I like seeing the view.’
He could hardly conceal his satisfaction over this new arrangement. Fifteen quiet minutes to bolt eggs and bacon and fifteen minutes with Zena.
That evening when Ian came home from the visit behind the cypress hedge, Grace said, ‘Ian, for God’s sake, where did you store my things? They’re an absolute mess, dirty, spotted, you might as well have kept them in the pigsty.’
Ian, unhearing, went to take his bath and change. Alone he’d worn pyjamas and dressing gown; he sighed as he put on fresh khakis. He settled by the fire with his book and his whisky. He had become fond of Jane Austen. The evening routine was a half hour with Jane Austen and two whiskies before dinner. Grace stood in front of him, furious.
The Weather in Africa Page 18
