A Stone's Throw (11 page)

‘Let’s go home,’ she said.

The drive to the house curved round past the Bromleys’ coffee sheds and up between two groves of eucalyptus that bowed, graceful as Masai, in the wind. There was no roasting going on now, but Meg could always smell, or fancied she could, the smoky, woody smell of the roasting beans. As ever, a cluster of children appeared on the verges and ran beside the motor car, some with a hand to its hot metal flank, some carrying a smaller child on their hip. Most were naked or wearing just a rough shirt, and all were barefoot. Anticipating Meg’s request, Yusuf brought the motor car to near walking pace and the car grumbled slowly up to the house.

Meg climbed out. Will would be here any second in his short trousers and buttoned shirt, and his sandals against the jiggas and broad-brimmed hat that George had given him so he could pretend to be on safari, running out to see what she’d brought, to see if there was anything exciting, Sita behind him, half-running to keep up.

Yusuf took the meat from the boot and Meg waited. She felt in her bag for the letter. A butterfly fluttered in her chest. Perhaps her mother had decided to visit, after all; or perhaps
she had fallen ill, or come into something unexpected. Money, or love.

‘Did you see Will?’ Meg said when Yusuf returned for the groceries.

‘No, Memsaab.’

‘Or Sita?’

‘No, Memsaab. I am leaving now till teatime?’

‘Yes,’ she said, nodding absently. ‘Of course.’

Everything was quiet – no small boy sounds. She opened the front door. It was heavy, resistant, built by the Germans to withstand … She didn’t know what it was built to withstand. Masai spears, perhaps.

‘Will?’ she called. ‘Sita?’

She looked for him in the drawing room – behind the sofas, under the low table, behind the door, the curtains. There was some paper and colouring pencils on the table and a picture with green and red lines and a circle that might be a face. The lines were so definite, as if Will knew in his mind’s eye exactly what he wanted to set down. She loved to watch him drawing. There was no hesitation in it and he always knew when it was finished.

There was no one in the dining room, or in the kitchen, so she turned and walked along the corridor to the bedroom Will shared with Henry. She didn’t think he would be in here because he wasn’t allowed when Henry had his sleep, and Sita would have removed him. She thought that if Will was nowhere else, then he would be with Sita, surely. Quietly she opened the bedroom door. It was dark inside.

‘Will?’ she called softly.

In the half dark she saw a figure seated on the bed and when she came closer, she saw that it was Sita and that she had Henry on her lap.

‘What is it?’ Meg said quietly, putting a hand to Henry’s forehead. It was hot. He looked up at her with heavy eyes, with the weary, disinterested look of the feverish.

‘Soon after you left for Kandula,’ Sita said. ‘He is exhausted now, but at first I could not calm him.’

Sitting on the bed, Meg stroked his brow. His soft baby hair was plastered to his head.

‘Has he been sick?’

‘Only crying, and very hot.’

‘Not floppy, or jerky?’ She mimed what she meant, to be sure. ‘You’ve checked for a rash?’ she said, lifting Henry’s vest. Sita nodded.

‘And he’s happy being held?’

‘Yes. He has been calmer since I closed the curtains.’

‘Then for now we must just wait and see. I will send Yusuf for the doctor if he is no better by the evening. Where is Will?’

‘He is in the drawing room with his paper and his pencils.’

Meg shook her head.

‘He’s not.’

‘But I told him to stay there till you returned. A good boy,’ Sita said.

‘I don’t think he’s in the house, or the garden,’ Meg said.

‘I told him because Henry, he was not well and so Will must stay there.’

‘He would have come when he heard the motor car,’ Meg said. ‘He always comes running then, in case it is his father.’

‘He is perhaps hide and seeking?’ Sita said.

‘Yes,’ Meg said. ‘Yes. Perhaps that’s it. I’ll go and hunt for him; Kibaki is making a cake later, for Mr Garrowby’s return tomorrow. I’ll promise him cake if he will come out. Kibaki can make him a cupcake for tea today. He always comes out for cake.’

