Ahmed's Revenge (35 page)

One last thing. I want to tell you just in closing that Juliet is outside, playing in the orchard or down on the nearest side of the pond. As in the third act of
Madama Butterfly
, I'm bringing her to you late, at the end of my story, and with no hints of her before. I remember thinking that was a structural weakness in Puccini's opera, but I don't mind doing it myself, I don't mind doing it at all. Today is Juliet's fifth birthday, February 4, 1980, so it's a red-letter day in more ways than one, for it is also the day I had told myself I would finish this memoir, the day I would finally stop spending my mornings in the office and would step out onto the land, taking up real life once more.

My farm has changed a little bit over the years. Part of it is a tent camp now, like Cottar's, where Ralph brings his tourists for a night or two, where he can see Juliet and me on his way to the Mara or on his way home. The tent camp is where the orchard used to be, with a view of the pond on one side, and a full view of the Mara plains on the other. It isn't very far from Jules's grave.

When Juliet starts school in September we will have to move to my father's house in town. Ralph will take over the entire farm, managing the coffee and the tent camp and living in the house. Juliet and I will come occasionally to visit her father's grave, but eventually we will both turn into town people again, with full town lives to live. Already Juliet is talking about ballet lessons. Can you guess where those will be?

When Juliet comes into the house in a minute she will have her daily job to do. She will take the lunch tray from my hands and walk with it to the dormitory and give it to Beatrice, who will feed my father, who spends his days staring at the pond, sitting on the dormitory porch on that same old bench. The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. Is that it or is it the other way around?

There are more twists and turns to the story of one's life than one realises—that's something I've learned from writing all this down. We live our lives in three acts: the first, to know we are alive; the second, to try to understand; the third, to work and grow. That's what I'll teach Juliet, that's her legacy from Jules and me, that is what she has to know.

And when Juliet is grown up, who knows, maybe she will have her own tale to tell and will find her starting point in mine. That would be good. In this family we are into the women's generation now, and I think that kind of continuation would be fine. I like to imagine that Juliet will feel a certain peaceful recognition when she sits on the porch of her farmhouse, watches the animals at her pond, and lets her eyes wander down to the words her mother wrote so many years ago.

I had a farm in Africa too. My farm was not in the Ngong Hills but on even richer land about eighty miles west of Nairobi. To get to my farm you drive down off what is called “the escarpment,” into the Great Rift Valley and then up again, forty minutes or so north of the dusty Maasai town of Narok.

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