A Stone's Throw

by Fiona Shaw

  ‘My wife dead! It should be you. You in that boat. You drowned!’

  Then someone else was shouting, and the lifeboat rocked, catching the waves broadside with a hard slap sound that banged through her head. But he was doing more than shouting; he was roaring and Meg knew his voice because she had heard it raised once before. Only now Jim roared with rage.

  She felt Mr Richardson’s fingers pulled away from her neck and his weight yanked off her. And when she opened her eyes there was Jim with his fist raised.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, and all her fear was carried in the cry. Fear for her life in this war, in this lifeboat; fear because she desired the man she couldn’t marry, and she would marry the man she didn’t desire.

  He looked at her, wild-eyed, as mad to see as Mr Richardson.

  ‘No!’ she shouted.

  She shook her head. She was so weary. There was too much to hold in and she couldn’t do it any more.

  Slowly Jim lowered his fist. Meg closed her eyes and imagined herself at home and alone in her bed. She was small again and the bed was her castle. She imagined the covers pulled high and tucked in, and sleeping beside her, turned away into the crook of his dream, was Will. He was there, and just for a moment she let go, and it felt so good, so warm and reassuring.

  It was no more than a few seconds, no more than that. Nothing had changed when she opened her eyes. Jim still stood over Mr Richardson, and the rowers still watched. But she felt the warmth between her legs, and the wetness.

  ‘Please God, no!’ she said, and the oars dipped and the boat went on.

  EARTH

  The view from the house was one of the best. Everybody said so. Everybody said how lucky they’d been, what with this view, and the pond, and the air and the trees. Even the earth they were lucky with, apparently; the black soil that grew things either very big or very small.

  The farm had belonged to a German couple and they’d sold the house to George for a song. So he told her, anyway. Sold it and run, he didn’t know where. North Africa, probably. The land had gone to the Bromleys, a nice addition to their coffee plantation, and George and Meg had got the house and the garden around. Lock, stock and barrel, everything: furniture, glassware, linen, rugs, right down to the books, all in German, and a rheumy old dog called Otto, who would come running to the right tone of voice, whatever you called him, little Will discovered.

  Lying in bed Meg would run her fingers over the pillowcase till she felt the raised edge of the monogram: ‘KvG’. She was sleeping on someone else’s name, and sometimes she was sure, even now, that she dreamed someone else’s dreams.

  Back in their first married months in Kenya, George and Meg had lived in Kandula, the town, in the little bungalow he had inherited from his predecessor.

  ‘Reggie Crumlin was single,’ George said, ‘and from what I’ve gathered, not very interested in anything except whisky and big game. And by the time he retired, it was only whisky.’

  Meg thought that Reggie Crumlin had certainly not been interested in the house, which had little in the way of furniture, not even a good bed, and only two chairs. It was, besides, too small for the two of them and with their first baby on the way so very quickly, George had jumped at the chance of the house in the hills, where the air was clearer and there was room for a nursery and the red dust didn’t lie quite so deep in the months before the long rains. They could entertain more easily now, he said, and he felt happier with Meg here, when he had to be away. It was safer, especially with Sita now sleeping in the next room and Yusuf only a shout away from the front door.

  ‘You’re sure we can afford it?’ Meg had said, and was answered with a curt nod. If that was all he would say, then she knew she’d get no more from him and there was no point fretting. It was usual for a husband to take care of financial matters. Other women spoke of their difficulties with this, but none did any differently. But Meg still wondered how they could afford it, because his salary was modest and he had no money behind him any more than she did.

  This early, the air was still cold and Meg shivered and wrapped her gown around her more tightly. But she didn’t go in because she liked it, when the mist still hung in the hills and the colours were less fierce. Sometimes in the early morning, the hills weren’t there. They could come and go so fast, it was like magic. As if a magician with a flourish had flung his silky scarf and made them disappear, and flung it again and there they were. She had seen such a thing once when Mrs Rogers hired a magician for the Christmas party. He’d stood with his hat and cape in one of the vicarage rooms and done his tricks before the village children. She remembered the feeling very well; she’d liked it, being tricked, because she knew he had the rabbit safe somewhere, so she didn’t mind not knowing where. Maybe that was how she felt about George and the money. She didn’t mind too much not knowing because she trusted him to keep things safe. They had been married for five years now and he had reliably been everything she had needed him to be.

