Death in Kenya (14 page)

‘Didn't you ever read your papers? They were the boys who pretended to be terrorists. Learnt all the jargon and dressed themselves up for the part – and blacked themselves all over, if they were British. They used to push off into the forests to make contact with the gangs. Drew had a hand-picked bunch of his own. Pukka devils, from all accounts. They pulled off some astonishing coups, and had a pleasant habit of cutting a notch in Drew's verandah rail for every kill. It made an impressive tally, and I am credibly informed that although the Emergency is officially a thing of the past, there is still an occasional new notch there. We'll take a look and see. Here we are. Stand by for the bump.'

He switched off the engine, and as the launch lost speed, manoeuvred it expertly alongside a small wooden jetty that thrust out into a narrow bay whose steep banks blazed with flamboyant and vivid cascades of bougainvillaea. A long flight of steps wound upwards from the jetty and passed between banks of roses and flowering shrubs, to come out on a gravel path which followed the curve of a stone wall buttressing a grassed terrace in front of a long, low, single-storeyed house whose wide verandah was shaded by flowering creepers.

Mr. Stratton might employ Masai on his estate, but his house servants were coast Arabs, and a dignified white-robed figure, whose face might have been carved from a polished chunk of obsidian, greeted the visitors, and informed them that the Bwana should be immediately notified of their arrival.

‘What a heavenly view!' said Victoria, leaning on the verandah rail and looking out across a vast panorama of lake and tree-clad hills and far rolling grassland ringed by blue ranges that shimmered like mirages in the afternoon sun. Her eye fell on a long row of notches cut into the wood of the rail, and she drew back sharply, the pleasure on her face giving place to disgust.

‘What did I tell you?' said Eden, following the direction of her gaze. ‘Quite a nice line-up.'

‘Nice!
You call that nice? Why, it's appalling! And – and barbaric! Chalking up a record of dead men!'

‘Of dead murderers,' corrected a dry voice behind her.

Victoria whirled round, her cheeks flushing scarlet. Mr Stratton, dressed in impeccable riding clothes, was standing in the doorway of a room that opened on to the verandah. He was looking perfectly amiable, and his bland gaze travelled thoughtfully from Miss Caryll to her cousin.

‘Courtesy call, Eden?'

‘Business, I'm afraid. Those Herefords of yours. Gran wants me to have a look at them before we clinch the deal.'

‘Of course. She said something about it yesterday. They're in the paddock just behind the house. You'll find Kekinai out there. He'll tell you anything you want to know. I'll entertain Miss Caryll until you're through.'

Eden looked doubtfully at Victoria, and then all at once a malicious smile leapt to life in his eyes, and he said: ‘Good idea. I won't be long.' And left them.

Victoria made a swift movement as though she would have followed him, but Mr Stratton, either by accident or design, had moved forward in the same moment and barred her way. ‘Cigarette?' he enquired, proffering his case.

‘Thank you; I don't smoke,' said Victoria curtly.

‘You won't mind if I do? Tea will be along in a minute. Or would you rather have a cold drink? It's quite a pull up from the lake on a hot day.'

Victoria disregarded the offer and said, stammering a little: ‘I'm sorry that you should have heard w-what I said. About the notches. I didn't mean to be r-rude.'

‘There's no need to apologize for your views,' said Drew gravely.

‘I'm not. Only for letting you hear them.'

‘My feelings,' said Drew, ‘are not so easily wounded. So you think I'm appalling and barbaric because I allow the boys to cut a tally of their kills on my verandah rail, do you? You are not the only one. There are uncounted thousands of soft-hearted and fluffy-minded – and abysmally ignorant – people who would agree with you.'

‘Thank you,' said Victoria sweetly.

‘Don't mention it. Unlike you, I meant to be rude. You see, Miss Caryll, I get a little bored by people who broadcast views on something that is, to them, only a problem on paper, and one which does not touch them, personally, in any way. We each have something that we love deeply and are prepared to fight for and die for, and kill for! and I wonder just how many of the virtuous prosers, if it was the agony of their own child or wife or lover, or the safety of their own snug little surburban home that was in question, would not fight in their defence?'

