The Flame Trees of Thika (18 page)

‘And this man,’ Kupanya asked, ‘if we can find him, he must go to Fort Hall?’

‘Certainly.’

‘And then?’

‘There will be a case, with a judge, and if he is guilty, he will go to prison.’

‘And if he is not?’

‘He will be set free, but then the askaris will come and look for the real culprit, and they will go on looking till they find him. So you need not think you can satisfy us with an innocent man, and that will be the end of it.’

‘Why should I do such a thing?’ Kupanya asked in shocked tones. ‘Am I not a chief, and is my first wish not to help the Government?’

‘In that case your task is easy. You must find the murderer, and send him to the
D.C.
’

‘Have I the eyes of a spirit, not of a man? Can I see into the hearts of people and tell their business?’

‘Very well,’ Hereward replied in his no-nonsense tone, ‘I will send for the askaris.’

No one liked having the askaris in, they were as bad as locusts, and in some ways worse, for locusts did not eat rupees or menace daughters. Kupanya tapped the ground with his brass-tipped staff and looked thoughtful and sulky. After a conversation in Kikuyu among his fellow-elders he rose with dignity from his three-legged council-stool and said:

‘Wait, bwana. If God will help me, I will find the man.’ Then he stalked off, followed by several elders. The others remained squatting in a circle and passed round a horn filled with beer. Their eyes were rheumy and some of them grew sleepy as the day grew hot.

All sorts of people had by now crowded round the fig-tree to look at us. Tilly and Lettice had been provided with cushions on which they sat gracefully, their riding-skirts spread round them, in the shade. Many of the young Kikuyu men, who smelt powerfully and richly, though not unpleasantly, of rancid fat and red earth, wore short leather cloaks which failed to hide their
genitals; when they pressed too close, Hereward shooed them off, looking embarrassed.

‘Perhaps we should not have brought the ladies on this expedition,’ he murmured to Alec; but Tilly overheard.

‘Perhaps we should not have brought the gentlemen,’ she suggested, indicating a number of well-greased, shaven-headed girls who had nothing on but very small triangles of leather and strings of beads, and whose breasts were still half-formed and therefore firm and in the right position.

‘Nakedness doesn’t seem to matter when people are black or brown,’ Lettice remarked. ‘White bodies look like clay waiting to go into a kiln. Natives look as if they’ve been fired and finished; perhaps that’s why they don’t strike one as indecent.’

‘Lettice, please!’ Hereward remonstrated. ‘And in front of a child!’ He sounded deeply distressed. But then Kupanya returned, bringing in tow a slim, drooping lad who looked as if he might evaporate at any minute, or disintegrate into a puff of wind. His lips were large and loose and he wore a glazed, helpless expression.

‘This is the man!’ Kupanya announced in tones of doom, as if he had emerged from single-handed combat with Goliath in chains at his heels.

‘He doesn’t
look
like a murderer,’ Lettice remarked.

‘Nor do I expect he is one,’ said Ian.

‘Ask him,’ Kupanya said, gesturing grandly towards the subject of the conversation.

‘Did you kill my headman in the fight?’ demanded Hereward.

‘Yes, bwana.’

‘Why?’ The man looked up for the first time, quite startled, as if this were a new idea.

‘Why?’

‘Yes, why, idiot; one doesn’t kill people for no reason.’

There was a rapid exchange of Kikuyu remarks.

‘I killed him because he hit me first. I hit back, and he fell down and died.’

‘Well, that’ll be for the
D.C.
to decide. This man must come back with us today,’ Hereward ordered. The young man, as he turned to go, smiled and said in halting English:

‘Good night, sir. Save all sinners.’

‘Good heavens! Where did you learn that?’

‘Good morning, sir. God save the King.’

‘A mission-boy!’ cried Hereward.

‘Yes, bwana,’ the young man said, relapsing now into Swahili. ‘I can read a book, I can write a letter.’

‘It is a pity he did not stick to that,’ Alec remarked.

‘You see?’ said Hereward. ‘What did I say? First thieves, and now murderers.’

‘He still scarcely looks up to it,’ Lettice objected.

‘Just shows you, what these missions teach them. You’d better send two strong men with him, Kupanya, to see he doesn’t escape.’

‘He will not escape,’ Kupanya replied.