  A voice at her shoulder. Yusuf, the house boy, stood with a tray.

  ‘Tea, Memsaab.’ He placed it on the table. ‘Master William is awake,’ he said.

  Meg never announced herself to Yusuf in the morning but somehow he always knew when she was up and he would be there on the veranda with a tray of tea never more than ten minutes after she had stepped out.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  The tea drew a thin, warm line down her insides, down to her belly. Soon Will would run to find her, and Sita would bring the baby, and there would be breakfast and things to decide, meals, and the diary to run through, because her memory had been terrible since the baby and she couldn’t remember, otherwise, what she should be doing or where she should be going. But just for now she stood on the veranda and looked out.

  George was in the north, beyond the hills, supervising a crop scheme – he had told her what it was, but she couldn’t remember the details. Something to do with ground nuts, she thought, or perhaps tobacco. They were waiting on the rains. Everybody was waiting on the rains. Then there were two barazas to attend, and he had several cases to hear, mostly land disputes, he said, and a whole list of other things. He had been away nearly a week and when he returned tomorrow, he would be filthy with dust and bone tired and he would want the house and the garden and Meg to be just so. She understood; she didn’t mind. He worked very hard. It was only that she seemed to be so tired, too, and everything was such a tremendous effort.

  Somewhere inside there were the sounds of doors opening and closing and a child’s voice. She took another look across the valley, as if to take in the view, breathe it in and hold it there, like a lungful of smoke; as if she could suck it into her blood this way, even though it was the wrong landscape really because she already had a place that lived inside her.

  Other people saw animals in this view from the house. George had pointed out antelope – eland he told her, the biggest kind – grazing on the plain, and different birds, and once a shadow in the hills that was a pair of lions. He saw them with binoculars. About the lions Meg had nodded – she believed him – but she didn’t want to see them.

  She’d had a letter from her mother that week, telling her all sorts from home: how much things cost now, and how long spring was taking to arrive; and how hard getting about was, what with her legs, and now her hands were sore as well. Meg was accustomed to this. Ever since she’d left, her mother had painted the price each month in her letters. Meg had got used to it, and anyway she’d felt less guilty since the children were born. In return she wrote chatty letters that were sorry for the sore hands and the slow spring. Then she wrote all sorts about the children, and George, and she told her mother gossip and how the Natives lived. These days her letters were wrapped around a post office money order.

  The only person Meg didn’t talk about was herself. She never said that she still missed her father; or that she still looked for her brother, though less fiercely now. And she never told her mother how much she missed things: the bed
with its bold as brass flowers, and the raised pavement she’d walked to school along every day, and the church with its stained glass, the fields, and the woods where the boys went to play. Because though she’d left and travelled to another continent, these were the places that inhabited her mind.

  ‘Boo!’

  Small hands gripped her calves and she felt her son’s head butt against her legs.

  ‘Boo!’ he said again.

  His fingers were like so many little pebbles, pressing and ticklish. Bending and turning in one movement, she picked him up and kissed him, once on each cheek, and he squealed his pleasure and threw his head this way and that. It was harder, doing this, than it had been even the few months back when she was very pregnant, but she would not let it go. Will sat on her hips, legs wrapped around her middle and it was her turn to butt her head.

  ‘My blue-eyed boy,’ she murmured, and she buried her face in him till he wriggled to be let down.

  She set him on the ground again. He had a little boy’s, not a baby’s body now, not an ounce of fat on him, and as if by way of consolation to herself, she patted his head to feel his soft hair.

  ‘Go and tell Kibaki we’ll have breakfast,’ she said.

