The Flame Trees of Thika (40 page)

News came at last of Hereward; he had secured his passage and would sail at once, rejoicing, to rejoin his old regiment. Lettice came over to tell us and stayed the night, as she did sometimes when she was alone. In a way that I could not define she had changed; life seemed no longer to bubble up in her, but had died down. She was thinner and her arms looked brittle, her rings were loose, shadows had come into her face, and whereas before she had possessed the quality of repose, she fiddled now with things and did not pay attention, and moved in a curiously leaden way. I wanted to speak alone to Lettice, but could not say so, and fretted for an opportunity.

‘So Hereward will be home before Robin,’ she said. ‘I hope that will not make Robin angry. What will happen to us, I wonder? Do you suppose we shall still be waiting for a passage when the war ends? Now that I know I must go, I should like to get it over quickly; this is like hanging about in purgatory, which I have never thought a very good invention, in spite of Dante; if God is merciful, he would hardly wish us to suffer any more than we already have on earth.’

I asked what was to happen to Puffball and Zena. They sat now in our only comfortable arm-chair, one on her lap, one tucked into her side, snuffling – a comfortable sound, like a kettle boiling – and licking their black button noses, and sometimes hunted noisily for fleas. Lettice replied that she wanted to take them with her to England; no one here could look after Pekinese. I asked:

‘And bring them back again?’

‘If I come back.’

‘But you can’t
not
come back!’

Lettice smiled. ‘Yes, I suppose it seems the centre of the world to you. But when you get home you will find it all looks different; as for myself, I don’t belong here, it is a cruel country that will take the heart out of your breast and grind it into powder, powdered stone. And no one will mind, that is the worst of it. No one will mind.’

I did not understand her meaning, and asked her what would happen to the farm, and the stone house they had built, and the ponies.

‘Don’t ask so many questions,’ Tilly said. ‘It is bad manners.’

‘But if I don’t ask questions, how shall I find out things?’

‘You are not supposed to be a private detective.’

‘All the same, that is quite an interesting point,’ Lettice remarked. ‘The best way to find out things, if you come to think of it, is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun; bang it goes, and everything takes flight and runs for shelter. But if you sit quite still and pretend not to be looking, all the little facts will come and peck round your feet, situations will venture forth from thickets and intentions will creep out and sun themselves on a stone; and if you are very patient, you will see and understand a great deal more than a man with a gun.’

‘Yes, I see.’

‘I don’t suppose you do, but it doesn’t matter; shall I come and say good night to you when you are in bed?’

This was a rare treat, so I had my supper and went off more willingly than usual. Lettice came later and sat on the edge of my camp-bed, and I noticed that the Turkish tobacco prevailed over the heliotrope. She told me a story, and talked about Hugh;
perhaps now that she would soon be seeing him, he was more often in her mind.

At last my opportunity came, and I said:

‘I have got something for you.’

‘How nice! Is it a bird’s egg, or a lizard that is indisposed? Or a particularly smelly Kikuyu charm?’

Lettice was on the verge of making fun of me, which was unlike her. It was in such small, subtle ways that she had changed, as perhaps she was bound to; if you fall into a fire your looks are altered, and if it is a fire that burns your spirit, that must be altered too.

‘It is not mine really,’ I said. ‘It is something I was given.’

‘If it was given to you, then it is yours.’

Now that I had come to the point, I had the greatest difficulty in passing it, as if I was swimming through a pool of treacle with weights tied to my limbs.

‘I think it was really meant for you.’

She would not help by asking who had given it to me, or what it was, and I knew that she was not really interested, so I put the little parcel on her lap without saying more. She unwrapped it and held it close to the safari lamp, and I said nervously:

‘It’s made of lion’s hair, from the tail.’

I felt her stiffen and go rigid; she sat for so long without a movement that I thought she had fallen into a sort of trance. Then I felt the bed shake a little; she was trembling, and the hand that held the bracelet quivered very slightly like the wing of a humming-bird.

‘How did you…? When did…?’

‘He gave it to me, but I think it was for you. A sort of charm.’

