by Fiona Shaw
She walked down the middle of the drive. Safest place, they said. Nothing going to creep up on you, or slither out, or nip you without a warning at least, if you walked in the middle of your drive. It turned, a graceful, sweeping arc, and she was out of sight of the house, walking still between the high eucalyptus trees. George said the Germans had done well, planting so many of these, because they drained the soil and discouraged mosquitoes. She liked them, with their high branches and their airy shade and the bark hanging in rips and tears.
‘William,’ she called out between the trees. ‘Will.’
She should go back and send Sita to look for him. Sita knew his hiding places; she knew where the children went. Besides, Meg was anxious about Henry. She wanted to see for herself that his skin was clear, that he wasn’t floppy, or stiff. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe Sita, but he was her baby.
‘Will!’ she called.
She was out of sight of the house now. Perhaps she should go to the African lines. She’d never been on her own before, and she wasn’t sure what she would say. Sita, or George, usually did the talking and she just smiled a lot. But this time she had lost Will, so she supposed that’s all she needed to say. And it didn’t matter what they thought. It didn’t matter at all.
She always felt embarrassed standing in their village, that was the point. They seemed to do so much outside their huts; they lived more or less in full view of everybody else and she felt as though she’d walked into somebody else’s house without an invitation. Imagine if she were to do that at home. Her mother didn’t go into anybody else’s house, ever, and Meg had always been careful to make sure she was properly invited; even by the Gilmers, who loved her, and by Mrs Gregg, Alice’s mother, who had known Meg since she was in the infant class. The Africans were always very welcoming, very friendly, at least to Meg’s face, but she knew there was something important that she didn’t understand at all about them.
Anyway, if Will had wandered down there, they’d have brought him back by now. Little Bwana, they called him.
‘My little bwana,’ she said to herself, and she remembered her last touch of him at breakfast that morning, how much of a little boy he was now, so slight and lean, and the last softness of his baby body gone.
She stopped at the bottom of the drive. In all the last four years, she’d never walked beyond here. She felt faint and her throat was tight, as if there were something she couldn’t swallow, and she crouched down, hands on either side for balance, in the dust. A memory came of snow and she shook her head to clear it. After a minute she stood up again and turned to walk back. The strength had gone from her legs and every step was an effort, as though she had been walking for hours.
‘Will,’ she called out, but her voice was weak. He’d only hear if he were very close by.
When she heard the children, she heard them quite clearly, more than one of them, laughing or calling out. But they were too far off for her to tell whether one of the voices was Will’s. She scrambled up the bank into the grove of trees, her breath so loud in her ears that she kept stopping and holding it so as to hear the children’s sounds again, then setting off once more. After a couple of minutes she found them: four little totos, one of them Will.
From where she stood, the children couldn’t see her and so she watched, unseen, and waited for her heart to slow down and her breath to be steadier. They were running to and fro, calling out, playing in a clearing between the trees where the sun broke through and streaked the air. One of the children was a girl and she held a tin bowl Meg recognised from the kitchen. The others waved sticks like spears. She watched Will raise his stick above his head and stamp his feet and she heard him shout ‘Row Row’, and throw back his head. Then the two African boys joined in and they shouted something out in unison that, whatever it was, wasn’t English. Whatever it was, it sounded wild and strange. She saw in her mind’s eye the picture she’d found in the drawing room with its red and blue lines striking away from the circle. She had guessed it as a person with a head and limbs; but watching her son now she didn’t know what it was, and she thought how much of a stranger he remained. She couldn’t imagine how it must feel to be him. A wash of pleasure ran over her to see her small son standing so separately, playing without fear. She had been very frightened by his disappearance and she would have to be cross with him in a minute, but for now she was glad that he could run around fearless like this.
