She loved him so much, and if he had loved Flamingo as Em loved it she would have forced herself to staying there for ever: to fighting her terror, her hatred of the land, and the ill health that constant fear, the height and the climate had inflicted upon her. But she did not believe that Eden’s roots were too deep in the Kenya soil, or that the land meant to him what it meant to Em. And lately she had persuaded herself that he would be just as happy in England with an estate of his own. Happier! for it had always been a sore point with him that Em had not made him manager instead of Gilly. ‘But Flamingo will be yours one day,’ Em had said. ‘You’ll need a manager then, and it’s better to have one who knows the ropes. Gilly’s not much use at present, but managers are hard to get these days, and he’ll learn. Besides, he needs the job.’
‘I didn’t know we were running a philanthropical society!’ Eden had said crossly. ‘You’re losing your grip, Gran darling.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong. You’ve got a hold over a man who needs a job. None over one who doesn’t. And I like things done my way.’
Eden had laughed and kissed her. ‘You do hate to have anyone accuse you of having a soft spot, don’t you darling? You gave Gilly the job because he was broke, and you know it – and because he knows the difference between Bach and Brahms!’
Em had made a face at him, but she had not denied it.
It was on Em’s account more than Eden’s that Alice had tried to reconcile herself to spending the rest of her days in Kenya, for although she had come to believe that she might be able to make up to Eden for the loss of Flamingo, she knew that she could never compensate Em for the loss of Eden. But now at last she had reached the breaking point. It had not been Victoria who had proved to be the last straw, but the things that had happened in the house during the last weeks: a situation that Eden had once referred to as ‘this silly business’.
‘It isn’t silly,’ Alice had said, and for the first time there had been hysteria in her gentle voice. ‘It’s horrible! Don’t you see – everything that has been broken or spoiled has been something special and irreplaceable. It’s as if someone who knew everything about Em, and wanted to hurt her specially, knew just the things to choose. Someone – someone evil.’
Eden had said sharply: ‘That’s nonsense! You mustn’t be hysterical about this, Alice. Believe me darling, it’ll turn out to be some silly Kuke who fancies he has a grievance, or thinks he’s had a spell put on him. You mustn’t lose your sense of proportion. After all, even if the things are irreplaceable, they’re still only things.’
But two days later it had not been a thing. It had been Simba.
Alice had not thought Em capable of tears, and the sight of her red and swollen eyes had been almost as shocking as the discovery of Simba’s stiff, contorted body lying among the crushed geraniums below the verandah. She had been frightened before, but it had never been like this. The wanton destruction of Em’s most cherished possessions had been horrible enough, but the poisoning of her favourite dog betrayed a cold-blooded malice that went deeper than mere spite.
Gilly was right, thought Alice, cold with foreboding. The ‘things’ were only a beginning. Simba was another step. Supposing – it is someone next? Someone Em loves. Eden— ! We must get away. We must! While there is still time …
It had been a particularly trying day for Alice. Eden had gone to Nairobi and would not be back until late, and Em had been noticeably jumpy and on edge all day. She had apparently had a minor squabble with Mabel Brandon in the course of the morning, and had not been pleased when Ken Brandon had presented himself at the house in the afternoon and had to be asked to tea.
Alice had not been pleased either. She found young Ken Brandon’s adolescent and unsnubbable infatuation for her more than a little trying, and had read him a stern lecture on the subject only the day before, which he had not taken well. He had ended by threatening to shoot himself – not for the first time – and Alice had lost all patience with him, and observed tartly that it would be no loss. She had hoped that this would put an end to his adoration, but Ken had turned up that afternoon asking to see her, and evidently intending to apologize for the dramatics of the previous day. Em had saved her from another scene by plying the boy with tea and arbitrarily taking Alice out shooting with her immediately afterwards.
