The Reckoning

by Chonghaile, Clár Ní;

  “Around here they do,” he said. “And anyway, I am trying not to make assumptions since you took it so badly last time.”

  I bowed my head in acknowledgment.

  “No, or rather I fly in planes flown by other people.”

  “Would you like to fly in mine? Flown by me?”

  I looked again at the plane. Here on the ground, it seemed fragile and ungainly.

  “I can’t say your landing just now filled me with confidence,” I said, stalling. I did want so very badly to fly with him and I couldn’t understand why.

  “I hit a tiny bump,” he said coolly. “This is not asphalt, you know. I can say I have never crashed, not even a little bit. Why don’t you come with me to Nairobi now and you can see for yourself. Before you make, what did you call it, yes, a snap judgment.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I think you should tell me your name first. You can tell a lot from a man’s name, you know.”

  “My name is Stijn, Stijn van der Berg. In English, I would be Stijn of the mountains.”

  He seemed endearingly pleased with his immediate translation.

  “Lina Rose,” I said, stretching out my hand. His hand was warm, the palm rough and hard like the skin of an animal.

  “I don’t know what that would be in Dutch.”

  “Lina Roos,” he said swiftly. I liked the way it sounded.

  And so, Diane, I took off in that tiny plane with a man who annoyed me and thrilled me and was the living embodiment of everything I thought I was not. Norbert was not best pleased to be told he would have to drive back alone. He stood, hands on hips, at the bar and glared in turn at the plane and then at Stijn.

  “Mama, I am not sure it is safe. You know, these planes, you cannot trust them. Many, many people have died in these planes. I think it is better for you to come in the car with me.”

  I calmed him as best I could, told him to leave the car at my house when he arrived and promised I would see him in the morning. He left, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. As he crossed the yard, I saw him stop to share his dissatisfaction with the security guards slumped on low stools under a giant mango tree. His arms windmilled, his head bobbed, his listeners laughed. They were probably right, I thought, turning back to the bar, where Stijn was settling his bill.

  I hovered behind him uncertainly, exasperated by the barman’s frankly curious gaze. They exchanged some low words in Swahili and that annoyed me even more. I didn’t want to come across as a star-struck child but neither did I want to be seen as some kind of latter-day Idina Sackville, a man-eating, hedonistic socialite with no regard for custom and convention. Maybe this was a bad idea. I could probably still catch Norbert before he left. I turned away. The sun was sinking to the horizon, dragging the heat out of the air and spreading a rose-tinted light across the land.

  I felt a hand on my elbow.

  “Let’s go. We don’t have too much time and the light is so beautiful now. We must make the most of it.”

  I knew he was right.

  Stijn helped me into the cockpit where I perched nervously beside him as he flicked switches, muttering all the while in Dutch.

  “Wear these,” he said, handing me some ear protectors. I felt safer once I put them on and the world disappeared behind a wall of silence.

  It was all I could do to prevent myself from gripping his arm as we bumped down the short runway and into the sky. I had flown on helicopters in Korea and in Vietnam but I had never trusted my life to a single almost-stranger in such an intimate space. I stared straight ahead, willing the plane higher, even stretching my torso and neck as if I could physically lift us up. At first, I didn’t dare to look out of the window but when I did, Diane, I was enraptured. As we flew out over the Rift Valley, the ground fell away so that even the clouds were below us. It was breathtaking. The sweep of the green and brown plains with Mount Longonot rising like an omen above the mango and papaya trees.

  “I can take you up Longonot if you like. You can walk around the top, or even sit and read if you prefer.”

  His voice was crackly, absurdly intimate in my covered ears. It felt like a kiss.

  The setting sun cast a red flush over the tiny houses, tinting the clouds below us. We were flying in a glorious red-and-orange bubble above what one could only too easily believe was the birthplace of mankind. There was something primeval about the soft tree lines, the jagged mountain edges, the huge scale of what was unfolding below. I was aware my mouth was gaping open but I could not hide my joy. I did not want to. I finally turned to Stijn and spoke through the microphone.

