The Weather in Africa

by Martha Gellhorn

  ‘I am cousin of father of that boy. You kill that boy. You give one thousand shillings for father.’ He was whispering but the whisper shocked him, it was as loud as the steam whistle at the cement factory. He stank of fear, he couldn’t remember whether Ali said one thousand or ten thousand. It was not easy, as Ali said. It was bad. She would call him a liar and Memsaab Grant would come and know he was lying. The police. He wanted to run from this room but was too full of fear. And the woman watched him with those crazy eyes, she wouldn’t let him go, she was watching him.

  ‘You give me money. Ten thousand shillings. You kill that boy.’

  ‘No!’ She slipped her shoulder free of his hand and rolled off the bed, crouching on the other side by the open balcony door.

  He could not remember how to say the words Ali told him, father, cousin, shillings, only ‘You kill that boy.’

  She was crying the strange words of her sleep. ‘No, I didn’t! Mother knows, she knows, don’t run wait Andy! I didn’t, I didn’t!’

  They would hear her, they would all come, and the police would beat him until he was covered with blood. He had to stop her, sweat poured from his face, from his armpits, his clothes were wet and cold, he was wild with fear. He had forgotten all the other words, he moved around the bed, to reach her, to stop her making that bad bad noise, whispering insanely, ‘You kill that boy, you kill that boy.’

  The woman screamed ‘NO!’, and ran so fast he barely saw her in the dim light, ran out to the balcony, ran. Far below, in that same instant he heard something, nothing, not as much as the sound of the waves. He stood, shaking, his hands over his mouth to shut in the terror. Shaking, he backed slowly to the door. The door, the door. With one hand still holding the terror inside, he opened the door and began to run. He threw the key away on the stairs and ran down five flights to the big empty dark dining room.

  Less than an hour after sunrise, Miss Grant and Dr Burke stood on the path along the north side of the hotel. The air was sweet with the scent of frangipani and jasmine and mimosa, birds sang, the morning breeze ruffled the leaves of the fever tree. Dr Burke had signed the form; while the balance of her mind was disturbed. The police had come and gone. Nothing marked the place except a mashed oleander bush and some stains on the coral rock bordering the path. Miss Grant looked as old as she was, without make-up in an orange kimono. Dr Burke had grabbed the nearest clothing, bathing trunks, beach sandals, a T-shirt. He felt hollow, sick from discouragement. He tilted his head to study the balconies above him. All the wide glass panels were closed, the curtains drawn.

  ‘Lucky they like air-conditioning,’ he said.

  ‘Most of them would have been on the terrace on the other side. There was a dance last night.’

  ‘Lucky none of them are early risers.’

  Miss Grant could not take her eyes from the oleander bush and the coral rocks.

  ‘Bad for tourism,’ Dr Burke said bitterly. ‘Mustn’t upset the tourists. Our great national industry.’

  ‘To think I was the last person to see her,’ Miss Grant said. ‘I could so easily have stayed. I’ll never forgive myself.’

  ‘You? I could just as easily have sent a night nurse and a day nurse or put her in the hospital whether she liked it or not. I knew she was over-emotional about that damned stupid accident but she wasn’t concussed, she wasn’t off her head. In God’s name, how could anyone guess? Oh Mary, it’s so useless. Why can’t these bloody morons keep their kids off the roads!’

  ‘I’d better get dressed before they start coming down for breakfast.’ She couldn’t afford to let go, the working day began at seven thirty when the dining room opened. Not now, later. And how would she handle the memory of the path and the broken body? Miss Grant took Dr Burke’s arm for company, for comfort; she was shivering.

  ‘Poor woman,’ Miss Grant said. ‘Poor woman. She should never have come to Africa.’

  :III: IN THE HIGHLANDS

  When Luke Hardy took to the bottle, everyone understood.

  His wife, Sue, the very picture of health, had keeled over dead while cutting roses in her garden. People heard it was a clot, something like that, one of those things. Luke and Sue were childless; for twenty-six years they lived on Fairview Farm in perfect love. Discussing this sad and sudden death at the Karula Sports Club, a woman said nobody would think to look at them that Luke and Sue were in fact Tristan and Yseult. Not to look at: both short, grey-haired, sun-wrinkled, in their fifties, one lean, one plump. The neighbours, English farmers and their wives from thirty miles around Karula, drove to Fairview to pay condolence visits. They were greeted at the door by Luke’s head houseboy who thanked them politely and made excuses for the Bwana. Luke Hardy could not disguise his pain and knew how embarrassing grief is to others.

