The Bonds of Matrimony

by Elizabeth Hunter

  ‘I want you to have it, Hero,’ he said abruptly. ‘Where is your room, by the way?’

  She was hesitant about showing it to him, but she couldn’t think of any good reason why she should cavil at his following her down the corridor to her own, much smaller room, with the same narrow bed she had when she was a child, and a much thumbed collection of books on the shelves that lined two of the four walls. He went over to the books at once, smiling at a battered copy of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons and some of the Dr. Doolittle books stuck in at random between more serious works on Agricultural Economics and the Principles of Accountancy.

  ‘I’d expected you to prefer girls’ books,’ he said.

  Her breath stuck in the back of her throat. Somehow it was terribly important that he should approve all the books she had had as a child. ‘I liked all sorts,’ she told him, ‘Little Women, and What Katy Did - even Little Lord Fauntleroy. I loved him dearly!’

  ‘Lucky little Lord Fauntleroy!’ His tone was again mocking.

  She edged towards the door, more shy of him than she had ever been. ‘I’ll go and find Koinage. He’ll want to know what we want for lunch. Shall I ask him to bring in your luggage?’ She hesitated, waiting for his answer. ‘Shall I unpack for you, or do you prefer to do it yourself?’

  He turned on his heel. ‘Would you really unpack for me?’ he asked.

  She threaded her fingers together, refusing to meet his inquiring glance. ‘Of course,’ she said.

  ‘What a splendid woman your mother must have been!’ he remarked.

  ‘Well, so she was!’ Hero agreed. And if he wanted to use her services now, he could jolly well ask, she thought to herself. She had plenty to do, unpacking for herself.

  He came across the room to her, picking up a strand of her hair and pulling it gently between two fingers. ‘I still think you should have your parents’ room,’ he said. ‘If I slept in the dressing-room, it would be more convenient when Betsy and her friends come visiting—’

  ‘How did you know there was a dressing-room?’ she demanded.

  He shrugged, smiling. ‘One door for the bathroom, the other the dressing-room. It didn’t take a great deal of deduction to work that out.’ He pulled at her hair again. ‘You can keep the door shut if you like. I can use the other one. Will that suit you?’

  She nodded silently. ‘But what will Betsy think?’

  ‘Does it matter what she thinks?’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ she admitted. ‘Not if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Betsy and I understand one another pretty well,’ he said dryly. ‘You don’t have to worry about her.’

  She looked up at him then. ‘Did you - did you know her before?’ she inquired.

  His hand fell away from her hair and he frowned. ‘I met her last year. She was doing the Tsavo Game Reserve at the same time I was there.’

  He did not continue, and Hero could not resist saying: ‘She didn’t tell me she’d known you before. I thought she barely knew you at all!’

  ‘I thought you once told me you didn’t go in for fishing?’

  He pulled her into the curve of his arm and walked along with her back along the hall. ‘I think I’d go a long way if those Greek eyes of yours were waiting for me at the other end. They’re so dark and serious, even when you laugh! Don’t throw them away on anyone who doesn’t appreciate them.’ He bent his head and kissed her lightly on the cheek. ‘I like the Greek bits.’

  Hero sat on the verandah, pretending to smock the top of a new nightdress she was making for herself, but actually she was waiting for Benedict. He had been gone for a long time and she was beginning to wonder if the Land-Rover he had taken had broken down, or whether he was lost, trying to discover the limits of the dried-out fields. The African servant came out of the door and stared into the distance too. He had already accepted Benedict as the new owner of the farm, which Hero, knowing his essentially conservative nature, had seen as a tribute to her husband’s handling of him. ‘Koinange, Bwana mahali gani?’ The African shrugged his shoulders. ‘Hajawa — ‘ he began. Memsahib Hero, ngoja. Bwana kuja sasa.’ Hero looked where he was pointing and saw the plume of dust that heralded the coming of the Land- Rover. ‘Leti chaiy Koinange,’ she said in relief, and then wondered if tea was quite the beverage Benedict would require after swallowing all that dust. In her anxiety, she pricked her finger and, in her determination not to give way to the expletive that rose to her lips, some blood fell on the new nightdress. She shook it crossly, rescuing the scissors from the arm of her chair only just in time to save them from clattering to the floor. So she missed seeing Benedict get out of the Land-Rover and was surprised to find him

  standing beside her.

  ‘I’ve ordered some tea,’ she told him.

  ‘Good.’ He flung himself into the chair beside hers, stretching out his legs in front of him.

  Hero stood up as quickly as he had sat down. ‘I’ll go and get the tea myself,’ she said. ‘Koinange will dream until sunset if he’s allowed to, and you look as if you could do with a cup of something. Papa always drank whisky, but I never got any more in after - I’ll drive to Isiolo tomorrow and get you some. I should have thought when we were in Nairobi—’

  ‘I’m quite happy with tea,’ he interrupted her.

  She made the tea as quickly as she could, using the local tea that had a pleasant, smoky taste that she herself liked very much. Then she went back to the verandah. Benedict was examining the nightie she was making, a slight smile on his face. She put down the tray and almost snatched it away from him.

