The Flame Trees of Thika (14 page)

I nearly cried out, it looked like magic, and the people weird and unfamiliar in the dancing light. Could this be some secret rite of adults, one of the queer, remorseless matters that they sometimes hinted at but never openly related? Then they paused and roared with laughter, and filled their glasses and began to sing. The blue flames died and I could see they had a dish before them; they had been dipping for raisins set alight with brandy and making their wishes for the New Year. They sang loudly; Pioneer Mary was herself seemingly alight, her red hair streaming, her shirt half-buttoned, her boots kicked off, and a glass never out of her hand. To my surprise, Mrs Nimmo was joining in the songs and waving her arms and tapping the ground in tune.

‘If we could have a reel now, wouldn’t that be fine?’ she cried, and soon they had one, she and Alec and the Walshes, while
Victor Patterson summoned queer sounds from a comb and a piece of toilet paper. Mary danced like a fiend all over the room, uttering at intervals wild beast-like shrieks, kicking her legs up, and clapping her hands, much to the distress of Mrs Nimmo, who pranced with agility but wanted desperately to keep to the steps, the order, and the time. Mr Walsh danced steadily and Alec did not know the steps at all. The two women pushed him about, laughing at him, and he played the fool, and when the reel broke up Mrs Nimmo sank into a chair with Alec on her knee, to everyone’s great entertainment. This was not at all the Mrs Nimmo that I knew, nor Alec either. It all seemed rather silly, so I went back to bed.

I was awakened later by shots. Through my window I could see the moonlight, and a jingling of bridles and a shuffling of hooves came to my ears. Voices in the house were shouting, then two more shots clapped through the darkness and were followed by a terrific crash, a cry of pain, and then a woman’s screams. I burrowed under the blankets, where it was warm and comforting and, I believed, bullet-proof. When I cautiously protruded my head the screams had stopped and been replaced, surprisingly, by laughter, perhaps of a hysterical kind, mingled with a stamping and snorting of mules.

I reached the window just in time to see a figure leap on to a mule and gallop off with a rifle in its hand held up like a banner, pursued by two more mounted cavaliers. The rifle went off again as the cavalcade vanished into the moonlit bush, sending back mournful echoes from the ridges; one of the men raised his voice in a wild halloa and sent more echoes chasing after. The halloas grew fainter, the echoes died, and silence majestically resumed possession of the night.

A wail came from the house and a figure staggered on to the veranda crying: ‘Never again! Never, never again! They came to me from my grandfather who was Writer to the Signet; when I was a little girl, mother carried them up the stairs before her as carefully as a hen with chickens and now that woman…that miserable wretch…’

‘I warned you to lock up the silver,’ said Alec, who was standing beside her looking after the departed revellers, ‘but I never thought of the warming-pans.’

‘I’ll take her to law! There’s a hole right through the centre of the largest of them….’

‘Nice shooting.’ Alec spoke admiringly.

‘Ach, that’s all you think about, no one cares a mite for my poor warming-pans!’

‘You hardly need them here, Mississimmo,’ Alec said in a voice that sounded as if his mouth was full of feathers.

‘Maggy to you, Mr Wilson, now we’re old friends.’ An unexpected and perhaps unintended giggle escaped from Mrs Nimmo. ‘You did look funny, dodging down behind that chair when the gun went off.’

‘Not cut out for cannon-fodder,’ Alec replied with dignity.

‘If Mr Nimmo had been here he’d never have allowed it.’

‘I think I’d better go home.’

‘What, and leave me unprotected with that band of tipsy brigands galloping about? Is
that
the act of a gentleman?’

‘Perhaps not…’

‘Your place is to protect me, Mr Wilson.’

‘Alec to you, Mississimmo – Maggy.’

‘Alec, then.’

‘My place is by your side?’

‘I am a lone woman…’

‘Not tonight, Maggy.’

‘Of course, I don’t mean…’

‘Ah, but I do,’ Alec said with unexpected loudness. He seemed to have swallowed the feathers and to find his mouth dry and hollow.

‘Oh, how can you!’ Mrs Nimmo cried, but she did not sound really distressed. Alec stepped up to her in order, apparently, to whisper his reply, and as the conversation appeared to have ended I returned to bed, and dreamt of hooves thundering up deep black valleys towards firelit caves, and cannonades from battlements, and shouts of victory; but I was riding Margaret the mule whose pace grew slower and slower, and carrying George and Mary who had become the size of crocodiles and were weighing me down. Blue names came out of their nostrils, they turned their faces towards me and opened their enormous jaws and there was Pioneer Mary dancing a jig among their teeth, each of which was the size of a large native drum.

