The Weather in Africa Read online

  The Weather in Africa

  Three novellas

  MARTHA GELLHORN

  WITH AN AFTERWORD BY CAROLINE MOOREHEAD

  For L.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  I: On the Mountain

  II: By the Sea

  III: In the Highlands

  Afterword

  Copyright

  :I: ON THE MOUNTAIN

  There was much talk when Jane and Mary Ann Jenkins came home to Mount Kilimanjaro. Mary Ann had been gone for only two years in an American city no one ever heard of, called Cleveland; but Jane was away for twelve long years, cutting a swath in Europe, so the locals understood. Gone into the wide world, far from this mountain, to make their fortunes, and returned to the ancestral hotel with no fortune and unmarried, both of them.

  All the Europeans knew the Jenkins family and all had something to say about the surprise reappearance of the Jenkins daughters. In Moshi, they talked at the hotel bar, the post office, the best general store, the petrol station, the bank; up and down the mountain, they talked in the farmers’ homes when the ladies had a bridge afternoon, at Sunday lunch parties, in matrimonial beds. Henry McIntyre, who’d farmed coffee on Kilimanjaro longer than living memory, delivered the majority verdict: ‘Those poor gormless girls have made a proper balls of it.’

  His wife said, ‘Girls?’ lifting her eyebrows.

  Jane was thirty-two and Mary Ann thirty.

  Everybody sensed defeat, the end of great expectations. Bob and Dorothy Jenkins, the parents, were overjoyed. They had no idea that people were talking about their children.

  But everyone agreed that Bob and Dorothy were getting on and it was only right for the girls to come back and give them a hand. The older generation remembered when Bob and Dorothy showed up, thirty-five years ago, and bought land on a dirt road, back of beyond on the east side of the mountain, to start a hotel. The neighbouring farmers thought they were mad. Who would come to it and why? The hotel was nothing but an overgrown log cabin in those days, with five bedrooms the size of broom cupboards. Bob and Dorothy named the place Travellers’ Rest, and were undaunted.

  There were forty bedrooms now. The log cabin had expanded into a long central building, two stories high, still faced with split logs, that was its charm, that and the great wistaria circling the verandah pillars by the main door, and the golden spray and the mat of ficus leaves and bougainvillaea against the dark wood. Inside there was a fine bar and stone fireplaces and a lounge with comfortable chairs and writing tables and a dining room tricked out in daffodil yellow cloths and napkins. The bedrooms above were chintz-draped, with plenty of first-class tiled bathrooms.

  Eight bungalows, four on each side, stretched in a semicircle from the main hotel: sitting room, bedroom, bath and a little verandah for private drinking before lunch, too cold in the evening. The bungalows were the last word with Swedish type furniture, Dorothy had said, and curtains and upholstery of bright jagged modern designs. The swimming pool was an ornamental blue lake set in the lawn; no one but tourists would be fool enough to plunge into that ice water. Behind the bungalows nearest the entrance drive, they built a tennis court for the young. Landrovers were on hire. All of this was buried in a garden like a huge flower bed. Old Bob was a true gardener, he’d suffered when he had to cut down trees for the new construction. Anything grew with so much rain and mist and unlimited water in the mountain streams.

  No one was disagreeable about the Jenkins’ success. They had earned it. Everybody knew what a sweat it was to make a business thrive in Tanganyika, now Tanzania. The watu, the Africans. You had to be on your toes twenty-four hours a day: they forgot everything; they broke everything; they were naturally unreliable and mindless; you couldn’t begin to imagine what idiocy they would invent next. Specially in a hotel where foreigners didn’t understand and expected slap-up service. Dorothy was after them day and night, checking, instructing. And Bob was a darling. Everyone loved Bob.

  All the resident Europeans found a chance to take a good look at the prodigal daughters. Everyone was curious about the changes wrought by time and absence. Jane had been a dewy English rose, with golden hair and big blue eyes, spoiled rotten by her parents. The dew had definitely dried off, which gave satisfaction; Jane had been too fond of herself, too pleased with her appearance, though no one could say she was by any means a hag now. Mary Ann looked pretty much the same. She didn’t look like her parents, any more than Jane did. Jane the beauty. Mary Ann, officially the homely one. Mary Ann was all shades of brown and average features. Jane had the tall lean elegant body of a fashion model; Mary Ann was short, with a bosom and hips and a waist. No man thereabouts had ever laid a hand on either of them. It had always been an unspoken sour assumption that the Jenkins girls were waiting for a better bet: Kilimanjaro and environs were not good enough for them.