  ‘You sew a neat seam, Hero Carmichael,’ he murmured. ‘Did your mother teach you that too?’

  She put the nightdress away. ‘I went to a convent school. Sewing was a very important part of the syllabus as far as the nuns were concerned!’

  He accepted his cup of tea from her hand with a comfortable sigh. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to start taking in sewing after today.’

  She cast him a swift look. ‘Is it very bad?’

  He nodded.

  ‘The Kaufman specials? Will they have to go?’

  He nodded again. ‘It would be a shame to slaughter them, though. I’m going to try to send them to a friend of mine, to look after until the going gets better. It’s sheer

  cruelty to keep them on here.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of them!’ She poured out her own tea. ‘I’m glad it’s your responsibility now,’ she confessed quickly. ‘I’m afraid it’s you who’ll be the poorer though, they’re all yours now!’

  ‘Shall we say community property?’ he suggested. ‘Don’t fret. It isn’t all bad news.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  He sat forward. ‘I’m going to get our topsoil back first of all. Most of it seems to have been washed down the river in the last rains. I’m going to truck it back to the fields and plant it with something to give it great stability before the next rains come.’

  ‘If they come!’

  ‘They’ll come! Not this year perhaps, but sooner or later they’ll come, and I want to be ready for them. If the biochemists are right, all this area will get steadily drier and drier in the next few years - it’s something to do with less heat reaching the world from the sun which upsets some regions more than others - and we’ll need to make use of every drop of rain we get. But I’m sure it can be done, and I’m going to do it!’

  She could almost believe him. ‘All alone?’ she said.

  ‘If it can’t be done in Kenya, it can’t be done anywhere! The other countries in the Sahel belt haven’t got the same advantages by a long shot. Most of them are tied to a single cash crop that’s still largely controlled by their old colonial masters. More and more of their traditional subsistence fanning, which is what they fell back on whenever things went wrong in the past, has been abandoned in favour of giving more and more land to producing something that will count with the economists towards their official gross na
tional production and serving the debts they’ve incurred from various international bodies. When the cash crops fail, the people starve!’

  ‘But I don’t see what you can do here.’

  ‘Probably not very much, but what one can do in a small area can be repeated again and again right across the continent. If I can show that some kind of farming here, despite the drought and the encroaching desert, I can pass on my results to UNESCO, and to the other agencies, and they can advise the governments concerned. It won’t make much difference, but it may save a few lives.’

  She poured Benedict out another cup of tea when he

  ‘Those trousers won’t do!’ he surprised her by say

  She poured Benedict out another cup of tea when he passed her his cup. ‘You can’t do it all at once!’ she said.

  ‘I suppose not, but I want to get the work started before I take you to England. It won’t wait, Hero. I wish it would, in a way. You’d be better off in England, with my aunt to fuss over you, than out here where things can only get harder in the next few months.’ Hero hid her face from him, watching the sun as it made its sudden dash from the heavens with the forces of the night in hot pursuit. Kenya being so near the Equator, there was no such thing as twilight. It was day one minute and as black as midnight the next. Indeed, the stars were already hanging like huge, heavy jewels against a black velvet background. Perhaps, later, the moon would come up and cast its silver glow over the dusty scene. Hero was always more conscious of such things at home than when she was in Nairobi. How she would miss it, she thought, when she went to England. She would miss the crickets and the brilliantly coloured song-birds that brought ecstasy to the bird-lover’s heart when previously they had only seen their dowdy relations of more northerly climes. Hero had heard them talking, marvelling over the combination of song and plumage that made them so special to their admirers. She would miss the animals too, and the people - she would miss her whole life here.

  ‘I think I’d rather stay,’ she said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Hero watched, with a sense of loss, the small plane take to the skies. It was ridiculous to feel like that, when she knew quite well that Benedict was coming back in a couple of days or less. It had been fun to work beside him on the farm and talk to him in the evenings. It had even been rather nice to hear him moving round the dressing-room at night. Sometimes she had remembered how lonely it had been coming back to the farm by herself and struggling with her problems on her own. Now they were Benedict Carmichael’s problems and she was glad of it. It was quite true what they said about a trouble shared being a trouble halved.

  He had meant what he said about retrieving what he could of the topsoil that had been washed away with disastrous results every time it rained. He had searched the river banks, clicking his teeth at the roots that had been laid bare, until she had felt obliged to tell him that to an African clicking one’s teeth was a deadly insult and not a simple gesture of disapproval.

  ‘And how do you know that?’ he had asked her.

  She had shrugged, not really knowing. ‘I just do,’ she had said.

  They had started trucking the soil back to the fields almost immediately. Hero had felt rather pleased with herself about that. She might have been scared of flying, and more than a little out of her depth in Nairobi, but she could drive a lorry and could even manage the round trip in a shorter time than it took Benedict himself.

  In the evenings she had started to make the shirt she had promised him to replace the one he had obediently thrown away. She had chosen the material with care. It had a white background, with black and gold stripes alternating, and she thought he looked more handsome in it than anything else she had seen him wear.

  He was wearing it now, to fly up to the Sudan on UNESCO business, so perhaps he liked it too. She wished he had said something about it, but he never seemed to notice what he was wearing, though he never failed to comment on her clothes, as though it really mattered to him.

