Acts of faith (50 page)

“Kwenda huto!”
In Texas-accented Swahili, Dare dismissed a hustler who was after their money, although what he was offering in exchange wasn’t exactly clear. The phrase was repeated several times as they passed the Jeevanjee Gardens, where AIDS orphans popped out of bushes reeking of human excrement to pluck at the sleeves of the two mzungu and their darker-skinned companion. A sprint across University Way brought them to Harry Thuku Road, separating the central police station from the University of Nairobi campus. Fitzhugh had always believed the placement wasn’t accidental: the university, generator of political dissent; the police right across the street, poised to quell student demonstrations.

At the entrance to the Norfolk, that relic of empire, its Tudor facade some nostalgic colonial’s re-creation of an English country house, safari vehicles were dropping off or picking up passengers weighted down with camera gear and dressed up like
Out of Africa
extras in multipocketed bush jackets and wide-brimmed hats with fake leopard-skin bands. More tourists, along with a few expatriates, were lunching on the Delamere Terrace, the same wood-beamed platform from which long-vanished sahibs and memsahibs, taking high tea, watched gazelle grazing on the plains—the view considerably altered now to one of smog-shrouded concrete and brick. The three entrepreneurs of aid found a free table, and just as he sat down to look at the menu, Fitzhugh was seized by a sudden longing, accompanied by a dread of spending the dinner hour in Adid’s company. He declared that he was opting out of the evening’s engagement, unless his presence was absolutely required, and he doubted it was.

Douglas twitched his head in surprise. “What would get you to turn down a free meal?”

“An old girlfriend,” he lied.

“Right. I guess
that
would.”

The longing persisted all through his lunch of fish and chips and beer. He was surprised by how firmly it gripped him, but when he thought about it, it wasn’t so surprising. She’d been dwelling in the back of his mind ever since he’d seen her, and he was always delighted to see her again, the rare times she showed up in Loki. The only cure was to act. Resolute, like a soldier, he went to his room, got his address book from his overnight bag, sat on the bed, and dialed. The housekeeper answered.

“Halo, Bibi Di—“
he began, then cleared his throat, deciding on a more formal, businesslike approach.
“Nataka kusema na Lady Briggs tafadhali. Ni mimi Bwana Martin.”

“
Bwana Martin,
okay.
Subiri kidogo.
”

He waited, long enough to feel his nerve failing him. Then:

“Fitz! So sorry to keep you. I’d just finished up in the ring.”

“The ring?”

“My horse. Where are you?”

He told her, and she said he was moving up in the world. He pictured her in jodhpurs and boots, tousling her hair, matted by the riding hat she was holding by the strap.

“I’m here with Doug and Wes. Talking to some wabenzi who’s interested in advancing us some capital.”

“Marvelous. I was speaking to John the other day, and he rather feels you’ve been neglecting him. He’s got, oh,
tons
of stuff waiting to go to the Nuba, and he can hardly get a plane scheduled.”

“We’ve been so committed. That mess in Bahr el Ghazal, yes?”

“Dreadful.”

“You heard what happened to Tara? To her pilot, I should say?”

“Ghastly.”

He paused to gather himself and, in a voice scrubbed of any emotion, asked if she was free for dinner. The first part of her answer—“Delighted!”—came so quickly and was so positive that the second part—“On condition Wes keeps the obnoxious remarks to a minimum”—didn’t register immediately. When it did, he hesitated.

“Are you there, Fitz?”

“Yes.” His heart was stammering. “Wesley won’t be there. Or Doug.
I’m
asking if you’re free.”

“I still am.”

“It’s a long way for you into town, and a woman alone ought not to be driving at night.”

“Perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

“I know! I’d prefer a place out your way.”

“There’s the Horseman, which I don’t like, and the Rusty Nail, which I do. I know the chef. I’ll ring up for a table and meet you there. Now listen, Fitz, it’s a frightfully expensive cab ride. Let me pick that up.”

