Various Flavors of Coffee (35 page)

Some time later,
Pinker comes out of his study to find the Frog waiting.

“Philomena,” he says, sitting down next to her,“I’m afraid your sister has had a shock.”

“I know. Robert has jilted her.”

“I—” He shoots her a look.“However did you know that?” “I asked Ada why Emily was crying and she told me.”

“I see.Well, you must be very especially nice to Emily now. For example, it would not be nice, perhaps, to use the word ‘jilted.’ They have simply decided that their future lies apart.”

“But if he hasn’t jilted her, why is she crying?”

“The other bad news is that Hector became very ill in the jun-gle. Sadly, he has passed away.”

“Was he buried?” “Yes, he was.”

“He wasn’t eaten by cannibals?”

“No. There was a short, dignified service, with a coffin, and a sermon, and all the natives saying prayers.”

The Frog thinks about this.“He probably got to heaven quicker from Africa than he would have done from here. Because Africa is in the middle.”

“Exactly.” Pinker gets to his feet.

“Who will Emily marry now, if she won’t marry Robert?” “Well, in due course she will meet someone else she likes, and

that is the person she will marry.”

Something suddenly strikes the Frog—a thought so appalling

that it forces her pouchy, frog-like eyes open as wide as they will go.“Robert will go on writing to
me,
though, won’t he?” she says anxiously.

“I doubt very much if he will,” her father says, shaking his head.

Then, to his astonishment, he finds he has not one daughter in tears but two.

[
fifty-three
]

e found the plantation in a bad way. Even though
it was mid-morning when we arrived, the workers were nowhere to be seen.The digging of planting pits, which had been proceeding at the rate of around fifty feet a day before I left, seemed to have slowed to less than a tenth of that, and although Hector and I had marked out with tapes the lines the gangs should follow, the new pits staggered randomly around the hillside as if dug by a giant mole. Without Hector’s iron discipline, it seemed, the place was incapable of functioning. But the worst of it was in the nursery beds.The leaves of the new seedlings were discolored with a faint spotting of rust-colored circles, like the foxing you

find on the pages of old books.

It was some kind of fungus. I could not understand it. Hector and I had carefully examined all the wild coffee bushes in the nearby forest, and none of them had showed any signs of ill health. I felt a sudden pang of regret—Hector would have known what to do. Instead, I turned to the pages of Lester Arnold, who advised washing the affected plants with a solution of soap and strong coffee.

When it became clear the coffee seedlings were going to die

anyway, we had to decide what to do next. There was money to buy another lot of seed crop, but only one: after that we would be unable to pay the workers.

I explained all this to Fikre one evening as we ate. “You are worried,” she said.

“Of course I’m worried. If the next lot die, there won’t be any more—there’s simply no more cash.” I spoke more forcefully than I had meant to: the anxiety was a strain.

She was silent a moment.“Do you blame me?” “Of course not.”

“But if you hadn’t bought me, there would be more money.” “There’s no point in going down that road.What’s done is done.”

It was not the most tactful thing I could have said. “So you do regret it,” she persisted.

“Fikre, can you stick to the point? I have to decide what to do.”

For a moment her eyes flashed again.Then she seemed to check herself.“Have you thought of growing coffee as the natives do?”

“The natives
don’t
grow coffee. They just pick the berries that grow wild in the forest.”

“Quite. Perhaps you do not need all this.” Her arm took in the cleared hillsides, the nursery, the rows of planting pits. “You could turn your diggers into foragers. They could bring you the wild coffee, and then you could pay them for it and take it to market at a profit.”

“It’s not how Lester Arnold says to do it.” “Lester Arnold isn’t here.”

“Maybe not, but his book is the only guide I’ve got. I can’t disregard his proven commercial methods for—for coffee grown willy-nilly in the jungle.” I sighed. “There is one other thing I could try.There’s a white man, an ivory trader, down in Zeilah. His name’s Hammond. He told me if I ever wanted help I should get in touch.”

“But how can this trader help you?”

