The Flame Trees of Thika (16 page)

‘We must leave her out of it,’ he said.

‘But why?’

He pointed with his whip at the sun, which was climbing quickly above the tawny ridge towards some fluffy clouds as light as meringues ‘Suppose the sun entered the sign of Virgo, the tide turned, and an eagle perched upon the Sphinx all at the
same moment, it might really happen; and we should look fools if we got back to breakfast and found our hostess had become a wallaby.’

I felt disappointed in Ian; like nearly all grown-ups, he had started something sensible and let it tail off into stupidity. But when I looked at him it was impossible to be annoyed, he was so gay and spirited, and smiled with such goodwill; he had in him the brightness of the morning, you could not imagine him ill-tempered and morose, and whatever he did, you accepted.

‘Perhaps she’d be a sort of bird,’ I suggested, determined to persist with the game. ‘With lovely feathers. A kind sort, of course.’

‘I’m not sure there are any,’ said Ian, who did not seem to have a high opinion of birds. ‘Rather, I think, “the milk-white hind, immortal and unchanged”, if that isn’t blasphemous.’

We turned our ponies, who became immediately transformed from sluggish, heavy-livered creatures into prancing steeds, tossing their heads and stroking the ground with their forefeet. On the outward journey Moyale had treated his surroundings with a lordly indifference, but now every bush became an object of the deepest suspicion, to be approached with pricked ears, wide nostrils, and stiff legs. I rode Moyale in a state of bliss shot through by stabs of anxiety. He could have done just what he liked.

We took a short cut through the bush and Ian, leading the way, suddenly pulled up his pony and signalled to me with his riding-crop. Our ponies, responding instantly to a current of warning, stopped their jiggling and stood stock-still. I caught a glimpse of some moving object in the long grass. It was part of the excitement of any ride that you never knew what you might encounter; apart from reed-buck, duiker, and other small game there were plenty of leopards about, and lions came now and then oh visits from the plains.

Then I saw Ian relax and urge his pony forward. The grass reached above the ponies’ knees. We halted on a low hump and saw below us nothing more ferocious than a circle of beaten-down grass, like a miniature race-course, about two feet across – a perfect little circle; and round the ring a single black and shiny-feathered bird, with a ruff like a Tudor courtier’s, only
black too, with head thrown back and wings outstretched, was prancing and hopping, like a demented ballet-dancer, first on one leg and then on the other, and springing into the air. In the middle of the circle, on a tuft of grass, a small, drab bird sat and brooded, rather hunched, thrusting a neck forward and backward as if something had stuck in its throat.

‘Whydah-birds,’ Ian said softly. ‘Watch them, you don’t often catch them at the game.’

We watched in silence while the birds performed their antics ten or twelve paces away. The dancing cock seemed about to stumble and fall, then recovered and leapt in the air as if to take off, only to land again. But after a while the central hen evidently grew bored and started to peck at some seed-heads in the tuft of grass. Whether because of her indifference, or for some other reason, the cock’s attention also wandered, his ruff subsided, his wings drooped, his tail sagged, and suddenly he took off and flew away. We waited to see whether the hen would follow him. But no, she had other plans; and presently a second black and shiny cock landed in the ring, ruffed up his neck feathers, arched the long plumes of his tail so that they curved back almost to his head, and began to prance for all the world like a jet of black water leaping from a fountain in the grass.

I do not know how long we should have watched them if Moyale, growing bored, had not snorted and sneezed. There was a chattering of alarm, a flapping of wings, and both birds took off and vanished over the crest of the ridge.

It was their mating dance, Ian Crawfurd explained. One after the other, cocks came to parade in their finery before the female, who squatted in the centre with a bright appraising eye; after a while, she would choose one for her mate.

‘What happens to the others?’ I inquired.

‘They fly away, and look for another hen to fascinate with their splendid plumage and their strong, masterful hops.’

‘Then there must be some over,’ I suggested, ‘who don’t get a mate.’

‘Yes, there are the doomed, perpetual bachelors; no nest to go home to, no little chicks to find insects for, no one to puff out chests and sing about when other cocks go by.’

‘It sounds very sad.’

