Whitethorn (87 page)

Each time we met we would talk about the emergency but in a quite specific way. Sam had the knack of getting me to talk about my secondment to the Kenya Regiment and what had happened between visits to Makindi. She didn't believe in burying things, and she was aware that I was, almost on a daily basis, exposed to the interrogation of captured prisoners or suspected Mau Mau. I'd also undergone a training course in the methods of the pseudo gangs which, like Mike, I had found a pretty harrowing experience. In this case I had been prevented from talking to her as the pseudo gangster training was considered classified material. She'd wait until we were blissfully on our own, then smiling, big blue eyes fixed on me, head tilted slightly to one side, she'd demand, ‘Out with it, Tom Fitzsaxby.'

‘What?' I'd reply, knowing exactly what she required from me, and also aware that any obfuscation would not be tolerated.

‘All the awful stuff that's going to fester if you leave it inside,' she'd say. I was never conscious that she did this for vicarious reasons. Sam was constantly exposed to the rhetoric of Mau Mau where the whites were never at fault. Like her brother, Mike, she was Kenyan-born and raised by a Kikuyu nanny, and they spent much of their childhood among tribal children, farm workers and house servants. Unlike her English settler parents, Jock Finger, small-time coffee farmer constantly preoccupied with coffee prices on the world market, and Bobby, a tennis-champion mother, who were away from home most afternoons when the children returned from school, Sam could understand both sides without being an apologist for either. While her parents' attitude to the blacks, like that of most whites in Kenya, was patronising, paternalistic and muted by a great sense of racial superiority, Sam didn't have a racist bone in her body. She actively craved a peaceful Kenya where everyone received the same opportunities and prospered equally according to their ability and efforts. In this desire she was probably an impossible dreamer. In Africa the downtrodden, cheated, beaten and enslaved are always the majority.

The week Sam and I finally consummated our love for each other began in much the same way, with Sam wanting me to talk about the past week so that we could then get on with the simple and lovely business of just being in love. We'd driven to a favourite spot known as
Ol Donyo Sabuk
, a small mountain overlooking rolling green plains. Sam had chosen a place for our picnic, below several small waterfalls. She'd spread a blanket some way away so that we could hear ourselves talk. Sam, if she had any faults, loved to talk. But then, it seems to me most women do. They seem able to talk about their feelings and anxieties with perfect strangers of their own sex and resolve them in concert, so to speak. I wasn't one of your great natural-born talkers, more a listener and lately a sometime witty replier (if that's a word), but definitely not given to spontaneous pronouncements or to exposing my emotions. Camouflage works two ways, with lots of words or very few. I guess, right from the beginning, not a lot of talking was expected from me. Until I went to boarding school in Johannesburg, the longest conversations I'd been involved in were directed to a constantly wagging tail and a pair of pricked-up ears and a Zulu with great big platform feet. Tinker and Mattress were both very good listeners. Then, of course, there was Gawie Grobler at the big rock, discussing shit-square news and the various viewpoints of his mythical uncle in Pretoria. Sergeant Van Niekerk and Marie were also sometime conversation partners, they were the two grown-up people who didn't involve me listening to a diatribe that would result in fresh Chinese writing on my bum. Except for Tinker and Mattress, the others usually did most of the talking. Gawie in particular was a natural-born talker, so that it had come as no surprise to me that he'd studied law at Stellenbosch University. I felt sure that some day he'd become a famous lawyer.

I prepared myself to talk with Sam about the week I'd just experienced, although in my mind it wasn't all that different to the one preceding it. After a while you harden up, you can take more and force yourself to think about it less. Sam, by demanding my weekly verbal expurgation, was untying the knot that ties and binds so tightly around the neck of that invisible bag in which you deposit your conscience, when you become adjusted to what is basically unjustifiable and immoral.

‘Sam, what can I say? The screening and interrogation is constant and the system so terribly unfair. Tens of thousands of young Kikuyu men from the slums of Nairobi are being arrested. They are herded into temporary barbed-wire enclosures like beasts, the military and police using rifle butts and
sjamboks
. There they face the
gikunia
.'

