The Flame Trees of Thika (39 page)

‘One would have thought so, but I’m afraid their characters are all the same; once they get among the trumpets, they are bound to say Ha-ha…. Hereward expects to get a passage any time now, and I shall follow by the next ship I can get on to.’

They fell silent, with an unspoken question lying heavily between them. Lettice had taken up her tapestry work, but she was only fiddling with it. She sat on a low stool of plaited thongs before the open fireplace, her head, with its chestnut hair loosely gathered up, bent over the neglected work, and Tilly was on the deep velvet sofa, frowning a little over her thoughts, which might have been of Lettice and her troubles, or of the pigeons and theirs, or of Robin, or of some new notion that was coming to birth. When she spoke to break the silence it was a matter on the outskirts of her mind.

‘I met that girl Dick Montagu married for the money she turned out not to have. She’s trying to escape, but he won’t let
her; people say because he still thinks she’ll get the money, but I think he’s fallen in love with her in his peculiar way.’

‘It must be rather like having a hippopotamus in love with one, or a gorilla.’

‘Matron gave her a job as a sort of bottle-washer and Dick came storming up in a black rage to carry her off. She locked herself in one of the empty private wards. Dick mounted guard and spent the night lying outside the door wrapped in a blanket. It was a great sensation. In the morning Matron had to call the military police to take him away.’

Their laughter slackened the tension a little, and Lettice was able to say:

‘I saw Ian in Nairobi.’

‘Yes…. May I try one of your cigarettes?’ I had never seen Tilly smoke before. She puffed experimentally, blowing out the smoke in little jets.

‘You know he took up some land at the back of beyond, near a mountain. He said it had caves full of bats, and wonderful butterflies. His nearest neighbour brought a house out from England in bits, carried for the last hundred miles or so by porters, and kept a cheetah chained to his veranda.’

‘I suppose this rotten war…’

‘Ian is chasing Germans on the border, if they’re not chasing him, and Hereward’s heart is absolutely set on becoming a hero…. Oh, Tilly, what am I to do?’

Lettice had jumped to her feet and was prowling round the room, changing the position of an arum lily in a vase, patting out a cushion, winding up a little leather-coated clock on her writing table. Tilly frowned at her cigarette, which had made her eyes water, as if it were the cause of all these complexities.

‘You know what I think,’ she observed.

‘Yes, and of course you were right then; everything was settled, and it only remained to face up to Hereward. But now…. He would pay us out, I know, poor Hereward; his life is nothing to him, or at least it comes low down on the list of things he considers important. So he would think nothing of discarding it, and we should have it with us for the rest of our lives, whenever we opened a cupboard we should see its skeleton quietly standing there at attention. And Ian…’

‘Yes, Ian! Hereward will be in his element, he’ll be a General covered with tabs, you’ll see. Surely it’s Ian who needs to be considered….’

‘I consider little else. At home we used to keep bees; a billy goat got loose once and tipped over several hives; the bees were in a state of absolute hysteria, their whole routine gone west, they flew in all directions buzzing hopelessly, with no one to tell them what to do. And now that billy goat of a Kaiser…. Tilly, if I go home, will you look after Puffball and Zena?’

‘Of course I will; but I suppose I shall have to go too, if Robin manages to get himself recalled.’

‘I don’t suppose Maggy Nimmo will go, but she’d feed them on porridge and oatcake which would make them much too fat, and sooner or later Mr Nimmo would turn up with that dreadful bull-terrier, who’d gobble them up in two mouthfuls. Oh, dear,
everything
is difficult….’

‘Come and see my pigeons,’ Tilly suggested. ‘Do you know when the mating season occurs? They don’t seem to take the slightest interest in each other.’

‘It would save a lot of trouble if we were the same, and only took an interest in each other at certain times of year. Then we could prepare for it, and if we had husbands like Dick Montagu they could keep us under lock and key.’

‘There doesn’t seem to be any way of telling with pigeons. Or perhaps they are shy.’