T
HE
guinea-fowl could not be shot until the sun was more than half-way down the sky and so we found a shady tree some way from Kupanya’s village for the picnic. In our circle of cool shade, as if under a rustling green parasol, we inhabited a different world from the sun-soaked Kikuyu ridges that stretched to meet a far, enormous sky, blue as a wild delphinium and decorated with vigorous clouds that threw shadows as large as islands on to the hillsides and valleys. It was as if we sat in a small, darkened auditorium gazing out at a stage which took in most of the world.

‘If one followed those little rivers to their birthplace,’ Lettice inquired, ‘where would one be?’

‘On top of the Aberdare mountains, where it’s bleak and cold and marshy, and the lions are said to have spots,’ Ian replied.

‘And down there?’ Lettice gestured with a sandwich towards the far distance where a brown smudge on the horizon showed us the beginning of the great plains.

‘The valley of the Tana, where there’s perhaps the finest concentration of game in all the world.’

‘I must go there one day,’ Lettice said.

‘You would find it unhealthy and hot.’

‘That is part of its attraction.’

Alec Wilson, with an air of plucking up his courage, observed: ‘That’s not the sort of thing you’re cut out for, Mrs Palmer. That’s to say, marching and camping and that sort of thing isn’t the life for a lady of your – for someone who – well, I mean…’ He grew not pink, but positively red, in his confusion.

‘For someone as incompetent as I?’

‘No, no, of course, I didn’t mean to imply…’

‘I’m sorry: I know you didn’t.’ She smiled at Alec with unusual warmth to make up for her remark.

‘You mean that Mrs Palmer is too good for Africa,’ Ian suggested. ‘You are probably right.’

‘That is rather a large claim,’ Lettice said.

‘Surely it isn’t a question of which is superior, Lettice or the continent of Africa,’ Tilly suggested. ‘It’s a question of adapting ourselves to the conditions.’

‘It might be dangerous to carry that too far,’ Lettice replied. ‘That is perhaps what the natives have done, I doubt if Hereward would like me to carry firewood about on my back with nothing on but some beads and a bit of greasy leather, and to share a hut with goats and hens.’

‘I have no wish for my wife to be a savage,’ Hereward agreed. Somehow one always got the impression that he was in uniform.

‘This is a savage country, so perhaps it might be better. An ability to sketch in water-colour and sing German
Lieder
is not very useful if there is an outbreak of plague or a puff-adder has got into the kitchen.’

‘There is no need for the womenfolk to concern themselves with such things,’ Hereward replied.

‘That is a very gallant attitude, but they do not always have men to do it for them. Whenever I look at a Kikuyu woman toiling up a hill with a baby and a load of produce on her back weighing about a hundred pounds, I feel guilty.’

‘How ridiculous!’ Hereward exclaimed. ‘They are only natives. Do you expect to lower yourself to their level?’

‘I sincerely hope I shall never have to try.’

‘Surely’, Tilly put in, ‘the idea is that they should rise to ours.’

‘Do you suppose’, Lettice mused, ‘that one day they will become adept at water-colour sketches and German
Lieder
?’

‘It seems unlikely,’ Robin reflected, watching a procession of three women, bent under their loads, plodding past us, their copper coils flashing back the sunlight, turning their shaven heads, gripped by leather bands, a little sideways to look at us with patient, bovine eyes.

‘Surely that’s the whole point of our being here,’ Tilly remarked. ‘We may have a sticky passage ourselves, but when we’ve knocked a bit of civilization into them, all this dirt and disease and superstition will go and they’ll live like decent people for the first time in their history.’ Tilly looked quite flushed and excited when she said this, as if it was something dear to her heart.

‘That is not the whole point of
my
being here,’ Alec Wilson put in, during a pause that followed. ‘I didn’t come to civilize anyone. I came to escape from the slavery one has at home if one doesn’t inherit anything. I mean to make a fortune if I can. Then I shall go home and spend it. If that helps to civilize anyone I shall be delighted, but surprised.’

‘Of course it will help indirectly,’ Tilly said.

‘They must have an example,’ Hereward agreed.

‘Do you think that we set an example?’ Lettice inquired.

‘I should have thought it was obvious, my dear. Even if it’s only a matter of soap and water, and clean houses, and rudimentary hygiene, and proper clothing and – well – decency.’

‘And the way the women get treated,’ Tilly added.

