Green City in the Sun (14 page)

     As he took a cheroot out of his shirt pocket and lit it, wondering where he was going to find a
duka la dawa
, a druggist's shop, open on a Sunday, Valentine watched a safari column muster on the street.

     It was one of the old-fashioned variety that was slowly being replaced by the automobile and would soon vanish from East Africa. A hundred natives were receiving their loads. In less than an hour the column would file out of Nairobi like a black centipede; at the rear the professional white hunter and his sweating millionaire clients would follow. The porters carried their loads on their heads because to carry them on their backs would be humiliating; that was the way women carried things. And there was a limit to the weight of their loads: 60 pounds. There was even a limit to the amount a donkey could carry: 120 pounds. But for an African woman there was no restriction on the weight of her load.

     As Valentine turned and headed down the street toward the King Edward Hotel, he thought how amazing it was to remember that fifteen years ago there had been nothing here but tents and a swamp. And before that, just an insignificant river and some scattered Masai. Nairobi had been born just a few years after Valentine was; he was certain they would grow old together.

     M
IRANDA
W
EST PUT
down her spoon, wiped her hands on her apron, and went to the window and looked out. Lord Treverton had said he would be stopping by today before heading back north to his plantation.

     She was in the kitchen of her small hotel, getting ready for Sunday afternoon tea, a project that took almost the whole afternoon because of the care and quality she put into her preparations. Miranda West enjoyed a good reputation as far away as Uganda, and many were the settlers who came miles by oxcart to sit at one of her tables. Today she would be filled to capacity
again, serving on the veranda and even out on the street. If the earl did not come soon, she would not have a chance to be alone with him. And that was all Miranda West lived for.

     The dreams and ambitions of East Africa were as numerous as the immigrants who brought them. Everyone arrived with a scheme. Whether it was to make money in farming, to make money in mining, to make money in elephant ivory, to make money performing some special service for others, the idea was always to make money. There was no end to the variety and ingenuity of the schemes. For example, the Irish twins Paddy and Sean had made a brief fortune raising ostriches to fill the demand for plumes in England and America. And then, just like that, the automobile became popular and women couldn't wear big, feathery hats while motoring and so the fashion changed to tight-fitting caps, and Paddy and Sean had to return their worthless birds to the wild. Then there was Ralph Sneed, who had bragged up a storm about the mint he was going to make growing almonds in the Rift Valley. He had spent very cent of his savings on buying and planting almond trees only to discover that because of the absence of seasons in East Africa, the trees bloomed all year round and never came to fruit. Ralph Sneed had gone back to South Africa, embarrassed and penniless. Finally, there was Miranda's own feckless husband, Jack West, who was last seen heading off with a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, and a bottle of quinine—going to Lake Victoria, he had said, to find hippo skeletons and pulverize them into bone meal fertilizer, which he was going to sell to farmers at a phenomenal profit. That had been six years ago, and Jack hadn't been seen since.

     So everybody in Nairobi had a plan. Miranda West's had, until now, been to capitalize on homesickness.

     Back in 1913 Miranda Pemberton had responded to an advertisement in a Manchester newspaper. The ad had been placed by a gentleman currently residing in British East Africa who was looking for a well-placed woman to marry and help him in his various "ventures of a financially promising nature." Miranda, a general cook and maid of all work to a penny pincher in Lancashire, England, had written at once on a bit of fancy notepaper stolen from her employer. She shaved five years off her age and tripled the figure in her bank account. The advertiser, a prospector named Jack West, had
chosen her letter out of sixty and had sent her the fare to come out.

     He had met her at the harbor at Mombasa, where, after experiencing an initial shock—he was shorter and younger than she—they decided they might as well get married and make a go at it.

     But the enterprise had failed. Miranda was appalled at the sight of ragtag Nairobi and the tent her new husband expected her to live in, and Jack felt cheated when she turned over her small savings. They struggled for a few months, trying to earn a living by buying produce from local Africans and selling it at a profit to wealthy parties getting outfitted for hunting safaris, until Jack took off in the middle of the night with the last of their money and Miranda's fake jade earrings.

     By great good luck Miranda heard of a Scotsman named Kinney who needed a European woman to "help around" his boardinghouse near the railway station, and while he actually meant she would do
all
the work, it was at least a roof over her head and ten rupees a month. Miranda's advantage lay in her white skin, which was why Kinney had hired her. He catered to a middle-class immigrant clientele that stayed in his house while looking for prospects or waiting for farm deeds to come from the Land Office. The wives of his boarders liked having a white maid instead of an African one, and when she demonstrated a skill for baking scones and concocting English trifle, for which his homesick settlers paid a high price, Miranda became indispensable.

     In a town where women were greatly outnumbered by the men, where most of the men were bachelors, and where newly arriving women, many not even young or pretty, were snatched up, Miranda became something of an oddity. She was married, yet her husband was absent, and even though she was friendly and liked to share a whiskey and a joke, she gently deterred the frequent advances from Kinney's boarders.

     Eventually old Kinney took a liking to Miranda and slowly gave over more and more of the running of the house to her. Where she saw waste she trimmed it; she balanced a tighter budget; she scrimped in places the customers wouldn't notice; and she had the boldness to double the price of a room, declaring that white people would pay for English cleanliness, and she had proved herself right. The value of the house went up.

