She was, of course, only partly right in her analysis of his motives. Naively, she did not link her husband’s political ambitions in Kitui District with Charles Mulonzya’s interest in her. There were two reasons for this. One: John had never really confided in her to the extent of explaining the actual nature of his ambition. He had mentioned his political ambitions, but not clarified the implications of these. Lesley was still largely unaware that standing against Mulonzya would entail their two families virtually declaring war on one another. Secondly: John had never told her or even intimated that the process had already started, and that hostilities had begun. John had not spoken of his ambitions at all over recent months. Ever since they had moved to Nairobi, he had seemed more preoccupied with other things.
“So your husband is going to provide the cash to set up the entire farm and then is going to give it all away?”
“No, not exactly give it away, I think.” Lesley tried to explain the planned scheme, though her understanding of it had never been any more than sketchy. “He is going to set it up. That’s part of the deal, you see. Apparently no one believes that the land is any good, even with a guaranteed water supply. Anyway, he will raise the first crop to show that it’s possible. Then the next stage is to hand over the running of the farm to a management committee. I think I’ve got this right. They will run it as a cooperative. He then expects other people nearby to join in and pool their land in return for a guaranteed income and other things like access to machinery and so on. When enough people have joined, the idea is then to run the whole thing like a corporation, with a labour pool and large-scale marketing of the produce, but still it will be controlled by a committee elected from its membership.” Lesley stared into space as she spoke, counting out each recalled stage on her fingers.
“It’s a long story, isn’t it?” she said with a smile. “I think that they are going to share out the produce or profit or something according to how much work people put in. John thinks that some people will just sell their share, but he’s fairly sure that most people will keep their membership and pass it on like they used to pass on pieces of land. It’s all a bit of a trick really, I suppose, because he’s going to get them to grow all kinds of things like vegetables and even some cash crops, as well as maize for making that awful ugali.” Another shudder told of her continued distaste of the idea.
“It sounds like a very innovative scheme,” said Charles. His prosaic tone did not divulge how permanently and accurately the words had lodged in his memory. “I don’t understand, though, what your husband will get out of it. He must have spent over one hundred thousand shillings already on buying land and drilling the borehole.”
“That much?” Lesley silently rebuked herself for showing her surprise. She could see Charles noting every nuance of her reaction. Or was he now touching her with his eyes? “I think he’s got it all worked out,” she continued, averting her eyes from his direct gaze towards the glass of wine she clutched just beneath her breasts. “Let me see. First of all, he hasn’t used our money. I’m sure of that!” She looked up momentarily and with a slight laugh tried to convey a false confidence in herself. When her eyes met those of Charles, however, a tiny shudder passed through her stomach and she immediately looked away. “Well I suppose he has really. He’s borrowed most of it from the bank, so until he has raised the first crop, he will have to make repayments on the loan from our money. Before handing over to the cooperative, he will sell enough of the produce to recoup all that money. The committee will then take over the running of everything, including the loan repayments.” She was surprising herself with the depth of her understanding of John’s scheme. They must have discussed it more than she could consciously recall.
“And what if it fails and they default on the payments?”
Lesley smiled slightly, humoured at her unexpected ability to recall all this detail. “Ah, then ownership reverts to John again - is it called being a trustee or something? - and he decides whether to have a go with another committee, carry on himself for a while, or sell the lot. He’s confident, though that it will all work out well. The idea is to show people how they can overcome the drought if they will work together. It’s all to do with traditional land use - something like that - where you use communal labour and then share the results.”
“But run like a business?”
“That’s it. John reckons that he should have most of his money back within two years.”
Charles nodded. “He’ll make ten to fifteen thousand shillings an acre on tomatoes alone. Just on the first crop, if he were to sell enough of it, he could make a whacking great profit.”
“Goodness, I never realised we were talking about sums like that! I thought it would be a few thousand shillings here and there.”
“But he’s got acre after acre. It’s a massive farm, even by Kitui standards, as far as I understand.” He paused here to look into Lesley’s eyes before continuing. The hint of surprise they conveyed convinced him she had never been to the visit the new farm. “You seem to understand enough about it, considering that you claim to be not the least bit interested in either Kitui District or the project, itself.”
Lesley gave a short sardonic laugh before answering. “I’ve had no choice but to be interested in it. It’s all that John has talked about for months. He goes off to Kitui at every opportunity and always comes back saying how well everything is going. And then he describes the progress since his last visit in minute detail, right down to how many courses of brickwork have been added to this building or that, and how many baskets of sand have been moved and exactly where each terrace has been laid down and on and on and on...” Lesley’s sigh bore some evidence of her frustration. “I was looking forward to him handing it all over to the committee, but now he is already saying he’s going to do it all over again, but next time in Mwingi. I keep telling him that he should get this one properly under way first, but he won’t listen.”
