‘Did you not sleep well, madam?’ she would reply,
‘Thoughts, Priscilla, thoughts. It is better to keep busy so that they do not get the better of you. I think I shall cut the hedge today.’
A little while before she died, one of the bad nights when Priscilla was sitting up with her, she had spoken clearly, aroused momentarily from her heavings and mutterings.
‘Be brave, my dear, when I am gone. It has been hard for you but at least you did not have to see your man die. He has had some sort of life, and it may be a good one.’
As she watched the last struggles, Priscilla could not shake off the memory of that night. It was a former clerk from the farm who led in the gang – he had resigned two years before, saying he had been offered a job in Nairobi, and there had been rumours that he was in the forest. Everything seemed to be clothed in rumours. They did not visit the homesteads any more, though it was still the time of homesteads: the security forces had not yet burned them down and moved the people to the new villages. Priscilla was glad that she had been spared that at least, safe in Nairobi and her mother sheltered in the church compound, while other workers in farms and schools were peering by night at the encircling fires and guessing, is that my home destroyed, my brother-in-law’s, my best friend’s? The hammering had come at the door and the clang of pangas until at last the wire frame had given way. They had stabbed at the Master first – he had ordered Mrs Bateson to the other room on the pretext of locking up what heavy tools they had. Then Priscilla’s father had come running from the kitchen in his cook’s apron, a carving knife in one hand and a heavy iron range poker hot in the other, short-sighted, grey-haired, utterly pitiful – they had jumped upon him in a moment and, knowing she could do nothing for him, Priscilla had run into Anthea’s bedroom – Anthea whom she had cared for since babyhood like the child she had never had. There was no key, but she had shoved furniture against the door, pushed the child into the wardrobe and herself stood trembling in front of it, but of course to no avail. The men had knocked down the flimsy barrier, pushed her aside and dragged the screaming child from the cupboard. One blow, mercifully, had been enough, a slash across the throat, gurgling blood and then the police whistles had begun to sound and the men had run off into the night, leaving maid and mistress alive and sobbing in one another’s arms. Her own mother was unhurt in the servants’ quarters: only two of the farm workers from the distant lines were missing.
She grieved for her father, but he would have suffered in any case; after thirty years of service in that home where his children had been nurtured and some kind of respect achieved, what new patterns of life were there for him? And yet all the patterns (they believed) were going to be new. He, like others, had spoken with resentment of land taken away by the whites and unjust taxes. And yet he was one of the lucky ones according to the terms of the time. The brandishing of the carving knife showed not only loyalty to an employer who could be termed a friend but also knowledge of his own doom and perhaps a faint hope of saving his womenfolk. But Anthea, with her perfect Kikuyu and her openness to new things, what purpose could be served by her death? Mercifully her older brother and sister were away in boarding school. And mercifully – perhaps for the only time in her life it struck Priscilla as a mercy – her own man was far away and could have no part in this shambles.
The police came and found her cradling Anthea’s body in her arms while Mrs Bateson bent over the Master’s. Themselves now stained with blood and scratched with broken wood and mesh, they answered question after question. Mrs Bateson had had to plead that she needed Priscilla, trusted her, knew that she had risked her life for the child, or she, too, might have been marched away among the suspects. And so they had moved to Nairobi, found a flat, started to live again, put a manager on the farm until in better times it could be sold, made a home for Jim and Susan before the term ended. And when preachers and politicians promised that all the patterns were going to be new, Priscilla alone remained as she had been before, a domestic servant, educated as far as girls could be educated in her time, working for a European with whom she always spoke good Swahili, not the kind with which employers sometimes insulted the kitchen. For although Mrs Bateson had urged her ahead and into the English-speaking classes, it was a kind of custom to speak Swahili with the servants, and perhaps a kind of courtesy, too, for neither of them to take refuge in the language of her own tribe. If it had not been for her man, she might have gone away to train as a teacher, but that man had changed everything. So Priscilla continued to take in morning tea, cooked breakfast (for no one ever spoke of engaging another cook), wearing a uniform, living in quarters, attending a different church from Mrs Bateson, eating different food, buying in different shops. Because when you have gone through so much together, how can you face any more changes?