  Luke buried his wife, without benefit of clergy, on a high ridge at the southern perimeter of his farm. They had agreed that the view here was their favourite though it was hard to choose one beauty from so much beauty. After that Luke sat on his verandah, with another spectacular view before him, and started to drink. Fairview Farm went slowly down the drain.

  Luke thought a man could drink himself to death at speed but the process proved remarkably long-drawn-out. He applied himself to the task for one year and two months. The head man and the cook stopped coming to the verandah for instructions since the Bwana received them with glassy indifference. Between them they ran the farm and the house to the extent that anything ran. When sober enough, Luke filled time by picking through his collection of books bought at sales after other funerals or when people moved away from the Highlands. The complete works of Robert Louis Stevenson, the complete works of Thomas Carlyle, H. G. Wells’ Outline of History, Zane Grey, the collected poetry of Robert Browning, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, the Koran, Baroness d’Orczy, Jane Austen, on and on, all without interest.

  One morning in January, shortly after dawn, Luke was drinking tea laced with whisky while reading Roget’s Thesaurus when disgust overcame him. He had been insulting Sue. Together they carved Fairview from the bush, with no money behind them. Together they made it a happy prosperous farm, never rich but comfortable for them and their watu. He didn’t have it in him to carry on the work alone but that was no reason to destroy it. Sue would hever have thrown away the effort of his lifetime.

  Luke got up and shouted for Kimoi, the head houseboy, a man almost as old as he. He wanted a fire built in the boiler outside the bathroom, he was going to wash and shave and eat breakfast and drink much coffee and write a letter which the driver should take to Karula immediately. Kimoi laughed like a lunatic, stoking the boiler. The Bwana had decided not to die. Actually the Bwana had decided to postpone dying; there was business to settle first.

  Fortified by coffee, Luke printed the advertisement since his handwriting was none too steady.

  BEAUTIFUL FARM FOR SALE. ROTTEN CONDITION DUE TO NEGLECT. FIFTEEN THOUSAND ACRES. UNLIMITED WATER FROM BEST SPRING IN THE HIGHLANDS. TWO THOUSAND HEAD NOTHING SPECIAL CATTLE. DAIRY RANCHING. USED TO AVERAGE FIFTEEN GALLONS CREAM DAILY BUT LESS NOW. ROOF LEAKS OTHERWISE HOUSE SOLID. WILL SELL REASONABLE PRICE TO BUYER I LIKE. DONT WRITE INSPECT IN PERSON. ASK DIRECTIONS KARULA GENERAL STORE LUKE HARDY FAIRVIEW FARM KARULA.

  He read this over and thought it an exact statement of the facts. He addressed an envelope to the Kenya Weekly News, a periodical subscribed to by all serious cow men.

  The neighbours saw the advertisement and wondered to each other how drunk Luke had been when he dreamed it up. It was a real come-on, it made your mouth water; rotten condition, nothing special cows, leaking roof: you could scarcely wait to snap up such a bargain. But anyway, if Luke was making jokes in the Kenya Weekly News, he must feel better and would reappear in Karula and start living a normal life.

  Luke suffered for a week, watered his whisky, sipped all day instead of swigging, and bellowed orders. The work section of the farm was hopeless but he could spruce up his house and garden for the stream of prospective buyers. The fou
r indoor servants swept, scrubbed, polished, aired everything in sight. Not bad, Luke thought, seeing for the first time in over a year the familiar furnishings. Big red cedar chairs and sofas, with wide arms for drinks and books, and lumpy cretonne cushions; big square tables and straight chairs to match; worn impala and zebra skins on the plank floors; faded brown rep curtains; pressure lamps; book cases; stone fireplace with the obligatory trumpeting elephant in oils above. The two bedrooms were as plain and satisfying. A local carpenter had made it all for the young Hardys, and made it to last.

