The Flame Trees of Thika (12 page)

Presently he escorted Tilly to the injured man’s hut, and they returned, subdued and shaken, to say that he appeared at last to be dead.

‘It’s hard to tell for certain,’ Tilly said. ‘It’s so hot in there and one’s eyes water. We took a torch and I think…’

‘No doubt about it,’ Alec added, with an emphasis suggesting some uncertainty. ‘It’s a shame that you ladies should have been exposed to such a…well, it’s a horrid experience for anyone, but for Mrs Palmer…’

‘I backed out and left it all to Tilly,’ Lettice said truthfully.

‘And now, of course, to you, Mr Wilson; it is a great comfort to have your help and support.’

Alec blushed and looked like a small boy presented with a new bicycle. His role as a protective male, however, was short-lived, for Hereward and Robin soon returned. They had not caught the murderer, but had seen the chief.

‘There seems to have been a fight,’ Robin explained, ‘so probably it isn’t murder but manslaughter, and no one knows who was to blame. Anyway Kupanya says he’ll produce the culprit and then we can send him to the
D.C.
’

‘How will you know he is the culprit?’ Lettice inquired. ‘I suppose the chief could produce almost anyone, and say he was the man.’

‘That will be for the
D.C.
to unravel,’ Captain Palmer said. ‘Meanwhile, half my labour force has run away and I must get the fellow buried, and I’m told these Kikuyu won’t touch a corpse.’

This was true; but the contractor who was going to build the Palmers’ house had sent out half a dozen men of another tribe, who would not mix with the Kikuyu. They were large and very black and liked to work stark naked, and came from the Kavirondo Gulf on Lake Victoria, so they were called Kavirondo, although this was not the name of a tribe. They did not object to handling corpses – in fact, rather the reverse. When at length we reached home on our mules, Sammy observed:

‘Why does the bwana want to bury the dead man? They will only dig him up again.’

‘Who will?’ demanded Robin.

‘The Kavirondo.’

‘But why?’

‘To eat, of course. The Kavirondo much enjoy corpses.’

‘Then they are
shenzis
,’ Tilly said.
Shenzi
was another very useful word, meaning anything from savage to merely down-at-heel or untidy.

‘Yes, indeed, they are
shenzis
,’ Sammy agreed complacently.

‘The Kavirondo are like hyenas, not like men, not like Masai or Kikuyu.’

‘I wonder if I should warn Palmer,’ Robin remarked.

‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ advised Tilly.

We had a mule called Margaret, very tame and good-natured; she would come into the veranda and eat sugar out of Tilly’s hand. I was allowed to ride her, and sometimes Sammy would escort me on his bicycle along the twisting paths; I think he liked the pretext for a ride, and besides he was fond of children. That afternoon, I got permission to take Margaret out, and went to find Njombo, who had taken over the duties of a syce, to ask him to saddle her. But Njombo had vanished. When I found Sammy, he said: ‘Njombo will come back in a few days. Kupanya has sent for him.’

I felt an uneasy foreboding. ‘Is it because of the dead man?’

‘Perhaps,’ Sammy said vaguely.

‘Was it Njombo who killed him?’

‘Why should you ask that?’ replied Sammy. ‘Kimani – that is the dead man – was at bwana Palmer’s shamba, but Njombo works here.’

‘If you tell me, I will not say anything to my father.’

Sammy looked at me and smiled. He had a rather wolfish smile, but I trusted him.

‘These affairs are not for children.’

‘If Kupanya catches him, will Njombo be sent to the
D.C.
?’

‘Njombo will not go to the
D.C.
,’ Sammy said firmly.

‘Bwana Palmer will send him.’

‘It is nothing to do with bwana Palmer. Njombo’s father, who is dead, was Kupanya’s brother, children of the same belly. This
man Kimani, he was drunk, and insulted Njombo. There was trouble between them about a woman, and Njombo hit him with a panga. And no doubt some enemy of Njombo’s used medicine to make that fool Kimani die.’

‘But you said Njombo killed him with a panga.’

‘Njombo hit him, but not very hard; many people are struck with pangas and spears; if Njombo’s enemy had not used bad medicine, perhaps Kimani would have recovered. As it is, there will be heavy fines to pay; Njombo is poor, and so Kupanya will have to help him to find many goats.’

‘But Kupanya has promised to send the murderer to the
D.C.
,’ I said, feeling rather at sea.

‘Kupanya will find someone to send, and perhaps pay him some goats; there will not be any trouble,’ Sammy said.

