The Flame Trees of Thika (11 page)

‘It all comes as a bit of a shock at first,’ Tilly remarked. ‘But you’ll get used to it. One sort of grows into the life.’

Hereward and Robin came back from their tour almost as brothers. Although Robin had served only for a short while in the Yeomanry, he had managed to recall one or two slight acquaintances in the Ninth; and, once that had been established, Hereward had fallen into line very satisfactorily about the quarry. He would engage a mason to cut and dress enough stone for Robin’s house as well as for his own. Robin would contribute the raw materials, which luckily did not need any wages.

‘Now we shall be able to build some stables,’ Tilly said delightedly.

‘And one for my piano,’ Lettice suggested.

Captain Palmer stroked his moustache and smiled at Tilly. ‘My wife is musical,’ he said, as if enlisting sympathy for some distressing ailment. ‘I can foresee difficulties in getting it here.’

‘It is with your trophies, Hereward,’ she reminded him. ‘They will need a stable too.’

Hereward laughed good-humouredly. ‘They will share ours. Perhaps it is bringing coals to Newcastle, but they have been in store for so long that I’m anxious to rescue them before they get weevily. Though I say it as shouldn’t, I have some fine specimens.’

‘I suppose you will add to them here,’ Tilly said.

‘Well, of course, when we’ve settled in…. They tell me the ladies are as keen on safari as the men. Perhaps we could
persuade you to join up with us and show us the ropes; I know your husband is an old hand.’

Robin looked guilty and would not meet Tilly’s eye. Hereward was a treat for him, and he was making the most of it.

And so the Palmers, by and large, were a success. Lettice even paid some attention to me. I had at this time a hospital for sick animals, which included a lame hen, a baby duiker, and a pigeon with a broken leg. This I had bandaged with tape and set in splints made of two matches, and to everyone’s surprise the bird had not yet died. (A hospital for sick animals has a quick turnover, since very few wild creatures that are both injured and in captivity will survive.) Lettice helped me to rearrange the pigeon’s splints and to feed the duiker from a bottle; I do not think it was sick, it was merely small and deprived of its mother.

‘I once knew a woman’, Lettice said, ‘who wore a live snake instead of a necklace at dinner parties; she said it kept her neck cool. That sounds a very tall story, but it’s true.’

‘There’s a python in the river,’ I suggested hopefully.

‘It would be more a question of the python wearing the woman, I’m afraid…. Which is your favourite animal, among all that you have seen since you arrived?’

Even Lettice, I thought sadly – even Lettice who fascinated me like some brilliant-plumaged flashing bird, or like a clown on a magic bicycle – even she did not avoid that distressing adult habit of asking enormous questions to which there could be no sensible reply. Cornered, however – I did not want to disappoint her – I fell back on my chameleons. She looked surprised, and stroked the ruffled pigeon with slender fingers on which there sparkled several rings.

‘You should keep one as a pet,’ she said. ‘No, two; you must always have animals in pairs. Most people keep only one, and try to suck all the love out of it like a vampire, but that’s cruel…. Look at this bird’s eye, it’s like a ruby in a certain light; why are pigeons’ eyes red, I wonder? Yours are blue. So are Hugh’s; he is much younger than you, and I’ve no idea whether he’s fond of animals and birds, or whether he’s musical, or what his likes and dislikes are, except that someone told me he was fond of Gentleman’s Relish…. We must be going, Hereward; if we are away
too long we shall find the headman drunk again and trying to murder someone, or perhaps successful, and everyone fled.’

After they had left Robin said with satisfaction: ‘That was a good day’s work about the quarry. I could never have afforded an Indian
fundi.
I hope he’s got as much money as he seems to have. One can never be sure.’

‘There’s something queer about them,’ Tilly said. ‘At least, about their being here.’

‘He’s a pompous sort of cuss, but there’s nothing very queer about that.’

‘Why did they come? They’re not the type,’ Tilly insisted. ‘My guess is they ran off together and have to live abroad; anyway, I bet there’s a scandal mixed up in it somewhere.’

‘A fine woman,’ Robin said appreciatively, looking after their departing ponies.

‘Emotional,’ concluded Tilly. This was a word of condemnation, because Tilly was a devotee of reason; she came of a Liberal family and believed that powers of intellect should prevail. In fact, no one was a greater victim of emotions, at least of the more generous kind, but she felt that to give way to them was rather disgraceful, and hoped by frowning upon them, whether they were at work in herself or in others, to drive them away.

