Authors: Fiona Shaw
Meg looked across the drawing room. Mrs Bromley’s furniture, too, was upholstered in flowers, and now swathes of bias-cut dahlias rustled and shifted themselves dizzyingly upon a bank of upholstered marigolds and daisies.
What do I do, Meg wondered, to keep England about me? It isn’t dressing in flowers. But it might be growing them. I used to like putting them in jars when I was little.
Mrs Bromley was in the middle of a lecture.
‘… the thing is,’ she said, ‘everybody is an immigrant. Us, the Masai, Kikuyu, everybody. It’s the Arabs who’ve been here the longest. Mr Bromley said thousands of years, but I’m not sure I believe that. The Arabs are the kings of trade, of course; while the Masai and the Kikuyu just wander about with spears and count their cows and goats. Don’t really grow very much, only what they need. You can see that in their shambas, can’t you?’
Meg remembered a line of jam jars on the kitchen table once, and one dandelion, was it? Or some other pretty weed, in each. Her mother hadn’t thought them pretty, though. She wondered whether her mother picked flowers for the table, now she’d gone. Her mother did most things at the kitchen table. She’d have written the letter there. The most recent, unexpected letter. Maybe she put daffodils in a jar. It was that
time of year in England.
‘Can’t you?’ Mrs Bromley repeated.
Meg nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said, and Mrs Bromley looked at her for a moment, then went on.
‘Then there are the Europeans. We might be the newest, but we do know about farming. So we’ve got on and bought the land, fair and square, planted the coffee and the hemp and so forth. Improved the country no end. Now the Africans say it’s all theirs, but what did they ever do to it? Never even laid claim to it. So frankly they should prove it’s theirs, or put their money where their mouth is. Stop getting up in arms about it all and show willing.’
Meg made noises now to show she was listening. The lecture was the price of friendship with Mrs Bromley. Although it varied a little from day to day, depending on what pearls of wisdom Mr Bromley brought home with him, basically it always followed the same course. And once she had it off her chest, Mrs Bromley became again the generous, toto-hugging settler’s wife most people knew her as. Meg could have told Mrs Bromley that the Africans couldn’t buy the land, or lease it, because the British had made sure of it, drawing things up to favour their own, because that was what George had told her. But she didn’t, because she didn’t share Mrs Bromley’s concerns, nor did she want an argument.
Meg didn’t lay claim to anything out here, except her children. Even her precious patch of garden was borrowed, and she knew that when she returned home, Africa would take back the ground very quickly. She looked around Mrs
Bromley’s drawing room. Old paintings, of ancestors, bowls of fruit and dead birds, hung on the walls. There were delicate tables with wood inlay in chequerboard style that Meg didn’t dare put her drink down on. On the floor was a large patterned rug that Mrs Bromley said was from Persia, and the sofas were plumped with green velvet cushions. A glassfronted cupboard was full of silver objects and figurines – shepherdesses and pierrots. Except for the mosquitoes and the view from the windows, this drawing room might have been in deepest England, and Mrs Bromley, seated in her flowered glory, was queen. But it wasn’t Meg’s England, and she no more belonged to this room than she did to the Africans’ thatched rondavels.
Through the window Meg watched Will running across the lawn. He was chasing after Johnty Bromley, who at seven years old had all the glamour of the older child.
‘Are you sending Johnty to England for school?’ Meg said.
‘In September,’ Mrs Bromley said, and Meg saw her shoulders drop as she said it. ‘He’ll be eight by then. Mr Bromley insists.’
After Will was born Meg had written to her mother: ‘His name is William Alan Garrowby. Alan for George’s father, and William for my brother. He will be known as Will.’
She wrote, too, that she and the baby were doing well and that she hoped it would not be too long before his grandmother saw him.
She didn’t hear back for three months and when a letter did finally arrive, there was no word written about her baby
son. No congratulations, no hope of seeing him, no word of support. Nothing.
‘Is Johnty looking forward to it?’ Meg said.
‘He thinks it’s all castles and kings and whatnot.’
‘My mother thinks Africa is all elephants and Boers.’
Mrs Bromley laughed.
‘Anyway, it’s got to be done,’ she said, ‘and if it were done, then best it were done quickly, as the poet said.’
