by William Boyd
Wheech-Browning patted the pockets of his jacket, and loosened his tie.
“Would you mind awfully if I cadged a ciggie off you, Smith? I must have lost mine when I was thrown.”
Temple took out a packet of cigarettes and offered him one.
“Dumb animals, eh?” Wheech-Browning said, exhaling smoke and looking at his mule. “Thought I’d got a real bargain. And talking of bargains,” he said, noticing the crates in Temple’s waggon, “what’ve you got there?”
“Coffee seedlings,” Temple said.
“Coffee? Here? Think they’ll grow, old chap?”
“Well, we won’t know till we try.”
“Got a point there, I suppose. Where did you get them? Nairobi? Nakuru?”
“No. I got them in Dar.”
“German East? Good Lord, how fascinating. Tell me, what’s it like? I’m hoping to get down to Dar for the exhibition thing in August. Our consul there was at Cambridge with a cousin of mine. How did you find the wa-Germani?”
“It’s a nice place,” Temple said. “Clean and neat. Efficient too—in Dar, certainly. But it was like an armed camp. Soldiers everywhere.”
“What you’d expect, really. Typical Hun mentality, always marching about.” He paused. “Well look Smith, mustn’t keep you. Thanks for catching my mule. Let’s hope the beastly thing’s more tranquil on the ride home. Don’t want to land on my arse again.”
He walked over and mounted the mule, an operation that was, for him, as easy as getting on a bicycle. When his feet were in the stirrups they were only six inches from the ground.
“Gee up,” Wheech-Browning ordered, and the mule obediently started walking in the direction of Taveta. Temple tried to stop himself from smiling at the ridiculous sight.
“Seems fine,” Wheech-Browning shouted over his shoulder. Then, “Oh, by the way, can you drop in and see me some time next week?”
Temple frowned. “Why?” he called.
“Those coffee seedlings from German East,” Wheech-Browning yelled. “You’ve got to pay me the customs duty on them.”
Temple was still cursing Wheech-Browning when he came in sight of his farm some thirty minutes later. ‘Smithville’, as he grandiosely referred to it, did not present an attractive aspect to the eye. His house was built on a small hill; or rather, it was being built. The two storey wooden frame house had been incomplete now for over two years. The ground floor, consisting of a dining room, sitting room and kitchen, was in working order, but only two of the three bedrooms on the floor above were habitable. The third bedroom, above the kitchen, had walls, a floor, but no roof. It had been left incomplete not so much through want of funds or building expertise but through lack of energy, all of that commodity having been claimed by and directed towards the construction of the sisal factory which, unfortunately for the house, still remained the centre of Temple’s world.
From the house the land sloped gently away towards the small patch of water—some two miles distant—that was Lake Jipe. Across the border in German East (which ran beyond the lake) rose the Pare hills, along whose other side Temple had travelled that morning in the train from Bangui to Moshi.
At the moment Temple’s farm was divided into plots of sisal, with their great spiky leaves like hugely enlarged pineapple crowns, and fields of linseed plants. At the foot of the hill on which the house stood was the ‘factory’. This was a large corrugated iron shed which contained Temple’s pride and joy: the Finnegan and Zabriskie sisal ‘Decorticator’, a towering, massive threshing machine that pulverized the stiff sisal leaves into limp bundies of fibrous hemp. A smaller shed beside it contained smaller, more domestic-sized crushers for processing the linseed berries. Grouped around this central nub of the ‘factory’ were other shaky lean-tos, relics of failed enterprises of the past.
