Wachera's homestead was now, after so many years, such a familiar part of the scene that it no longer aroused comment. Indeed, many European farms were now peppered with "squatter" homesteads—the small plots of Africans who had come out of the Reserves and who chose to work for the white man and live as a tenant on his land—so that Wachera's presence at the end of the polo field was no longer the oddity it had once been. The young medicine woman, Grace knew, lived a strange, secret life, going silently about her ancient business like a shadow at the periphery of one's vision. But Grace knew what she did. Her patients told her.
Mathenge's widow led the people on spirit hunts whenever an epidemic struck, she supervised planting ceremonies before the rains, she made magical charms to keep children safe, she delivered babies, she brewed love potions, she talked to the spirits of the dead, and she read the future. She also, Grace suspected, wielded the knife during the initiations of girls.
"I think," Grace said quietly, "that the District Commissioner is going about it the wrong way. Simply making something illegal doesn't make it disappear. What we have to do is outlaw the perpetrators of such barbarism. Wachera and people like her must be removed, and then the old practices will die naturally."
"How do you propose to get rid of her? Valentine tried without success."
"I don't know. I shall go down to Nairobi and organize the missions into a more unified effort. The Africans must be made to see that traditional healing is bad and that the white doctor is the person they must go to."
James took out his pipe and lit it. "I'm afraid I disagree with you, Grace. I still maintain there is a lot of good in traditional healing. Remember when I had that outbreak of dysentery among my chaps and I was all out of Epsom salts and castor oil? It was the old Kikuyu rhubarb remedy that saved them."
She shook her head. "We never took smears, James. We never did a microscopic analysis. You don't know for sure it was dysentery or even amoebic."
"Not everything has to be diagnosed through modern medicine, Grace. You know, there is such a thing as being too one-sided."
"You wouldn't be saying that if you had seen that poor girl this afternoon."
Suddenly a group of boys came running around the corner of the classroom hut, laughing and looking back over their shoulders. When they saw Grace on the veranda, they immediately drew up to attention and presented serious faces. "Jambo, Memsaab Daktari," they said, and marched by like little black soldiers.
"Merciful heaven," she murmured, rising from her chair, "what are they up to now?"
At the rear of the long structure that was the school, she found a little girl lying on the ground, covered in mud. "Wanjiru," Grace said, going to her.
Helping the nine-year-old to her feet and brushing the dirt off her dress, Grace said, "There, there, Wanjiru. You're not hurt, are you?"
Close to tears but holding them back, the little girl shook her head no.
"Would you like to go home?"
She shook her head more fiercely.
"Very well then. Go and find Memsaab Pammi and tell her I said you could have a sweet."
The child mumbled a shy asante sana, then turned and ran to the entrance of the schoolhouse, where Miss Pamela was having a tea break between lessons.
"Is she one of your pupils?" James asked as they walked back to Bird-song Cottage. "I didn't know you had female students."
"She is my first girl, and I'm afraid she's having a terrible time of it. You know what a struggle I've had trying to get girls to come to my school. Three months ago a woman from one of the villages upriver brought her daughter to the school and enrolled her."
"That took courage."
"Indeed! The woman is a widow with nine children. She has a very hard life, and she told me that she wants something better for Wanjiru. She's the first African woman I've heard express that sentiment. I'm thrilled to have the girl, of course, but the boys tease her mercilessly. They taunt her and tell her she'll never marry and she'll be thahu because she was doing a man's thing. Yet she comes every day, more determined than ever. And she's a good learner, which I think the boys also resent."
When they reached the veranda, Grace said, "Something must be done about the plight of African women, James. You know, we had a locust invasion two months ago and the men blamed the women for it! They said it was because the women were wearing short skirts and God sent the locusts as a punishment."
