Leopard at the Door

by Jennifer McVeigh

  “Hear, hear,” Steven says, jovially, raising his glass. I look at my father—he is staring across the table at the curtained window. I do not remember my parents ever talking this way before, and I wonder what is going through his mind. Why does he put up with Steven, sitting here at his table, dominating the conversation?

  —

  WHEN MUNGAI comes in to clear the plates, Harold stands up from the table.

  “Where are you going?” Sara asks.

  “To my room to read—”

  “Why don’t you have another drink with Steven?” Her voice is quick with disappointment. “We don’t have visitors very often.”

  Harold hovers over the table, unsure what is expected of him.

  “That’s all right—” Steven says, standing up and putting a hand on his shoulder. “You get yourself a good night’s sleep. There’ll be plenty more chances.” When Harold has gone, he asks, “How old is he?”

  “Coming up to sixteen,” Sara says. “If only he would stop taking those wretched photographs of Africans and do something useful with his time. It’s become an obsession!”

  “Almost old enough to join the King’s African Rifles,” Steven says, licking his lower lip, not quite in earnest, testing the waters. “A boy of his age should be kept busy. Not left too much to his own devices.”

  “I don’t think he would like the army,” I say, surprised that he would even suggest it.

  “Rachel is right,” my father says. “It wouldn’t suit him.”

  “Might do him good,” Steven says. “Toughen him up a bit.”

  “Would they take him?” Sara asks, lighting a small, thin cigarette and inhaling deeply, her eyes squinting into the smoke.

  “They might do,” Steven says. “If I have a word.”

  “We’ll think about it—” she says, sitting down on the sofa next to my father. Mungai serves coffee, black and pungent. Sara leans forward to whisper in my father’s ear, her polished fingernails slipping across the inside of his thigh. His expression softens, and I look away, blundering into Steven’s gaze.

  He smiles at me, at what he knows I am thinking, and I stand up and leave the room, my face on fire. I wonder how much of a threat Steven Lockhart really is now that I am no longer a child.

  The door in the hall is unlocked. I pull it open and stand breathing in the cold night air. From far off in the forest comes the slow cracking of huge branches. No terrorist could make a noise like that—it is elephant, moving through the acacia trees, looping up their trunks to bring down the high branches so that they can eat the leaves.

  “Not scared?”

  I turn and see Steven Lockhart standing behind me. I want to step away—a shiver runs from my neck to my torso—but I force myself to stand still. I am no longer a child. I will not be afraid.

  “I thought,” he says slowly, “that if we listened very carefully—we might be able to hear the dogs.”

  There is a small, charged silence. After a moment he opens the door a little wider and stands leaning into the frame. His gun is slung from his belt. He pulls a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and offers one to me. The cigarettes I brought with me from England ran out yesterday. I feel a tight yearning in my chest, but hesitate. He gives a low laugh. Unable to resist, I pull one from the packet and, holding back my hair with one hand, I dip my head to his lighter. His fingers—chunks of flesh—glow red in the flame.

  I draw deeply, feeling the familiar, satisfying rush fill my lungs. He takes a cigarette between his teeth and lights it. I look at him. My father is in the next-door room. He cannot do anything to me here. When the flame goes out the night outside is black—only the shadows of trees, the whispering of the papyrus grass and the slow timeless destruction of the forest cracking in the night like thunder.

  “I tracked a large bull once for a week in Uganda. The hunter said he had never seen such big tusks. He weighed seventeen thousand pounds. He was traveling with an askari—a young bull to protect him.” He inhales, licking tobacco off his lower lip. “The hunter lined me up for the bull.”

  “Did you shoot it?”

  “I shot the askari.”

  “Why?”

  “Curiosity.” He exhales slowly, looking at me. “I wanted to see what the bull would do.”

  “What did he do?”

  He takes another short pull on his cigarette. It is the same motion I saw in the office at Uplands, before he killed the striker. I look away, but I can feel his gaze still on me. “I wanted to know if he would feel shame in running away, if it would try charging us, but in the end I felt like an idiot. All the fever that had consumed me while I tracked it was gone. It was just a damned animal running away through the bush, with shit running down its legs.”

  I take a last drag of my cigarette and grind it out against the wall. I am careful not to look at Steven, and I walk quickly inside.

  His bedroom is at the end of my corridor, next to Harold’s darkroom. A single room that shares a wall with mine. I lock my door, clean my teeth, pull a brush through my hair and climb into bed. Juno lies down against the door, and when—much later—I hear the heavy tread of his feet in the corridor, she growls low, the vibration filling the room. I hold my breath. He pauses outside my door—his weight seesawing on the creaking boards—just long enough—I think—to let me know that he is there. My heart is thumping. After a moment he walks on and I take a ragged breath, exhaling into the dark, reaching down a hand to steady Juno.

  It takes a long time for sleep to pull me under. Just before it does a thought slips like a ghost into my mind. Briar Rose. A hundred years she sleeps and when she walks down from her tower the castle is unchanged. I have been hoping all this time that the farm would be the same, but no gentle fairy has built a forest of thorns around my home; or made sure that those I love would be waiting for me, unchanged, just as they were when I left them. I have come home to find the farm ransacked by a future I don’t yet understand.