Meg liked Joyce Bromley. She was a salt of the earth kind of woman, like Mrs Gilmer back home. She knew her liking was at least partly expedient. The Bromleys lived just down the hill. When George was away, they were her first port of call in an emergency. Besides which the two men were about to go into business together.
‘You didn’t think of going back to England with Johnty, then?’ she said.
‘To live? Goodness, no. The other two have coped. Besides, Mr Bromley needs me here. Expensive business, educating one’s children. You’ll discover that soon enough.’
‘I can’t bear the thought.’ The words came out before Meg could check them, and behind them the press of tears.
Mrs Bromley tsked again.
‘Heavens, girl, Will is only four years old. You’ve got years yet.’
Meg felt Mrs Bromley study her face.
‘You’re upset about something,’ Mrs Bromley said. ‘Distracted.’
‘I’m absolutely fine.’
‘A disagreement with George?’
Meg shook her head.
‘It’s just been a bit of a morning.’
So she told her about Henry’s fever, which had broken now, thank goodness, and about Will being lost and found again. She didn’t mention the letter in her bag, tucked flat between her purse and the shopping list, and Mrs Bromley made sympathetic noises and mixed Meg another gin and orange squash, despite her earlier protestation.
‘You’ll work it off, digging your lovely garden,’ she said, putting it down firmly beside Meg. ‘But listen, arguments about the children going away are as old as the hills. We all have them. Wife in tears, husband with his chin out, stubborn. You know that.’
Meg looked at her. That was it, of course. Children going away. A child had gone away from her home and they never talked about it, her mother and her. Never mentioned it. Never said his name. And then she wrote his name in a letter. Dared to. Dared to miss him, to wish for him, and the letter drowned with the ship. So then she placed his name next to her heart and gave it to her son. Her mother couldn’t silence it now.
‘Let me guess…’ Mrs Bromley went on. ‘… George has had the boys’ names down for prep school since birth, and of course they must go because what was good for him, family tradition, etc etc.’
Meg wondered if it was possible that Mrs Bromley didn’t know what kind of background she came from, or George.
‘He only told me a month ago,’ she said. ‘Will’s to go to a prep school on the South Downs. He won’t even be eight years old when he goes. George mentioned it in the same breath that he told me about the plan for the dairy farm.’
She thought: I couldn’t bear to cross a single road or walk along a pavement or past a church. My son will have to cross an ocean.
‘Doesn’t make one feel better about these things when one’s husband compares one’s children to prize Friesians,’ Mrs Bromley said. ‘I’ve explained that to John I don’t know how many times. But he’s a shrewd businessman, your husband. Too canny for the colonial service. I’m glad he’s going into business with John, because frankly, John is good enough with the livestock, and with the Africans, and he can tell if the coffee’s roasted well, if it comes to that; but he hasn’t got a business head. Not like George has.’
‘George has certainly read enough books,’ Meg said.
‘Think he’s done more than just read the books,’ Mrs Bromley said. ‘He’s done jolly well for himself, and for you and the boys, and well done him, I say.’
‘I don’t know very much about George’s work,’ Meg said. ‘He won’t tell me very much.’
‘Well, you’re a brave girl,’ Mrs Bromley said puzzlingly. And Meg had that old sense of not being told the whole story. George called her his little woman when she asked him something he didn’t want to answer and Mrs Bromley told her she was a brave girl. She didn’t remember what her mother had said, but then she had given up asking her for answers when
she was still small.
They ate their lunch on the veranda, the two women at one table and the little boys at another.
‘It’s just the cards table. A bit rickety. But frightfully grown up for them,’ Mrs Bromley said.
Behind her, Meg heard Johnty whisper something and Will giggle.
‘Mind your manners or you can go and eat in the kitchen,’ Mrs Bromley said. ‘Johnty, you’re the big boy, so you can show William what to do.’
After that the boys behaved impeccably, tucking their napkins under their chins and cutting their fish into small pieces. When Mrs Bromley was called away by her houseboy, Meg listened in to their conversation.
‘We can play soldiers again after,’ Will said. ‘Cos I can run faster when I’m not hungry. I can run fast as Njombo nearly.’
‘Who’s Njombo?’
‘I play soldiers with him. He’s nearly as big as you.’
