A Spear of Summer Grass (19 page)

“Yes.” He pushed his hands through his hair. It was rough and unkempt, but it had felt like raw silk in my fingers. “I’m leaving. I’ll be gone at least a month. I’ve got a short safari to guide for a client coming out of Nairobi.”

“Safe journey, then.”

“Goddammit, Delilah—” He broke off. “Never mind. I’m leaving Gideon behind. He’ll keep an eye on you and on Fairlight.”

“I don’t need a nursemaid, Ryder. Not even yours.”

“No, but you could probably use a friend. He’ll know where to find me if you need me.”

Before I could say a word, he grabbed me by the back of the neck, kissing me hard. It was over as soon as he began, and when he released me he looked angrier still, as if kissing me had been something he had done entirely against his will.

“I know exactly how you feel,” I murmured. He stalked off without another word and I turned and went into Fairlight, now empty and small. But whether I was thinking of the house or myself, I couldn’t say.

* * *

After that, things settled into a routine. I spent my mornings patching up the Kikuyu and Masai at Fairlight while Gates hid his resentment and did what I told him for the most part. While I was away, Dodo had started a complete overhaul of the house from top to bottom. She had the house scrubbed, and hauled the carpets and curtains outside to the garden to be beaten. She set four boys with cricket bats to them, and the cloud of dust and insects they raised nearly choked us all. The floors were waxed and polished and the silver rubbed until it shone. Every window was cleaned with vinegar and sheets of newspaper, and when she was finished the house seemed lighter, shedding its coat of filth and neglect.

The kitchen was overhauled as well, and Pierre found a proper cook, an elegant Somali named Omar. He wouldn’t touch pork, but his skills made up for the lack of bacon at the table. Pierre was delighted with the changes and I presented him with a dashing new red fez to replace his old one. He even went so far as to serve dinner one evening wearing white gloves, but I told him it was a ridiculous affectation in Africa and he took them off. He sulked for a while, only perking up when I promised him a raise. Dora pursed her lips and looked disapproving, but she said nothing. She had worked her fingers to the bone on the house. The entire place shone like a new pin, and I told her so.

“Why, thank you,” she said, looking a little startled. “I have actually rather enjoyed it. Not all of it, mind you. There were days only stout British resolve got me through. But it looks rather lovely now, if I may say.”

“You may. The slipcovers you made for the drawing room were an inspired choice.”

She had ordered yards of a glazed black chintz with a pattern of falling autumn leaves and I had wiped out the rest of that quarter’s allowance from the Colonel to pay for it. The black kept it from feeling too feminine and the falling leaves somehow evoked the warm colours of the African landscape. She had broken half her nails on an elderly sewing machine she’d unearthed before she found that Mr. Patel could run up anything in half the time for pennies an hour. It was a useful discovery considering the fact that we had each managed to ruin most of the clothes we had come with. Insects, stray nails, thornbushes—all had taken their toll, and Dora had finally resorted to having Mr. Patel make half a dozen housecoats to put over her own clothes while she worked. I hadn’t bothered. I had gotten into the habit of wearing riding breeches and Misha’s shirts every day, my fashionable Paris frocks packed away in cedar and lavender until an evening entertainment or trip to town presented itself.

Aside from Kit, we had seen little of our neighbours. I made a point of walking over to visit him a few times a week for obvious reasons. He had decided to paint me, and after he fed me lunch and took me to bed, he would get up and stand in front of his easel, the sunlight warming his bare skin. He committed me to the canvas, first with a soft pencil, then with a palette and paints, frowning from the image to me and back again. He had positioned me sitting up against the headboard, the sheet draped carelessly at my waist, a cigarette dangling from my fingertips. I was at an oblique angle, something like
La Grande Odalisque,
so there was nothing objectionable on display, although I knew objections would be made in any event. I didn’t much care. Kit was a talented artist, and I quite liked the idea of hanging on some collector’s wall, or better yet, in a museum, naked for the world to see. I turned my face so that my gaze would be directed at whoever viewed the painting, and Kit gave a little shout of exultation.

“Perfect, my darling! Hold that expression. Chin down just a fraction—there. Don’t move. And whatever you’re thinking about, don’t stop. That expression is precisely what I want. It dares the viewer to look away. It will make them feel as if they are naked instead of you.”

