Leopard at the Door

by Jennifer McVeigh

  He puts down his binoculars and looks where I am pointing, indulging me, but there is a blankness behind his eyes.

  “You said she lived just beneath the surface of the water, guarding the island. Once we rowed out there together and you showed me the weed trailing in the water. You said it was her hair.”

  “Did I, darling?” I can sense his disinterest in my insisting on something he doesn’t recollect. I feel panicked by it. “We used to come down here when she was fishing. We walked back in the evenings together. And at other times. We sat here and skimmed stones, and you said each stone was an offering.”

  I wonder if it is possible that he doesn’t remember. And what it means that the things which were so important to me as a child, the memories which are seared into my mind, out of which I am assembled, might be meaningless to him. The platform on which my childhood was built has dissolved over time; like a new building built on the foundations of the old, only a shadow of the original remains.

  “Was she happy?” I ask.

  “Your mother?” He laughs softly. “She was happy.” There is intimacy in his voice now. He hands me the binoculars. I lift them to my eyes and feel the familiar dizzying closeness. At the bank on the far side three buffalo and a calf are crowding at the water’s edge. They blend so perfectly with the dark bush behind them that it is almost impossible to see them with the naked eye.

  “This place would have been the end of most women,” my father says. His voice is warm and soft. He is speaking unchecked—for a moment I have him all to myself. “We lived on scarcely anything. Our first house was a toolshed—the tools were moved to one end, and we camped in the other. There was a cooker on three legs, rats, and no plaster on the walls, but she was happy. It was only the taps.” He smiles. “Your mother never complained about anything—she was stoic in all things. But taps. God, how she harped on about taps. There was no running water for thirty kilometers, and everything had to be carried up to the house. In the end I took a stick and divined for it. We dug and dug and eventually—there it was, clear, bubbling water springing from the earth. That evening your mother stripped off her clothes and poured bucket after bucket of water over herself. I thought she would die of cold.” He laughs. I hang on his every word. He is leaving a trail of golden thread, and later, in the quiet of my room, I will stitch it into a tapestry that will bind me to my past. But I am also bitter, that this intimacy is there after all; that he keeps so much of it hidden from me.

  “A year later I bought a little pump secondhand and we piped water directly into the house.”

  He chooses a long, thin stone from the bank and throws it out over the water. It leaps across the surface. “It was hard in the beginning. It took years for science to catch up and help us here in Kenya—but it has come eventually. Rust-resistant wheat, Gammexane to dip the cattle, cobalt to combat deficiencies in the soil, inoculation, penicillin. We are finally at the point your mother and I dreamed about—some small measure of control over the land, so that we can work it to our profit, for all of our sakes. And now this.” He gestures to the land beyond the dam. “Mau Mau.”

  We sit in stillness for a long moment. I put down the binoculars, and he turns to look at me. “I brought you here, Rachel, because I wanted to talk to you.”

  He swallows, and I realize, with a quickening of my heart, that everything he has said is just a prelude to what he wants to say now.

  “I know it can’t be easy for you, coming back home, to all this talk of violence. Your mother gone, and Sara here in her place. But she is sensitive, more than you might think. And it hurts her to feel you might not be getting along.”

  “Have we not been getting along?”

  “She feels there is a tension between you—” He throws out the dregs of his cup onto the pebbles. “It isn’t easy for her being here, so far from the city. She is cut off from her old life. She has had to sacrifice so much to be here.”

  I glance at him—is this what he wanted to say all along, when he said walk with me? Did he only want to use the opportunity to talk about Sara?

  “Why did she come if she doesn’t like the bush?”

  “I think you know that life is not always so straightforward,” he says. Then—in a softer voice, “We thought that it might help if we explained the situation. We are waiting for a divorce from Harold’s father. She has written to him, but he hasn’t responded. If and when her divorce does come through we will have a small civil ceremony. You should know that it doesn’t bother me in the least that we’re not married—I have never been one for the niceties of society. But it is important that you understand this arrangement between us is not something temporary. That I have made a commitment to Sara. That everything I have”—he spreads his hands out over the dam, over the land—“is also hers; that she is to all intents and purposes my wife.”

  “I understand,” I say, swallowing.

  He puts a hand on my knee and looks at me. “I would like you to make a particular effort with her. If you are going to stay.”

  If you are going to stay. His words slip through me like a knife. I feel the pain somewhere deep in my core. He is cutting me loose. My staying here is not something that he takes for granted, or perhaps even desires. I swallow heavily. I will not cry. We say nothing for a while. I stay quiet. I do not argue. I do not jump with pain. I want to see how far he will go—how far he will commit himself—so that I know exactly where I stand.

  “Sara is very generous-spirited. She wants you to be happy, and I know there is much that you could learn from her. She has suggested that you be encouraged to spend more time in the house. She feels—and I agree with her—that your running around on the farm all day, on your own, isn’t appropriate for someone of your age.”

  “Mama wasn’t cooped up in the house all day.”

