Green City in the Sun (87 page)

     "Did you search down by the river?" Mona asked the governess.

     "I did, Mrs. Treverton. Your daughter is nowhere to be found."

     Mona scowled as she spooned out the tea. Until earlier this year she had not had to bother much about Deborah. The child had lived almost
constantly in the girls' boarding school. But now that white schools were being threatened with racial integration and settlers were pulling their children out and thus closing the schools, Deborah had to receive her schooling at home.

     And Mona didn't want her daughter at home.

     "Have you any ideas where I should look, Mrs. Treverton?"

     The title of Mrs. was the governess's choosing. Mona decided that it made Mrs. Waddell feel better because it lent an air of respectability to her job. Certainly she knew that Mona was not married and that her child was a bastard. The whole colony knew it.

     Mona remembered little of the night of David's death. She was told afterward that she had briefly gone out of her mind and that Tim had found her up here, going through her mother's things, searching for something. Mona didn't remember Tim's making love to her; he never spoke of it and never gave any indication that he wished to try it a second time. When, three months later, Mona had discovered she was pregnant, she was stunned.

     Tim had been upset by the news. He had made a gallant, mumbled proposal of marriage. To his infinite relief Mona had refused him, saying that as they weren't in love and that as neither was cut out for marriage, it was an unnecessary and impractical idea. She had carried the baby indifferently for the next six months and had then named her, as her own mother had named her Mona, for a character in a book. From the moment Aunt Grace placed the baby in her arms, Mona felt no love for it.

     "I was that surprised!" Mrs. Waddell said.

     Mona looked at her. The governess had been talking, but Mona hadn't been listening. No doubt it was another string of complaints. Mrs. Waddell seemed to feel it her duty to report to Mona the latest "incidents."

     "There we were," she went on, "Gladys Ormsby and I, with our flat tire and stranded on the road, when along comes a truckful of Africans. Instead of helping us, as they would have done in former times, they shout, 'Get out of the way, white bitches!' "

     Mona put the tea on the table, found some biscuits in a tin, and sat down with the governess.

     "Can you imagine?" Mrs. Waddell said as she helped herself. "They're
spending over a quarter of a million pounds to enlarge the LegCo building. The African members are demanding it. Well, I suppose hot air does take up a lot of room!"

     Mona gazed out the window, at the sunlight on dusty flowers, the yellowed grass, the weeds. She had a hard enough time keeping an adequate number of field hands working on the coffee; there just wasn't enough in the budget to hire a proper gardener.

     "Have you heard that Tom Westfall sold out? To Kikuyu no less! That's the end of
that
farm."

     Mona knew what Mrs. Waddell was referring to. Because of the rapid changeover, with Africans grabbing up land and the Europeans making hasty retreats, the transition was proving disastrous for the farms.

     When Jomo had announced that in order to divert a second Mau Mau, which was brewing, thirty thousand Africans were to be settled on white land before independence, which was three months away, two hundred white families throughout the Rift Valley had received payment from the British government and relinquished farms they had built with their own hands many years ago. The Africans had moved in with the speed of locusts.

     "I've heard it is simply ruinous," Mrs. Waddell said. "They've got chickens on the mantelpieces and goats in the bedrooms! And nothing gets mended, of course. I passed by the Collier homestead last week—shocking. Poor Trudie's roses all trampled. Her vegetable garden completely shot. Windows broken, doors hanging off hinges. And a charcoal fire in the middle of her living room! Her heart would break if she saw it. But Trudy's in Rhodesia now and well out of it. I ask you, Mrs. Treverton, if it's this bad now, what will it be like
after
independence?"

     Mona had no idea, but it was the major concern among those whites who were still in Kenya. Every day Africans who had once been servile and obsequious were growing bold and impudent. She heard of whites being forced off sidewalks and being called names, of having their livestock stolen and carted away in broad daylight. The Africans were suddenly a race gone mad. It was as if independence were a strong liquor. "This is
our
home now" was the general feeling. "And you whites might as well get out because we won't tolerate you anymore."

     Was this the beautiful future David had envisioned for himself and Mona?

     "In December," the governess said, "the British police are going to turn their authority over to the Africans.
Then
whom do we call when there's trouble?"

     That was precisely why Alice Hopkins had sold her huge ranch in the Rift—the one she had rescued when she was only sixteen—and moved down to Australia. She had seen terrible days ahead, in which the Africans, free from the arm of British law, were going to go on an antiwhite rampage of revenge and retribution.

     And now Tim, too, was going to join his sister on her new sheep farm.

     "Sell up, Mona," he had said. "You won't survive. Bellatu hasn't made a profit in years. Let the wogs have it. Come down to Tasmania and live with Alice and me."

     But Mona was not going to sell. If she were the last white in Kenya, she would never sell.

     "Well, Mrs. Treverton," the governess said as she finished her tea and wished there were proper sandwiches to go with it, "I suppose I'd best tell you my own news now. Mr. Waddell and I have decided to go down to South Africa and live with our daughter. We've lived in Kenya for thirty years, you know. Our children were born here. We turned a wilderness into a paradise. We made crops grow where there was only rock-hard ground. We poured money and industry into this colony. But now we're no longer welcome. We've sold the farm to Africans. And I want to be gone before I see what they do to it."

     Mona was not surprised. Mrs. Waddell was the third governess she had hired for Deborah in the last few months. Kenya was a sinking ship, and all hands were deserting.

     "When will you be leaving?"

     "In two weeks. Just wanted to give you fair warning, on account of your daughter."