Except that gradually times had changed and moulded them. Jim and Susan grew up and left the country. By Uhuru they had stopped coming for regular vacations. When Mrs Bateson broke her arm in a motor accident she asked Priscilla, as a favour, if she would sleep in Susan’s room in case of difficulties in the night, and they both felt more secure. They got into the habit of sitting down to morning coffee together and both took to wearing bright smocks to save their good dresses when they were doing chores in the kitchen or garden. Mrs Bateson even suggested teaching Priscilla to drive, but that was more than she could face. They simplified their way of life to suit the strength they had left.
She lay wakeful, turning it over in her mind, while Bessie in the next bed sobbed for her baby – a five foot ten baby with a rifle and corporal’s stripes. Susan had come when Mrs Bateson died, offered her whatever she wanted of the furniture and found her a similar job with another widowed lady. It sounded the same, but of course it was not. The house was larger and harder to clean. There were more guests to cook for and Priscilla was finding it harder to lift and carry things. She was under the doctor herself, and after a couple of years was told that her heart would not stand such heavy work. She wrote to Susan, since she did not communicate very well with the new employer, and Susan, after enquiring round, had got her a place in the Refuge. She was under sixty at the time, and knew she must look favoured to the others, but Matron looked upon her as an ally and, as she suspected, donations came to the home from Susan and her friends. Priscilla asked someone to store the few pieces of furniture she had chosen before the flat was sold, and kept her own savings against emergencies. No one knew better that anything may happen.
Jim visited Kenya once on a business trip and came to see her, bringing a hundred shillings from himself and a dress from Susan. She asked him if he would like to take any of the stored furniture away, but he had looked scared at any mention of the old home, showed her photographs of his own children and avoided any mention of early days on the farm. In her prayer book she had a picture of him on a pony, looking as though nothing would ever frighten him. They are good people, she thought, to remember. Some employers don’t remember. But she did not dare to think any further back than that. She did not dare to think.
But one is never quite safe from reminders. On one of her visits Mrs Reinhold was to be collected by a lady from All Saints’ Cathedral, since streets and districts grew blurred to her as she moved from one African country to another, confusing the greetings, the currencies, the landmarks, but never the tabulated criteria of aid. The lady herself held the geography of the city clear in her mind: when she occasionally needed to visit the eastern districts it was a matter of honour to do it efficiently. She felt this the more in that her imagination had never been able to grasp the kind of life lived in these overcrowded little boxes of houses or sprawling tenements of many doors and courtyards. Her husband’s elder brother, jack of all trades and master of none, had lived in Eastleigh once before she knew him, before the glutinous mud and the influx of cheaper lifestyles had driven the last few, unachieving whites away and changed the race course. But she could not picture it, and the rest of the family preferred not to try.
Like many of the white Kenya-born she was tall and bony: she had tried, theoretically speaking, to bow her head and shrink her needs – her simple widow’s single bed and dressing-table, her armchair, desk and footstool, her few serviceable dresses and pots and pans – to fit the bare, square rooms without convenience of windowseat or mantelpiece, and knew that she had failed. The failure made her not less generous but less capable of compassion: objectively, the acknowledged ignorance enriched her. So many of her neighbours knew, in their own conceit, everything worth knowing.
She put her head through the door to where the women were gathered round Rahel and greeted them. Then she took a longer look.
‘Why, it is Priscilla, isn’t it?’
‘Indeed, madam,’ Priscilla answered in precise, simple Swahili. ‘How are you and what brings you here?’
‘I am well, Priscilla, and delighted to see you. I shall never forget how you cared for Mrs Bateson those last months. Are you working here?’
‘Oh no. I had one job after my madam died, but it was not the same, and the doctor said I must rest, so they brought me here.’
‘I am sure you had earned a rest after all those years. I am retired myself and live very quietly since my husband passed on. Perhaps you did not know?’
‘I heard, madam, in my last place, and I was sorry. I know you had nursed him for a long time.’