Victoria said: ‘I didn't mean that. I meant this sort of thing – cutting notches. Making a game of killing.'

‘It wasn't a game. It was deadly serious. The men we were after had deliberately bestialized themselves by acts and oaths and ceremonies that were so unspeakably filthy and abominable that the half of them have never been printed, or believed by the outside world. If any of us were caught – and a good many of us were – we knew just how slowly and unpleasantly we should die. You cannot conduct a campaign against a bestial horror like the Mau Mau with gloves on. Or you can! – if you have no objection to digging up a grave in the forest and finding that it contains the body of your best friend, who has been roasted alive over a slow fire after having certain parts of him removed for use in Mau Mau ceremonials.'

Neither Drew's face nor his pleasant voice had altered, but his bland blue eyes were suddenly as hard and blank and cold as pebbles, and Victoria was aware with a sense of shock that he was speaking of something that he himself had seen – and could still see.

She said hesitantly and inadequately: ‘I – I'm sorry.'

The blankness left Drew's eyes and he tossed the end of his cigarette over the verandah rail and said: ‘Come here; I want to show you something.'

He took her arm in an ungentle grasp, and turning her about, walked her over to the far end of the verandah and stopped before the upright post that supported the corner of the roof. There were notches on that too. Each one cut deep into the flat of the wood pillar.

‘Those are our losses,' said Drew, and touched them lightly. ‘That one was Sendayo. We used to play together when we were kids. His father worked for mine when they were both young men. That was Mtua. One of the best men we had. They cut his hands and feet off and pegged him out where the safari ants would get him. That one was Tony Sherraway. They burnt him alive. This one was Barugu. He was a Kikuyu whose entire family – parents, grandparents, wife and children – were murdered in the Lari massacre, where the Mau Mau set all the huts in the village on fire and clubbed and panga'd the people as they ran out. Barugu worked for us for a year before they got him, and what they did to him is not repeatable.'

He released Victoria's arm with an impatient gesture and said: ‘Why go on? They won't mean anything to you. Or to anyone else. But cutting a tally of kills helped the morale of the others. They also got a bit of satisfaction out of chalking up that score, and out of knowing that if one of them went, he would be amply avenged.'

Drew turned away and stood looking out across the beauty that lay below and around him, his eyes narrowed against the sun glare, and presently he said: ‘It's no good trying to treat Africans as though their processes of thought were the same as Europeans. That is the way of madness – and politicians!'

Victoria said doubtfully: ‘But it
is
their country.'

‘Whose?' demanded Drew, without turning his head.

‘The – the Africans.'

‘Which Africans? All this that you can see here, the Rift and most of what is known as the White Highlands, belonged, if it belonged to anyone, to the Masai. But it is the Kikuyu who claim the land, though they never owned a foot of it – and would have been speared if they'd set a foot on it! The place was a no-man's-land when Delamere first came here, and the fact that cattle and sheep can now be raised here is entirely due to him and men like him. And even they didn't just grab the land. The handful of Masai then inhabiting it voluntarily exchanged it for the enormous territory that tribe now holds.'

‘But——' began Victoria, and was interrupted.

‘All the chatter about “It belongs to them”,' said Drew, ‘makes me tired. Sixty years ago Americans were still fighting Red Indians and Mexicans and grabbing
their
land; but I've never heard anyone suggesting that they should get the hell out of it and give it back to the original owners. Our grandfathers found a howling wilderness that no one wanted, and which, at the time, no one objected to their taking possession of. And with blood, toil, tears and sweat they turned it into a flourishing concern. At which point a yelping chorus is raised, demanding, in the name of “Nationalism”, that it be handed over to them. Well, if they are capable of running this on their own, or of turning a howling wilderness into a rich and prosperous concern, let 'em prove it! There's a hell of a lot of Africa. They can find a bit and start right in to show us. But that won't do for them. It's the fruit of somebody else's labour that they are after.'

