‘A great help!’ he observed. ‘How about bribery? They like tobacco and beads, but what about the cowrie shells the women are wearing? Is that some kind of currency as it was down at the coast?’
‘No,’ Hero said.
‘Oh well, you seem quite sure about that!’ he told her. ‘I shan’t ask you what they do mean—’
‘No,’ she agreed hastily. ‘They symbolize being a woman. Benedict, wouldn’t it be wrong to bribe them? The rains are late, but they may come, and then everything will be all right.’
‘For a few months. A few days’ rain isn’t going to save much in the long run. The whole trend is for the desert belt to move south and we have to work in that context. The problem won’t disappear if we look the other way, my dear. We know it’s coming and we have to prepare for it!’
She looked at him, hoping he would not recognize a look she could not conceal from her eyes. ‘You can’t do it all alone!’ she exclaimed.
He flicked her nose with his fingers. ‘Careful,’ he said, ‘it isn’t your admiration I’m seeking!’
He took a tighter hold on her hand and changed the subject. ‘Have we any use for a donkey, do you think? Because they have one for sale—’ She stiffened, unsure if he were still teasing her, but he showed no sign of noticing her reaction. ‘Wouldn’t you like a donkey? It’s such a pretty thing.’
‘Let’s buy it!’ she said.
The donkey cost sixty-five shillings. Its body was striped like a faded zebra and its temperament was mournful in the extreme. Hero thought, if it had been human, it was the kind that would have said we’d have been born with wings if we’d been intended to fly. It kicked up its heels the moment it saw the plane and, once inside, it kicked at everything in sight. Hero was exhausted after she had tethered it in the aisle between the seats, and battered and bruised besides.
‘What are you going to call it?’ Benedict asked, his arms folded across his chest as he watched her do battle with the animal.
‘I shall call it after you!’
‘Ben?’
Her eyes flashed. ‘Fulani!’ She tied the last knot and turned and faced him, her chest heaving with the effort of making the beast secure. ‘It suits you both!’
‘Now that doesn’t sound at all ladylike,’ he observed.
‘I seem to have heard the term somewhere before.’
Doesn’t it mean a so-and-so?’
Hero brushed down her dusty cotton trousers. ‘I wouldn’t really call you that.’
‘Quite right!’ he said with amused calm. ‘You won’t!’ She gave the donkey a final pat and collapsed into her seat up front, sticking her legs out in front of her to ease her much-tried muscles. ‘It’s been fun, hasn’t it, coming here?’ she commented. ‘I wish we didn’t have to go home.’
‘Better than trucking soil?’ he suggested.
‘Much better!’ she said in a small voice. ‘Don’t you think?’
Betsy was every bit as furious as Hero had expected her to be when she heard that Benedict had left her behind that morning. Hero had been careful not to tell her, but by evening she forgot to maintain her guard and, when Bob was asking her about the cones of loose stones that Benedict had built up round some of the young trees he wanted to preserve, he had also asked her what had become of the three Turkana warriors who had been hanging about earlier.
‘We flew them home this morning,’ Hero answered without thought.
‘You flew?’ Bob grinned at her, impressed.
‘Well, not exactly,’ Hero admitted. ‘But I was there.
I don’t mind flying half as much as I thought I would!’
‘You didn’t think to ask us if we wanted to go too?’ Betsy’s cool voice came across the verandah.
Hero wiped her suddenly damp palms against the sides of her cotton trousers. ‘I did, as a matter of fact. I think Benedict decided there wasn’t enough room for us all to gdeg-‘
‘Then you could have stayed home and I could have gone!’ Betsy shot at her.
Hero muttered something about going along to translate, and Bob hooted with irreverent laughter. “With your Swahili?’
‘You’d be surprised,’ she said.