     When her employer said nothing more but lapsed into silence, Mrs. Waddell helped herself to another biscuit and gave a mental shrug. Mrs. Treverton was a strange duck, the governess thought, living here on this
derelict old estate and fighting to keep it going when everyone who had eyes could see what a futile struggle it was. Mrs. Treverton couldn't get enough Africans to work for her because they all were demanding higher pay. The quality of her coffee had declined as a result, so that she didn't receive sufficient world trade prices. It was a mystery to Mrs. Waddell why Mona Treverton held on so tenaciously to a losing farm, living alone in this white elephant of a house, all by herself with no husband and a wild, bastard daughter, when there were droves of gullible Africans waiting to buy it from her.

     If Mona chose to explain her position, she would have told Mrs. Waddell that she stayed because Bellatu was all she had left—the impartial, unjudging land. There were no people in Mona's solitary life; she had no friends, no one she cared about. Any love or compassion or devotion she had ever felt had died with David and their baby.

     When Mona had awakened that next morning to be told about her strange flight to her parents' bedroom—her momentary insanity—she had discovered a cold pain in the middle of her chest. And it was a pain that she knew would always be there.

     Mona did not recover from her grief as her aunt Grace had done after six months of mourning for James Donald. Mona's indomitable aunt had allowed herself half a year of deep grief; then she had picked herself up, squared her shoulders, and resumed command of her mission and its needy population. Grace had the enviable capacity for regenerating love, Mona thought, as a lizard does a new tail. But Mona's own capacity for loving, once cut off, would never come back. And without love, there could be no people in her life. Only the farm.

     She suddenly understood why her mother had chosen suicide after Carlo Nobili's death.

     Although Mona had not had the courage to take her own life, she had retreated into a kind of suicide nonetheless. She saw her aunt occasionally, and Geoffrey and Tim once in a long while, but Mona had withdrawn into a reclusive life, dedicating herself to the five thousand acres of soil and enfeebled coffee trees that had been left to her. The baby, Deborah, she had turned over to a nursemaid the day she was born, and Mona never touched
her again. The child, she believed, had sprung from a sterile, almost perverse act and had no right to live.

     But now Deborah was in the house because the schools were closing, and governesses did not stay long. Mona was suddenly faced with a very unpleasant situation.

     "If you'll pardon my saying so," Mrs. Waddell said, "you'd do well to sell up and leave with the rest of us, Mrs. Treverton. Come December, this isn't going to be a healthy climate for anyone with white skin."

     But Mona said, "I shall never sell," as she cleared the tea dishes. "I was born in Kenya; this is my home. My father did more for this country than a million Africans ever did. He
built
Kenya, Mrs. Waddell. I have more right to be in this country than those people out there who have done nothing more than live in mud huts all their lives."

     Mona paused at the sink and then turned around. "In fact," she said quietly but with a light behind her dark eyes, "it is the Africans who should leave. They don't deserve this rich and beautiful land. They have done nothing to earn Kenya. They will only spoil it and let it go to ruin. When my father came here, they were living in huts made of cow dung and wearing animal skins. They were grubbing out a meager existence as they had for centuries, with no further ambition than tomorrow's beer drink. And they would still be living like that today if the whites had never come to Kenya. We planted farms and built dams and paved roads and gave them medicine and books! We have put Kenya on the bloody map, and
they are telling us to leave!"

     Mrs. Waddell stared at her employer. Those were the most words she had ever heard Mrs. Treverton say at one time. And with such emotion! Who would have thought it, in a person whom all the colony regarded as hard and unfeeling?

     Suddenly the governess recalled something she had once heard years ago: a nasty bit of gossip involving Mona Treverton and an African. But not even Mrs. Waddell, who did cherish such unsavory tidbits now and then, could swallow that distasteful story. It was unthinkable—the daughter of the earl having it on with her Kikuyu manager!

     But now, as she heard the bitterness in Mrs. Treverton's voice and saw
the passion in her eyes, Mrs. Waddell realized that her employer harbored some deep, extraordinary hatred for the Africans, and so she wondered if that horrible little rumor had been true.

     Finally the governess left, and Mona was alone again. She stood at the sink, clutching its edge as if to keep from drowning. The cold pain in her chest had come back. It rose and filled her throat. She couldn't breathe; she felt as if she were choking.

     But she fought it down and was soon in control again. Nine years ago, right after David's death, these spells had alarmed Grace, who had run an electrocardiogram on her niece. But Mona's heart—her
physical
heart—was found to be in excellent health. The constant pain and episodes of breathlessness stemmed from a spiritual source that Grace's modern medicine could not touch.

     "You must let yourself cry, Mona," Grace had said. "You're bottling it up, and that's not good."

     But Mona had lost the ability to cry. When David died in her arms, she had retreated into a kind of gray shock that had continued to envelop her long after the dead had been buried and Mau Mau been brought to an end. After her night with Tim not one tear had been shed by Mona for the deaths of David and their baby.

     Mona heard a sound overhead.

     She looked up at the ceiling and listened.

     There was another sound and the drone of muffled voices.

     In her parents' bedroom!

     Mona ran from the kitchen and up the stairs.

     D
EBORAH HAD LEARNED
about locks and keys in school. It had been part of the lesson on tying shoes, pouring one's own milk, how to carry scissors safely. A few months ago, all alone in the house and investigating, Deborah had come across an old tarnished set of keys, hidden away in a cupboard. She had tried matching them to various locks, as Miss Naismith had taught her, and had managed to open the door of this fabulous fairy tale bedroom.

     When Deborah first set eyes upon the canopy bed with its ruffles, the window seat crowded with satin pillows, the dusty vanity table cluttered with beautiful old perfume bottles, she had thought she had stumbled upon the secret tower of a fairy tale princess. But then Deborah had realized that no one lived here and that therefore, she must be free to explore its wonderful treasures.