Green City in the Sun (88 page)

     She had found old sequined gowns and dresses made of lace and gauze and jeweled tiaras and feather boas. She had played with the dried cakes of mascara and lipstick that crumbled when she touched them. She had opened the bottles and had smelled the vestiges of exquisite perfumes. And she had wondered, her child's imagination conjuring up Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty, what sort of princess had lived here.

     Now she shared her secret room with Christopher Mathenge, her new best friend.

     They were sitting on the floor and going through what Deborah called the "paper box." It was small and wooden and contained packets of old yellowed photographs, letters, greeting cards, mementos from occasions Deborah knew nothing about. Since she didn't know who any of the people in the pictures were, she made up names and stories for them.

     "This is me," she said, showing one to Christopher. Deborah had chosen to identify with the little girl in the old-fashioned sun helmet and funny clothes, not realizing that she indeed shared a strong resemblance with her. The girl was sitting among trees next to a blond, sad-eyed woman who had a monkey in her lap. There was something about their faces that made Deborah stare for hours; they both looked so unhappy. On the back of the photograph was written "Rose and daughter, 1927."

     "Oh!" Deborah said as she pulled a thin little book out of the box. "Here's one
you
can be! See? You even look like him!"

     Christopher was surprised to see that what Deborah held out to him was a passbook, very like the one his mother had carried for years. He stared at the face in the photo.

     "Who is it?" Deborah asked. "Can you read the name?"

     Christopher was nonplussed. The man's name was David Mathenge.

     "But that's
your
last name!" Deborah said. She didn't understand about
last names, had no idea that she should not have the same surname as her mother's parents. Deborah knew nothing about marriage and fathers and how women's last names changed when they became wives. She assumed that her own situation was the way it was with all mothers and daughters.

     Christopher couldn't take his eyes away from the photo. There was a resemblance, yes, but his fascination went further: The passbook gave the man's home as the Nyeri District, and his parents as Chief Kabiru Mathenge and Wachera Mathenge.

     Christopher knew nothing about his own father—what his name was, who he had been, or when and why he had died. His mother always refused to talk about him. When she had told stories to Christopher and Sarah, first in the Kamiti camp, which Christopher barely remembered and where his sister was born, and then later in the Hola camp, where they lived for five years, his mother only ever told tales of his grandmother, the medicine woman, and of the chief who lived long ago, the first Mathenge.

     But this man David ...

     "You can keep it if you like," Deborah said when she saw how Christopher held on to the passbook.

     He carefully tucked it into the waistband of his shorts.

     As Deborah reached into the drawer to pull out more treasure, the light from the open doorway was suddenly cut off.

     M
ONA STARED IN
disbelief.

     This room which she had locked up nine years ago now stood open to the hallway light. Familiar objects, for so long put out of her mind, seemed to loom up before her in stablike waves of memory. Her mother's vanity table, where Rose would sit for hours, ignoring her daughter while Njeri combed out her long platinum hair. Valentine's rhinoceros whip, hanging on the wall, the symbol of his totalitarian power over her and Bellatu. And the big canopy bed where generations of Trevertons had been conceived—Mona herself, in England, forty-five years ago, and Deborah, her daughter, the night David had died.

     Mona looked down, stunned, at the barefoot little girl with tanned limbs and masses of black hair who now lifted her face up to the light like a nut-brown sunflower. "Hello, Mummy," the child said.

     Mona couldn't speak. Nine years ago she had closed this door and turned the key in the lock, sealing inside all her unbearable memories and private demons. She had walked away from this terrible room with its dusty secrets, a woman free of the past, feeling safe as long as the devils were never let loose.

     But now the room stood wide open and menacing, its security breached by a little girl who had been created only because David had died.

     "How dare you!" Mona said.

     A look of bewilderment crossed Deborah's face. "I was just showing my new friend—" was all she had a chance to say before her mother swooped down, seized her in a painful grip, and dragged her to her feet. Startled, Deborah cried out. When her mother started to slap her, she tried to protect herself with her free arm.

     "No!" shouted Christopher in Swahili. "Stop!"

     Mona looked up. The light from the hallway fell over the African boy. She stared at him. Her grip loosened on Deborah.

     She frowned. "David?" she whispered.

     And then memories flooded back—the older, more deeply buried ones: the burning surgery hut; the necklace from Uganda.

     The room seemed to tilt. The cold pain returned to her chest, and it rose in her throat, choking her. She groped for the doorjamb.

     Deborah, who stood rubbing her arm and trying not to cry, said, "This is my best friend, Mummy. His name is Christopher Mathenge, and he lives with the medicine woman who's his grandmother."

     Mona couldn't breathe. She pressed her hand to her chest.
David's son!

     Christopher's wide, terrified eyes watched the woman in the doorway. She was looking at him in a strange way, her eyes filling with tears. When she took a step toward him, he retreated.

     "David," she murmured.

     He thought of the passbook in his waistband.

     Mona reached out, and Christopher stumbled backward, bumping against one of the bedposts.

     She came closer. The two children watched in fear and fascination, the way her arms went out to him, the tears streaming down her face. When she was within inches of the boy, Deborah and Christopher held their breath.

