The Flame Trees of Thika (32 page)

‘Thank goodness you’re safe,’ Robin said, beaming with pleasure, after they had embraced. ‘I have missed you…. I’m planting out the coffee and everyone is hard at it, and the office work has got chaotic, and Sammy is away.’

‘It’s lovely to see you,’ Tilly responded. ‘And you look well…. Do you know I shot a lion: not a very large one, but definitely a lion: the skin is coming on with the safari, so we shan’t need another rug in the living-room.’

‘I’ve got the still in working order, except for one or two small details, and I think we shall be able to start on the geraniums in a week or two if this rain keeps on.’

‘In a way I didn’t want to shoot it, but it sloped off into a
donga
, and when I saw something tawny moving in the grass I let fly and hit it in the leg.’

‘We’ve had a bit of bad luck with the oxen, one broke its leg, and another died of colic, probably a poisonous plant, I should say; and the boys broke the axle of the water-cart, but I’ve made a start on installing the ram.’

Clearly it was more blessed, or at any rate more enjoyable, to give news than to receive it, and they continued in this independent vein for some time. Then Robin suddenly asked:

‘But what has happened to Lettice and Hereward?’

‘They’ve stayed behind at Nyeri – Hereward’s had an accident, and must go down to Nairobi as soon as he can be moved.’

When Robin asked what sort of accident, Tilly said a buffalo had charged him; and gave me her glass, telling me to get it refilled. We had lunch at the Blue Posts and rode back afterwards in the heat of the afternoon, which Tilly said was cool compared with the banks of the Guaso Nyiro river. They had shot many animals, it seemed; in fact it had been a successful safari except that a mysterious cloud had fallen over it towards the end.

‘And Ian?’ Robin inquired. ‘I suppose he is hardly sitting at Hereward’s bedside, giving him ice-packs and enemas?’

‘Ian is involved in a
shauri
about Ahmed.’

‘Ahmed! He’s in trouble, I suppose.’

‘No, it’s Ian who’s in trouble, up to a point. Ahmed went back to his tribe in Somaliland, or wherever he comes from.’

‘Ian will miss him.’

Tilly agreed, and added: ‘You must never breathe a word about all this.’

Everyone was delighted to see Tilly. Andrew had returned, limping, to his duties, and we now had a Masai houseboy as well. These haughty, long-shanked young men had shaved their pigtails when they donned the
kanzu
of office, and looked noble and heraldic in their green sashes, like figures from Egyptian friezes. Tilly said she never grew entirely used to seeing them in the house, it was as if one were to come across a couple of panthers in the boudoir. She had dosed them heavily when they had arrived for several kinds of parasite, and dressed several kinds of sore. They trod softly and were delicate in their movements, and seldom broke things, as the heavier-handed Kikuyu were apt to do, and they dusted with the care of a woman; there was, indeed, something strangely effeminate about the warriors of this aggressive, battle-hungry tribe. They greeted Tilly with an upraised arm, as if a chieftain had resumed his kingdom, but with reserve; the Kikuyu were more demonstrative, and full of questions about the lands she had travelled in, the lions she had shot, and the people she had encountered.

‘You see, we have looked after bwana very well,’ they said, giving themselves a share in all this goodwill. ‘We have seen that
he has not gone hungry and that his cattle and horses have not fallen sick, and that his shamba has thrived; and the
toto
also, we have looked after her.’

It must have been about a week later that Lettice, heralded an hour or two before by a note in her large sloping hand on royal blue paper, came over to see us. Most people did not notice me when they arrived, but Lettice always did; she kissed me and said:

‘You see, I was right: you have grown older since we’ve been away, and learnt many new things. But I am distressed to hear that you have had a great sorrow. It is just as sad for you to lose Twinkle, as it is for older people to lose their brothers or sisters or sons, and perhaps one’s first great sorrow is the worst of the lot. But Twinkle may be happier, even if you are not; and Ian is bringing you a new pet, not perhaps so lively as Twinkle, but with a charm of his own. He wears a handsome black and yellow armour, and comes from the dry country in the north and can only speak Somali, so you must keep him warm and teach him English. He is called Mohammed, and eats grass.’

Mohammed was a tortoise, and Ian would escort him to Thika in a few days.