It was not a restful dream, but this did not prevent my waking refreshed to a morning new-washed in dew. Doves were cooing, weaver-birds twittering, and shrikes calling; sunshine threw a square of gold on to the earth floor and from outside came that familiar overture to the African morning: the swish-swish, swish-swish of a twig broom sweeping the path gently and rhythmically, swish-swish, swish-swish, like the whisper of waves on a beach, broken by pauses and the padding of feet and the melody of high voices calling to each other in hope and laughter, for night was done with and the sun climbing up the sky. Even the sun was newly washed, according to Kikuyu legend, which held that it sank into the sources of the rivers and at night was carried down to the sea for a cleansing dip, to emerge clean and bright every morning.

The houseboy and a
toto
were clearing up the living-room, which looked as if a bull had been loose in it all night. Warming-pans and charcoal-carriers lay on the floor, the spinning-wheel was prostrate and the furniture all awry. When Alec appeared he looked bleary-eyed and ruffled, and walked like someone who would rather not be seen. However, he nodded to me, winced a little at the motion, and said:

‘If there’s one piece of advice I would offer to a child at the outset of life, it is, don’t see the New Year in with a mixed party of Scots, Irish, and Australians; it’s an explosive mixture, like
T.N.T.
In fact don’t see the New Year in at all, but if you must, find a maiden aunt to do it with and be sure she’s a teetotaller.’

‘Did they shoot anything?’

‘Only Maggy’s warming-pans, I think.’

Breakfast was a silent meal: at least, Alec was silent and ate very little. We had poached eggs. I always played a game with poached eggs, which was to cut the white away bit by bit until only the round yolk was left, and to postpone as long as possible the moment when I pricked the yolk to release a yellow flood: just as, in the oval tin tubs we bathed in, I used to lower each bent leg as slowly as I could until a small white island of flesh on top of each knee-cap remained in an expanse of water, and then very, very gradually reduce the margins of the twin islands until at last the waters closed over them.

Mrs Nimmo, unfamiliar with this practice, asked sharply: ‘What are you doing, child, with your egg?’

At this moment I pricked the yolk with my fork and remarked with satisfaction: ‘Look, it’s bleeding!’ To my surprise, Alec rose with a groan and rushed from the room.

‘Is something the matter?’ I inquired.

‘He’s not quite himself, poor fellow,’ Mrs Nimmo said. She was more concerned about the damage to her property, especially to a sampler bearing the text: ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither shall the floods devour it,’ done in cross-stitch in purple on a mustard-yellow background. There was a tear through the middle of the ‘quench’.

‘To think it came down to me from my aunt Kate, who worked it before she ever married and went to India! It has a great sentimental value to me, a
great
value. Treating my house like some low saloon! What Mr Nimmo will say when he comes home, I cannot for the life of me imagine.’

‘I’ll buy you something better,’ I promised, for I had plans to get a pony and win a great many races. Each race, I knew, resulted in a silver cup, which must surely be worth a lot of money.

‘That’s a kind thought,’ Mrs Nimmo said, patting my hand. ‘And so you shall, when your ship comes home.’

‘I haven’t got a ship,’ I objected.

‘We all have one, in a manner of speaking, but sometimes they take a long time to come home.‘

This was a new idea – everyone with ships sailing about on some distant ocean, apparently quite out of control. I wondered what had happened to Tilly’s and Robin’s.

‘Do they ever sink?’ I inquired.

‘Unfortunately they do.’

That explained matters. The Palmers’ ship I knew to be approaching with a grand piano and some stuffed heads inside.

Alec Wilson reappeared, looking pale but rather better, and took Mrs Nimmo’s hand.

‘Thank you for your hospitality, and everything.’ He spoke rather awkwardly, his eyes on her face.

She withdrew her hand, pursed her lips, and answered with formality:

‘It was kind of you to stay, Mr Wilson; I must admit I shouldn’t have liked to have stopped here alone with the bairn, with those wild, godless creatures about.’

‘Any time you need protection, Maggy, send for me.’