  The garden shamed Luke. How could he have forsaken what Sue slaved over and cherished. The magnolias were dead and the roses and all the soft pretty flowers in the borders around the house. Oleanders and hibiscus survived, as did the podo and pepper trees, the jacaranda and wild fig which framed the view. Luckily golden shower and bougainvillaea and jasmine still bloomed on the rough stone walls of the house. The lawn looked like a hayfield; Sue would have hated that. Luke told the watu to slash the grass; useless to pretend he hadn’t let his place fall into ruin.

  Every day Luke was shaved, clean, as near sober as possible and waiting. No cars bumped the twenty-three miles over ruts and potholes from Karula to Fairview. Luke couldn’t believe it; his feelings were hurt. He was more than half drunk and entirely hostile when a Dodge pick-up turned from the public road into the long driveway. Luke heard the car but did not move. He meant to tell the bastard that Fairview was no longer for sale. In the usual Kenya farm style, the driveway ended at the kitchen door. Kimoi led the visitor around the house to the verandah. Luke had not expected to see a boy; this one wouldn’t be a buyer, probably the young dolt ran out of petrol.

  ‘Mr Hardy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name’s Ian Paynter. I saw your advertisement in the Kenya Weekly News.’

  ‘Took your time, didn’t you?’

  ‘I’m sorry sir. I only saw it this morning.’

  Luke unbent. ‘Sit down. Come to look it over for your father?’

  ‘No sir.’ Luke couldn’t understand the expression on the boy’s face.

  ‘You’re getting married?’ After all he bought this land when he was a boy, with Sue.

  ‘No sir.’ My God, Luke thought, what have we here? The chap certainly wasn’t making conversation easy. Well then, let’s not talk. Silence did not appear to worry the Paynter fella. The Paynter fella sat upright and tense on one of the old verandah chairs which were not built for that position and stared at the view. He must be six feet two and weighed nothing at all. This wasn’t the slenderness of youth, this was more like emaciation. Sick for a long time, TB maybe. He had the sort of face young Englishmen have, public school voice, perfectly ordinary young chap, except he didn’t seem capable of speech.

  Out of this puzzling silence, Ian Paynter said, ‘If your farm isn’t already sold, sir, I’d like to buy it.’

  ‘You haven’t seen it, man, what are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ve seen this,’ Ian Paynter made a small gesture towards the view.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-five.’

  ‘You’re too young to live here alone. The nearest neighbours are five miles away, people called Gale, and I don’t much care for them. The ones I like most, the Gordons, live 15 miles the other side of Karula. It’s lonely. You’d go crackers. Besides the farm is a mess. You’d have to work your balls off. What do you know about farming anyway? How long have you been out here?’

  ‘A year. I was second assistant to the dairy manager at Ol Ilyopita.’

  ‘George Lavering’s place. That’s a Rolls Royce compared to here.’

  ‘Mr Hardy,’ the boy turned to him and smiled for the first time. The smile came as a shock, revealing a complete set of outsize lustrous false teeth. ‘I hope you will sell me your farm. It’s exactly what I want.’

  Luke Hardy told himself he was a stupid old sot and deserved a kick up the ass. ‘How long have you been out here?’ What sort of question was that? The boy had been in the war of course; just demobbed before arriving last January. More likely he’d just got out of hospital, ghastly gut wound judging by his skin and bone looks, no doubt infection, poisoned blood, something did in his teeth too. And the nervy way he held himself and the trouble he had to force out a few words at a time, probably recovering from shell shock, plenty of chaps were shaky afterwards, Luke thought, confusing his distant war with the war he had missed, that ended a year and a half ago.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ Luke announced. It was four o’clock on a glittering afternoon. ‘Kimoi will look after you. Stay the night. See you in the morning. Talk then.’

  Ian Paynter sat alone on the verandah, first refusing Kimoi’s offer of tea, then the offer of drink as sunset colours streaked the sky. He was thinking of Fairview and its sozzled owner, Mr Luke Hardy. How can I make him sell it? I must have it, it’s the only thing I want. But I can’t go through all the talk, I can’t explain. Why in God’s name do people ask questions?

  No, I’m not looking at your farm for my father; my father is dead, so is my mother, so is my sister Lucy; everyone’s dead except me. It was the war, you see, Mr Hardy. My sister Lucy was seventeen and riding in a lorry with a lot of other girls to a dance at some American airforce base near Aylesbury where we lived. The lorry skidded in the black-out and overturned and Lucy and one other girl were killed. My mother went to London for the day to shop or maybe have some fun, a matinée with friends and tea at Claridge’s, and a buzzbomb hit a building and a piece of masonry smashed her skull. My father had a heart attack when he heard, quite natural after two such accidents wouldn’t you think, and that weakened him so he died of pneumonia. All this happened in England while I was in Oflag XV B outside Hannover.

