Green City in the Sun (54 page)

     This was not a pleasure trip; they were going to a funeral.

     Mona studied her aunt's tight profile. Grace seemed oblivious of her niece in the seat next to her. Mona told herself that it was because she sat on her aunt's "blind," side, the side of the injured eye. Unaware she could not see them, anyone not knowing Grace Treverton might stand or sit on her left. Giving her aunt's unresponsive hand a squeeze, Mona returned to staring out the window.

     The Avro monoplane was flying low over dense forest and jungle. From the air Mona thought Africa looked far wilder and more intimidating than it ever did on the ground, but it was also more breathtakingly beautiful and compelling. This dark continent was her home, its rivers ran in her blood, its trees were rooted in her flesh; she believed that because she had been born here, she loved Africa with a passion that surpassed anyone else's, especially people
like her father, interlopers in a land they barely understood. Mona wanted to remove the glass from the window and stretch her arms out to embrace it all, to shout down to the herds grazing on the plains below, to call to the herdsmen leaning on their tall staffs. Mona believed that because of her unique love for Africa, she would never become disillusioned with it or embittered.

     She glanced at her aunt again.

     Grace had said little since receiving the telegram from Ralph Donald three days ago. Something had happened at the
irua
ceremony, Mona suspected, but Grace wouldn't talk about it. All she had said was "I wasted my time while James lay dying."

     And now she was afraid she was too late.

     Grace had insisted they wear black. Not even for Arthur had Mona worn black; she simply didn't own anything that was darker than brown. Light colors were the most practical in an equatorial climate. But they had found an Indian
duka
in Nairobi that had been able to supply them with mourning dresses and little black hats with black veils.

     Mona felt the airplane shudder, watched its canvas-covered wings dip and sway in the East African winds. Only last week a twin-motor Hanno carrying mail into Uganda had crashed upon landing.

     She thought about death. She thought about Arthur in his solitary grave in the burial plot behind Bellatu, the first grave on a patch of ground waiting for future Trevertons. He had been dead only two months; it seemed two years. And now perhaps Uncle James, whom Mona barely remembered.

     Geoffrey Donald was sitting in the rear of the plane, down where the cabin narrowed and where he shared a window with two Catholic nuns traveling to a mission at Entebbe. Geoffrey's loss of his mother had made Mona suddenly sympathetic toward him, had made her feel an unexpected tenderness for him, so that now, as the plane banked and came into its final leg of the flight, she thought about Geoffrey Donald.

     BECAUSE GRACE HAD sent a wire to Ralph concerning their flight, he was at the landing strip outside Entebbe, waiting for them. He wore a
black band on the sleeve of his khaki outfit.

     The brothers embraced solemnly; then Ralph turned to Grace, who said, "I'm sorry for your loss, Ralph." Finally he turned to Mona and took her into his arms. "I'm glad you came," he murmured, and she looked at him, this tired-looking man, who was so colorless compared with his brother. She wondered what she had ever seen in him.

     "Your father—" Grace began as she stood by the open door of Ralph's Chevrolet.

     "He's on thirty grains of quinine a day, but he's stabilized."

     Grace bowed her head and whispered, "Thank God."

     "It's been a nightmare," Ralph continued, "what with absolutely everyone coming down with the malaria." His voice broke.

     Geoffrey laid an arm around his brother's shoulders.

     Ralph wiped his eyes. "It was madness. Some sort of unusual strain, the experts at the Makerere medical department tell us. Mother went swiftly, thank God. She was hardly ill. And then Gretchen put up a big fight. She's all right now, but I'm afraid you won't recognize her."

     "Ralph," Grace said softly, a catch in her throat, "please take us to your father now."

     SIR JAMES WAS sitting up in bed, insisting to his daughter than he couldn't possibly swallow another cup of tea. When the four came into the bedroom, he cut himself off in mid-sentence and stared like a man who couldn't believe his eyes.

     Geoffrey went to him, sat on the edge of the bed, and embraced his father.

     "Thank you for coming," Gretchen said to Mona and Grace.

     Mona was shocked. Ralph had warned her that she wouldn't recognize her old friend. Gretchen looked years older than eighteen. "We came as quickly as we could," Mona said. "We decided that flying would be faster than the train."

     "You're very brave. I could never get on an airplane."

     "I'm sorry about your mother, Gretchen."

     Her friend's eyes filled. "Well, at least it was quick. She didn't suffer."

