A Spear of Summer Grass (28 page)

“Because something that beautiful and dangerous is worth watching,” he replied.

Just then she darted out, launching herself straight at a small patch of quivering grass. A young tommie huddled under the grass, waiting until the last possible moment to run. Too late, its mother saw the danger and circled back, bleating her distress and throwing herself between the cheetah and her young.

But the cheetah would not be diverted. She circled back, cutting sharply and seized the tommie, carrying it off in triumph. The mother sniffed the air and let out another soft cry before returning to her herd. The cheetah took her trophy back to her mound, suffocating it quickly and beginning to eat.

“She doesn’t waste time,” I observed.

“She can’t afford to. She seems fierce but there are lots of things out here bigger and meaner than she is. Any one of them would take that tommie from her and go after her, too. She’s a lot more vulnerable than she looks.”

I sighed. “Did you bring me out here just to show me metaphors for my own life?”

A tiny smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “No. I wanted to talk to you where we wouldn’t be overheard.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly onto the wind. “How is he?”

“Poor. I took him to one of the outlying villages near the Ugandan border, too far for the officials in Nairobi to bother with. He has no cattle of his own and he can’t claim his
babu’s
property when the old man dies. Without either of those, he can’t take a wife. And he won’t accept handouts from me.”

“So I did it for nothing.”

“He’s alive.” Ryder turned on me fiercely. “And that’s all that matters right now. He will work hard and he will make his own way. Don’t underestimate him, Delilah. He’s stronger than you know, and right now he is walking on his own two legs—a free black man in a white man’s Africa—because of what you did. Don’t ever forget that.”

I said nothing. Guilt was sitting too heavily on my shoulders to talk about it. I had acted impulsively, rashly, as I always had. And while it might have saved Gideon’s life, it also made it impossible for him to have the life he wanted. Once again I had acted from the heart rather than the head, and there were consequences. Only this time someone else was bearing the weight of them.

“Have you thought about what you mean to do?”

I watched the cheetah tearing happily at the throat of the little tommie. Survival was a bloody business. “I mean to leave as soon as I can. Nothing’s changed, Ryder.”

He went very still, but I felt the change in him. Anger shimmered off him, sparking the air between us.

“I should have known. Tusker warned me not to rely on you. She swore you wouldn’t stick it out, but I defended you. I told her she was wrong, that there was something fine in you, something that would see this place for what it was and be changed by it. But you won’t change, and do you know why? Because you never stay anywhere or with anyone long enough to let them in.”

I let out a ragged breath. “Do you know what a cicatrix is, Ryder? It’s a scar, a place where you have been cut so deeply that what’s left behind is something quite different. It doesn’t heal, not really, because it isn’t the same ever again. It’s impenetrable and it’s there forever, to protect you from hurting the same place again.”

“You get maudlin when you philosophise.”

“It isn’t maudlin if it’s true.”

He grabbed my wrist, twisting it hard where the black ribbon bow folded on itself like a mourning flower.

“Can you feel that? Can you feel anything? Christ, Delilah, I thought I was damaged, but I have never in my life met anyone so afraid of feeling anything as you are.”

“You know why,” I said with a shrug.

“No, I don’t. You told me what’s happened to you, but guess what? Bad things happen to everybody. I’ll give you that. But you can’t just shut down and refuse to keep living. Do you think that’s what Johnny would have wanted? You might as well have jumped down into that grave with him and pulled the dirt over you like a blanket for all the real living you’ve done since then.”

He turned and took my face in his hands. “Delilah, this may be the last chance you have to wake up. Life is giving you a new chance every goddamned day that you wake up and you’re throwing it away. Wake up, Delilah. Wake up.” He punctuated his words with his lips, pressing his mouth to my eyelids, my temples, my cheeks, my jaw, and with every touch he murmured, “Wake up.

“Wake up,” he said. “Wake up, wake up, wake up.” An invocation, an invitation, an incantation, but I pulled away from him and shook my head.

He dropped his hands. Silence stretched between us, heavy and thick. He settled back and pulled a cigarette from his case. Wordlessly he lit it and passed it to me before lighting another for himself. We smoked them in silence but I could feel him thinking, planning his next move. He was playing a chess game, trying to win, convinced he could keep me if he could just hit on the right strategy. He just didn’t realise I wasn’t playing the game.

