‘That’s right,’ said Gilly. ‘Remember Alice’s sundial. “It is later than you think!”’
He laughed again, and the sound of his laughter followed them out into the silent garden.
2
The sun had dipped behind the purple line of the Mau Escarpment, and the lake reflected a handful of rose-pink clouds and a single star that was as yet no more than a ghostly point of silver.
There had been very little rain during the past month, and the path that led between the canna lily beds and bamboos was thick with dust. Mr Stratton slowed his leisurely stride to Alice DeBrett’s shorter step, but he did not talk, and Alice was grateful for his silence. There had been too much talk in the Markhams’ drawing-room. Too many things had been said that had better have been left unsaid, and too many things had been uncovered that should have been kept decently in hiding. Things that Alice had never previously suspected, or been too preoccupied with her own problems to notice.
Was it, she wondered, the long strain of the Emergency, and the present relaxing of tension and alertness, that had brought these more petty and personal things to the surface and exposed them nakedly in Lisa’s pink-and-white drawing-room? Had she, Alice, displayed her own fears and her own feelings as clearly as Lisa and Gilly and the Brandons had done? Had the brief coldness of her reply to Lisa’s questions on the subject of Victoria Caryll been as illuminating as Lisa’s own comments?
‘Look out,’ said Drew. He caught her arm, jerking her out of her abstraction just in time to prevent her treading full on a brown, moving band, four inches wide, that spanned the dusty track. A river of hurrying ants – the wicked safari ants whose bite is unbelievably painful.
‘You ought to look where you’re going,’ remarked Mr Stratton mildly. ‘That might have been a snake. And anyway you don’t want a shoe-full of those creatures. They bite like the devil.’
‘I know,’ said Alice apologetically. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t looking where I was going.’
‘Dangerous thing to do in this country,’ commented Drew. ‘What’s worrying you?’
Alice would have resented that question from anyone else, and would certainly not have answered it truthfully. But Drew Stratton was notoriously indifferent to gossip and she knew that it was kindness and not curiosity that had prompted the query. She turned to look at his brown, clear-cut profile, sharp against the quiet sky, and knew suddenly that she could talk to Drew. She had not been able to talk to anyone about Victoria. Not to Eden. Not even to Em, who had said so anxiously: ‘You won’t mind, dear? It’s all over, you know – a long time ago. But she shan’t come if you mind.’ She had not been able to confess to Em that she minded. But, strangely, she could admit it to Drew.
‘It’s Victoria,’ said Alice. ‘Victoria Caryll. Eden and she – they’ve known each other for a long time. They’re some sort of cousins. Em’s her aunt and his grandmother, and he used to spend most of his holidays at her mother’s house when he was home at school – and at Oxford. They – they were engaged to be married. I don’t know what went wrong. I asked Eden once, but he – wouldn’t talk about it. And – and her mother died a few months ago, so now she’s coming out here…’
Alice made a small, helpless gesture with one hand, and Drew reached out and possessed himself of it. He tucked it companionably through his arm, but made no other comment, and once again Alice was conscious of a deep feeling of gratitude and a relief from strain. She could think of no one else who would not have probed and exclaimed, sympathized or uttered bracing platitudes in face of that disclosure. But Drew’s silent acceptance of it, and that casual, comforting gesture, had reduced it to its proper proportions. There was really nothing to worry about. It was, in fact, a direct dispensation of Providence that Em’s niece should be free to come out to Kenya, for it was going to make it so much easier to break the news to Em that they must leave her. It would have been impossible to leave her alone and old and lonely. But now she would have Victoria. And with luck, and in time, she might even grow to be almost as fond of Victoria as she was of Eden, and if that should happen perhaps she would leave her not only half of the estate, as Hector Brandon had suggested, but Flamingo, and the property at Rumuruti, whole and entire, so that she, Alice, would be free of it for ever, and need never come back to Kenya …
A huge horned owl, grey in the green twilight, rose up from the stump of a fallen tree and swooped silently across their path, and Alice caught her breath in an audible gasp and stopped suddenly, her fingers clutching frantically at Drew Stratton’s sleeve.
