Leopard at the Door

by Jennifer McVeigh

  “Did you take this?” I ask, my voice dropping to a whisper.

  “Mau Mau buried him alive,” he says, behind me. “Facedown in an ant hole. An informer in Nyeri.”

  “But why were you there?” I’m shocked. He seems too young to be witnessing something like this. To be allowed to pause over it and make a record.

  “The District Officer took me on a field trip for a few days. He is a friend of our parents,” he says, tipping more photos from a pile onto the desk in front of me.

  Our parents. There it is. My father and his mother; the two of us linked now, whether we like it or not.

  “Where did you learn to take photographs?”

  “An American taught me. He stayed with us for a few weeks—gave me a camera, showed me what to do—” I remember the extra film that Nathaniel brought for Harold. Sara’s words, like an accusation—he’s out on the farm, taking photographs.

  “Nathaniel Logan?” I ask.

  “Do you know him?” His eyes lift to mine.

  “He drove me up here.”

  “Nate Logan? Is he still here?” His voice is tight with anticipation.

  “He left about an hour ago—” I say. “He gave your mother some film for you.”

  His face drops, raw with disappointment.

  I glance down at the photographs on the table: a bull elephant lifting his head from the muddy shores of the dam, water dripping like rain from his tusks; a lioness crouched low over the carcass of a zebra, its body held tightly beneath her own; an impala, ears erect, staring. More striking than these are the photographs of the Kikuyu: young workers, bare chested, leaning against heavy, wooden-handled tools; the slick, muscular backs of a group of boys dancing; a laborer on a stool, hands pulling the long, white teats of one of my father’s cows. And there are other images, which must have been taken at Nyeri. A man lying on the floor, his arms strung behind his back, a woman kneeling, barbed wire, a pile of guns. I don’t look carefully. I don’t want to see. They are all too intimate, wrested from the people they are capturing.

  But there is one I glimpse among the others which I cannot turn away from. I slide it from the pile. My father embracing Sara, his hand making an impression on her skirt, grasping it so tightly that it is hitched up to her thigh. She is looking over his shoulder, oddly detached from the embrace, her eye steadily catching the camera, aware of her son’s glance. I swallow, uncertain, and look away.

  “They’ve been oathing on the farm. In the shambas,” Harold says, though all I can see is the photograph of my father and his mother and I know he must be conscious of it too.

  “I think what you have seen in Nyeri has scared you,” I say softly.

  He shakes his head. “Your father says it isn’t true, but I know. I’ve seen their faces change.” He gives me a quick look. “Do you know about their oathing ceremonies?”

  “Only what I have read in the papers.”

  “They drink goat’s blood. And they make a vow. When the war-horn is blown, if I leave the European farm without killing the owner, may this oath kill me.”

  “Even if you are right—even if some of them have taken an oath—I don’t believe they can mean it,” I say. “Perhaps in Nairobi, in Nyeri, but not out here.”

  He looks down at his hands, the pale, fine-boned fingers, and does not speak. There is something disconcertingly adult about him, as though he has spent a great deal of time on his own, learning to map out his fears, and how to handle them.

  I leave him standing there with his photographs, and make my way back along the corridor, through the sitting room, and out of the back door into the night. The air is cool and fragrant, and I stand for a moment—my hair damp against my neck—breathing deeply, letting the conversation with Harold dissolve into the dark. Down the flagged path is the kitchen; a low brick building, separate from the main house, and shielded from view by a dense honeysuckle hedge. Juno trots across the patch of light that spills out of the open door and disappears into the night. I stand in the doorway and look in. Smoke curls up from the old stove oven. Onions frying. The familiar smell of food being cooked outdoors.