She turned to him. "James, I have measured some of the loads these women carry. One woman was carrying as much as a hundred and eighty pounds! And the birthrate is so high. You see many women with eight or ten children, working their farm plots all alone because their men have gone to work for the white man. Now that young African men are becoming educated, they don't want to stay on the farms anymore. They want to work in the cities. They come home for visits, get their wives pregnant, and disappear again. And they are very much against education for their wives and daughters."
James looked at her, at the face that had gotten brown in ten years, with creases around the eyes and a chin just as determined as ever. It was a face which he pictured often and which visited him in dreams. "Can we walk, Grace?"
The Africans who worked at Grace's mission no longer wore goatskins and shukas but trousers and shirts and European-style dresses. Heads were no longer shaved but covered with closely cropped hair. A few still sported wooden cylinders in their earlobes and copper beaded bracelets, but for the most part the only adornment was a small cross on a chain.
Grace paused at the back of a wooden shed to inspect the rows of water-pot filters that were being readied for distribution among the villagers. Each filter consisted of two round clay pots, the smaller one seated in the mouth of the larger. She demonstrated to James how they worked. "The top pot contains a layer of clean sand, a layer of clean gravel, and finally a layer of broken brick. The water is poured in through the top, and as it drips through these layers into the pot below, it is cleansed of impurities, especially the guinea worm. I'm trying to install one in each village hut, with a lesson in the vital importance of water purity."
"This would be something valuable to include in your book," James said.
Grace laughed. James had begun pressing her to write a health manual for nonmedical rural workers. "When would I have time to write a book?"
They walked past a clothesline where mattresses were airing. These were made of americani stuffed with dried corn sheaves and, like the filters, were Grace's invention.
They climbed the path up to the ridge and emerged onto a view that might have been a painting. Rows of lush green coffee bushes, heavy with ripe berries, covered five thousand acres. The landscape was not flat but rose and fell in waves and hillocks like a gently undulating sea, the dense green interrupted by stripes of red dirt and tall breaks of jacaranda trees bursting in purple flowers. It was May now, and the long rains had ended; women and children moved along the rows, picking the berries and filling their sacks. Trucks awaited them at the edges of the fields, and men transported the berries to the dryers and tumblers down by the river. Mount Kenya guarded the distant border of the immense vista, sharp and dark against a clear sky, its snow-streaked peaks shining in the sun. Directly facing the mountain across the valley was Bellatu, lifted skyward on perfect green lawns and terraced gardens.
Several shiny automobiles were parked in the drive. Grace recognized one as belonging to Brigadier Norich-Hastings. The others, except for the two Oldsmobiles which belonged to Valentine, were owned by her brother's current houseguests.
Bellatu was never quiet. Now that cars were commonplace in Kenya, and a road, although still dirt and impassable during the rains, came all the way to the estate—and now that the train reached Nyeri town—it was but a day's journey from Nairobi. Valentine's house had become the social center of Kenya; there was always a party, a fox hunt, a polo match going on which drew East Africa's rich and fast set to the coffee plantation. A legend had grown up around Bellatu. To those who only ev
er glimpsed the fabulous house from a distance, it seemed that the people inside must be eternally young and beautiful, they did the smart things and drank champagne, and only the wealthy and aristocratic were visitors. The twenties had been a boom decade for the Kenya gentleman settler; Treverton coffee was now shipped all over the world and in great demand. Grace's brother reigned like a king—and he was never alone.
Grace stared at the house, hearing, when the wind shifted, music and laughter.
She resented Valentine for what he was doing to Arthur, trying to bully him into being a man. The boy had received more than one severe beating for being caught with his sister's dolls, and his awkwardness and spells of falling were not, as Valentine argued, staged for attention but were possibly the result of a neural problem. Grace had begged her brother to send Arthur to specialists, but Valentine had told her to mind her own business. No son of his was weak or handicapped, and any sign of weakness or effeminacy was going to be knocked out of him.
