Читать книгу An Unsuitable Woman - Kat Gordon - Страница 9

The station was big and crowded with no benches or stalls, just two signs, one reading ‘Mombasa’, and the other ‘Upper-class passengers and luggage’. Most of it was open to the hot November sun and the flies.

After a few minutes I found a porter, and led him back to my family: my father, mopping his forehead, my mother, tapping her foot, and my twelve-year-old sister Maud, melting against the pile of trunks holding books and clothes and everything else that hadn’t been sent on ahead to the new house at Lake Naivasha.

‘There you are, Theo,’ my father said. He waved our tickets and two pennies in front of the porter, ‘Load our luggage into the carriages, there’s a good man.’

‘Yes, Bwana Miller,’ the porter said. He was wearing a thick navy jacket and trousers. As he picked up the first of our trunks I saw he had dark circles under his armpits. He smelled different to the Africans in Tanganyika, less spicy and more sour.

Our carriages were two square compartments with an interconnecting door and mosquito screens attached to the window frames. I sat next to the window on a green-cushioned bench and my mother and Maud sat with me. Smartly dressed train guards checked our tickets and bowed to my father as he strode around the two rooms, explaining little features here and there. My father was an engineer, now Director of the same railway that in 1896 he’d come out to Africa to build.

I rested my forehead against the cool glass of our carriage window. We’d spent the last two weeks in Dar es Salaam, and if we were still there I would have been stretched out along the jetty with Maud and Lucy – the daughter of my father’s friends – soaking up the warmth of the wood beneath us, and listening to the shouts of the men unloading fish and spices along the harbour. In front of us, moored dhows would be bumping gently against each other in the waves, and kingfishers dive-bombing the water in flashes of blue and orange. Across the bay was Zanzibar, home to the sultan. One afternoon I’d taken my father’s binoculars out to look at the island, a stretch of brilliant white sand dotted with palms and matched by the whitewashed palace and fort at its edge. To the left I could see an Indian banyan tree, alive with vervet monkeys, and behind that, the shaded labyrinthine streets of Stone Town. Children darted in and out of focus, rusted-red iron roofs sloped upwards, and bedsheets, used in the place of curtains, flailed outwards in the breeze. ‘That’s the breath of God,’ Maud said, when I showed her. I didn’t see how Kenya could be better than that.

Along the train, doors began to slam.

‘Theo, open the window, please,’ my mother said.

‘Perhaps we should leave it closed,’ my father said. ‘It gets quite dusty later on.’

My mother frowned, and he hurriedly waved at me to do as she said.

With the window open the carriage began to smell. Home – Scotland – had smelled clean, like heather, or salt when the breeze blew straight from the ocean. And then in the spring and autumn the rain would come, hammering the earth and releasing the rich smell of peat from it. Africa smelled too much – fishy, peppery, rotting, and smoky all at once – and at first I’d thought I was going to pass out in the confusion. Now I could occasionally make something out: the sour, animal scent of a donkey, or the sweetness of the mimosa that spilled over the white fences surrounding the Europeans’ houses. Or caramel, from the sugared nuts a man was selling on the platform.

‘That’s hardly any better,’ my mother said, peeling off her gloves, and I pressed myself against the back of my seat to be further away from her. She was seventeen years younger than my father, and I knew that men found her beautiful. To me, however, she was only unpredictable. Sometimes she would nuzzle me, rubbing her nose against my cheek and gently pulling my hair, and other times she would fly at me, cuffing me around my head. My last tutor had quit when my mother – whose own schooling was stopped at thirteen – overheard me stumbling on my arithmetic and ran into the room to slap me across the face, shouting the right answers. After that I was sent to boarding school.

‘When are we going to leave?’ she said. ‘Can’t you have a word with someone, William?’

‘Just a few more minutes.’

Maud traced an outline with her finger over the mesh of the mosquito screen. ‘Will we come back to Mombasa?’

‘Another time,’ my father said. ‘We’re going to The Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi now. You know, Theodore Roosevelt stayed there in 1909 on his “African Safari and Scientific Expedition”.’ He placed a meaty hand on my neck. ‘Your namesake, Theo.’

At fifty-four, my father was the one who resembled Roosevelt, with his moustache and his glasses and his waistcoats. I was slim, short and blond, and my mouth was too large – too thick-lipped – and my nose too wide, my eyes too green and my cheekbones too high to be much like the former President. I was too girlish-looking. The boys at my school had called me Theodora; sometimes they’d chased me around the rugby pitch and pinned me down while they took turns to kiss me.