  ‘But I’m still in my pyjamas.’

  ‘No matter.’

  She went to the nursery and found Sita feeding the baby. He was a hungry baby with eyes only for his bottle, and when it was empty and Meg took him to her shoulder to wind him, he grizzled a little.

  ‘We’re having breakfast,’ Meg said. ‘Will you get him dressed?’

  She kissed the top of his head and gave him back to Sita.

  ‘I can still feel it,’ she said, putting an arm across her breasts.

  ‘He needs stronger food now,’ Sita said. ‘More than milk.’

  Will had little interest in food and he sat on his cushion at the dining table with his elbows planted, napkin tucked into his pyjama shirt, toying with the squares of toast and the slices of orange that Kibaki had arranged for him.

  ‘I want to play,’ Will said.

  ‘When you’ve eaten your breakfast and drunk your milk.’ Meg nudged one of the toast squares. ‘Kibaki has made a pretty flower this morning.’

  ‘It’s not a flower, it’s a star.’

  This was one of their jokes, Kibaki’s toast. Sometimes he cut it into circles and sometimes he made a face out of the different shapes. Today he had made a star, or flower, out of the lozenge-shaped pieces. When Will began, finally, to eat a piece, it was Kibaki’s job to pretend to be upset by the disarranging.

  Meg sipped her tea. The china, left by the fled Germans, was delicate. The tea service was pale blue in colour, decorated with a frieze of tiny flowers. She almost thought she could see the light through the side of the tea cup, and she took care, lifting it and setting it back down.

  ‘Eat up, Will.’

  The little boy traced around the flowers on his plate in a half-absent, half-provocative way.

  ‘I want to play,’ he said.

  ‘If you don’t eat up your toast, you’ll have a little boy’s plate again tomorrow,’ Meg said, ‘and I’ll have to tell Daddy when he comes home.’

  Will ate a mouthful of toast, chewing laboriously, and rearranged the star shape, making the space between the toast points equal to his eye.

  Yusuf came in, walking across the polished boards with his long, delicate stride. He was like a crane high-stepping in the shallows, all knee and angle. Will watched him from beneath his eyelids. Yusuf set a dish on the sideboard: ‘Eggs, memsaab, and your diary.’ Placing the diary on the table beside Meg, he turned to go out.

  Will pushed a piece of toast to and fro.

  ‘Anyway Yusuf’s my real daddy. Cos he doesn’t ever eat anything either, and he’s skinny like me,’ he said.

  Meg had never seen Yusuf’s calm broken – not when the rains failed, nor when thieves took his best cow; not even when his own child, his daughter Jata, was so ill they feared for her life and drove her in the Austin in the dead of night through the hills to the mission hospital, Yusuf at the wheel, silent and focussed, pushing the little car to its limits.

  But now she saw his back stiffen, and when he turned, there was panic on his face.

  Meg had listened to the gossip amongst the women at the club, and she’d overheard the men talking over the port right here in her dining room. It was absurd, to be worried about a small boy’s words like this, but Africans had been attacked, left for dead, for little more. All it would take would be Will repeating this to one of his little toto friends and next thing Yusuf might be beaten to a pulp with his own panga, like the African they’d mentioned at the club who gave a piggyback to his boss’s child.

  Meg laughed. She heard the sound as if it came from outside herself.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Will. Yusuf has his own son, and his own daughter, you know that. And you are mine. Mine and your daddy’s.’

  ‘George Lombard Garrowby,’ Will said, like a lesson learned.

  ‘Memsaab?’ Yusuf said.

  ‘Thank you, Yusuf.’

  Meg waited till she was sure he was gone before speaking.

  ‘If you eat up all your toast then I’ll tell you the story about when I got married to your daddy.’

  ‘Before I was born,’ Will said.

  ‘Eat up your toast.’

  ‘Before I was a twinkle,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Properly tell it?’

  She nodded.