We rode back next morning with the pigeons, and a few days later Robin came home on leave, bringing me a present of a pair of German field-glasses, and a lot of news about the war, which was not going very well. However, the Mounted Rifles were patrolling the border and hoped to meet the Germans in a fair fight at any moment, and of course to win a victory. So far the enemy had avoided open battle in a typically Teutonic way; the bush was exceedingly thick, and more trouble had been caused by rhinos than by Germans; hyenas were so bold that, at night, the men made pillows of their saddles, and even then sometimes the leather was chewed. Malaria was the worst enemy. A secret force was said to be coming by sea from India to land on the German flank, and that would turn the balance, Robin believed.

‘After that I shall be able to get home without any trouble,
except that all the ships are full. There’s a rumour that my battalion has gone to France already. It’s maddening to be stuck out here.’

It was indeed a surprise to find Robin, in his new martial spirit, no longer really interested in the still. He rode off to the station again in a few days, promising to send me a button from a German uniform.

I cannot remember how long it was after Robin’s leave that I was down in the coffee nursery one evening, engaged in the construction of a little furrow to irrigate some orange pips I had planted, when Alec Wilson appeared, looking for Tilly. A couple of shamba-boys were repairing the banana-leaf thatch over beds of young coffee trees, and we could hear shouts and laughter from women washing their babies in the python pool. The shadows had fallen already on the river, all was peaceful and serene.

Alec looked dusty and smelt of pony, so I knew he had just returned from Nairobi. He nearly always went on horseback rather than by train, because it was cheaper. He asked me what I was doing.

‘I’m going to have an orange shamba of my own.’

‘Splendid. When it’s grown, you shall sit in the orange grove at dusk with humming-birds flying round your head, playing love-songs on a dulcimer, and I will come and lie at your feet and stroke the spotted fawns.’

‘I haven’t got a dulcimer,’ I objected.

‘I’ll buy you one next time I go to Nairobi. And now I must find Tilly to tell her my news.’

‘Is the war over?’ I asked.

‘No. Less so than ever, in fact.’

‘Have the Germans run away?’

‘No, they have fought a battle near a hill called Longido, and won it, I’m afraid. Now I should forget about it, and go on with your shamba.’

I took his advice, but somehow I had lost interest in the oranges. I made a little mound to represent Longido, and stuck some twigs and leaves in it, and some stones to indicate soldiers. The ants that were crawling about made themselves into rhinos, lions, and zebras.

One of the shamba-boys came up, adjusting his red blanket, and said:

‘What is that you have made on the ground?’

‘That is a hill with Germans on it.’

‘Germani? Eee, they are bad men.’

‘I am going to drown them with this water.’

‘Good. But if you drown them, you will also drown their cattle and horses. It would be better to shoot them. Haven’t you any gun?’

‘Yes, but they have run out of cartridges.’

‘In that case you must take your sword and rush upon them and slit their stomachs, and then they will all die like this.’

He lifted a bare foot and stamped on the mound, twisting his foot so that it was flattened and scattered.

‘There, you see,’ he said, ‘Now there are no Germani. That is the way.’ He picked up his club, tucked it into a belt round his bare middle, shook out his blanket, and set off up the hill, his day’s work over, the enemy obliterated. It seemed a satisfactory conclusion, also, to me, and I clambered up to the house.

I found Tilly on the veranda, with Alec, having a late cup of tea. They both looked gloomy, and Tilly’s eyes were red.

‘Run along now and play with something,’ she said.

‘With what?’

‘Oh, never mind. Why don’t you sit down and read a book?’

I went inside and looked at an atlas lying on the table, but I could hear them talking on the veranda.

‘It would be best for you to tell her,’ Alec said.

‘Yes, I shall have to; but it’s late now to go over tonight.’

‘She will have the rest of her life to think about it, so you will do no harm by waiting till the morning.’

‘If it had been anyone else…’ Tilly’s voice was hoarse and muffled. After a pause Alec said:

‘Those fools of doctors threw me out. They’re idiots, I’m as sound as a bell. I shall have another shot, but meanwhile…Good night, Tilly, try not to fret. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…’

Like the bees, our routine was upset. This was the time of our evening ride; instead, Tilly settle down on the veranda to do accounts. Then she laid them aside and returned to a scheme
she was working out to supply fresh vegetables for the troops. It proved so successful on paper that she cheered up a little; when the present stung her, she sought her antidote in the future, which was as sure to hold achievement as the dying flower to hold the fruit when its petals wither.