It all seemed very much involved, and I was sorry Njombo had gone; I liked him, he was always cheerful and smiling, he had a merry eye, and he wore a neat little bead-edged leather cap, made from a sheeps stomach, with a rakish air.

‘Njombo is buying a wife,’ Sammy added, ‘and now all his goats will have to go to Kimani’s father, so he will not be able to pay for her.’

‘I hope he will come back,’ I said.

‘Yes, he will come back, for he will need rupees to buy goats to pay Kimani’s father. Kimani was a worthless man, but now he has died he will bring wealth to his father. ‘That seemed to be Kimani’s only epitaph.

I could not mourn Kimani, as I had not known him; but next morning the pigeon with the broken leg lay in its moss-lined box stiff and cold, its half-closed eyes not red at all, but dull brown. There had been so much life in its palpitating, downy chest, it had put its head on one side and pecked so keenly at its food, that I could not believe it would never fly again. I had felt certain it would recover, and the blow was bitter. Tilly found me in tears and suggested an honourable funeral, so I dug a grave and interred it underneath a young fig tree, and made a small cross.

The little duiker was a comfort, and let me stroke her warm body while she waggled a stumpy tail. But she would not allow me to touch her black velvet muzzle, which was soft as shammy-leather. She had thick, stiff hair with a faint tinge of blue about
it, and a line down the middle of her back. Sometimes she twitched her ears and lifted her muzzle and I knew that she was testing the air for the least suspicion of a whiff of other duikers, for news from home, as it were, and that if such news came, she would feel restless and perhaps disappear. We called her Twinkle. When she came, her legs had been like long, thin twigs and her eyes enormous; gradually the rest of her body grew to match their scale, and she attained a great deal of self-possession. She walked about freely, and came into the house, and nibbled titbits from my hand.

The houseboys grew used to her; although the Kikuyu killed duikers and other buck whenever they could, because of damage done to their shambas, they did not eat the flesh of wild animals, so Twinkle was safe with them. But Juma warned me against the Kavirondos. ‘They will eat her if they see her,’ he said. ‘They will eat anything, even hyenas.’ This was untrue, but they would certainly have eaten Twinkle. Although we had no Kavirondos on the place, the Palmers’ cannibals were not far away.

A few days later a
toto
arrived with a wicker basket and a chit for Tilly. Inside the basket, on a bed of leaves, sat two green chameleons, a present to me from Lettice. ‘I hope they are a he and a she, but no one seems able to tell,’ she wrote. ‘At any rate they appear to be friends.’ Tilly and Robin thought of various fancy names for them but in the end we called them George and Mary, because Robin thought their crests looked like crowns, and they had the dignified, deliberate movements proper to royalty.

If I put them on a tartan rug, Robin told me, they would explode. I believed him, and refused to try the experiment. Their repertoire of colour was not very wide, but they could change from green-all-over to a patchy greenish-brown with touches of yellow (suitable for bark) in about twenty minutes. It was fascinating to watch the lightning dart of their long, forked tongues – as long as their whole bodies – which would nick a fly off a leaf too swiftly for the eye to follow. They were just like miniature dragons. When they had gulped a fly whole, their expression of complacent self-satisfaction seemed to intensify and they sat completely motionless. Robin said they looked like aldermen at a city banquet who had eaten themselves into a
Stupor. But their expression was not stupefied: it was watchful, calm, and impassive.

We built a large cage of wire netting around a shrub, where they could lead a natural life. To begin with I caught flies for them, but they ignored my offerings. They were independent creatures, and waved their legs as if they were cycling when I picked them up, wriggling desperately; yet they were not frightened of me and never tried to run away. One day I proffered a chameleon to Njombo who shrank back with an expression of extreme distaste.

‘They are bad things,’ he said, and refused to tell me why. His aversion was odd, since chameleons did nothing but good, and had no bite or sting. But Alec Wilson came across an explanation in one of his instructive manuals or periodicals that contained some native legends. The chameleon, apparently, had been entrusted by God with an important message for the first man, who was living somewhere near Mount Kenya. ‘You must take this message and not linger by the wayside,’ it was told. ‘You must deliver it before the moon wanes.’

The chameleon started off in fine fettle but soon forgot the purpose of its journey. Various adventures befell it which I forget, and which in any case probably changed with the teller; it visited the underworld, and met some unpleasant ogres. At any rate by the time it recollected its mission, resumed its journey, and eventually arrived, the time limit had expired.