She stepped out into the children’s game, appearing, as if like magic, from between the trees, and the African children turned tail and fled, soundlessly, vanished in moments, so that Will stood deserted in the middle of the clearing, a little, grubby European boy with a stick in one hand and the tin bowl somehow in the other. Meg smiled. He looked so left alone.
Will didn’t look at Meg, only lifted his chin and planted his stick more firmly in the ground, still king, or hunter, or warrior, or whatever it was he was playing at. She felt heavy with relief and she wanted most of all to pick him up and hug him to her. But she put on her severest voice.
‘William,’ she said. ‘Sita told you to stay in the drawing room.’
Will looked down at the ground, his jaw stubborn.
‘She told you to stay there till I returned. When I came back, I couldn’t find you and I’ve been very worried. Why did you disobey her?’
He shrugged.
‘I thought you might be hurt. I didn’t know what had happened to you,’ she said. She waited again.
‘William?’ she said.
‘Njombo called to me,’ he muttered finally, still staring at the ground.
‘Njombo?’
‘He knocked first,’ Will said. ‘He invited me.’
‘He knocked where?’
‘On the window. I was drawing my picture and he put his hand on the window, and he invited me.’
He made a beckoning gesture with his hand to show how it had been, as if that explained it.
‘Njombo is the toto you have played with before?’ Meg said.
‘His father is a chief,’ Will said.
‘But Njombo is only a little boy, like you. You must ask me before you go to play with him.’
She put her fingers under his chin and lifted his head.
‘Look at me, Will.’
He didn’t want to meet her eye and he looked one way and then the other.
‘Njombo’s not the same as you,’ she said. ‘He comes from here. He’s an African. This is his country, his home …’
Will broke in, his voice impassioned.
‘But it’s mine too.’
Meg shook her head.
‘No. Not so that you can play like Njombo plays. You’re an English boy. One day we’ll go home to England and then you can play like this. You’ll be a bigger boy then, too, and I won’t need to run and find you.’
Will crossed his arms and stamped his foot on the ground. Meg smiled. George crossed his arms when he was angry, and for a second Will was a miniature George. She took his grimy, reluctant hand and tugged him back through the trees towards the drive.
Mrs Bromley tsked through her teeth and mixed another gin and orange squash. She pointed to Meg’s glass.
‘No, thank you,’ Meg said, ‘else I’ll be asleep this afternoon.’
‘Nothing wrong with that,’ Mrs Bromley said.
‘No, but I’ve promised myself an hour in the garden.’
‘Anyway …’ Mrs Bromley said.
She settled herself in her chair and Meg waited. Mrs Bromley always took her time. She was a large, comfortable woman in a large, comfortable floral print dress. Indeed Meg had never seen her in anything except floral prints and she had even wondered aloud to George recently whether one of Mrs Bromley’s ways of keeping England about her was to walk around in a perpetually flowering garden.
Meg looked across the drawing room. Mrs Bromley’s furniture, too, was upholstered in flowers, and now swathes of bias-cut dahlias rustled and shifted themselves dizzyingly upon a bank of upholster
ed marigolds and daisies.
What do I do, Meg wondered, to keep England about me? It isn’t dressing in flowers. But it might be growing them. I used to like putting them in jars when I was little.
Mrs Bromley was in the middle of a lecture.
‘… the thing is,’ she said, ‘everybody is an immigrant. Us, the Masai, Kikuyu, everybody. It’s the Arabs who’ve been here the longest. Mr Bromley said thousands of years, but I’m not sure I believe that. The Arabs are the kings of trade, of course; while the Masai and the Kikuyu just wander about with spears and count their cows and goats. Don’t really grow very much, only what they need. You can see that in their shambas, can’t you?’
Meg remembered a line of jam jars on the kitchen table once, and one dandelion, was it? Or some other pretty weed, in each. Her mother hadn’t thought them pretty, though. She wondered whether her mother picked flowers for the table, now she’d gone. Her mother did most things at the kitchen table. She’d have written the letter there. The most recent, unexpected letter. Maybe she put daffodils in a jar. It was that time of year in England.
