After all, one lived through it and got called to a better way. She would not have had to live on charity now if it had not been for those askaris kicking over the brand new stock that she had invested most of her savings in, and hurting her arm so that she had to spend so long in hospital and gradually eat up the rest. But the sisters had helped her to find this place and she had no regrets.
But her brother – it was painful even now to think back to that little boy who, for the sake of school fees, had put up with the rows of home and the weariness of the quarry. As soon as he was eighteen he had joined the army – that was in the early days of the war – gone through the campaigns unhurt, become a drunkard and a boaster. She had met him once or twice during his leaves in Nairobi. Whether he sought her out or came there by accident in his search for pleasure she was not sure, but he got her address and used the name for next of kin. They had lost touch with their real father and the mother was wandering again.
So one day the letter came from Gilgil. Dead. There were no details. She knew something was wrong. She suspected something the clerk was not reading out to her. Where, in any case, could she have buried a body? What, in any case, would she have done with a tin box of men’s clothes? What had she to do with newspaper reports and whispers? Something froze in her. Two years after the war ended and a few months before he was due to come back to life, civilian life, she meant. He might have lived through it and got saved. This was when she started thinking of going to Uganda. Of course she knew the Emergency was coming – in the streets and back alleys such knowledge comes to the surface – but there was more to it than that.
She had other brothers, but no idea of what had become of them. She remembered them as small, undifferentiated creatures, and they would hardly remember her at all. And if they could remember, what would she tell them except that a boy could struggle for education, grow up in harsh and self-defeating service, and still be written off by blank words in an envelope. Dead. In too much hurry to start life again. Was it not, after all, better to be a woman, easy come, easy go? When they had no more use for you, at least they left you alone.
Nekesa did not give the nurses any trouble when they examined her. She had dealt with her own life shrewdly enough, attended the special clinic when the illness that made her barren (and, as long as treatment lasted, broke!) recurred several times, early understood that there would be no betrothal offer for her, tailored her desires to possibilities. There had been a fur-fabric coat one time in Kampala, in Nairobi a gilded, full-length mirror that had soon been broken in a brawl. She could not now remember how desperately she had wanted them, or why, but perhaps the longing had been healthy, repressing deeper yearnings that could never be met in the flesh. The ribs had mended where the askaris kicked her but the cough still gave her pain. The arm broken twelve years ago had set slightly crooked, but well enough to serve her purposes. She still had a taste for buns and soda when she could afford them, but ate heartily of the daily food and did not complain.
Mama Chunga, though ordinarily placid and helpful, closed up in contrast at the sight of a pencil and paper. Her age? She was not an educated person, expected to think in figures. Over fifty? Well, look at her. Over sixty? Well, yes, probably. Did she remember the Italian war? Was she married then? She had never been married. Working? Yes, she was working as a housemaid. She remembered the troop-ships. So it was Mombasa then? Yes, Mombasa. Was she born there? No, her parents said she was brought there as a small child. From another part of the coast? She did not remember. Did she go to school? She had learned to read and write in a private class. In Swahili? Of course. Her parents? The mother had died when she was a child and the father had gone away to get a job on a ship when she was beginning work. She thought he must have died in the war. Other relations? She did not remember any.
This was a good deal less than the truth. She had always felt a handicap to her father, who for her sake had taken a shore job in a snack bar after her mother died with the next baby. But he was good company, taking her for walks and playing his guitar. He kept up his bit of English and his mess-jacket carefully folded away in the tin trunk against the day he should be free to go to sea as steward again. They boarded in an auntie’s house, speaking patois there but Swahili outside: she was darker-skinned than her father and mixed freely with the local children. She was not very quick at lessons.
Papa had told her that it was the extra tips that attracted him back to sea: they would be enough to educate her or, if that did not suit, set her up with a dot against her marriage. She used to wonder what was wrong with her, that she should need to take a dowry to her husband when all the neighbouring girls expected to bring wealth to their fathers. But already she sensed that it was more the comradeship of crew quarters he needed than the money, and glamour rubbing off the adventurous passengers, after the disappointment of a sickly wife and a lone surviving daughter. She supposed that he did not want to commit himself to another marriage.
Mimi – that was her name then, and until quite recently she had been addressed by the courtesy title of Mrs Paul, which was close to anonymity enough – began daily work as a nursemaid at fifteen, and when in 1937 she found her first residential job with an elderly European couple, Papa fulfilled his dream at last and set off aboard a coastal cruise ship going up and down to Durban.
The Seychellois community was a warm one, full of aunties: there was some dearth of uncles, as many of them had jobs away, serving on ships or trains, doing maintenance jobs at remote stations which were not very popular with Europeans or camps which had no family quarters. Mimi was considered a pretty girl: she straightened her hair with hot combs and used a lot of oil and light fluttery dresses. The aunties did not always approve, but they did not cut her off. It was only when you married into another group, according to the features you had been born with or your adaptability, that they might stand back a little to help you work out your new identity.
