Green City in the Sun (25 page)

     Next up was little Roland Fox, who had jiggers in his toes.

     "Used to be," said Lucille, testing the Dover stove for temperature, "the kitchen boy was the house doctor. We had to rely on him for all our emergencies. He was an expert on digging out jiggers."

     "I'd rather die!" declared young Cissy, who had come to the Nanyuki area only the month before and was already wishing she were back in England. Like the two women who had come to the Donald farm with her today, Cissy's husband had been awarded a land grant through the Soldier Settlement Scheme. Led by visions and dreams, he had brought his family out in a covered wagon, and now they scratched a rugged subsistence on their struggling farm. These get-togethers at the house of one of them, typical of Kenya life, were their sole source of entertainment and companionship and an opportunity to trade what produce or goods they had in excess for items badly needed.

     Cissy finished changing Gretchen's diaper and returned her to the playpen, where the two little girls, sixteen months and thirteen months old,
played quietly. "What do you do if you have a
real
emergency?" asked Cissy.

     "You pray," said Lucille, and she slid her bread pans into the oven.

     Grace worked on Roland's foot, only barely paying attention to the conversation. The women, it seemed to her, all were talking at once, and a pack of kids yelled and shouted and made gunshot noises all through the house. It was bedlam, and Grace desperately needed to think.

     Problems crowded her mind this morning.

     This past June week had been full of ceremonies and festivities commemorating Kenya's new status as crown colony. Like royalty, Valentine and Rose had been in Nairobi, presiding over events which had culminated in the unveiling of the bronze statue of King George V, donated to the colony by Valentine. It was a week of races, fox hunts, parties, and speeches.

     In Nairobi Valentine and his wife stayed at the Norfolk Hotel, the only place where anyone who was anyone stayed.

     But they had separate rooms. They managed to explain it with a lie: that Rose suffered from night asthma attacks and did not wish to disturb her husband's sleep. Everyone accepted the story with a wink and a nod. Bush telegraph made secrets impossible in East Africa. When Rose learned she was pregnant after the gala Christmas party at Bellatu, the news was all the way to Tanganyika within a week. And when she miscarried three months later, that, too, was common knowledge, including the fact that the baby had been a boy. Since then a rumor circulated that the earl and countess slept apart for whispered reasons.

     "Tell him, Grace," Rose, while still bedridden from the miscarriage, had said to her. "Tell Valentine he must never touch me again." It was much the same plea Grace had heard from her before, but this time Rose had been surprisingly frank and open about it. "I find the whole obligation revolting. Now I know why they call it the
master
bedroom. Just be thankful you're not married, Grace."

     And what could Grace have replied? That her own feelings were exactly the opposite? That she ached for that intimate contact between lovers? That she fantasized about sleeping with Sir James? Rose would never have understood.

     As she bandaged Roland's toe, Grace stole another glance out the window.

     "How is the clinic doing, Grace?" Audrey Fox asked.

     Sending Roland off to play with the others, with an admonishment that he was to wear shoes at all times from now on, Grace set about straightening up her supplies. This visit had not been as demanding as some: just a bottle of aspirin for Cissy's monthly cramps; a quick look at twelve-year-old Henry's throat, which was sore, she determined, not from illness but from too much yelling; a lotion for Lucille's chapped hands; a routine check of Mary Jane's pregnancy; and the few minor complaints of the kids. Now she was finished. She should pack up and go home. But James had asked her to wait. A surprise for her, he had said.

     "The clinic is doing fine, thank you," she said as she put her instruments to soak.

     Grace sometimes wondered if the other women ever noticed what a private person she was, that she never participated in the usual exchange of feminine intimacies. They sat in the kitchen and talked of menstruation and babies, of bedroom problems and conjugal secrets, of strange dreams lately, of premonitions and intuitions; they shared tea and listened to the weather and compared measles and whooping cough and the relative development of one another's babies. But Grace rarely said anything at such times other than in the capacity of doctor. She never talked of her personal life or feelings. Perhaps they did not expect her to; perhaps they regarded her more as physician and counselor than as a fellow woman. Or maybe it was just as simple as the fact that she had neither husband nor babies.