     Then war broke out. Kinney joined the East African Mounted Rifles and promptly got himself killed. To her surprise, Miranda found that having no family or other friends, he had left the house to her, and so she borrowed from the bank and set about turning the place into a proper hotel. Before long troops began pouring in from England, and Nairobi was transformed into a military camp. The soldiers flocked to Miranda's place, which she had given the rather pompous name of the King Edward Hotel, to devour her scones and talk of home.

     The war came and went, and she never heard from her husband again. So Miranda's cunning and opportunistic mind surveyed the situation; she had seen what she must do to ensure her survival.

     A woman needed to be taken care of, but Miranda was no longer interested in marriage. She had seen the handsome earl of Treverton in his Royal Fusiliers uniform, and she had decided that he was going to be her next ambition. It was not her plan to slave for the rest of her life in this hotel, sweating in the kitchen, trying to cater to the whims of petulant settler wives who came to the protectorate with notions of higher stations for themselves. Miranda was going to snare the earl and be taken care of by him.

     Such an ambition would have been unthinkable back in England, where social strata were firmly set with locked gates at every level. But in British East Africa the ladders were there for anyone with nerve and determination to climb. The first thing Miranda had done was dress herself in a suitable guise. "Widow" rang with respectability. She could put the title on like a hat and wear it with no questions asked. There were many false pedigrees in Nairobi—Colonel Waldheim, the German dairyman, had never seen military service; Professor Fredericks, the local schoolmaster, held no college degrees—and to be the widow West was but a harmless masquerade. Titles were adopted the minute one touched ground at Mombasa, the port where all seekers of new lives cast off old identities and class restrictions. Miranda West, no longer downstairs maid in sooty Manchester, was now the dignified widow of a man who had lost his life on the shores of Lake Victoria; she kept her name out of the gossip column of the
East African Standard
and herself out of men's beds; she held a calculating eye on Lord Treverton and hoped that Jack West would never reappear.

     She saw the earl now, going into the Indian druggist's across the way. She felt a catch in her throat. Lord Treverton was the most beautiful man Miranda had ever seen. He was such a contrast with the farmers and cowboys in their wrinkled khakis and pith helmets; like a young god he looked in his well-cut jodhpurs, white silk shirt, and band of leopardskin around the crown of his hat.

     Miranda had to hurry. She had promised him a batch of Devonshire biscuits, which she now slipped into her Dover stove between a tray of Cornish splits growing golden brown and a tray of jumbles, which were light brown and ready to come out. The biscuits, Miranda knew, were for Lady Rose. Valentine Treverton never left Nairobi without a gift of some edible sweet for his wife. The countess was partial also to macaroons, which were cooling on a rack.

     Miranda returned to the clotted cream, which she had begun the day before and kept cool overnight, and skimmed off its crust with a spoon. She wasn't going to give it to the earl to take with him; it would never travel the ninety miles. She had made it in the hope he would stop for a few minutes and try a few of her brandy snaps with clotted cream. The best way to a man's heart, she told herself...

     Customers were starting to wander into her dining room, which had been neatly and tastefully set with white tablecloths and a small Brown Betty teapot on each table. It was Miranda's attention to such detail that these expatriates appreciated—the harrier cake made with
just
the right amount of treacle and the light touch with which she sugar-dusted her sponge cake. The story was that Miranda West had been cook to a famous marchioness who had been known for her kitchen. It was a lie, but the result was the same. Whether she had learned from the French chef of nobility or from recipes torn out of the
Times
of London, Miranda's skill with English pastries was almost uncanny. And the cleanliness, of course, was the most appreciated feature of her dining room. Every memsaab who had to get after an African house girl could attest to
that.

     As she covered the cream and hurried to the sideboard, where a kitchen boy was cutting crusts off finger sandwiches, Miranda glanced again out the window and saw Valentine emerge from the druggist's, tucking a small
envelope into his shirt pocket. He would be coming here next. Whipping off her apron, Miranda rushed from the kitchen up the back stairs to her private apartment and combed her hair with an anxious hand.

     V
ALENTINE PAUSED TO
look up and down the street. In front of an Indian dry goods
duka
his Africans were loading his donkeys in preparation for the trip northward. A large package was strapped to the last animal; it contained the legs to Rose's piano, come at last on the latest boat from England. That was going to be her first surprise. The second was to be a tin of Miranda West's excellent pastries, which Rose declared were as good as those served at Ascot. The third surprise, which made Valentine want to mount Excalibur right now and gallop off home, lay in the envelope in his pocket. A teaspoon of the white powder in Lady Rose's evening chocolate, Dr. Hare had said, should do the trick.

     Valentine saw a truck parked behind his string of donkeys. It was one of the new Chevrolets that were so hard to come by in the protectorate, and it belonged to Sir James. It was only two months old, and already the vehicle was worn and battered. The argument against having motorcars in British East Africa was that they wouldn't last long; the argument
for
them was that they were immune to tsetse fly and foot-and-mouth disease. Sir James was proud of his new acquisition, and Valentine liked to tease him about it, asking why an automobile manufacturer would call itself "milk goat."