Charles’s expression darkened instantly. For a moment, his thoughts turned to business, but then, with this snippet of information and its associated possibilities duly stored for future reference, he switched back to their conversation. “Your husband is away often then?”
“More often than not these days.” Lesley’s words were resigned, but still clearly underpinned with cynicism and disaffection. Charles not only took note of this, but also of the apparently greater ease with which she now spoke to him.
It was then that Lesley realised that she had all but admitted publicly for the first time just how estranged she had become from her husband. She had related what she knew of his plans as if he were a complete stranger, and, more importantly, as if they held no place or role for herself. This was no illusion, of course, for she had remained a complete outsider in this aspect of John’s life. She was forced by this cross-examination to admit to herself that her difficulty in remembering the details of John’s scheme was not because her husband had never explained them, but because she had never listened. She simply did not care. More important and ultimately more difficult to admit, was the fact that she had received more direct attention from Charles over the previous hour or so than she could remember receiving from her husband for many months. He had become obsessed with his ideas and had ignored her to such an extent that she had almost forgotten what it was like to share small talk with him. Everything in their lives now carried an agenda.
Without John, she had only herself to turn to and hence her recent bouts of insomnia and depression. It had taken Charles, a virtual stranger, to make her see all this in its true light. In him she saw much of what John used to be when he was younger, that which she hoped he would rediscover when he returned to Kenya. In the event, it was now becoming clear that Kenya might have changed John and estranged him from her to such an extent that now she felt she hardly knew him.
After a difficult, nervous start, talking to Charles had grown easy, easier, in fact, than talking
to her own husband of late. She did not yet apportion blame for their predicament. She was still undecided whether it was John who had changed, or whether, in this environment that she still found oppressively foreign and threatening, it was she herself who had grown selfish and therefore unable to sympathise with his concerns. This place still did not feel in the least like home and it had distorted their relationship, had changed either John or herself, but she had not yet decided which.
She spent the rest of the evening talking to Charles. Neither she herself nor he seemed the slightest bit interested in mixing with others. She began to find his obvious interest in her somewhat comforting, and soon she had quite forgotten that before that evening they had met just once. As the conversation drifted from one aspect of Nairobi life to another, she began to feel quite comfortable in his company. If anything, he was a rather quiet, shy man beneath a very thin veneer of overt sophistication. Yes, he had money. Yes, he flaunted it, but what he seemed to be seeking in life were comforts much more homely than those which were generally on offer in the life he led.
They talked of everything, but discussed nothing. They filled increasingly easy silences with drinks and cigarettes, or merely eavesdropped on the general hubbub to find that everyone else was doing the same as themselves, simply passing the time. Lesley felt increasingly gratified at this. It seemed that at last she had found that reassuring state of hypnosis that is small talk. For once she forgot her cares, she forgot about John’s plans and ambitions that had begun to eat at the core of their relationship, and simply enjoyed the ephemeral and indulgent present for what it was.
It was very late indeed when Lesley finally declared it was time she should leave. When Charles offered her a lift, she did not accept immediately. She knew what he wanted. His eyes made everything quite clear. She thus had to make a decision. Twenty yards from where she now stood there was a rank with a plethora of taxis, each of which would be overjoyed by the prospect of a fare to Lavington Green. But here was a challenge, a different kind of challenge from anything else currently in her life. Here was something that promised to be exciting and just a little dangerous, but also completely without commitment. Something to be done for its own sake; not for her husband’s sake, and that would make a pleasant change. And then she said yes.
Lesley did not sleep with Charles that night. The idea was certainly at the forefront of her mind, but on the way home in Charles’s car she suppressed it, partly out of renewed loyalty to John and partly because conscience reminded her of what a momentous step it would be. And could she trust this man? Of course she could not. But then if they had an affair, would she be looking for trust? In this land, where wives could be bought, why should he be interested in her? He was rich enough to command the most beautiful or the most talented women in the land. What could he want with a married woman in her thirties? When they parted, Charles kissed her politely on the cheek, but placed his hand lightly at the very small of her back, which made her shiver. Instinctively, she drew away and offered a handshake.
Then Lesley was again alone in what was supposed to have been the family home. She was again thrust back on herself, set apart from the humdrum existence she now led. Attacked by conscience, having actually admitted to herself what was bound to happen, she spent a sleepless night drinking coffee, cup after cup, and smoking until, just before dawn, still dressed in her party finery, she fell asleep in a chair out of sheer exhaustion.