So she called for him through the house and then through the garden, but there was no sign of him and no sound. He wasn’t there. Perhaps he had quite forgotten Sita’s instruction and run off to play. But he’d soon come back, not because he was hungry – he never seemed to be hungry – but because he had remembered that his mother was returning from the town, or because Kibaki had promised to let him whip the egg whites.

She was not out of breath but her heart was thumping in her chest and she felt a sweat break on her skin.

‘Will!’ she called out, the sound like a bell note in the sharpening air.

The valley and those beautiful hills were full of dangers, full of her fears, and they held no mercy for her little boy. The lions and snakes would be prowling and slithering. There were thorns and wild pig holes and all manner of things that could hurt him.

There was never any mercy for little boys, she thought.

She tried to think calmly. Tried to think what George would do. Perhaps she should go back to the house and up
to George’s study. You could see further from up there; you could see things that were invisible from the lawn. Or should she walk down the drive, now, hunt for him? She’d take one of the sticks from the hall stand to beat things back with. Because Will might have gone that way; he might have gone further than he ought, looking out for her and Yusuf, or running after something, or someone. Perhaps he had fallen and hurt himself; or perhaps he was trapped …

She looked down beyond the lawn. Sita should go and look, not her. Sita was better at looking – it was her country, after all – and Meg should stay with Henry. It wasn’t meningitis, Meg was sure of that. Nor yellow fever. Mrs Pritchard’s girls had all got yellow fever in the last rains, but it hadn’t been too bad, she had said, not so different from the usual.

Meg knew what to do for Henry. These fevers that took the children: if it wasn’t malaria, then usually they ran their course quite quickly, and all you could do was keep the child cool, and give them water, and comfort them. Will had been ill a few times. So far none of them had caught malaria, but she supposed it would only be a matter of time, if they stayed in Africa, despite her efforts with the chloroquine.

She walked down the middle of the drive. Safest place, they said. Nothing going to creep up on you, or slither out, or nip you without a warning at least, if you walked in the middle of your drive. It turned, a graceful, sweeping arc, and she was out of sight of the house, walking still between the high eucalyptus trees. George said the Germans had done well, planting so many of these, because they drained the soil and discouraged
mosquitoes. She liked them, with their high branches and their airy shade and the bark hanging in rips and tears.

‘William,’ she called out between the trees. ‘Will.’

She should go back and send Sita to look for him. Sita knew his hiding places; she knew where the children went. Besides, Meg was anxious about Henry. She wanted to see for herself that his skin was clear, that he wasn’t floppy, or stiff. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe Sita, but he was her baby.

‘Will!’ she called.

She was out of sight of the house now. Perhaps she should go to the African lines. She’d never been on her own before, and she wasn’t sure what she would say. Sita, or George, usually did the talking and she just smiled a lot. But this time she had lost Will, so she supposed that’s all she needed to say. And it didn’t matter what they thought. It didn’t matter at all.

She always felt embarrassed standing in their village, that was the point. They seemed to do so much outside their huts; they lived more or less in full view of everybody else and she felt as though she’d walked into somebody else’s house without an invitation. Imagine if she were to do that at home. Her mother didn’t go into anybody else’s house, ever, and Meg had always been careful to make sure she was properly invited; even by the Gilmers, who loved her, and by Mrs Gregg, Alice’s mother, who had known Meg since she was in the infant class. The Africans were always very welcoming, very friendly, at least to Meg’s face, but she knew there was something important that she didn’t understand at all about them.

Anyway, if Will had wandered down there, they’d have brought him back by now. Little Bwana, they called him.

‘My little bwana,’ she said to herself, and she remembered her last touch of him at breakfast that morning, how much of a little boy he was now, so slight and lean, and the last softness of his baby body gone.

She stopped at the bottom of the drive. In all the last four years, she’d never walked beyond here. She felt faint and her throat was tight, as if there were something she couldn’t swallow, and she crouched down, hands on either side for balance, in the dust. A memory came of snow and she shook her head to clear it. After a minute she stood up again and turned to walk back. The strength had gone from her legs and every step was an effort, as though she had been walking for hours.

‘Will,’ she called out, but her voice was weak. He’d only hear if he were very close by.