Benedict came out to join them in the darkness. Hero could see the red glow of his cigarette as he took it up to his mouth. He smoked too much, she thought, but then he also worked too hard. She had gone out with the lorry this afternoon, but after a few trips he had sent her back to the house, telling her she had done enough for one day. He himself had not come in, though, until their dinner had been on the table and Koinange had gone to look for him. She hoped that Betsy would leave him alone now and not go on and on about his not taking her to the Turkana settlement.
‘Hero can say a great deal in Swahili,’ Benedict said. ‘She knows the difference between mwanamke — and mke.’ Hero was very conscious of his mocking gaze.
‘How would you know that, old man?’ Bob asked, laughing.
Hero could sense Benedict’s dislike of being addressed in such terms and she tried to change the subject. ‘How many more days before we’ve finished trucking?’
‘None, if I’ve any say in the matter!’ Betsy interposed. ‘Tomorrow Benedict can take me out, and you two can mind the farm between you. If I’d known it was going to be like this, I’d never have come! Where shall we go?’
Hero couldn’t bear to listen any longer. She didn’t want to know where they were going and then she couldn’t imagine what they would be doing there. She jumped to her feet. ‘I think I’ll go to bed,’ she announced. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘Who’s stopping you?’ Betsy demanded, annoyed by the
interruption. ‘Well, Benedict?’
But Benedict wasn’t listening to her either. He held out a hand and barred Hero’s progress across the verandah.
‘Haven’t you forgotten something, Liebling?’ he said, and the sound of his voice set her heart thundering against her ribs.
‘I don’t think so,’ she breathed.
He stood up too and, when he drew on his cigarette, she saw he was smiling at her. But there was a hint of steel also in the touch of his hands and in the way he stubbed out the cigarette beneath his heel. Hero bent her head, determined not to give way to him.
‘Hurry up, Hero,’ he advised softly. She couldn’t be sure she hadn’t dreamed the words. She lifted her face to his and trembled as his hands tightened on her shoulders.
‘Fulani’!’ she whispered as his lips took hers.
The playful slap he delivered on her backside made her jump and he took advantage of her confusion to hold her closer still and kiss not only her lips, but her cheeks and eyes, and lastly her mouth again, stirring her into a deep response.
‘Well, well,’ said Betsy yawning. ‘Hero is coming on! First she ditches her best friend and goes flying off into the blue, and now we have play-acting too! Next, we’ll find she doesn’t want to go to England at all, but plans to remain here forever and ever. Too bad, honey, if it’s true, because sooner or later you’re going to have to learn that nobody gives a damn what you do!’
But Hero only gasped, dodging under Benedict’s restraining arms, and ran blindly into the house. Playacting? If only it had been! It might have been on Benedict’s part, but as far as she was concerned, it had brought home to her that it wasn’t pride, or admiration, or any of those noble sentiments
she had imagined she felt for him. She was in love with him.
CHAPTER NINE
The flash of lightning lit up the room as clear as daylight. Hero turned over, pulling the bedclothes over her head, and prayed for rain. Never mind that they hadn’t finished trucking the topsoil back to the fields, never mind anything, if it would only rain. So much more could be done and life would come back to the whole district.
Another shattering drum-roll of thunder broke almost directly over the house and the lightning became an intermittent but continuous light, refusing to allow her to ignore it any longer. She sat up, hugging he
r knees, and tried to persuade herself that she was not afraid. If she had more courage she would have gone out to the stables to see how the little donkey was faring, but she couldn’t face the journey in the dark and the storm, and the donkey had the company of the other animals, whereas she was all alone.
‘Hero!’
She shivered, thinking that she had imagined the sound of her own name. The door between her room and the dressing-room opened slowly. ‘Hero,’ Benedict said again. ‘Are you awake?’
He looked solid and reassuring in the flickering light. She found herself admiring his powerful shoulders as he crossed the room to the window, and wondered if he never wore the top of his pyjamas, or whether it was only because the night was so hot that he was in the trousers only.
‘Is it going to rain?’ she asked him.
‘I doubt it. Afraid?’