  Two kerosene lamps hang from the low corrugated roof, throwing out flickering pools of light, swimming with the shadows of moths and long-legged insects which pop against the glass. A long table stretches down the center of the room. I used to sit here as a child on hot afternoons and peel the crayfish I had caught in the dam. And when my mother was working late on the farm, Jim fed me here in the darkened kitchen, posho and cooked beans scooped up with my hands, legs dangling from the chair, eyes itching with tiredness, the throbbing of the cicadas in my ears, my fingers sticky and warm. And I would watch Jim standing in the open doorway, smoking, listening to the noises of the night.

  He has his back to me now, stirring a huge black pot. He has not heard me. The familiar broad shoulders force a catching in the back of my throat. A gecko croaks and flickers across the wall.

  “How are you, Jim?” I say.

  He swings around and stares at me for a moment. Then laughs, and I see his gold tooth gleaming in the light. “Aleela!” He comes toward me, pulling me into him, and like a child I give myself up to his embrace.

  He draws back, wiping his hands on his white smock. “I heard your car—”

  “But you were too busy to come and say hello?”

  His gaze shifts away from mine, and I remember the way Sara had said, Jim is in the kitchen. I should have known. She does not like him in the house.

  “I’ve brought you something—” I hand him the two English reading books I bought in England.

  He takes them from me, his dark hands falling across the cover of the one on top—an English girl and boy in a green garden, behind a white picket fence. “Asante,” he says softly.

  “You don’t want them?”

  He doesn’t reply.

  “Where is your primer?” He always kept the grease-spattered English grammar book that my mother had given him tucked into the pocket of his tunic. If witches cast spells while they stirred their cauldrons, Jim cast his magic with conjugations.

  “The new memsaab—” he says, handing the two books back to me. “She doesn’t like me reading,” and I flinch at the title which had always been reserved for my mother.

  “I’ll have a word with her,” I say. “She can’t mind you improving your English. It’s absurd.”

  He shifts his weight, but says nothing, and I realize he knows better than I do that my authority is less than hers. “Well, I’m sure she won’t mind you reading these,” I say, giving him the three women’s magazines I have brought with me from England, their back pages full of recipes.

  He turns the thin pages over with his large fingers. My mother had spent days with Jim in the kitchen, unraveling recipes from an old cookbook of my grandmother’s, and he had supplemented this knowledge from the back pages of her Women’s Monthly, teaching himself rudimentary English and showing an extraordinary talent for concocting strange dishes from the far-off country that my parents called home—soufflés, trifles and pastry cases—that he had never tasted. Now he places the magazines carefully on a shelf, shakes flour out onto the table, picks up a mound of dough and begins flattening it with a hand-fashioned rolling pin.

  “What are you making?” I ask in Swahili.

  “Beef and onion pie. Raspberry sponge.”

  “My father told you I was coming home,” I say, smiling. These were the dishes I asked for as a child, when my mother let me choose.

  “It has taken you a long time,” he says.

  I watch him work, the rolling pin heavy in his hands, the pastry turning deftly in his fingers, and wonder what never occurred to me as a child: how he produces such things in the near darkness.

  “Is your family well?” I ask in Swahili.

  “Mzuri,” he says. “Mzuri sana.”

  �
�And Ngina? Mukami?” I ask after his two wives.

  “Both well. And I have a new wife now.”

  “A new wife? Your third?”

  “Yes, Aleela,” he says, still turning out the pastry. “I call her Waceke.”

  “Waceke—the slim one?” The Kikuyu word comes back to me.

  “Not anymore,” he laughs, a deep, rocking sound, not looking up from his work. “She is with child.”

  —

  MY FATHER IS ALONE in the sitting room when I come through. The fire is lit and the flames throw a shifting yellow light over the room. Incense—burning sandalwood—fills the air with its heady, aromatic smoke.

  “You’ve been to see Jim?”

