The Flame Trees of Thika (9 page)

I suppose this incident made Mrs Nimmo pack away her hopes with the silver-plated teapot. After that, she found herself reverting more and more to her profession, but now without a doctor’s direction and certainly without pay. People came to her at all hours and from miles away and it was very hard to refuse them, yet she lacked the medicines to treat them with, or money to buy the necessary drugs, for Mr Nimmo had left her with scarcely any cash. It was no good trying to charge the natives, for they had nothing either. Robin and Tilly used to buy supplies when they visited Nairobi, and a doctor Mrs Nimmo had served under sometimes sent her things. For the rest, she worked by faith and Epsom salts. The clearing of the bush made slow progress. ‘I expect Nimmo will beat her for that when he reappears,’ Robin said.

The land next to the Nimmos’ was taken up by an Australian called Victor Patterson. I believe he was some relation of the Patterson who wrote
The Man from Snowy River
, which became one of my favourite works. He was a self-taught prospector who had come to seek gold, and rumour had it that the block of land he now possessed had come to him in payment for a poker debt. What I remember most about him was his set of very badly fitting false teeth. They seemed to have a life of their own, jumping up and down without relation to the words emerging from his mouth, rather as, in the early days of sound-tracks, the voices often failed to synchronize with the actors’ lips. I always believed them to be kept in with elastic, and sometimes it was a near thing that they stayed in at all. His face was lean and cadaverous, he spoke with a strong Australian twang, and now and then he gave a long, impressive hoicking in his throat that ended in a bold spit like the crack of a stock-whip.

About twice a week we sent a syce down to the post at Thika on a mule. Not much, as a rule, came back, except on those exciting occasions when an English mail-boat had arrived. But one day Robin received a letter from Roger Stilbeck that ran:

‘Some people you will like have just bought a block of Thika land. His name is Hereward Palmer, you may have heard of him. He was in the 9th. She was a Pinckney, and is a dear. They are new to the game and I told them I was sure you’d give them a helping hand. She will be a friend for Tilly. I expect you have seen that good coffee land is now fetching up to £10 an acre. You got yours cheap. When are you coming in for the races? Look us up when you do. There is talk of starting a country club and I daresay I could put you up for it if anything comes of the idea.’

This letter infuriated Tilly.

‘He thinks he can dictate whom I’m to make friends with, just because he’s sold us some land at a disgusting profit. Now he’s gloating over having found more mugs. And I suppose the country club is another ramp of his. If the Palmers are friends of his I shall have nothing to do with them.’

‘They won’t be friends after they discover how much he’s stung them,’ Robin said soothingly. He did not like to admit it, but he looked forward eagerly to the Palmer’s arrival. Hereward Palmer was a Captain. Although no one could have disliked the Army more than Robin had when he was in it, now that he was not, it had acquired in his mind a certain enchantment. At times he thought of himself as a great soldier
manqué
, and after prolonged struggles with reluctant oxen, broken implements, weather that refused to do what was expected of it, and Kikuyu who had very little idea of what they were expected to be doing at all, he yearned for the prospect of communication with more orderly minds. He hoped Tilly would not take against the Palmers. Like a spaniel, he always wanted to make friends.

Tilly ran into them at the Blue Posts hotel. We had ridden down to the
dukas
and looked in on our way back to leave a pair of socks Tilly had knitted for Randall, and some guava jelly she had made. We were hot, dusty, and dishevelled, and saw on the veranda two tidy figures who had clearly stayed the night and not yet set forth on the day’s journey. Tilly guessed at once who
they were and tried to bolt, but Major Breeches came hurrying out to introduce them, so there was nothing for it but to face the Palmers as we were.

Although it is so long ago, and afterwards she changed so much, I can still remember Lettice Palmer as I saw her then for the first time: friendly, eager, and above all handsome in a stylish, natural, and entirely unselfconscious manner. Her skin was the finest I have ever seen, as fresh and translucent as the petal of a columbine. Her eyes were amber-brown and her hair an unusual colour, like a dark sherry; she had the spring and cleanliness of health about her, and a trick of tilting her head back and arching her nostrils, almost wrinkling them, when attentive or amused. Major Breeches practically fawned on her, like an ecstatic dog.