She said nothing. Sometimes, in the garden in the early morning, I would find a snail moving forward, like a tiny ship with hunched brown sail, and would tickle it with a grass-blade to watch its grey questing horns quickly curl and vanish with the eyeless head, both sucked out of sight, and the whole snail became instantly becalmed. It was like that now with Lettice. I could not help prodding with my grass-blade.

‘Do you want it?’ Still she sat without a word. I searched for something to say that was not a question.

‘One of the men he was in charge of was an excellent conjurer.’

Lettice got to her feet and tried to speak, but her throat had dried up, as I imagined the throats of men who die of thirst must do. Her hand now shook so much that she could not hold the bracelet; at any rate, she dropped it on my bed, put the hand to her face, and hurried away. I picked up the bracelet feeling dazed, as perhaps a beetle feels when, all but scorched against a burning lamp-glass, he tumbles out of range and lies there, half stunned, to recover.

Now the bracelet was really mine. It was black, neatly plaited, pliable. I slipped it on and thought about the lion; perhaps he had come charging from behind a rock to challenge Ian, perhaps he had been wounded and roared out, a mask of fury, for his revenge. Although the rifle had been too much for him, he had been brave, and Ian had respected him; and Ian had perhaps been killed in much the same way.

I put away the bracelet, and for a long time valued it. When I was away from Africa I would sometimes take it out and look at it, and think of the tawny lion crouching among wiry grasses and grey boulders, and the heat and aromatic smell, and dust and dryness, and the flat-topped acacias with their tightly clustering yellow sweet-smelling flowers, and the big clouds with their crowded sail throwing patterns on the furrowed hills, and the doves cooing, and the whistling thorns. But later still, in some move or other, the bracelet was mislaid. I did not notice its loss at first, and then I was sorry, but other things soon put it out of my mind.

Hereward came over to say good-bye a few days later, and not long after that we had a telegram from Robin; he had got his passage, and was coming on his final leave. He spent the time making plans for the shamba while we were away, for how long no one knew, and going round to say good-bye to those of our neighbours who were left on the ridge. Most of them had gone, and the rest were going, except perhaps for Alec; even Mr Roos had vanished, though whether in pursuit of animals or of Germans there was no way of knowing. Edward Rivett had been wounded at Longido, a word that had a heavy sound for us all.

We found Mr Nimmo at home on one of his visits, with the news, quite unexpected, that he, too, would soon be in uniform. Robin congratulated him, and asked what unit he had joined. With his feet squarely planted, his head slightly on one side and a pugnacious look in his eye, Mr Nimmo replied, vigorously rolling his r’s:

‘I’ve joined the Guar-r-r-ds.’

This was a surprise; the Guards seemed a far cry from Thika and the Mounted Rifles, so Tilly inquired which regiment, Coldstream or Grenadiers, or perhaps the Scots Guards. Mr Nimmo looked at her impassively and said:

‘The railway Guar-r-r-ds.’ Mrs Nimmo went off into shrieks of laughter.

The time came for Tilly and me to ride down to the station to see Robin depart, as Hereward had departed a few weeks before. His belongings had gone ahead in the ox-cart: his kilt and its embellishments, his sword, his surviving tweed suit that had been packed away in moth-balls in a tin trunk. He had been excited, but now the time had come upon us, we were all subdued. Things were not going as they should have, either in France or in Africa, where our troops had been routed at Tanga by Germans and bees; and submarines had started to prey upon shipping in seas that should have been indisputably ours.

‘When I get back,’ Robin said, ‘we must start at once on the coffee factory. I think it will pay us to hull our own beans, rather than to send them off in parchment. I was working it out last night; in a decent year, once everything is planted up, and with this new system of pruning, we ought to get a hundred and fifty tons….’

Robin’s calculations went on; he had been busy with scraps of paper and our fortunes were as good as made. He had bought a steam plough, a race-horse, and a Mercedes before we reached Thika, and was considering a new wing to the future house. All there was of it at present was a few foundations beyond a flame-tree avenue planted soon after we had arrived.

Njombo was waiting at the station to ride the extra pony back to the farm. He shook Robin’s hand and said:

‘Good-bye, good-bye, bwana, and may God help you to kill
many, many Germans; kill one for me, since I cannot go myself, and slit open his stomach and cut off his head! You will kill them all single-handed!’