‘Now look what you have done,’ God thundered. ‘The message you carried was to reprieve the moon from its monthly extinction, and man from death. Now it is too late. Henceforth the moon must disappear each month and every man and woman must die, and all because you did not obey my instructions.’ So ever since the poor chameleon, who could have saved mankind, had been shunned. In a sense that protected it, for shunned things were not molested. No one, for instance, would have dreamt of harming a hyena, or even a vulture.

I discovered gradually that a legend existed to fit every bird and beast, but the Kikuyu very seldom told them to Europeans; they were for women and old men to repeat to children in the smoky, firelit evenings. When my pigeon died, and Sammy found me mourning by its grave, he told me a story I often
recalled when I heard these birds cooing on three notes which the Kikuyu imitated in their name for dove: Da-toooo-ra, the second syllables oft, liquid, and very drawn-out.

There was a girl, Sammy said, called Wanjiru, who lived by a river, and her mother beat her so severely as to break her back. When her bones were scattered on the grass, the doves picked them up in their beaks and decided to put Wanjiru together again. So they joined her bones with links of the fine chains made by Kikuyu smiths and worn by Kikuyu people, and hid her in a cave.

Along came some girls to draw water. Each helped the other to lift a full gourd on to her friend’s back: but no one would help the smallest girl, who was Wanjiru’s sister, because she was disgraced by her mother’s cruel behaviour. So she sat down by the stream and cried. Wanjiru heard, and emerged from her cave to lift the gourd into position on her sister’s back; but she warned the girl to keep the secret of her hiding-place.

After a while, the secret leaked out. Wanjiru’s parents hid in the grass and, when she emerged from her cave to help her sister, they sprang out, captured her, and took her home. But the doves were having none of this. They flew into the hut and demanded from Wanjiru’s mother all the chains she wore as ornaments. When she refused, they pulled out all the links that held Wanjiru’s bones together. So she fell apart, and her mother put the bones back in the cave. But the story ended happily. For a second time the clever doves re-assembled Wanjiru and she lived in the cave, obedient now to their instructions never again to help her family.

W
HEN
the New Year came round, most of the farmers went to Nairobi to the races. Tilly and Robin stayed at home their first year, but next time the Palmers persuaded them to go, and I was sent to Mrs Nimmo’s.

Mrs Nimmo was kind, but too motherly. Tilly was so taken
up with the daily business of living that she had little time, and perhaps even less inclination, for a broody hen approach to parenthood. Life was there for me to take part in, and always offered plenty to do, but things were not invented for me, I was not labelled as a child to be handled with care and given special treatment. Mrs Nimmo, being so far childless – the prolonged absences of Mr Nimmo perhaps did not give her much encouragement – was inclined to lavish her maternal love on me. This I found embarrassing, though not without its compensations, for I was given things to eat that I enjoyed and made to feel important. On the other hand she disapproved of the amount of time I spent pottering about on my own or talking to the Kikuyu, and tried to curtail my liberty.

Mrs Nimmo was a large, strong, often flurried woman who gave the impression that she was about to overflow. She was not exactly fat, but generous in build, and compounded of a strange mixture of indolence and energy. Sometimes she would wear her hair in curling-pins half the morning and slop about in bedroom slippers, yet she was extremely fussy about the neatness of her living-room, the way meals were served, and such matters (often overlooked in our household) as cleaning one’s boots before entering the room.

In some ways she was in advance of her time. Kitchens, for instance, were generally regarded rather like a witch’s lair, to be left strictly alone. They were small, smoke-blackened places filled by a wood-burning range (generally bought second-hand) and a great many people who always clustered there, relatives of the cook’s perhaps, or just passers-by. The cooking was performed in large black pots that were never scoured, like French stock-pots. Everything was encrusted with a black deposit of wood-smoke, the window was blocked up by old sacks to prevent the least whiff of fresh air, it was much too dark to see and the intrepid white explorer stumbled over
totos
crouching in corners, took alarm at peculiar smells, and emerged with smarting eyes and choking lungs into welcome daylight. From this black and overcrowded hole emerged food which was always hot, apparently nourishing, and, if the cook was given half a chance, often appetizing as well. No good came of hankering after hygiene, and no cook would stay for long if his employer nagged him about it.
This arrangement suited Tilly, who had not been taught to cook and preferred the work of farm and garden. So she put the matter out of her mind, and left the kitchen to Juma.