When had Valentine changed? she wondered. It had been a gradual process. Ever since that terrible business with Miranda West, it seemed to Grace, and then with the birth of Arthur. Everyone in Kenya knew that Valentine kept an African mistress in Nairobi, in the very house he had built for Miranda. She was a beautiful Meru woman who wore expensive clothes and drove her own car.
James walked past Grace, his boots crunching the red earth, and squinted in the sunlight. She watched his hard, lean body as he reached for a strip of eucalyptus bark and began to shred it, deep in thought. His frequent visits to Uganda of late, which were for Lucille, who had developed a passion for the inland African country, were more wearing on Grace than her long days filled with hard work. She missed him sharply. When he was so many miles away, in such dangerous territory, she lost her appetite and tossed and turned at night. But when he was at home on Kilima Simba, she was comforted, knowing he was there, just a few miles away. There was the constant anticipation of his unexpected visits. They were what had kept her going these past ten years, what gave her energy to get through days of frustration and setbacks. Grace would come out of the clinic and James would be standing there, dusty and sweaty from the long drive, usually with a gift—something from the dairy, a kill for the pot. He would stay awhile; they would sit on her veranda and talk quietly like the two old friends they were, sharing troubles, offering help and advice, laughing, or even just sitting in silence, close together but not touching, as the African day winked into night.
Then he would leave, and Grace would lie in her bed so badly in want of him that sleep sometimes never came.
"Grace," he said now, "I have something to tell you."
She looked at him.
"Lucille and I have decided to move to Uganda and live there. Permanently."
23
G
RACE STARED AT HIM. THEN ABRUPTLY SHE LOOKED AWAY.
"I'm sorry," he said. "We only decided it on this last visit."
"When will you go?"
"As soon as I can arrange shipment of our things. Lucille stayed behind this time. She's in Entebbe, getting our new house in order."
Grace walked a few steps from him and reached out to a eucalyptus tree to steady herself. Its shade seemed to swallow her; the day felt suddenly dark, as if clouds covered the sun.
"What about the ranch and the children?" she finally said.
"I'm leaving the operating of the ranch to Sven Thorsen. He's been with me for two years and is quite capable of managing it on his own. Geoffrey will stay on at Kilima Simba. He's seventeen now and keen on ranching. But Ralph and Gretchen will go with us."
"What will you do in Uganda?"
"Lucille has joined the Scottish mission there. She wants to dedicate herself to its work."
"And you?"
"I've been offered an administrative post in Entebbe."
She turned and looked at him. The sun shone down on a man whose arms were sunburned and whose body was lean from years of rugged outdoor living. "You'll work in an office?" she said.
"I'm forty-one, Grace, and not getting younger. Lucille thought I should slow down. And I'm, not needed around the ranch the way I used to be. It's practically running itself, and it's doing well. Sven will oversee things."
Grace knew the Donalds were doing well financially, that their days of overdraft and making do were over. It had come as no surprise to her when, last year, Hardy Acres had informed her of an increase in the yearly deposit into her account.
"I will miss you," she said.
"And I, you." He came up to her, standing close and looking down with intense eyes. "It was not an easy decision to make, Grace. But you know how unhappy Lucille has been."
"Yes."
"She's a different woman in Uganda. She's genuinely happy there. I can't refuse her."
"No."
Her senses were assailed: the smell of his body, the coarse look of his safari jacket, the sound of a voice at once commanding and humorous and tender; his overwhelming nearness. James had always been there for her, if not as a lover, then as someone to love; he was the secret passion that was better than no passion. Dreams of him had made her nights less lonely, her bed less empty; his quiet, reliable strength had helped her through days of frustration and failure; he had shared her triumphs, too. The physical loving that she ached for could never be, she had always known that, but there was the occasional touch, the fingers on her arm—and an embrace under the trees out of the rain, at a homecoming, through ten New Year's Eves....
A long time ago Grace had removed Jeremy Manning's engagement ring; she had taken James Donald into her heart and kept him there, her secret soul mate. But now a terrible door was opening, and he was walking through it. For the first time Grace was aware of her age. Suddenly years seemed significant. I shall be forty next year.