‘Is he one of the totos that runs after the motor car?’ Johnty said.
Will nodded.
‘He puts his hand on my window.’
‘Then he deserves to be run over. That’s what my father says.’
‘Well, my daddy thinks he’s brave,’ Will said.
‘Anyway, it’s silly, playing with Natives. When I go away to England I’ll play rugby. Only baby children play with the Natives.’
Mrs Bromley came back with a shopping list.
‘I’m going into Kandula this afternoon. Anything you need?’
Meg shook her head.
‘Of course you’ve been in already today. Lost your boy and found him again.’
‘Yes,’ Meg said. And she thought: I can’t open the letter on my own too. I can’t bear to.
Meg had made her garden just out of sight of the house, where the land dipped down to form a small hollow. A cluster of juniper trees and wild fig gave some shade and she’d made flowerbeds and what she thought of as a glade with English flowers: daffodils and jonquils, harebells and tiny violets that flowered suddenly, rapidly, once the long rains came. In one corner there was a small pond and it was dense now with yellow flag irises and water lilies. Sometimes she’d see a frog, submerged to its shoulders, and she’d watch the frog and the frog would watch her back, unblinking, unmoved. In the flowerbeds she had planted roses and lavender, hollyhocks and pansies, not with any great design, but because they were the flowers her mother grew and so they were familiar.
The sun was fierce now. She could feel the press of it through the sleeves of George’s old shirt, through the brim of her hat. Later, once the children were in bed for the night and the air was cooler, she would carry down watering cans. She thought perhaps she’d read her mother’s letter there then, if the lantern gave enough light. But for now there was weeding
and deadheading to do, and she would cut some fresh flowers. She bent down and pushed her fingers into the earth. It was so warm and so dry. This piece of garden was hers. It was her own place where she need not pretend to anything. Sometimes she would talk to herself amongst these English flowers. She’d tell herself that she’d been a fool, or that she’d been wise and all would be fine. Sometimes she was very sad and she’d find herself crying, the tears lost in the dark soil.
Jim. This was the only place she’d allow herself to think of him. The only place she’d name him. Jim. Jim. Jim. Again and again, till the name was no more than a sound. She wondered if he were alive; she’d looked for his name in the lists, but she could have missed it. And if he were alive, she wondered whether he was married now. That gave her a stab, like catching her thumb on a rose thorn. She wondered if he had a child; if he had another son. Sometimes when Will laughed, she saw Jim’s grin and Will had a way of remarking, already, that was so like Jim that it shocked her: ‘Phew,’ he’d exclaim, or ‘Wow,’ and it must have been in the gesture he made that she saw Jim standing there, on her cabin floor, and she would turn away.
What if George suddenly remembered the soldier from the lifeboat who watched them, who watched her, when the others had turned away again? What if he remembered her looking back as they left the quayside, the last of all her looking, her longing over those endless days on the endless sea; and the way that the soldier lifted his head to her, eyes steady, then lowered his glance again?
Meg cut white roses for the bowl in the dining room.
Her fear was absurd. But she still looked at her son and saw another man’s child. Will had been born full term, a dark-haired scrappy bit of a baby. This surprised the doctor because long fingernails and flaky skin were a sure sign of an overdue baby, but the parents were quite sure about the conception date, and the baby was healthy and the mother was fine, so he didn’t enquire further.
‘The spit of you,’ he only said to her, and lifted his hat.
Then carefully Meg bit down each of her baby’s nails, and gently she rubbed baby lotion into his dry skin. And when George came home later, they looked together at their sleeping baby, and George laid his hand on his forehead like a blessing.
Once she had filled the basket with roses, Meg walked back up to the house. Henry still slept and she was loath to wake him after his fever, though she hoped this didn’t mean he would be awake during the night. In the kitchen the air smelt sweet with Victoria sponge. Will knelt on a chair at the table and stirred a bowl of butter icing with a wooden spoon. Elbow hooked out, head down so he could bring all his small boy strength to bear, he looked like he was stirring with his life.
Standing behind him, Meg made a circle in his fair hair with her finger.
‘Crown fit for a king,’ she said.
Will kept on, intent with his task.
‘Kibaki found a snake inside the house,’ he said after a moment.