The Weather in Africa

by Martha Gellhorn

Luke had left the serious business at the bank until last. He was easing Ian into urban life gently. Though silent as always, Ian behaved all right when presented to the station master and the post master and Ram Singh at the garage and Jivangee at the general store. But Ian froze with Jim Barnes at Barclays. Perhaps the boy became paralysed only in the company of whites. Jim Barnes was visibly put off by Ian’s manner. Luke talked to cover Ian’s stony silence. Ian had not bothered to ask and Luke had not bothered to say how much he wanted for the sale. Hearing now Luke’s price for Fairview and everything in it, Ian was distraught. When papers had been signed and witnessed and the cheque written, Luke, in a temper, hurried Ian out.

  ‘Honestly, Paynter, what bites you?’

  ‘I couldn’t say anything in there, Mr Hardy, but it isn’t right. It’s too little, you’re giving me Fairview, I can’t take it, I’m not poor, I can afford a decent price.’ To date, Luke had not heard Ian speak so long or so fast. He put his hand on Ian’s arm, smiling at the unhappy young face above him.

  ‘Listen, son. I know what I’m doing. I don’t need more, I haven’t anyone to leave it to. I want you to spend your money on Fairview, see? That’s all I care about.’

  ‘I will, sir, but all the same this isn’t right.’

  ‘It is. Now forget it, will you? We’re off to the Club.’

  Luke was thinking that Paynter was a good boy, a nice boy, yet with a screw loose somewhere. What ought to have scared Paynter, taking over a large gang of unknown watu, didn’t ruffle him but the prospect of meeting a few pleasant neighbours, people of his own kind, obviously scared him stiff. Could Paynter manage Fairview if he had such wacky nerves?

  Ian expected the Sports Club to be elegant on the Lavering style and filled with the sleek types who frequented the Laverings. The Karula Sports Club was a tatty little cement building, masked by handsome trees. Mottled brown linoleum covered the floor. A bar, flanked by doors labelled Memsaabs, Bwanas, stretched along one wall. A tinted photograph of the King and a Union Jack had been nailed rather crookedly above the bar. Small wood tables, stained by glass rings and cigarette burns, and kitchen chairs completed the furnishing. Ten people, five of each sex, were comfortably knocking back beer, gin and orange squash in this room where none of them would be caught dead at home in England. They rose, when they saw Luke, and fell upon him with kisses, handshakes, back-slapping and cries of rejoicing. ‘Darling Lukie, what a treat!’ ‘Lukie dear, you’ve made the day!’ ‘How are you old boy, wonderful to see you!’ ‘You’re looking fine, Luke, perfectly fine.’

  But he wasn’t of course. Luke was the other kind of drunk, the sort that stops eating and shrivels and grows grey-faced and trembly. They were all much more effusive than was their habit, being shocked to find Luke so sick and so old. When they had quieted, Luke made introductions. ‘This is Ian Paynter who’s just bought Fairview. Mr and Mrs Ethridge. Mr and Mrs Gale. Mr and Mrs Gordon. Mr and Mrs Farrell. Mr and Mrs Brand.’ They smiled and shook hands and said cordial things like ‘We must get in touch … come to lunch soon … let us know if there’s anything we can do to help.’ But they were not interested. They hovered around Luke, who was dismayed to be the centre of attraction. Months of solitude at Fairview had unsuited him for so many voices, so much carry-on. He understood Ian better. Promising falsely to see everyone before he left Karula, tell them his plans, hear the news, yes, sure, I’ll appear on the doorstep, Luke extricated himself with Ian in tow.

  Safe in the Dodge, Luke took a crumpled handkerchief from the pocket of his crumpled khaki shorts and wiped his forehead. Ian’s guarded though knowing smile annoyed him. ‘The secretary will send you a membership form and a chit for your dues.’

  ‘Actually, Mr Hardy, I don’t want to join.’

  ‘Of course you’ll join. If we didn’t all pay our dues, how do you think the Club could keep going?’

  This was the authentic voice of the old colonialist. The Club must be kept going, not only to satisfy an inborn English need for clubs but as a symbol of Empire. Ian didn’t give a hoot; he would pay his dues, since that was the drill, and never set foot in the place again.

  ‘I’d be glad to drive you, sir.’

  ‘No thanks, I’ll go with the lorry.’

  ‘Won’t you be awfully early?’