‘He very nearly brought you two small eagle chicks as well. Do you remember them, Tilly – how he clambered up among the rocks to find the nest after he had killed the eagle with a single shot into the sky?’

‘Yes, it was a very fine shot,’ Tilly replied.

‘Ian shoots as great pianists can play, each note is perfect, there is never any muffing or the least failure of touch; it is a sort of genius. But he didn’t in the least want to shoot that eagle; he wouldn’t have done so if Hereward hadn’t challenged him in such a stupid way. “It has a nest somewhere in those rocks,” he said, do you remember? “Let it be.” Then Hereward sneered at him, and made it sound as if he had been boastful, which Ian never is, and so he put up his rifle almost without thinking, and the eagle fell among the rocks, and as it fell it gave a screech of rage, rather than pain. That cry made my blood run cold. I looked at Ian – he felt as I did, it was wanton and unlucky, he should have let the eagle be, and not allowed Hereward to provoke him. Ahmed was standing by, and I think that was when
he first…Well, never mind, the eagle is dead and cannot be put together, and later Ian found two chicks in a nest he said was very smelly, and brought them down. Do you remember how they tried to peck and scratch even though they were so small, and the fierceness of their yellow eyes? Ian didn’t think they would make good pets, especially as they would have needed mice and rats to eat, and even snakes and mongooses when they grew older; so he got you a tortoise instead.’

Tilly sent me on an errand which I knew she had invented to get me out of the way, so I loitered in the veranda to listen, in case the mystery should be explained.

‘I don’t know what to do, Tilly,’ Lettice said when I had gone. ‘I am in great agony of mind. I must go back to Nairobi and there I shall meet Ian, and either we must say good-bye and he will leave the country or…How dreadful it is to drift into a position where whatever you do, somebody must get hurt.’

‘I suppose it is a question of who would get hurt the most, or recover the soonest.’

‘I know how you would decide that, and everyone else would think the same, but I believe you are wrong. Hereward has something to hold on to; he will always be a soldier fighting for his country, and sometimes he will suffer defeats and be betrayed, but that will not really twist the sinews of his heart, for soldiers are born to bear misfortune and take a pride in doing so. So Hereward would only be bloody but unbowed, whereas Ian…If he has looked for something all his life and at last found it, and cannot keep it, he will know there is nothing else to go on searching for, and that will be the end of him, like the eagle that fell down among the rocks.’

‘That is all rather too deep for me,’ Tilly replied. ‘Ian is tremendously attractive, and I can understand how you feel, and wish I could help you, but I don’t see how I can.’

‘Yes, Ian is attractive, but so are other men; it is simply that I feel as if I had come to the end of a journey, and that often there is no need for words between us at all, and yet there is never any shortage of them; we are at ease together, and even when he is not there, all my thoughts are shaped to fit his mind, and I think his fit mine also without our intending it – a queer feeling, one I have never had before. And sometimes, when he isn’t
there, he seems more real to me than people who are with me, Hereward perhaps; I can see him there and almost touch and smell him, and I know that the same thoughts are in our minds. Well, there it is, and of course there is no doubt where my duty lies; but somehow, while that ought to solve the whole question, I’m afraid for me it doesn’t solve anything.’

‘There is a practical side to it,’ Tilly suggested. ‘Ian doesn’t seem to have any money to speak of, nor a farm here, nor anything at home, and he could hardly support a family by horse-trading in Abyssinia, or shooting elephants.’

‘He bought some land at an auction a year or two ago, and thinks he has enough capital to start developing it, so I suppose that he would settle down.’

‘If he is the settling-down type.’

‘I read a book the other day about pearl-fishers in the Persian Gulf; they dive without any apparatus, quite naked, and pick oysters off the floor of the sea; most of the oysters are useless, but now and again, very seldom, there will be a pearl, and always there is the belief that the very next oyster will have a stupendous pearl. I thought, Ian is like one of those divers, he won’t case himself in armour, he is on his own, searching for pearls on the floor of the sea…. Most people enclose themselves in diving-suits – they try to make fortunes or, if they have enough already, like Hereward, to win a big name, or to add a new bit to the Empire, something to make England mightier yet, like a bullfrog swelling out in a pond. Ian doesn’t want to make a fortune, or a name, or even bits of Empire, he simply wants to live – though I shouldn’t say simply, it is anything but that. You can’t live, he says, if you are trying to grow richer or greater – only by fitting into the scheme of things, and not trying to alter it to fit you.’