‘What a journey!’ she cried. ‘The grass is brown, the trees have huge flowers but no leaves, it’s the women who carry everything…. And do you really live here? You’ve got a house, and a garden, and know how to speak to the boys? I hope that you’ll help me, at present I feel like a lost sheep on a mountain full of wolves.’

‘A year ago I shouldn’t have called it a house or garden,’ Tilly replied.’ But I suppose we have both in a sense. Of course we’ll help; Robin will come over, and lend you some boys.’

‘One doesn’t know where to begin; I haven’t felt so helpless since my small brother fell off a rocking-horse when I was seven and filled the nursery with blood and no one came when I shouted. And Hereward thinks I should not have brought Chang and Zena, but I couldn’t leave them behind. I love them dearly and they have the hearts of lions. Do you think it wrong?’

Chang and Zena were Pekinese, and lay at her feet looking disdainful and hot. Certainly on this bare veranda, beside a bougainvillea whose concentrated purple almost screamed aloud, and surrounded by tawny vegetation much the same colour as the Pekes’ silky coats, the embroidered sleeve of an emperor’s kimono seemed a long way off.

‘They feel the heat,’ Tilly suggested. She invited them to make friends, but they stared at her indifferently from their huge myopic eyes and wiped their small pug-noses with enormous pink tongues.

Captain Palmer had jumped to his feet when Tilly appeared, bowed slightly over her hand and now stood as stiffly upright as one of the posts, surveying the scene with an air of male superiority and contempt for women’s prattlings, combined with a touch of pasha-like complacency. He was a good-looking man: fair, with hair brushed straight back off a high forehead, a long bony face, strong features, and a vigorous moustache. He could have been nothing on earth but an English officer and the observant might have placed him in the cavalry, perhaps from his heron-like legs and his walk. Whether they could have specified the regiment, I am not sure.

‘Not fair on the dogs,’ he said.

Tilly disagreed with him.’ They’ll be all right if you’re careful. You’ll have to dress their coats every day with paraffin against the ticks, and boil their meat because of worms.’

‘What dreadful perils!’ Lettice cried. ‘And the worst of it is, Hereward is powerless to protect them; he has five different kinds of gun, but all of them useless against ticks and worms.’

‘Plenty of game, I suppose?’ inquired the Captain, feeling the bristles of his moustache with the tips of his fingers. He smelt faintly, and pleasantly, of bay rum.

‘The only beautiful things in the country, so far as I can see, are the wild animals, and everyone thirsts to slaughter them,’ Lettice Palmer said. ‘When they have succeeded there’ll be nothing left but ticks and dust and those pathetic little oxen with their humps and welts on their hides. And the children! Why have they all got such big tummies, as if they’d been blown up by a bicycle pump?’

‘Eat too much,’ suggested the Captain.

‘No, no, the wrong things,’ Tilly amended, ‘and at all hours of the night and day. But the doctors say it’s partly an enlarged spleen from malaria.’

Lettice Palmer impulsively covered her face with her hands, which were fine and white with long fingers. The gesture was theatrical but to her natural; she moved her hands and head a great deal, and yet nothing that she did struck one as false or affected. ‘How dreadful! There must be
something
we can do! All those children half-deformed and the women going along like toads under those enormous burdens and the babies with
flies all over their eyes! Shall we ever be able to make an impression? Will it ever be changed?’

‘My wife is very sensitive,’ Captain Palmer said with some pride. ‘These things always upset her. But she’ll get used to it in time.’

‘That’s just the trouble! One gets used to it in time and then one takes it for granted and then it all goes on as before. I should be a reformer out with nourishing soups and Keating’s powder, instead of that I luxuriate at concerts or the ballet or lie in bed reading a novel. How dreadful it is!’

‘It’s impossible here,’ Tilly said.

‘Yes, I’m sure this will do me a great deal of good. Layers of virtue will gradually be added to my stupid nature until at last I shall become a pearl for Hereward and adorn his establishment, like his record blackbuck he shot in Kashmir. How many inches was it, Hereward, from one end of its horns to the other?’

‘Nepal,’ Hereward amended.’ It was twenty-eight.’