“I am perfectly capable of paying for myself.” He raised his voice to a feminine treble, mimicking her accent. “See you there. Seven.”

She laughed, and he heard her say, as if speaking to someone in the room with her, “My God, I believe I’ve been asked out on a
date.
”

He knew the dim lighting flattered her, erasing every line; still, his throat tightened a little when he saw her, ravishing in a sleeveless dove-gray blouse with a scooped neckline, and a linen skirt that teased her knees, a silk shawl tossed over her bare shoulders, a choker throwing off emerald gleams from her throat, her hair champagne-gold. Though he’d showered, shaved, brushed his hair, and splashed on some Bay Rum, he felt grubby and underdressed. He also felt conspicuous. Apart from some of the help and one black couple, his was the darkest complexion in the place. Plus, he was in the company of an older white woman, who might or might not be married (he still wasn’t sure) and who was obviously not dressed for a business meeting. He caught a few patrons stealing looks at the mismatched couple sitting at an intimate corner table, near a window. He tried to ignore them, reminding himself that he was now a junior, albeit very junior, partner in a successful young airline and belonged here as much as anyone else. Diana was perceptive enough to notice that he was failing to convince even himself.

“Do relax and don’t mind them,” she said, laying her hand on his. She seemed to deliberately leave it there as a waiter presented menus. “I know everybody here. It would be jolly fun to get some gossip going.”

He didn’t know what to make of the remark. There was some sort of encouragement in it, surely; but he didn’t care to be a prop in some game of cheap social scandal.

She did know everybody, interrupting her study of the menu several times to flutter her fingers (still no wedding band, he observed) at this table and that table. When the owner, a gaunt, papery-skinned man with a long English jaw, stopped by to pay his respects and make recommendations, Fitzhugh began to feel more at ease. Diana’s standing was such that she probably could have walked in here arm in arm with a Masai chief in full tribal regalia and not done herself or the chief any harm: an aristocrat who could get away with things prohibited to a woman of the hoi polloi. She asked the owner to give her very best to Rick in the kitchen. In a few moments Rick-in-the-kitchen dispatched a waiter to tell her that he’d just received a shipment of fresh prawns from the coast and would be delighted to prepare them especially for her and her guest in a garlic, butter, and white wine sauce, to be preceded by his signature dish, capellini primavera.

“Brilliant!”

When the waiter handed her the wine list, Fitzhugh gave up all notions of exercising any masculine authority. He was in her world.

“I think a Montrachet would be nice, don’t you?”

“Brilliant,” he said.

Over Rick-in-the-kitchen’s signature dish, he told her about the meeting with Adid, and that the man made him uncomfortable with his piercing look. He related his thoughts as he passed by the university, his memories of his unsuccessful stab at playing angry young man, when he’d led a protest march in honor of J. M. Kariuki, who’d been murdered by his political rivals. Those recollections had probably moved him to cancel out on Doug’s dinner plans—

“Fitz, dear,” she interrupted, and drew her face closer to whisper teasingly, “you are supposed to say that what moved you was an overwhelming desire for the pleasure of my company.”

He didn’t take it in the lighthearted spirit she’d meant it, and he protested that he
had
longed for the pleasure of her company, really, he had—but he couldn’t deny that he’d also dreaded, with a dread equal to the longing, listening to more talk about business plans and market share. In recent weeks he’d sensed that he was drawing further and further away from the man he used to be, and the outraged nineteen-year-old who’d led a protest march now seemed so far away as to be someone else. One more hour in the wabenzi’s presence would have made the distance feel all the greater. And yes, he added by way of epilogue, he was aware of the irony of his speaking this way in this place, sipping Montrachet and dining on capellini primavera with a beautiful woman.

Delivering the compliment caused his heart to stutter again, but Diana did not react. She only fixed him with her dark blue eyes—they looked indigo in the sconce’s hooded light—and daubed her lips with her napkin as the plates were cleared away.

“I must sound like I’m in a psychiatrist’s office,” he said, fearful of her silence.