But she was sombre and the evening sad, and I went to look for George and Mary and for Mohammed, who was kept from roaming by a long string tied to a hole in his shell. George was clinging to a twig, wearing his usual expression of immense self-satisfaction, like a politician (Robin had said) seeing his name in the Honours List – but it may have been Mary; although I pretended to know them apart, I could only guess.

I knew that someone was dead. People often died, animals and people; I had seen a dead body once, lying in the grass by the side of the road; a cloud of flies had risen from it, the ponies had shied, I had been hustled past it, and past the stench of putrefaction. It did not make any great impression. But none of that could be connected with Lettice, or with anyone I knew.

When I sat over my supper, and the lamps had been brought in, I asked Tilly if anything was wrong with Lettice.

‘Nothing, so far as I know.’

‘Are you going to see her tomorrow?’

‘Probably.’

‘Can I come too?’

‘No, you have been neglecting your lessons; you must learn some French verbs.’

‘We should have lost Mohammed, if it hadn’t been for the string; do you know, he dug himself a hole under the Cape gooseberries. Will Ian come back soon?’

‘You must eat up the white as well as the yolk, it contains albumen, which is good for you…. No, Ian – well, if you must know, he has been killed. Now don’t ask any more questions, and I’ll read to you for twenty minutes before you go to bed.’

This was a great treat – we were reading
Robbery Under Arms
at the time – and so I did not think any more then about Ian, but when I was in bed I remembered how I had seen him on the station platform, and how his hair had shone in the lamplight like a golden sovereign, and the bracelet he had given me made from a lion’s tail. I had it wrapped in tissue paper and tucked
safely into my scrapbook, too valuable to wear. It was hard to imagine a dead Ian, lying limply in the grass with blood on his face and flies buzzing over him, so hard in fact that I gave it up and thought of him as I had seen him when we had found the whydah birds dancing, and when he had lain under the fig-tree talking to Lettice, and when they had sung together after the piano had arrived. I had not seen Ian many times, but each time had been like a special treat, even though nothing unusual had happened; when he had been there it had seemed as if the sun had been shining, and I thought that he would never altogether disappear from my mind.

Even when I went to sleep I dreamed about him; we were riding across a great plain to reach Lettice, and in the distance Germans moved about like grey lice; he had no rifle, but if only Dirk would come with the carbine, we should be safe. Dirk would not come, and then Ian was sailing boats on the furrow with Kate Crawfurd and Bay, and she told him that she had a flock of butterflies which carried messages. Even here, a danger threatened Ian; it grew closer and more ominous, something terrible and final that none of us could see. Ian only smiled and said that he must wait for Lettice, and then the sky turned dark, and a gigantic eagle spread its black wings overhead. We ran away, but Ian took a bow from the Dorobo and fired an arrow, and the eagle gave a screech; just as it fell upon us, Ian changed into a bushbuck and bounded away. I woke up struggling to escape from the enveloping eagle, which resolved itself into a blanket swathed round my head.

My dreams were always jumbled, and next morning I could remember only bits of this one, but the eagle stayed in my mind for some time. The Kikuyu believed that when a man died, his spirit could enter an animal, and it seemed quite likely that the spirit of Ian, who was so much a part of the wild and silent places, would choose a forest creature like a bushbuck for a habitation. As for his body, I knew it would be eaten by maggots and hyenas; but if in time its remnants turned to dust, as the funeral service said, his dust, I thought, would not be quite the same as other people’s, but would shine like those little specks of brightness that sometimes glitter in the sand.

T
HE
life of the farm continued as usual on the surface, but underneath there was a feeling of suspense and uncertainty. Our time at Thika was running out and everyone knew it, even though no word had been said.

Tilly was waiting for news of Robin, of the war, of our departure; and when news did come, it was never good. She hated, as she said, marking time, but could not forward march towards some major project like the vegetable scheme. Hearing of a meat shortage in Nairobi, she bought a dozen native ewes and wrote up-country for a pure-bred ram to make a good mutton cross. The ram duly arrived in an ox-cart, took one look at his scruffy little brown brides, and fled into the coffee plantation, pursued by the entire labour force waving sticks and uttering cries. Before he was recaptured a number of coffee trees had been damaged, and could not be replanted until the next rains.