The Flame Trees of Thika (41 page)

A painful moment came when Lucifer and his companion, Dorcas the chestnut mare, went away to join the war. They were to become remounts, mere units of transport in the hands of people who cared nothing for them, and we knew that we should never see them again. Moyale was spared. He was too fat and spoilt, and Tilly convinced herself that he would be useless to the war. Alec was to have him, and of course he could have had no better home.

Lucifer and Dorcas went off unsuspecting to be put into the train, and while this happened I took Moyale for a farewell ride in the reserve.

It was, as I remember, a cloudy day, with a sky of storms, low and threatening. Yet the sun threw long, triumphant shafts down the ridges to make huts and trees and goats look hard and solid, as if carved from wood, like objects in a toy farmyard. The green of the new grass was so intense and fierce that every hillside seemed afire with an emerald flame, rising to meet a sky of glutinous indigo. Moyale’s progress was dignified; nothing would hurry him. We made our way up to Kupanya’s to say
good-bye. The chief emerged to greet me in a cloak fashioned, I was distressed to see, of many duiker skins, and with elaborate bead ornaments hanging from his ears.

‘Have no fear, we will look after your father’s shamba until all the Germans are killed,’ he said. ‘I will look after it myself and see that no harm is done by strangers and wild animals.’

‘When we return, will you still be here?’

‘How should I not be here? I am too old to be taken for an askari. The Government has trusted me to look after the people, and to send them warriors.’

The war had, indeed, enhanced the chief’s powers and importance, not to mention his wealth, for it was understood that if a young man wished to avoid recruitment, and gave Kupanya a goat, or possibly two goats, he would not be sent to Fort Hall. And while a good fight with loot to crown it would have pleased the warriors, news had already got round that the young men, far from being given spears, much less rifles, and a prospect of booty, were expected to carry grievous loads in foreign countries and to eat poor food; as this was the work of women, not only uncongenial but insulting, no young man was going to volunteer to undertake it.

‘The ponies have gone,’ I said, ‘except Moyale, who will stay with bwana dung-beetle.’

‘Good. When we see this white pony, we shall say: here is the
toto
of bwana bad hat, she will have this pony in her head as a man herds his cattle there, so we will think of you when we see him. Eee-ee-ee, but he is fat, and shiny, and strong; Njombo will feed him, when you return he will be as big and strong as a buffalo.’

Several of Kupanya’s wives, of whom he had by now at least a dozen, came up to wish me well. Coils of copper wire glinted on their seal-sleek skins, their loaded ear-lobes dangled on to mahogany shoulders. One of the wives, with wide cheek-bones, eyes like a moth’s, and an air of wisdom and sadness, spoke to me in Kikuyu and put into my hand a necklace of blue and white beads.

‘These you must take to Europe and wear for us,’ Kupanya explained. ‘These beads will be like our people, the blue ones are men, the white ones are women, and the children are the
spaces in between, and the thread is the river that runs past your father’s shamba. If you wear it always, you will come back safely to greet us again.’

I thanked him, and looked for something to give in return, but my pockets yielded only a crumpled handkerchief, a knife, a few beans, and bits of string. I thought perhaps the knife would do and offered it to Kupanya, but he shook his head.

‘The traveller does not give a present to those who stay, it is those who remain who give presents to the traveller to help him on his journey, and bring about his safe return.’

The women crowded round and several of them gave me presents also – a lump of dough wrapped in a leaf, an iron bangle, a roasted maize-cob, a dried gourd, a small
kiondo
(a woven bag used for carrying grain). It was difficult to manage these things on a pony, but I stowed them away in pockets, or tied them to the saddle, and rode away rather like the White Knight, festooned with objects whose use it would have been hard to define.

The day of our departure rushed towards us. Alec came over to fetch the tortoise, the chameleons, Bancroft the spaniel, and Moyale; he had become a universal dumping-ground.

‘A tortoise lives a hundred years, they say,’ he remarked, ‘so with any luck Mohammed should be here to welcome your return; and George and Mary are planning a surprise already, there will be a row of little chameleons lined up on a branch to greet you, and nothing much will change while you are away.’