‘The Palmers are too civilized for this life,’ Robin said. ‘Or, at least, she is; and he is too stupid. I fear she’s thrown herself away.’

‘At least on to a comfortable rubbish-heap,’ Tilly remarked.

O
NE
day a syce arrived with a note scrawled on sky-blue writing paper in Lettice’s large and sloping hand. ‘Please come at once,’ it said. ‘There has been a terrible disaster.’ Tilly sent for Robin who was out on the farm. He returned reluctantly, some critical situation having arisen, and inquired of the syce:

‘What is this bad news?’

‘
Sijui
,’ said the syce, using that useful, universal word that covered almost every form of ignorance or indifference, and that had given its name to many rivers, districts, and ranges of hills.

‘It can’t be anything much,’ Robin suggested.

‘All the same, you ought to go over.’

‘I thought perhaps you might…’

‘Robin!’ cried Tilly. ‘Are you a man or a mouse?’

Robin paused for some time in thought, and lit one of the small cheroots he favoured.

‘Well,’ he concluded, ‘I’m never quite sure.’ But with reluctance he climbed on to his mule and trotted off to the Palmers’.

A note came back about an hour later. ‘You had better come, there has been a fight, and bring iodine, bandages, and a sharp pair of scissors.’ Tilly collected the equipment and set out, taking me with her. Outwardly, all seemed unruffled at the Palmers’; the sun shone, a man in a red blanket swung a sickle-ended stick very slowly to and fro decapitating grass-heads on what would one day be a lawn, several others drooped about in various attitudes of indolence and supple meditation among the foundations of the future house, which stood on a knoll commanding a wide view of grass, bush, and scattered trees. A dire event needs a crowd to endow it with reality; it is the murmuring, nudging people, the peering heads, the avid eyes that give it drama; without these, it is insignificant, and might be part of a dream.

We asked for Lettice, who was not in the lime-washed rondavel that was their living-room; a houseboy led us to the Kikuyu huts a little way off and Lettice emerged from one of them looking white and shaky, with blood on her hands.

‘Thank God you’ve come,’ she cried. ‘A wretched man inside has been cut to ribbons. I’ve done what I can but I’m not good at it; it’s dark and everything is filthy and they’ve all run away….’ She staggered a little, dived for the back of the hut and I think was sick, and when she came back Tilly took her arm and told her to go in and lie down. ‘First-aid is not my strong point either,’ Tilly said, ‘but I’m getting used to it; where has Robin gone?’

‘He and Hereward have ridden off to catch the man who did
it. Or perhaps there were several; half the boys seem to have run away.’

‘I had better send for Sammy,’ Tilly decided. She vanished into the dark little hut with its horrors, while I returned to the house with Lettice, who helped herself to brandy and then lay on a sofa with her eyes closed, white and limp. Her eyelids had little blue veins on them and looked like rice-paper, they were so thin.

‘Perhaps I could have saved him,’ she said, opening her eyes, ‘if I had known enough about it; but this happened in the night and they never told us till the morning; and all that time the wretched man….’

‘Is he dead?’ I inquired.

‘Not quite, although I can’t imagine why; if we could only have got him to a hospital…. As it is I don’t know what we can do.’

Lettice looked lovely and incongruous on the sofa in the rough hut. Or rather, the sofa was incongruous; the Palmers’ furniture had arrived before their house was built and some of it was in the mud-floored rondavel, not at all at home. The sofa was covered in green velvet, and its ends were looped together by golden cords; it stood upon a floor of puddled clay, a low stool beside it on whose cushions, worked in
petit point
, Chang and Zena lay. It was very quiet in the rondavel, which smelt of lavender and had a vase of wild flowers on a French table with curved bandy legs and a fascinating surface of marquetry. Although there was much to look at in this room unfamiliar and queer, I wished I had been riding with Robin and Captain Palmer up the paths into the reserve, in pursuit of murderers.

‘I only hope that Hereward will keep his temper,’ Lettice murmured. ‘If he doesn’t, there will be another murder on our hands. That man had a gash right through his skull; part of his scalp was hanging down over his cheek and there was nothing but pulp where one eye…What a conversation for a child! Get that box from the table in the corner and I will teach you how to play chess, if you don’t already know; perhaps you are too young, but they say children start at four or five in China.’