  The lorry left at eight in the morning to haul cream churns to the station.

  ‘I have things to attend to,’ Luke said. ‘And you ought not to waste time. Get on with your job. You’ll probably have questions you want to ask before I leave.’

  The lorry was as decrepit as the old Austin. Everything about Fairview amazed Ian. Logically, the farm should have ground to a halt long ago.

  Luke bought tickets for his cook, Joseph, and Kimoi at the station; they were to sit in the crowded train for most of a day and all of a night but that wouldn’t depress them; the train was as good as a beer parlour. What depressed them was the coast, alien territory, alien tribes, but they did not consider refusing to accompany their Bwana into exile.

  Luke fumed around Karula in a rage; Ram Singh the old shit didn’t have the Austin ready. He had planned a morning call on Helen Gordon and was so late now he could barely make it before lunch.

  ‘About time goddamnit,’ Luke said and headed for the Gordons’ farm which was called Mastings, a meaningless name, because Charles Gordon’s family place in England was called Mastings, also a meaningless name.

  Charles Gordon fell in love with Africa while on a shooting safari. To emigrate, he required a wife whom he quickly found, a pretty fair-haired girl, the belle of the previous London season. The parents of the bridal couple regarded this African venture as a foolish fling and expected their children home within months, or else Helen without Charles. The Gordons had now lived in the Highlands for fourteen years. Africa gave Charles everything he really cared about, from trout fishing to stalking elephant. Farming provided camouflage for the sporting life. He talked as if he was a burdened earnest farmer but old Roy Dobson, sixteen years his senior and hired as manager from the beginning, ran the farm. Old Roy, Charles was apt to say, is a priceless chap, one of the best, with the implication that old Roy was not quite one of us.

  Helen Gordon liked Roy Dobson more than any man around Karula. Roy had started her on gardening, taught and encouraged her. She built her life on her garden; she was inseparable from it now that Charles had torn her children from her bosom and shipped them home to England. Charles was in a fever lest the war go on so long that his two sons would miss a proper education.

  Despite the difference in age, Sue Hardy and Helen Gordon had been close loving friends, bound by their passion for making the earth bloom. Luke turned naturally to Helen for help. He found her, as always, grubbing in the garden, her face streaked with dirt where she had pushed back her sweat-damp hair, her old trousers mud-caked fore and aft.

  ‘Luke! If I hug you, I’ll get you filthy, but at least a kiss.’

  ‘You’re a pretty girl, Helen.’

  ‘Hardly a pretty girl, darling, not at thirty-four. Lukie, come with me at once. I have to show you my latest. I’ve made a bosky dell, all spring flowers. In January, that’s what I like, so dotty.’

  She led him under trellises, down terraces, across immaculate lawns past glowing borders, to a far corner of the garden.

  ‘Charles is furious, he says I’m wasting his precious water. Do you like it? Isn’t it a dream? Though I must admit using a sausage tree and mwangwas for shade rather spoils the Old England effect.’

  The bosky dell was a small natural bowl with a cunningly contrived imitation natural pool in the centre. Fringing the pool and scattered up the grassy slopes, iris and daffodils, freesia and jonquils, violets, narcissus, fairy bells grew in lovely confusion, as if growing wild. The light fell softly, broken by the African trees.

  ‘Your year’s work, Helen? It is a dream.’

  ‘I’ve sweated blood on moss but I don’t think it’s going to take. Now come and sit down, behold my rustic be
nch. I had the carpenter make it as I thought this would be the perfect place for reading poetry, not that I ever sit or read poetry. Tell me your news.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about Ian Paynter.’

  ‘The gangly young man you brought to the Club. What’s that tic on his face?’

  ‘Tic?’

  ‘Yes, you know the way he keeps loosening and widening his lips.’

  Luke laughed. ‘I hadn’t noticed but I reckon it’s his party smile, to stop from showing his teeth.’

  ‘Why, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘They’re the size of horse teeth and false. He ought to sue his dentist. Poor chap. I expect his went rotten in that Hun prison camp.’

  ‘Lukie, explain.’

  ‘They shouldn’t make war with boys,’ Luke said in sudden fierce anger. ‘They ought to call up old men like me; let the old men fight their bloody wars. I figure the Huns had Paynter in jail from the age of eighteen to twenty-three, think of it, Helen, the best years of a young man’s life when he’s just got out from under school and family and feeling his oats, everything is new and exciting, and he can’t wait to start. Why not wreck the old men, we’ve nothing to lose.’

