Acts of faith (79 page)

“Then fair enough. So one more question that you need to put to yourself. Is it him alone I would be married to, or him and something else?”

“Something else?”

“Are you sure it’s not a cause you’re in love with? Are you sure you would be marrying a man and not a cause? Or maybe half of one, half the other?”

What kind of hair-splitting was this? Quinette thought, and said with some irritation, “I’ve never thought about it.”

“I know, which is why I’m asking you to. It could make a big difference.”

She rode to her office in a pique, past women squatting in the dust behind their baskets of charcoal. She nearly fell when she wrenched the handlebars to avoid a goat that bolted across her path. She had gone to Malachy hoping to obtain some clarity, and all he’d done was to cloud her mind further with his lists of questions, some of which struck her as irrelevant. By committing herself to Michael, she would be committing herself to his cause and to his people. What was wrong with that? Why should she consider it? To love him was to love what and who he was fighting for—they could not be separated.

She cruised into her office compound, where the old gardener was raking the dirt, and went inside to confront the stacks of files, the diskettes with their records of human suffering. Annoyed as she was with Malachy, she admired him. If he could devote his life to his vocation, she could devote herself to Michael. It was a good thing she’d awakened the other morning with all those doubts; they had forced her to think about the penalties of becoming Michael’s wife as well as the rewards; now she could imagine it in its totality, with no illusions or impossible expectations—or so she believed. What she couldn’t imagine was a life without him.

God, through Michael’s proposal, had sent her a message: My tolerance of your illicit love is not without limits. Either she ended it or she sanctified it by saying yes. Michael had chosen her; now it was up to her to choose him, as the girls at the Nyertun had chosen their mates.
Yes.
The word flooded her with joy, and convinced that her heart was speaking to her finally and unambiguously, she wrote him a brief note and had it delivered by a Knight Air pilot: “Darling, I’ve thought about it, my answer is yes. I will fly to you as soon as I can, My love always, Q.”

Love in Wartime

M
ALACHY HAD INFORMED
several of the most important headmen that Fitzhugh and Diana would be traveling in Turkanaland for the day, and he trusted the bush telegraph to spread the word to the others: They were friends of Apoloreng and were to be treated hospitably—another way of saying, Do not rob, harm, or molest these people. In case someone didn’t get the message, the Father of the Red Ox saw to it that a pair of askaris accompanied the mzungu lady, her companion, and their interpreter on their safari.

They were on safari not to photograph wild game but to get a picture of the latest drought to afflict the Turkanas’ much-afflicted homeland. Diana, the woman of good works, had a new project: funding a campaign to dig bore holes and thus provide the inhabitants of northwestern Kenya with a more reliable source of water than the heavens. Fitzhugh had gone along on the trip only for the chance to be near her.

Their affair had become common knowledge in Loki and among her Nairobi social circles, and the chatter was as cheap and predictable as he’d feared. Diana was painted as a randy woman of a certain age, Fitzhugh as an African gigolo taking advantage of a lonely, middle-aged white woman who also happened to be rich. It was pointless to protest; a protest would require him to answer the question “Then what are you doing with her?” and he could not, even to himself. He’d quit looking for answers. He was happy when he was with her, unhappy when he wasn’t—the whole thing was no more complicated than that.

Visiting the nomads’ camps, it delighted him to watch her, in the cotton trousers that clung to her high, ample hips, approach the circles of waiting elders with her sergeant major’s stride, and to see her lovely head bobbing under a wide straw hat as the interpreter translated the elders’ replies to her questions. She could have been making the rounds of dinners and cocktail parties in Karen; instead, she was bringing succor to a wasteland where cattle died on their feet and women had to walk half a day to find water. In a country ruled by thieves, hers was a heart that gave. If he needed a reason for his love, he could find no better.