Alice never went out shooting if she could help it, but on this occasion she had accepted gratefully, and they had taken Kamau, one of the boys, and driven out in the Land-Rover to shoot a buck for the dogs. Em had shot a kongoni out on the ranges, and helped Kamau to degut it and hoist the limp ungainly body into the back of the Land-Rover, where it lolled in a sticky pool of blood that smeared the seats, stained Em’s hands and clothing with ugly dark splotches and filled Alice with shuddering revulsion. It was one of the many things about Kenya that she could never get used to. The casual attitude of most women towards firearms and the sight and smell of blood.
I haven’t any courage, thought Alice drearily, staring into the green dusk. Perhaps I had some once, but it’s gone. If only I can get away … If only I need not go back into that horrible house …
Em was still playing Toroni’s concerto, and the too familiar cadences, muted by distance, plucked at Alice’s taut nerves, demanding her attention and forcing her to listen.
She had never been able to understand Em’s and Gilly’s admiration for the concerto. It had seemed to her a tuneless noise, alternating from the discordant to the intolerably dreary. But tonight she seemed to be hearing it for the first time, and it was as if the Valley itself were speaking. The enormous golden Valley and the great yawning craters of extinct volcanoes – Longonot and Suswa and Menengai. The impassable falls of dead lava: the frowning gorge of Hell’s Gate: the vast, shallow, flamingo-haunted lakes, and the long twin ramparts of the Mau and the Kinangop that were the walls of the Great Rift.
Em had told her that Toroni had loved the Valley. But Em was wrong, thought Alice, listening to the music. Toroni had not loved the Rift. He had been afraid of it. As she herself was afraid of it. She shivered convulsively, clutching her hands tightly together in her lap; and as she listened a little breath of wind whispered through the bushes and swayed the hanging trails of roses, and somewhere near her a twig cracked sharply.
Quite suddenly, with that sound, the garden was no longer a friendly place, but as full of menace as the house, and Alice stood up quickly and stooped to gather up the fallen flowers, aware that her heart was thumping painfully against her ribs. She had not realized that it had grown so dark.
Below the knoll and beyond the shamba, from the shadowy belt of the papyrus swamp, birds began to call; their clear piping cries mingling with the sweet clear notes of the distant piano. But the day had almost gone and the sky was already shimmering with pale stars, and there was as yet no moon. There should be no birds calling at this hour. Had something, or someone, startled them?
She remembered then what Gilly had said less than an hour ago. Something about General Africa – still at large despite the heavy price that the Government had set on his head, and suspected of being in the employment of one of the settlers in the Naivasha district. Something about a gang under his command who were rumoured to be still in hiding somewhere in the papyrus swamp, being fed by the African labour of the farms that bordered the Lake.
She had not paid much attention to it at the time, but now she remembered it with alarm, and remembered, too, Em’s instructions that she should not stay out after sunset. But the sun had set long ago, and now it was almost dark, and the evening breeze had arisen and was stirring the leaves about her and filling the green dusk with soft, stealthy rustlings.
A twig cracked again immediately behind her, and turning quickly she caught a flicker of movement that was not caused by the wind. Her hands tightened about the roses, driving the thorns into her flesh, but caught in a sudden spider’s web of panic she was almost unaware of the pain. Her brain told her to run for the house, but her muscles would n
ot obey her. She could not even scream; and she knew that if she did so no one in the house would hear her, for the music of the piano would drown any sound from outside. But there was someone watching her from among the bushes; she was sure of it——
Alice stood quite still, as helpless and as paralysed with terror as the victim of a nightmare. And then, just as she thought that her heart must stop beating, a familiar figure materialized out of the dusk at the foot of the knoll, and the blood seemed to flow again through her numbed veins.
She dropped the roses, and with a choking sob of relief began to run, tripping and stumbling over the rough grass in the uncertain light. She was within a yard of that dimly seen figure when something checked her. A sound …
There was something wrong. Something crazily and impossibly wrong. She stopped suddenly, staring. Her eyes widened in her white face and her mouth opened in a soundless scream. For it was someone else. Someone suddenly and horribly unfamiliar.
3
‘And as I was saying, what with Income Tax and strikes and the weather, well it’s no wonder that so many people decide to live abroad. In fact, as I told Oswin – that’s my present husband – I can’t understand why more of them don’t do it. Don’t you agree?’