I couldn’t wait to see it, but Kit was superstitious. He always made me dress and leave straight after so I couldn’t peek. He was excited about it, more than the lovemaking itself. Most days he rushed the sex to get to the painting, and I should have been a little miffed. But I always made sure I got what I came for, and if he didn’t, well, he had the painting to console him. He said it was going to be the centrepiece of the Nairobi show, and he chattered like a monkey while he worked. Most artists liked silence while they painted, but not Kit. He wanted to talk so long as I listened and didn’t move too much. He twittered on about how small the art world was and how one successful show anywhere would be his ticket back in. He talked about the contacts he still had in Paris and New York, and how the Berlin art scene was beginning to hop. He talked about Barcelona and Chicago and Rome, all of his hopes and ambitions.

He talked about people, too, mostly our neighbours, and he gave me a wicked look as he began to catalogue the women he’d had since he’d arrived in Africa. I wasn’t surprised he’d bedded Jude and Bianca, but the fact that he’d slept with Helen came as a bit of a shock.

“I would have thought her a little old for you,” I said, careful not to move my mouth too much.

He gave a short bark of laughter, like a hyena. “If Helen likes to put it about, who am I to stop her? The trouble is that Rex isn’t enough for her. Oh, it’s not his fault. She said he’s enormous and very skilled with it. But our Helen likes variety.”

“So she
is
a nymphomaniac. Poor Rex. Do you think he knows?”

“Oh, he knows. And between you and me, I think he’s almost proud of it in a strange way. Rex likes to have the best and most beautiful and Helen’s little adventures prove that other men want what he has. Besides, his driving passion is politics. He tolerates her lapses and she tolerates his ambitions. It seems to work fine for them. More than fine—they are not a couple I would want to come between.”

“Perhaps. It still seems a little sad.”

“Why? Don’t tell me the scandal of two continents believes in fidelity,” he said with a mocking twist of his mouth. Why had I never noticed how thin his lips could go?

“Three continents, actually. You forgot about that time in Buenos Aires. And yes, I do believe in fidelity. Not to you, of course,” I added with a malicious smile. “But I have always been faithful to my husbands until they either died on me or the marriage broke down. I have never deceived a man I promised to love until death.”

He said nothing for a minute. He was too busy painting furiously. Then he peered around the canvas. “I had a letter from my sister. She said the Paris gossip mills were working overtime when your Russian prince died. Word is you might have had a hand in it. Did you?”

“No,” I said slowly. “But he asked me to. He gave me his revolver. It belonged to the last tsar of Russia, you know. It was a beautiful little piece, but lethal enough. I just couldn’t pull the trigger. A better wife would have done it.” I thought of Ryder’s choice under the same circumstances. It was strange that we had something like that in common. It made a bond between us even though we had answered the call quite differently. He was stronger than I was. Or maybe he had just loved his father more than I had loved Misha. You had to love someone completely to be willing to destroy them.

The paintbrush clattered to the floor. “Jesus Christ.”

I took a deep drag off my cigarette. “Well, you did ask,” I said evenly. “That was the last time I saw him. I put the gun to his head and my hand was shaking. And I thought of how many times I had stroked that hair and brushed it and clutched it as I screamed his name. And I couldn’t make myself squeeze the trigger. I walked out and left him there, knowing he wanted to die and that I didn’t love him quite enough to help him do it.”

He didn’t attempt to retrieve his brush. He just stood there and stared at me as I talked.

“Why did he want you to do that? Was he that upset about the divorce?”

I laughed, but it didn’t sound like a laugh. It sounded like a sob, something dry and brittle rattling between the bones. “I’ve never broken any man’s heart badly enough to kill him, Kit. He had cancer, the painful, sly kind, wedged down deep in his bones. There was nothing the doctors could do. He wanted to go out on his own terms before things got worse. He had been shooting himself with morphine, but it had gotten so bad that it was barely knocking the edge off the pain. It was time.”

“What happened after you left?”

I shrugged. “Misha found the courage I had misplaced. He put the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger and ruined a yard of expensive wallpaper at the Ritz. They billed me for it, the bastards.”

Kit put down his palette and walked slowly to the bed. “I don’t even know how you live with a story like that.”

“Easy. Like every bad thing that’s ever happened to me, I lock it up and don’t think about it. And once in a while someone asks, and I take my pain out and pass it around for other people to look at. It’s like a glass eye or a wooden leg. It shocks them and it gives me a gruesome little thrill to inflict it on the unsuspecting.”

He shook his head. “You have always been dazzling—the life of every party, the glamour girl who dances until dawn.”

“Well, I am. But I’m dancing on broken glass. I’m Miss Havisham’s wedding cake, Kit. A frothy, expensive, mice-eaten confection. I’m the Sphinx’s nose, the fallen Colossus. I’m a beautiful ruin, and it’s time that has done the deed.”