A large number of fenced-off wooden pens had served first as a pig farm, which had flourished for nine months before swine-fever had decimated the entire herd in a fortnight. Undeterred, Temple had immediately adapted the enclosures for ostrich farming, raising the fencing until it stood six feet high, and taking out some of the intervening walls. He had bought thirty ostriches at considerable expense and had been looking forward to his first harvest of feathers and the outcome of his breeding efforts—eight huge eggs had been laid by the hens—when disaster struck for the second time. One night a pride of lions had broken in and killed every bird. The ostriches trapped in their corral had been absurdly easy prey, their long necks an inviting target and broken with one swipe of a paw or crunch of teeth. Temple could still recall the shock of witnessing the result of the massacre, standing knee-deep in feathers, surrounded by his ravaged, mangled flock. Ostrich farming had proved a costly failure. All the recompense he had received was a week of superb omelettes—for breakfast, lunch and supper—as he and his family had sadly eaten their way through the clutch of eggs.
All the same, Smithville had survived, sustained by the reliable but boring sisal and linseed. Temple had invested in the Decorticator as much in an attempt to liven up the business of farming as to save him the processing fees he had to pay if the hemp was made at Voi. Theoretically, his forty acres of sisal did not warrant the erection of the factory, but it had swiftly become one of the most exciting and joyous moments of his life to set the great Decorticator in motion, its engine belching smoke, the webbing drive belts flapping and cracking, the tin shed echoing to the crunch and clang of the flails as the bundies of sisal leaves were fed into the jaws of the machine by his terrified farm boys.
It was now almost dark and the sun was dropping behind the Pare hills, sending their blue shadows advancing across the orange lake. Temple had travelled faster than he expected. He got Saleh to unharness the oxen, supervising the careful unloading and storing of the coffee seedlings, and looked in briefly on the dark gleaming mass of the Decorticator before he trudged up the hill to the house.
Matilda, his wife, was sitting on the verandah reading, a book propped on her pregnant belly. She had a neat, bright face with round, very dark brown eyes. After Kermit Roosevelt had dismissed him, Temple had found temporary work with the American Industrial Mission near Nairobi, where his expertise had come in useful in the teaching of rudimentary engineering skills to the orphans, the mission housed and cared for. Matilda’s father, the Rev. Norman Espie, ran a mission a few miles away. Temple was sent to supervise the erection of a water tower and met Matilda. It was something about her enormous calm that attracted him and encouraged him to think of staying to make his future in the new and growing colony. The day he received notification that his savings had been transferred from Sturgis to the Bank of India, Nairobi, he proposed and was, with only a night intervening to allow further reflection, accepted.
Matilda looked up at the sound of his footsteps.
“Hello, dear,” she said, returning to her book. “Have a nice trip?”
“I did,” Temple said. His wife never ceased to astonish him: he might have popped out for ten minutes. “Very interesting. And successful.” He chose his words carefully, conscious of the creeping onset of guilt as he bent to kiss the top of her head. He had a sudden image of the oiled, compliant whore in the Kitumoinee Hotel. Now, in his home, with his wife, family and farm around him, he wondered what had possessed him to visit the place.
“How are you?” he said, a flood of tenderness making his voice tremble. He cleared his throat. “Everything go fine? No problems?”
“What?” Matilda said, looking up and squinting at him. “Oh yes. All well.”
“Good,” Temple said. “Good, good, good.” He sat down. There was a tray with a tea pot and milk jug on it. He cupped his hands round the pot.
“Coldish now, I should think,” Matilda said. “Why not have a peg?”
Temple squeezed her hand. “I think I will. Join me?” But she hadn’t heard, she was reading again.
Temple went into the house. The dining room table was covered with the residue of some disgusting meal. Enamel plates, g
lasses and cutlery were assembled haphazardly on its surface among damp spills and pieces of food. His children had been fed, that at least was something. He went through into the kitchen. This room was practically bare. In the centre of the floor stood a table. In a corner was a stoneware water filter and a large meatsafe, a fly-proofed cupboard whose four legs stood in small tins of water to protect it against invasion by the ants that swarmed everywhere on floor and walls. Along one of these walls was a three foot-high concrete trough, filled with charcoal and covered in thick iron grilles. It was on this crude instrument that all their cooking was done. Temple walked to the back door. In the gathering dusk he could just make out, beyond the privy and a huge pile of firewood, his cook and houseboy’s shamba, an untidy collection of woven and thatched straw and grass huts and ill-tended vegetable plots. He saw the plump figure of the ayah waddling up the hill, his baby daughter Emily balanced on her hip.
