The Ashford Affair (2 page)

Addie put the letter abruptly away, cramming it back into her travel wallet. It would be what it would be. And then she would go back to David, David who thought he loved her and perhaps even did. He seemed very sure on the point.

Was he sure enough for both of them?

Yes, she told herself. Yes. David belonged to her new life, the life she had built for herself, piece by painful piece after—well, after everything had gone so hideously, dramatically wrong. The rest was all history, lost in the mists of time. She and Bea could laugh about it now, on the porch of the farm. Did the farm have a porch? Addie assumed it must. It sounded like a suitably rustic addition.

That was why she was going, she told herself. To make her peace. She and Bea had been each other’s confidantes for so long, closer than sisters. These last five years of silence had gouged like a wound.

She wouldn’t think about Frederick.

The whistle gave one last, shrieking cry and the train jolted to a halt. “Nairobi!” someone shouted. “Nairobi!”

It seemed utterly impossible that she was here, that the train journey wasn’t going to go on and on, jolting and smoky, the sun teasing her eyes through the blinds.

“Nairobi!”

Jolted into action, Addie scooped up her overnight bag, scanning the room for stray possessions. Her hat still lay abandoned on the bed. She plonked it back down on her head, skewering it into place with a long steel pin. Here she was. No turning back now. Straightening her suit jacket, she took a deep breath and marched purposefully to the compartment door.

Wrenching it open, she squinted into the brightness. Her silly little hat was no use at all against the sun; she had a confused impression of light and dust, people bustling back and forth, unloading packages, greeting friends in half a dozen languages, calling out in Arabic, in English, in German, in French. Poised on the metal steps, Addie shaded her eyes against the sun, ineffectually searching for a familiar figure, anyone who might have been sent to greet her. Car horns beeped at rickshaws drawn by men in little more than loincloths, tires screeching, while the sound of horses’ hooves clattered over the excited chatter of the people at the station. In the hot sun, the smells seemed magnified, horse and engine oil and curry, from a stand by the side of the station.

Over the din, someone called her name. “Addie! Addie! Over here.”

Obediently she turned, searching. It was Bea’s voice, husky and lovely, with that hint of laughter even when she was at her most reserved, as though she had luscious secrets she was longing to tell.
A mouth made for eating strawberries,
one of her suitors had rhapsodized, lips always pursed around the promise of a smile.

“Bea?” Dust and sun made rainbows over her eyes. Dark men in pale robes, Europeans in khaki, women in pale frocks, all swerved and shifted like the images in a kaleidoscope, circling around one another on the crowded rail side.

A gloved hand thrust up out of the throng, waving madly. “Here!”

The crowd broke and Addie saw her. Time fell away. The noises and voices receded, a muted din in the background.

How could she have ever thought to have outdone Bea?

Two children hadn’t changed her. She was still tall and slim, her blond hair gleaming golden beneath the hat she held with one hand. It was a slanted affair that made Addie’s cloche seem both impractical and provincial. Bea’s dress was tan, but there was nothing the least drab or dowdy about it. It fit loosely on the top and clung tightly at the hips, outlined with a dropped belt of contrasting white and tan that matched the detail at sleeves and hem. It made Addie’s suit seem both fussy and cheap.

Addie felt a familiar wave of love and despair, joy at the joy on her cousin’s face, so beautiful, so unchanged—so unfairly beautiful, so unfairly unchanged. She knew it wasn’t fair to resent Bea for something that was so simply and effortlessly a part of her, but she did, even so. Just once … Just
once …

“Dearest!” Bea had never been one to shy from the grand scene. She swooped down with outstretched arms as Addie clambered clumsily down the metal stairs, stiff and awkward from a day and night in a steel box. “Welcome!”

Addie put out a hand to fend her off. “Don’t touch me—I’m a mess.”

“Nonsense,” Bea said, and embraced her anyway, not a social press of the cheek, but a full hug. For a moment, her arms pressed so hard that Addie could feel the bones through her dress. She was thinner, Bea, thinner than she had been in London. Her arms grasped Addie with wiry, frenetic strength. “I have missed you.”

Before Addie could reply, before she could say she had missed her, too, Bea had already released her and stepped back, poised and confident, every inch the debutante she had been.