‘It’s all right. It’s only an owl,’ said Drew pacifically.
‘It was a death owl!’ said Alice, shuddering. ‘The servants say that if you see one of those it means that someone is going to die. They’re terrified of them!’
‘That’s no reason why you should be,’ said Drew reprovingly. ‘You aren’t a witchcraft-ridden Kikuyu.’
He frowned down at her, perturbed and a little impatient, and putting a hand over the cold fingers that clutched at his arm, held them in a hard and comforting grasp and said abruptly: ‘Mrs DeBrett, I know it’s none of my business, but don’t you think it’s time you gave yourself a holiday in England? You can’t have had a very easy time during the last five years, but you mustn’t let this country get you down. Why don’t you get Eden to take you home for a few months? It will do you both good, and this niece of Em’s will be company for her while you are away.’
‘Yes,’ said Alice a little breathlessly. ‘I – we had thought…’ Her colour was coming back and she breathed more easily. She stilled the nervous shivering of her body with a visible effort and said: ‘I’m sorry, Drew. I’m behaving very stupidly. You’re quite right; I should go home. I’m turning into a jumpy, hysterical wreck. Do you know what Gilly said to me this evening? He said, “You can’t be more than thirty-five.” And I’m twenty-seven. Eden’s only twenty-nine. I can’t look six or seven years older than Eden, can I?’
‘Gilly was tight,’ observed Drew dispassionately.
He studied her gravely, thinking that Gilly’s estimate of Mrs DeBrett’s age, though ungallant, was understandable. But Drew had seen nerves and shell-shock and sleeplessness before, and recognized the symptoms. He said: ‘You look pretty good to me,’ and smiled.
He possessed a slow and extraordinarily pleasant smile, and Alice found herself returning it. ‘That’s better,’ approved Drew. ‘You look about seventeen when you smile, not twenty-seven. You should do it more often. Are you and Eden going to this dance at Nakuru on Saturday?’
He talked trivialities until they reached the plumbago hedge that marked the boundary of the Markhams’ garden, and Alice dismissed him at the gate:
‘I’m not letting you come any further, or you won’t get home before it’s dark. And I’m perfectly safe, thank you. No one is likely to try and murder me between here and the house! Not now, anyway.’
‘Probably not,’ said Drew, ‘but I imagine that it will be some years yet before half the women out here will feel safe without a gun.’
He watched her walk away across the garden and was conscious of a brief and unexpected flash of sympathy for Eden DeBrett. Not really the type for a settler’s wife, thought Drew. She’ll never stay the course.
A dry twig cracked in the soft carpet of dust behind him and he turned sharply. But it was only Gilly Markham.
‘Came out for a breath of air,’ explained Gilly morosely. ‘Mabel’s gone off to pick a lettuce or a pineapple or something, and Hector says he’s going to walk home, so Lisa’s locked up the booze. Women are hell.’
He leaned heavily on the gate, his eyes following the noiseless flight of a bat which swooped and flittered along the pale blossoms of the plumbago hedge, and said with sudden violence: ‘God, what a country! What wouldn’t I give to get out of this god-forsaken, uncivilized, gang-ridden hole! Can’t think how you can stand it.’
‘No reason why you should stand it, Gilly,’ observed Drew without heat.
>
‘That’s what you think!’ said Gilly sourly. ‘Easy enough for you. But I can’t afford to up-sticks and get the hell out of it. D’you suppose I wouldn’t if I could?’
Drew said dryly: ‘If you’re getting the same screw as Gus Abbott got, you can’t be doing too badly. By all accounts, Gus left a packet.’
‘Gus didn’t have a wife!’ retorted Gilly bitterly. ‘You don’t know Lisa. If I were making twenty times what I get, Lisa’d spend it. Thinks I don’t know why she’s always buying herself new clothes and having her face and hair fixed. Well I may be a fool, but I’m not such a fool as I look! Take my advice and don’t ever get married, Drew.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ said Drew solemnly. ‘So long, Gilly.’
