Authors: Fiona Shaw
A ship found them drifting, and when they took her off the lifeboat, they said all she asked for, again and again, was a clean dress. They thought it funny, and a product of her delirium. Her skin was burned from the sun, she was feverish with sun-stroke,
she had lost nearly two stone in weight and what she longed for, the only thing, was a clean dress. This the men approved of. This was a mark of her will to live and when the captain of the rescue ship gave her away less than a week later, in a clean and borrowed frock, he told her that a young woman like her, with such a spirit, deserved this marriage and he was sure her father would be proud when he knew.
She remembered just a single figure standing when the ship came into port. Just a single, solitary figure waiting patiently, an act of faith in the midst of so much bad faith. It was like a scene from a novel and ever after it stayed this way in her mind, though later she thought her memory had surely played tricks, because there must have been a horde of people swarming about the quayside, not just the single one. He stood still and held a small box in his hand, though till she was nearly up to him, it looked like his fist clenched. And when he saw her, a little figure decked out in a pair of sailor’s ducks, he just raised his arm, as though he had expected her to arrive like this. And before he greeted her, he held the box out on the palm of his hand, ceremonious, and flipped it open so that the ring caught the sun, making a hard line of light.
‘But what nearly happened to the ring?’ Meg said. She wanted to hurry through this part of the tale this morning, but Will was a stickler and she’d given her word.
‘It slipped off,’ Will said, ‘cos it was so loose, only Daddy saw it slip and he picked it up.’
It had been so loose on her finger, she feared it would drop and be lost in the dust; so she wore it on a chain around her
neck for a month, trying it on each day for size, till gradually, as her weight and her figure returned, she grew into it again.
‘We were so long in the little boat that we nearly ran out of food,’ Meg said.
‘And water. Tell about the water, and the funny man who drank the sea, and the kind one with the hurt head who said he’d walk you home.’
She looked at Will, his eager face. The man was called Jim, but she never said his name aloud when she told the story. So to Will he was simply the man with the hurt head. He’d eaten every last bit of toast, but she couldn’t tell any more.
‘Enough,’ she said. ‘Maybe later,’ and she rang the bell. ‘Please tell Sita that we’ll start Henry on some ground rice,’ she said when Yusuf came in.
‘That’s only baby food,’ Will said.
‘And Henry is only a baby. But he’ll be eating his breakfast faster than you very quickly, and then who will get more stories?’
She pulled Will’s chair out from the table and tipped it forward so that he slid, giggling, to the floor.
‘Can’t you even sit on a chair yet?’ she said, giving him her hands and jumping him to his feet. ‘I am going to look at my diary now and you are going with Yusuf to find Sita and get dressed.’
‘Don’t want to get dressed,’ Will said, crossing his arms in defiance.
She couldn’t resist a last touch, putting her hands around his middle, slipping them under his pyjama jacket to feel his warm skin.
‘Go on,’ she said, pushing him gently, and he went, only just remembering to throw his mother a sulky look as he left the room.
Although the house was still cool, outside the sun shone with the ferocity Meg knew now to come before the rains. Everything was coloured in ochres – reds and oranges and browns – everything drawn in, sucked dry, waiting for the rains to start.
Meg sat on at the table, the diary open. Like all the rooms in the house, the dining room still felt like someone else’s: the ghosts of the departed Germans still sat in the chairs, still looked out from the windows. But despite them, Meg liked this room best in the house. There was room to breathe here and she felt nearly at ease. Or as at ease as she would anywhere, in a country, amongst a people, mixing in a class not her own, and married to a man she was grateful to, but didn’t love.
On the mahogany sideboard she set fresh flowers daily, a great, untidy vase full, cut from the garden she had made, and the rich, dark wood took in and gave back their colours in its shiny surface. Broad windows and French doors opened out onto the veranda, and beyond she could see the hills, with clouds above like false promises. The sun never shone in directly but the room seemed to gather up the light even so. Sometimes she set the ceiling fan turning, not so much because it was too warm, because in that room it was rarely too warm, but because it seemed exotic, and because she found the slow, steady turn of the blades restful, and she would sit, with her
elbows on the starched white cloth, and let her eyes close.