Seychellois house servants used to command a decent wage. Like the Somali, they were considered to need a margin for sophistication. When the elderly couple retired up country, they got Mimi a place with Mr Robert. There was a Swahili cook and a separate house. She would be all right, they said: they would be prepared to leave their wallet with Robert’s father, whom they had known for years. Homes were better run when there was a memsahib, but times were hard and many people were reducing their staff. She must make the best of it.
She was making the best of it when Mr Robert started to call her to the house in the evening when he got back from the bar, on the pretext of making him coffee or mending a torn shirt. She was flattered, ambitious, lonely, not ignorant. You had to take your chance. She weighed this one against the sailors in the streets, who made demands on other girls she knew if they did not settle early into their own homes, ‘Oh-la-la, parlay-voo?’ The alternative lay in the dim, fringed houses of the aunties, full of sewing remnants and sacred pictures. And although Mr Robert had not actually said he would marry her, people lived in hope. He stood apart, for some reason, from his own kind; his shabby house, his clothes were marginal enough. There was no evidence of his having married before, and he was not very young – she realised afterwards that the glazed eyes with deep pouches, the fumbled shaving, the unsteady hand made him look older than he was.
She could not pretend she cared for him deeply: by the time of the first miscarriage she had come to understand how intensely selfish he was. Her father had come to visit her about this time and was more upset than he wanted her to see. He urged her to move elsewhere, but jobs were hard to find and she expected the master’s obligation to her to guarantee some protection. There was no other pull on her affections and she thought that a child might touch Mr Robert’s heart. But when the next baby died, and the brother- and sister-in-law quarrelled with him – whether because of his liaison with her or his indifference to the child she did not know – she lost hope. Her name was spoiled and she still had nothing to love. Her father’s schedule had changed a
nd he now had barely a day or two off between trips. Labour troubles were building up and one was afraid to be caught between a new employer and new pressures outside.
So she dusted the seedy furniture, cooked on the greasy kitchen range (for the cook, with an eye to the future, had got a better job in a forces canteen), grew expert in Alka-seltzer and pick-me-ups. And when Robert made a little more effort to woo her again, expressing sympathy for her loss and contrition that he had not introduced her to his family, she determined to take a chance.
She pulled herself to order: memories must be kept under control. It was necessary to protect oneself against these hopeful girls and their notebooks. Children? Yes, she had had two children. (They would find out from the scar.) For one of them she had had to be cut open. Both had cost her agony. Neither had lived beyond a few months and the doctor had said she could have no more. So of course she could not marry. What had the children died of? (Does this have to go on my clinic card, forty-five years later?) Mombasa is hot and malarial: babies die, that is all. The father? He had taken no interest. (Babies die for lack of an anchor, will, prayer to keep them fast.)
How had she lived? By working, always working, naturally. She was strong until that time she had had pneumonia, from the laundry, and her savings had got finished and so they brought her here. The girls shrugged and did not press her. (Old people may also die for lack of an anchor, will, prayer to keep them fast, except that they have acquired the habit of living, and habit dies hard.) There was not much physically wrong with her now – her wits a bit slow, perhaps. If she had had a house of her own, she could have managed. . . . The report dwelt on temperatures, routines, bowel movements.
Mama Chungu’s wits were working all right, working to efface herself. When they picked her up, skin and bone, from the begging place, she had indeed been confused by hunger and despair, had babbled, half-understood, wept and apologised for her isolation, and so had got her new name. But now she had herself well in hand.
Mimi went through her morning sickness during the strike, with the rubbish piled high, stinking and breeding flies, and the strikers wandering about in great gangs, which she felt a menace, Robert getting praised for organising voluntary labour in the docks and all the non-African unemployed eager to join in. By the time the second child was born, Robert was away at the war and the house taken over by naval officers who had their own servants. He had left her a little money for the confinement and she had something saved to keep her going till she recovered enough to look for work: the child had died in the fifth week. Robert never replied to her letter saying it was so. Well, perhaps he never got it. Boats were sinking those days, with people in them and letters, stores and precious unspoken promises and guns and money.
Mimi never saw her father again. The passenger ships, of course, were commandeered and troops were moving all about – Madagascar, Eritrea, India. If a letter or, at worst, a telegram had come it might well have followed the box-holder to some new address. After the war she enquired about the docks without success. She encouraged herself to think of Papa as settled with a young wife and a gratuity, tending a bar in a Seychelles hotel with entertaining stories of his days at sea. But another voice told her that if he had been alive he would have come to look for her. She generally managed to quell the third voice that said he might be lying helpless in a veterans’ hospital somewhere or down and out in Beira or Mtwara. The sea is more merciful than the land in keeping its victims to itself. Or, at the very worst, it must be over by now.