There was no answer, and Mrs Brocas-Gill, observing with annoyance that her neighbour had fallen asleep, turned her attention instead to the desolate green and brown expanse of Africa that lay far below her, across which the big B.O.A.C. Constellation trailed a tiny blue shadow no bigger than a toy aeroplane.
Miss Caryll, however, was not asleep. Only an exceptionally strong-minded woman, or one in need of a hearing-aid, could have slept in the company of that human long-playing record, Mrs Brocas-Gill. Victoria was neither; but she had endured Mrs Brocas-Gill’s indefatigable monologue with barely a break since the aircraft had left London Airport, and as they had been delayed for twenty-four hours at Rome with engine trouble this meant that she had been compelled to listen to it for the best part of two days. Even the nights had not silenced Mrs Brocas-Gill, who had slept with her mouth open, and snored. And Victoria wanted to think.
She had not allowed herself much time for thought during the last three weeks. Once she had made her decision and cabled her acceptance of Aunt Emily’s offer, there was little point in stopping to think; and little time in which to do so, for there had been a hundred things to see to. But there would be the flight to Kenya; twenty-four hours of sitting quietly in an aeroplane with nothing to do. There would be time then to think, and to sort out the turmoil in her mind and face the past – and the future. But she had not calculated on Mrs Brocas-Gill, and now they were flying over Africa, and the Dark Continent lay spread out below them with Nairobi Airport only half an hour ahead.
Half an hour! thought Victoria in a panic. Half an hour in which to sort out her thoughts and prepare herself for meeting Eden. To face all those things that she had cravenly refused to face during the past three weeks, and that she had forced herself not to think of for more than five years. Half an hour …
It was difficult to remember a time when she had not loved Eden DeBrett. She had been five on the day when she had tried to make Falda, the little zebra which her father had caught and tamed for her, jump the cattle gate by one of the waterholes. Falda had not taken kindly to the idea, and Victoria had pitched head-first into the sloshy churned-up mud by the drinking troughs where, in addition to winding herself badly, she ruined the clean cotton dress in which she was supposed to appear at a luncheon party.
It was Eden, nine years old and spending the weekend with his great-Aunt Helen, who had saved the situation. He had retrieved Victoria from the mud, dried her tears on a grubby pocket-handkerchief and suggested the immediate removal of clothes, shoes and socks, and their immersion – and Victoria’s – in the clean water of the cattle troughs.
His suggestion had been followed, with such excellent results that when the gong had sounded she had been able to walk demurely up to the house in a crumpled but undoubtedly clean dress, and no one had noticed that her long brown plaits owed some of their sleekness to the fact that they were damp. Eden’s superior male intelligence had saved her from disaster and from that day he was Victoria’s hero.
She had been a plain little girl, with a tendency to stammer slightly when shy or upset; thin and leggy and very brown. Brown sunburnt skin, brown eyes and long, lank brown hair. But although her own lack of good looks had not interested her, she had been deeply impressed by Eden’s beauty.
Even as a child Eden DeBrett was beautiful, and he did not outgrow that beauty as so many children do. It seemed, in fact, to increase as he grew older, and it had its effect on everyone he met, so that there were few people, if any, who were ever to know what he was really like, or to be quite fair to him: their judgement being invariably swung out of true by his amazing good looks.
He was ten when Em hardened her heart and sent him home to a famous preparatory school in England, and the six-year-old Victoria had wept bitterly and uncontrollably, and greatly to Eden’s disgust and her own mortification, on the platform of Nairobi railway station where she had gone with her parents to see him off.
Her gay and charming father had died two months later, and the tragedy of his death, the sale of the farm and the misery of leaving Kenya – even the parting with her ponies and dear fat friendly Falda – had been mitigated by the thought that she would be seeing Eden again. For it had been arranged between Em and Helen that Eden should spend the Christmas and Easter holidays with the Carylls, and return to Kenya once a year to spend the two months of the summer holidays at Flamingo.
In actual fact he had spent all his holidays for the next six or seven years with them, and had seen nothing of Em and Flamingo; for tragedy on a Homeric scale had taken over the stage, and the war put an end to countless plans, as it was to put an end to countless lives.