“Ayah,” he shouted. She was Indian, inherited from Matilda’s family, and spoke English. “Call Joseph,” he instructed. His voice carried to the shamba because shouts and screams of excitement promptly rose up from it, and the small pale bodies of his two boys, Glenway and Walker, hurtled from behind one of the huts and ran breathlessly towards him screaming “Papa, Papa!” in their shrill young voices.
He felt a twinge of irritation at Matilda’s complacency. The boys were not meant to play in the cook’s shamba. It was annoying to come back from a long and arduous journey to find the house in a mess and his instructions so heedlessly flouted. His two boys—Glenway nearly four and Walker nearly three—reached him and jumped up and down, tugging at his trousers and jacket. He picked them both up. Joseph, the houseboy, loped grinning behind them.
“Joseph,” Temple ordered, “one whisky and water, on the verandah, quickly.” Joseph ran off to get the whisky while Temple set his two boys back on the ground and then walked round towards the front, holding their hands.
He paused at the side for a moment, looking over his farm: the drying racks, the trolley lines, the factory, the neat rows of sisal and linseed stretching out to the shores of Lake Jipe, now dark and opaque. All around the crickets were trilling, somewhere a hyena barked. He saw Saleh and the farm boys walking back down the road to the village where the farm workers lived, a mile or so away on the banks of the thickly wooded river—the Lumi—that flowed into Lake Jipe. Over to his left, some distance off and invisible in the dark, was a small grove of wild fig trees which contained the grave of his third child, an unnamed baby girl, who had barely lived for a day.
Glenway pulled at his arm. “Come on, Papa,” he said. “Let’s go in.” Temple looked down at his children. He found it strange that they spoke with English accents—said ‘P’pah’ instead of ‘Poppa’. It was an indication, he ruefully admitted, of the amount of time he spent with them. They walked round to the front of the house. Matilda still sat on the verandah, an oil lamp on the table illuminating her book. In the dining room he could see Joseph clearing away the remains of the children’s meal. He felt the comforting presence of his family form around him, the reassuring familiarity of the things he owned and the things he had grown or made occupying their appointed places in the gathering dark—from the two hundred fragile green shoots of the coffee seedlings to the imposing bulk of the Decorticator; from the thousands of sisal and linseed plants to the fences he’d erected at his land’s perimeter just a few yards from the border with German East.
They were like pinions that fixed him to the soil; clamps that fastened and bound him to this new life he’d chosen. He ruffled his son’s hair, enjoying the pleasant sensations, his heart big with self-satisfaction and pride.
“Where did you go?” Walker asked him as they climbed the steps to the verandah.
“To another country,” Temple said.
“What did you do there?”
“I bought some coffee plants and…” he paused, sensing the beginnings of a blush spread across his cheeks. “And, guess what, I saw a big battleship and lots of soldiers.”
“Soldiers,” Glenway said, his eyes gleaming. “Are they going to fight in a war?”
Temple laughed. “Did you hear that, Matilda? A war? Don’t be silly, Glenway. There isn’t going to be a war. Well, at least not here in Africa, anyways.”
Chapter 4
24 July 1914,
Ashurst, Kent, England
Felix Cobb stepped out of the train at Ashurst station. He put his bags down on the platform, took off his glasses and folded them away in their case. The wrought iron railings behind the station building had been recently repainted and bright tubs of geraniums stood evenly spaced out along the length of the platform.
