A Fool's Knot (22 page)

By now, Bill felt quite stunned by what he had seen since his plane touched down in the dull half-light of a Nairobi dawn. In the London taxi, he believed he knew what to expect. In the event, reality did not exceed expectation, but merely bypassed it. He emerged from the airport by nine and for the next five hours he and John battled against the remnants and effects of last night's rain to travel a mere hundred skidding miles, with the constant fear that they might have to turn back and try again the following day. Having completed the bulk of the journey, only a few miles separated them from their intended destination but, if John's fears proved real, there was utterly no chance of reaching his farm that day, either by car or on foot. How would I have reacted at home, thought Bill, if I had made such a journey only to find a sign across the road a few miles from my destination saying, “Road washed away – no other route”? How soon one might be disappointed, he thought, if one came to this place to impose one's own standards rather than discover its own.

How could one react to this? thought Bill, as he looked around from the vantage of the mission drive. Behind the house, a bare field rose up an incline, thereby denying any view of what lay beyond. In front of the house the land dipped into a shallow valley only to rise again to the slopes of a long flat rock, apparently compressed beneath the sky. Further to the left a taller, greener mountain, rising from the crest of a vast ridge, tapered to a neatly pointed summit. The rest was a barren lifeless rust of earth, today saddened to mud by rain and bearing only a few tattered yellow maize stalks, obviously the uncleared and now lifeless remnants of a pitiful crop from last season, and everything was apparently trapped beneath the vast weight of a wide, glaring sky. The wind gusted fresh and cool, blowing from behind the pointed mountain, rippling the surface of pools of water standing on earth still too hard to absorb it.

In this landscape there were none of the familiar, recognised elements, none of the landmarks one expected to see, none of the fingerprints that mark human activity or work. Here, people seemed to live unaffected by the delusions of their own grandeur that controlled, artificial landscapes can cajole their observers to believe. Here, it seems, human beings were merely one of the many creatures prying the earth for survival. And here people were not succeeding, were not the dominant force. They seemed held in a kind of bondage not, like the European, by the grip of his own hand, but by the land, the sun and the rain. An animal, here, was still free to wander, to search and to find the comfort of food, but humans were now rooted to their farms, unable to leave fields fast dying from what appeared to be their own misuse.

Bill's contemplation was ended by the rasping of a motorcycle on the nearby road. He watched as the bike whined through a change of gear and turned towards the mission. Riding it was, to his surprise, a young white girl dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. Her long brown hair flowed and twirled in the wind. Though unexpected and incongruous, Bill was already so immune to further surprise that he could merely stand and watch as she drove up to and alongside John's car.

“Are you looking for Father Michael?” she asked after nodding her head in greeting. After Bill confirmed, she continued, “He's gone home to Ireland. He left today and certainly won't be back before July. It could even be as a late as September, because I heard the other day that he might do a fund-raising trip before he comes back.”

“My friend has gone to the town to look for the cook,” answered Bill, after a moment's surprise at being offered so much information about a man he had never met. “I think you should tell him when he comes back.”

At that very moment John appeared from behind the tall euphorbia grass hedge, returning from the town, where he had been told that Mutua had gone home to his farm in Thitani after Father Michael had left Migwani. The appearance of Janet immediately solved his problem, however. Of course he could simply have taken two rooms at the back of the Safari Bar, but he had not wanted to subject Bill to the hard metal-framed beds, with their creaking wire frame springs and flea-infested foam mattresses, which were the only facilities the town's only hotel could offer. Immediately he saw Janet, he smiled and waved, and greeted her warmly with a handshake and a gentle hug. Bill could see in that instant, perhaps in the way she did not automatically arch her body away from his, perhaps in the way that he assumed she would move towards him in the encounter, that the two of them were something more than acquaintances. He explained their predicament in a few words and a moment later they were on their way to her house, Janet having offered them beds for the night.

Later, after dinner of roasted goat and chapatti, the two men relaxed for the first time that day. Bill produced a bottle of whisky he had bought on the plane and the three of them set about its destruction. Though Janet at first said she didn't want any, because she had quite recently been stupid enough to have drunk too much of the stuff and got quite drunk, she did relent and joined in on the third round. John took only a little, diluting it with Sprite, but Bill clearly enjoyed his drink, his already ruddy complexion glowing a little brighter with each glass.

“I didn't want to come here,” explained John, “because I thought you might have gone away on a trip.”

“Not this time,” said Janet, self-consciously fiddling with a cigarette. She had not yet been smoking long enough to have shaken off the need for self-retribution each time she succumbed and accepted an offered cigarette. The revelation tobacco had delivered her some months before had been sorely needed when she had smoked for the first time, but by now it had become something of a commonplace. “I decided to stay at school this holiday to finish various things I had let run for weeks. I'm due to leave in a few months so I may not get another chance to do them.”

“You are a very conscientious teacher, Miss Rowlandson. I wish you would consider staying here. Our school would be the richer for it,” said John.