‘Mr Crawfurd hasn’t given an opinion,’ said Lettice.

‘Well, as to that, I don’t think Ahmed (for example) is at all likely to follow our lead where women are concerned. In fact, if there’s one thing that really shocks him, it’s the way our women behave.’

‘It hardly seems his place to be shocked,’ Hereward said.

‘He’s horrified (if that’s a better word) first of all at the way they answer back, and secondly at their idleness. To see a man working while a woman lolls about offends his sense of decency. And as for the way in which wives mix with other men, he thinks it quite shameless.’

Hereward went rather red and looked as if he was going to
splutter like a firework, but so many things occurred to him to say at once that he said nothing. Alec remarked soothingly:

‘Captain Palmer hasn’t told us yet why he came here – to set an example, or to make money.’

‘I came to play a small part in building a new Colony under the Crown. That seems to me a good enough reason for anyone. As for the natives, they are very fortunate to come under British rule.’

This declaration put a full-stop to the conversation, as Hereward’s remarks were apt to do, whereas with Lettice and Ian, or Robin and Tilly, talk would volley gently to and fro until halted by some external event. We lay under the tree in silence, watching the sky wink at us through gently-moving leaves and hearing the rustle of heavy-seeded grasses, the far tinkle of goat-bells, the never-ceasing chirruping of crickets that seemed to concentrate the essence of heat and brightness into sound. In this high afternoon, human noises were suspended and you could almost hear the earth drinking in the hard sunlight, and the frail, dry pattering of insects’ feet.

Ian lay on his back creating for himself, it almost seemed, with his bright hair, a little tarn of sunlight. It had become a fashion among the younger men (set I think by the Cole brothers, Berkeley and Galbraith) to wear round their shoulders one of the light, fine woollen shawls affected by the Somalis, and Ian had one, on which he was reclining, that exactly matched the sky. Lettice was propped on one elbow, scratching patterns in the soil with a twig. On Tilly’s dressing-table stood a little pin-tray made of mother-of-pearl whose cool, smooth, iridescent lustre, haunted by the ghosts of colour, was the nearest match that I had seen to Lettice’s complexion.

Ian was watching her with a look of concentration, almost of puzzlement. She raised her eyes and they gazed at one another in silence. Not long ago, Robin had blasted some rock out of the quarry. After he had lit the fuse, we had waited several hundred yards away for the bang. Now I had the same sort of feeling, as if we all waited for something big and dramatic; but of course there was nothing like that to come in this peaceful, drowsy afternoon lull under a tree.

An ant carrying a speck of food hurried across the dusty plain under Lettice’s eye. With a twig, she gently pushed it aside to
change its direction, but each time it turned back to resume the course on which it was set.

‘Such a little thing,’ she remarked. ‘And yet its resolution is stronger than mine. I shall tire of this battle of wills before the ant.’

‘You are playing the part of fortune, who is rightly called a woman,’ Ian said.

‘The part is too big for me.’ Lettice threw aside her twig. ‘Let the ant carry his prize to his family.’

They were silent for a little, Lettice tracing a pattern in the dust with a forefinger, while the probing sunlight, piercing the canopy of leaves, threw on her reclining form a dappled pattern of light and shade. I could not see whether Ian was watching her, or the world of sunshine outside. The others were busy with a conversation; when they paused, the crickets’ chirping, the goat-bells, the rustle of leaves wove themselves into’ a backdrop of sound. Ian spoke very quietly, so that I could hardly hear.

‘Lettice, you have me at your mercy like that wretched insect. I think that you have paralysed my will.’

‘I have done nothing,’ Lettice said gently, digging her forefinger into the ground.

‘You have existed. You exist now. And that is enough.’

‘Hush,’ Lettice murmured. ‘You are indiscreet.’

‘So is a volcano, so is a typhoon, so are the flames of a blast furnace. It is too late for discretion.’

‘Too late….’ Lettice echoed, in a voice that sounded stiff and strange. She was breathing quickly, as if she had walked uphill. There was a pause while she seemed intent on controlling her breathing; then she looked across at him and smiled.

‘You must not try to hypnotize me, Ian; you are like the Ancient Mariner. You must think of the ant. I only caused it inconvenience; then it hurried on.’

‘It knew where it was going to; that is the difference between ants and men. But now you have set me on my course.’