The very next weekend, when John again rushed eagerly to Kitui, she went with him. Desperately she tried to penetrate his world. She tried to understand why he worked so hard and so single-mindedly and devoted so much of his time to this cause on behalf of a group of complete strangers. But she returned to Nairobi none the wiser, except that she was now sure that there would never be a niche for her in his work. She also brought back to the city with her a severe stomach upset, caused, she believed, by drinking rainwater out of a tank. Another week later, she stood in the driveway of their home and watched him drive off, bound for a court hearing in Nyanza Province. He would again be away until late the next day. She felt, as always, that he was leaving her behind, driving out of the poverty of their shared life and into the riches and stimulation of his career and politics. He seemed to see her role in his life increasingly as the housewife who tended the home while he won the bread, a duty that was and would always be his by right. What made matters worse was that he had never once asked her what she wanted, not for months and months and months.
Only then did Lesley admit to herself that she really did want to see Charles again, whatever his motives might be. She saw in him a chance to escape from this drab loneliness into another life, the like of which she had once known when she first met John. Strangely, though, as she fumbled with her purse to extract the business card Charles had given her, she felt neither excitement nor guilt at the prospect. This was little more than the satisfaction of a need. John had been gone for barely fifteen minutes when Charles answered the phone to receive an invitation to dinner. Lesley did not tell him that John would not be there, hoping that he would assume he would be one of several guests. She would then be able to judge his reactions later when she told him the two of them were to be alone. As she replaced the receiver, she was fully aware of what she had done. She knew then that Charles would spend that night with her. What she did not know at that stage, of course, was that their affair would blossom, and last.
***
And then, much later, when John died, it was Charles who offered Lesley comfort and sympathy and enabled her to cope with the trauma so well. For a short while he had shared her sadness, but for him the initial shock soon dissolved and self-interest took over. He clearly had known that Lesley and John’s relationship had been breaking down. Not only was she having an affair with him, she was confiding in him, telling him every detail of her frustrations with a husband who increasingly took her for granted. Privately, Lesley had spoken of divorce, but both she and Charles knew that if John had discovered his wife’s feelings he would have done everything in his power to keep her, if only to spite the Mulonzya family. Though it was clear that all their problems had been caused by John’s obsessions with career and politics, had she asked for a divorce, John’s priorities would surely have shifted and all Charles would have achieved for himself would have been an act of philanthropy. Obviously he had a vested interest in keeping them together, since that enabled him to continue to see Lesley without any danger of her suggesting he take on some responsibility in her life. It also gave Charles continued access to the inside information on where John Mwangangi was, whom he was seeing and what projects he was hatching.
But then it became clearer every day that things were coming to a head. Reports from Mwingi had told Charles that John’s father in Migwani had openly criticised, even disowned his own son. Since the cooperative project relied upon the continued involvement of the much-respected old man, Charles felt quite gratified that the rift between father and son had developed. Within a short time, the rift had grown so deep that John’s father was actually making statements demanding that no one continue to cooperate with his own son’s schemes. What John was beginning to gain, his father was systematically destroying.
In addition, the more John quarrelled publicly with his father, the less he seemed to think of his wife and thus each new report, every item of gossip was received by Charles with double satisfaction. Without any personal intervention from him, events conspired to further both of his aims, to discredit John Mwangangi in public and to continue to see his wife in private.
Lesley was not sure why she was crying. It seemed the right thing to do, despite the fact that she had privately and angrily wished death on her husband a thousand times in recent months, so distant and unfeeling towards her had he become. In some ways, therefore, her bereavement was hardly a loss. Was it relief that brought the tears, relief that at last everything might be resolved? Was it merely a final thought for the husband she h
ad once known, the ultimate act which would make way in her own mind for Charles to take his place - a parting gesture, a relieved good-bye? Or was it just her body coping with the shock and finding a way to release the tension it brought? Or would she now find that she would miss him? Had she lost him earlier, before they came to Kenya, the sadness would surely have killed her. But now, after the return to his roots had seen him unthinkingly revert to a type which Lesley would never have wanted to have known, she found that her emotions were uncluttered by any love for him. If she cried, she cried because of the trauma of the circumstances, but inwardly she felt as if a stranger had died. She was crying for herself. It was nothing more than self-pity that filled her mind now.
“Lesley,” said Charles. His voice was soft and comforting, but also quietly confident and assured. “Take your time. Cry as much as you want. I’ll be here all the time. You’re crying because you’ve lost him. But remember, in reality that happened months ago. You’ve nothing to worry about. You did all you possibly could have done. If communication breaks down between two people, it doesn’t mean that both are to blame. You know I want to marry you. And you know I will look after Anna. There is no problem.”
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