  “Your mother was a married woman. I am simply asking you to moderate your interests.” He pauses, breathes out and looks at me. “I loved your mother, but I have come to realize that she didn’t always set the best example. Perhaps she shouldn’t have had you educated at home. Your childhood was too free. It brought you up to a life that isn’t compatible with the Kenya we live in now. We must draw greater boundaries between ourselves and the Africans if we are going to try and make life in this colony work.”

  “Why must we?”

  But he doesn’t answer my question. Instead he retracts his hand from my knee. “You’re not a child any longer,” he says. “You are a woman now. You should think differently about how you conduct yourself.”

  I hear the disappointment in his voice. The sense that I am perhaps not what he has been told I ought to be. When he asked me to join him, in the cold, early light of morning, I had hoped it was because he wanted my company. And when he asked me to sit with him at the dam, I had thought he might want to talk about the past, about my mother, to remember her for both our sakes, but I see after all that it is Sara who asked him to speak to me, and that he had only her in his mind all along. We stand up and rinse our cups in the dam. He drops a hand affectionately to Juno’s head.

  I watch him, the man who is my father. I love him. There is no way for me to turn away from that, but his words have hurt me more than I can admit, even to myself.

  —

  I STAND THE PARAFFIN LAMP on the basin and stare into the mirror, looking for my mother. Light, freckled skin, large, slanting eyes, a full mouth. Perhaps this is her. And what does it mean that I carry her inside me?

  The story from our book of fairy tales which frightened me the most was “Hansel and Gretel.” I was gripped by the trial of the two children, led out into the woods by a wicked woman who was not their mother, and rejoiced when they found their way back to their loving father. But as I look at myself in the mirror, I see a different side to the story—it is not, after all, the woman in the story who is to blame. It is the father. He is weak. Weak enough to be convinced into aband
oning his children, not once but twice. Weak enough to be talked out of his loyalties. Does he love Gretel then—and he just doesn’t know it? What is love if it can change so easily, under a stranger’s persuasion?

  Juno has got up onto the bed before me and is stretched out on the quilt. She doesn’t move—but her eyes watch me, and her tail thumps slowly against the quilt when I sit down. In the last two weeks her belly has swollen so that it pushes out to one side when she lies down. I lean my head against her warm, clean coat, feel the dry scrape of her paw against my bare arm and shut my eyes.

  XII

  Lillian Markham steps out of the car. “Damn it, Rachel. Why didn’t you write and tell me you were home?”

  She pulls me into her and holds me, the palm of her hand warm and firm against my neck. I slip my arms under hers and feel her chest rising against mine. After a moment she steps back, her hands on my shoulders, and looks at me, smiling through her tears.

  Lillian was the woman my mother used to stay up with late into the night, drinking whiskey, when she and her husband came to stay; the one my mother went out riding with, galloping back to the farm with the dusk, smelling of cigarette smoke, sweat and horses; the one she laughed with—tears running down their faces, while my father, Gerald and I looked on in smiling puzzlement. Lillian wrote to me in England, her letters sent, every year, on the day my mother died when it seemed there was no one else but me to remember.

  Her husband, Gerald Markham, is a farmer like my father and their farm—Matabele—borders ours, though it is more than an hour’s drive away. They are settlers who arrived at the same time as my parents, after the First War when land was cheap and England was in the grip of a depression. They had never had children of their own. They were my parents’ greatest friends, and their arrival at our farm, when I was a child, always brought a burst of happiness. My father has persuaded Sara to ask them for lunch—he says she will have to have friends if she is to live here, so far from any neighbors.

  “Gerald—” Lillian says, holding me at arm’s length. “Come over here and look at this. Isn’t she the very spitting image?”

  “Of who?” I ask.

  “Don’t you know?” she asks, laughing. “Of your mother of course!”

  “Why—Robert—” She turns to my father. “You must have told her? The similarity is uncanny.”

  “It is—” my father says, agreeing, his eyes settling on me. “She is Tessa through and through,” and I feel a thrill of happiness, hearing him speak her name, to these people who knew her so well.

  We walk out onto the veranda. Gerald settles into a leather safari chair. He stretches out his legs and runs a calloused hand over Juno, who sinks her head deep in his lap. “How are you holding up, Robert?”

  While my father and Gerald talk, Lillian asks me questions, more questions than I have had to answer since I came home, and I talk freely, telling her about the school—miles from anywhere—where I spent six long years; my grandparents’ house on the outskirts of an industrial city—cold and lifeless; the shrouded windows; the pastoral evenings with my grandfather; his crushing moral exactitude; my grandmother’s inability to stand up to him; the growing sense that the suburb—with its long, dreary days spent indoors, its bridge evenings and church meetings, would swallow me up and I might never get back home. I falter on the last bit and she reaches forward and squeezes my hand. “But you did come back. You escaped. Just like your mother did. Just like I did. England didn’t suit us either, not a bit. Your mother used to tell me that every day she woke up at Kisima she was glad that she had left. And that didn’t mean she didn’t miss your grandmother. But your mother needed to be outdoors, she needed to be busy, working with her hands, in this landscape—” She spreads out her arms to encompass the wilderness, beyond the lawn, and smiles. “She would be so proud of you if she could see you here now.” I smile, happy to hear her say it.