     
But I could tell you things
, she thought as she dried her instruments and returned them to her bag.
I could tell you about the soldiers on the warship and the confessions they made, the propositions I received, the very correct officers knocking on my cabin door late at night. I could tell you of
my
dreams and needs and loneliness. And of this love growing within me like an unwanted child—love for a man I can never have.

     But
was
it love she felt for James Donald? It was a riddle Grace tried to unravel morning and night. This longing for his touch, the continual thinking of him no matter what she was doing, the way her heart jumped whenever he appeared unexpectedly—was it love? Or was it merely a product of her loneliness, of her natural urges which remained unsatisfied? But if that
were the case, if she were merely another frustrated spinster, then surely she would welcome the attentions of the men who demonstrated an interest in her. Some were charmers; some she might even fall in love with. And yet all she could think of was James.

     She considered the ring on her left hand. The women all had noticed it, but Grace had never felt compelled to explain it.
Let them wonder
, she thought.
At least this ring is proof that at one time I was wanted by a man.

     Grace stared at her hand. She was stunned. Where had
that
notion come from, that she wore the ring as a flag, as something to flaunt before people who pitied her?
Is that why I still wear it?

     "How is the earl's plantation doing, Grace?" asked Mary Jane Simpson, whose husband owned a bacon factory.

     
Or do I wear this ring
—Grace covered her left hand with her right and closed her eyes. She was coming close to being afraid of her own thoughts.
Do I wear this ring as armor, as protection against the fact that James will never look upon me as anything but a friend?

     "Grace?"

     She looked up. Mary Jane's face was puffy from pregnancy, her maternity smock faded from having been worn for six previous babies. And for an instant, inexplicably, Grace did not like her.

     "The plantation is doing fine," she said.

     "The Christmas rain destroyed most of his crop, I heard."

     "Yes, but Valentine purchased a new lot of seedlings and planted at once. The estate is doing better than expected, in fact."

     "I'm surprised at that," said Lucille as she fed wood into her stove, "considering the curse that medicine woman put on Bellatu."

     "Oh, Lucille!" said Cissy. "You don't believe in that, do you?"

     But Lucille's mouth was set as she said, "That woman is an agent of Satan. You mark my words."

     Grace pictured the round mud hut that stood just at the southern end of the polo field. In the nine months since Valentine had first ordered the huts torn down and Mathenge's family moved across the river, the young medicine woman had put up an astonishing fight. When she had rebuilt her hut yet again, after the Christmas opening of Bellatu, Valentine had asked the
authorities to do something about her. Officer Briggs and two askaris had escorted Wachera across the river and had burned down her hut. The next morning she was back, rebuilding it. Exasperated, Valentine had then installed a tall chain link fence around the entire polo field, so that Mathenge's widow was cut off. He ultimately chose to ignore her, deciding that it was beneath him to engage in games playing with an African medicine woman.

     Grace, on the other hand, could not ignore Wachera Mathenge. Despite the growing popularity of Grace's little clinic, Wachera continued to ply a healthy business in magic and, to Grace's thinking, witchcraft. Although, because of Chief Mathenge's acceptance of the white doctor, some of the people came to Grace with their ailments, the majority stubbornly sought out the medicine woman. Grace feared that as long as Wachera was allowed to practice what Grace regarded as mumbo jumbo, the Africans would remain in ignorance and darkness. She had begun talking with the authorities about getting tribal medicine officially outlawed.

     The back door crashed open, depositing two wild-haired boys into the kitchen. "It's a new heifer, Ma!" they shouted, dirty hands seizing jam tarts off a cooling tray.

     "Mind your manners," said Lucille. "Look who's here."

     "Hullo, Auntie Grace," said eight-year-old Geoffrey and five-year-old Ralph as they crammed tarts into their mouths. They shuffled self-consciously among the women and diapers, then let out whoops and tore off through the house.