To my astonishment, he reached out and held me then, and after a moment I let him.

He put a finger to the black ribbon at my wrist. “I’ve always wondered what you’re hiding. Makes you even more mysterious, you know.”

“What do you think is under there?”

He gave me a devilish smile. “I think it’s a tattoo from where you were marked with Creole voodoo as a child. Or were you branded for thievery, like Milady de Winter?”

“You’ve read too many Gothic novels. It’s just a ribbon, Kit.”

“I like my version better. More interesting,” he said, closing his eyes and pulling me nearer. I relaxed against him and almost let myself go.

That’s the danger of locking away your pain. It makes it hard to be human again, to let someone hold you just for the sake of being close. And before things got too comfortable between us, I slipped my hand between his legs and he forgot about consolation. Instead he thrusted and grunted and when it was done, he rolled over and fell asleep almost instantly. I sat up in the sticky sheets and smoked another cigarette. I had almost let down my guard with Kit. He was wild and creative and unpredictable. But there was another side to him as well, an unexpected sweetness that was dangerous. He was fickle as the wind, unreliable as spring sunshine. It would never do to invest my hopes in him. There was no bedrock in Kit to build on. I couldn’t let myself get too fond of him. I dressed quietly and slipped away.

16

The rest of that month brought surprises. The first was how much I grew to like Tusker Balfour. She appeared at Fairlight one morning covered in red dust from the road, pushing a bicycle with a flat tire.

“Had a puncture just beyond your gate,” she said by way of greeting. “Don’t suppose you’d run me back?”

“Of course. Ryder left me his pitiful excuse for a truck. We can throw your bicycle in the back. But you must have lunch first.”

She accepted so speedily I wondered if the puncture might have been a ruse to get inside the gate. She needn’t have bothered. The code of the African bush was the same as that of Creole hospitality. If a neighbour appeared, you fed and sheltered them and got them where they needed to be without question or mention of payment.

We sat down to a dish of curried chicken and rice and a few tasty accompaniments, including an orange sponge cake that Omar was ridiculously proud of. He had split it and filled it with custard, then sprinkled the whole thing with rosewater and presented it with a flourish. Tusker unashamedly ate three pieces.

“Damned fine cake. However much you’re paying that fellow, best double it if you don’t want Helen to lure him away. She’s the worst servant poacher hereabouts.”

“That doesn’t seem very neighbourly.”

Tusker shrugged. “That’s Helen. She’s all right, I suppose. Bit fluffy-headed, but no real harm in her.”

Faint praise, indeed. She went on. “Where’s that cousin of yours?”

“Dora? Off attempting a landscape of the countryside. She was so worn out after overhauling the house, I told her to start taking time to kick up her heels a little. For Dora that means a sketchbook and a new sponge cake recipe. She and Evelyn Halliwell have struck up a friendship based on art and gardens, I think. And Kit helps them with the rudiments of their work from time to time.”

She shook her head. “I have to wonder what you’re thinking.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She sat forward, her expression earnest. A tiny bit of custard clung to one lip, trembling a little as she spoke. “You have character, a backbone. Oh, it may wobble from time to time, but it’s there. Like my niece, Jude. You can do better than Kit Parrymore. He’s handsome, I’ll grant you that. But he’s soft inside. No spine of his own. You’ll end up carrying him, and it will break you. You’ll regret him.”

“Only if I’m stupid enough to rely on him,” I countered.

She gave a sharp yip of laughter. “Well, that’s a relief. At least you see him for what he is.”

“It would be difficult to see him for anything else. Kit isn’t like most men. He makes no secret of his shortcomings.”

“True enough.” She picked up a dish of pistachios and began to crack them idly. “For instance, did you read the piece in the latest issue of the
Standard?
There’s a juicy little item about the pair of you. All about how the centrepiece of his coming show is a painting he’s doing of you—a nude.”

“Is that right?” I lit a cigarette and blew a smoke ring while she played with her pistachios.
Crack. Crack.

“It said the painting will be the latest in a long line of scandals for you. And then it proceeded to list them.”

“I’m surprised the good people of Nairobi have nothing better to read about than my little peccadilloes.”

“Kit said it would be the making of his career.”

I stopped halfway through blowing another smoke ring. It fluttered away like a stillborn angel. “Kit was quoted?”

“Lavishly.”
Crack. Crack.