Soon she would go down into the town and do her errands, then an engagement for lunch. In the afternoon she had promised herself an hour in her garden while the children rested. The evening Meg had to herself and she held the time in mind like a gift to be opened later. It should be a nice day.
Over the last four years Meg had learned well how to be as a member of the British middle class and as a colonial wife, and on a number of occasions the second task had worked as a convenient mask for her mistakes with the first. Other wives understood her confusion over how to order groceries because they’d all had to learn how to treat the watu.
‘Speak clearly to them and remember they’re not so much devious as simple,’ Mrs Bromley had advised.
And when the soup spoons were in the wrong position, her guests laughed at the crude ways of the Somali houseboy, who probably ate with his fingers at home so couldn’t be expected to know any better; and Meg, to her shame, because it was she who had placed the spoons, laughed with them.
In the kitchen Meg spoke with Kibaki and wrote out the list into her notebook. George had showed her how to set it out in their first month of marriage and there was a line of notebooks in his desk, every penny Meg had spent in the last five years listed and totalled. He liked to have control of things – she’d learned that very well – and he didn’t like surprises.
That’s why he’d still been waiting for her ship to come in, as if he could compel it, and her, to do the proper thing, the expected thing, just by not believing otherwise. Afterwards,
when he told the story to somebody, he told it as though it were somehow her fault that he had to wait so long and it was so dusty and hot and he couldn’t take a bath.
‘It is Mr Garrowby’s last night away, and we’ll all have boiled eggs tonight,’ Meg said to Kibaki, ‘and I’ll cook them. Yusuf is back then, so you may go home at five.’
She turned to go out and then remembered.
‘How is your daughter?’
Kibaki nodded.
‘She is still not well, Memsaab,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Meg said, and she felt her old blush rise. She’d rarely been down to the African lines, although they were only just beyond the garden, and never into an African hut. So she didn’t know what kind of place Kibaki and his family lived in; though she knew, from other women, that the African hut was called a rondavel. She’d seen them from outside, of course: clusters of circular thatched huts with little squares of land attached dotted with colour, where they grew their food, and always crowds of little, naked totos running about. From a distance it all looked very lively and what Mrs Richardson had described once, telling Meg about Africa, as
au naturel
, which Meg had taken to understand as quite in the natural order of things. But she did wonder what kind of sanitation there was and whether the children went to school at all, and she couldn’t help noticing that the totos they passed in the motor car usually had big bellies and dirty faces.
And seen closer up, the little boys Will played with had crusty eyes and snotty noses, though she couldn’t be sure they
were the same boys each time. She had wiped Will’s hands and face with a solution of TCP the first time, but after that she hadn’t worried so much. Though she hadn’t told George about these boys, and she had tried to impress on Will that it would be better to keep the game a secret.
‘The Africans don’t want to live like us,’ George reassured her. ‘God knows, we’ve asked them. Don’t trust our doctoring, don’t like our farming methods. So live and let live, I say.’
Meg knew there were other views about this; there were quite heated discussions amongst the wives sometimes when they met for coffee. But most of the people she had met, people George assured her were good types, thought as he did. And it was true, after all, that George himself spent much of his time helping Africans as best he could.
So Meg didn’t ask Kibaki any more about his daughter – such as what the matter was, or if she could help – because in an emergency she believed he would ask her for help, and otherwise she thought he would rather she kept out.
‘Will was very pleased with his star,’ she said. ‘He ate it nearly all up.’
‘Thank you, Memsaab.’
Again Kibaki gave his short bow – she often heard him teasing Will, but he was always serious with her – and she went to find Yusuf.
When Meg left the house, when she left the hills: those were the times that she felt as if she belonged in them, and this morning she’d have been more than happy to stay up there.
But there was shopping to be done and she must go into the town. So Yusuf drove the Austin down towards Kandula, the small, mosquito-ridden town eight miles away, and Meg tried to put away her mood.
