Green City in the Sun (34 page)

     When they arrived at the train station, people stopped and stared at the elegant and mysterious woman emerging from the limousine. These eight weeks in Paris had been Rose's first contact with the world of fashion in more than ten years; she had adopted the latest styles at once. The black felt hat pulled tightly over her head, covering her forehead and eyebrows and revealing eyes blackened with too much mascara, gave Rose a provocative mystique. She wore a black wraparound Chanel coat with an upstanding fox collar that hid the lower part of her face so that she bore a striking resemblance to Pola Negri, the popular screen vamp.

     Mona knew that everyone thought her mother must be a film star; in
shops around Paris people had approached Lady Rose for her autograph. Mona felt painfully conspicuous as she stood close to her mother and watched the trunks and packages go onto the baggage cart. When Sati and Njeri came out of the second limousine, a murmur rippled through the French crowd.

     Despite her fashionable drop-waisted dress and strapped shoes, nine-year-old Njeri caused a sensation with her shaved head and loops of Kikuyu beads strung through holes in her ears. Rose's maids, both Africans in black uniforms, and her private secretary, Miss Sheridan, also in tight cloche hat and upstanding collar hiding her face, closed in around their mistress to form a protective knot. Together they all hurried after the baggage cart, anxious to be on the train.

     There was a moment of confusion before boarding. A mob congested the platform, kissing and embracing, waving farewell. Mona was overwhelmed by the press of fur coats and rapid French speech; she hung close to her mother while Miss Sheridan went in search of a conductor to assist them.

     When Mona saw how Njeri, also intimidated by the railway crowd, stayed close to Lady Rose, her resentment of the little African girl swelled.

     Njeri had first caught Rose's notice one day last year, when she had come tentatively into the eucalyptus glade to stand as still and timid as a gazelle and watch the memsaab sitting in the gazebo. Mona had watched in child's jealousy as her mother, taken with the shy little girl dressed in rags in the same way she was touched by stray animals, had coaxed Njeri into the gazebo with a macaroon. The next day the little girl had returned—with her brother! And Mona's jealousy had turned to anger to see her mother give them both sweets.

     David, the eleven-year-old son of Wachera, the medicine woman, had not come back after that; but Njeri had returned every day, and Rose, enchanted by the little girl, who seemed starved for attention and who was clearly in awe of the memsaab, allowed her to stay.

     When plans for the European trip were made, Rose had asked Mona's Aunt Grace to obtain permission from Gachiku to take Njeri along—"As a companion for Mona," Rose had said. But Mona knew the truth: Karen von
Blixen had caused a sensation by traveling about Europe with a little African boy in her entourage; Lady Rose wanted to do the same.

     Mona, receiving little enough attention from her mother, desperately resented Njeri's intrusion. In fact, she resented all the African children who received attention from her aunt Grace in the mission school and who, because of their poverty, were the frequent recipients of Lady Rose's charitably donated castoff clothes. But more than anyone, Mona disliked Njeri's brother, David, whom she thought an arrogant boy and who had one day, down by the river, impudently declared to Mona that his mother had told him this land was
his
and that one day all the white people were going to leave Kenya.

     That was why Mona could not go to the academy in England. She had to return to Kenya, to show David Mathenge that the land was
hers.

     And so, when the first good opportunity arose, she was going to run away.

     THE CARS CREPT along the gravel drive toward the stately, mansion, where a line of servants stood out front: footmen in livery, maids in uniform; old Fitzpatrick, the butler who had fled Kenya back in 1919 three months after his arrival there. The March wind made skirts snap like pennants, and the staff of twenty ogled the newcomers in silence. They had never seen Africans before, and there was a dusky beauty in lemon yellow silk who looked as if she had just stepped out of the
Arabian Nights.
Sati, the ayah, was unimpressed—she had seen British mansions before—but the two Kikuyu maids, shaven-headed and awkward in their shoes and uniforms, stared openmouthed at the three-story house with its towers and turrets and thousand windows.

     "My dear Rose!" said Harold as he came down the steps. He took her gloved hands and stared into the furtive eyes barely seen between veil and fox collar. "It
is
Rose, isn't it?"

     Harold had grown fat. He bore little resemblance to his older brother Valentine, who, at forty-one, was still athletically trim and showing only touches of silver at the temples. "Surely you didn't have to bring all of Africa
with you!" he said in a forced joking manner. Then he said, "Come along. Edith is anxious to see you."

     The elegant George V Hotel in Paris had awed Mona with its grand lobby and chandeliers. But
this
house. It was like a palace! It took her breath away as she entered the dark hall lined with standing suits of medieval armor, ancient tapestries on the walls, darkly brooding portraits of people long dead. It made Bellatu seem a mere cottage, and it would have been her home, she knew, if her father had not fallen in love with East Africa eleven years ago.

     Edith Treverton was in the drawing room with another woman and two young girls. Edith greeted her sister-in-law with exaggerated enthusiasm, introducing the visitor as Lady Ester and one of the girls as her daughter, the Honorable Melanie Van Allen. The other girl was Edith's daughter, Charlotte, Mona's cousin.

     "Rose, how good it is to see you again after all these years!" Edith declared, kissing the air next to Rose's cheek. "We all truly believed you and Valentine would be on the first boat back to England! How
do
you stand living in the jungle?"