I breathed in deeply; the idea that I’d never see a school again made me want to shout with exhilaration. My mother had already found a governess to take charge of my education. After the incident with one of the rugby boys that last term, and after I’d been sent back early, she hadn’t spoken to me for a week, but at least she seemed to realise I was better at home for the next three years. Then there would be university, but I didn’t need to think about that yet.

‘Will we see any animals from the train?’ Maud asked.

Maud had large brown eyes and olive skin; in Scotland they’d called her ‘the Spanish Sister’, because of her looks and her habit of carrying a bible around. I’d once heard my father tell a friend that Maud had never lied in her life.

‘We will,’ my father said.

There was a shrill blast of a whistle from the platform, and the train jerked forwards impatiently.

‘Finally,’ my mother said.

At first the scenery was of dusty bazaars and colourful buildings – pale pinks and greens and glowing whites with towers and domes and covered balconies – or wide roads lined with palm trees and sycamore figs and only a few cars in sight. The blare of shouting reached us through the open window, becoming muffled as we headed out of the centre and the houses turned European: well-spaced bungalows with large, tropically lush gardens. Then came the thatched huts and swampland, African children running alongside the tracks to wave at the train, and then we were out of the city completely. The view changed to brown scrubland and small streams and I turned away from the window, disappointed with what I’d seen of the country so far.

The journey was slow. We had to stop every time a buffalo wandered onto the track, and the train jolted badly. At Voi we stopped for an hour, this time to have dinner by the side of the track, under large hanging lamps and a cloud of buzzing insects. We started with soup then moved on to a rubbery-tasting fish.

‘It’s good to have some proper food again,’ my father said, spearing a large piece with his fork.

I swirled my own piece around its plate, leaving trails of slimy leeks in its wake.

‘What’s wrong?’ Maud asked me. ‘Do you miss Dar es Salaam?’

‘We were only there for a fortnight,’ my mother said. ‘You can’t be that fond of it already.’

In Tanganyika our supper had been dates, then spiced beef or fish curries cooked in coconut milk and served with rice on a metal platter, with hollows for each dish so we could mix the food if we wanted to. Sometimes, if we were still hungry afterwards, we’d buy food from the baba lishas – the feeding men – down by the harbour: grilled cassava with a chilli sauce, samosas, pineapple, custard apples, avocados and andazi, a sweet, deep-fried dough cake. Lucy’s parents had joined us on our second night for supper, bringing Lucy too, the first time we’d met. She sat with me and Maud and I tried to talk to her, but she was monosyllabic.

‘You made quite an impression,’ my mother said afterwards.

‘She didn’t like me.’

She gave me a funny look. ‘Your delusions never fail to amaze me, darling.’

My father pushed away his empty plate, and an Indian waiter in a starched white uniform swooped down and exchanged it for one piled with beef. My mother, who’d just laid down her knife and fork in the middle of her plate, hurriedly picked them up again and continued to pick at her fish.

A cat appeared in the doorway of the station master’s office, and sauntered along the platform in our direction.

‘Here, kitty,’ Maud said, holding out a morsel of fish.

The cat reached my mother and started to rub himself against her leg, purring and arching his back. My mother reached down and scratched his head, and I suddenly wondered what it would feel like to be him, to stroke my face against her long, smooth leg, and have her fingers gently massage the ticklish spot just behind my ears. I looked away from the two of them.

‘How much longer before we reach Nairobi?’ I asked.

‘Oh, sixteen hours or more,’ my father said.

‘Is it as far as Edinburgh to London?’ Maud asked.

‘Much further.’ He dabbed his mouth with his napkin. ‘That’s why it took so long to build. That and the lions, of course.’

‘The lions?’

‘In Tsavo,’ my father said. ‘Slave trader caravans used to cross the river there, and two lions developed a taste for human flesh. They must have been eating the bodies of dead captives left by the wayside before we showed up.’

Maud put down her cutlery.

‘They ambushed the workers at night and dragged them off. After a while most of the workers ran away – we had a devil of a time trying to get them back. The lions ate more than a hundred men until Patterson found them and shot them.’ He shook his head. ‘He took them home as rugs. Beautiful specimens.’