‘Indeed. I wonder now what is left worth doing. But I am lucky. I did not have to face violence as Mrs Bateson did and, I believe, you also.’
She glanced at the wedding ring and Priscilla bowed her head.
Wairimu pricked up her ears. Sophia, mercifully, was sucking up to Mrs Reinhold and Matron, so she did not hear.
‘But isn’t this someone else I know? Where have I seen you before? Forgive me: we are all getting old and I forget things.’ She was looking at Mama Chungu, who giggled and turned away.
‘This is Mama Chungu,’ said Priscilla in English. ‘She does not talk about herself. I think she got her name because if you ask her about the children she says, “It hurt me, it hurt me”. She can talk all right about other things.’
The ladies gathered round. Their endless curiosity had always been defeated by Mama Chungu’s attachment to the here and now.
‘So, Mama Chungu,’ went on the white lady, ‘I ought to know you. Where can I have seen you?’
Mrs Reinhold had come out of Matron’s house with Sophia and joined the group. She did not understand Swahili.
‘Perhaps by the mosque?’ someone suggested. ‘She used to beg outside the mosque.’
‘No, I do not think it was there. Where before the mosque, Mama Chungu?’
Of course there would be record cards, but Matron did not discuss record cards in front of residents.
‘Flowers in the market?’ offered Mama Chungu quietly.
‘I don’t think so. I have a garden, so I never buy flowers. Where before that?’
Priscilla gave a start. A memory stirred in her of chasing someone out of the gate, the white marguerites she had taken without permission scattered on the ground. And later seeing the same woman hustled along by policemen, one of them holding incongruously the big bunch of flowers she had picked, a few at a time, from gardens along the way, until one angry householder had turned her in. Priscilla had never given it another thought. But the Cathedral lady had lived beyond the city limits until her husband’s illness circumscribed them. It could not be a simple matter of picking flowers.
‘Before that dobi Ngara.’ Mama Chungu was reciting as though in a trance. Everyone in Nairobi shopped at Ngara at one time or another. They did not recollect her, but everyone changes. Mama Chungu had become sturdy again once they had brought her in from her pitch outside the mosque and fed her properly. She had begun begging too late in life to do well out of it, and her body had never adjusted itself to the angles of the pavement or the cocoon of polythene bags and wrapping paper. One could imagine her, at fifty, say, scrubbing at khaki uniforms in a backstreet laundry.
‘No, it was not in Ngara.’
‘Housemaid at Kamiti,’ Mama Chungu replied to the unspoken question. Bessie raised her head but turned the movement skilfully into a need to scratch her armpit. Who was she to give away secrets? But she remembered, in her usual fuzzy way, being taken outside for grasscutting during that endless cleansing process for detainees that she could never understand, Leonard tied to her back – or was he still in the womb? – and seeing a chubby, light-skinned woman hanging clothes on a line. Someone her own age, fortyish she thought, whose babies would be behind her, someone safe, busy, defined. ‘All these Europeans like to employ foreigners,’ one of the other women had hissed. A foreigner, with soap-sore hands, in an ayah’s dress? It was beyond her.
‘My husband’s brother worked at Kamiti for a time, but we never went there. Did you live anywhere else?’
‘Mombasa.’
‘Mombasa? But you are not one of us,’ protested Sophia. ‘You do not look like it. You do not talk like it. You might have had a grandmother. . . .’
‘No,’ agreed Mama Chungu softly, trapped now, acquiescent. ‘Not from Swahili. From Seychelles.’
‘You come from Seychelles? You speak French?’ asked Priscilla, suddenly understanding. There would be wrangles about citizenship, calls for papers.
‘Not much French. I come when very small, my mother say. I grow Mombasa, speak a bit English, work there for white people. I get old. I forget,’ concluded Mama Chungu in English. They all stared at her. ‘Two babies hurt me. I not get any more. I go Kamiti.’