‘
Gikunia
, that means a hooded man?' Sam said.

‘
Ja
, that's it exactly. Each of the arrested men passes by a dozen or so hooded Africans standing at the entrance to this barbed-wire corral, that is, people with full-length cotton sacks over their heads and bodies with eye holes cut out of them. The hooded man or woman is purported to be a loyal Kikuyu who simply shakes or nods his or her head when an arrested man passes. A nod and he is handed a red card, a shake, white. Red means he's a Mau Mau and white, clean. Red means Langata Prison Camp for interrogation, ill-treatment and torture, white means he's sent to the Kikuyu reserve to basically starve. It's as arbitrary as that! How can that possibly be just? The
gikunia
are forced to come up with a decent quota of victims or else they are thought to be Mau Mau themselves.'

Sam nodded. ‘Operation Anvil, everyone's saying how successful it is.' She sighed, then added softly, ‘
Cry, the Beloved
Country
,' quoting the title of Alan Paton's famous South African novel.

‘It's the scale of the operation. Effectively Anvil has rounded up 50 000 men, women and children living in the slums of Nairobi, 20 000 of whom have been given red cards and despatched to Langata, the other 30 000 sent to the hopelessly overcrowded reserves, their homes ransacked and their lives completely destroyed.'

‘How can the authorities process 20 000 suspects?' Sam asked, incredulous.

‘Well, of course they can't!' I shouted indignantly. ‘White officers simply go by appearance, if a man looks “suspicious”, you know, the way he stands, the whites of his eyes, his demeanour, a sideways glance, anything, he is branded Mau Mau. Based on the assumption that more than half the Kikuyu have taken the Mau Mau oath they must, by definition, get some of it right. But it's not moral and it's not just! Arbitrary justice was last practised by the Nazi SS in Poland and Russia and the British fought a war to eliminate it!' I was getting very worked up. I forced myself to calm down and went on to explain to Sam that because my army brief said that I was a lawyer on secondment I was permitted to witness one of the last mass trials where the prisoners were all said to be confessed guerillas.

‘There was no defence lawyer present other than a policeman and an army officer who read out the indictments,' I explained. ‘No formal plea was entered on behalf of the prisoners. It seemed to me any pretence of a properly conducted trial had been abandoned. The hanging judge, unable to pronounce the difficult African names, allowed the black clerk to read them out. He didn't even gavel each name and make the hanging pronouncement. He waited until they'd all been called out, whereupon he simply slammed his gavel down and condemned them all forthwith to be hanged by the neck until dead . . . at the public gallows! Then he announced an adjournment for lunch.'

‘Oh, Tom, how awful,' Sam said quietly, looking down at her hands resting in her lap.

But I hadn't finished. ‘Sam, do you realise that in the last three years more than 1000 Kikuyu have been publicly hanged? In the entire history of the British Empire there have never been this number of civil executions performed in public!'

Sam suddenly burst into tears. ‘Oh, Tom, what shall we all become?' she wept. ‘I am so ashamed, so terribly, terribly ashamed!'

I took her in my arms. ‘Sam! Darling, darling Sam, I really shouldn't talk to you about these matters. I apologise, I
really
do, it isn't fair.'

Sam pulled away from me. ‘Oh, Tom, but you must! You can't keep all this awful stuff to yourself. It's turned my brother into a sad and ashamed person. He used to be such a happy one. I know he'll never be the same again!' Tears streamed from her wonderful blue eyes and down her freckled cheeks. ‘Tom, I simply couldn't bear it if the sadness happened to you,' she sobbed.

I reached out for her. ‘Come here, silly,' I said, trying hard to smile. ‘How can I ever become unhappy with you in my life?' I kissed her on the forehead and then drew her head to my chest. How could I tell this lovely creature that the sadness had first come to me at the age of seven when my friend Mattress was murdered and it had never left me even for one day?