  ‘They did it to your generation too,’ Helen said gently.

  ‘Perhaps that’s why I feel so sorry for young Paynter. I was lucky, I got in and got out quick.’ Second Lieutenant Hardy invalided out with a cushy wound, leaving his right arm permanently shorter and bent and scarred from shoulder to elbow as though by a lion’s claw, which didn’t hamper him at all. He wore long sleeves. He hadn’t missed his youth and the cocky fun of it.

  ‘Anyway, Helen, I wanted to ask you to keep an eye on him.’

  ‘Of course, Lukie. I’ll have him to lunch at once, Charles will take him off on his killing sprees …’

  ‘No, no, absolutely not. No parties, no fuss. He’ll do best on his own at Fairview. Five years like that is enough to bust anyone up but I think there’s more.’ Luke stopped, feeling he was about to betray a confidence, Ian’s voice when he said his parents were dead. ‘The point is, he’s a bit strange and I don’t want people gossiping about him. I know how it gets in a place like this, people start talking and then everyone begins to look at you as if you’re queer or contagious.’

  ‘Lukie, you sound positively paternal. He must be a very nice young man. What would you like me to do?’

  ‘Put in a word for him. That’s all. See he doesn’t get a bad name. And spread the idea that he’s been ill or something, hasn’t got his strength back, doesn’t want a shower of invitations.’

  ‘I’ll do my best. Oh Lord, we must run. Charles will give you a drink while I tidy. I’ve never grasped why Charles foams at the mouth if he’s kept waiting for his food.’

  The sitting room at Mastings bore no resemblance to Fairview. Chippendale and Queen Anne, family possessions from home, Persian carpets, old Dutch still-lives of dewy fruit, old English rural scenes, flower-filled vases everywhere. Charles Gordon looked at Luke with pity and comprehension and splashed in a drop of soda to dilute the whisky for the sake of good form.

  ‘I cannot understand why Helen is always late,’ Charles said. ‘Though I suppose I should be thankful she doesn’t have her meals sent down to the garden. Have you seen her latest? Pretty soon there won’t be water for the stock.’

  ‘How are your boreholes?’ Luke needed to drink quietly, and knew Charles enjoyed holding forth on boreholes. Helen interrupted an account of Charles’ recent excavations.

  ‘Here I am,’ Helen said. ‘Bring your drink, Lukie. I always drink steadily right through lunch.’ Iced tea but it looked enough like whisky to avoid shaming dear Luke, and the houseboy filled glasses without being told.

  ‘We’ve been talking about Ian Paynter, Charles.’

  ‘Well, Luke, I hope you got a good price for Fairview since you wanted to sell it, but my God what a monkey the watu will make of that young chap. You know how sly they are. They’ll see he’s green as grass and pull all their tricks on him.’

  ‘He seems to do all right with them.’

  ‘Naturally, at the beginning. He’s the new Bwana. But in a couple of weeks, they’ll be coming to him for money, moaning about funerals, sick totos, I can hear it now, and then asking for leave, more funerals, more sick totos. They’ll drive him up the wall. A young chap with no experience can’t run a farm like Fairview. They come out from home thinking there’s nothing to it but we jolly well know better.’

  Helen smiled; her great big booby couldn’t run a chicken coop without Roy’s guiding hand. Luke drank.

  ‘I give him a year,’ Charles said, interested now in a plate full of delicious lasagne verde. Except for tardiness at meals, Helen was a highly satisfactory wife. She had taught herself to cook and then taught that surly old ape in the kitchen. ‘One year,’ Charles said, chewing contentedly. ‘Then he’ll go broke and Fairview will be on the market again.’

  Helen saw that this wounded and worried Luke. ‘Come off it, Charles,’ she said abruptly. ‘You met the man once for a minute. How do you know he won’t turn out to be the best farmer in the whole Karula district?’

  Luke gazed at her with affection and began on his third whisky. She thought it wise to give Ian Paynter a rest. Charles might decide to put on his farmer act and list all the ways Ian Paynter could mishandle Fairview.

  ‘What are your plans, Lukie? Where are you going?’

  ‘I’ll stay with Billy Blake, you remember him, he used to farm on the Kinangop. Moved to the coast about four years ago, high blood pressure, some place the other side of Kilifi creek. He’ll lend me a bed until I find a furnished house.’