     "Those boys are wild," Lucille said. "I'll be glad when we can send them to the European school in Nairobi. They worry me sometimes. I can't see to them properly. I can't be doing all things at once."

     "They're just boys," Cissy said.

     Lucille sank into a chair and brushed hair from her face with a hand covered with flour. "James is gone before sunup and gets in when the boys are asleep. I've got Gretchen and nappies all day and all the household chores as well. I can't grow vegetables here, the well has too much soda in it, and the groundwater is good only for cattle, not crops. So I have to take the wagon to the nearest native market, where they cheat me blind."

     They all sat in silence, the other three farm wives hearing their own stories
in her words. Then Lucille said quietly, "Do you know what I did back in England?"

     They leaned forward. People rarely spoke of their past lives, of what they had done before coming to East Africa, as if life had not existed before Kenya. "I owned a little shop in Warrington." Her voice grew soft, her expression wistful. "I sold ribbons and thread. It made me no great fortune, but it was a comfortable and respectable living. I had a place upstairs, where I lived with my mother. And I was walking out with a boy who was a clerk at the ironworks. We had a secure and reliable life, with church every Sunday and the vicar to tea and Tom placing the odd guinea on the pools."

     Grace had heard it before, how Lucille's life had changed when James Donald had walked into her shop. She had fallen head over heels for him and had packed it all in to come to Africa with him. Whenever Lucille spoke of it, Grace always heard an element of regret in her voice.

     Grace wondered if James was aware of it. She also wondered now, as she studied Lucille's sagging shoulders and limp wrists, if he was aware of how tired his wife was looking lately.

     "Still," said Lucille, pushing herself up from the chair and returning to the hot stove, "farming life is an honest and Christian life. And the good Lord has blessed us."

     These last words reminded Grace of another of her latest worries: the letter in her pocket.

     It had come last week. A notice from the Mission Society back in Suffolk informing her that until a proper inspection could be made of her mission, all monetary support to her clinic would be suspended.

     The back door opened again, and this time Sir James entered. He removed his broad-brimmed bushwhacker's hat, stamped mud off his boots, and said, "Hello, ladies." When his eye caught Grace, his smile broadened. "You're still here. I was hoping you hadn't left yet. There's something I want to show you."

     The cold wind was refreshing as she stepped outside and took a deep breath. Beyond the few trees protecting the homestead, a vast savanna, green now after the long rains, stretched to the distant blue mountains. Cattle grazed on enormous tracts of new grass; farmhands worked among
fodder crops, singing as they went. The sky was a stunning blue with shreds of white clouds about Mount Kenya's craggy summit. Grace felt her spirit soar up to the pale sun.

     As she walked at James's side, wishing she could do this every day of her life, Grace said, "The boys announced the birth of a new calf."

     "One of our dairy cows. They usually require close management during calving. This was a case of hind legs first; but I got it turned around, and we delivered successfully. Thank God I've got the best stockman in the protectorate."

     "Haven't you heard? We're a colony now."

     He laughed. "Yes, I forgot. It will take me forever to catch up. I still think Edward is king!"

     As they crossed the busy compound from the house to the dairy, stock boys and cattle boys called out greetings to Grace. They all knew her; she was a familiar face around Kilima Simba. She had treated the injuries of some of these men when she came to visit Lucille or when she brought the microscope for James to borrow. The Donald farm was noisy and busy: to her left, beef cattle were being prodded through a footbath; to her right, cows were lining up to enter the milking bails. Calves romped in small paddocks; hay was being laid out in a feeding field; a skittish Guernsey bull was being handled by three Africans. Kilima Simba was one of the biggest cattle ranches in Kenya; it supplied much of the beef and dairy products of East Africa. And yet, like so many other farmers, James Donald continued to operate on a bank overdraft.

     "Mind where you step," he said, taking her elbow.

     "What is it you want to show me?"

     "You'll see!"

     "You're being very mysterious."