‘Can’t you?’ Mrs Bromley repeated.
Meg nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said, and Mrs Bromley looked at her for a moment, then went on.
‘Then there are the Europeans. We might be the newest, but we do know about farming. So we’ve got on and bought the land, fair and square, planted the coffee and the hemp and so forth. Improved the country no end. Now the Africans say it’s all theirs, but what did they ever do to it? Never even laid claim to it. So frankly they should prove it’s theirs, or put their money where their mouth is. Stop getting up in arms about it all and show willing.’
Meg made noises now to show she was listening. The lecture was the price of friendship with Mrs Bromley. Although it varied a little from day to day, depending on what pearls of wisdom Mr Bromley brought home with him, basically it always followed the same course. And once she had it off her chest, Mrs Bromley became again the generous, toto-hugging settler’s wife most people knew her as. Meg could have told Mrs Bromley that the Africans couldn’t buy the land, or lease it, because the British had made sure of it, drawing things up to favour their own, because that was what George had told her. But she didn’t, because she didn’t share Mrs Bromley’s concerns, nor did she want an argument.
Meg didn’t lay claim to anything out here, except her children. Even her precious patch of garden was borrowed, and she knew that when she returned home, Africa would take back the ground very quickly. She looked around Mrs Bromley’s drawing room. Old paintings, of ancestors, bowls of fruit and dead birds, hung on the walls. There were delicate tables with wood inlay in chequerboard style that Meg didn’t dare put her drink down on. On the floor was a large patterned rug that Mrs Bromley said was from Persia, and the sofas were plumped with green velvet cushions. A glassfronted cupboard was full of silver objects and figurines – shepherdesses and pierrots. Except for the mosquitoes and the view from the windows, this drawing room might have been in deepest England, and Mrs Bromley, seated in her flowered glory, was queen. But it wasn’t Meg’s England, and she no more belonged to this room than she did to the Africans’ thatched rondavels.
Through the window Meg watched Will running across the lawn. He was chasing after Johnty Bromley, who at seven years old had all the glamour of the older child.
‘Are you sending Johnty to England for school?’ Meg said.
‘In September,’ Mrs Bromley said, and Meg saw her shoulders drop as she said it. ‘He’ll be eight by then. Mr Bromley insists.’
After Will was born Meg had written to her mother: ‘His name is William Alan Garrowby. Alan for George’s father, and William for my brother. He will be known as Will.’
She wrote, too, that she and the baby were doing well and that she hoped it would not be too long before his grandmother saw him.
She didn’t hear back for three months and when a letter did finally arrive, there was no word written about her baby son. No congratulations, no hope of seeing him, no word of support. Nothing.
‘Is Johnty looking forward to it?’ Meg said.
‘He thinks it’s all castles and kings and whatnot.’
‘My mother thinks Africa is all elephants and Boers.’
Mrs Bromley laughed.
‘Anyway, it’s got to be done,’ she said, ‘and if it were done, then best it were done quickly, as the poet said.’
Meg liked Joyce Bromley. She was a salt of the earth kind of woman, like Mrs Gilmer back home. She knew her liking was at least partly expedient. The Bromleys lived just down the hill. When George was away, they were her first port of call in an emergency. Besides which the two men were about to go into business together.
‘You didn’t think of going back to England with Johnty, then?’ she said.
‘To live? Goodness, no. The other two have coped. Besides, Mr Bromley needs me here. Expensive business, educating one’s children. You’ll discover that soon enough.’
‘I can’t bear the thought.’ The words came out before Meg could check them, and behind them the press of tears.
Mrs Bromley tsked again.
‘Heavens, girl, Will is only four years old. You’ve got years yet.’
Meg felt Mrs Bromley study her face.
‘You’re upset about something,’ Mrs Bromley said. ‘Distracted.’
‘I’m absolutely fine.’
