Death in Kenya (6 page)

Her gay and charming father had died two months later, and the tragedy of his death, the sale of the farm and the misery of leaving Kenya – even the parting with her ponies and dear fat friendly Falda – had been mitigated by the thought that she would be seeing Eden again. For it had been arranged between Em and Helen that Eden should spend the Christmas and Easter holidays with the Carylls, and return to Kenya once a year to spend the two months of the summer holidays at
Flamingo.

In actual fact he had spent all his holidays for the next six or seven years with them, and had seen nothing of Em and
Flamingo;
for tragedy on a Homeric scale had taken over the stage, and the war put an end to countless plans, as it was to put an end to countless lives.

Eden had missed active service, but he had done his National Service with the Occupation Forces in Germany, and followed it by three years at Oxford, during which time he had seen little or nothing of the Carylls, for he spent his vacations with Em in Kenya, flying between London and Nairobi. Victoria had not seen him for over a year when Em suddenly announced her intention of paying a visit to England and staying with her half-sister. She had not seen either for years, and she and Eden would spend July and August at Helen's instead of at
Flamingo.

Victoria's Aunt Emily, who was Eden's grandmother, was exactly as Victoria remembered her, save for the fact that in deference to the post-war nerves of the Islanders she had refrained from wearing her favourite Kenya garb of scarlet dungarees, and was soberly and somewhat disappointingly clad in a brown coat-frock that whispered of moth balls and the Gay Twenties.

Eden had arrived two days later, and he had looked at Victoria as though he were seeing her for the first time: as though she were someone whom he had never seen before.

She had been picking roses and her arms were full of the lovely lavish honey-pinks of Betty Uprichards; but that had been an unrehearsed and entirely fortuitous circumstance, as Eden had not been expected for another two hours. She had blushed under Eden's startled gaze, and Eden had said foolishly: ‘
Vicky—!
What have you been doing to yourself? You've – you've grown up.'

And at that they had both laughed, and he had leaned forward and kissed her above the roses and they had fallen in love.

No, that was not true, thought Victoria. At least, it was not true of herself, for she had fallen in love with Eden years and years ago, when he had picked her up out of the mud by the cattle troughs and dried her tears with a handkerchief that smelt of Stockholm tar and chewing gum. And she had never stopped loving him.

It was Eden who had fallen in love that day. Or had he? Had it only been affection for someone he had known all his life? Sentiment and a summer evening, and a pretty girl in a yellow dress with her arms full of roses?
Any
pretty girl? No! thought Victoria. No. It isn't true. He did love me. He did! I couldn't have been mistaken.

It had been an enchanted summer. They had danced together and dined together, and walked and talked and planned their lives together. Em had been pleased; but Victoria's mother had not approved of the cousins marrying, and she had been against it from the first.

‘I might agree, if they were first cousins,' Em had said, ‘but they are not.'

‘Eden has Beaumartin blood in him,' said Helen unhappily.

‘And Carteret and Brook and DeBrett blood too! It will be a great success.'

But Helen had counselled delay. Eden was only twenty-three, and Victoria four years younger. They could afford to wait. Eden was to do a year's course at an agricultural college so as to fit him for taking over
Flamingo
– as his years at Oxford would fit him, so his grandmother hoped, to hold political office one day in the country of his birth and her adoption.

‘He is a second-generation Kenya-ite,' said Em, ‘and there are not so many of them. The Colony needs men who love the country to run its affairs.'

By Helen's wish there had been no formal engagement, and no announcement to friends. Em had gone back to Kenya when the summer was over and Victoria had gone on with her secretarial course, because, she told Eden, it would be a help in the running of
Flamingo.

They were to be married when Eden was twenty-four, and he had actually married when he was within a week of his twenty-fourth birthday. But it had not been to Victoria. It had been to Alice Laxton. Five years ago … Yet even now, to think of it brought back some of the suffocating, agonizing pain of those days.