Though flattered and rather embarrassed by the strength of the compliment, she smiled, but it was with a distinct tinge of frustration in her voice that she acknowledged the words. “Thanks. If only I could make up my mind…” How many times had she pondered the question during recent months? And how many times had she sternly resolved not even to consider it further, only to find it again at the forefront of her mind an hour later? To leave would be to give up a life she had grown used to, had even grown to love, to leave a place which had grown to become the happiest home she had ever known. Here she felt thoroughly alive, liberated from Europe's neuroses and allowed to live a life of true freedom, immune from perceived pressure. She now seemed to rely on the freedom that Africa endowed. To leave would necessitate another new beginning and she was still unsure whether she wanted to teach in Britain. Such a decision bore too much of an air of inevitability, of potential respectability, feeling more of a termination than an opportunity. She was qualified in her field, but as yet had no particular skill or experience to offer an employer and had little desire to make what she saw as the retrograde step back into a college of some sort to seek new and different qualifications. To leave Migwani would mean coming to terms again with a society and its associated attitudes that she could no longer respect. To stay, on the other hand, would be to forego the chance of making relationships on equal terms with people of her own age or beliefs. It was also to commit economic suicide. Each year the return was deferred would make it ever harder to leave. She would have to reject not only the seedy side of English life, which was easy, but also the side she liked, the chance to visit friends, theatres, cinemas, concerts and galleries which, in her student past, she had enjoyed so much. To stay would mean that she would have to learn to live with, rather than flirt with the sides of Kamba life she could not accept. To stay and teach in the school might destroy her sanity, so deeply did she doubt the worth to these children of the academic education their nebulous aspirations demanded. Always to be remembered was the chance that here and now she might by sheer default take one of life's irreversible decisions in the light-headed manner, which life in this land encouraged, only to realise some time hence that she had made a mistake and be terribly, deeply disappointed and unhappy.

“I haven't really thought about it,” lied Janet, unconvincingly, to John's question.

Bill, who had listened rather than spoken after the introductions had been completed much earlier, spoke next. “I can't help feeling great admiration for someone like you, Janet. It must take a great deal of nerve and lot of guts to come to a place like this to work and live alone.”

John smiled and looked at Janet, who hardly knew how to begin to address the contradictions in the words. Though they had seen one another just a couple of times since the closure of the Munyolo case, they felt they now shared a bond. On the few occasions they had met, they both felt as if they had taken up their conversation at the point where they left it, usually focusing on their shared experience and love of London. As John Mwangangi and Janet Rowlandson eyed one another, Bill Goodman instinctively and immediately knew they were at least good friends. After a long silence, during which she helped herself to more of the whisky she originally said she would avoid, she said in her soft, now consciously flippant voice, “Well, I'm not actually alone. There are twenty thousand people in Migwani location.”

Bill looked suddenly enlightened, then embarrassed and then delighted by Janet's answer. He began to laugh at himself, saying, “You know, I really had never thought of it like that. Isn't it strange that even when we think of ourselves as enlightened, liberal thinkers, we can still say something like that? I suppose it's part of our culture to assume that black people don't count. Everything I have said about this place has assumed someone like yourself is apart from the rest of the community, something different from ‘the people'. In fact,” he continued, lightly coughing the words after a sip of his undiluted drink, “that kind of distinction can only be made by someone who has utterly no concept of actual experience.”

Janet, impressed by Bill's willingness to eat humble pie, began to take more than a polite interest in the conversation.

“What about yourself?” asked Bill. “If you don't mind me saying, you're a very attractive young lady. You must have a very limited social life here. Have you had many difficulties adapting?”

Janet's pursed, suppressed smile as her eyes met John's was immediately noticed by the questioner, who interpreted correctly that his assumptions again had been misplaced. There was obviously more than mere acquaintance between these two. “You pre-suppose that I have adapted,” she replied. Two years before she would have blushed and mouthed a quiet, inconsequential reply. These days, however, her shell was harder, her will stronger and, as a result of her contact with John Mwangangi, her experience wider.

Bill was becoming very impressed with Janet, in very much the same way he would with a new student who showed signs of being more than run-of-the-mill. “One must assume,” he noted, “that you must have adapted to some extent, otherwise your life here would have become unbearable some time ago.”

Janet agreed and continued by answering his original question. “The amount of difficulty a person experiences in adapting – the degree of culture shock one suffers, if you like – is determined only by one's staidness: the depth of one's refusal to modify the demands one makes of others. A person who accepts this place as it is will have no problems. A person who comes to impose conditions of friendship will feel estranged.”

Somewhat stunned by Janet's words, both John and Bill looked at one another and smiled. Then, as John began to state his point of view, there was a knock on the kitchen door and they all instinctively turned toward the sound.

Janet got up and, after closing the door connecting the kitchen to the lounge behind her, went to answer the call. With Janet out of the room, the two men immediately began to discuss who would take the spare bed in the house and who would sleep on the plastic-covered settee. Bill, adamant that his tourist visit should cause no one even the slightest inconvenience, said that he would take the settee. John, laughing at his exhibition of characteristic overt politeness, which he had not experienced since leaving England, refused Bill's offer, telling him that now he was in Kenya he would have to get used to the local custom of accepting whatever offers of help were made. To refuse here, John explained, was to insult. To say ‘Yes' said the Kamba proverb, could never cause harm, though he accepted that these rules might not apply in Janet's case – she was, after all, English. John pointed out that it was he who was actually making the offer and he was a Mukamba, so Bill had better accept that John would be sleeping on the settee. “Furthermore,” John continued with a laugh, “I promise to take any refusal one hundred per cent personally.” Thus Bill would take the bed.

Janet's caller had been unexpected. In Migwani, Solomon Musee was still a young man, regarded as immature and irresponsible by his father. Only rarely now did he ever visit his family home in the Kaliluni area of the location and each time his visits were proving ever more trying, because he had grown tired of what he interpreted as his parents' constant nagging. They were forever telling him that he should be saving to buy a parcel of land, that he needed to start building a herd of cows so that he might be able to marry, that the life he was leading in a rented room in Kitui town was bound to lead to trouble, bound to leave him poor and alone. He had gone to the town as a school leaver without qualifications two years previously. His intention was to seek out any available work. His goal was simple: to earn some money so that he could buy for himself a few of the symbols of modernity, a transistor radio, a bicycle, perhaps, and some colourful shirts to go with his flared trousers and
platiform
shoes.