  “Yes,” I say, sitting down in the old armchair opposite him. My father is a tall man, and broad, with a physical presence that can dominate a room. He nurses a glass in a large, knuckled hand, his fingers round and flattened from years of clearing the land. He is wearing a felt waistcoat and brown leather shoes with laces, instead of the old slippers which he used to wear around the house, and he has shaved off the thick beard that used to cover his heavy jaw. He looks naked without it. His hair—cut shorter than it used to be and combed into a parting—is graying at the temples. The whole impression is more refined than the one I am familiar with—smarter, more ordinary. I realize with a small shock that when I look at him I don’t see my father. He is a man, a stranger, and this detachment makes me feel as though I am losing my grip on reality, spiraling away from what I know to be real. The same panic I felt when I was alone in my room rises in my throat and I swallow it down.

  “He has been looking forward to you coming back. We all have—” he says, and I wonder who he means by we. For the last six years my father has been out of reach. I thought I only needed to come home for things to go back to the way they were, and yet—now that I am here—he feels farther away than ever.

  “I brought him some books—Dick and Jane—but he wouldn’t take them.”

  “He doesn’t read anymore—not like he used to,” my father says, without blinking.

  “Oh—” I lean forward. “But he didn’t say that. He said he wasn’t allowed to read. That you had forbidden it.”

  His eyes flicker away from mine. “I don’t think we said anything as strong as that. Sara felt he was spending too much time with his books and not enough time working. She had a few words with him, and that was the end of it.”

  “What about the primer?”

  But my father’s attention has shifted. I follow his glance. Sara is standing in the doorway, dressed for dinner—a white collared shirt tucked into long, tailored khaki trousers. She looks both too sophisticated for this unpolished room, and strangely compelling—there is no one else here to impress—it is all for my father, and as he stands up and puts a hand to her waist, she lifts her chin to kiss him on the mouth, her lips slightly parted. The gesture is intimate and I find myself looking down at my hands.

  “You’re talking about Jim?” she asks. “I’m afraid I felt compelled to throw that book away.”

  “But why?” I ask, unsure of the tone in her voice.

  “Because it was filthy—” She goes over to the bureau and pours herself a drink. “I saw mold growing between its pages. And it was distracting him from his work.”

  “It was given to him as a gift.”

  She sips her gin. “What possible use could it be to him?”

  “He was learning English.”

  “And why does he need to speak English?” she asks, with a small, tight smile. “It was only putting ideas into his head. Sooner or later he would have been spoiled, and then he wouldn’t have been any good to anyone.”

  “Why should he be spoiled by learning English?” I am not sure I completely understand.

  “Darling, he’s a good man,” my father says in soft admonishment, calling on her for respect, if only—I see—for my sake, trying to put an end to the conversation. “He has been with us for years.”

  “I reserve judgment,” she says, sitting down at the other end of the sofa, cradling her glass in her lap, “on a man who has married three times.”

  “It is their custom—” my father says, and I realize they have had this conversation before.

  “His last wife is not a day older than you, Rachel”—she says my name for the first time, slowly—“and he laid his sweating, greedy body over hers, and now she is with child.”

  Despite myself I feel my face reddening. And then—cutting across my awkwardness—come the crisp tones of an English voice. It is the news broadcast. I look up. Harold has come into the room without me noticing and has turned on the radio. This is London. We fall still, listening. The notes of “Lillibullero” fill the room, and for a moment I think I can smell the rain, the wet concrete, the streets of England four thousand miles away. There is news of the Queen’s Coronation—an official proclamation has been made in London, with the date set for the second of June next year. A British expedition is being put together to make the first ascent of Everest. And then local news. My father leans forward in his chair, listening more keenly. More Mau Mau crimes in Nyeri and the Kikuyu reserves; the bodies of several Kikuyu police informers have been found beheaded, floating in the Kirichwa River. The government has responded with a wave of arrests and an extension of the curfew across the region.

  When I ask my father afterward what he thinks, he says that he is confident the government will do what is necessary to control the rebellion, that the violence is unlikely to come to as remote a place as Kisima.

  The new houseboy, Mungai, serves us dinner, dressed in a uniform I haven’t seen before—white, with a burgundy sash, and a matching burgundy fez—something Sara must have introduced.

