Green City in the Sun (45 page)

     He had not wanted the job, but his mother had encouraged him to take it, reminding him of the Kikuyu proverb that said, "It is the well-fed lion that studies the herd."

     David could now hear the grinding of truck motors up on the ridge. The southern acres were being harvested, and the berries were being taken down to the shed, where he was deafened all day long by the roar of processing machinery. Up on that ridge, with bent backs and fingers raw from picking, Kikuyu women and children plucked the red berries from the three-quarter-million trees and filled their sacks.

     He lifted his face to the pale blue sky and thought,
That is my land...

     But David wanted more than land. He wanted his manhood back, and the manhood of his people.

     "We are not the white man's equals!" he had cried at the last political rally, his handsome black face, the image of his warrior father's, cast in the glow of torchlight. "In Nairobi we are restricted where we may walk. The white man has the run of the city;
we
are not allowed to cross River Road. If we pass a white man and do not lift our hat, he has the right to give us his boot in our backside. There are signs on shops and eating places that say, 'No dogs and Africans allowed.' We are not permitted to wear shoes or long trousers but must do with bare feet and shorts like little boys because they tell us we must not aspire to things we cannot afford to buy. The white men take our women as mistresses and prostitutes, but if an African shakes the hand of a white woman, even if in friendship and with her consent, it means a prison term for him! Not even in the afterlife are we equal, for are we not buried in
separate graveyards?"

     And then, just when the young crowd was at its hottest and David had stirred their blood, he had made his one fatal mistake. "The time has come," he had shouted, "for leadership to be removed from the ineffectual and useless chiefs and handed over to us educated young men!"

     That was when Chief John Muchina, the only man in all Kenya whom David feared, had stepped in and broken up the rally.

     David hated John Muchina. The man had grown fat on collaboration with the imperialist overlords. He played both sides, placating his simpleminded people with a few roads, a school here and there, pleasing the whites with his bootlicking ways, and in the middle growing rich off both. John Muchina was a Kikuyu elder from the Karatina area; he owned nineteen wives, five hundred head of cattle, a stone house, and a motorcar. He was what the white men called "a good nigger," and as Chief of the Nyeri District, one of the most powerful men in the colony, Muchina had the authority to put David Mathenge in prison—to be at the mercy of interrogation/ torture.

     But David was no fool. When he had called for today's meeting of the YKA he had made certain first that Chief John Muchina was going to be down in Nairobi deeply involved with the Chief Native Commissioner.

     As he strode across the dusty ground to fetch a gourd of goat's milk from his mother's hut, David was stopped by the sight of two horses that
suddenly appeared on Bwana Lordy's polo field. When they galloped nearer, David recognized the riders. And he was surprised. Bwana Geoffrey was no stranger to the Treverton Estate, but Memsaab Mona had been away at school in Nairobi. David had not seen her for three years; he now stared at her, the girl who had dared him to go into the surgery hut.

     "G
IVE OVER
, M
ONA
!" Geoffrey whooped, swinging his polo mallet high in the air. "Make way for a champion!"

     She galloped ahead of him and reined in her horse at the last minute, causing his pony to shy. She swung her mallet and sent the ball flying. Mona then raced down the field toward the goalposts at the north end with Geoffrey close behind. They made a lot of noise and kicked up a lot of grass sods in their scramble for the ball. This was the end of the field that abutted Grace Treverton's land. On the other side of the fence lay the new road that ran between the towering gates of the mission. Beyond those gates, the cinderblock buildings with their iron roofs could be seen among trees. Inside one of those stone bungalows, working in two modern operating theaters and tending patients in a hundred beds, Grace's well-trained medical staff could hear the calls of the two on the nearby polo field and the crack of a hit ball.

     Now Geoffrey pushed his mount back down the field toward his own goal; Mona flew after him, mallet ready to swing. They laughed breathlessly and shouted good-natured insults, each recognizing the other's ability and skill. Geoffrey Donald, twenty-five years old, had a rating of four and was a Number Three, his team's best player. Mona's position was Number One and rated a minus one, but she was only eighteen and had been playing the game for just a year. She was rapidly making progress and a reputation for herself in female polo and was spending these weeks after graduation in practice for the big tournament that was going to be held during Nairobi Race Week.

     They reached the south end of the field, where David Mathenge watched them through the fence. Mona nearly had a clear shot when Geoffrey's horse wheeled about unexpectedly to the left, surprising her Arabian and causing
it to rear. Startled, Mona was thrown from her saddle, and she landed on the ground flat on her back.

     Geoffrey was immediately at her side. "Mona!" He gathered her into his arms. "Mona?"

     Her eyelids fluttered. She had difficulty focusing. Then she drew in a breath and laughed.

     "Are you all right?"

     "I... think so. Just got the wind knocked out of me. No harm done."

     He helped her to her feet. She leaned against him, feeling a bit dizzy. "You're sure?" he said. And when she raised her face to say yes, he kissed her.

     It caught her off guard. Mona had never been kissed before, and she had never dreamed Geoffrey Donald would be the first to do it. So she let him. And it was a long one, with his arms going around her and pulling her against him. But when his tongue touched her closed lips, she drew abruptly back. "Geoffrey!" she said with a laugh.

     "I'm in love with you, Mona. Marry me."

     "Geoff—"

     "You know it's what they've been expecting. It's been understood between our two families for years that you and I would get married."

     Suddenly annoyed, Mona pulled away from his arms and brushed grass off her riding pants. Yes, she knew about the "understanding" between the two families, and she had never given it the least thought. Mona knew that her parents wouldn't let her marry just "anyone." She was the daughter of a lord; her full title was Lady Mona Treverton. Geoffrey Donald only just qualified because he was very rich and because his father had been knighted for bravery in the war. But what about marrying for love? What about asking Mona what
she
wanted?