‘Thank you, Mr Wilson, I’ll remember that, but I don’t expect it to be necessary. Mr Nimmo will be home any day.’

I wondered why Mrs Nimmo was treating Alec less as a friend than as a slight acquaintance; but Alec did not seem to mind, and rode off quite cheerfully, although complaining that his mouth felt like the inside of a parrot’s cage. The next day I, too, rode home on Margaret, escorted by Njombo who (as Sammy had predicted) had reappeared, as jaunty as ever so far as I could see. His head had been shaved, and shone like a sovereign. Now that he had become a murderer I vaguely expected some change in his appearance, but that was the only one.

‘There has been a holiday at memsabu
Ngwari’s
,’ he remarked. (
Ngwari
was the word for francolin, and they called Mrs Nimmo that because she chattered such a lot, on a continuous and monotonous note.) Most of the Kikuyu took little interest in our customs and behaviour, but Njombo had an inquiring mind and sometimes tried to find out what we were up to. ‘Perhaps it is to ask God for rain. Everything is parched in the shambas.’

‘It was not because of rain,’ I explained. ‘A new year has started.’

This made Njombo thoughtful. The Kikuyu did not reckon time in years, new or old, or in any way cut it up into sections. It flowed on like a stream. They had rainy seasons and dry intervals : millet rains which were short, and just over, and bean rains which were longer. As a rule, after every millet harvest they held a circumcision ceremony, and the youths and maidens who were initiated received a general name, such as ‘locusts’ if there had just been an invasion, or ‘much millet’, ‘smallpox’, ‘burning forest’, ‘hungry birds’, ‘ear-rings’, ‘maize mill’, according to some event of note, or interesting incident. Of course the age of circumcision was not the same for everyone, but this system did provide a rough guide; people of the smallpox age-grade, for instance, were circumcised in 1894 and therefore now in their early thirties. Njombo’s grade was called ‘sheets of iron’, presumably
to mark the introduction, in his district, of corrugated iron roofs.

‘There cannot be a new year’, he remarked, after some reflection, ‘when no one can plant seeds because it is dry, nor harvest crops because they are finished. No, that is just a story; the memsabu with the rifle and the red hair is a powerful magician and she has come to help us with this business of rain.’

I asked Njombo how she had helped us, or would do so in future.

‘She eats fire,’ he said.

‘Yes, I saw that. The others ate it too.’

‘There will be rain, we shall see. Perhaps your father will give her a cow, then she will make a sacrifice to cause his coffee trees to grow, and to make his wife fertile. The spirit of the red memsabu is very strong.’

That Pioneer Mary had a vital power above the ordinary was as plain to me as to Njombo. While I was wondering whether I could ask her to use it to get me a pony, a reed-buck bounded across the path and skimmed away into the long grass and bushes with splendid leaps, almost like a bird flying. Njombo hurled a light spear he was carrying after the buck, but the blade missed and embedded itself in the bark of a fig-tree. Njombo loped after it, retrieved the spear, and returned looking very downcast. He stood for several moments gazing at the tree and then bent down and scooped a little hole from the red earth by the path-side. Margaret, growing impatient, jiggled and tossed her head.

‘Wait,’ Njombo commanded. He gathered several leaves from a shrub with a big mauve flower, crushed them in his hand, mixed them with some powder from a horn dangling from his neck, stuffed them into the hole, and then pushed the earth over them with his foot.

‘It is bad to strike that tree,’ he said sombrely, and we continued on our way, Njombo quite subdued. Some trees were sacred and some were not, and we had no way of telling which was which; but the Kikuyu always knew, and on several occasions had refused to touch one that Robin told them to fell. Evidently Njombo had been unlucky with this particular fig. He wore many charms on his shiny body: two goat-horns, including the one from which he had taken the powder, a bracelet with
small wooden rattles on his right arm, a leather purse on a chain and, on his right leg, a little wooden cylinder containing dust and powdered leaves taken from seven different paths and mixed with good-luck medicine, to protect him against the evils to be found on all the roads and paths of the world.

In spite of these, the ill luck to be expected from the striking of a sacred tree had slipped through his defences. Even the path that crossed a small stream, fringed with banana trees, dividing our land from the Nimmos’ (I began to see) was full of dangers more subtle and sinister than any to be apprehended from the lions and rhinos that once had sheltered there, and had now retreated to the plains before the savage onslaught of mankind.