Looking Addie up and down, she grimaced in a comical caricature of sympathy. “That dreadful train. What you need,” she said, with authority, “is a drink.”

Addie looked ruefully down at herself, at her carefully chosen traveling dress, soiled and sweat stained. So much for her grand entrance. So much for competing with Bea. She had lost before she’d begun. “What I need is a bath and my things.”

“We’ll get you both. And a drink.” Bea linked her arm through Addie’s in the old way, drawing her effortlessly through the crowd. “Travel is always ghastly, isn’t it? Those hideous little compartments and those nasty little people crowing about tea from the sides of the track.” Bea had always had a gift for mimickry. She did it unconsciously, twisting herself into a pose and just as quickly twisting out again.

“It wasn’t so ghastly,” said Addie, struggling to keep up. Her overnight bag was heavier than she had remembered, her shorter strides no match for Bea’s. She scrounged to remember some of David’s lectures. “I gather it’s much easier now that the railroad’s been put in.”

“Much,” said Bea absently. She smiled and waved at a man in a pale suit. “That,” she said out of the side of her mouth to Addie, “is General Grogan. He owns Torr’s Hotel. We don’t go there.”

“Oh?” Addie’s bag banged painfully against her knee. “Is it—?”

“Common,” said Bea dismissively. “Of course, you wouldn’t be staying there anyway, since you’ll be with us, but if we’re in town, it’s Muthaiga. Or the Norfolk.
Never
Torr’s.” She gave the unfortunate owner a broad smile that made him trip over his own feet.

“Right,” said Addie, although the names meant nothing to her. “Of course.”

She craned her neck to look behind, but the man was already gone, and Bea was imparting more wisdom, something about race meetings, and drinks parties, and this couple and that couple, and whose farm had failed and who was worth knowing.

“—don’t you remember, Euan Wallace’s first wife? You must have met them, surely?” Fortunately, Bea didn’t wait for an answer, plunging on, even as she plowed through the crowd. “She divorced him ages ago—or maybe he divorced her. It’s so hard to keep track. Joss is her new one, although not so new anymore. It’s been—seven years now? Eight?”

“Mmm,” said Addie, trying desperately to keep from panting too obviously. Sweat blurred her eyes, half-blinding her, but she couldn’t get to a handkerchief to wipe it off. She blundered determinedly on, trying to ignore the nasty sinking feeling deep in the pit of her stomach, the one that told her that this had been a terrible mistake.

Instead of being the worldly one, she was, instead, the neophyte, being introduced by Bea into the mysteries of her world, mysteries Addie would never perfectly understand, and which would, once again, render her dependent on Bea’s leadership and guidance.

In short, straight back to the same old pattern.

“How much farther?” she blurted out, breaking into Bea’s recitation.

“Not so very far,” said Bea, looking at her in surprise. “Oh, darling, you do look done in. It’s the heat, isn’t it? It does take people by surprise in the beginning.”

It hadn’t done anything to Bea; she looked perfectly cool and fresh. But, then, she wasn’t the one carrying a bag that seemed to have gotten considerably heavier over the past ten minutes. Nor had she spent the past twenty-four hours in a closed train car.

“Don’t worry, darling,” she said, “we’ll be at the car in a tick. Oh, look! There’s Alice de Janzé.” Bea waved languidly at a woman dressed as smartly as anything you would see in Paris. “American, married to a Frenchman. I can’t think what she’s doing in Nairobi. She’s usually off at Slains.”

The social catalog grated on Addie’s nerves. It was like being back in London, back in their deb year, Bea constantly surrounded by people, effortlessly making friends and friends of friends. What had happened to “we live quietly on our little farm”?

Addie asked breathlessly, “Where are your girls?”

Bea’s pace picked up. Addie had to practically run to keep up. “They’re at the farm. They’re happy there. Like Dodo with the stables. There’s no accounting, is there?”

Addie sensed the edge of an argument, one not to do with her. Unsure how to respond, she said, instead, “Dodo sends her love.”

Dodo was Bea’s older sister, the only one of the clan officially on speaking terms with her. With Dodo, though, it was hard to tell the difference between speakers and non-speakers; the only things she ever talked about were her beloved horses. She came down to town once a month, always to the Ritz, where her battered tweeds made an odd contrast to the other women’s tailored suits and Paris frocks. Perhaps that was the nicest thing about Dodo; she always was what she was.