‘Perhaps not quite all,’ said Robin.

‘Here is a charm that you must wear round your neck and it will protect you from iron; it came from a very powerful
mundu mugo
near Mount Kenya and I have worn it since I was circumcised. It is a charm for warriors, and as I cannot be a warrior any longer I give it to you.’

Robin was touched, and thanked him warmly, but in the mumble into which he always retreated when embarrassed by someone’s goodwill; so Njombo could scarcely have heard. The charm was a little leather cylinder with ground-up powder of some sort inside – it was best not to inquire too closely about its origin, which in any case would not have been known to Njombo. It hung on a fine, light chain made by a Kikuyu smith. Robin slipped it into his pocket and looked more embarrassed than ever; he had intended to give Njombo some money as a parting present and now this would seem like paying for the charm. He felt in his pockets but found nothing suitable, and remarked ruefully: ‘I suppose he doesn’t smoke cigars.’ Then the stationmaster was on us, bowing and smiling and wishing Robin luck in his babu English.

‘You kill many Germans, please. You come back here to family safely and soundly. We praying for you, please.’

The train snorted, the engine-driver shooed everyone inside, passengers hauled themselves up into high carriages, the guard waved a flag.

In retrospect, much of one’s time in that early war seems to have been spent in seeing people off in trains, or else in travelling in them. A Kikuyu might have called it the war of the train; and its successor, the war of the aeroplane. Even in peacetime, there is in the departure of any train the faintest echo of the raven’s croak; in times of war, trains are freighted heavily with fear and sorrow. This one, however, went off cheerfully, with many people waving from the windows, including Robin; and we mounted our ponies and rode away. At the Blue Posts we paused to pick up a parcel and saw Major Breeches, with florid look and spiritous smell.

‘I’ve just heard splendid news, good people,’ he cried. ‘Splendid news. The enemy have been routed, our troops have crossed the Pangani river, they’ll be in Tabora before the week is out. I think that calls for a little celebration, don’t you?’

The trouble about Major Breeches was that you never knew whether, one day, he might relate a rumour that turned out to be true – although, up to now, we had never known it happen. So while Tilly was certain in her mind that he had made up this victory, her heart whispered that it might conceivably have occurred, and she went back a little bit comforted. About half-way she noticed that Njombo was wearing Robin’s wrist-watch.

‘Where did you get that?’ she inquired.

‘Bwana gave it to me at the station. When the engine shouted, he gave it, saying: “This is for you, so that you will know the time when memsabu calls you to help her while I am away.” This is my baksheesh, I shall keep it as if it were my child, and it will bring me good fortune like a charm.’

‘I did not see him give it to you,’ Tilly objected.

‘No, he did not wish you to, he thought you would be angry. He turned his back and put it into my hand as the train went away. Bwana is a good man, and God will help him in the war.’

This sounded just like Robin, and I felt sure it was true. The watch was all that he could find to give Njombo and he gave it, and would buy another when he reached Nairobi, I supposed. But then, you never could be quite sure. Njombo with his open, cheerful, smiling face was packed with guile and an accomplished liar; he had long desired a watch, and Robin was often careless with his possessions. As with Major Breeches and his victories, there was always an element of doubt. Indeed in our double world there was very little we could be sure of. Tilly hankered after certainty, but never found it, and rode back in silence to the farm.

B
ERTHS
were found for us at last in some kind of ship, a Greek cargo vessel; no one knew just when it would sail, and we were to wait for it at Mombasa.

To be torn up by the roots is a sad fate for any growing thing, and I did not want to leave Thika for the unknown. Especially I did not want to leave the animals and people of Thika, to leave Moyale and Mohammed, George and Mary, or Alec and Mrs Nimmo, Njombo and Sammy and Andrew, or Kupanya and old Rohio, and even Kamau, and many others. Lettice had gone already, suddenly, in response to a telegram. Her belongings had been packed away, her furniture sheeted, Zena and Puffball had vanished with her, and the Palmers’ farm had sunk into a haphazard lethargy jogged every few days by a visit from Alec. Despite his goading, weeds had begun already to gain the upper hand.