     And then Deborah was astonished to see a tender smile come to her mother's face, a face the girl had only ever known as hard and unchanging.

     "David's son," Mona said softly, a tone of wonder in her voice.

     Christopher, pressed against the bedpost, steeled himself when her hands came up and took gentle hold of his face.

     A marveling look came into Mona's tear-filled eyes as she studied those sweetly familiar lines: the furrow between the brows; the almond-shaped eyes; the forward slung jaw that was the legacy of Masai warriors. Christopher was still just a boy, but the man he would one day be could be seen. And, Mona saw, he was going to look very much like David.

     "David's son," she said again with her sorrowful smile. "He lives in you. He is not dead after all..."

     Christopher's heart raced as the woman came even nearer, her cool hands on his cheeks, until her face was inches from his.

     Then she bent and kissed him very gently on the mouth.

     When Mona drew back, her face seemed to collapse, and a sob escaped her throat.

     She touched him one last time—to trace a fingertip along the crease from his nose to the corner of his mouth—then turned and ran from the room.

A
FTER ALL THESE YEARS
G
EOFFREY
D
ONALD STILL DESIRED
Mona Treverton.

     As they sped along the highway into the brilliant equatorial sun, the Land-Rover startling herds of zebra and antelope on the roadside, Geoffrey glanced frequently at the woman sitting next to him. Mona was in the front seat between Aunt Grace and him, her expression fixed behind enormous sunglasses. She had lost weight and grown pale in the past few weeks, for reasons unknown to Geoffrey, but he liked her that way. At forty-four Mona was just as appealing, he thought, as she had ever been.

     His anger and bitterness toward her, spawned on the night of his father's death, had faded. The years had mended his grief and had allowed his old appetite for her to return, especially as his wife got plumper and more indolent with each passing year, since the birth of Terry, their last child. It was not, of course, as if Mona gave him any encouragement or even really seemed to be aware of him beyond a purely superficial, almost afterthought relationship. But that was part of what made her fascinating—her aloofness
and unavailability. Geoffrey Donald was, at fifty-one, ruggedly lean and sunburned, with silver in his hair and a charm that appealed to his female clients. His conquests were too easy and many; he had become bored and jaded in the area of romance. But Mona's apparent uninterest and her nine years of celibacy made the chase suddenly fresh and exciting. When she had agreed to come along on this safari into the Masai wilderness, Geoffrey's blood had raced with renewed lust and hope.

     He had a surprise for her at the end of the road.

     They were heading for Kilima Simba Safari Camp, a lonely outpost nestled in an outcropping of rock about twenty miles from the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. It lay in the heart of the Masai Amboseli Game Reserve, a vast tract of wilderness owned and overseen by the Masai tribe, whose grazing land this was. The road along which Geoffrey now drove in the heat of the day, with Deborah and Terry bouncing around in the back of the Rover like sacks of grain, was barely more than a ribbon of dirt through flat, yellow savanna. In the distance, mauve and snow-capped, Mount Kilimanjaro rose to a cloudless sky. As far as the eye could see, there were no signs of civilization; flat-topped thorn trees dotted the landscape; impalas and bushbucks grazed among the grasses; giraffes loped in graceful insouciance; a pride of lions basked under a tree. This was one of the richest game areas in Africa, and Geoffrey Donald was going to capitalize on it.

     "A game lodge!" he had explained to Mona. "Tents just aren't appealing to everyone. Few of my clients find the camp pleasurable after a day or two, what with cots and mosquitoes to deal with, and no proper toilet facilities. I tried to think of ways to improve things, to get more tourists out here, and then it came to me. A resort, right in the middle of the African bush!"

     Only a handful of Geoffrey's friends thought the idea had any worth. Most thought it would fail, reminding him that tourism was going to vanish from Kenya after independence. "This won't be a safe place for whites," they said. "The whole world knows what savagery this country is going to descend to after Her Majesty's government pulls out."

     But Geoffrey saw things differently. "Old Jomo isn't crazy or stupid," he argued. "He knows he needs us. Europeans still monopolize all the large corporations, the banks, the hotels in Kenya. He knows he has to keep us on
and keep us happy if he expects to maintain a stable economy. Without us and our connections and our capital and know-how, Kenya would collapse like a house of cards, and the wogs know it!"

     It was something that was starting to prove true. In the five months since Kenyatta had taken over as prime minister, none of the vengeful reprisals the settlers had feared had come to pass. Indeed, to everyone's surprise Kenyatta was calling for moderate policies and peaceful coexistence between the races, and he had demonstrated the sincerity of his words by initiating a partnership with the European Farmers Association.

     Nonetheless, Geoffrey's friends argued, Kenya was not yet fully independent. British troops were still here. Wait until next month, they said, when the government was officially handed over to the Africans,
then
see what happened.

     But Geoffrey was determined. Sensing the direction of the "wind of change," he had sold the Donald cattle ranch near Nanyuki and had set himself up in Nairobi as a tour agent. When not dividing his time between his luxurious Parklands residence and his house in Nyeri, where Ilse lived with little Terry, Geoffrey met his few intrepid vacationers at the airport and escorted them all over Kenya in a convoy of Land-Rovers.