‘Yes, it is. There was once a cock who loved the fairest of all the whydah-birds – the darkest, perhaps I should say, the darkest and the kindest; but another cock, a cock with blacker wings and longer tail-feathers, had made her his own. So she shared the nest of another, and sat by his side, and when her chosen mate danced before her, she nodded her head at him to say bravo, bravo. The first cock knew that she could not be his, because he came too late, and hadn’t got such black wings, or such a long tail. So he flew far away into the mountains and looked for worms and beetles and things like that. Sometimes he found them, but they did not taste very good, and he knew that they never would, so long as he had to eat them all by himself, with his lady-love so far away.’

Ian Crawfurd paused, I thought to collect words for the ending; but that seemed to be all. I did not like inconclusive stories.

‘What happened then?’

‘Nothing happened – and that’s the way to tell a true story from a made-up one. A made-up story always has a neat and tidy end. But true stories don’t end, at least until their heroes and heroines die, and not then really, because the things they did, and didn’t do, sometimes live on.’

‘Does every story’, I wondered, ‘have to have a hero and a heroine?’

‘Every story, since Adam and Eve.’

That story, I reflected, if you came to think of it, scarcely had an ending either; it started well, but tailed off into Cain and Abel, and I could not remember what had happened to Eve. Ian Crawfurd, I supposed, was right, but it was unsatisfactory, for everything ought to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

A
HMED
the Somali was waiting to welcome Ian back, clad in a white tussore silk robe, a green sash, and his loosely-wrapped tomato-red turban. He bowed and brought a cupped hand to the centre of his forehead with a wide sweep of the arm. There
should have been an embroidered cloak and a sword for him to receive from his master; as it was, Ian threw his binoculars to this haughty noble, and expressed the hope that, in the absence of camels’ milk, he had found suitable nourishment.

Ahmed wore the mettled air of a highly-bred race-horse. His long, thin, grey fingers seemed curved to grasp a dagger’s handle, his eye was proud and lonely as a kestrel’s. With the air of one conferring a dukedom on a retainer he inclined his head and replied:

‘I have eaten, bwana.’

At breakfast, Lettice Palmer remarked: ‘Ahmed makes me uneasy; I can never quite get over the feeling that I ought to be on my knees like a Circassian slave offering him a bowl of rose-water. He’s the only
regal
character I’ve ever encountered.’

‘I had the same sort of fear myself at first,’ Ian admitted, ‘but his manners are so perfect he’s managed to make me feel like a Caliph born to command the services of princes; so we are both satisfied.’

‘I had a jemadar very like him once on the Frontier,’ Hereward announced. ‘A splendid fellow; he once killed four Pathans single-handed and recaptured a Maxim gun after he’d been hit in both legs.’

‘And ate them all for breakfast,’ Lettice said sharply. She immediately looked contrite, and asked Hereward how the farm work was getting on. Hereward replied meekly; he was her slave. He had the farm labour organized in gangs called after colours: the blue squad, the red squad, and so on. In his office, a cubicle divided off from the store, he kept on the wall a large map of his farm studded with pins bearing little coloured flags, so that he could see at once where each squad was, or ought to be. It was his intention to create a healthy spirit of inter-squad rivalry, but in this the African response was disappointing; if rivalry existed, it was not expressed in terms of work.

He was, moreover, plagued by a distressing tendency on the part of his men to wander from one squad to another as the spirit moved them. If he put the blue squad on to clearing tree-stumps, a hot, strenuous activity, and the red squad on to thatching shelters for coffee seedlings, which took place by the river in the shade, by ten o’clock he would find the red squad
twice its proper size and the blue squad sadly diminished. The respective headmen, tackled on the subject, would merely look hurt, shrug their shoulders, and make some excuse bearing no possible relation to the truth, but applied as an emollient to irritated feelings. This, among Africans, was an expression of politeness, a desire to please; but of course it only angered white men, and especially Hereward.

‘Every one of these fellows lies like a trooper, and not one has an inkling of the meaning of discipline!’ he would cry. Then he would add, with an air of martyrdom: ‘I suppose I must just go on trying to knock it into them, that’s all.’

He did try, very hard, and it was unjust that Lettice found his efforts ludicrous. As a rule she concealed her feelings, but Ian’s presence made this more difficult. That day at breakfast, while Hereward was holding forth, I saw their eyes meet across the table and then drop to their plates. Their mouths twitched just a little, and simultaneously they both picked up their knives and forks and resumed their eating.