‘Not if it means rain.’ She slipped out of bed and joined him at the window. ‘I keep telling myself that it’s a fabulous sight and I’m lucky to be seeing it. Are you afraid too? Is that why you came?’
‘No, I find it exciting, nothing more,’ he said. ‘But I thought you might be in need of company if it went on for much longer. Even animals herd together in a thunderstorm!’
Not for the first time she wondered how he came by his knowledge of the habits of wild animals.
‘It’s kind of you,’ she brought out with difficulty, ‘but Betsy gets much more upset in storms than I do. Shouldn’t you go to her?’
He went on looking out the window. ‘Betsy is not my wife,’ he said.
‘No, but she might expect it.’ Flustered, Hero wished she had thought to put on her dressing-gown for, if she was very much aware of her husband’s naked torso, the chances were that her nightdress was very nearly as revealing. But when she moved away to find a housecoat, shrugging herself into it and tying it tightly round her waist, Benedict was there before her, straightening the collar for her with a look that frankly bewildered her.
‘Are you wearing your new nightie?’ he asked her.
For a moment she couldn’t remember. ‘How did you know?’ she demanded when she recalled that she was.
‘I recognized the embroidered gathering down the front. What do you call it?’
‘Smocking,’ she said dryly.
‘It’s pretty. It’s a shame to cover it up.’
She trembled as he took a fingerhold on her collar. ‘Betsy will be furious if you don’t go to her!’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Am I supposed to quake at
the thought?’
The idea was plainly ridiculous.
‘Can’t you close your ears to her complaints, Liebling?’ he continued. ‘She can’t really hurt you, you know.’
‘But don’t you mind if she’s upset?’ she insisted. ‘She only came to be with you! And I can’t think why Bob came at all, because it was obvious that she wouldn’t have anything to do with him with you here. I thought that was what you wanted!’
‘I can live with the situation—’
‘But I can’t.’
His mouth curled into a smile. ‘I thought you wanted her here?’
‘I did,’ she admitted. ‘But now I don’t! I hadn’t understood how she felt and - so on. It would be different if she was interested in the farm, but neither of them are.’
His hand moved to the back of her neck, his fingers playing with a lock of her dark hair. ‘Are you discovering you haven’t as much in common with Betsy as you thought?’ he inquired.
‘Her family have been very kind to me—’
‘But you don’t feel as grateful as you should, is that it?’
‘Oh, Benedict, how did you know I ought to be grateful to her, for finding you for me, if for nothing else, because I never would have found anyone myself who would have married me and given me his nationality. But I don’t think she did it for me after all. She wanted you to stay in Kenya. I think she’s been more than a little in love with you all along !’
‘And that worries you?’
The thunder rolled above their heads. She did not answer.
‘Why should you mind if she’s in love with me, Hero? Isn’t that rather a dog in the manger attitude?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But she doesn’t understand how important your work is. Or how much depends on you.
She’d want to come first!’ She found his shoulder close to her and buried her face in his neck.
‘But Liebling,’ he said in her ear, ‘wouldn’t you expect to come first with someone you loved?’
She shook her head. ‘I’d be happy to help him - if I could. Betsy doesn’t know how important you are. She seems to think your work is of no more value than her father’s, or Bob’s, or of anyone else she knows!’
He laughed. ‘She could be right!’
‘I don’t think it’s anything to laugh about !’ she retorted. ‘I expect the whole household is awake by now. I’ll go and make some cocoa and take it round to them. Will you have some?’
‘No, you won’t!’ He held out his hand to her, silently commanding her to come back to her former position. ‘If they want cocoa, they can get it for themselves! You have better things to do!’
She cast him a startled glance. ‘Benedict—?’
He touched her lips with his own. ‘No, not that, sweetheart.’
‘Then what?’ she faltered.
‘Don’t you like watching the storm with me? D’you know, I think it may rain after all!’
A faint pattering on the roof came at the same moment at his words.
