Green City in the Sun (13 page)

     "This bloke captained the Eldoret cricket side, you see," came Norich-Hastings's voice, "and there was a one-day fixture against Kisumu. He won the toss, chose to bat, and went in to open the innings. By teatime he was still making the runs."

     Valentine listened to the story and laughed with everyone else. He was in excellent spirits because of the appointment he had with Dr. Hare in Nairobi later that afternoon. The physician had gladly agreed to open his office for a private consult, even though it was Sunday, and Valentine was confident that the man would have a solution to Rose's problem.

     As he helped himself to deviled kidneys and scrambled eggs, half listening to talk around the table of coffee growing, Valentine reminded himself that, really, it was his fault that his and Rose's sexual relations were strained.

     After all, he decided, it could not have been easy for a lady of her delicacy and breeding to give up a life of comfort and social prominence for a tent camp in the bush! Unlike Grace, who seemed to relish each challenge Africa offered, Rose was afraid of everything about this country. And there were no other ladies of her own kind to offer support. Lucille Donald had little time for Rose's sort of socializing; besides, the two women were as different as night and day. Hyenas in the henhouse were of no concern to Rose, nor how to make homemade glue out of buffalo hooves. And Lucille had not the faintest interest in fashion or style, was not curious about hemlines or where the royal family was vacationing.

     Still, despite being left alone most of the time, since Valentine had to be out on the estate all day to make sure the tender young coffee trees were being properly cared for and since Grace had
her
hands full with trying to get the local Africans to come to her clinic, Rose seemed to have adjusted rather well. In fact, Valentine realized now as he laughed when another funny story was told, Rose seemed almost to welcome being left alone.

     "I've got five hundred acres of coffee in bearing," said a man from Limuru, "but because of lack of rain, the beans are small, there are too many defective berries, and the coffee's got a blasted dull look to it." He turned to Valentine. "How goes your crop?"

     "It's going rather well, actually."

     Those at his table were not surprised. The earl's great luck and continued
prosperity were the talk of East Africa. Everything he touched, it seemed, turned to gold.

     "I hear you dammed the Chania."

     "Yes. When it looked like the rains weren't going to come, back in March. Then I dug a furrow, so my fields are being irrigated."

     "Must've surprised the darkies to see the river tampered with! They don't think ahead, you know, have no concept of tomorrow. They never grow more food than they can eat today, never wonder what they'll do if a drought hits. It's all
shauri ya mungu
to them."

     "Bloody wogs," interjected a man with a sun-reddened face and bushy blond beard. "Can't get 'em to work for love or money! They sit on their black arses and expect americani and sugar and oil to be handed them, without for a moment considering that one must work to earn it!"

     "You can take the monkey out of the jungle," said the Limuru man, "but you can't take the jungle out of the monkey!"

     As Valentine stirred his tea, he stole a glance at his watch. His long legs shifted restlessly under the table.

     "Did you enjoy the hunt, Your Lordship?"

     He looked up into Lady Margaret's smiling face. She reminded him of a Pekingese dog, but with a better temperament. "And how is your charming wife, the countess?" she added before he could reply. "We need to see more of Lady Rose in Nairobi!"

     Those were the times when she came to life, Valentine realized, those few occasions when Rose did come down to Nairobi. There had been the grand ball at the Muthaiga Club, given in honor of the king of Sweden, and then that pompous planting ceremony in front of Government House, to which Rose had donated a cutting of her precious roses. In Nairobi Rose was gay and lively, the center of admiring attention; if it weren't for the long journey from the Central Province, riding in wagons and stopping every night to camp, Valentine knew that she would come down more often.

     "You must thank her for the tea," Lady Margaret said. "I found it be an exciting blend."

     Rose had brought with her from England a special private blend of Mysore and Ceylon tea that had been in her family for generations. When
the supply had run out, instead of sending to her London tea broker for a fresh supply, Rose had had a firm in Nairobi substitute for the Ceylon a locally grown tea, cultivated in the cooler regions near Lake Victoria, and had found it produced a unique, pleasing flavor. When Rose had remarked upon it the last time she was in Nairobi, at a gala supper in honor of the King's birthday, and Lady Margaret had expressed interest, Rose had sent her a packet of the tea.

     "Would the countess mind," the brigadier's wife asked, "if I ordered the blend for myself? I think I shall go off Lady Londonderry's altogether!"

     He was about to reply when she went hurriedly on: "I have a small gift for Lady Rose in return. I
finally
received my order of Belgian embroidery floss. I sent off for it nearly a year ago! And there is the most delicious green that I know will go perfectly into her tapestry."

     Back in April, wanting to give Rose a treat and a rest from the tent camp, Valentine had taken her on safari up the slopes of nearby Mount Kenya. He had tried to make the traveling as gentle as possible for her, rigging a hammock between two poles and having her carried in it by Africans, and she had responded by falling in love with the rain forest. In fact, she had been so taken with it that she had returned to the plantation with the scene perfectly imprinted on her brain. Rose had immediately taken a length of Irish linen from her cedar chest, unpacked her needles and yarns from a trunk, and launched upon what was promising to be a most impressive tapestry. It was only embryonic now, but one could already see how skillfully the rain forest was going to translate onto the linen: the rich shades of green dotted with bright orange and yellow and blue wildflowers; the long, ropy vines that hung from damp, twisted trees; the emerald moss and giant ferns and elephant's ear palms; even the low-hanging mountain mist had been outlined in delicate pearl blue silk thread, and off to the side Rose was leaving a space where an imaginary golden-eyed leopard would lurk.