  So Will ate the toast as if it were the simplest thing in the world, and Meg began. She didn’t try to abridge the story or amend it. He had a child’s sharp ear for being short-changed and he would only have stopped eating and made her go back. She told him about how she had travelled across the huge ocean to marry his father, and how George travelled across the great desert to marry her; and how he carried her wedding ring with him in its special box.

  ‘And then he waited and waited by the sea for me to arrive, and the boat didn’t come and the boat didn’t come, and everybody else that was waiting, one by one, they went home.’

  ‘Tell it how they went,’ Will said, ‘all the different people,’ because he had heard this story before and he wanted it told just so.

  ‘Well, there were the soldiers, and the vicar, and the motorcar with the dog inside …’

  ‘And the man with the white hat, and it was a proper dog, not a pye dog,’ Will said, his mouth still full.

  ‘Yes, a proper dog with a collar round its neck that put its head out of the motor car window. But they all went home when the boat didn’t come …’

  Will bounced in his seat and broke in with his own recitation, because this story was part of the family rosary: ‘… First of all the dog and the mummy and daddy and the two big girls went home, and then the soldiers went home, and the man with the white hat and last of all the vicar but …’ He shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘… not Daddy.’

  ‘No, not Daddy. And when the boat finally arrived, and everybody was so thirsty and dirty, and hungry …’

  ‘…and you were so dirty cos you hadn’t cleaned your face with a flannel not for days and so hungry you would eat a horse …’

  ‘I was so dirty and so thirsty and tired and hungry, and who was standing there, waiting?’

  Will nodded slowly, solemnly, like a boy beyond his years. Absentmindedly he put the last finger of toast in his mouth.

  ‘It was Daddy, and he showed you the ring, and the next day the vicar who had gone away married you in his church.’

  Almost it had happened like that. Almost. Meg touched the ring. They had predicted seven, but it was eleven days at sea in the lifeboat before they were rescued. She couldn’t properly remember the last of them.

  A ship found them drifting, and when they took her off the lifeboat, they said all she asked for, again and again, was a clean dress. They thought it funny, and a product of her delirium. Her skin was burned from the sun, she was feverish with sun-stroke
, she had lost nearly two stone in weight and what she longed for, the only thing, was a clean dress. This the men approved of. This was a mark of her will to live and when the captain of the rescue ship gave her away less than a week later, in a clean and borrowed frock, he told her that a young woman like her, with such a spirit, deserved this marriage and he was sure her father would be proud when he knew.

  She remembered just a single figure standing when the ship came into port. Just a single, solitary figure waiting patiently, an act of faith in the midst of so much bad faith. It was like a scene from a novel and ever after it stayed this way in her mind, though later she thought her memory had surely played tricks, because there must have been a horde of people swarming about the quayside, not just the single one. He stood still and held a small box in his hand, though till she was nearly up to him, it looked like his fist clenched. And when he saw her, a little figure decked out in a pair of sailor’s ducks, he just raised his arm, as though he had expected her to arrive like this. And before he greeted her, he held the box out on the palm of his hand, ceremonious, and flipped it open so that the ring caught the sun, making a hard line of light.

  ‘But what nearly happened to the ring?’ Meg said. She wanted to hurry through this part of the tale this morning, but Will was a stickler and she’d given her word.

  ‘It slipped off,’ Will said, ‘cos it was so loose, only Daddy saw it slip and he picked it up.’

  It had been so loose on her finger, she feared it would drop and be lost in the dust; so she wore it on a chain around her neck for a month, trying it on each day for size, till gradually, as her weight and her figure returned, she grew into it again.

  ‘We were so long in the little boat that we nearly ran out of food,’ Meg said.

  ‘And water. Tell about the water, and the funny man who drank the sea, and the kind one with the hurt head who said he’d walk you home.’

  She looked at Will, his eager face. The man was called Jim, but she never said his name aloud when she told the story. So to Will he was simply the man with the hurt head. He’d eaten every last bit of toast, but she couldn’t tell any more.