‘Twenty-eight inches! How proud it must have been of its masculine glory, like a man with a magnificent moustache, or those narrow hips that look so well in uniform! And now those horns are in a crate in Nairobi. They’re too precious to venture into the wilds until we have a house ready for them. They’re kept with the uniform cases and the silver, and when we are ready to receive them, they will be sent for and arrive in state.’

Hereward looked at her and smiled astringently. He had a curious trick, in smiling; he moved his whole scalp and slid the skin back across his forehead. When he laughed he looked aggressive, although we found that he was not.

‘My wife’s grandmother was a Russian,’ he said, as if that explained everything.

‘The ship was full of people who thought they would very soon make a fortune, but now I’ve seen a little of the country I cannot think why. The natives have been here for thousands of years and all they have is a few beads. What is there to make a fortune out of? Of course there are ostriches. One man on the ship was going to rob the wild birds of their eggs and have a ranch full of ostriches. Then he would pluck the tail feathers of the cocks and sell them for enormous sums. That would be quite
an easy way to grow rich and really quite respectable, too. But Hereward won’t have it. He wants to own a plantation….’

‘I’d never bank on ladies’ fashions,’ Hereward explained. ‘With respect’ – he bowed to Tilly – ‘I know the sex too well. But a plantation – look at the fortunes made in India and Ceylon. A slow business, admittedly. Nothing back for five years.’

‘Five years!’ Lettice looked as if he had stabbed her to the heart. ‘In five years my youth will be over, I shall be fat and middle-aged and letting out my dresses and Hereward will be feeling twinges of gout. Five years! And all that time we shall watch the sun rise and set and keep out of its way in between, and I shall make a garden and Hereward will watch the coffee bushes grow up very, very slowly; and in five years Hugh will be nine years old and perhaps he’ll have forgotten that he ever had parents at all. We have a son, you know,’ she added, ‘and of course he has to stay at home, and while I suppose that this is necessary, and Hereward says so, I find it hard to bear. But what a lot I am talking about myself, and how foolish this is, because I am not at all interesting; now you must tell us how we are to start setting about things on our piece of land.’

Tilly gave advice, most of which dismayed Captain Palmer even more than his wife, for it sounded very haphazard and untidy to a military mind. They had with them two handsome ponies they had bought in Nairobi for a large sum, as things went in those days. Tilly told Captain Palmer that he ought not to take these ponies to his new farm until he had built a stable to accommodate them.

‘But
we
shall be living in tents,’ Lettice protested. ‘Must they have something better?’

‘They’ll die of horse-sickness within a few months,’ Tilly warned her, ‘unless you shut them in before dark and keep them in a mosquito-proof stable.’

‘Roger Stilbeck said there was no horse-sickness here,’ the Captain remarked. ‘He said mere was a move to start a polo club.’

‘He’s a great talker,’ Tilly cautiously remarked.

‘At least the altitude makes it healthy for human beings,’ Lettice suggested.

‘Well, in a way; of course bubonic plague and smallpox are endemic, and the natives are riddled with yaws and parasites, so you must be very careful to boil the water. There’s typhoid about, a lot of elephantiasis, and a man died of blackwater the other day. And you must be very careful of those dear little Pekes; it’s terribly important to de-tick them every day, there’s a form of tick-fever in this district that affects dogs. And of course there’s rabies, so if you see a native dog behaving in a suspicious way you must quickly shoot it. As you know, rabies is quite incurable.’

‘Thank you,’ Lettice said. ‘You have been a great help to us.’

‘I shall come and call on your husband,’ the Captain added. He was looking displeased. ‘I’m sure he will take pity on a greenhorn and put me on the right lines.’

‘If you can reach him through a sea of germs,’ Lettice remarked. She had taken up the two Pekineses in her arms and was playing with their silky ears as if to reassure herself that something in the world was still soft and desirable. Her skin was so thin that you could see the veins under it, like a leaf in spring. When she smiled good-bye, there seemed to be a warmth coming from her as from a peach on a wall in high summer, or from a bird cupped in the hand.

Tilly rode back a little guiltily, for she had liked Lettice, but never could resist the urge to deflate pomposity. She said to Robin:

‘She’ll be a fish out of water, I’m afraid.’

‘He has plenty of money. He can dig her a pool where she can shelter under water-lilies.’