“The Emperor needs guns—everyone says so—he’s buying every half-decent rifle that reaches Harar. White men—men like Hammond—can get them sent up from Aden.With the profit I’d make from that, I could set the farm straight.”

“What will the Emperor do with these guns?”

“Hector thinks—thought—he wants to expand his territory into the Interior.”

“To turn them on the natives, in other words.”

“So long as it’s only blacks he’s butchering, it’s no concern of ours.”

She glanced at me. I had forgotten, for a moment, the color of her own skin.“You know what I mean,” I said impatiently.

“It is a risky business.”

“I’m not sure I have a choice.Anyway, I’m going to sleep on it.” “I see.” She turned away.“Let me know what you decide.”

“I certainly will. After all, it affects you too, darling.”

Dear Hammond,

I am writing to ask a favor.You said you might be interested in doing a little trading with me. If that is still the case, can you get me as many of the latest Remingtons as an Englishman’s credit will buy, and send them up to Harar? If anyone asks, say the boxes contain tools for the plantation. For reasons which I will not go into, I need an urgent source of funds, and there is a ready market for goods such as those at present.

I am enclosing twenty Austro-Hungarian dollars as a down payment.

Best, Wallis

I sent the letter with an agent who passed on his way to the coast, although I knew it could take weeks or even months to get a reply.

Meanwhile, I was busy—too busy. It was as if the plantation was jinxed.The seedlings that were not diseased were attacked by black ants.A warthog got into the nursery beds and wreaked havoc.The workers became increasingly truculent. My feet became infested with jiggas, which had to be dug out with the point of a needle. The rust disease spread amongst the remaining plants, never quite wiping them out but preventing them from thriving. I replanted the diseased seedlings in more spacious beds, re-dug the nursery with fresh soil, and planted fresh seeds where the old ones had died. Some days I fell asleep without even taking my boots off, which at least prevented more jiggas from getting at them.

And yet, and yet . . . Every night, as evening fell—those ridiculously early equatorial nights, blackness falling like a blanket over the jungle—the kingfishers and parrots flashed to and fro in the dusk, colobus monkeys swung effortlessly through the trees overhead, and fireflies tumbled through the darkness like magic. Fikre and I ate together, the hissing lamp our only companion. It was hard not to feel a sense of satisfaction at those moments.Whatever I had thought I might end up doing when I was sent down from Oxford, never, in my wildest dreams, had I imagined anything like this.

f the pain were a coffee, Emily sometimes thinks, she
would be able to enumerate its myriad components. Heartbreak, of course, but heartbreak is only one element of what she is feeling now. There is humiliation—the knowledge that for the second time in her life, she has made a fool of herself. Her father and Ada love her too much to say “I told you so,” but they did tell her, and she ignored them: now it turns out they were right about Robert all along. Failure—she feels stupid, useless, incompetent. How can she ever hope to change the world, when she can’t even pick a husband? Anger—how dare he: betraying her like this with just a few casual lines, as if he were canceling a subscription to a newspaper? But the elegant, icy brevity of the note, she realizes, was part of the message. Loneliness—she misses him, she would give anything to have him back. She remembers afternoons cupping coffees here in her father’s office, the descriptors bouncing back and forth between them like musical phrases, a duet, a private sensual language conveying so much more than the taste of coffee. . . . And then there is an emotion for which there is no word, or none that she can think of, the terrible wrenching amputation of a phys-

ical desire that will now never be expressed. She feels like some misshapen, stunted grotesque, an old-maid-in-waiting
.... Damn you, RobertWallis,
she thinks as she collects suffrage petitions.
Damn you,
she thinks as she takes minutes for Arthur’s constituency meetings.
Damn you,
she thinks, as she wakes in the night and remembers suddenly what has happened, why her eyes are sore and her nose inflamed, and waits for the tears to come yet again, as inevitable as a bout of fever.

“Twisty”—a coffee with characteristics that are dubious as to its reli-ability.