  No, I’m not getting married, Mr Hardy. I went straight from Marlborough into the Army and straight from the Army into Oflag XV B, Dunkirk till the end, five years. Not much chance to meet girls. I’m not interested, I never got the hang of them and it’s too late now. I loved three people and they’re dead and that’s the end of it. No, Mr Hardy, I won’t be lonely. If you’d spent five years in a room with nine other men, and shared one and a quarter acres inside barbed wire with three hundred men, you’d see that being alone in a lot of space is my idea of heaven. I don’t want people. I don’t know how to talk to them any more, I kind of gave it up in those five years. I found the best way to keep from going round the bend was not to listen or talk or think or feel, you might say I went to sleep for the duration.

  Perhaps I’ll get over it in time, I mean be able to natter about nothing like other people, but I can’t cope now. I learned that in Aylesbury when I was sent home after we were liberated. Not to our house, I couldn’t look at it, I stayed with the Mayfields, Paynter and Mayfield, solicitors, third generation of both families. God how everyone talked, day and night, squawking like parrots, I didn’t understand any of it. Civilian life in the war. I didn’t understand the soldiers either, when Tom and Larry Mayfield got demobbed and came back. They used to be my best friends. Larry was a gunner, Tom was in the tanks. They talked and laughed until I thought the windows would break. Their war sounded like one glorious leave in Naples and Rome and Brussels and Paris, getting drunk and jokes and girls.

  I suppose I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t overheard Larry talking to his mother. He said he and Tom were going to visit pals from their outfits because the house was too gloomy with old Ian creeping around like a ghost. I didn’t mind leaving, I was glad to, I hated it in Aylesbury where I’d always been happy, people being sorry for me and nagging about my teeth until finally I got these awful choppers which are worse. I remembered some men in the Oflag talking about Kenya, starting a new life there after the war. They said it was big and empty. So I told Mr Mayfield I wanted to go to Kenya and he wangled a job with Sir George Lavering through the old boy network. I didn’t imagine I’d like farming but I had to do something and live somewhere. The point is, Mr Hardy, what I’ve been getting
at, is that I like farming better than anything I’ve ever done, it’s wonderful for me, I couldn’t begin to tell you how wonderful because now I’ve got an interest in life, I’ve got something to think about.

  You needn’t worry that I won’t have enough money to pay for Fairview. I have plenty, being the sole inheritor and our house was pretty valuable and had some good things in it and that’s all sold too. I can give you a cheque in the morning, only for God’s sake don’t ask questions, just leave me alone and sell me the place. I know it’s right for me, I know it, and I don’t care what shape your farm is in, I haven’t anything else to do with my life except work.

  Kimoi called him for dinner. The cook had said he wasn’t going to wait all night until the strange Bwana tired of sitting on the verandah in the dark. Ian came blinking into the big room, dazzled by the pressure lamp over the dining table. The fire was lit, the table set with sticks of celery and raw carrot in a glass jug, a lump of home-made butter, a home-made loaf on a board, a soup tureen, and a quart bottle of cold beer. Roast beef and roast potatoes, cauliflower, peas and baked apples with thick cream followed. Ian ate like a man starved. He thought this the finest room and the finest food in Kenya. It was extraordinary how contented he felt here in the easy quiet.

  At Ol Ilyopita, there were too many people, the European staff, all public school to suit Lady Layering, all friends, all given to evening drinks and dining in each other’s houses. They were jubilant because the war was over, they were alive and where they wanted to be, on the biggest grandest farm in Kenya with agreeable jobs and super perks including polo ponies, two tennis courts, a swimming pool and Lady L’s sumptuous parties. They enjoyed themselves at the top of their lungs. Ian was painfully conscious of being a transplanted ghost. They knew Ian had had a beastly war, the worst, and no wonder the poor chap was a bit touched in the head. They treated him with tact like a cripple. Ian saw the reasonableness of their attitude but he hated it. He was not a cripple to himself. He didn’t dislike them, he didn’t dislike anyone; he simply could not fit in.