‘A disagreement with George?’
Meg shook her head.
‘It’s just been a bit of a morning.’
So she told her about Henry’s fever, which had broken now, thank goodness, and about Will being lost and found again. She didn’t mention the letter in her bag, tucked flat between her purse and the shopping list, and Mrs Bromley made sympathetic noises and mixed Meg another gin and orange squash, despite her earlier protestation.
‘You’ll work it off, digging your lovely garden,’ she said, putting it down firmly beside Meg. ‘But listen, arguments about the children going away are as old as the hills. We all have them. Wife in tears, husband with his chin out, stubborn. You know that.’
Meg looked at her. That was it, of course. Children going away. A child had gone away from her home and they never talked about it, her mother and her. Never mentioned it. Never said his name. And then she wrote his name in a letter. Dared to. Dared to miss him, to wish for him, and the letter drowned with the ship. So then she placed his name next to her heart and gave it to her son. Her mother couldn’t silence it now.
‘Let me guess…’ Mrs Bromley went on. ‘… George has had the boys’ names down for prep school since birth, and of course they must go because what was good for him, family tradition, etc etc.’
Meg wondered if it was possible that Mrs Bromley didn’t know what kind of background she came from, or George.
‘He only told me a month ago,’ she said. ‘Will’s to go to a prep school on the South Downs. He won’t even be eight years old when he goes. George mentioned it in the same breath that he told me about the plan for the dairy farm.’
She thought: I couldn’t bear to cross a single road or walk along a pavement or past a church. My son will have to cross an ocean.
‘Doesn’t make one feel better about these things when one’s husband compares one’s children to prize Friesians,’ Mrs Bromley said. ‘I’ve explained that to John I don’t know how many times. But he’s a shrewd businessman, your husband. Too canny for the colonial service. I’m glad he’s going into business with John, because frankly, John is good enough with the livestock, and with the Africans, and he can tell if the coffee’s roasted well, if it comes to that; but he hasn’t got a business head. Not like George has.’
‘George has certainly read enough books,’ Meg said.
‘Think he’s done more than just read the books,’ Mrs Bromley said. ‘He’s done jolly well for himself, and for you and the boys, and well done him, I say.’
‘I don’t know very much about George’s work,’ Meg said. ‘He
won’t tell me very much.’
‘Well, you’re a brave girl,’ Mrs Bromley said puzzlingly. And Meg had that old sense of not being told the whole story. George called her his little woman when she asked him something he didn’t want to answer and Mrs Bromley told her she was a brave girl. She didn’t remember what her mother had said, but then she had given up asking her for answers when she was still small.
They ate their lunch on the veranda, the two women at one table and the little boys at another.
‘It’s just the cards table. A bit rickety. But frightfully grown up for them,’ Mrs Bromley said.
Behind her, Meg heard Johnty whisper something and Will giggle.
‘Mind your manners or you can go and eat in the kitchen,’ Mrs Bromley said. ‘Johnty, you’re the big boy, so you can show William what to do.’
After that the boys behaved impeccably, tucking their napkins under their chins and cutting their fish into small pieces. When Mrs Bromley was called away by her houseboy, Meg listened in to their conversation.
‘We can play soldiers again after,’ Will said. ‘Cos I can run faster when I’m not hungry. I can run fast as Njombo nearly.’
‘Who’s Njombo?’
‘I play soldiers with him. He’s nearly as big as you.’
‘Is he one of the totos that runs after the motor car?’ Johnty said.
Will nodded.
‘He puts his hand on my window.’
‘Then he deserves to be run over. That’s what my father says.’
‘Well, my daddy thinks he’s brave,’ Will said.
‘Anyway, it’s silly, playing with Natives. When I go away to England I’ll play rugby. Only baby children play with the Natives.’
Mrs Bromley came back with a shopping list.
‘I’m going into Kandula this afternoon. Anything you need?’