It had happened suddenly and without warning. Eden had arrived one afternoon to see her mother, and left again without waiting to see Victoria, who was out. Helen had looked pale and upset but had said nothing more than that Eden had been unable to stay as he had to spend the weekend with friends in Sussex, but that he would be writing.

The letter had come three days later, and Victoria could still remember every line of it as though it had burned itself into her brain. They had made a mistake, wrote Eden, and confused cousinly affection and friendship for something deeper. Nothing could alter that fondness and friendship, and he knew her too well not to know that if she did not agree with him now, she would one day. One day she would fall in love with someone else, as he himself had done, and then her affection for him would fall into its proper place. And as they had never really been engaged, neither of them need suffer any public embarrassment.

As he himself had done
 … In the face of that statement there was nothing for Victoria to do but write an unhysterical letter accepting the inevitable and agreeing that his decision was the right one. She had saved her pride, and probably salved Eden's conscience, by doing so; if either of those things were worth doing.

Helen had been relieved and had not attempted to disguise the fact. ‘I never think that marriages between cousins are a good idea,' she said. ‘Inbreeding never did anyone any good.'

Em had written from Kenya. She had quite obviously accepted Eden's view that the break was mutual, and the letter had been charming and deeply regretful, and had ended with the hope that they might both think better of it. But on the same morning as its arrival
The Times
and the
Telegraph
had published the announcement of Eden's engagement to Alice Laxton, and less than a month later they had been married.

Oh, the agony of those days! The tearing, wrenching pain of loss. The shock of casually opening an illustrated paper at the hairdressers and being confronted with a full page photograph of Eden and his bride leaving St George's, Hanover Square. Eden, grave and unsmiling, and as heart-breakingly handsome as every woman's dream of Prince Charming. And Alice, an anonymous figure in white satin whose bridal veil had blown across her face and partially obscured it.

‘Better looking than Robert Taylor or any of those,' said the hairdresser's assistant, peering over her shoulder. ‘Ought to be on the films, he ought. It's a waste. Don't think much of her, do you? Can't think how she got him. Money, I expect. The papers say she's got any amount of it. Wish I had! What about just a touch of brilliantine, Miss Caryll?'

Any amount of money … Had that been why Eden had married her? No, he
could
not be so despicable! Not Eden. But
Flamingo,
she knew, had been losing money of late, and Eden had expensive tastes. Em had spoilt him. It would be nice to be able to think that he only married Alice Laxton for her money, for then she could despise him and be sorry for his wife, and apply salve to her own hurt pride. But what did hurt pride matter in comparison to the pain in her heart? I won't think of him any more, decided Victoria. I won't let myself think of any of this again.

It had not been easy to keep that vow, but hard work had helped, and at last there came a time when memory did not rise and mock her whenever she was tired or off-guard. She had not thought of the past, or of Eden, for months before Helen died, and afterwards she had been able to read his letter of condolence, and reply to it, as though he had meant no more to her than the writers of a dozen other such letters. She had sold the house and taken a secretarial post in London. And then that unexpected letter had arrived from Kenya.

It was not the sort of letter than Em had ever written before, and there was an odd and disturbing suggestion of urgency about it. The same urgency that Helen had sometimes betrayed when she had wanted to do something, or to see someone, and had been afraid that she would not have time to do it before she died. A fear that was both harrowing and pitiful. But there was something else there too. Something that Victoria could not quite put her finger on, and which disturbed her even more.

The letter had contained only one reference to the past: ‘You know that I would never have suggested your coming if I had not been quite sure that you and Eden could meet as friends. And I know that you will like his wife. Alice is such a dear girl, but we are neither of us strong, and I fear that I am getting old. I need help.'

Em had provisionally booked a passage for her on an air liner leaving for Nairobi on the twenty-third of the month. Which meant that she would have to decide at once, as the company would not keep the reservation for long. Was that why Em had done it? So that she would be forced to make up her mind quickly, and could not waver and hesitate? Was Em, too, afraid of dying too soon, and aware, as Helen had been, that it was later than she had thought?