     Mona sat self-consciously on a brocaded chair, surreptitiously watching the two girls, both of whom were slightly older than her and very stylishly dressed in the latest drop-waist fashion. Her aunt Edith did not make much of an impression, nor did Uncle Harold, who did not look at all like her father or Aunt Grace.

     While the adults talked, the young ones sat in polite silence, Charlotte and Melanie handling their cups and plates with extraordinary finesse. Their training, Mona soon learned, had been obtained at Farnsworth's Academy, the very school in which she would be enrolling the next day. "Charlotte will show you around," Edith said. "She's thirteen and will have a different set of friends, of course. But you
are
cousins."

     Charlotte and her friend exchanged a secretive, amused look, and Mona wanted to vanish into the upholstery.

     "You know, Rose," said Harold, frowning at the African girl who hovered near the doorway, "I hadn't expected you to bring a pickaninny with you. What shall we do with her?"

     "She sleeps outside Mona's door."

     Edith looked at her husband. "Perhaps it would be best if we put her in the servants' quarters. Your letter was so vague, Rose, we had no idea what to expect."

     The conversation became adult and boring, about who had died, moved away, married, and had babies. All the news of Suffolk was wrapped up in speech beyond Mona's understanding or interest, and while Charlotte and Melanie resorted to whispering and giggling, Mona stared out the window and wondered if the long rains had come to Kenya.

     Dinner, she discovered to her dismay, was to be taken separately—her mother with Uncle Harold and Aunt Edith and Lady Ester; she with the two thirteen-year-olds. "But, Mummy," Mona protested as she was getting settled in a bedroom that was big and cold and damp, "you and I
always
eat together. Why do I have to eat in the nursery?"

     Rose laid out Mona's things, her manner distracted. "Because it is the way it is done here, Mona. It's the
proper
way of doing things."

     "But I thought we were proper at Bellatu."

     Rose sighed, and a troubled expression briefly crossed her face. "I'm afraid we've let things slide a bit over the years. I just hadn't noticed. Africa does that to one. We shall have to correct that. Which is why, Mona, you are going to attend Farnsworth's Academy. By the time you come out, you will be a polished young lady."

     Mona was engulfed with despair. "When will that be?"

     "When you are eighteen."

     "But that is
such
a long time! I shall perish from being away from Kenya!"

     "Nonsense. You'll come home for holidays. And you'll soon make friends among the lovely girls at the school."

     Mona started to cry. Rose came and sat next to her on the bed and said, "Now, now, Mona. What a bother over nothing!" She laid her arm lightly about her daughter's shoulders; it felt to Mona like a mist. Her mother's perfume enveloped her, and she ached to be held by warm flesh. "Listen, poppet," Rose said quietly, "when I get home, I shall start on the tapestry again. Why don't you tell me what to put in the blank spot? In ten years I haven't
been able to think of what should go there. I'll leave that to you. Would you like that?"

     Mona sniffed back her tears and drew away from her mother. It was no use. There was simply no way to make her parents understand the pain in her heart, her anguish at being sent away, the certain knowledge that she wasn't loved and that they were, in fact, glad to be rid of her.
If only I were pretty or smart
, she thought,
then they would love me.

     
And if I were suddenly to disappear, then they would realize how much they missed me.

     "W
HAT IS IT
like, living among naked savages?" asked Melanie Van Allen, a pert girl with bangs and shingled hair and an eye that looked as if she sought out trouble.

     "They're not naked," Mona said as she moved the food around her plate.

     The three were sitting at a table in what was called the nursery and were being waited on by footmen. Njeri was in the corner at a smaller table, eating in glum silence.

     "I once read," said Charlotte, "that they are cannibals and don't believe in God."

     "They believe in God," said Mona.

     "Yes, now that they've been made Christian."

     "Do you actually play with her?" Melanie asked, pointing to the African girl at the other table.

     "No. She was brought along as my companion."

     "Don't you have any
white
friends?"

     "There's Gretchen Donald. And Geoffrey and Ralph, her brothers. They live on a cattle ranch called Kilima Simba."

     Charlotte whispered something to Melanie, and they both giggled.

     "Ralph is very handsome!" Mona said, thrusting out her chin.

     Melanie leaned across the table, her eyes flashing. "Do you shoot lions and tigers?"

     "My father does. But there are no tigers in Africa."

     "Of course there are! You don't know very much about your own country, do you?"

     Mona closed her ears and eyes and took refuge in a vision of Bellatu. She saw the golden sunshine and the flowers; she saw Arthur, her little brother, with his perpetually scraped knees, and against the blue sky, the silhouette of her father astride his stallion. She heard the cheers of the rowdy polo matches that took place on the field down by the river and smelled the aroma of the bull roasted every New Year's and divided among the Africans who worked the estate. Mona felt the sun on her bare arms, the red dust beneath her feet, the highland wind play with her hair. She tasted Solomon's millet cakes and Mama Gachiku's sugar-cane beer. Her thoughts swirled in a kaleidoscope of English, Swahili, and Kikuyu. She yearned to be sitting not at this odious dining table but in Aunt Grace's cottage, rolling bandages and sharpening needles. She thought of Ralph Donald, Gretchen's brave and dashing brother, who ran wild like an antelope and who enthralled her with stories of the bush.