The Kikuyu on the farm decided to hold a dance to celebrate our departure and bring destruction on the Germans, they said; in Tilly’s opinion it was merely an excuse to extract from her a fat ram. Grudgingly, she agreed to provide one; and then on impulse decided that the flock of mutton ewes must go, Alec would not have time to bother with them, so she gave the two biggest to the dancers and the rest to Sammy, whose delight was scarcely to be expressed in words. Sammy was getting richer and richer, he had a bicycle, a wrist-watch, three wives, and, in his own country, an ever-growing herd of cows; now we were going away and he was sorry, because something was ending, but glad, because the chances both to enrich himself, and to exert his superiority over the Kikuyu, would now become incalculable.
With a charming speech about remembrance, he gave me a present of a Masai spear, the light kind used for daily herding, not the big long-bladed weapon of war, which he said would be too heavy to carry.

An immense amount of beer was brewed for the dance; big fat gourds bubbled for days in the huts by the fire that was never allowed to go out, night and day, from its lighting in the newly-built home, when the timbers were white and fresh, until the home’s abandonment, when the rafters were encrusted with thick, black deposits of smoke. The young men came in full fig with white feathers in their hair, wooden rattles on their ankles, and patterns in chalk and red ochre all over their faces and their naked, glistening skins. The young women greased themselves from head to foot and put on all the ear-ornaments and wire coils they could muster, and their best leather aprons with beads sewn into the seams. They looked gay and festive, but not as decorative as the men.

Camp-chairs were set for us to watch the dancing and feasting. Sammy stood beside us wearing an expression tinged with contempt for the caperings of such monkeys; had this been a Masai dance, his look implied what nobility, what strength, what splendour we should have witnessed! At the war-cry of the lion-maned warriors, all this Kikuyu trash would scatter like a flock of weaver-birds when the axe is laid to their tree. However, Sammy’s manner suggested, the Europeans had elected to tolerate these people, and children must be expected to play, so he would do his best to conceal his feelings.

Andrew the cook did not watch the dance. He was offended with Tilly. When he had told her that he was going with her to Europe – this seemed to him a natural and, indeed, inevitable consequence of his attachment to her service – she had been obliged to refuse. Europe, she had told him, was distant and cold, but he had not minded that; would she not need a cook just as much in Europe as in Africa?

‘There are other cooks in Europe,’ she had said.

‘But
I
am your cook.’

‘The houses are different, the food, the customs…. Besides, where would you sleep?’

‘Are there not kitchens in Europe?’

It was very difficult. Tilly had been compelled to say: ‘I have no house in Europe. Truly, you cannot come.’

Andrew had picked up a clod of earth – they were standing in the garden – and dashed it to the ground.

‘That is how you treat me. Because I am black.’

Tilly was distressed, Andrew pierced to the core of his spirit, but no one could put matters right. So Andrew did not come to the dance. Once launched on its career it would have continued, had it been allowed to, all night and all next day as well. The feet and limbs of the Kikuyu, unlike mine or Tilly’s, never seemed to tire.

When we awoke next morning it was grey and drizzly and the world appeared to share our sadness. The clanger sounded promptly at half past six, but the labour force was not responsive. People drifted in with downcast eyes, walking slowly, their stomachs queasy and their heads like drums full of heavy stones. Sammy stood by the store directing them with a quiet hauteur, speaking with patience even when they were particularly dense. Already he felt the potion of authority working in his blood and brain.

‘Alec is going to have a packet of trouble,’ Tilly said, observing this as she gave Sammy her last instructions. There was no time to worry now. Everything was packed, and loaded into the mule-cart. I had said good-bye to Moyale and Njombo and to many others; I could not believe that in a few moments the house, the garden, the farm, and everything in it would be out of sight and gone, as if on another planet; or that it was beyond my power, beyond anyone’s, to freeze it, to catch it in a groove like an old gramophone record and keep repeating the same few minutes over and over, forever.

‘Kiss each of the four walls of the living-room,’ Tilly said, ‘and you will come back for sure.’ I did so, and fingered Kupanya’s bead necklace with the men, women, and children in it, and felt better. This was only an interlude, like going to Molo, and everything would still be here to greet us when we returned after the war.

W
E
went to Nairobi in the train, and then in a procession of three rickshaws from the station to the crowded hotel. The Norfolk was a great place for running into people; sooner or later, it was said, every up-country European climbed the steps. of its veranda, or passed in front of it along the dusty avenue of gum-trees planted by John Ainsworth, the sub-Commissioner who had helped to lay out the town, towards the bridge called after him just out of sight down the road.