He flung out a hand in the direction of the green lawns and gardens, the orchards, outhouses and paddocks: ‘There was nothing and nobody here when my grandfather first saw this. This is the fruit of his labour – and of my parents', and my own. I was born here, and this is as much my home as Sendayo's. I want to stay here, and if that is immoral and indefensible Colonialism, then every American whose pioneer forebears went in a covered wagon to open up the West is tarred with the same brush; and when U.N.O. orders them out, we may consider moving!'

He turned to face Victoria and for the first time since she had met him, he smiled. It was a disquietingly attractive smile, and despite herself she felt a considerable portion of her hostility towards him waning.

He said: ‘I apologize for treating you to a grossly over-simplified lecture on the Settlers' point of view. Very tedious for you. Here's the tea at last. Come and pour out.'

He kept up an idly amiable flow of small-talk until Eden returned, and after that the conversation took a strictly technical turn, and Victoria allowed her attention to wander.

‘An over-simplified viewpoint.' Perhaps. Yet she could still remember her father telling her tales of her grandfather's early days in the great valley. The gruelling toil under the burning sun. The laborious digging of wells and the struggle to grow grass and crops and to raise cattle. The first glorious signs of success – of the ‘wilderness blossoming like a rose'. The years of drought when first the crops and then the cattle died, and ruin faced them – and was stared down and outfaced by men who refused to be beaten. The first roads. The first hospitals. The first railway. The first schools … It could not have been easy, but the sweat and the toil and the despair and determination that it had cost had made it doubly dear, and Victoria found herself remembering a line from the theme song of
Oklahoma!
– that exhilarating musical about another pioneer state which barely a century ago had also belonged to ‘painted savages'.

‘We belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand.'

She was aroused from her abstraction by Eden saying: ‘Look, Drew, if you're driving over to see Gilly, why not come back in the launch with us, and let your driver take the car round to
Flamingo?
Then you can have a word with Gran about the deal. Just as well to get it settled.'

Mr Stratton, having agreed to the suggestion, went off to change out of his riding clothes, and Eden cocked an interrogatory eyebrow at Victoria and said: ‘How did you get on with the detestable Drew? Sorry I had to leave you like that, but you wouldn't have enjoyed inspecting cows and calves, and I took it that you wouldn't actually come to blows! Do you mind having him as a passenger on the way home? I want him to have a word with Gran, and this seems a good way of seeing that he gets it.'

‘Of course I don't mind. Why should I?' enquired Victoria loftily. ‘I'm not so prejudiced that I can't sit in a boat with him. And in any case you will be far too busy discussing milk yields and foot-and-mouth for either of you to notice whether I am there or not.'

Eden laughed and reached out to pull her to her feet. ‘Did we bore you? Forgive me, darling. I promise to keep off shop in future whenever you're around.'

Something in Victoria flinched at his casual use of an endearment that had once meant so much but which now came so easily and so meaninglessly to his tongue. She removed the hand that he still held, and said lightly: ‘If I'm to be of any use to Aunt Em, the more I know about milk yields and foot-and-mouth the better. So don't let me put you off. Do you suppose the police will have gone by the time we get back?'

‘If they haven't, I don't suppose we shall get any supper,' said Eden with a laugh. ‘The staff are apt to get a bit disorganized on these occasions. I can't tell you how many times during the Emergency we were reduced to bread and cheese because Greg's chaps had been asking questions and the cook was too upset to concentrate on such mundane matters as meals. Here's Drew. If you're ready, let's go.'

9

Day was withdrawing reluctantly from the valley, and the gardens of
Flamingo
were noisy with the chatter and chirrup of birds coming home to roost. But the house itself was silent, and the police had apparently gone.

Conversation during the return journey had been desultory, but now it had ceased altogether, and Victoria, looking round to see why Eden's steps had slowed, surprised an expression on his face that startled her. He was staring at the house as though he hated it, or was afraid of it, and was walking slowly to delay the moment when he must enter it again.

An unexpected and icy little shiver ran down Victoria's spine, and Mr Stratton, who had been strolling beside her with his hands in his pockets and his face blank and apparently unobservant, said: ‘Are you cold? Or was that someone jumping over your grave?'