‘That sounds rather Eastern,’ Tilly remarked with caution. ‘I can see he is a more interesting companion than Hereward, but not perhaps such a good provider.’

‘You are on Hereward’s side,’ Lettice said sadly, ‘and of course you are right; there are no two ways about it; and there is also Hugh. It is easy to dress one’s weakness up as courage, and selfishness as enterprise. To tell the truth I don’t know which is which, and what is right and wrong, because while I know it
in theory, when you look through a door into a garden that may be full of sorrow and remorse, and yet has been prepared for you, a force that seems stronger than you are – I suppose it is called temptation – tries to prevent you from shutting the door and turning back to what you now see is a prison, when you thought it was a home.’

‘I know what I should do if I were in your place,’ Tilly observed. ‘But that is not at all the same as knowing what
you
will do, as we are quite different people.’

‘You would do your duty,’ Lettice said regretfully.

‘No, I should not; I should do what I wanted, and enjoy it, and eventually be sorry, and never admit that I was.’

‘You have buttered your bun, and now you must lie on it, as the babu said; and I expect that is the last word, if there ever is such a thing. At any rate Hereward is better; disaster was averted by a quarter of an inch. Poor Hereward, I hope that when he next loses his temper he will be careful that there are no Somalis near, and that he does not speak to them as he does to fellow-Englishmen with their cold, phlegmatic blood.’

‘I hope Ian will be able to keep it hushed up,’ Tilly remarked.

‘I think he will; it is hardly worth sending a company of
K.A.R.
to look for Ahmed, and they would not find him if they did. Ian says Ahmed will come back some day, when it has all blown over, because he is a faithful henchman – too faithful, in a way – and because Ian owes him three months’ wages. What a time we have had, Tilly! It’s strange, but I feel now that I have passed the very peak and crown of my life….’

They continued to talk, but my attention had long since wandered, and I went out to look for birds’ nests in the reeds by the river. At tea-time Tilly remarked to Robin:

‘Lettice has only just gone; she seemed very
exaltée
; I expect she will go off with Ian, but I can’t see how it will work.’

‘Ian can sing and read Greek poetry, and Lettice can play and do
petit point
, and they are both fond of riding, and wine, and wild animals, and conversation. Perhaps it will be all right.’

‘When you are used to luxury, you think that you despise it, but when it disappears you realize that it has grown into your life, like one of those parasites that start as creepers and end up as trees. Or so I’m told; I can’t speak from experience.’

Robin looked a little guilty. ‘Yes, my Aunt Dolly was like that. She created a scandal first of all by marrying a stockbroker – no one had ever done that before in Inverness – and then by leaving him for a sailor who hadn’t a penny in the world; love in furnished rooms in Portsmouth was too much for her, she took up with a wine merchant from Bristol and ended in Jamaica with a rich old planter they said was a mulatto, but as she was past the age of child-bearing by then, I never could see that it mattered.’

‘How lucky she was to find a rich old planter,’ Tilly remarked. ‘We can only hope that you will become one, in the end.’

U
NDETERRED
by her losses, Tilly imported from England twelve more Speckled Sussex pullets and a cockerel to make a new start. We rode down to meet them at the station on a cool, wet day with low clouds, and an inclination to drizzle: we had weather like that sometimes in July and August, but it did not last.

We met several neighbours at the station and they all discussed the same topic, bad news from Europe, and the probability of war. Austria and Serbia were fighting, Belgrade was in flames, the Bank of England had closed its doors. All this came as a complete surprise to Tilly and Robin. People said the Army was mobilizing and that, if England went to war with Germany, we should at once invade German East Africa, and everyone would volunteer.

‘I had better go to Nairobi and see what’s happening.’ Robin said. Tilly replied:

‘Let’s get these pullets settled in first, for goodness’ sake. I don’t want to lose them all a second time.’

Both my parents were rather silent on the ride home. There was a lot to think about. What would happen to the farm? To Tilly and me? To the crops and plans?