“Not at all.” Again covering his hand, though in a more maternal way. “But if I can play amateur analyst, I’d say you suffer from a common delusion. You equate poverty with virtue, but it isn’t virtue. It’s just poverty.”

He shrugged one shoulder, screwed up a corner of his mouth.

“Oh, yes. You could go to any bush village right now, find the smartest kid there, send him to school, and make him a success, and he won’t be likely to turn out any better than anyone else, and maybe worse. You can bet he’ll forget where he comes from and everyone there. He’ll distance himself from the people who helped him on his way because he’ll need to believe he did it all on his own.”

“This sounds like the voice of experience.”

“It damned well is.” She sipped her wine. “But better that than to leave the kid there. And there’s always the chance you’ll find the one in a thousand who doesn’t forget and who makes a difference.”

“That’s it, Diana! That’s what I was saying. All I’ve wanted to do is to make a difference, not make money.”

The prawns arrived, twice the size of a man’s thumb, curled up pink in their shells.

“Fitz, there’s more of that nineteen-year-old in you than you know. The one does not necessarily preclude the other.”

She peeled one of the shellfish, stabbed it with her fork, and bit it in half; the sauce glistening on her lips made him want to bite them.

Searching for a lighter topic of conversation, he patted his midriff and joked that the expanding distance from his former inner self was being matched by an expansion of his outer self. Then, feeling that he was talking too much about himself, he asked what she’d been doing lately. The usual: scrounging after aid grants, visiting refugee camps, finding sponsors abroad, obtaining visas. Recently she’d befriended a young Kenyan craftsman who was trying to start his own shop. Lived in one of those corrugated iron shanties that line the Ngong road. No electricity or running water. She’d helped him find space where he could begin turning out tables and chairs for sale at the roadside.

“He’s related in some way to my housekeeper, so I took him on.” She sighed. “Wes would say, rich bitch with a guilty conscience.”

Fitzhugh bowed his head, pretending to an interest in the dessert menu. “I have a confession to make. When I first saw your place, I thought something like that myself, yes? Not rich bitch. A daughter of colonials, making up for the sins of the fathers.”

“Can’t say I blame you—”

The waiter interrupted, asking if they’d decided. Just coffee, said Diana. Fitzhugh followed suit, in the interest of his waistline.

“But I really think I do what I do because I love this place,” she resumed. “It is my country as much as it’s yours or anyone else’s. Oh, it was so exciting here, the first few years after independence, wasn’t it? All that hope and promise.”

Her tone was eulogistic. But now, she went on, Kenya, like the whole of black Africa, appeared to be devolving, not into the primitive conditions before European conquest but into chaos. The temptation to write it off as hopeless was irresistible, and she rather thought that much of the world had written it off. She hadn’t because she couldn’t, and she couldn’t because she loved her country and her continent too much. Couldn’t imagine herself living anywhere else, certainly not in the damp gloom of her ancestors’ homeland. The hope and promise had not been entirely extinguished. She was trying, with small actions like assisting the young craftsman, to keep the fragile flame burning. And with larger actions as well, like the White Papers she wrote for foundations and governmental aid agencies, pleading with them to do their bit to arrest Africa’s whirl to the bottom. She compared it to a family’s intervention on behalf of a relative destroying himself with alcohol or drugs. You do it because he’s your blood. Well, Africa was in everyone’s blood, from America to China, wasn’t it? This was where Lucy stood upright one gray dawn a million years ago and left in the mud of the Olduvai Gorge the footprints of the true Eve. The ribs and femurs and mandibles of her children were buried in African soil. Diana tilted her body forward; she seemed to be lit from within. If everyone turned their back on Africa, it would not merely fall further and further behind, it could very well lead the world into a dark and lawless tomorrow . . . then abruptly, she shook her head. “Goodness! Listen to me!”

He was, as attentively as ever he’d listened to anyone. How glad he was that he’d chosen to spend these hours with her.