Seated on the picnic rug I held Sam, rocking her gently as if she were a distressed child. After a while she drew away from me and knuckled the tears from her eyes and rose and walked towards the highest of the waterfalls. I watched as she stood facing me, standing within the misted spray, her head raised into it, the sunlight, fractured by the falling water, forming a rainbow above her head. Her light summer dress was soon soaked, showing her lovely figure through the wet cotton. It was if she was cleansing herself, washing away the shame she felt for this lovely country. She lifted her arms and turning slightly she drew her wet hair away from her face and I saw the gorgeous curve of her breasts. Then she walked back and stood over me. ‘Tom, please make love to me,' she said.

‘Next to the waterfall,' I said softly. Taking her hand I led her back to the misty spray where the rainbow colours danced. We undressed and there, on the moss-covered bank of the pool where the white water crashed, Sam Finger and Tom Fitzsaxby made love.

I'm not much good at writing about such things. The words used to describe the loving of two people always seem so weary from overuse, so worn-out. I suppose I was an experienced lover and Sam, as she later confessed, a first-timer, but while making love may be a process that improves with practice, loving is not like that, it doesn't need a descriptive narrative punctuated with random adjectives. It becomes time suspended, a void into which you both plunge and where you hope you will remain blissfully together, forever. It is simply every meaning of the words loveliness and togetherness. Every gasp, every moan, every wonderful movement of Sam's gorgeous body . . . See what happens when you try to use words!

Pirrou taught me that most women don't experience orgasm during the process of making conventional love. And so I suppose I had been pretty well tutored to do what was required by a sexually demanding and sophisticated woman. Of course, I was an eager pupil and I guess I must have become a reasonably practised lover. Pirrou and, in particular, La Piroutte, always gave a commanding performance and expected nothing less from her partner. ‘No came, no gain!' she'd sometimes laughingly quip.

However, nothing of the sort happened when Sam and I made love that first time. I know she climaxed twice, but it wasn't because I was the so-called ‘practised lover performing my masculine magic on her tender young virgin body', nothing could have been further from the truth. I suppose we could have made love in the weeks before the waterfall. I certainly wanted to and constantly dreamed about doing so. I felt sure Sam would have agreed if I'd asked her, but here again the words of the ever clear-eyed Pirrou returned to me. ‘Tom, the first time a virgin makes love to a man she is almost always disappointed. This is mostly because he has been pestering her for weeks, the bulge in his trousers dictating his every waking thought. In the end she usually relents, afraid that she may lose him if she doesn't. The first time for a woman should always be because she is truly in love and can think of nothing except wanting to release the bulge and possess and ravish her lover.'

Pirrou, as she usually was in matters amorous, proved correct. I don't believe I brought very much skill or experience with me into the act of loving Sam that first time. I just needed and wanted her so very much, and she me, that the loving took care of itself, a wholly overwhelming and wonderful thing, climaxing simultaneously. Afterwards we were entwined around each other, lying in the sun with our clothes spread out on a rock to dry. I couldn't take my eyes off her happy face. Every part of her neat body felt so very beautiful. ‘Will you marry me, darling?' I asked.

She didn't answer at first. Slowly unclasping herself, then rolling a foot or so away, she raised herself onto her elbow, her head resting on her hand. ‘Yes, but only after I've completed my horticulture degree. Then you'll have to buy a farm where I can grow
Brassica oleracea
and
Passiflora edulis
and we'll breed thoroughbred horses.'

‘Cabbages and passionfruit, you and me, Fitzcabbage and Passionfinger,' I said. Then, trying to be too clever by half, I added, ‘I guess you'll be the nag and I'll be the stud.'

‘Passionfinger! Why, that's very rude, Tom!' she scolded, her eyes laughing. The warm afternoon sun and her gorgeous body stretched out in front of me did the rest. ‘Hmm, I see!' she exclaimed, her blue eyes growing wide in a pretence of shock. ‘Onto your back at once, Fitzsaxby,' she commanded.

I rolled onto my back and Sam mounted me. ‘I assume you're a novice at all this?' I said happily.

Guiding me gently, Sam grinned. ‘I'll have you know I've been riding since I was five.' She gave an ecstatic little shake of her pretty shoulders as all of me entered her. ‘But you're my very first thoroughbred, darling,' she gasped, then lifting and lowering, she looked down at me. ‘Beautiful saddle!' she said, settling into a perfect trotting rhythm.