Eden had missed active service, but he had done his National Service with the Occupation Forces in Germany, and followed it by three years at Oxford, during which time he had seen little or nothing of the Carylls, for he spent his vacations with Em in Kenya, flying between London and Nairobi. Victoria had not seen him for over a year when Em suddenly announced her intention of paying a visit to England and staying with her half-sister. She had not seen either for years, and she and Eden would spend July and August at Helen’s instead of at Flamingo.
Victoria’s Aunt Emily, who was Eden’s grandmother, was exactly as Victoria remembered her, save for the fact that in deference to the post-war nerves of the Islanders she had refrained from wearing her favourite Kenya garb of scarlet dungarees, and was soberly and somewhat disappointingly clad in a brown coat-frock that whispered of moth balls and the Gay Twenties.
Eden had arrived two days later, and he had looked at Victoria as though he were seeing her for the first time: as though she were someone whom he had never seen before.
She had been picking roses and her arms were full of the lovely lavish honey-pinks of Betty Uprichards; but that had been an unrehearsed and entirely fortuitous circumstance, as Eden had not been expected for another two hours. She had blushed under Eden’s startled gaze, and Eden had said foolishly: ‘Vicky—! What have you been doing to yourself? You’ve – you’ve grown up.’
And at that they had both laughed, and he had leaned forward and kissed her above the roses and they had fallen in love.
No, that was not true, thought Victoria. At least, it was not true of herself, for she had fallen in love with Eden years and years ago, when he had picked her up out of the mud by the cattle troughs and dried her tears with a handkerchief that smelt of Stockholm tar and chewing gum. And she had never stopped loving him.
It was Eden who had fallen in love that day. Or had he? Had it only been affection for someone he had known all his life? Sentiment and a summer evening, and a pretty girl in a yellow dress with her arms full of roses? Any pretty girl? No! thought Victoria. No. It isn’t true. He did love me. He did! I couldn’t have been
mistaken.
It had been an enchanted summer. They had danced together and dined together, and walked and talked and planned their lives together. Em had been pleased; but Victoria’s mother had not approved of the cousins marrying, and she had been against it from the first.
‘I might agree, if they were first cousins,’ Em had said, ‘but they are not.’
‘Eden has Beaumartin blood in him,’ said Helen unhappily.
‘And Carteret and Brook and DeBrett blood too! It will be a great success.’
But Helen had counselled delay. Eden was only twenty-three, and Victoria four years younger. They could afford to wait. Eden was to do a year’s course at an agricultural college so as to fit him for taking over Flamingo – as his years at Oxford would fit him, so his grandmother hoped, to hold political office one day in the country of his birth and her adoption.
‘He is a second-generation Kenya-ite,’ said Em, ‘and there are not so many of them. The Colony needs men who love the country to run its affairs.’
By Helen’s wish there had been no formal engagement, and no announcement to friends. Em had gone back to Kenya when the summer was over and Victoria had gone on with her secretarial course, because, she told Eden, it would be a help in the running of Flamingo.
They were to be married when Eden was twenty-four, and he had actually married when he was within a week of his twenty-fourth birthday. But it had not been to Victoria. It had been to Alice Laxton. Five years ago … Yet even now, to think of it brought back some of the suffocating, agonizing pain of those days.
It had happened suddenly and without warning. Eden had arrived one afternoon to see her mother, and left again without waiting to see Victoria, who was out. Helen had looked pale and upset but had said nothing more than that Eden had been unable to stay as he had to spend the weekend with friends in Sussex, but that he would be writing.
The letter had come three days later, and Victoria could still remember every line of it as though it had burned itself into her brain. They had made a mistake, wrote Eden, and confused cousinly affection and friendship for something deeper. Nothing could alter that fondness and friendship, and he knew her too well not to know that if she did not agree with him now, she would one day. One day she would fall in love with someone else, as he himself had done, and then her affection for him would fall into its proper place. And as they had never really been engaged, neither of them need suffer any public embarrassment.