  “You didn’t tell me Nate Logan was coming,” Harold says to his mother when Mungai has left the room.

  “Should I have done?” Sara asks, her fork hovering in midair, her voice lifting in surprise.

  “You know I should like to have seen him,” Harold says.

  “I’m sorry, darling—I forgot you two were such close friends.” There is just the hint of sarcasm at the edge of her voice.

  Harold does not say anything more, but the color has rushed to his cheeks, mottling his pale skin red, and I sense that by asking about Nathaniel he has given her the upper hand, a clear target on an old battleground.

  Jim’s cooking is as good as I remember it. The pastry on the pie is soft and buttery, and the sponge—with its hot, sticky layer of raspberry jam—welds itself to the spoon so that I have to peel it off with my teeth as I did when I was a child.

  After supper Sara goes to bed and Harold disappears to read. At last my father and I are alone together. He pours himself a drink, throws a log on the fire and stirs it with an iron. I sit down on the huge hearth, with my back to the mantelpiece. Juno turns a circle in front of the flames and lies down, the tips of her coat glowing red in the fire’s light. My father stretches out his legs, kicking off his shoes, rubbing the arch of one giant, socked foot against the other. “He’s a decent boy, Harold. A little quiet, but decent all the same.”

  “Yes,” I say, looking up, waiting for him—now that we are alone—to say something about my mother’s death, to bridge the years that we have spent apart, to ask about the long journey from England. But instead he says something that completely throws me. “I hope you’ll make a particular effort with Sara, now that you are here.”

  “Of course—” I say, swallowing uncertainly, trying to hold back the emotion that is rising inside me. After all the years that have passed, he has chosen only this to say to me.

  “It’s not easy for her living up-country.” His mouth twists, and I see both anger in his face and embarrassment. “Not everyone has been welcoming. She has had to give up an awful lot, and she isn’t used to it yet—the distance from Nairobi, the lack of friends.”

 
“Nathaniel Logan stayed for a while?”

  He takes a long sip of his whiskey. “Yes—for a few months. I rather liked him, but in the end there was a row; he made some comment about white settlers in Kenya clinging on to their status as self-made aristocrats, lording it over the African. I can laugh at that sort of thing, but she took it too much to heart. And she didn’t like the way he and Harold used to disappear into the bush for days on end with their cameras. Now even the Markhams rarely come.” He looks up. “She’ll enjoy having you here as company.”

  “I hope we will get along—”

  “I know she does too.” He smiles at me, pleased that I have acquiesced, that I have put to bed the niggling worries of this domestic drama. But I am left with a bewildering sense of isolation. And something else that sits heavily on me. A foreboding that I will not be able to protect him. That he has irrevocably attached himself to someone who is dragging him into unhappiness.

  After a moment I say, in an unsteady voice, “When did you meet?”

  “Two years ago. You remember the Norfolk?”

  “Yes.” The Norfolk was a hotel in Nairobi, popular among English safarigoers. “She was in Kenya on holiday?”

  “No—she was working there. Her husband was an engineer—got a job in Nairobi before the war. She followed him over with Harold, and six months later he left her—no money, no house, nothing. She worked for twelve years to support them both. A hell of a life.” It explained why she seemed different—not entirely at ease out here in the bush, the smart clothes, the lipstick. She wasn’t from a farming family.

  “She’s done as good a job with Harold as she was able, but it wasn’t easy, all on her own. I’ve tried to get him interested in the farm, but his heart isn’t in it. His mother would like to see him out hunting with me, but it’s obvious he would much rather have a book or a camera in his hand than a gun. He spends all day on the labor line, at the plantations, down at the shambas, taking photos of Africans. Drives his mother crazy—” He swills the rest of the whiskey; the yellow liquid clings to the sides of the glass. “I thought Nate Logan was a good influence on him. Before he came Harold barely said a word, but—” He shrugs his shoulders.