She was not quite herself today, but pensive, reticent, and distant, a state Fitzhugh ascribed to her preoccupation with her project and to the dreadful conditions they saw, journeying from camp to camp. Her mood didn’t improve as they returned to Loki. She wore a sorrowful look, as if she were grieving over some loss. Passing through a pan of nearly treeless desolation, where termite mounds rose tall as chimneys and camels floated through the mirage on the horizon, they came to a broad riverbed. As the interpreter started to take the Land Rover across, Diana asked him to stop. She looked around, then pointed and murmured, “Please go that way.”

“I thought we were done for the day, memsahib,” the interpreter said. “Besides, there are no Turkana camps in that direction.”

“I know. Please go, it won’t be far.”

They rocked alongside the riverbed, dodging boulders, skirting clumps of acacia. At an oxbow bend, she called another halt.

“We’re going to take a walk,” she said to the interpreter. “You and the askaris wait here.”

“But memsahib—”

“We’ll be quite all right.”

Fitzhugh followed her around the oxbow, wondering what she was up to. He called her attention to the lowering sun—no one, not even Apoloreng, could guarantee their safety after dark. She said not to worry, they were going just a short way. “There, in fact.” She motioned at a mound of rubble and a broken concrete slab that lay against the riverbank. She walked beyond it in her resolute way, then sat down, her knees raised, her arms clasped around them.

“I used to come here whenever I had the chance, but it’s been years since the last time. I’m surprised I could still find it.”

It did not look like a “here” to Fitzhugh. Except for the slab of concrete, possibly the foot of an old bridge, he saw nothing to distinguish it from any other part of the desert. Patting the ground, Diana invited him to sit beside her.

“What is this about?” he asked.

“Kiss me first,” she said. “Kiss me like a man who loves me.”

She’d been so withdrawn all day that this demand startled him. He did his best to comply. “Now you will tell me what we’re doing here, yes?”

“I have been thinking about us quite a lot. There are some things I must tell you.”

The severity in her voice made him apprehensive. “I am listening.”

“It came to me that I ought to tell you here. This spot is special to me. My baby was conceived here.”

Incredulous, Fitzhugh looked at the thorn trees, the sandy river bottom, the fissured banks. “The daughter you told me about? The one who was stillborn? She was conceived in this wilderness? What were you doing here? You could not have been more than—”

“Eighteen. It was two years before Kenya got its independence. My father was a colonel, royal engineers, putting in roads and bridges out here. He and my mother had a house in Lodwar. We were in school in England, my sister and I, and on the summer holidays we would come back out to Kenya to be with them. That particular summer my father had a civilian working for him, an Irish boy of twenty-two, Brian McSorley. He’d been raised in Kenya, and he was in charge of the African labor crews. Brian and I—I can’t say we fell in love, we conceived a passion for each other.”

“Yes, and out of that, the daughter,” Fitzhugh said. “Pardon my asking, but she was the reason you and this Brian were married?”

“Would you please not interrupt, darling?” she said gently. “We were quite mad to get at each other, but there wasn’t much opportunity under the circumstances. The chance came one Sunday, when by hook and by crook, we managed to get away together. Brian was driving out to inspect progress on a bridge—that one there.” She gestured at its remnants. “I went with him. We had a picnic, about where we are sitting now. There used to be a very great tree here, and we were picnicking under it when a furious rainstorm came down. There was a flash flood, and in no time at all this riverbed had twenty feet of water rushing through it. The storm passed, but we had to wait for the river to go down before we could get back across in our car—the bridge wasn’t finished. We were rather delighted with this dilemma, but you know, this was nineteen sixty-one and I was eighteen and a virgin, and as eager as I was for him, I couldn’t quite bring myself to make love to him.