They drove in towards the main street – past the railway depot and the string of dukas and shanty beer parlours, then the Sports Club, where the Union Jack hung from its flag like old washing, and the Leicester Hotel. And though she didn’t remember much from her time living there now, the feeling that surfaced was an old familiar. It was like the chill in the stomach she got as a child when her mother found her out in a lie and it lay over her spirits, soft and penetrating, like the deep, red dust that lay over the streets before the rains turned it to mud.
In an effort to shake it, she asked Yusuf about his family: a sister married and gone to live in Nairobi, his widowed mother, his brother. She asked after each of his wives: ‘Is Amina well? And Faisa?’
And after each enquiry he bowed his head so that his turban brushed against the windscreen, and said: ‘She is, I thank you.’
Only about his brother would he say a little more: ‘He has travelled to Nakuru with a herd of cattle because a man there has named a good price,’ he said.
‘Your brother is a good trader,’ Meg said.
‘He is a good Somali,’ Yusuf said. ‘You are accepting if I take my leave this afternoon?’
‘Yes,’ Meg said. ‘You’ll be back by five?’
He nodded, but offered no further conversational distraction
and the two of them fell quickly into their habitual silence. Usually Meg liked this; there was something restful and companionable in it. But today she wished she had a European at the wheel who would gossip, and chat about the weather, and take her mind off things. If she could have thought of a reason, she’d have ordered Yusuf to turn around and drive back home.
The breeze that blew through the hills had given up before it reached the plain and the heat in the town was damp and oppressive. Meg left her grocery list with Mr Gupta and sent Yusuf to the African market to buy meat and cassava. George liked to see only English food on his table, but Sita had discovered that Will would eat cassava with some sugar added when he would eat nothing else. If Yusuf could find some mangoes, even better. She walked along the street, her mind still half caught in the past, still remembering the day she arrived in Africa and the truths she had told Will this morning, and the lies.
Meg bought stamps in the post office, exchanging the necessary courtesies with Mrs Grant: ‘Thank you, yes, it’s very close; yes, let’s hope the rains come soon, yes.’
But she didn’t check for letters because she hadn’t yet replied to Alice’s and she’d only just had one from her mother. So she was on her way out, nearly gone, when Mrs Grant called to her.
‘Mrs Garrowby, you’ve got a letter.’
Meg stopped and turned to the wall of mailboxes. She had done this so often in the last years, hoping against hope. What
if he had found out where she was? What if he wrote to her? It was only in the last year, since being pregnant with Henry, that she had let go, or nearly let go, of this hope and now here she was, heart racing, not knowing what to wish for.
She slipped her hand into the box: a single, flimsy airmail letter, and when she looked at the handwriting, she felt the disappointment, despite herself. There was her mother’s hand, the address looking a little scrawled, more carelessly written than usual, as if done in a hurry, though that might just be because Meg was looking at it more closely than usual. She turned the letter over, but there was nothing unusual to see. Why had she written again? Her mother was a creature of strict habits, obsessive even, and she wrote to Meg once a month, never more and never less, on the first day of the month. That letter had arrived less than a week ago.
‘Nothing you weren’t looking for?’ Mrs Grant said.
‘No,’ Meg said, but already something was rising in her that she needed to put away.
She left the post office and stood on the dusty street, the letter in her hand. Then, decided, she put it in her bag. She would open it later, not now. Later, when she was on her own and she had more time. Because after all she didn’t mind not knowing what it said, yet. Because after all she had spent a lifetime, nearly, not knowing things. It was a familiar feeling, and she didn’t need to rush away from it.
Mr Gupta had her groceries ready by the time she returned, and Yusuf was waiting too, holding two long sweet cassava roots for Will in one hand and in the other, the meat, wrapped
up in newspaper and tied with a piece of string, held away from his body, away from his crisp overshirt and sarong. Blood was already soaking through the cricket news and the flies were thick. Meg thought of England and the butcher’s shop in the village with its cold, white tiles and scrubbed wooden benches. She thought of the small, tidy pieces of meat that were all she and her mother could afford.