“Bastard,” I said softly. I stubbed out the cigarette. “Well, I shouldn’t have expected any different from him. In my experience, all artists would sell their own mothers for a bit of publicity.”

She yipped again and I respected her for not trying to say something consoling. I reached out with my napkin and wiped the custard off her mouth. “If you’re going to sit there cracking pistachios, at least eat them.”

She crunched a few and slipped the rest into her pocket. “For my new filly. Special treat.”

“How did you get the name Tusker?”

“When I was newly married, I went on safari with Balfour. I killed an elephant with one shot, and me not nineteen. It was the talk of the colony—or the protectorate, as it was then. I was even written up in the
Standard
for it. The governor himself sent me a letter of congratulation. But I didn’t realise the elephant was a mother. She had a calf that had got separated, and when I killed the mother, I orphaned the calf. I cried all the way home. Balfour had taken the tusks and I took the tail. The calf followed along, trailing the smell of its mother’s blood. Balfour said we ought to just shoot it, but I wouldn’t let him. I fed it and taught it to use its trunk and what plants to eat and how to scratch itself on a tree. I even shot a leopard that sprang at him and tried to take him when he went to drink. Years passed and that elephant followed me everywhere. He grew the most beautiful set of tusks you ever saw—a hundred and fifty pounds if they weighed an ounce. And when he was fully grown and ready to mate, I walked him out into the bush where he could live out his life with his own kind.”

“A sweet story,” I said.

She cracked another pistachio. “Oh, not so sweet. Hunter took him a month later for those tusks. Just carved them right out of his head and left him there. He died not a mile from my house. I think he might have been coming back to see me.” She ate the nut slowly. “That’s why I’m peculiar about ellies.”

“Peculiar?”

“Ask anybody. They’ll tell you I’m mad, but I’m not. It’s just that I can’t bear to see the tuskers hurt. They’re so big that people forget how gentle they are. And how much like us.”

“Elephants are like us?”

“More than most any other animal I’ve ever seen. They live in families, and when one dies, the others pay their respects. They grieve. I’ve seen them do it. And I’ve seen them keep on mourning for years afterwards. They’ll go miles out of their way just to pass a place where one of their own died, and their memories are always green. They are the gentlest creatures on earth if you know how to handle them. But that sentiment gets me into trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“I’m banned from Government House, for starters,” she said with a mischievous grin. “I wanted the governor to sign a mandate creating a sanctuary for them and banning elephant hunting. Of course, he refused. So I took a leaf from the suffragettes’ book. Chained myself to his desk.”

“I don’t imagine that pleased him.”

“Not by half. It took them almost a day to find bolt cutters big enough to sever the chain. I looked like the world’s biggest paperweight.” She laughed at the memory. “Ryder understands. I think he’s the only one who does.”

“Odd that he would, since his livelihood depends upon hunting them.”

She snorted. “Ryder is tricky as the devil and twice as clever. He always manages to guide his clients to shooting problem animals that ought to be put down anyway— man-eaters or a cat that has taken to preying on Masai cattle or Kikuyu goats. He tells them a good yarn about how vicious the animal is and how everyone else is too frightened to track it. Then he and his boys guide them right to it and when the client shoots it, Ryder has the natives stage a big scene with dancing and a feast. The hunters are carried around like St. George after the dragon and everybody’s happy. The only one who pays is Ryder since he slips the natives something to cover the expense of the feast.”

“That
is
clever. I’m surprised the clients are quite that stupid.”

“They shoot animals for fun. They aren’t exactly the brightest stars in the firmament,” she said, cracking another nut. “No, they are no match for Ryder, but it won’t matter. He’ll get himself killed one of these days and the fun will be over.”

“By an animal?”

“Or some idiot with a gun. There’s a page on it in the betting book at the club. Quite a number of viable options. Could be a jealous husband or some criminal he’s horsewhipped. Could be a disgruntled client or a jilted woman. Or it could be his driving. He’s a trifle reckless. Of course, he has been known to walk right up to a lion, so I suppose that could always be a possibility. Then there are cobras and wildfires and epidemics and tribal rebellions and blackwater fever and envious guides and lightning on the savannah. It’s a dangerous place, our Africa—for man and beast.”

* * *

The days were surprisingly peaceful. Sometimes I walked out with Gideon to see the wildebeest moving in long dark shadows across the plains. Other days I simply lay on the sofa in the drawing room, smoking Sobranies and thinking. Dora had given up her art lessons with Kit and spent her time pottering about the gardens, working the soil from dawn to dark. I didn’t mind. There was a glumness to her that seemed to blunt the edge of whatever good mood I might have enjoyed. She had gone grey and dull, and when she retired early, I just turned up the gramophone and sang along without her.