When she heard the children, she heard them quite clearly, more than one of them, laughing or calling out. But they were too far off for her to tell whether one of the voices was Will’s. She scrambled up the bank into the grove of trees, her breath so loud in her ears that she kept stopping and holding it so as to hear the children’s sounds again, then setting off once more. After a couple of minutes she found them: four little totos, one of them Will.

From where she stood, the children couldn’t see her and so she watched, unseen, and waited for her heart to slow down and her breath to be steadier. They were running
to and fro, calling out, playing in a clearing between the trees where the sun broke through and streaked the air. One of the children was a girl and she held a tin bowl Meg recognised from the kitchen. The others waved sticks like spears. She watched Will raise his stick above his head and stamp his feet and she heard him shout ‘Row Row’, and throw back his head. Then the two African boys joined in and they shouted something out in unison that, whatever it was, wasn’t English. Whatever it was, it sounded wild and strange. She saw in her mind’s eye the picture she’d found in the drawing room with its red and blue lines striking away from the circle. She had guessed it as a person with a head and limbs; but watching her son now she didn’t know what it was, and she thought how much of a stranger he remained. She couldn’t imagine how it must feel to be him. A wash of pleasure ran over her to see her small son standing so separately, playing without fear. She had been very frightened by his disappearance and she would have to be cross with him in a minute, but for now she was glad that he could run around fearless like this.

She stepped out into the children’s game, appearing, as if like magic, from between the trees, and the African children turned tail and fled, soundlessly, vanished in moments, so that Will stood deserted in the middle of the clearing, a little, grubby European boy with a stick in one hand and the tin bowl somehow in the other. Meg smiled. He looked so left alone.

Will didn’t look at Meg, only lifted his chin and planted his stick more firmly in the ground, still king, or hunter, or warrior, or whatever it was he was playing at. She felt heavy with relief and she wanted most of all to pick him up and hug him to her. But she put on her severest voice.

‘William,’ she said. ‘Sita told you to stay in the drawing room.’

Will looked down at the ground, his jaw stubborn.

‘She told you to stay there till I returned. When I came back, I couldn’t find you and I’ve been very worried. Why did you disobey her?’

He shrugged.

‘I thought you might be hurt. I didn’t know what had happened to you,’ she said. She waited again.

‘William?’ she said.

‘Njombo called to me,’ he muttered finally, still staring at the ground.

‘Njombo?’

‘He knocked first,’ Will said. ‘He invited me.’

‘He knocked where?’

‘On the window. I was drawing my picture and he put his hand on the window, and he invited me.’

He made a beckoning gesture with his hand to show how it had been, as if that explained it.

‘Njombo is the toto you have played with before?’ Meg said.

‘His father is a chief,’ Will said.

‘But Njombo is only a little boy, like you. You must ask me
before you go to play with him.’

She put her fingers under his chin and lifted his head.

‘Look at me, Will.’

He didn’t want to meet her eye and he looked one way and then the other.

‘Njombo’s not the same as you,’ she said. ‘He comes from here. He’s an African. This is his country, his home …’

Will broke in, his voice impassioned.

‘But it’s mine too.’

Meg shook her head.

‘No. Not so that you can play like Njombo plays. You’re an English boy. One day we’ll go home to England and then you can play like this. You’ll be a bigger boy then, too, and I won’t need to run and find you.’

Will crossed his arms and stamped his foot on the ground. Meg smiled. George crossed his arms when he was angry, and for a second Will was a miniature George. She took his grimy, reluctant hand and tugged him back through the trees towards the drive.

Mrs Bromley tsked through her teeth and mixed another gin and orange squash. She pointed to Meg’s glass.

‘No, thank you,’ Meg said, ‘else I’ll be asleep this afternoon.’

‘Nothing wrong with that,’ Mrs Bromley said.

‘No, but I’ve promised myself an hour in the garden.’

‘Anyway …’ Mrs Bromley said.

She settled herself in her chair and Meg waited. Mrs
Bromley always took her time. She was a large, comfortable woman in a large, comfortable floral print dress. Indeed Meg had never seen her in anything except floral prints and she had even wondered aloud to George recently whether one of Mrs Bromley’s ways of keeping England about her was to walk around in a perpetually flowering garden.