When we returned to the carriage, the guards had made up our bunks with crisp sheets, soft pillows and blankets. Our parents were in the compartment next door, and I shared with Maud. I lay on my top bunk, unable to sleep. After an hour or so I jumped down and stood by the window.

‘What are you doing?’ Maud asked.

‘Surveying my kingdom.’

She got out of bed and stood next to me, wrapping her arms around herself. ‘Do you think there’ll be wild animals there? By our house, I mean.’

‘Of course there will be.’

‘I want to see an elephant. And a tiger.’

‘Tigers are in India, Spanish. Africa’s got lions, and hyenas. And leopards.’ I turned to face her, leaning back against the window. ‘You know they live in trees, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you have to look up when you’re in a forest. Otherwise they could drop down behind you and bite you here,’ I put my hand to my throat, ‘and drag you back up and we’d never find you.’

‘They don’t eat humans,’ Maud said.

‘They eat everything.’

‘Stop trying to frighten me.’

‘It’s no fun if you don’t actually get frightened anyway.’

‘Mother says we can have a dog here.’

‘She won’t really let us.’

Maud looked up at me, wide-eyed. ‘But she promised.’

‘When I’m older and I have my own house,’ I said, ‘you can live with me and we’ll get a dog.’

‘Are you going to move out soon?’

‘Why? Do you want me to go?’

‘No. I hated it when you went to school. But I do want a dog.’

I tried to hide my grin.

‘Anyway,’ she said, leaning her head on my shoulder. ‘I won’t be able to live with you because you’ll have a wife and a family.’

‘I’ll never love another girl as much as I love you.’

She sighed. ‘Liar.’

Just before dawn the next day the train stopped for the passengers to stretch their legs. The light was silvery, just clear enough to see by, and jugs of hot water were produced for the men to shave. The grass by the side of the tracks was still wet with dew, the air so cold it burned my throat. We huddled together, scarves wrapped around our faces so that only our eyes were showing.

‘Only six more hours,’ my father told us. ‘You know, if we stayed on all the way to Lake Victoria we’d have travelled more than five hundred and eighty miles. How about that for engineering? We built this line through swamps, forests, mountains, plains, deserts, you name it. They didn’t think we could do it, but we did. And before the bloody Germans, too.’

Sometimes I wondered why my father disliked the Germans so much. Maybe, I thought, it was in solidarity with my mother, whose only brother had been killed by them in the War, whereas my father had stayed at home with flat feet. My mother never talked about her brother. I couldn’t remember him, but I’d seen a photograph of him in her locket. I thought he looked like her, and like me.

We climbed back aboard and as the train wound its way along the track the sun came out and coloured the landscape outside our window in blushing oranges and coppers and scarlets. Now that we could see better, we realised we were covered in dust from where the desert had blown through the mosquito screen. My mother took out a handkerchief and rubbed at her face, but said nothing, and the window stayed open.

A few hours after sunrise, the air was already shimmering with heat. Maud and I sat with our faces turned towards the view and I felt my stomach knotting with relief and excitement. Overnight, the scenery had turned dramatic – plains stretching endlessly away from us, matched by a colossal, empty sky. Looking upwards I saw it carried on blankly forever, miles and miles of bright blue and nothing else.

The plains, on the other hand, were warm with life. Giraffes clustered around trees, nibbling at the upper branches, and swooping long necks down to nuzzle at their babies, already taller than my father. Fifty or more zebra marched in a long snaking line towards a nearby pond, where a herd of wildebeest were bathing, the mud darkening their spindly legs. One of them raised his head and stared at the train. He had the gentle eyes of a cow, but a horse’s long face.

‘Look, Theo,’ Maud said, pointing.

I saw a flash of white, brown and black – four gazelles running and leaping abreast of each other to rejoin their herd.

‘They’re so sweet,’ she said, clapping her hands.

I pressed my face against the screen – Dar es Salaam had been exotic, but this new Kenya was the Africa I’d dreamed of, the Africa of H. Rider Haggard, and I was impatient to finish the train journey, to start living in this incredible landscape.

Eventually we saw a city on the horizon. It got closer and closer, the buildings on the outskirts made of daub and wattle, or yellow stone, then sturdier brick buildings, then the train pulled into Nairobi, and we piled out with our luggage onto the wide platform, with the station clock swinging from the canopy above us, showing twelve thirty in the afternoon.

‘Well,’ my father said. ‘Are we ready for our new lives?’