  IX

  Steven leaves early, his car rattling away in the milky light of dawn. There are footsteps in the corridor—Harold, going to his darkroom. He spends hours in there, behind the locked door, careful to avoid my father and Sara, only coming out for meals and to walk on the farm with his camera. In the late afternoon he returns to develop the rolls of film. I know because the smell of the chemicals he uses drifts under the door of my room.

  I dress quickly in the cold and walk down to the stables to see what I can find of the things my father and Sara packed up. The yard is empty—it is too early yet for Michael to be working. My father has given me a set of keys for the padlock on the huge doors of the barn. I fiddle with the lock until the key catches, then slip off the padlock and push back one of the doors, letting the light flood in. Against the far wall, behind my father’s tractors, I find three leather trunks piled on top of one another. I drag them down onto the floor and brush away the thick layers of dust.

  My name has been inked onto the lid of one of the trunks in writing that is not familiar—Sara’s, I expect. The other two are not labeled and do not open when I try them—they need a key. Only the trunk with my name on it yields when I unclasp the buckles. I drag it close to the door of the barn, where sunlight falls on the hard earth floor, and push back the lid. Inside are mostly old clothes—crinkled and musty from years in storage. A pair of small, white plimsolls, the rubber edges pulled back from the canvas, the glue yellowing along the inside rim like the curling of old lips; a few dresses; a handful of books; a photograph in a frame. An album full of stamps collected from the letters which had arrived from across the colonies—Malaya, Uganda, Somalia and from my grandparents in England. The plastic crackles as I peel it back to run my finger over the many colored faces of the King. I look but do not see the python skin I found on the shore of the dam; the king baboon spider in a glass jar; the discoveries that marked out one day from another, and sent m
e racing to the house to show my mother.

  What remains is a small catalog of a childhood interrupted. I look at the photograph. I must be about eleven, a year before my mother died, with long, plaited blond hair and wide eyes, sitting on my mother’s lap in the Land Rover. I am grinning out at the camera, and she is looking down at me, smiling softly. My father must be smiling as he takes the picture, her smile after all is for him, the proud collusion of a mother and father, over the object of their love.

  There are two cardboard boxes next to the trunk. They are too heavy to carry, and I drag them forward into the light. Inside are books. Some are my mother’s—a few journals on fossils, the origins of early man, a handful of novels, and two sewing manuals with pull-out patterns.

  The other holds my schoolbooks. I lift them from the box. A geography textbook, a compendium of English history, mathematical equations and a stack of leather-bound volumes—David Copperfield, Robinson Crusoe, a poetry anthology and a few Shakespeare plays. At the bottom of the box is my mother’s book of fairy tales. I take it in my lap and turn the pages, the illustrations both beautiful and haunting. There were the evenings when she would slip, shoeless, between the covers of my bed, the lamp burning beside us, and read to me. And I would lean into her soft warmth, the sharp, earthy smell of whiskey on her breath, my whole being absorbed in the rhythmic sound of her voice.

  When I step out of the barn Michael is in the yard. His eyes fall to the books that I am carrying. They are the same books we used to read when he gave me lessons.

  “I found them in boxes at the back. I don’t think they’ve been opened since you left Kisima—”

  He comes close to where I am standing and takes one from my hands, wiping the dust off the cover with his palm.

  “I thought I would teach the children—like my mother used to—”

  “What are you planning on teaching them?” he asks, flicking through the thin pages.

  “Letters, a little English, history perhaps.”

  I want to know what he thinks of the idea, but he has stopped turning pages and is absorbed in the text. I wonder if he has heard me. He looks up after a moment and smiles kindly, handing the book back to me, and I take it from him, frustrated by his reticence.

  —

  OUR FIRST LESSON. I am eleven years old. We are sitting in my father’s study, the room which has been allocated for my schooling. There is a gentleness about him, a warmth despite the austerity of his face with its high cheekbones and wide-spaced eyes. His skin is very black, almost blue, and the insides of his hands where they lie half open on the table are pink like the underside of shells. We look at each other across the table. He seems relaxed, not threatened by me or the situation into which my mother has thrown us, but I am embarrassed and—as we look at each other—I fidget in my seat, wishing I was somewhere else.

  “What have you been reading?” he asks.

  I look in panic at the small collection of books my mother has assembled on the desk; I am not sure about any of them.

  “The Tempest,” I venture, seeing it in the pile. My governess insisted we read it aloud, twice right through. Something in the story of the man cast adrift on an island must have appealed to her sense of isolation.

  He pulls out the old leather-bound book and turns it over in his hands. I wonder if he has read it. I am not sure what they teach Africans, and I don’t completely trust my mother when she assures my father that Michael is capable of teaching me what I should be learning at school.

  “Is there a good character in the play?” he asks.

  “Prospero.”

  “Why?”

  If he had read it, he would have known. “Prospero is the only civilized man on the island. He teaches Caliban to speak,” I say.