     This was what she did with her time. Stitching the tapestry was all she did. She sat in the little glade that was at the center of the eucalyptus trees, in the protection of a gazebo which Valentine had built for her, sheltered from the tropical sun in the company of pet monkeys and parrots and Mrs. Pembroke with baby Mona.

     "Can we offer you a shakedown for the night, Lord Treverton?" Lady Margaret asked. With such great distances between neighbors and hotels nearly nonexistent, the strenuous travel in British East Africa had produced the custom of providing shelter for overnight guests, friend or stranger.

     But Valentine was in a hurry. There were two things he must see to in Nairobi—Dr. Hare and arranging Rose's "surprise"—and then he would be striking northward, for home.

T
HERE IS ONE POSSIBLE CAUSE FOR YOUR WIFE'S RELUCTANCE
, Your Lordship. The medical term for it is
dyspareunia.
It means"—Dr. Hare tapped his pen on the desktop—"ah . . . the woman experiences pain during sexual intercourse. Does Lady Rose have pain?"

     Valentine regarded the physician with a blank expression. Pain? He had not thought of that. Was it possible? Was that why she shied away from his embrace?
Did
she feel pain? Valentine sat back in the chair, oblivious of the glorious Sunday sunlight slanting through the window and illuminating Dr. Hare's cramped office. Grace hadn't said anything to him about Rose's having pain. She had been delicate in her wording, mentioning the strain of Mona's birth, the awkward train car, the lack of proper facilities.

     Valentine experienced a sudden rush of hope. Could that be the answer? Could it be that simple? That Rose was afraid of pain? Because if that were the case, if it were due to a physical problem and not, as he had feared, a problem with their relationship, then surely help could be found!

     "What causes the pain, Dr. Hare?"

     The man shrugged. "I need to examine your wife to determine that."

     Valentine would have to think about that. It had not been easy for
him
to come to this man; how could he subject Rose to a stranger's examination? Valentine had chosen Dr. Hare because the few medical men in East Africa were part of the "crowd" and gossip risk was high. Dr. Hare was new, just out from America, and not yet given to talk.

     "She had a baby seven months ago," Valentine said. He would not allow himself to remember that Rose's reluctance had begun long before Mona's birth; he did not see that he was grasping at straws.

     "That could be the cause," the doctor said, studying the earl's face. He saw fear on it, plain as day, and worry. Dr. Hare had engaged in many such private consultations during his twenty years of medical practice. They were all the same, like textbook chapters: wife unresponsive or even resistant to sexual advances; husband plunged into morass of self-criticism and sudden doubts about manhood.

     Hogwash, Dr. Hare wanted to say. Women these days! With their talk of birth control and the vote. Why were they so set on denying their one purpose on this earth—to bear children? They made such a fuss of it, giving birth, when that was the very thing they were created for!

     "Can you do anything for her?" Valentine asked, praying that the answer would be simple.

     The doctor began scribbling on a pad. He would like to tell the earl what
he
would do if it were his own wife: exercise his legal right as a husband and ignore her protests. Instead, Dr. Hare said, "I prescribe a mild bromide. It will relax her. Most of these cases stem from tension in the, ah, pelvis. Usually a dose or two of this will clear up the problem." He snapped off the page and handed it to Valentine.

     When Valentine emerged from the clapboard and corrugated tin building and paused to shield his eyes from the bright equatorial sun, he drew in a deep breath. He felt like shouting for joy.

     He drank in the unique light of East Africa, a lumination that, for Valentine, sharpened outlines, details, and colors. Because of the altitude, the fact that Nairobi was five thousand feet above sea level, the air was crystal
pure; no industrial pollution soiled it, and the few motorcars that rattled along Nairobi's dirt streets coughed negligible fumes.

     When Valentine had first arrived with the 25th Royal Fusiliers, to fight the Germans down near the border, he had been spellbound by the light. It was not only bright, he had realized, but light in the sense of having no weight. Luminosity, he decided, could have density, like any object. The sunlight of England, for instance, was bogged down by smoke, river mists, fog, and salt air from the sea, but the sunlight of British East Africa was unsullied and buoyant, weightless, lending an almost supernatural crispness to shapes and textures. Even the most mundane object took on a certain glory. The grizzled old prospectors on their bony donkeys, the dusty black Africans whiling away the noon, and the prosaic old wood and tin buildings, weathered and coated with grime—all seemed washed in an inexplicable splendor.

     Valentine Treverton loved Nairobi. Having once been blinded by the light of this infant town in the sun, he knew he could never live in England again.

     But there was more to Nairobi than its light. It was a living, breathing, pulsating town with, Valentine was certain, a brilliant future. Although the end of the war had sent the king's troops home, ending the four-year boom, a new wave of fresh population now washed up on East Africa's shores—exmilitary men flocking to the Highlands with land grants from the Crown, under the new Soldier Settlement Scheme; Boers from South Africa in their covered wagons and long mule trains; shifty-eyed hustlers and their counterpart suckers all looking for a quick way to make money; the turbaned Indians with their dusky wives and parade of children trailing behind; the white settler who came to make a new life; the strutting young officials in clean, pressed khaki uniforms, wearing big cork helmets with shiny badges in front and long, sweeping rear brims like otters' tails—and finally, in the middle of them all, serene and of blank expression, with seemingly nothing more to do than squat in the dust and stare, was the African, who had been here long before the others had even thought of coming.

     Nairobi was a rough place where nearly every man carried a gun, where fires were constantly breaking out, where the Indian bazaar was
overcrowded and filthy and the source of epidemics. It was a crude town crowded with oxcarts, riders on horseback, rickshas, and the occasional Model T. And it was the only town where Valentine, the earl of Treverton, felt he truly belonged.