The carved pieces with their pennants and mitres and prancing horses fascinated me so much that the rules of the game
hardly seemed to matter, but Lettice was very patient and showed me what to do. After a while Tilly came in and took off her heavy hat, made of two thicknesses of felt lined with red and worn all day; she was flushed and hot, and her hands trembled when she laid the hat aside.

‘He’s still alive,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think he will be much longer. Only a surgeon could save his life. I wonder if we ought to put him in a cart even now, and take him to Fort Hall; but I don’t see how he could possibly survive the journey.’

‘I am fiddling while Rome burns,’ Lettice said, ‘but there’s nothing I can do to put out the fire. That poor creature, his eye haunts me…. Do you play chess?’

‘They have all deserted him, which means they think it’s hopeless; they won’t sit with a dying person. Usually, you know, they make a hole in the side of the hut and drag the sick person out to die; that saves the hut. If someone dies inside it, they have to burn it down. I couldn’t stand the fug any longer; there’s still a fire in the middle of the hut and the smoke stung my eyes and throat and I kept coughing…. I’ve found someone to sit with him, a boy who isn’t a Kikuyu, and there’s no more to be done….’

‘Let’s have a game of chess,’ Lettice suggested. Tilly glanced at her and started to speak, but then changed her mind, for she saw that Lettice was very pale and her hands were shaking.

‘If you are a good player, you had better give me a castle,’ Tilly remarked. ‘I haven’t played since I was at school.’

But Lettice had only half her mind, or less than that, on the game.

‘I am glad that Robin is with Hereward,’ she said. ‘He will have a calming influence. When Hereward is angry he doesn’t bluster and shout, which gets it out of the system, he goes hard and cold as an icicle, and I’m always afraid that he will kill someone. In the days of duels he would have called people out almost every day.’

‘He may find life here difficult, it consists so much of petty irritations.’

‘Life has been difficult for Hereward everywhere in the last few years. But now I know he intends to stay, because he has sent for his heads.’

‘And you for your piano,’ Tilly reminded her.

‘Yes; but how am I to keep it tuned?’ Her voice was full of melancholy, so Tilly said:

‘I daresay one could learn piano-tuning quite easily.’ Tilly was a great believer in learning things out of books, and was always writing to her sister for manuals on various subjects and skills. She had just sent for books on accountancy, plumbing, grafting trees, and palmistry, and would no doubt put piano-tuning on her next list.

‘I never trust the things I do myself,’ Lettice said sadly. ‘I know from experience that they are very seldom properly done. I would rather piano-tuning remained the mystery to me that it is and always would be, even if someone revealed its secrets.’

This was what Tilly called doing the helpless female act, and she did not approve. Perhaps Lettice felt her reservations, for she added: ‘I know it’s a luxury one can’t afford, to be so useless at practical things. I shall try to reform. This appears to be a country where women do all the hard work while the men look fierce and decorative, like cock birds. That might suit Hereward, but I have a long way to go before I can be as useful as a Kikuyu woman…. That wretched, battered boy. If we could only do something…. I’m sorry, I’m afraid I must take your queen.’

Alec Wilson arrived while they were still playing, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

‘I heard there’d been trouble,’ he said, striding into the room in a purposeful manner, rather red in the face. ‘I thought a native rising might have started.’

‘It’s scarcely that,’ Lettice said.

‘Well, if there’s anything I can do, here I am. Where’s Captain Palmer?’

Lettice explained, and Alec looked relieved. ‘In that case, it’s just as well I came; I can hold the fort while you two ladies are left on your own. One never knows what a spark may do; I sometimes wonder if we’re sitting on a powder magazine.’

‘It’s very thoughtful of you, Mr Wilson,’ Lettice said.

‘It’s a privilege to feel I’m any use at all to someone as – to a lady of your – oh, well, you know what I mean.’ Poor Alec grew redder than ever and wiped his neck with a large, bright bandana handkerchief. When he looked at her his eyes went moist and soft, like a calf’s, and his lips opened slightly. One could see that
to a solitary, hard-working bachelor, who seldom went even so far as Nairobi, Lettice would seem as marvellous, magical, and unexpected as, to a Cytherean fisherman, Aphrodite emerging from the foam must once have done.