In the hotel lobby I saw a framed photograph of the town in 1904 – rows of identical huts along a dirt track and The Norfolk, newly opened. Nairobi had grown since then, but the hotel still looked the same: a long, low building with a mock-Tudor front, surrounding perfectly manicured gardens and a turquoise pool in a courtyard area. Inside, the roof was supported by rows of gleaming white columns and criss-crossing white beams. It was the grandest building I’d been in. I didn’t wonder that Roosevelt had chosen it for his hunting trip.

Our interconnecting rooms were homely, decorated in soft greys and caramel browns and furnished with sleek sofas and lacquered dressers. Chrome and frosted-glass desk lamps provided soft pools of light, and slatted doors to the garden kept the heat out. My father tipped the bellboy another penny and closed the door behind him.

‘What do we think?’ he asked my mother.

She lay down on the bed in their room. ‘A soft mattress at last,’ she said. ‘Maud, come and unpin my hair.’

My sister knelt by the side of the bed removing hairpins one by one until her hair fell in a fiery mane across the pillow. Maud had inherited red hair from our mother, but hers was a dark mahogany colour, not the pure copper that gleamed before us now.

I met my mother’s eye. ‘Can we go for a swim?’ I asked. She shrugged, but gripped my wrist as I turned to collect my bathing shorts.

‘Look after your sister,’ she said.

Maud and I changed and took our towels downstairs. Out of our room, I was painfully conscious of the bruising on my left thigh that showed just below the bottom of my shorts. My mother had been responsible for that, after I’d made too much noise outside her hotel room one afternoon in Dar. She’d had a headache but I’d forgotten, and the fact that I’d brought the beating on myself only made me want to hide the evidence even more, so when we reached the garden path I sped up. By the time I reached the pool I was running. I dropped my towel and sprang forwards, feeling my muscles uncoil after days of cramped conditions, and hitting the water with a smack.

I let myself sink to the bottom, holding my breath until I thought I was going to pass out, then clawed my way back to the surface. Maud was sitting cross-legged by the side of the pool. I could tell she’d been watching for my bubbles.

‘One day you’re going to go too far,’ she said.

We stayed for an hour, racing each other, doing handstands underwater, then drying off in the sun. It was early afternoon when we went back into the hotel and the lobby was deserted. The receptionist was talking to someone in the office – we could hear his voice floating out but not the words. We walked through the room, trailing our fingers over the deep armchairs arranged in groups around it. Our footsteps rang differently across the wooden floors, Maud’s slapping as she ran ahead, mine padding softly behind her. I’d been in a grand hotel in Edinburgh before, but that had been stuffy, smaller and darker and filled with elderly people asleep in uncomfortable leather chairs. The Norfolk was nothing like that.

‘We should put some clothes on,’ Maud said when we’d done a full circuit. ‘Someone might see us.’

‘Mm-hmm.’

‘Are you coming?’

‘Later,’ I said. I heard her skidding off, but I was already looking at the covered terrace outside the hotel. The same plush armchairs were assembled out there, but two of them were occupied. I felt myself mysteriously drawn in their direction, not minding that the occupants were in a private conversation, or that I was naked other than bathing shorts.

At first I thought they were a young boy and an old man – since only old men wore brightly coloured African shawls – but then I reached the edge of the terrace and saw that the old man was young and blond, and the boy’s flannel shirt gave way to a long, white neck, and above that a slim face, half-hidden by a cocktail glass, but visible enough for me to see a woman’s painted mouth and elegant nose. More than that I noticed her eyes, which were fixed on me over the rim of her glass; they were the colour of the last moment of an African sunset, when the sky deepens with violets and blackish-blues, and they made me feel hollow. She was the finest, most delicate person I’d ever come across, a living china doll with porcelain skin and wide, doe-like eyes and black hair so shiny it was like an oil slick. When she smiled I felt a surge of energy in my stomach.

He had his hand on her knee, but lightly, as if he didn’t need to keep track of it. Her body was twisted towards him, one elbow resting on the arm of her chair and her face propped up in her hand.

When I didn’t look away she smiled, and dropped her gaze, then murmured something to the man who turned to look at me properly. He smiled too and called me over, and I felt a flush rising through my body that had nothing to do with the sweltering heat; I fled back inside the hotel, leaving them laughing at my shadow.

That was my first glimpse of Sylvie and Freddie.