And every morning I went to see Moses. I started checking on him soon after I came back from the lion hunt, and it wasn’t long before it became a habit. Each morning I finished breakfast and wrapped up several pieces of toast in a cloth. I walked out to the pasture, taking in deep breaths of cool, clean air. There was always the tang of woodsmoke and cow, good earthy country smells. And Moses would be waiting, lifting up his head and giving me a shy smile as I approached.

I shared the toast with him and he always wrapped up the last piece to save for later in the day. He took his meals at the back door of the kitchen, and I had warned Omar that he was never to be turned away if he asked for more. His favourite was toast dripping in honey.

One morning as we sat and watched the cattle grazing gently, a bird flitted by. It was a nondescript little bundle of grey-brown feathers. Only the white tips of its tail caught the eye as it dipped and rose on the wind, but Moses was excited. He tugged at my arm and dragged me to my feet. He hurried after the bird, beckoning me to follow.

We trotted quickly beyond the pasture and down into a
lugga,
and I cursed myself for not bringing along a rifle. Moses had only his cowherder’s stick for protection. But he plunged on, running now, and only occasionally checking to see if I was keeping up.

The bird flew out of the
lugga
and flashed its tail as it darted a little distance farther out on to the savannah. A single tree stood there, and the bird made straight for it. Moses was right behind, and when I finally joined him, breathing hard and sweating like a field hand, he pointed up, smiling happily.

The tree was a wild fig. Gideon had explained the brutality of the wild fig. It grew up around another tree, wrapping itself so closely that it suffocated its host. At first glance, a wild fig looked whole, but inside the host tree was rotten, and this one held within its decayed heart a honeycomb. Bees buzzed gently around us. Moses bent swiftly and gathered a handful of grasses. He fashioned these into a twist and motioned for me to give him matches. A moment later the makeshift torch was smoking hard, the green grass burning slowly. He moved cautiously forward, humming a song of his own making. The bees continued to circle, but none came close to him. He wedged the burning grass into a knothole of the tree and used his stick to break off a piece of honeycomb. He lifted it, dripping with golden honey and placed it carefully onto his saved piece of toast. When he was finished, he scraped a hole in the ground to bury his burned grass. He hummed another few bars of his song for the bees and turned to me, smiling his sweet smile.

We walked a little distance away so as not to disturb the bees, and he broke off pieces of the honeycomb to share with me. I sucked the honey from the beeswax. It was warm and thick on my tongue and I tasted the sharp edge of something green and herbal before it was submerged into the sweetness. Moses finished his honey and chewed the beeswax and I gave him mine to save for later. He laughed at the honey on my chin, and I thought about the mother that had given up on him and the father who had disowned him and I hated them both.

It was a slower walk back to the pasture. Moses was limping now, resting heavily on his stick, but determined to return to his herd. He took his cows very seriously, and when we reached the pasture, he was very proud to show me that one of the cows I had bought was carrying.

“Make sure she gets extra care,” I told him. “She’ll be the foundation of our herd.”

He smiled again and headed into the pasture to hum a special song to her, a song that would make her calf grow strong and her milk come sweet.

It was only after I walked away that I remembered I wouldn’t be staying long enough to see it born.

* * *

There were other walks with Moses after that, and long mornings spent listening to him sing his wordless songs to the cattle and telling stories to each other with our gestures and words scratched into the dirt with his cowherder’s stick. Sometimes Gideon joined us, and sometimes the three of us walked into the bush to see a baby giraffe or to gather honey for the table. Besides my outings with Gideon and Moses, Tusker called twice a week for lunch, Mr. Patel came to bring mail and packages, and I spent long hours on the veranda, nursing a drink and catching up on my reading.

I was falling into the African rhythm of life, a slow and steady pace that meant one day was sometimes very like the next until the seasons changed and brought an entirely new world. Tusker talked of the short rains that would come in November and the wild Christmas extravagances at the club in Nairobi. She talked of the growing tension between the settlers and the government, and she taught me much about the natives. She had a soft spot for the native girls, lamenting loudly the fact that so many of them were circumcised.

“Goodness knows I never had much going on in that way, what with marrying a poof, but a woman ought to at least have the option of getting her cork properly popped,” she said roundly.

“Of course they all justify it by claiming it stops the women from wandering off.”

“That’s absurd. It certainly didn’t stop adultery in Moses’ mother’s case.”