England had been enduring an exceptionally cold and wet spell that year, and Victoria, clinging to a strap in a crowded bus on her way to work, the letter in her pocket, had looked out over the damp, bedraggled hat of a stout woman in a wet mackintosh, to the damp, bedraggled London streets that streamed past the rain spotted windows, and thought of the Rift Valley——

The enormous sun-drenched spaces where the cattle grazed and the herds of zebra and gazelle roamed at will under the blue cloud shadows that drifted by as idly as sailing ships on a summer sea. It would be wonderful to see it again. It would be like going home. And
Flamingo
would be a home to her. Aunt Emily had said so. Aunt Emily needed her, and it was so comforting to be needed again. As for Eden, he was happily married, and Alice was ‘such a dear girl'. The past was over and done with. She need not think of it.

*   *   *

The stewardess of the air liner said: ‘Fasten your safety belts please,' and Mrs Brocas-Gill said: ‘Wake up dear. We're going down to land. Are you feeling all right? You're looking very pale.'

‘No,' said Victoria a trifle breathlessly. ‘No. I'm all right thank you. It's just that——'

The plane tilted on one shining wing and the ground rushed up to meet it. And then they were skimming low over roof-tops and trees and grass and bumping down a long runway, and Victoria was thinking frantically and desperately and futilely: I shouldn't have come! I shouldn't have come! What shall I do when I see Eden? It isn't all over – it won't ever be all over! I shouldn't have come …

4

The sun was blindingly bright on the white walls of the Airport, and there seemed to be a great many people meeting the plane. But there was no sign of Lady Emily. Or of Eden.

A small stout man with a red face and a bald head, wearing a singularly crumpled suit and, somewhat surprisingly, a revolver in an enormous leather holster, waved a white panama enthusiastically from beyond the barrier and yelled a welcome to someone called ‘Pet'.

‘There's Oswin,' said Mrs Brocas-Gill.

‘You're late!' shouted Mr Brocas-Gill, stating the obvious. ‘Expected you yesterday.'

He embraced his wife and was introduced to Victoria. ‘Bless my soul!' said Mr Brocas-Gill. ‘Jack Caryll's girl. I remember your father when— Why, dammit, I remember
you!
Skinny little thing in plaits. Used to ride a zebra. Glad to see you back.'

He relieved his wife of a dressing-case and an overnight bag and trotted beside them into the comparative coolness of the Airport building:

‘Who are you stayin' with? Oh, Em. Hmm. Isn't here, is she? Can't understand it! Bad business. Just shows that it doesn't do to get too complacent. Who's meetin' you?'

‘I don't know,' confessed Victoria uncertainly.

‘Oh well, they're sure to send someone. We'll keep an eye on you for the moment. Hi! Pet——!' He plunged off in pursuit of his wife who had departed to greet a friend.

Left alone Victoria looked about her a little desperately, searching for a familiar face, until her attention was arrested by a man who had just entered the hall and was standing scanning the newly arrived passengers as though he were looking for someone.

He was a tall, slim, sunburnt man in the early thirties, who carried his inches with a peculiar lounging grace that somehow suggested the popular conception of a cowboy. An effect that was heightened by the fact that he, like Oswin Brocas-Gill, wore a belt that supported a revolver. But there the cowboy resemblance ended, for the cut of the carelessly careful coat, in contrast to Oswin's crumpled attire, spoke almost offensively of Savile Row, while his shoes were undoubtedly handmade – though not in Kenya.

It was not, however, his personal appearance that had caught Victoria's attention, but the fact that he was now observing her with interest and a distinct suggestion of distaste. Men were apt to look at Victoria with interest. They had been doing so in increasing numbers since somewhere around her sixteenth birthday, so there was nothing new in that. What was new was the distaste. No man had ever previously regarded her with the coldly critical lack of approval that was in the blue gaze of the gentleman by the doorway, and Victoria involuntarily glanced down to assure herself that she was not showing six inches of petticoat or wearing odd stockings. She was engaged in this apprehensive survey when he crossed the hall and spoke to her: