The Weather in Africa E-Book

Martha Gellhorn

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 406

Beschreibung

Martha Gellhorn's three intertwined novellas are concerned with the integration of European outsiders into the dramatic landscape of East Africa. It makes an electric theme, which alternates between enchantment and rejection. Two sisters, one beautiful, one plain, return unmarried from their adventures in the great world to their parents' hotel On the Mountain, where they are caught up in scandalous relationships. A heartbroken woman tries to escape the memory of her son's death on a doomed holiday By the Sea. A lonely, awkward young Englishman, orphaned by bombs in London, disoriented by years as a prisoner-of-war, seeks a new life In the Highlands.

Leseprobe

The Weather in Africa

Three novellas

MARTHA GELLHORN

WITH AN AFTERWORD BY CAROLINE MOOREHEAD

For L.

Contents

Title PageDedicationI: On the Mountain II: By the Sea III: In the Highlands Afterword Copyright

:I: ON THE MOUNTAIN

There was much talk when Jane and Mary Ann Jenkins came home to Mount Kilimanjaro. Mary Ann had been gone for only two years in an American city no one ever heard of, called Cleveland; but Jane was away for twelve long years, cutting a swath in Europe, so the locals understood. Gone into the wide world, far from this mountain, to make their fortunes, and returned to the ancestral hotel with no fortune and unmarried, both of them.

All the Europeans knew the Jenkins family and all had something to say about the surprise reappearance of the Jenkins daughters. In Moshi, they talked at the hotel bar, the post office, the best general store, the petrol station, the bank; up and down the mountain, they talked in the farmers’ homes when the ladies had a bridge afternoon, at Sunday lunch parties, in matrimonial beds. Henry McIntyre, who’d farmed coffee on Kilimanjaro longer than living memory, delivered the majority verdict: ‘Those poor gormless girls have made a proper balls of it.’

His wife said, ‘Girls?’ lifting her eyebrows.

Jane was thirty-two and Mary Ann thirty.

Everybody sensed defeat, the end of great expectations. Bob and Dorothy Jenkins, the parents, were overjoyed. They had no idea that people were talking about their children.

But everyone agreed that Bob and Dorothy were getting on and it was only right for the girls to come back and give them a hand. The older generation remembered when Bob and Dorothy showed up, thirty-five years ago, and bought land on a dirt road, back of beyond on the east side of the mountain, to start a hotel. The neighbouring farmers thought they were mad. Who would come to it and why? The hotel was nothing but an overgrown log cabin in those days, with five bedrooms the size of broom cupboards. Bob and Dorothy named the place Travellers’ Rest, and were undaunted.

There were forty bedrooms now. The log cabin had expanded into a long central building, two stories high, still faced with split logs, that was its charm, that and the great wistaria circling the verandah pillars by the main door, and the golden spray and the mat of ficus leaves and bougainvillaea against the dark wood. Inside there was a fine bar and stone fireplaces and a lounge with comfortable chairs and writing tables and a dining room tricked out in daffodil yellow cloths and napkins. The bedrooms above were chintz-draped, with plenty of first-class tiled bathrooms.

Eight bungalows, four on each side, stretched in a semicircle from the main hotel: sitting room, bedroom, bath and a little verandah for private drinking before lunch, too cold in the evening. The bungalows were the last word with Swedish type furniture, Dorothy had said, and curtains and upholstery of bright jagged modern designs. The swimming pool was an ornamental blue lake set in the lawn; no one but tourists would be fool enough to plunge into that ice water. Behind the bungalows nearest the entrance drive, they built a tennis court for the young. Landrovers were on hire. All of this was buried in a garden like a huge flower bed. Old Bob was a true gardener, he’d suffered when he had to cut down trees for the new construction. Anything grew with so much rain and mist and unlimited water in the mountain streams.

No one was disagreeable about the Jenkins’ success. They had earned it. Everybody knew what a sweat it was to make a business thrive in Tanganyika, now Tanzania. The watu, the Africans. You had to be on your toes twenty-four hours a day: they forgot everything; they broke everything; they were naturally unreliable and mindless; you couldn’t begin to imagine what idiocy they would invent next. Specially in a hotel where foreigners didn’t understand and expected slap-up service. Dorothy was after them day and night, checking, instructing. And Bob was a darling. Everyone loved Bob.

All the resident Europeans found a chance to take a good look at the prodigal daughters. Everyone was curious about the changes wrought by time and absence. Jane had been a dewy English rose, with golden hair and big blue eyes, spoiled rotten by her parents. The dew had definitely dried off, which gave satisfaction; Jane had been too fond of herself, too pleased with her appearance, though no one could say she was by any means a hag now. Mary Ann looked pretty much the same. She didn’t look like her parents, any more than Jane did. Jane the beauty. Mary Ann, officially the homely one. Mary Ann was all shades of brown and average features. Jane had the tall lean elegant body of a fashion model; Mary Ann was short, with a bosom and hips and a waist. No man thereabouts had ever laid a hand on either of them. It had always been an unspoken sour assumption that the Jenkins girls were waiting for a better bet: Kilimanjaro and environs were not good enough for them.

America had improved Mary Ann. She didn’t dress as sloppily. Before her Cleveland adventure, Mary Ann cut her hair with a nail scissors and wore any old trousers, or dresses like flowered chair covers in the evening. Now she did things to her hair, sometimes piling it on top of her head, sometimes wearing it in that odd younger generation way, as if you’d got out of bed and forgot to brush it, hanging down all over the place; sometimes in a pony-tail with a scarf knotted and floating behind. And miniskirts and well-fitting slacks and pullovers that enhanced her breasts. American clothes. Clothes were reported to be very cheap in America.

Aside from losing dewiness, Jane seemed to have picked up an extra dose of the haughties in Europe. From the way she behaved, they were all watu to her now.

‘I like how they talk,’ said a newcomer, the young bank manager in Moshi, who weekended at Travellers’ Rest, and enjoyed the company and the tennis. Moshi was a dead little town, the week was long and lonely. ‘Where did they get that accent?’

‘Chagga,’ Henry McIntyre explained. ‘Chagga English. They spoke Chagga first, running around with the kids in the servants’ lines and the village up there. Considering how they grew up, it’s funny to hear Jane now. She sounds like a typical old colonialist Memsaab. God knows the watu drive you batty but there’s no malice in them, poor sods. No reason for Jane to go on as if they were monsters. Half the watu in the Jenkins hotel have been there all Jane’s life; she used to play with a lot of them. Though I will say she bossed the hide off them, even as a child.’

 

Mr and Mrs Jenkins beamed, Bob from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, Dorothy from her sharp darting black eyes. They beamed and relaxed, glad to see the girls taking over. It was the girls’ hotel, they had made it only to give to their girls. Dorothy, who seemed never to have sat down since the moment the hotel opened, now often took her ease by the big fireplace in the lounge or in a woven plastic chair on the verandah. And Bob, who had grown stooped and half bald on this mountainside, looked younger from happiness in having his daughters home.

Bob and Dorothy agreed that the girls shared out the work wisely. Mary Ann supervised the staff, the supplies and the office. Jane attended to the guests. Jane had real poise and style after her years in Europe; the guests were charmed by her; and she’d become a linguist too. Very important now that they got so many nationalities on these tours. Jane handled them beautifully, speaking French and Italian. The guests were thrilled to hear that their daughter was a celebrity, the famous singer Janina, resting after triumphs in the capitals of Europe. Jane knew the amount of French and Italian needed in a hotel; she’d used those words, living in hotels. The guests sometimes wondered who the little dark girl was, rushing about in the background.

At the age of seven and a half, Mary Ann’s eyes were opened painfully and permanently. They had returned for their first Christmas holiday from boarding school, Jane from Tanamuru Girls School, the most expensive establishment for young ladies in Kenya, and Mary Ann from a modest little place near Arusha, practically next door.

Jane said, ‘How’s your school?’

‘Very nice.’

‘I’m so glad.’

It was like being hit in the face. Mary Ann could not have put it into words; she was not skilful with words at thirty, let alone at seven and a half. But she knew by Jane’s smile and voice and the look in her eyes: the golden-haired princess was graciously condescending to the peasant. That was how Jane saw them and meant them to be. From that day, Mary Ann ceased to follow and adore her older sister.

She wanted to strike back; she wanted to hurt Jane. She hid a small harmless snake in Jane’s underwear drawer and Jane, screaming with terror, was petted and stroked and kissed and cuddled by Mummy and allowed to sleep in the parents’ room until the fear passed. She broke Jane’s favourite doll, claiming an accident, and Daddy bought Jane a new and better doll. Mary Ann realized then that she was not clever enough to fight Jane. Her parents didn’t love her, they had found her in a basket, she was not their child, she would run away and live in the forest like Mowgli. Mary Ann was unhappy for the whole month.

But since Mary Ann was born to be cheerful she gave up worrying about Jane and ignored her, which was easy to do as Jane spent less and less time at home. Bob and Dorothy paid more attention to little Mary Ann, thinking she would be sad without her sister. Mary Ann rejoiced to be alone with her parents and back on the mountain, where she always wanted to be.

‘Jane’s so popular,’ Dorothy would say with pride and some sorrow. Jane wrote about the wonderful time she was having at Ol Ilyopita with Cynthia Lavering, at her family’s enormous farm in Kenya; Sir George and Lady Lavering, Jane noted. She had been to the Nairobi races in the Hallams’ box with Stefanella Hallam; Mr Hallam owned the best racehorses in Africa, Jane explained.

‘Jane’s making fine friends,’ Bob Jenkins would say, awed that his daughter bloomed in the fashionable society of Kenya where he would have felt out of place and miserable.

Bragging, Mary Ann thought, big fat show-off: a hideous offence. But who cared, the more Jane stayed away from Kilimanjaro the better.

They would never guess how Jane sucked up to Cynthia and Stefi, the richest, grandest, prettiest girls in school, and how brutally they mocked and rejected her. Nor how she had wooed their mothers, at a school festivity, clinging wistfully to the great ladies until the mothers gave the desired invitations and ordered their daughters to be civil. There were no further visits in those realms of splendour, as Cynthia and Stefi turned sullen and unmanageable; but Jane continued to write to her parents about the Laverings and the Hallams, while accepting third and fourth best offers of hospitality. She hated Cynthia and Stefi who made her beg for what should be hers by right. And she was determined that one day she would be where she belonged, at the very top, looking down.

Bob and Dorothy were to blame, of course, aside from the mysteries of genes and chromosomes. They had read no books on child psychology or any other psychology and believed in their simple old-fashioned way that love was the best guide in rearing the young.

‘You’re my little princess,’ Bob would say, holding Jane’s hand, parading her through the lounge for all to admire.

‘You look like a little princess,’ Dorothy would say, smoothing a new dress, giving an extra brush stroke to shining yellow hair.

To Mary Ann, Bob would say, ‘Be my good little girl and bring home a fine report this term.’

And Dorothy would say, ‘Tidy your room, darling, don’t dawdle, there’s my good little girl.’

So they bent their twigs, as parents do, with the best intentions. Jane had to conclude she was a princess in exile since princesses do not stem from pub-keepers with ‘The customer is always right’ as their royal motto. Mary Ann had to conclude that being a good girl was the highest aim in life, or despise her parents as fools. The Jenkins’ friends and neighbours agreed unanimously that Bob and Dorothy were making a perfect mess of Jane though Mary Ann was a dear little thing.

Jane was a beauty, no getting around that fact. Mary Ann accepted that fact as she accepted Jane’s cast-off, cut-down clothing. It was pointless to resent being plain and plain girls automatically got second best in everything. While Jane took singing lessons in London, she learned shorthand and typing in Mombasa because her parents needed a competent secretary. If Jane wanted to dazzle London, let the silly bitch go to it; her life was here on the mountain, helping to run the hotel. Everyone couldn’t be beautiful; she was happy as she was. Jane, for all her looks and privileges and the blind adulation of her parents, never seemed happy.

When she returned from the secretarial college and worked with them every day as an equal, Mary Ann finally understood her parents and forgave them. They were loving and humble and very much ugly ducklings and, for no explicable reason, after six years of marriage when hope was gone, they had produced this swan, Jane. Mary Ann realized that Jane was the achievement of their lives, not the hotel. It had never occurred to them that building a hotel 7,000 feet up Kilimanjaro, out of sight of the famous sugar loaf top, on a bad road, was an act of folly. Ignorant and confident, they had built and worked, built more and worked more; the hotel, filling no previously felt want, was a success from the beginning.

But Jane was a dispensation from heaven, a miracle. Merely by looking at a photograph of Jane they felt singled out for divine favour. Mary Ann, small and cosy and dark, was what they might have expected: an ordinary person like themselves, to be loved, not worshipped.

Neither of the girls talked to each other or their parents or anyone else about their years away from Kilimanjaro. Jane buried memory under layers of pride. Pride had kept her going and pride reminded her that she was Janina, temporarily resting at her family’s stylish hotel in East Africa until her agent proposed a worthwhile engagement. But waking at night from a bad blurred dream, she could not forget the last memory. The Savoy, in Harrogate: the too large chilly provincial dining room and the terrible band and the clients, often gathered in determinedly hearty conventions, middle-aged, middle-class, safely accompanied by their wives. She had finished her number, microphone returned to Sammy, the band leader, herself slipping behind the curtain to her dressing room, when she was stopped by a voice from the past.

‘Hello, love. Don’t you recognize old friends?’

He was fatter and more common but also richer; he looked oiled with prosperity. Jeff Parks, her secretly married husband of less than a year; a man, scarcely a man then, who had walked out on her when she was twenty-one. She remembered every instant of that final scene and every word. He’d said, ‘You’re as cold and limp in bed as a slab of plaice. And you better live in Africa where you’ve got all those blacks to do the work, no man wants to come home to a pigsty and feed off tinned beans. And besides that, Goldilocks, you’ll never be Lena Horne, never, got it? You’ll never never never make the Savoy.’ Then he left, and his face was alight with relief and gaiety as he closed the door behind him.

Now he said, ‘Congratulations, Goldilocks. You made it after all. The Savoy.’

Jane fled from him; she did not cry then, as she had not cried when she was twenty-one. She stood in this bleak cubicle where no artist could ever have received baskets of flowers, throngs of admirers, flattering telegrams, and stared at her face. Her eyes looked crazy with fear. She left a note for the manager, mentioning a cable from home, packed her bags and caught the night train for London. She kept the taxi while she cashed a cheque at the London bank where, year after year, Bob and Dorothy deposited her allowance; it was the least they could do to help their gifted child, all alone in the costly cities of Europe. Then she drove to the airport and waited until she could get a seat on a plane for Dar-es-Salaam.

The road had been long and stony and cold: singing in coffee bars on the King’s Road, and later in shabby nightclubs in Soho, snubbing men, after Jeff Parks, not wanting them anyway, wanting only her name, Janina, on billboards, in newspapers, on records, engagements in great hotels, the stage, films: fame. Then the Left Bank in Paris, a series of basement boîtes, hateful people to work with and the male customers assuming that a girl nightclub singer was also a whore. And always the dead time, between jobs, resting in smelly hotels, listening to her gramophone, practising before the mirror, patting her face with creams and astringents, brushing her hair, exercising her body, fighting off loneliness and doubt and four walls. Until Rome.

In Rome, there was Luigi, three years younger though she never told him, and beautiful with tight black curls and a glorious profile and satiny olive skin and eyes to drown in and a soft voice murmuring praise and tenderness. He worked as a salesman in a men’s shop on the Via Francescina; he was poor but superbly dressed, they made a stunning couple as they walked arm in arm along the Via Veneto. Her allowance and salary were enough for them both.

With his touch, Luigi woke the frozen sleeping princess at last. She had not imagined that life held such wild happiness; her singing showed it. Five months of unclouded delight. She felt young and carefree, protected, truly loved, a woman fulfilled. The solitude and ugliness of the past vanished; she had Luigi, the golden present in this magical city, the glowing future. One night Luigi came to the Club Aphrodite glum and Luigi was never glum, always gay, warm, proud of her, passionate. He said he’d lost his job but did not say the boss called him a lazy bum who better find a rich old American to keep him like all the other lazy bums. He was sick of Rome, Luigi said, noisy shoving people; everything cost too much. He was going back to his paese, anyway he’d been getting angry letters from his mother, telling him his duty was to return, his wife was about to drop another bambino. The third, Luigi said, making a face, shrugging his shoulders.

Jane believed that Luigi had not offered her marriage because he was poor; she understood all the aspects of pride. He had explained that he was learning the business from the bottom; his uncle planned to set him up in a shop of his own. When Luigi had his shop, Jane knew he would speak. Her relentless endurance and ambition seemed absurd now, except as a means to this end. Her career had been a trick of destiny to lead her to Rome and Luigi. What was the lonely dream of fame compared to the joy of being Luigi’s wife? It was only a matter of time, a little waiting, but enchanted waiting, until Luigi’s male pride was soothed by the possession of his own shop. They had invented the name together: Palm Beach. Jane wondered whether she could work with him, be near him by day as well as night, or would a woman’s presence lower the tone of the most elegant men’s boutique in Rome? She would learn to cook and to sew; she meant to serve Luigi tenderly, ardently, in every way, with her whole heart.

Jane’s arm moved by itself. She hit Luigi hard, swinging her handbag like a club. He clutched his cheek, glared at her with fury, and ran from her dressing room. Jane locked the door and wept, for the first time, until she felt cold, faint, blinded and choked by tears, too weak to move. A broken heart was a real thing, a knife pain in the chest. And in the mind, black despair. There was no one in the world to turn to; she was alone with this anguish, she was freezing to death from loneliness.

But no one must ever know, no one, ever. She could not live if people mocked her, laughing behind her back, the proud English Janina fooled by the first Italian who laid her. She would wait here until everyone had gone so that no one should see her ravaged face. A terrible word hovered, pushing itself forward to be heard. Failure. There were no tears left, only this sensation of creeping cold, in the airless dressing room on a summer night. Wait, Jane told herself, wait, wait. The couch with the bumpy springs smelled of mildew, the worn green damask was greasy from many other heads.

Later, singing those ritual words – ‘Doan evah leave me … why ya treat me so mean … youah mah man, I need ya honey, I need ya lovah …’ – there was meaning and emotion in her voice. But now she hated Rome too, hated every beautiful young man with tight black curls, and the streets were full of them. She welcomed a stout middle-aged English gent who said he was in Rome on holiday, the manager of the Savoy, in Harrogate, and a lovely English girl like her didn’t belong here with all these slimy Wops, she ought to come home, his clientele wasn’t an ogling bunch of lechers, they were good solid English people.

Mary Ann had less to remember and no special reason to forget. There had been eight years of work in the hotel, lifting some of the burden from her parents’ shoulders. When she felt she could steal time for herself, she was off up the mountain, passing the Chagga village where she chatted with old friends, into the damp jungly world of the rain forest. She had learned little at school but Miss Peabody, beloved maths teacher, happened to be an amateur botanist and Mary Ann had acquired curiosity and excitement from her. Before that, Mary Ann treated the natural world as Africans usually do: fauna were a nuisance or a menace or something to eat; flora were uninteresting unless edible or saleable. Bob called this botanizing Mary Ann’s hobby and was glad the child had an amusement. Mary Ann became extraordinarily knowledgeable, an untutored scientist.

Mary Ann was too busy to think about men and, considering herself plain as a plate, she did not imagine that men would ever think about her. Sometimes, playing with African babies, she was shaken by the lack of her own; but then the hotel wrapped her in its coiling demands, and time passed. Until Mr and Mrs Niedermeyer arrived as guests and took a tremendous shine to her and finally proposed that Mary Ann return with them to Cleveland.

‘It’s perfectly lovely here,’ Mrs Niedermeyer said to Dorothy, ‘I can’t imagine a lovelier place to live. But don’t you think the child should see more of the world and meet more people? I won’t make her work too hard, I promise; she’ll have plenty of time for parties and fun and young men.’ Mrs Niedermeyer had in mind her favourite nephew, thirty-one and single, and though the comparison was disloyal she found Mary Ann sweeter and gentler than the girls she knew around Cleveland; and romantic too, with that little brown face and funny accent and demure manner. If only Jack fell in love with her, everyone would be settled and happy.

Working as Mrs Niedermeyer’s secretary was a rest cure after the hotel. Mary Ann had plenty of time and money. She had refused to accept any allowance from her parents, but Mrs Niedermeyer paid her well. With the aid of her new enthusiastic Cleveland girl-friends, she bought clothes and tried out hairdressers. Jack taught her to play bridge and dance. She was surrounded by talkative cordial girls and by Jack, teacher, guide, protector. He was a cautious young stockbroker and took a year to decide he was in love with Mary Ann and was dumbfounded when she thanked him and said No, with a look in her eyes like one who has accidentally hurt an animal, like knocking over a dog in the road. Jack then knew he was passionately in love with Mary Ann. Mrs Niedermeyer had kept her Fred waiting too; she realized Mary Ann was not playing with Jack, the child was truly uncertain.

Jack offered Mary Ann everything and more to come. How could she explain that she didn’t want everything; she didn’t know that she wanted anything. It seemed to her that she already had too much; why did she need eight lipsticks for instance? Principally, she could not say to Jack or any of these generous American friends that Cleveland and surroundings produced something like a stone in her stomach, a solid heaviness of depression. She never woke with a singing heart because she knew what lay around her, a vast lake full of filth, an ugly sprawling city, a slum for both rich and poor, a flat weak countryside with spindly trees. She hungered for the air and silence and space of Africa and the great untamed mountain. At first snow had fascinated her; then she watched it turn to yellow slush and she thought it was hell. She had a fur coat, a present from Mrs Niedermeyer, and was cold all winter and in the summer felt she would suffocate. Air-conditioning stopped up her nose. Jack persisted with patience and unflagging will. Competition, Mrs Niedermeyer thought, the breath of life to all of them, even if the competition is only a girl saying no.

Mary Ann reasoned with herself. Who did she think she was, a beauty like Jane, with a queue of suitors to pick and choose from? Jack was the first man to want her and would certainly be the last. He was kindness itself and good-looking though she could never exactly remember his face when she was alone. But marriage was long, look at Daddy and Mummy, forever long, sleeping in the same room. When Jack kissed her she felt embarrassed; he talked a lot and laughed a lot and that was nice but she could not keep her mind on what he said. Perhaps if you weren’t attractive to men, it worked the other way too, so you weren’t very attracted to them.

Finally, because everyone seemed to accuse her, silently and sadly and somehow justly, of meanness, Mary Ann agreed to be engaged, but a long engagement; she had saved money to see the Far West, already glimpsed in the Moshi cinema, and she also wanted to visit her parents. Jack kissed her with unusual force and gave her a handsome diamond ring which she did not wear unless she was with him, for fear of losing it. Her innocence was her armour. Jack would have been more assertive sexually with a more experienced American girl. He was a bit frustrated but also pleased, as if he’d netted a rare bird of an almost extinct species. Mary Ann set off on bus and train to see America.

She kept thinking it was awfully small. Perhaps it wasn’t but the cars and buses and trains and planes and roads made it feel crowded or used up; and there were signs of people everywhere, interminable muck, though when she reached the west and the mountains, it felt better, if not as splendid as in the films. She thought the California desert was like parts of Africa she didn’t know, for she hardly knew Africa either, like the country around Lake Rudolf. She went walking, she was always searching for a chance to walk where there were no cars. The desert grew a rich crop of empty beer cans and bottles, and sometimes great mounds of used tyres, and dirty papers and plastic containers blew in the hot wind. She dared not tell Jack that she couldn’t face it, so said she was now going home to visit her parents and wrote to him, sick with guilt, on the aeroplane, explaining that she could never make him happy and would he please forgive and forget. He would find his ring in the top right-hand drawer of the desk in Mrs Niedermeyer’s guest room.

Her parents misunderstood Mary Ann’s misery when she first returned, guessing at blighted love. They were glad when she revived which she did within four months upon receiving a letter, at once perky and hostile, from Mrs Niedermeyer announcing Jack’s marriage to a girl born in Cleveland, someone he’d always known, a fine old family. Now, at thirty, Mary Ann knew that she would never marry. But the mountain was there, a gold mine for a botanist except that she never had a minute to herself.

If she’d known Jane was coming home, she might have stayed in Cleveland and married Jack. Daddy and Mummy were crackers; what did they mean dumping the whole hotel on her shoulders as if doing her a favour. Daddy and Mummy sat around boring the guests and making asses of themselves, boasting about Jane, you’d think Jane was Marlene Dietrich. Jane did nothing. She idled in her room with green cement on her face to ward off wrinkles and listened to her gramophone, wah-wah-wah bellowing about love like a sick cow. Or she floated among the guests being lordly or drove to Nairobi to chat up travel agents. What did Daddy and Mummy mean? Room boys, waiters, gardeners, kitchen staff, drivers, desk and office clerks, fifty-nine Africans and one Asian, and she alone was supposed to keep them all up to tourist standards. She was so tired and worried she felt sick. She was just about ready to give Jane a piece of her mind. High time someone took Jane down; she’d been conceited enough before she went to Europe and now she was worse. And Amir had gone on leave so there were the accounts as well; too much, too damn much, more than flesh and blood could stand.

Mary Ann had never before given Jane a piece of her mind. Jane stamped into the office where Mary Ann was bowed over a ledger, saying, ‘There’s an African drinking at the bar.’

Mary Ann went on, moving her lips, adding the long line of figures.

‘Since when,’ Jane said furiously, ‘do Africans drink at our bar?’

‘Since Independence,’ Mary Ann said, still adding.

‘It’s the limit. Why do we put up with it?’

Mary Ann laid a ruler to mark her place and made a note. Then she turned to Jane. ‘He’s the M.P. for this district. A very nice man and an honest one. He even insists on paying for his beer. We’re lucky he likes to stop in here when he’s visiting his people.’

‘Lucky?’ Jane said with scorn. ‘We certainly don’t want African good will and a ghastly lot of African guests.’

‘You fool,’ Mary Ann said. ‘We want African good will like mad. Haven’t you heard about Independence? What do you keep under your peroxided hair? We’re visitors here. It’s not our colony, it’s their country. If we insult Africans, we’re out. Deported. They can do it and they do.’

‘I never heard such rot. I’d rather sell the hotel than crawl to Africans.’

‘Would you? Have you got a buyer? My God, how stupid can you be?’

Jane was too stunned by this turning worm to answer properly. Instead she said, ‘I’m sure Daddy’s put money aside.’

‘Think again. They’ve ploughed the profits back so they could make a big fancy hotel for us, to keep us in our old age. Were you rude to him?’

‘He smiled at me,’ Jane said, furious again. ‘I didn’t say anything but I imagine he got the message.’

‘Oh for God’s sake. Now I’ll have to go and try to make up for you. You tiresome dangerous half-wit.’

Jane brooded and fumed and sulked and, for once, her parents backed Mary Ann.

‘We’ve had very few African guests,’ Bob said. ‘Mostly Ministers. Decent well-behaved chaps. Africans don’t really like it here and it’s quite expensive for them. But of course we do our best to make them happy if they come; we must, Jane. It’s different from when you were a child. They don’t want the hotel and they know we’re useful for the tourist trade. But believe me, if we offended them, they wouldn’t worry about anything practical, they’d kick us out.’

From spite, to show up Mary Ann and her parents, Jane unleashed all her charms and wiles on the next African guest. He was the new African, a young bureaucrat in a grey flannel suit. He came from the coast; there were ancient mixtures of Arab in his blood; he had a sharp nose and carved lips and a beautifully muscled slender tall body. With white skin, he would have resembled a Greek god as portrayed in the statues in the Rome museums which Jane had never visited. His name was Paul Nbaigu, a Christian like the Jenkins. He had a bureaucrat’s job in the Ministry of Co-operatives and a European’s taste for bathrooms and respectfully served food. Instead of staying with the African manager of a Co-op, he chose to do his inspector’s round from Travellers’ Rest. At the bar, where he was quietly drinking whisky and soda, splurging his pay on European pleasures, Jane joined him, introduced herself and smiled her best, sad, alluring, professional singer’s smile. She might have been moaning more of the ritual blues’ words: why doan yah luv me like yah useta do.

Jane suggested sharing his table at dinner, more spiteful bravado: let her family see what crawling to Africans looked like. Paul Nbaigu could not refuse but failed to appear honoured. Jane began to notice him.

‘Where did you learn English?’ Jane asked. ‘You speak it perfectly.’

‘Here and there. And at Makerere University.’

She could hardly inquire where he’d learned his table manners which were faultless. He began to notice Jane too, in particular the way she treated the waiter, not seeing the man, giving orders contemptuously. A small flame started to burn in the mind of Mr Nbaigu, who did not love white people though he did not specially love black people either.

‘Where did you learn Swahili?’ he asked.

‘I was born here.’

‘Upcountry Swahili,’ Mr Nbaigu said mildly. ‘On the coast, we rather make fun of it.’

He was not easy to talk to but Jane had never talked with an educated African before, nor talked with any of them since childhood when she ruled as queen of the infant population in the nearby Chagga village. And talk was not really the point. All during dinner – roast lamb, mint sauce, potatoes, cauliflower, treacle tart, good plain English cooking, Dorothy’s pride and specialty – Jane felt an alarming sensation, as if waves of electricity flowed from this handsome composed African and rippled over her body. She was babbling like a nervous girl by the time muddy coffee was served. Mr Nbaigu excused himself, saying he had work to do. Jane swaggered across the dining room to her family’s table.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘Making Africans happy, Daddy, buttering up our bosses.’

Bob nodded and continued to chew treacle tart. Dorothy’s hands trembled but she said nothing.

‘He’s not one of our better bosses,’ Mary Ann remarked.

‘And how do you know?’ Jane asked.

‘I’ve friends, Chaggas. They don’t like the way he stays here and pops in on them, all neat and citified, and asks a few questions and gives a few orders, and hurries off. They think he cares about his job for himself, not for them.’

‘You’ve certainly got your finger on the pulse of the nation. Why don’t you become a Tanzanian citizen so you can really shove in and run things? Does he come often?’

‘Every few months,’ Bob said. ‘He’s got Meru district too, probably more. Mary Ann’s right; he’s not popular with the African farmers. A proper bureaucrat, same breed all over the world. Funny how quick the Africans have picked that up. They’ve taken to government paperwork like ducks to water.’

Dorothy still did not speak; Mary Ann was too angry to look at her sister. Jane’s little exhibition had hurt the parents. They were incurably old colonialists, not the wicked ogres of propaganda either, kinder and more responsible employers than Africans were, ready to expend time and thought and money to help any Africans in their neighbourhood who needed help. Mary Ann knew of all the loans, all the transport to hospital, all the home doctoring, all the advising: calls for aid heeded by day and night over the years. Like good officers, they cared for and liked their troops. But there it was: Africans were Other Ranks. By law, Africans were now equal. Laws had not changed emotions. And the sight of a white woman with a black man roused emotions which Mary Ann did not understand, but knew her parents were feeling now.

Clearly, Jane had been teaching the family a lesson: do not criticize Jane, however gently. They were helpless, and Mary Ann wished Jane would turn into Janina again and depart before boredom and frustration made her sharpen her claws on the old people.

Jane dreamed of the black man several times and woke afraid. Erotic dreams, ugly dreams. She cursed Luigi and knew with fear that Luigi had left her with more than a broken heart and that she was starving and she was also getting older and perhaps she would starve to death, taking a long time over it, a long empty man-less time. She went to Nairobi more often; she sat at the pavement tables of the Thorn Tree café looking at men, to see if she could find someone she wanted. No one. East Africa appeared to be overrun by middle-aged tourists wearing paunches and peculiar clothes, rumpled garments from where they came or instant comical safari kit. Or there were very young men, young as puppies, with masses of hair and occasionally beards to make them sweat more, with shorts little better than fig leaves and strong brown hairy legs. She wanted someone as beautiful as Luigi and far more trustworthy; an Anglo-Saxon of thirty-odd, perfectly groomed, perfectly made, and single.

Paul Nbaigu returned sooner than usual; something was wrong with the coffee plants on a co-operative farm, a bug, a fungus. The farmers were anxious, he had to report. Jane joined him again at the bar but now she was hesitant, not graciously condescending, and he was worried for he knew nothing about his job except how to fill and file all the mimeographed forms. They talked little, locked in their separate trouble, but the waves of electricity flowed even more strongly over Jane, concentrating, it seemed, where Luigi had most expertly caressed her body.

She was staring at Paul Nbaigu, hypnotized, when he turned to her and something unknown happened: she felt herself drawn into his eyes as if they had widened like black caves and she was physically pulled into them. At the same moment, mindlessly, she knew that electricity now moved both ways, that he too felt this hot demanding warmth on his body. She blinked, to break the spell; and they looked at each other, startled, sharing absolute knowledge without words.

Jane did not suggest joining Paul Nbaigu for dinner but sat with her family, lost to everything except the sensation of spinning in a whirlpool, voiceless with terror, and compelled by inescapable force to the dark sucking centre.

‘Aren’t you hungry, darling?’ Bob asked.

‘No, Daddy.’ Surprised she could speak and surprised by that voice, someone else’s. Her own voice was screaming silently, No! No! No! to another question.

‘You don’t look well, Jane,’ Dorothy said. ‘You haven’t forgotten to take your Nivaquine? They say there’s a lot of malaria in Nairobi now. There never used to be, before, but everything’s so changed.’

Mary Ann was silent too, though eating heartily. An Englishman had arrived that afternoon, in a scarred Landrover, and asked a magical question: what was the best way from here into the rain forest? She told him, longing to ask why, and he obliged without questioning. ‘I’m a botanist,’ he said, and was amazed by the delighted warmth of her smile. Now Mary Ann was debating whether she could seek him out, after dinner, without seeming pushy; wondering, beyond that, if he would let her go along some time to watch and learn.

Mary Ann was settled in the lounge, chatting to a tall skinny Englishman, whose neck was also tall and skinny and badly reddened by sun, obviously a newcomer getting his first dose of the climate, with a skin all wrong for it. Jane pretended to be casual about the guests’ register: Paul Nbaigu was in room 24. Second floor of the main building, and there was no reason for her to go up the wide wooden stairs. The family lived in a log cabin of their own, like the bungalows only larger and set back in a private garden west of the hotel buildings. Mr and Mrs Jenkins would circulate a bit, asking the guests pleasant questions about their day, available for complaints or requests, and then take a torch to light their way home. Mary Ann seemed glued where she was, hanging on the Englishman’s words. Jane roamed through the bar and lounge and stepped out to the verandah, useful at night for brief stargazing if cloud permitted or it wasn’t raining; in all cases too cold to linger. Paul Nbaigu must be in his room.

She felt now like a sleepwalker at the edge of the whirlpool, dreaming her helplessness and the force that pulled her. She had stopped thinking of her parents, Mary Ann or any inquisitive guests; she was not thinking at all; she was moving slowly towards the powerful drowning centre. She did not knock at the door of room 24; she turned the knob and entered. He was waiting for her.

He locked the door and turned off the light; a gleam came from the lighted bathroom. He took her face in his hands and kissed her once, but kissing was not what they needed. In silence, in the shadowed room, they got rid of their clothes, pulling them off and dropping them on the floor. Then he held her, close against him, the whole length of their bodies pressed hard together. He groaned softly, softer than a whisper. She felt deaf and blind; all sensation was direct and overwhelming through the skin. He lifted her and laid her on the bed. They made no sound, and muffled the final wrenching cries against each other’s bodies.

Much later, Paul Nbaigu looked at the luminous dial of his watch. ‘Go now,’ he said. Jane obeyed, collecting her clothes from the floor and dressing herself without care. The man lay silent on the bed. When she had her hand on the doorknob, he said, ‘Tomorrow’. No other words had been spoken. She moved as secretly as a hunting cat and was not seen or heard on the way to the Jenkins bungalow. The family was asleep; in the morning they would not question her. Adults could not live together if they spent their time questioning. Presumably she had stayed in the lounge, perhaps playing bridge.

Mary Ann found the day difficult. The cook had forgotten suddenly and entirely how to make apple pie. This sort of amnesia was frequent and why not? Africans never ate the European food, had no idea how it should taste and merely remembered -except for lapses -how to cook it and how it was supposed to look when done. Five houseboys sent word they were at death’s door having got drunk on village homebrew the night before; the hotel was full. Three Landrovers were out of commission just when everyone seemed bent on making the cold bumpy trip to the Bismarck Hut to watch the sun rise or set over the vast gleaming top of the mountain. Several guests had objected to their bar bills which were inaccurate. The barman, who wrote the chits, had in his eyes a look which Mary Ann knew well; he was withdrawn into the dream world that Europeans cannot penetrate or imagine; all his outside actions were meaningless, he was living elsewhere. Routine, nothing special, nothing to get fussed about. But today Mary Ann was absorbed by what Jim Withers, the botanist, had said last night; she was repeating it to herself; she needed time to sort it out.

He explained himself, he thought simply and clearly, and left Mary Ann baffled.

‘I’ve got a grant for a year,’ Dr Withers said. ‘Another scientific carpet-bagger. If it keeps up like this, there’ll be more scientists than business men here, all carpet-bagging like crazy. Poor Africa. Anyway I comfort myself that I’m harmless, don’t cost anyone here a penny and won’t destroy anything. It’s my sabbatical, I’m a botany don in a university you’ll not have heard of, and I’ve got this grant to work up a survey of the plant ecology of the montane rain forest. Best luck that ever happened to me. I’ve always wanted to come to Africa but lacked the lolly, of course.’

What could it all mean?

Then they talked about the rain forest; slowly, it seemed that Mary Ann was doing the talking. He listened and said, seriously, ‘Look, this is damned unfair. You should have the grant and make the survey and get the recognition. It’s your bailiwick and you know it like the back of your hand. Let’s do it together, you sign the work too; I’ll see you get paid, if need be I’ll split the grant. It can’t cost much to live here, specially as I’ll be camping.’

‘Oh no,’ Mary Ann said, ‘Oh no.’

‘Why not?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it; besides there’s the hotel. My parents have practically turned it over to us, you see.’

‘Well, if you can’t take time off for fieldwork during the week, I can bring samples and consult you, and you could surely get away on Sundays. I mean it, I want to work with you. It’s purely selfish of me, you could save me all sorts of time and keep me from making dumb mistakes.’

Heaven, Mary Ann thought. For the first time in her life, something she wanted to do with all her heart. Not work at all, plain bliss. He was called Doctor, she found out, because he was a Ph.D.; and don meant professor, far better than dear long-lost Miss Peabody.

She was not going to lose this chance. If the hotel fell apart that might make Daddy and Mummy see how lunatic they were, she didn’t care, Jane wasn’t the only one who had the right to a life of her own. And Dr Withers did indeed need her badly. Mary Ann thought he was wonderfully sporting and eager but not very practical. She hired a safari servant, despite his protests (‘I can cook and look after myself, I’m not used to servants’). But camping, Mary Ann explained, was an occupation in itself: gathering firewood and making fires, boiling water, washing up, washing clothes, even if he cooked for himself which was a good idea; and besides someone had to help him in the forest. No, it would be unwise to set up his tent actually in the rain forest, too damp and gloomy, but she knew a sort of glade by a stream where she’d always thought she’d like to stay.

In the late afternoon, between tea and dinner when not much could happen at the hotel, Mary Ann drove up the track and bumped across country to Dr Withers’ site, a grassy slope shaded by wild fig and mvule and podo trees, with a stream between high banks, the water creaming around boulders and smooth over brown pebbles. She counted a day ruined if she could not come; her heart lifted when she saw the neat camp. The big tent that was Jim’s home and office, Koroga’s small tent, the thatched cookhouse lean-to with firewood stacked to keep dry, the careful circle of stones around the charred camp fire, the tarpaulin-screened latrine, the unscreened shower bucket hanging from a branch.

Jim learned a little Swahili before he came; Koroga knew some English after three years at a mission school but Jim had asked Mary Ann to translate in Chagga his one firm