  “Caliban cannot speak?”

  I shake my head. “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Prospero tells us. He can only gabble.”

  “And you believe Prospero?”

  “Why not?”

  “What if Caliban spoke a language that Prospero didn’t understand? Would it sound like gabbling to him?”

  I look at him, still unsure whether he has read the play. “Perhaps. But why does it matter?”

  “Because it means you cannot trust Prospero’s version of the truth.”

  “But Caliban is just a slave,” I say.

  “And does a good man keep slaves?”

  I look at him and blush, the blood rushing up my cheeks to the roots of my hair. I haven’t been in the presence of someone like this before. It is as though all the people I have known up until now have been like toy soldiers with their feet set apart on a lead base, and he is real; in movement; on a course that I am compelled to follow.

  “Authority is not a substitute for truth.” He opens the book, finds a page and passes it to me. “Read it,” he says. I look at where his finger marks the page, and read.

  When thou camest first,

  Thou strok’st me and made much of me—

  I stop, look up. He is watching me.

  —wouldst give me

  Water with berries in ’t, and teach me how

  To name the bigger light, and how the less,

  That burn by day and night. And then I loved thee

  And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,

  The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile.

  Cursed be I that did so! For I am all the subjects that you have,

  Which first was mine own king.

  I look up at him again. His eyes settle on mine and he smiles. It is gentle, there is no animosity, just a stillness about him, a surety, that has a calming effect on me. As though he has a knowledge, a confidence that is also a kind of physical grace that cannot be corrupted by the fears of other men.

  —

  I ONLY SEE HIM ONCE when he is not at ease. My parents have guests for lunch and my mother puts her head round the door of my father’s study at twelve o’clock.

  “Michael? Come through,” she says.

  “He is a walking, talking dictionary,” my mother is saying, proudly, to her guests. “He can recite all of Shakespeare’s sonnets from beginning to end.”

  “I shan’t believe it,” the woman says, laughing, as we come into the room. We sit on the sofa, and Michael stands, awkward, in front of the cold fire. I know his body language better than my mother. I see from the way he holds his hands behind his back that he is uncomfortable. He licks his lips. I am sometimes asked to perform recitals in front of my parents, for their guests, so they can enjoy the novelty of seeing a child articulate something beyond her years. But Michael is not a child. He fought in the war. He was stationed in Burma. He showed it to me on the map—it is a country in Asia, thousands of miles from Kenya.

  “Well, go on, son,” the man says, looking up as he knocks the tobacco out of his pipe. “This is your moment to shine. Don’t keep us waiting.”

  My mother looks at Michael, and I see doubt flicker across her face. She has set this up and now she sees that perhaps it is not right.

  Michael shifts his feet. The silence stretches a moment too long to be comfortable. When he speaks his voice has a richness, a depth, as though the words, the way in which he says them, might overcome the situation in which he has been placed.

  Being your slave, what should I do but tend

  Upon the hours and times of your desire?

  I have no precious time at all to spend,

  Nor services to do, till you require.

  I do not know the sonnet he has chosen. I look at my parents’ friends. They sit still, listening, smiling appreciatively at the gentle irony of the verse. One sonnet follows another, seamlessly without pause, and I am drawn into the richness of his voice, which belies the awkwardness of his body.

  There is a soft clapping when he has
finished. “Where did you learn all this?” the man asks.

  “At school, Bwana.”

  “What?” the man exclaims. “Africans teaching Africans Shakespeare?”

  “Not all the teachers were African, Bwana.”

  “You had an English teacher?”

  “Yes.”

  “At the Alliance High School,” my mother says. “You must have heard of it? They are educating a new generation of Africans. The head should have been a professor of mathematics at Cambridge—he turned it down to teach here in Kenya.”

  “So much for the ‘heart of darkness’—” the man says, chuckling wryly as he fills his pipe. “Kenya will be the very heart of civilization if this continues.”

  “Thank you, Michael,” my mother says, nodding at him to leave. I think I can sense something of what he is feeling in the muscles ticking in his jaw.

  “They’ll cause trouble,” my father said, when three of our Kikuyu laborers came back to the farm after the war, looking for work. “They’ve killed white men, and they’ve slept with white women. They won’t have any illusions left.” The same rules don’t apply to Michael. My father says proudly that he is the ideal African—intelligent, hardworking, Westernized, always looking to the future. I tell Michael and he laughs. “Like a prize bull. All the qualities for the show ring.” And I realize that my father’s words are not necessarily a compliment though it is difficult to put my finger on why exactly they might be insulting.

  —

  I CALL JUNO over to the tap behind the house. I have a bottle of shampoo with me. I hold the skin on her neck with one hand and sluice water over her with the hose. Her coat is thick with dirt and grease, and I have to work at it with my fingers to get the water to penetrate. I squeeze a dollop of shampoo onto her back and lather it with both hands, the white foam turning brown as it mixes with the dirt. She curves her body into me, enjoying the feel of my fingers along her back. Then I soap her ears and around her nose, and she shuts her eyes and goes still.