     But even if they did ask her, Mona would not know what to say.

     For six years she had been attending a girls' boarding school in Nairobi. Whenever she came home for holidays, her only contact with boys was at large gatherings when Bellatu was packed with people. She hadn't had an opportunity to develop a special friendship with a boy or to curry a schoolgirl crush. In those six years she had occasionally encountered Geoffrey Donald, a roughly cut, unpolished hunter/ rancher who worked Kilima
Simba when he felt like it, then disappeared for months on safari. Those times they had met he had been politely indifferent to her, having seen no doubt just another awkward girl who was all eyes and knees and who sat with her cake plate on her lap like an unwanted guest. And then, last year, things changed. Geoffrey came to her seventeenth birthday party, given not to please Mona but as another excuse for her parents to have a hundred guests to Bellatu, and he had looked at her as if they had never met. To Mona's surprise, two letters had come to her at the school after that, one from the Sudan, where Geoffrey was doing herd control, the other from Tanganyika, where he was hunting lion on the Serengeti. Finally, when she had come home from school once and for all a few weeks ago, Geoffrey had appeared, looking a little more combed and pressed than usual, and now he was almost a permanent fixture around the estate.

     Mona was flattered. She had never received so much attention in her life. Geoffrey was good-looking—not as much so as his father, Sir James, but still terribly attractive. He led a romantic, adventurous life, owned a very prosperous cattle ranch, and was generally admired by everyone. But Mona wasn't in love with him.

     "I say," said Geoffrey, "who's that?"

     Mona looked through the goalposts at David Mathenge, who stood between the two huts that abutted the polo field fence. "Nobody. Just one of my father's boys."

     "I must say, he's a sullen-looking chap. I don't think I care for the way he's watching us."

     "Come on, Geoffrey. Let's get back up to the house."

     But Geoffrey remained where he was. "I'll bet we shocked him with our kiss! They don't kiss, you know. And they don't know what they're missing!"

     Mona felt suddenly uncomfortable. David stood in the smoky light of early morning, his naked chest and long limbs resembling those of the Masai warriors she had seen in Nairobi. Strangely, his khaki shorts struck Mona as a mockery—but to whom, to him or to herself, she didn't know.

     "Let's shock him again, shall we?" Geoffrey said.

     Mona said, "No," too quickly. Then: "Yes," and she impulsively put her arms around Geoffrey's neck.

     
They don't know what they're missing
, Geoffrey had said. Unexpectedly Mona remembered an afternoon of a few weeks ago in her aunt's cottage. Grace had befriended two penniless archaeologists, and she was trying to raise money to fund their digs in Kenya, so she had put on an Indian bun-and-treacle tea for the Leakeys, and during the course of the little party Louis Leakey had spoken knowledgeably and frankly of the Africans.

     "It is considered a disgrace," Dr. Leakey had said, "for an African husband not to give his wife complete sexual satisfaction. Prior to marriage the young man is instructed in exactly what to do and what not to do, while his bride is taught by her mother all the best positions and whatever is necessary for an exciting and gratifying sex life."

     
I doubt David Mathenge is shocked by our kiss
, Mona thought. And then added on a deeper, more secret level of her mind:
Our cool, unexciting kiss.

     Geoffrey drew back but continued to hold her by the arms, close to him. He looked into her eyes and said, "You will marry me, won't you, Mona?"

     She felt her annoyance rise again. Was this his idea of romance? The rather accidental meeting of lips on a polo field? Then she thought:
But what
do
I want anyway?
Mona had never experienced sexual excitement, had never mooned over a film star the way the girls at school had, never reveled in delicious fantasies or felt the electricity of "his touch." All Mona ever felt inside was a sort of detachment, perhaps even a bit of impatience with the whole thing, and it was starting to worry her.

     In fact, it was starting to frighten her. She was turning out to be just like her mother....

     "What do you say, darling?"

     "I ... don't know what to say, Geoffrey." His nearness felt strange. In a way it made her giddy; in another way it was unpleasant. The giddiness was not due to the fact that he was a man but simply that he was another human being. Mona wasn't used to physical contact with others. Her father had never hugged her, her mother only rarely; that left Aunt Grace and her brother, Arthur, the only two people whose bodies she had ever felt. Now she was feeling Geoffrey's. And she didn't know if she liked it or not.

     "I need time," she said, acutely aware of the grooms leading the horses
away, of the chaps stamping the sods back onto the field, of the day growing bright, of David Mathenge watching her.

     Suddenly she resented him, the boy who had argued with her years ago over whose land this really was, who had glared miserably at her as she lay in his bed in his mother's hut, recovering from her wounds gotten in the fire. All of a sudden David Mathenge represented all of Mona's problems; he symbolized the source of all her misery. He hadn't
had
to show up that night at the surgery hut so that as a consequence, Mona got badly hurt in the fire and now bore ugly scars that kept her out of swimsuits and made her fear that any lover she had would be repulsed by them.
He
was the root of her unhappiness—David Mathenge, who was always looking so proud when surely he had nothing in the world to be proud of.

     She pulled abruptly away from Geoffrey, put her hands on her hips, and called out, "What are you staring at?"

     Geoffrey turned around. "Is he still there? I'll send him off."

     "No. I'll do it. He's one of ours." Mona walked up to the fence and said, "Did you wish to speak with us?"

     "No," David said quietly.

     "No,
what?"
said Geoffrey, coming up. "Show some respect, boy."