“Pity she couldn’t send cash,” said Bea flippantly. “You have no idea what it costs to run a coffee farm, no idea at all. No crops for the first four years and then whatever the market will bear. It’s vile.”

“Is Frederick at the farm?” No need to worry about tone. Her voice came out in gusty pants.

Bea winced sympathetically and slowed down. “No, he’s with the car. He’d have come to meet you, but he was waylaid by D.”

“Dee?” Addie’s imagination conjured up a vamp with long, red fingernails.

“Lord Delamere. Frightful old bore.”

Addie laughed breathlessly. “Not one of the blessed?”

That was how they used to refer to people they liked, she and Bea, back in the nursery days, part of their own private code. It felt rusty and raw on her tongue.

Impulsively Bea turned and hugged her, nearly knocking her off her feet. A wave of expensive French perfume blotted out dust and sweat. “Oh, I
have
missed you! Are you hungry?”

Addie swayed and caught her balance again. She set her bag down with a thump. She was hungry, she realized, hungry and a little dizzy with the heat and sun.

“They fed us at Makindu.” There had been a British breakfast of eggs and porridge, looking oddly foreign in that setting, with strange, striped beasts grazing in the distance. Addie scrunched up her nose, trying to remember how long ago that had been. It felt like a different lifetime already. “But that must have been—oh, hours ago. Just about dawn.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll see you fed, once we get you out of that frightful frock.”

Addie tensed, instantly on the defensive. “What’s so frightful about it? Once it’s been washed and pressed…”

Bea looked her up and down with an expert eye. “Oh, my dear, no.”

Addie suddenly saw herself as Bea must see her, frowsy and wilted, in an off-the-peg dress that had lurched at fashion and missed. Bea had always been, and was, even now, effortlessly and glamorously fashionable. She could make a pair of men’s trousers look like a Worth gown. Addie had no doubt that on her that sad little traveling suit would look like Lanvin.

“Don’t worry,” she said, as one might to a child, and suddenly Addie was back at Ashford again, six and shy and unprepared, harkening unto the Gospel according to Bea. “We’ll find you something much better.” Her expression turned speculative. Her pale blue eyes glinted as she looked at Addie from under her lashes. “And, perhaps, a man?”

“I already have one of those,” Addie said tartly. She picked up her bag again, taking a firmer grip on the handle. “David Cecil. He’s a lecturer at University College. In Economics.”

“My dear,” Bea said. “How frightfully clever.”

“He is,” Addie said loyally, as though he hadn’t, over the course of the trip, become little more than a mirage in her imagination, David, whom she was supposed to love, and whom she might love, if only she could convince herself that the past was past.

Wasn’t that what David was always telling her? The world of her youth, with its house parties and servants, Lord This and Lady That—that world was gone. She had been in it but not of it, not really. It was David with whom she would build a life, share a flat, share a bed, grow old and grow roses—or whatever other plant it was among which they would gently potter, surrounded by children and grandchildren, all as clever as he.

“We’re to be engaged when I get back,” she said, and it came out more belligerently than she had intended.

“So you’re engaged to be engaged?” It did sound rather ridiculous when put that way. Bea smiled a crooked little smile. “Isn’t that funny. I had thought—well, never mind. Look. Here we are.”

“Here” appeared to be a monster of a car, a massive square thing that reminded Addie of the estate cars back at Ashford, designed for moving both men and game. There were two men standing by the side, deep in conversation, in which she could hear “elevation” and “fertilizer.” The one on the right was shortish, on the wrong side of middle age, with a face like an amiable turtle beneath a round hat with a wide brim.

The other man had his back to them, but Addie would have known him just the same. He had always been thin, too thin the last time she had seen him, but the casual clothes of the colony suited him; he looked rangy rather than lanky, the short sleeves of his shirt displaying skin that had acquired a healthy glow. Unlike his companion, he wore no hat. The sun had burned lighter streaks into his dark hair.

“Look who I’ve found!” called Bea, and he turned, his face breaking into a smile of welcome.

“Addie,” he said. “It is. It’s really Addie.”

He smiled, and Addie’s heart turned over with a sickening lurch, five years gone in five minutes.