The lady from the Cathedral sat down suddenly. She blamed herself for fumbling after a memory, forcing a confidence, set off on the trail by the thought of Eastleigh first and then Kamiti. That brother-in-law, rolling stone, drinker, had for a while, just before the war, got a job in a Mombasa trading house. She and her husband, newly married, had been glad to stay with him for a cheap seaside holiday in those lean years. And one day she had seen, outside the servants’ quarters, a young, light-skinned girl who had never, since their arrival, come into the house. She would have been pretty if not strained by sorrow, and in her arms was a sickly fair-haired baby with Robert’s bony forehead and chin. ‘My husband’s nephew,’ she had thought, stupefied, and begged Robert to take the child to hospital or fetch a doctor. But by the time he was persuaded, at nightfall, it was too late. The girl came home, big-eyed and trembling. She thought she would never forget that anguished face, and it appeared she never had.
‘Don’t take it to heart,’ Robert had said to them. ‘It won’t take her long to get another.’ The brothers had quarrelled and they left the next day.
Robert had served in the war, then drifted into the extra security forces taken on during the Emergency. He had married and been posted to Kamiti, and for the wife’s sake they never referred to the past. It had never occurred to them that the girl would still be with the household. Eventually, after his wife had left him, Robert made his way south and out of contact.
‘It must have been Mombasa,’ she managed to say in a steady voice. ‘If I remember right, you were a pretty girl: you still have the features. You won’t remember me, but it was I who asked someone to take you to hospital. We felt very sorry for you.’
‘I was always good at washing, madam,’ replied Mama Chungu in a servant’s Swahili. ‘I cannot complain of lacking work. It is only because the babies died that I could not do better for myself.’
‘Yes, I understand, Mama Chungu. I do not know where your – your old employer is, or even whether he is still alive. He did not keep in touch with my late husband. But if there is anything. . . .’
‘Matron looks after us very well.’
‘Yes, yes. I know Matron looks after you. . . . Mrs Reinhold, we must hurry to get you back to lunch before your next appointment.’
The ladies all waved the car off.
‘Does she have children herself?’ Mama Chungu asked Priscilla.
‘Two da
ughters, I think. But probably they are overseas. She used to be a friend of my madam.’
Priscilla knew better than to ask questions.
‘Let her have joy of them. It is not her fault,’ Mama Chungu summarised without explaining. ‘I am going to water the beans. It is better to work than to keep on nattering. Bessie, why don’t you come and help me? It is time you started taking a share of the work. If you just sit about you will get so fat you will burst out of your new dress, and that would be a pity.’
Mumbling something, Bessie obediently began to fill a tin with water. They understood her to mean that she would be prepared to look after the chickens if there were any.
Bessie was the newest comer and also the nearest comer. She had lived, as long as anyone around could remember, in one of the wooden shacks on the edge of Eastleigh. She was only heard to speak Swahili and the few words of Kikuyu common to the town, and she could not tell you where she came from before or how she got her name. Even when old neighbours came to see her in the Refuge – till most of them drifted away, in the frequent movement that marks off our cities from the place called home, or grew embarrassed when she failed to recognise them – she would only weep for her dead baby and turn away from them.
There had been a sort of order in Bessie’s life, though not one fitting her very well for the routine of the Refuge. Her little home was full of things – benches and old pillows, tin cans, a couple of china plates, odd calendars and pieces of matting. She spent a lot of the day, her decent dress encrusted with dirt, a nylon scarf elaborately tied round her head, picking up fragments of charcoal round the dumps and carrying them home in a bucket. The dealers ignored her unless she came too close: she would peer into dustbins in search of other oddments to build up her fire. A few chickens scratched around her place and a few leafy plants grew there, though one did not see her tending them. And from time to time the boy came – always in civilian clothes, but by his bearing and the vehicles which sometimes dropped him off one saw that he was in the forces. No one remembered old Bessie having a child, but there he was. He would go to the door and she would smile and start at once to chatter. And then one would see the old clutter of the house put out for airing, and sweeping and washing going on, and Bessie would put on a brand new dress or wrapper while the old one hung out to dry. He must have brought food, for she was plump and healthy, though you did not see her cooking: perhaps someone was persuaded to keep a little store for her or make a phone call when she needed attention. It seemed a danger contained.
The Present Moment Page 10