Mimi found a lowly job in the naval stores and ignored any man who approached her. She felt tangled with physical pain for a year after the operation, and what was the sense in bearing more pain when no fruit could come of it? There was no child to cherish and to seek money to educate. In any case she felt in her early twenties shrivelled, thin, shrill, dull of hair and skin. People talked around her of politics and strikes and unity coming across the country – Beauttah was already famous, especially in Mombasa, and a great organiser. There was talk of people getting their rights after the war and throwing out the foreigners. Chege had not yet come. Hyder was a name to conjure with. Archbishop Alexander was remembered as a sort of antichrist. She was not interested in talk, but she combed out her woolly hair, spoke only Swahili and resolved to be a Kenyan. But she did not speak of this to those who, twenty years afterwards, made a conscious choice. After all, there had been nowhere else she wanted to go. Sharing a room with a Taita widow, she lived decently enough.
Robert never came to look for her. That could hardly be thought of. But she met him one day at a bus stop in 1946, and he told her he was married and looking for a place to settle when his wife came from England. That she could well understand. British soldiers’ wives were competing for places on every ship to come and join their husbands. Even Mr Kenyatta’s coming was delayed because he had to wait, like others, for a berth. She answered coldly – Robert did not at first remember to ask what had happened about the baby. But by now her figure was trim again and her hair shining: with the upheaval of the strike next January she lost her job. So finally she agreed to set the new house in order for the memsahib to come, and pretty soon she was being called on to warm the bed as well.
She had no will of her own. She did not even drive a hard bargain. She had never been very good at calculating. He got her foodstuffs reserved for Europeans in the shops and gave her an extra twenty now and then: she lit some candles for her father’s safety. When the wife came, he bought her a separate radio, since she no longer had the run of the house.
Robert was attentive to his wife at first and she had no reason to suspect anything. She was a pale woman, often prostrated by the heat and very ignorant of life in Kenya. Mimi exercised her best English to help her understand things in the house, but never outside. When, later on, they moved to Kamiti, she agreed to go too. It would be a change for her and she hoped to live more comfortably under strict observation. She was in her thirties now, and filling out. She thought the memsahib would find her feet in a place where white people were more dominant, and keep her husband up to the mark. But Robert was incorrigible. There was an incident with a female suspect, carefully hushed up. There was coarse talk in front of the nursing sisters, and by now he was loud-mouthed when he strode out to the quarters at night.
It was not only because he took her body and her humiliation for granted that she now resented Robert’s intrusion. For the first time since the babies had died she was beginning to feel there was something of her own to protect.
The Taita man used to come with one of the vehicles delivering stores. It was not very clear to her what he was doing. They called him Kinyozi, the barber. He said that he had known her father in the snack bar before the war – that was possible – and had seen her when he used to work in the docks. There was nothing extraordinary about that. He was older than her, with a lined face, a ready smile but eyes that smouldered deep down. He seemed to go out of his way to make conversation, popping up when she was on her way to market or taking a message to one of the memsahib’s friends outside the compound. She could not understand it. When he started making advances to her, she froze, and sensed that it was a relief to him that she did so. She felt herself ugly because of the fear and strain under which she lived, and she had never known a man who would turn up for friendly conversation. She had never, after all, claimed to be very bright. What was it, then?
He missed Mombasa, he said. He had had to go away after the strike and felt he had lost the respect of anyone he cared for there. But, even so, one had a commitment to make things better. Did she not think so?
Well, yes, she agreed. One wanted to belong. But she was a simple, uneducated woman, who would find it difficult to get away from her employer. He had spoiled her youth. . . .
Yes, yes, Kinyozi knew that. He seemed to know a lot of things.
So there was nothing she could do, really.
That – he paused – that was not in fact so. If she trusted him – well, he
had not had much luck in his dealings with women, he did not want to put pressure on her in any way, they were both mature people, but if – if sometimes he could leave a small packet with her, or occasionally a letter that would be collected by one of the warders, identified by him, just in the spirit of helping. . . .
Of course she did not refuse or even think of refusing. She knew very well what it was about, and suddenly she knew too her need to feed the hatred that was growing in her. But she was very embarrassed the next day when Mr Robert came shouting round her quarters that he heard she was entertaining ‘native’ men in her room, amounting to an insult to the memsahib as though she were not being paid enough, did not know what was good for her. He started throwing cooking pans about, until the watchman came to investigate and called an officer who edged him away.
The envelope was hidden among her dresses in a wooden box. It was not till the next evening that the sergeant, calling her to the door in noisy protest against women whose bosses disturbed the peace of the whole servants’ quarters, while he was only trying to have a peaceful supper with his brother-in-law along the line, was able to collect it with a wink of gratitude.
The Present Moment Page 15