     Then Geoffrey rose from the bed, and Mona looked at her aunt. But Grace seemed unable to move. So Mona went and shyly said, "Hello, Uncle James. I'm glad you're feeling better."

     "Well,
getting
better," he said in a weak voice but smiling. "It's good to see you, Mona. You've grown into a lovely young lady."

     An awkward moment followed. James gazed across the room at Grace. Finally, he held out an arm, and she went to him.

     Mona watched as her aunt went smoothly and naturally into his arms, burying her face in his neck, crying softly. And how James's hands stroked her back, her hair, how
he
comforted
her.
And suddenly Mona knew: This was the long-ago love her aunt had spoken of, the man she could never marry.

     Grace drew back and studied James's haggard face. The years and harsh living in Uganda and this final illness had etched their work in his features. The cheekbones were sharper; the mouth was thinner.

     "We were afraid we were going to lose you," she said.

     "When Ralph told me you and Mona and Geoffrey were coming, it was the perfect medicine. I decided right then that I wasn't going anywhere."

     "I'm sorry about Lucille."

     "She was happy here, Grace. She did a lot of good work and has left her mark. Many people will remember her with love. When she was dying, she said she didn't mind. She had done her work and she was going to the Lord. If there is a heaven, she's there now."

     He sighed and rested his head back on the pillow and said, "But I'm through with Uganda, Grace. I want to go back to Kenya. I want to go home."

     ENTEBBE WAS A small port town on the north shore of Lake Victoria, and it was the administrative center of Uganda. A young African lurked among the official buildings, as he did every day, in the hope of catching news from home. When he saw four white people emerge from the Provincial
Commissioner's bungalow, and he recognized the two women as Grace and Mona Treverton, David Mathenge retreated into the shadow of the building and watched them cross the dirt road.

     He could almost taste the sweetness of revenge.

     Because of them and others like them, he had had to flee his homeland, live in exile, and be hunted down for a crime he didn't commit—a shamed man. But his mother had promised him that the land would someday return to the Children of Mumbi and that her
thahu
upon the Trevertons would someday be fulfilled. The white people were currently the masters of East Africa, but David Mathenge vowed that they would not be so forever. He would return to Kenya someday, when he was prepared, when he had learned what he had to learn, and he would see to it that he had his revenge.

T
HE RADIO WAS PLAYING A
G
LENN
M
ILLER SONG, AND
R
OSE
hummed along with it as she went through her wardrobe, trying to decide what to wear.

     She looked through the bedroom window to let the weather be her guide. Since it was a gloriously sunny day splashed with the colors of newly blossomed flowers, and since she was going to overstitch the wild gardenias on her tapestry today, she settled upon a primrose yellow dress of moss crepe.

     It was impossible to get new dresses these days. The war in Europe had brought the fashion industry to a standstill. Styles hadn't changed in five years; dresses still had padded shoulders and below-the-knee full skirts. Worse, clothing in England was rationed, and the only "new look" to come along in years was called the "utility suit." Rose found it all baffling. Wartime had made uniforms and working clothes the guideline of high fashion!

     She sat at her vanity to let Njeri comb out her hair. After Rose had had her hair cut for the night of the gala opening of Bellatu, twenty-five years
ago, she had let it grow out again, so that it now tumbled down her back to her waist. It was still the color of a harvest moon, still youthful and shiny, and had not a single gray hair, despite the fact that Lady Rose Treverton had just celebrated her forty-fifth birthday.

     The radio broadcast crackled, faded, then died out. Rose gave the radio a mournful look. It seemed one couldn't depend on anything anymore.

     She found matters not much better downstairs in the kitchen, where, a few minutes later, she came upon one of the African house girls buttering the bread
before
toasting it. "And the tea supply is getting lower," she murmured when she looked into the caddy. Supplies from Nairobi were infrequent and rarely complete. So much had to go to the war effort—to the feeding of Kenya's troops and the thousands of Italian prisoners coming into the colony—that little was left, it seemed to Lady Rose, for the civilians to pick over.

     If Valentine were here, she was certain, such would not be the case.

     But Lord Treverton had signed on to the King's African Rifles four years ago, when Italian forces had invaded northern Kenya. He had been there ever since, first fighting the campaign in Ethiopia that had signaled the collapse of the Italian Army in East Africa and now an officer in the intelligence section of the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, policing the border between Kenya and Somaliland. He had been home only once in all that time.