  Juno wanders over and sits down next to me, leaning her weight against my legs. “She’s going to have puppies?” Lillian asks, looking at her swollen belly.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s Rachel’s dog,” my father says, nodding at me.

  “She ran away to have her puppies a year ago, and they died.”

  “I had a bitch who used to do that. I’d run all over the farm looking for her at God knows what hour. Keep her locked up somewhere safe, when you think it’s near her time. And don’t be nervous for her—” Lillian says, putting a hand on my knee. “She’ll be fine.”

  Mungai arrives with a jug of ice water and beers.

  “Take a look at my herd this afternoon, Gerald. You’ll be impressed,” my father says, taking a long draft of his beer.

  “The Friesians?”

  “I have a bull now that can produce a true black calf nine times out of ten.”

  “I think it’s a shame,” Sara says, appearing in the open doorway wearing a white dress that is pulled in tight around the waist with a wide leather belt. She looks sharp, sophisticated, too bright next to Lillian Markham whose sturdy brown legs emerge solid and firm from her safari shorts.

  “They were the only thing that reminded me of home in this wretched place.” She winds her way across the veranda and sits on the arm of my father’s chair. “I could drive down to the dairy and look at those black and white cows and almost believe I was in Devon.” She slides a hand over the inside of my father’s knee and smiles at us. “Everything in this country ends up darker than when it arrived.” She looks at my father. “Why do you insist on helping it along?”

  “What advantage is it to breed out the white patches?” Lillian asks.

  “The black skin is almost entirely resistant to the sun.” My father rubs a hand across his jaw. “A completely black Friesian can graze in this climate for twice as long as its English cousin.” His voice quickens with passion. “My milk yield has next to doubled, with no increase in bulk feeding. If it doesn’t—”

  “Robert—” Sara interrupts, with a little downward smile. “Gerald and Lillian didn’t drive all this way to talk about farming.”

  “Sorry—” my father says, smiling sheepishly. “Sara thinks I’m a terrible bore.”

  “Honestly—” Sara pushes back the corners of her hair. “It’s enough for him to be out on the farm, from dawn to dusk.” She smiles, shrugging her shoulders.

  My father pats her knee, as if to quieten her, but she won’t be shushed. She wants to express something to these people.

  “You know—when I first came here Robert used to eat his supper in his pajamas,” she says, giving a little laugh.

  “I’m afraid we’re rather guilty of the same thing,” Gerald says. “It’s something of a tradition around here—supper in our pajamas.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe you could have been as bad as Robert,” Sara says. “He was scarcely civilized when I met him—were you, darling? All he talked about was heifers and yields and fertilizers, morning, noon and night.” I think back to those evenings by the fire, as a child, my father in his slippers reading the pedigrees of bulls from England, my mother writing letters, the house quietening around us—was it possible something had been lacking?

  —

  WE EAT LUNCH on a table that has been set up on the lawn, under the shade of an acacia that drops its leaves like confetti onto the white tablecloth. Sparrows dart across the table. From the bush all around us rises the song of the cicadas, and somewhere far off is a dove, calling out its low, fluted notes.

  Harold does not appear for lunch. I saw him head out this morning early, just after dawn. “He’s rather preoccupied—” Sara says, apologetically, and I feel her disappointment that he is not here, making an effort with her guests.

  Mungai serves poached chicken, potatoes, courgettes, peas and mint from the garden.

  “It must be wonderful to have her home,” Lillian says to my father, who sits on the other side of her.


  “It is—” he says, but although he smiles at me, I hear the gulf between the expectation in Lillian’s voice—the simple, overwhelming pleasure of a child returned—and the complicated reality of what he feels.

  “Quite a responsibility for me,” Sara says. “I hardly know what to do with her all day long.”

  “Oh, I expect Rachel is good at taking care of herself,” Lillian says.

  “But that’s just the problem. Should a girl be left so much to her own devices, at such a formative period in her life? We’re completely cut off here from the real world. I scarcely know what month of the year it is. No cinema, no shows, no shops worth talking about. We’re only a hairbreadth away from living like the Africans.” She pushes her potatoes around her plate, then puts her knife and fork together, and dabs at her mouth with a napkin.

  “I should think it’s probably rather good for a young woman—” Gerald says, smiling at me as he mops his plate with a piece of bread. “To get away from the real world.”

  “How is Nate Logan?” Sara asks, changing the subject. “It always seems rather strange to me that he casts himself adrift out here. Almost as though he is running away from something.”

  “Oh—I don’t know about running away,” Lillian says, smiling. “But it’s true he is rather wild. He disappears into the bush with a Dorobo boy, and we don’t see him for weeks. He comes back looking like those pictures of Neanderthals, with his beard down to his chest and his hair all matted together.” She laughs.

  “I heard he had been exiled from America,” Sara’s voice sharpens, “for being a communist.”

  “I’m not sure he’s a communist,” Lillian says, taking a sip of her water. “But he isn’t afraid to express his opinions. He believes in change.”

  “Change for America or change for Kenya?” my father asks, and no one answers.