The train puffed off and Felix realized he had been the only passenger to get out. For a second he thought he’d left his hat on the train before he remembered that he and Holland had decided to go about bareheaded. He waited a little longer. It was clear no one had come to meet him. He felt the irrational hatred of his family, which he’d vowed to keep banked down this weekend, flare up inside him. Typical, he thought: a family of soldiers and they can’t even organize someone to meet me off the train. He picked up his suitcases and walked out of the station, handing his ticket to the sleepy collector on the way.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning and the sun blazed down from a washed-out blue sky. Felix felt his clothes heavy on his body. He wore an old tweed jacket and navy blue serge trousers, a new soft-collared bright emerald green flannel shirt and a red tie. Both these last items had been purchased the day before on Holland’s instructions.
Felix ran his finger between the prickly collar and his moist, chafing neck. The stationyard was also empty, except for two horse-drawn drays from which chums of milk were being unloaded. The boys hefting the churns looked not much younger than him, sixteen or seventeen. They wore large flat caps, collarless shirts with the sleeves rolled up, coarse woollen trousers that stopped at the ankles, and heavy, clumsy-looking boots. Felix sensed he was being scrutinized. He tried to look at ease and approachable, hoping his coloured shirt would proclaim him an ally. He wished he was still carrying the book he had been reading on the train—it was Kropotkin’s Social Anarchy after all—but realized that, even if the two boys could have read the name of the author, it would be unlikely to have much significance for them. Instead he kicked casually at a pebble and whistled a couple of bars of ‘All Night Long He Calls Her’, a tune he’d come to like recently. He tapped his pockets, wondering if he had time for a cigarette. Perhaps he should set off and walk the mile into Ashurst village: he could get someone to take him out to the house from there.
“Bloody family,” he said out loud. “Damn bloody damn bloody family.”
Felix was of average height—five foot nine—and slimly built. His lips were full and a dark pink, almost as if he had rouged them. This vaguely effeminate feature was counter-balanced by his blue-ish beard, unusually heavy for an eighteen-year-old, on his upper lip, spreading from the corners of his mouth and on to his chin, as if it had been blacked in for theatricals. The skin around his eyes had a brown foxed look (which might have indicated a tendency to insomnia), but the most arresting feature of his face was his eyebrows, prematurely thick and wiry, barely thinning where they met above his unexceptionable nose.
Felix took a cigarette from his cigarette case, and was about to light it when a car—a Humberette—pulled in to the station yard, the klaxon giving a strangled hoot of welcome. When Felix saw who was driving all the accumulating tensions and irritations of the day cleared themselves. It was Gabriel, his brother. Gabriel stepped out of the car and gave a salute, clicking his heels together ostentatiously. He was wearing a Norfolk jacket, a shirt with a cravat and grey flannel trousers.
“Your excellency,” Gabriel said. “Your motor is waiting.”
“Gabe,” Felix said. “You’re here.”
“Looks like it, old fellow. Can’t miss your own wedding, you know.” He strode forward, his hand out, smiling.
He was tall and broad-shouldered. His pale brown hair was cut short and parted neatly in the middle. His face was square, as if his jaw muscles were permanently clenched, and his features were even and pleasant. He looked strong and a bit simple. Gabriel was the only member of his family to whom Felix gave his love uncritically and unreservedly. He was twenty-seven and a captain in his father’s old regiment, the Duke of Connaught’s Own West Kents, currently stationed in India, from where he’d just returned. Felix shook his hand, squeezing hard.
They got into the Humberette, Gabriel driving.
“Ready?” he said. “Off we go.”
They turned right out of the station yard and drove off up the main road from Ashurst to Sevenoaks.
“How’s the army?” Felix asked, raising his voice above the noise of the puttering engine. “Boring?”
“How’s school?” Gabriel riposted, not rising to the bait.
“Over, thank God. And now,” Felix paused, stretching luxuriously, “Oxford.”
Gabriel glanced at him. “When did you clear that with Father?”
“Oh he doesn’t bother about me, Gabe. He gave me up as a bad job years ago. Mother told me he didn’t mind.”