He spoke quietly, weighing his words. “You aren’t like anyone I’ve ever met, Delilah. You are the most appallingly selfish person I have ever known. I thought once that there might be something good in you, something worth saving. But now I think there isn’t, there can’t be, if you could look at this place and how wretched it is and turn away. There is real good we could do here if you would only stop feeling sorry for yourself and have a care for anybody else. But you would rather dance off and leave it all behind, let someone else clear it up. Well, what if no one else will? What if you’re the only one who could make a difference and you don’t? It’s sinful, that’s what. And I don’t use that word lightly. I’m barely religious. I hardly say my prayers and I almost never go to church, but I do believe in God and I believe some things are flying in his face. Walking away from here now is one of those things.”

I opened my mouth to answer him, but I never got the chance. A cloud of dust was rising on the savannah, and as we rose and watched it started moving closer. Whatever it was, it spooked the tommies and they hurried on, dragging their gangly offspring with them. By the time the cheetah had left, picking her way delicately across the savannah, the apparition was almost upon us. It was the motorbike. Mr. Patel was riding it, his eyes shielded by his motoring goggles, his robes fluttering behind him like a knight’s pennant. We descended from the rock as he skidded to a stop and jumped from the bike, heading straight for Ryder.

“This came and it was most urgent,” he said, proffering a telegram. Ryder went to take it, but Mr. Patel shook his head. “For
Memsahib
Delilah,” he corrected, nodding towards me.

I stepped forward and took the envelope. The ripping sounded unnaturally loud in the wide emptiness of the plain. Ryder had moved behind me, shielding me from Patel with his body. It was an exquisitely considerate gesture and a futile one. There is no such thing as privacy in Africa.

I read the lines twice, then three times.

“Who?” Ryder said quietly. I turned to him and he was staring at me intently. I don’t know how he understood. Cables bring good news just as often as bad. But not this one.

“My stepfather, Nigel. He suffered a heart attack at his club in London. He died almost immediately.”

Ryder said nothing. He opened his arms and I went into them. There was nothing in that embrace beyond what a parent might offer a grieving child. It was comfort and solace, and after a long moment he released me.

“Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

“I’m taking you home. To Fairlight.”

But he was wrong. Fairlight was part of Nigel’s estate. It belonged now to his eldest son, Edgar. It would never be my home again.

We made our way slowly back. There was nothing to hurry for. I could not make it to England for Nigel’s funeral in any event. I sent cables via Mr. Patel to Mossy and to Edgar and turned my attention to the scenery itself. I did not expect to come this way again, and I found myself staring at the horizon, memorising Africa against the day when all I would have were my own sepia recollections.

We parted at Ryder’s
boma,
each of us heading our separate ways and saying nothing. I stripped off my filthy clothes and tossed them in the corner, too tired to care. I barely washed before I fell into bed and down into a heavy sleep.

I awoke suddenly, startled by the screech of a monkey in the garden. A leopard must be roaming, I thought sleepily, but there was no familiar rasping cough. Instead, there was a strange, silken noise rustling in my ears and the smell of smoke in the air. I decided someone must be up early, starting a cooking fire against the morning chill, but even as I thought it, I knew it was wrong. It was the middle of the night, far too early for the hearth fires.

I sat bolt upright, throwing off the blanket and calling out. “Ryder!” I don’t know why I shouted his name. He hadn’t come home with me, but in that moment of horror, his was the name that I shouted.

I ran through the house and to the outbuildings, screaming for the men. The barn burned hot and high, and the harsh light against the western sky must have alerted Ryder at his
rondavel.
By the time he arrived, the barn was gone and the kitchen was fully engulfed. Pierre and Omar had rallied the men and they were passing leather buckets of water, but even as they worked I could see it was futile. The lake was full of water but there was no pump to bring it up, and so they worked as best they could, carrying the heavy buckets and passing them from hand to hand. Ryder soaked a handkerchief in water and tied it over his mouth before climbing up to the roof of the house, bucket in hand. He made the trip dozens of times, determined to save the house if nothing else. We worked all the rest of that night, and when the sun rose, it rose upon a battlefield. Two of the workers had fallen from the roof, breaking bones in the process, and several others had collapsed from the smoke and the exertion. Omar had burned his hand badly and Pierre’s eyebrows were singed off. The barn was nothing but a charred ruin and the kitchen with all its stores had been utterly destroyed. The fences and half the garden burned as well, and the guest wing of the house had been gutted. Only the main living area remained, although the drawing room was heavily damaged by smoke.