“It got late, and Brian was anxious. The Turkana were as belligerent then as they are today. It was then that we heard a strange sound, quite ominous—a ragged banging and clattering mixed up with a rhythmic thudding noise, a bit like the sound of an approaching train. Brian stood to look in the direction of the noise—there was a full moon, it was almost bright as day. Immediately, he said, ‘Oh, my God!’ and went over the bank, pulling me with him. The water had gone down a few feet, but there was still a strong current, and we had to cling to the roots of the tree or be carried away. The noise grew louder. ‘Turkana war party,’ Brian whispered. We drew our heads over the bank, and it was a sight I can still see clearly today. There, hardly ten yards from where we were hiding, scores, perhaps hundreds, of men went jogging past. They were wearing nothing but loincloths, and each one carried a shield and two spears. Two spears, you see, meant a war instead of a hunting party. They were in single file, and it must have taken twenty minutes for them to go by. I wasn’t frightened. You seldom are when you’re eighteen. The spears clattering against one another, banging against the shields, the blades glinting moonlight, and all those half-naked warriors moving past us—it was breathtaking.

“When they’d passed, Brian said we must get home and started for the car, but the entire experience had overcome my schoolgirl shyness. The danger, the excitement of it made me reckless. I said I was soaking wet and had to wring out my clothes, and I pulled off my dress right in front of him. I was shameless enough to tug at the buttons of his shirt, telling him he had to dry his clothes as well. It was my very first time, right here on the wet ground, and like all first times, it was nothing like what I’d expected. A bit painful, and terribly quick. We moved to the car . . . ah, I’ve said enough. I don’t know why I went into so much detail.”

Fitzhugh was quiet, mesmerized by images of the Turkana warriors, the gleaming spear points, the young lovers embracing under the bright African moon. Thinking of how ravishing Diana must have been at eighteen, he was jealous of Brian McSorley.

“I was back in England, my first year at university, when I found out I was pregnant. My first time, and pregnant straight away! As you can imagine, I was frantic. I wrote to Brian and told him. He answered and said he would marry me, but I—I never wrote him back. The British class system, you know. The colonel’s daughter, the Irish colonial, her dad’s foreman. I could not imagine my parents’ reaction, or rather, I could.”

She fell silent.

“So you and this Brian never—”

She shook her head.

“And did you go away somewhere to have the baby?”

“Away? Yes, away,” she said distantly. “I should come to the point. I lied to you, that night after dinner at the Rusty Nail. The baby was not stillborn.”

“You gave her up for adoption? But why would you tell such a lie? I’m not upset for myself. What would she think if she knew you had denied her very existence? Where is she now, do you know?”

“Darling, I’ve no idea if it was a girl or a boy. The baby wasn’t stillborn. It was never born.”

Fitzhugh glanced aside. In the west, over Sudan, the sun was turning orange. “And there is some reason you invented this story of a stillbirth?”

“Shame,” she replied. “I did it for the most selfish reasons. I got rid of an embarrassment, an inconvenience by killing it. I’ve felt awful about that all my life. About that and never responding to Brian. He never knew. We never saw each other again.”

“But you were hardly more than a child yourself,” Fitzhugh said. “You didn’t think I would condemn you, did you? For an abortion you had thirty-five years ago?”

“I condemn myself, and I’m not quite finished. The operation was botched. I could not have children ever again. When I did get married—it was some seven years later—I was afraid to tell my husband. He was very high church, and he wanted a family. After five years passed with my not getting pregnant, David went in for some tests. The doctors said there was nothing wrong with him, so he asked if I would be tested, and that was when I told him. He was appalled. Which appalled him more, the abortion or my duplicity, I don’t know. We tried to make a go of it, but two years later we were divorced.”

Fitzhugh was upset now. “I believe that was another lie. You told me that you and he never divorced.”

“Well, we did. That’s where the house in Karen comes from. David was extremely well off and kind-hearted and he offered a very generous settlement—more than I deserved, I suppose. It was my decision, and I think it was a wise one, to come back to Kenya and start over.”

“Your decision to tell me you weren’t divorced, what sort of decision was that?”

She didn’t answer.

“Was it a way to keep things within certain boundaries? Or were you just amusing yourself?”