  She had asked him about the letters on the sides of the plane as they had walked down to the air-strip together.

  ‘So you noticed them, did you?’ he had said, surprised. ‘I thought you were in too much of a panic to notice anything.’

  ‘I always notice inessentials!’

  ‘So it seems. MAB: Man and the Biosphere. It’s a UNESCO programme that’s going on at the present time, mostly in West Africa at this time, making a scientific assessment of the long-term future of the Sahel area. My field is the Sudan and making observations here in Northern Kenya too.’

  Hero had stuck her hands into her pockets, wishing she understood more about such things. ‘Are you very important, Benedict?’

  He had laughed. ‘We all like to think that.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make us so,’ she had responded.

  ‘What do you do exactly?’

  ‘A bit of this, a bit of that. I can tell you better what MAB is doing, like a soil and vegetation inventory; examining the potential of the Sahelian zone as a support for human and animal life; and various ecological observations involving the study of plant life suitable to drought conditions and the finding of new species that could contribute to the regeneration of the ecosystem. We’re even looking into a balance between the needs of the nomads who live right across the area, and those of the small farmers wherever they come into contact with one another. Does that give you some idea?’

  Hero hadn’t liked to confess that she was as much in the dark as ever. She had made a mental resolution to read his book in its entirety while he was away, instead of skimming through the duller chapters, hoping to find out more about his personal reactions and about all the different things he had done.

  ‘We have mostly nomads around here,’ she had told him. ‘The Turkana. They’re a fabulous people - literally! It was years before anything was known about them, except that they were supposed to be practically giants and terribly fierce. They were the only people to take on the Masai and rout them, but then they were enslaved by the Abyssinians themselves. They’re a Nilo-hamitic people. You’ll like them.’ ‘Do any of them work for us?’

  She had considered for a moment. ‘No, I don’t think so. Most of the people we employ are Somalis, and one or two Samburus.’

  And then, a moment or two later, he had stepped into the plane, fastening the door securely behind him, and she had been alone. The movement of the aeroplane had raised the dust and it had risen in a cloud round her head, staining her skin and clothing a uniform rust-red. She hadn’t been able to see whether he had waved to her or not, but she liked to think he had.

  Hero spent the rest of the day trucking soil as though her life depended on it. She didn’t even bother to go back to the house for lunch, working through the heat of the day with a tenacity that would have brought Benedict’s ire down on her head had he been there to see it. Going home, just before sunset, there were dik-dik everywhere, scuttling back and forth across the road. The smallest of the African antelopes, they are no larger than a hare, with the delicate features of their race and a turn of speed that make them difficult to follow as they dash for cover when startled. Hero slowed to a crawl, enjoying their antics ahead of her. She was even better pleased when she caught sight of a handsome oryx further off in the bush, with its distinctive long horns, curling slightly backwards, and its beautiful black and white markings on its face. It had been startled by some sound and, head raised, was sniffing the wind, scenting some unseen danger.

  Then Hero saw it too. A lioness, thin to the point of emaciation, crouched behind a long-dead bush, waiting to spring at any prey that came her way. And she had chosen the oryx, there was no doubt about that. Hero’s heart went out to the beautiful animal as it began its run too late and was brought down by the tawny huntress, but that was the way of life in the wild. The lioness would call her family to the kill and they would survive a little longer because of it, or some of them would. The male would eat first, gorging himself on the still warm carcass, and the
n his wives would eat too. Only after they were done would the cubs be allowed to take their share, with the result that the drought had taken its toll of the young cats too, more even than of their elders.

  There was only Koinange to tell about the animals and he greeted the information with an impassive face that told more clearly than anything he could have said how little they meant to him. His only interest was in what Hero was going to eat that evening.

  ‘Wataka hiki au hiki? Do you want this or that?’ he demanded, pointing to the casserole she should have had at lunchtime and a large venison steak he had planned for her dinner.

  Hero didn’t care what she ate. She longed for a bath to wash away the red dust that covered her from head to foot, a long, hot bath that would ease her aching muscles and make it easier for her to sleep. But there was no chance of that and she had to do the best she could with a bowl of tepid water and a lot of determination.

  After that she ate the casserole that Koinange had heated up for her to the accompaniment of a recording of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra. The blind Spanish composer was very much in favour with her at the moment and she felt much better when the last sounds had died away. There was nothing to stop her then from going straight to bed to read Benedict’s book until sleep overcame her, but she found no comfort in the enormous bed that had been her parents, and she was tempted to return to her own room, or even to trespass in the dressing-room where contact with another human being wouldn’t seem so very far away.

  It was the first time she had been in the dressing-room since Benedict had taken possession of it. It was a very small room. Nor did he seem to have made much impact on it: there were no photographs on display, or any of the usual clutter that people kept in their bedrooms. In a way this disappointed her, but as she felt rather guilty being there anyway, in another way it was rather a relief. She lay fully clothed on his bed and opened the heavy book at the beginning, determined to take in every word of it so that, when he came back, she would be able to take an intelligent interest in all his doings.