‘No, don’t go!’ said Gilly urgently. ‘Stay around for a bit. Got the purple willies on me this evening and that’s a fact. Know why people like talking to you, Drew? Well I’ll tell you. It’s because you’re so bloody detached. You don’t give a damn for any of it, do you? But tell anyone else anything, and before you know it it’s all round the Colony. Why can’t they mind their own business?’
‘Why indeed?’ said Drew. ‘Sorry about it, Gilly, but I’ve got to go. It’s late.’
Gilly ignored the interruption. ‘Hector, fr’instance. Never forgiven Eden for marrying a woman who he doesn’t consider is “The right type for Kenya”. What’s it got to do with him? Anyone would think he’d invented the place! Probably thinks that as soon as Em dies Alice’ll persuade Eden to sell out to that syndicate of Afrikaners who offered a fortune for Flamingo last year. Wouldn’t suit Hector one bit to have that sort of concern on his doorstep! Ruin the market for him. And the next thing you know they’d build a decent road round the lake, and how he’d hate that! Hector and his like may talk a lot of hot air about the Colony, but the one thing they’re terrified of is development around their own little bit of it. They like it just as it is. Just exactly as it ruddy well——’
He broke off abruptly and lifted his head, listening intently.
There was no breath of wind that evening. The vast stretch of the lake lay glass-green in the twilight, and even the birds were silent at last. But someone in the big rambling house that lay beyond the pepper trees and jacarandas in Em’s garden was playing the piano. The quiet evening lent clarity and a haunting, melancholy beauty to the distant sound, and Drew, who had turned away, paused involuntarily to listen, and said: ‘What is she playing?’
‘The Rift Valley Concerto,’ said Gilly absently.
His thin, nervous, musician’s fingers moved on the top bar of the gate as though it was the keyboard of a piano, and then clenched abruptly into fists, and he struck at the gate in a sudden fury of irritation and said savagely:
‘Why the hell can’t she play that third movement as it’s meant to be played, instead of hammering it out as though it were a bloody pop tune? That woman ’ud make Bartok sound like “Two Eyes of Grey” and Debussy like “The British Grenadiers”! It’s murder – that’s what it is! Plain murder!’
He relapsed into glowering silence, slumping down on a square concrete block that stood among the grasses by the gate. His brief spurt of rage gave place to an alcoholic sullenness, and he took no note of Mr Stratton’s departure.
* * *
Alice was half-way back to the house when she remembered the Mardan roses that Em had wanted for the dining-room table, and she turned off the path and walked across the parched grass, and through a sea of delphiniums that grew waist-high and half wild at the foot of a small knoll that was crowned by a tangle of bushes and the trunk of a fallen tree.
From the crest of the knoll, and between a break in the bushes, she could look out over the lush green of the shamba and the wide belt of grey-green vegetation, dark now in the fading light, which was the marula – the papyrus swamp that fringed the shores of the lake with a dense, feathery and almost impenetrable jungle, twice the height of a tall man.
A broken branch of the fallen tree supported a cascade of white roses that were not easy to pick even by day, for they were plentifully supplied with thorns. But Em loved them, and during their brief season she liked to arrange them in the Waterford glass bowls that had belonged to her grandmother. Was that why she had asked for them now? So that she could fill other bowls with them and pretend that she did not care? For the Waterford glass bowls had gone. They had been found one afternoon almost a week ago, broken in pieces, though the house had been quiet that day, and the dogs had not barked …
‘Don’t touch them!’ Alice had said, looking at Em’s drawn, ravaged face. ‘There may be finger prints on them. We can find out——’
‘And have the police all over the house, trampling all over Flamingo and bullying my servants? No!’ said Em. And she had gathered up the broken pieces with old, pitiful, shaking hands and given them to Zacharia, telling him to throw them away.
Em had refused from the first to send for the police. She had set a number of traps, but no one had fallen into them. The poltergeist seemed to be able to circumnavigate burglar alarms, trip-wires and similar booby traps, and to avoid by instinct objects smeared with a substance guaranteed to inflict an unpleasant sore on any hand that touched it. But the effects of its depredations had been more demoralizing to the whole household than anything achieved by the Mau Mau during the years of the Emergency. The servants were frankly terrified, Eden was angry and on edge, and Em grim and stubborn.