Tilly met many acquaintances, including Dick Montagu, who was standing everyone drinks and recounting, in his booming voice, his adventures while leading a patrol into German territory and wiping out a dangerous enemy post. But Randall Swift, whom we also encountered on his way to Europe, had a different story; according to his version, Dick Montagu had advanced upon a German mission, found the missionary at breakfast, shot him through the window, and walked in to finish up his bacon and eggs.

We saw Humphrey Crawfurd, which was unexpected, and he looked older, and tired, and somehow dispirited, like a bird that is fished out of a tank. Perhaps he had run out of money to make water-furrows, and of course the death of Ian would have been a hard blow.

‘Is Kate with you?’ Tilly inquired.

A strange look came over Humphrey Crawfurd’s face, like the despairing look of a cornered animal. He turned his head away and mumbled a sentence impossible to hear, and then looked back at Tilly in a puzzled way and said:

‘You haven’t heard. You see, Kate…Kate…’

That seemed to be all. He ducked his head and walked away, looking at the ground.

We stood there in confusion; Tilly frowned. ‘Perhaps it is the baby,’ she said. ‘Perhaps Kate has lost it. She ought to have come to Nairobi, instead of staying up there on the farm.’

I imagined a baby lost in the forest; perhaps Kate had put it down and it had crawled into a hole and gone to sleep and Kate had searched everywhere, calling vainly. I was sorry for Humphrey, who looked as if his spirit had been crushed by a python and lay inside him limp and shrunken, instead of filling his body as the sap fills a tree.

That night I could not get off to sleep because of the excitement of our coming journey, and the heat, and mosquitoes which pinged outside my net with a malignant obsession to find a chink. No sound concentrates so much spitefulness and malice into a very small volume as the pinging of mosquitoes, as if needles tipped with poison were vibrating in a persistent tattoo. Sometimes, from the Norfolk, you could hear lions grunting on the nearby plains, but that night they were still.

After a while Tilly came in. She turned up the safari lamp so that I could just see her sitting on the other bed, a dark shape against the soft, folded whiteness of the mosquito net which hung above her like ectoplasm in a spirit photograph. I asked sleepily:

‘Has the baby been found?’

‘What baby?’

‘Mrs Crawfurd’s.’

Tilly paused for so long before replying that I thought she had forgotten my question. But at last she said: ‘The baby’s all right. It is Kate who is lost. If you see Mr Crawfurd, you mustn’t mention her. He is half off his head.’

I was muzzy with sleep, and could not understand how Kate had got lost. She had never walked far, or wandered off alone. Perhaps the Dorobo had led her in search of something in the forest, and then deserted her.

‘She needed a doctor,’ Tilly added, ‘and if he had got there in time, she might have been saved. If only she had gone to Nairobi, as Humphrey wanted her to….’

If I had been there, I would have saddled the pony and galloped so fast to Nakuru that he would have fallen dead at the doctor’s feet, his nostrils flecked with bloody foam, like the horse that brought the good news from Ghent to Aix; the doctor would have galloped through the night and reached Kate Crawfurd in the nick of time.

‘It wasn’t the doctor’s fault,’ Tilly added. ‘He came as soon as he got the message. But the boy they sent with it spent four hours up a tree to escape a wounded buffalo.’

The marks of its horns were on the tree-trunk, Tilly said, to confirm his story. And he had seen a half-healed wound on the buffalo’s shoulder, suppurating and fly devoured. So no one could blame the messenger, or even the buffalo.

‘It was that Dutchman – that young brute who stole their pony and was always blazing off with his gun. He wounded the beast and let it get away. And then it did for Kate. I’d like to do for him….’

‘It wasn’t Dirk’s fault,’ I said. I remembered that wounded buffalo, and how Dirk had tracked it nearly all day, even with his stiff leg. It was the Dorobo who had found the buffalo, and I who had found the Dorobo, and it struck me suddenly that I was to blame for this disaster, in a roundabout way. If I had never told Dirk about the Dorobo, he would never have wounded the buffalo; and if I had not stood that morning in the forest looking at the dikdik and the butterflies, and wanted to get tobacco for the Dorobo, none of this would have come about. This sudden glimpse of a pattern of events in which one had a part without knowing it, in which some force beyond all comprehension moved one about like a counter on a board, was very frightening, and I lay still without saying anything more, and thinking that the deepest magic of the Kikuyu would be needed to keep one out of reach of these malignant powers that controlled a sequence starting with butterflies in a forest glade and ending with the death of Kate Crawfurd.