  “You can do this any time you want?”

  He nodded curtly but his eyes were warm.

  “You may just be the luckiest man alive,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “Maybe.”

  All too soon, the buildings of Nairobi rose ahead of us; squat and solid and smothered in a red haze. We flew over Nairobi National Park and I squealed when I saw zebras and Thomson gazelles running below. Stijn smiled and dipped the plane abruptly so that we were gliding just above the animals. We soared up again and I caught a glimpse of giraffes ambling contentedly among the trees.

  “We shouldn’t scare them too much,” his voice said in my ear. “I shouldn’t have gone so low but you looked so excited. I thought it would be fine just this once.”

  As his words echoed in my head, I realised I couldn’t possibly bear it if this was “just this once”. Suspended thousands of feet in the air above a scrubland spotted with wild animals in a tiny two-engine Cessna with a man I barely knew, I felt safer than I had in years. Completely secure and intoxicatingly free. As we glided in to land at Wilson Airport, I sat as if in a trance. I looked down at my hands, clasped tightly in my lap. I lifted one, or someone who was now in charge of my body did, and I placed it for the tiniest moment on Stijn’s hand. He didn’t look at me but he smiled a long, slow smile.

  “I’m glad you have enjoyed the tour,” he whispered straight into the most open part of my brain. His voice lit a fuse and I closed my eyes for a second to enjoy the colours exploding inside my brain.

  Stijn did take me walking to the top of Mount Longonot. He took me boating on Lake Naivasha, where we got as close as we dared to the submerged hippos, whose comical foreheads and bulbous eyes belied how dangerous they were. I flew with him many, many times, mostly from Nairobi to the flower farm he owned on the northern banks of Lake Naivasha. I eventually learned to relax in the air, to be less spellbound, but those journeys over central Kenya always filled me with wonder.

  At first our friendship was platonic. We enjoyed spending time together but we were in no rush. Stijn had been married before to a Dutch woman who found life on a struggling flower farm in Kenya was less than she had imagined in ways she couldn’t have foreseen. She had returned to Holland after the war but their daughter Else had joined Stijn when she turned 18 and now aged 20 acted as the de facto lady of the house. She was a tall, capable young woman with her father’s grey eyes and her mother’s dark hair. She spoke perfect English and Swahili and like her father, she made me feel as though nothing bad could ever happen while she was around. She had a preternatural calm and something of that calm reminded me of Charlotte.

  Did Else remind me of you? Truth to tell, she couldn’t, Diane. I didn’t know who you were by then. I could not imagine you as a nearly grown woman, just a little younger than Else. And besides, I did not then think of Else as a daughter. She was more of a friend, despite the age gap. She was wise beyond her years and I was still immature in many ways and so we made a good pair.

  I never told Stijn about you, Diane. I said I had been married and that my husband had died after the war. I talked about my time at the Ministry and what I had done afterwards but never in any great detail. It suited us both that way. Stijn liked to say he was a simple man who just wanted to live in the present. He said there was so much to see and feel and hear and experience in a single day that there was no time to indulge in th
e past. I don’t think he managed to live solely by that mantra. I do believe there was more going on than simple sensation when he fell silent as we sat on the veranda in the evening, listening to the birds calling and watching the bats darting in and out of the eaves. But I respected his decision to try to live totally in the present. It was, after all, simply a purer, less tainted form of what I had tried to do since the war.

  Through 1964, I spent many weekends on the farm Stijn had named Ol Mlima, or the Mountain. I went riding with Stijn, we hiked around Lake Naivasha and we spent hours inspecting new blooms in his greenhouses. Else sometimes joined us but seemed to know instinctively when we should be alone. She was, and is, in the purest sense, a lovely person.

  One day, we were in the greenhouse when Stijn picked a rose and held it out to me. I raised it to my nose and sniffed.

  “Beautiful. And I love the colours. I’ve not seen this mixture of red and yellow before.”