"I will miss you," she said again.
"I'll come tomorrow and say good-bye."
Tomorrow? she thought. The beginning of the true meaning of loneliness came to her. She saw the nights stretch before her, like a string of desolate little train stations where there was no light, no life. She saw herself in the future, sitting on her veranda, prim and chaste, gazing through the darkness past the mission she had built, across the polo field, where, she realized, there was a little hut where another lone woman—Wachera—sat at her cook pot, stirring, stirring.
Grace drew back. "Say good-bye to me now, James. I don't know what I shall say to you tomorrow."
He put his hands on her arms. Their grip was tight. He bent his head to kiss her.
"Auntie Grace! Auntie Grace!"
They turned. A spidery little figure was flying down the drive from the gate where one of the Treverton cars stood with a door open. It was an imp with an impossible haircut and outlandish imitation-adult clothes, and it sprang through the air to clamp arms about Grace's waist. "Oh, Auntie!" Mona squealed. "How I've missed you!"
It came too quickly, joy upon grief. Grace dropped to her knees and pulled her niece into a desperate embrace. The girl started instantly to talk of ships and trains, of France and horrible cousins, then said, "Don't cry, Auntie Grace. I'm back now, and I shall never leave Kenya ever again!"
"Mona," Grace said in a tight voice, "what are you doing here? What happened to the academy?"
"Uncle Harold said I couldn't go! Auntie Grace, are you all right? Why are you crying?"
"I'm just so happy to see you, darling. Look at you. A proper young lady now."
"I was nine when I left; now I'm ten and a third. England was horrid, Auntie Grace. I'm ever so glad I came back."
Seeing Rose coming now toward her, Grace stood up and went to her sister-in-law. "Welcome home, Rose," she said.
"It's wonderful to be back," Rose said as she linked an arm through Grace's. They walked to the ridge and looked down at the churning river. The banks were thickly green and bursting with wildflowers of every color. "How I missed this place! And I'm so anxious to get back to my tapestry!"
Grace,
numb, moving like an overrehearsed actor, watched little Njeri come shyly out of the car, The girl stayed close by Rose, as if afraid. Grace looked at the child with sharp affection; Njeri was the baby she had lifted from Gachiku's womb. "Njeri," she said, bending down, "don't you want to go home and see your mama?"
The nine-year-old hung back and shook her head.
"She's become quite attached to me, I'm afraid," Rose said with a laugh, patting the girl on the head. "Aren't you, Njeri? You should have seen the attention she got in Europe. And she's such a help to me. She loves to spend hours brushing my hair. Njeri can go home later. She wants to stay and help me sort my new yarn."
Mona was watching. She swallowed back her jealousy and pain and reached for her aunt's hand.
Grace stared at Rose. This was all too unreal. Here was Rose after an eight-month absence, acting as if she had just arrived for tea! Why wasn't she asking about Arthur? About Valentine? And why had Mona come back with her instead of staying behind at the academy?
Grace's head swam. She wasn't ready for all this—the homecoming and the leave-taking with James.
"Auntie Grace," said Mona, tugging her hand, "are you crying because of me?"
She looked down at her niece and said, "I'm happy because you're home and also sad because Uncle James is going away. He and Aunt Lucille are going to live in Uganda."
Mona looked up at James, her eyes round. "Are Gretchen and Ralph going, too?"
"I'm afraid so," he said.
Then Mona, too, looked sad, and tears formed in her eyes.
Grace knelt and took the girl's face in her hands. "Don't worry, Mona," she said softly. "You and I still have each other." She thought: You may have to come and live with me. It's all too strange. Your mother seems less present, less real than ever. I will mother you, Mona; you will be the daughter my body will never have. There is a love emptiness in you, dear child, as there now is in me. We need each other.
"Where is Valentine?" Rose suddenly asked.
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