I sat on what was left of the lawn, both of us muddy, stinking wrecks at that point. As I watched, the tortoise crawled out from under the veranda and made for what was left of the jacarandas, giving me a baleful look as he went. Ryder came to sit next to me, his hands blistered and raw from the night’s work.

“At least no one died,” he said drily.

“Leave it to you to find the silver lining.” I fished in my pocket for a cigarette, but the case had been damaged. All that was left inside were sodden shards of loose tobacco and a few shreds of paper.

“I would have thought you’d have been cured of that after what you just went through,” he said. I gave him an evil look and he smiled. “Cigarettes are in my truck. I would be the gentleman and get them, but if I stand up I’ll probably fall over.”

Soot was ground into his skin, but when he smiled the lines appeared, white and sharp, highlighting his good humour even at the worst of times. I fetched the cigarettes and a flask I found in the glove box. We each took a cigarette and a long pull from the flask before he passed it to the men who stood, shocked and exhausted, at the periphery of the garden. Their women had come to tend them, and for once I wasn’t the one doing the mending and patching. The two with broken bones had been carried off to their homes. Until the swelling went down, the bones couldn’t be set. Pierre applied salve to Omar’s burns and covered them loosely, and the others needed only rest and a good meal to put them right.

“Do you suppose this place is cursed?” I asked Ryder. “Was it built on an ancient Masai burial ground?”

“The Masai leave their dead out for the hyenas, princess. No, you’re just unlucky all on your own.”

“You mean Fairlight never had trouble until I came?”

“I mean you are trouble,” he said. He took a deep drag from the cigarette and immediately started coughing. He spat black soot into the grass and ground out the cigarette on the sole of his boot before clearing his mouth with gin. “If you’ve ruined me for cigarettes I’ll never forgive you.”

I said nothing and he leaned over, pushing his shoulder firmly into mine. He lowered his head, his voice consoling. “You can always rebuild.”

“I can’t rebuild what isn’t mine,” I reminded him. “Fairlight belongs to Edgar now, and for all I know, he’ll want the whole place torn down and the land sold.”

“Pity,” Ryder said lightly. “This place could be a real goer with the right hand at the helm.”

He rose slowly to his feet and put out a hand to help me up. He winced a little as I grasped his blistered hand. “If the smoke gets to you, you can come stay with me.”

“You don’t have a guest bed,” I reminded him.

He gave me a slow smile. “I know. That’s why you would be sleeping out in the
boma.
”

He bent and kissed me gently on the mouth, then walked away. I sat on the remains of the veranda, too tired to do anything else, until Moses appeared. He brought a bowl of corn gruel compliments of his
babu,
and motioned for me to eat while he sat next to me.

I forced down a few spoonfuls. “I’m happy to see you, Moses.”

He gave me a smile, his broad, perfect smile. He sketched a few words onto the ground with his stick.

“You want to stay with me? But I have no cattle for you to tend, Moses.”

He made a putting away gesture with his hand.

“You might think it doesn’t matter, but you will miss the cows very much.”

He put a finger to his chest, then to mine, hovering just over my heart.

“You are in my heart also, Moses.”

My throat was too tight to swallow, so I handed him the bowl. He finished off the gruel happily.

Together we watched the giraffe come and drink at the far edge of Lake Wanyama. It was a small herd, just a few cows with their calves and a few adolescent males trailing behind. They were graceful and silent, bobbing their heads down at a ridiculous angle to get to the water. A crowned crane waded nearby, breaking the water into small ripples that flowed over to our edge, connecting us. And suddenly, the feeling Moses had conjured grew so strong and so deep I felt I could just float away on it. I was in love, really in love for the first time in a very long time, maybe the first time ever. And it was with this place, this Africa, as real to me as any man. The grey-green water of the Tana River was his blood and his pulse was the steady beat of the native drums. The red dust of his flesh smelled of sage from the blue stems of the
leleshwa
and sweetness from the jasmine and under it all the sharp copper tang of blood. In the heart of the Rift lay his heart, and his bones were the very rocks. Africa was lover, teacher and mentor, and I could not leave him.