  “I hope not,” Stijn said. His usually dour face split into a wide smile.

  “I made it. Or no, that is not correct. I designed it. Is that better?”

  “You made it?” I said. “You know, that makes you a god, Stijn.”

  “It makes me a foolish man,” he said. “I’m calling it ‘Lina’.”

  I didn’t know what to say. We had been growing steadily closer and I think we both knew we were progressing along a path that would lead to something more. I was becoming increasingly attracted to Stijn. The face I had first deemed ugly I now found strong, vibrant and reassuring. I longed to run my fingers over those lines by his mouth and feel his sharp eyes on my body. I was increasingly captivated by lips I had once dismissed as thin but now realised were exquisitely shaped. I wanted to feel those capable arms around me.

  I was falling in love but I was in no rush. Isn’t that strange, Diane? That my sense of urgency diminished as I aged. You’d think it would be the other way around. I suppose there was a delicious comfort in the certainty of knowing that what was going to be was definitely going to be. A kind of luxurious foreplay, I suppose.

  But in that greenhouse on that damp October day, as he stood before me, telling me that the rose I held was called Lina, I knew the time had come. I stepped towards him, fancying I would give him a gentle kiss on the lips but he met me halfway and pulled me hungrily towards him. We kissed like teenagers, abandoning all restraint. It was shocking and inevitable. And that was it. We were together.

  I quit my job a month later and moved to Stijn’s farm. McNeish was disappointed but he was retiring himself in a few months and he wished me the best in a voice that rang with determination and quiet desperation.

  “You said it’s a flower farm?” McNeish said. “I can’t quite imagine you as lady of the manor, Lina.”

  “It’s not like that at all,” I laughed. “I won’t be dressing in chiffon and drinking gin at 11 a.m.. Well, not every day, I’m sure. I might write. I feel I could write something else here. There is enough space for that, enough space to create another world, or maybe even worlds. It’s quiet and slow and I can hear myself think for the first time in years, Thomas. And what’s more I’m not afraid to listen. Does that make sense?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “I have to say, I’m a little frightened of the listening myself. I’ve been doing this for so long, I don’t know what else is in my head. If you take away the news, the global crises, the deadlines, the angles, I wonder if there will be anything else. I suppose I’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Maybe you’ll write a book,” I said. He laughed.

  McNeish might well have had a book in him. They say we all do but he would have had the skill and the discipline to get it out. He never had a chance though. He was dead by the end of that year. They said it was a heart attack but I wonder if it was the strain of listening.

  CHAPTER 25

  Stijn and I grew into each other like trees that over time become conjoined, the bark abrading until two merge into one. It wasn’t always a smooth progression. Our arguments became legendary among the staff at Ol Mlima; as soon as my voice started rising, piercing the bungalow’s thin walls, our housekeeper Mary and houseboy Joshua would hurry away to the back kitchen. They would take the wireless with them and turn it up loud so that in my memory, our rows always play to a soundtrack of Kenyan gospel songs. The only person who seemed unperturbed was Else. She could sit calmly in a wicker chair, reading her book or knitting, as our rage crashed around her. Or to be more accurate, while my rage crashed around her. Stijn was not given to sustained outbursts, which wound me up even more. He would start off strong, yelling back at me with his clipped, too-perfect sentences, but eventually, he would run out of steam, answering my tirades with a grunt, or a raised eyebrow or a one-line sarcastic dismissal. He made me furious and I drove him mad with what he called “your talking and talking and your needing and needing”. He had me down pat.

  Having eschewed love or even strong attachments for so many years, I threw myself into this relationship as though I had to feel everything as intensely as possible to make up for all the things I had buried for so long. As I was no longer working, Stijn became my sole focus, the source of all my emotions and the receptacle for all the fallout. He struggled with that. He too was having to adjust after years of being alone, answerable to no one.

  One day, I exploded after he told me he was leaving for three days to visit flower farms in the west around Lake Kisumu. It must have been sometime in April 1965, just at the start of the rainy season.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Now. Well, in the next 10 minutes or so. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  He appeared genuinely bewildered.