  ‘But Lukie, nothing grows at the awful coast. Nothing except bananas and mangoes. You’ll die of boredom. What will you do?’

  ‘Drink,’ Luke said. ‘With a clear conscience.’

  Joseph and Kimoi had been driven off in the lorry with their iron cots, bedding, pots and pans and cardboard suitcases loaded behind. They looked like men on the way to prison. Luke was leaving two servants for Ian. Mwangi, Luke explained, was as good a cook as old Joseph but Joseph’s jealousy held him down to assistant and substitute when Joseph was on leave. Kimoi trained Beda and Beda was a perfectly capable houseboy. In case Ian wanted more servants; Ian interrupted to say he would never need more. Now Luke was ready to depart. He took only four worn suitcases as salvage from his entire adult life. Ian felt like bursting into tears which would disgrace him, Luke, Marlborough and the British Empire. Mwangi and Beda stood at the kitchen door weeping without shame.

  Luke had not foreseen the anguish of this moment. It was as if Sue died a second time. He wanted to hurry away from the sight of Fairview and the pain of homesickness. Ian closed the door of the old Austin.

  ‘Thank you for everything, sir.’

  ‘Take care of the place, Paynter. Take care of it and find someone responsible to leave it to.’

  ‘Leave it to?’

  ‘You aren’t immortal, you know. A place like this,’ Luke said, with difficulty, ‘a place like this deserves looking after.’

  The Austin backfired and creaked down the drive. Ian watched its dust trail rising into the tall double row of eucalyptus that Luke and Sue had planted long ago. He watched until he could see no further sign of Luke. Depressed and aimless, he wandered on to the verandah, thinking he would take a look at his property before facing the tedious chore of sorting out the office. Some kind of miracle happened there in the morning sun. He saw no visions, heard no divine voice. The miracle was how he suddenly felt so happy, happier than he’d ever hoped to be again. He had a reason for living: fifty African families and land and stock and a house and garden to look after. And there was this wonderful feeling in him, like coming home.

  The watu were bewildered by their new master, Bwana Panda. They had never seen a European, naked to the waist, sweating as they did, wield a pick and shovel alongside them. Bwanas kept clean and gave orders. They had never seen anyone, black or w
hite, enjoying work like this Bwana. If he wasn’t racing over the farm, pitching in on all the jobs, he was racing to Nakuru. Each time he went, more lorries full of cement timber roofing piping bricks fence wire machinery arrived at the farm, as well as more outside workmen to be hounded by that Sikh boss. There was no peace; everyone was running around as if in the middle of a forest fire.

  When it rained for a week in March, the watu counted on a rest. Nobody wanted to get soaked and chilled, you couldn’t be expected to work in the rain. Bwana Panda worked in the rain, soaked and chilled, driving them and himself. What’s a little water, he said; dig drainage ditches along the roads while the ground is loose, pry out the rocks, get trenches ready for new piping, put up fence posts. Hurry, hurry, hurry. This wasn’t the life they had known.

  But Bwana Panda was not a bad man, by which they meant bad-tempered, their only standard for judging Europeans. He never shouted at them. Ian knew from the Oflag how it eats into a man’s soul to be shouted at and unable to shout back. The watu gave him a nickname, as they did to all Europeans. They called him Soft Voice. It was a compliment.

  Though Soft Voice was constantly crazily on the move, the watu had seen him stop his small truck and stand beside it for a moment in silence. They discussed this act and agreed that Soft Voice was praying. His God commanded him to stop anywhere, any time, and stare at Africa, praying. Ian looked at the land, mile after empty beautiful mile, stretched out to the smooth receding mountains and said to himself: I’m free, I’m free.

  The African bush telegraph operated with its usual efficiency. Karula was also an information centre. Ram Singh at the garage and Jivangee at the general store were subtle gossips with connections in Nakuru. There was a steady flow of news about Ian and Fairview Farm. Paynter had built new large rondavels for his watu and piped in water to standing taps. Every rondavel had a latrine. Moreover, Paynter gave his watu domestic furnishings, iron cots and kapok mattresses, wood tables and chairs, buckets and cook pots, blankets and coarse towels, and a regular ration of blue soap. He had dressed the labourers in new overalls and Wellingtons and thrown in yards of cloth for the women and children. This was unheard of, a dangerous precedent. If you spoiled the watu, they asked for more and worked less.