—
j. aron & co.,
Coffee Trading Handbook

*

’ll have to go to Harar,” I told Fikre.“I need to replace

those seeds.”

“Of course. Do you want me to come with you?”

I hesitated. “Could you bear to stay here? The boys will work better if there’s someone to keep an eye on them.”

“Of course.There are a few other things you might get, for the house—I can give you a list.”

“That would be grand.” I looked at her. “You know I love you?”

“Yes, I know it. Come back soon.”

• • •

My business
in Harar was swiftly concluded, so I thought I would look in on Bey and see if he had heard from Hammond.

There was something different about his house. The filigree lamps that had hung from the balcony were gone: that was it. I knocked on the door. It was opened by a man I did not recognize.

“How can I help you?” he asked in French. “I am looking for Ibrahim Bey.”

He smiled mirthlessly.“As we all are. Bey is gone.” “Gone? Where to?”

The man shrugged. “To Arabia, perhaps. He left suddenly, to avoid his creditors.”

It made no sense.“Are you sure?”

He laughed, grimly. “Certainly—I was one of them. I was lucky: I had this house as my security. The scoundrel had been planning this for some time—there was nothing left to sell.”

A thought suddenly struck me—a thought so awful that I could not quite bring myself to think it through. “Do you by any chance read Arabic?”

He nodded.“Yes, a little.”

“May I show you some documents?” “If you wish.”

I went back
to the French merchant’s house and found the pa-pers I had signed when I bought Fikre. Retracing my steps through the streets, I knocked again on the ornate, carved door of the house where Bey had lived.

The man spread the papers by the window and looked through them.“This is a bill of sale,” he told me.

Thank God—

“It is a receipt for ten crates of the finest pistachios in Cairo. And this one,” he tapped another document,“is a loading bill for a

consignment of coffee.And this,” he held up the certificate of ownership,“is a letter.A note, rather. It seems to be addressed to you.”

If you ever set her free, you must tear this up...

“Are you all right?” he inquired solicitously. “Perhaps you would like some coffee.” He called some words in Adari, and a servant entered with a pot.

“No. Please—what does it say?”

“It says: ‘My friend, do not judge us too harshly. It is surprisingly hard to make money in coffee anymore, and my debts have been mounting for years.When you are less angry, I hope you will recall that you paid only what you wanted to. As for the girl, forgive her. She is in love, and this was the only way.’ ”

I didn’t understand.What did it mean? What way was the only way? For what was I having to forgive Fikre? How did he know that she was in love with me?

Unless . . .

Something else flitted into my brain, a series of separate memories that suddenly joined together and made a coherent pattern.

“It wouldn’t fool a doctor, but it might fool a man in lust—such a man believes what he wants to believe.”

I had to get back to the farm.

It was impossible
to hurry that journey—the jungle clutched at you, it caught at your feet and tangled them with vines, it reached out to you with branches and leaves, placed its hand on your chest and said
wait;
it sapped your strength and exhausted your will.

Besides, I already knew what I would find.

Fikre gone. Mulu gone.A note, fluttering on the camp-bed.

Don’t try to find us.

And then, in a slightly different hand, as if she had turned back

at the final moment, unable to leave without this last, hasty explanation:
He is the only man I have ever really loved.

I will not
try to describe how I felt. Perhaps you can imagine it. Not just despair, but grief—a complete, crushing, suffocating hor-ror, as if the whole world had collapsed around me. As if I had lost everything.

But then, you see, I had.

In the end,
it is the stories we tell ourselves which are the dangerous ones, the ones that kill us or save us or leave us stranded in the middle of a jungle, three thousand miles from home.

They must have planned it long before they met me. Perhaps that was what they were doing while Hector and I were kicking our heels in Zeilah: going over the details, getting the nuances right, making the whole package—the lure—so perfect, so
delec-table
that I couldn’t help but swallow it.

Was the bait concocted specially for me? Certainly, the coming of an Englishman must have galvanized them. And such an Englishman: young, naive, impetuous, oblivious to everything ex-cept the sap roaring through his veins . . .