  “You’re going to leave for three days, just like that, without asking me if I am okay with it, okay with being here on my own?”

  “Of course,” he said, a touch of irritation creeping into his voice. “Anyway, you will not be alone. Else will be here and all the staff. Why are you so annoyed?”

  “Because you should ask me first, you fool.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is common courtesy. You can’t just wander off without even asking. Maybe I had other plans?”

  “What other plans? You don’t do anything.”

  He didn’t say it in a biting way. His tone was totally neutral. It was the matter-of-factness of it that drove me wild.

  “What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

  “What it means, of course. You do not have a job, Else manages the staff, I do the flowers, so you do nothing. Or am I wrong?”

  It gives me no pleasure to admit that at that point, I threw the book I was holding at his head, turned on my heel and stomped out of the room. He didn’t come after me – that was not Stijn’s way – and a little while later, I heard the car sputter into life to take him to the airfield at the other side of the farm.

  After a few hours of sulking on my bed, I realised that he was absolutely right, as usual. Stijn was maddeningly clear-sighted although like all of us, he was not immune to blind spots when it came to his own character. But on this occasion, I had to admit he was correct. I was doing nothing. I wrote the odd piece of journalism when asked to, commentary mostly. Despite waxing lyrical to McNeish about writing something else, I still hadn’t taken the plunge into fiction. I wandered around the farm with Else. I followed Stijn into the greenhouses to check the roses and keep him company. I read voraciously. I tried painting but found I had no talent. Mary taught me to prepare a few Kenyan dishes – stodgy ugali, spicy githeri and the green sludge they called sukuma wiki that Stijn adored. But that was it. I was in truth doing very, very little. That was probably why we were sparking off each other like flints. I was almost always the instigator. Perhaps I was just bored, I realised with some surprise.

  I climbed out from under the mosquito net and went downstairs to the room Stijn had given me as an office but which I had never used. I unearthed my typewriter from under a pile of invoices for bulbs and carried it
out to the veranda. I called Joshua and asked him to bring me some chai and then I fed a blank page into the roller and sat back, fingers poised. Two hours later I was still sitting there, fingers still poised, having drunk two teapots of tea and having written precisely nothing.

  Else wandered out, bronzed and capable in knee-length shorts and a crisp white shirt.

  “So, he got under your skin again?” she said with a smile, flopping down into a chair. “You mustn’t pay too much attention to what he says. He doesn’t mean to be judgmental. He just says what he sees and he never thinks how this might affect the person he is talking too.”

  “I know, Else. But as is too often the case, he was right. I do nothing. I’ve done nothing in all the time I’ve been here. And that’s no good.”

  “Maybe you needed to do nothing for a while,” she said, helping herself to some tea. “Maybe you did too much and now you need to rest.”

  For a second, I thought about confiding in her. I could tell her everything and I knew that she would listen without judgment. But I held myself back. Else didn’t ask for my problems. She didn’t deserve the burden.

  “What are you trying to do now?” she asked.

  “I thought, with typical arrogance, that I might start writing a book. But it turns out you need ideas as well as a sulky disposition and an immature desire to prove yourself,” I said, laughing.

  “Well, if the words are not coming, why don’t we go for a walk instead? I’m going down to the waterhole to clear my head. I’ve been looking over the books all morning and it’s made me tense and nervous. My father has no patience for book-keeping and it really shows.”

  She went inside to get the rifle she always carried when travelling beyond the edge of the farm, then we pulled on Wellington boots and headed down the front lawn. The rains had cleared and although the ground was soggy and the drains running high and noisy, the sun was already turning the water to steam, giving everything an ethereal quality. Else pushed open the gate in the fence that divided Stijn’s reclaimed patch from the surrounding bush and we followed the track that led through the knee-high scratchy grass, spiky euphorbia and umbrella acacia trees to the waterhole, about a mile away.