‘If someone thinks that they can frighten me into leaving, they’ll find they’re wrong,’ she said. ‘The Mau Mau thought they could frighten us into leaving our farms, but we are still here. I don’t know what anyone hopes to gain by destroying things I am fond of, but whatever it is, they won’t get it!’ And as if to emphasize her defiance she had sat down at the piano and played from memory Toroni’s ‘Rift Valley Concerto’: playing it furiously and loudly and not very accurately.
That had been on the day that the recording of the concerto had been destroyed, and that same evening, looking tired and defeated and very old, she had told them that she had sent for Victoria.
Victoria’s mother had died that spring and Victoria was at present sharing a small flat in London with two friends, and working as private secretary to the assistant manager of a firm of importers.
‘I have asked her to come out here and work for me,’ said Em, not looking at Eden: looking at nothing but the candle flames on the dining-room table and, perhaps, the past. ‘I am getting too old to deal with half the work I do. I need someone who can be a confidential secretary, and whom I can work hard. And at this time I would rather it were someone who – who belongs. It will also mean that I am doing something for Helen’s child. Giving her a home as well as an adequate salary.’
She had looked at Alice for the first time, her eyes blank and unfocused from the dazzle of the candle flames, and said gently: ‘You, who are an orphan too, will know what that must mean to her. But she shan’t come if you would rather she did not, my dear.’
Perhaps Alice might have found it possible to protest if it had not suddenly seemed to offer a way of escape. She did not want to meet this girl whom Eden had once meant to marry and with whom he must once have been in love. And she did not want Eden to meet her again. But if Em’s niece came to live at Flamingo perhaps she, Alice, could persuade Eden to leave Kenya: to take her back to England. It would not be as though they were leaving Em alone. She would have Victoria …
Alice looked down at the white roses that filled her hands, and letting them drop to the ground, sat down tiredly on the smooth trunk of the fallen tree and thought with affection and desperation and despair of Lady Emily DeBrett. Of Em and Eden. It was not going to be easy to tell Em that she could endure Kenya no longer. Em had a reputation for impatience, hard-headedness, shrewd business acumen, an iron nerve and a refusal to suffer fools gladly. Yet she had suffered Eden’s wife, who according to all her lights must have seemed a fool. She had mothered her, protected her, encouraged her, an
d stood between her and danger.
Sitting in the dusk on the knoll at Flamingo, Alice recalled her first sight of Eden’s grandmother, and the shock it had given her. Eden had mentioned casually that his grandmother was inclined to be eccentric in the matter of dress, but he had not prepared her for the grotesque figure that had appeared on the porch steps when the car that had brought them the fifty-odd miles from Nairobi Airport drew up before the big thatch-roofed house on the shores of Lake Naivasha.
The years had thickened Emily’s stately figure to more than ample proportions, but had not eradicated her antipathy to skirts. She had never willingly worn feminine attire, but she had a fondness for bright colours and a leaning towards eccentricity. Em’s scarlet dungarees and vivid blouses – both of which served to exaggerate her impressive bulk to a distressing extent – and the flamboyant wide-brimmed hats that she habitually wore crammed down upon her short cropped hair, had for more than thirty years been as familiar a sight to half Kenya as the roving zebra herds, the wandering, ochre-smeared Masai warriors, or the snows of Kilimanjaro. But they had done nothing to reassure Alice DeBrett, three weeks a bride and arriving at Flamingo dizzy from repeated attacks of air-sickness and dusty and shaken from the last fifteen miles over an unmetalled road – a newcomer to a strange country torn with savagery and violence, where even the women carried guns and all men were afraid of the night, never knowing what darkness might bring.
It was odd, looking back on that day, to think that Em had been the only reassuring thing in all the months that had followed. She had been both mother and grandmother to Alice, who had never known either. It was Eden who had failed her. But then it could not be easy to be Eden, thought Eden’s wife. To be so fatally good-looking that women looked once and fell desperately in love – as she herself had done. She had been married to Eden for almost five years now, and she still could not look at him without a contraction of the heart.