‘It’s raining! It is raining!’ Hero escaped, jumping up and down in her delight. ‘Oh, it’s gone again!’
‘Never mind, it shows that there’s some rain about, and that’s more than I hoped for. We’ll have to hurry to finish trucking the soil and put up our barriers to hold it there, in case this is the start of the rains. Maybe this year they will come!’
‘If we work at it, we could finish tomorrow,’ Hero put in. ‘I’ll work at it all day.’
‘Today,’ he amended, glancing at his watch. ‘Can you manage by yourself? And don’t forget to stop for lunch and tea as well !’
She felt suddenly cold. ‘Where will you be?’ she asked. ‘Are you taking Betsy out?’
‘No, Miss Curiosity, I am not! I’m flying up to the Sudan again. I’ll be back in a couple of days. Meanwhile, do you think you can cope on your own, or shall I send the lot of you down to Nairobi for the rest of the week?’
‘Who’d do the trucking then?’ she objected.
‘Hero Carmichael is not the only person on the payroll.’
Hero remained unconvinced. The work would be skimped, or the lorries would break down, or, if the rains came, the Africans would be too busy celebrating to come to work at all.
‘You wouldn’t really banish me to Nairobi, would you?’ she said.
‘Would it seem like banishment? I should have thought you might welcome a touch of civilization, like a nice hot bath! But you don’t have to go if you don’t want to—’
‘I don’t! And how would the donkey get on without me?’
‘Well, if you think you can put up with the others for a few days by yourself, you’re more than welcome. You can get on with the planting when you’ve finished trucking the soil. Each field needs to be sown with a different seed to see which of the grasses holds the ground together the best. Think you can manage that?’
‘Yes,’ she assured him, ‘I think so. Have we enough seed?’
‘I’m hoping so. If you haven’t, you could organize a trip to Nanyuki and get some more. You ought to be all right as
long as Bob goes along too.’
‘I’ll wait till you get back,’ she murmured. ‘Then we can all go. It would be fun!’
‘We’ll see!’ he said.
The thunder had grown more distant and the lightning no longer lit up the room as if it were day. Hero was sorry to see the storm go. She had no more excuse to stand in the window with hi
s arm around her. The unexpected moment
of intimacy would be over and gone forever.
‘It didn’t rain after all,’ she said.
‘Only those few drops. Never mind, one can feel the damp in the air and that bodes well on the whole. Are you going back to bed?’
‘It’s over,’ she said on a sigh.
‘Don’t you believe it!’ he retorted. ‘It’s only beginning.’
Her smile was rather a watery affair. ‘You will be careful in the Sudan, won’t you? You haven’t told me yet what you’re doing there.’
‘And I’m not going to start now, young lady. Questions, questions! One might almost think you wanted to keep me in your bedroom all night!’
Hero took off her housecoat, folding it neatly, and slid under the bedclothes. ‘But I want to know, Benedict. I want to know about your hands too!’
‘I thought you’d decided I was scarred by having to break up heavy stones in prison - if they still do that sort of thing in prison!’
‘They do here,’ she told him. ‘I think.’
He bent over the bed and kissed her cheek and then her mouth. ‘Sleep tight, Liebling.’
‘But you haven’t told me!’ she protested.
‘And spoil my romantic image for you?’ he mocked her. ‘Certainly not! Go to sleep, and be thankful you have
a strong-minded husband! Good night.’
‘Good night!’ she whispered back.
She was late for breakfast. It was the most extraordinary thing, but having decided that she wouldn’t sleep a wink all night, or what was left of it, she had been fast asleep ever since. She had even slept through Koinange bringing in her early morning tea, for which he would not forgive her if he found out, so she drank the orange juice down in a single gulp and dumped most of the tea out of the window, hoping that he wouldn’t examine the flowerbed too closely in the near future.
Everyone else was already assembled at the table. Hero took a cautious look round, caught her husband’s eye, flushed scarlet, and dropped a hasty kiss on the side of his cheek.