I was always sorry when the time came for me to leave the Palmers’. Their living-room was quite different from ours, although the shape was much the same, and the reed lining, and the lizards in the roof. Their furniture had many curves and curlicues and decorations, and no doubt looked even more out of place than ours, but it was entertaining. There were cushions made of dark-green velvet, and others of a striped golden satin which shone like the insides of buttercups. Zena and Chang had a special cushion each. Flowers stood about in cut-glass vases and porcelain bowls. Lettice had a china-cupboard full of shepherds, musicians, pedlars, and the like posturing in arbours of leaves and flowers of every colour one could think of, all intertwined, and modelled with astonishing delicacy. I daresay these were not very valuable, but they enthralled me, each leaf and flower, each foot and finger, were so enchanting and exact. Hereward said it was absurd to have such things in a grass hut in Africa, they would only get broken, but Lettice dusted them herself.

They had several pictures, too. The one everybody admired was a portrait of Lettice looking splendid, but aloof and rather impersonal, not as I knew her at all. It was beautifully painted,
but one could not feel the life in her face. It was by a fashionable portrait-painter and had been in the Academy. Hereward admired it very much. I preferred two other paintings in the room. One had been done by Lettice herself, so it had no value, but I always looked at it when I came in. It was a picture of a ravine in Scandinavia with tall, snow-weighted pines and dark, mossy rocks and a waterfall, and it had an air of silence and mystery and long nights; one could imagine black bears prowling under the pines, and a cold, resinous atmosphere, and unseen creatures lying in wait. The other was entirely different: some sailing boats rocking on a very blue river, and people fishing from a bridge, all broken up, like the sunlight on the water, into flashing surfaces of brilliant paint. It was the gayest thing you ever saw, but Hereward said it was a hideous daub; it even made him angry, I could not think why. It was true that you could see the brush-stokes and the gobs of paint, so perhaps it was unfinished and raw, but all the same the boats danced before your eyes on the water, you knew it was a warm, sunny spring day and that the fishermen were enjoying it all.

Apart from these interesting things, and many others, and quantities of books in fresh, exciting jackets, the Palmers’ room always smelt delicious. Dried rose-leaves and lavender mixed with patchouli in Chinese bowls were no doubt responsible. Even the garden-house – the privy – had a few touches other people’s lacked. Instead of an ordinary roll of toilet paper, Lettice arranged sheets of Bromo in a spiral like a pack of cards, in a flat, open basket, and put a lavender bag on top. A copy of the
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
bound in green leather lay beside a pile of copies of the
Revue des Deux Mondes
, but personally I found the
Sporting and Dramatic Life
, which was also present, to be more congenial. A maximum-and-minimum thermometer hung on the back of the door and Lettice was training honeysuckle up the walls.

Our own house was less exciting, and rather cramped. We lived and ate in a single, square room full of furniture, ranging from the commode I have mentioned, and a good mahogany writing-table (always piled high with account books, letters, bills, and catalogues) to a roughly carpentered deal table, home-made chairs with seats of cowhide thongs, a couple of old arm-chairs
upholstered in leather, whose stuffing protruded from several rents, a pouffe or two, and various other necessary things. One side was occupied mainly by an open fireplace which, with its chimney, was the only object made of stone. A Victorian fire-screen worked by Tilly’s mother stood incongruously before it, quite dwarfed by the aperture, like a mouse guarding a cave.

You could not secure pictures to the reed-matting walls, or not for long – several had fallen down; there was no ceiling, only a forest of poles above us lashed together with creeper-twine, and insect-rustling thatch; the floor, until it was cemented, undulated so much that all the furniture wobbled, and bits of wood or wads of paper were constantly being stuffed under legs to achieve an equilibrium that never lasted. We always had a lot of flowers, jostling for position among books and paint-boxes, magazines and veterinary medicines, Tilly’s embroidery, Robin’s sketches of machinery, my birds’ eggs, and everybody’s oddments; sometimes they found themselves in tall silver vases or a Chinese porcelain bowl, sometimes in a jam-jar, whichever came first to Tilly’s hand.