  America had improved Mary Ann. She didn’t dress as sloppily. Before her Cleveland adventure, Mary Ann cut her hair with a nail scissors and wore any old trousers, or dresses like flowered chair covers in the evening. Now she did things to her hair, sometimes piling it on top of her head, sometimes wearing it in that odd younger generation way, as if you’d got out of bed and forgot to brush it, hanging down all over the place; sometimes in a pony-tail with a scarf knotted and floating behind. And miniskirts and well-fitting slacks and pullovers that enhanced her breasts. American clothes. Clothes were reported to be very cheap in America.

  Aside from losing dewiness, Jane seemed to have picked up an extra dose of the haughties in Europe. From the way she behaved, they were all watu to her now.

  ‘I like how they talk,’ said a newcomer, the young bank manager in Moshi, who weekended at Travellers’ Rest, and enjoyed the company and the tennis. Moshi was a dead little town, the week was long and lonely. ‘Where did they get that accent?’

  ‘Chagga,’ Henry McIntyre explained. ‘Chagga English. They spoke Chagga first, running around with the kids in the servants’ lines and the village up there. Considering how they grew up, it’s funny to hear Jane now. She sounds like a typical old colonialist Memsaab. God knows the watu drive you batty but there’s no malice in them, poor sods. No reason for Jane to go on as if they were monsters. Half the watu in the Jenkins hotel have been there all Jane’s life; she used to play with a lot of them. Though I will say she bossed the hide off them, even as a child.’

  Mr and Mrs Jenkins beamed, Bob from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, Dorothy from her sharp darting black eyes. They beamed and relaxed, glad to see the girls taking over. It was the girls’ hotel, they had made it only to give to their girls. Dorothy, who seemed never to have sat down since the moment the hotel opened, now often took her ease by the big fireplace in the lounge or in a woven plastic chair on the verandah. And Bob, who had grown stooped and half bald on this mountainside, looked younger from happiness in having his daughters home.

  Bob and Dorothy agreed that the girls shared out the work wisely. Mary Ann supervised the staff, the supplies and the office. Jane attended to the guests. Jane had real poise and style after her years in Europe; the guests were charmed by her; and she’d become a linguist too. Very important now that they got so many nationalities on these tours. Jane handled them beautifully, speaking French and Italian. The guests were thrilled to hear that their daughter was a celebrity, the famous singer Janina, resting after triumphs in the capitals of Europe. Jane knew the amount of French and Italian needed in a hotel; she’d used those words, living in hotels. The guests sometimes wondered who the little dark girl was, rushing about in the background.

  At the age of seven and a half, Mary Ann’s eyes were opened painfully and permanently. They had returned for their fir
st Christmas holiday from boarding school, Jane from Tanamuru Girls School, the most expensive establishment for young ladies in Kenya, and Mary Ann from a modest little place near Arusha, practically next door.

  Jane said, ‘How’s your school?’

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘I’m so glad.’

  It was like being hit in the face. Mary Ann could not have put it into words; she was not skilful with words at thirty, let alone at seven and a half. But she knew by Jane’s smile and voice and the look in her eyes: the golden-haired princess was graciously condescending to the peasant. That was how Jane saw them and meant them to be. From that day, Mary Ann ceased to follow and adore her older sister.

  She wanted to strike back; she wanted to hurt Jane. She hid a small harmless snake in Jane’s underwear drawer and Jane, screaming with terror, was petted and stroked and kissed and cuddled by Mummy and allowed to sleep in the parents’ room until the fear passed. She broke Jane’s favourite doll, claiming an accident, and Daddy bought Jane a new and better doll. Mary Ann realized then that she was not clever enough to fight Jane. Her parents didn’t love her, they had found her in a basket, she was not their child, she would run away and live in the forest like Mowgli. Mary Ann was unhappy for the whole month.

  But since Mary Ann was born to be cheerful she gave up worrying about Jane and ignored her, which was easy to do as Jane spent less and less time at home. Bob and Dorothy paid more attention to little Mary Ann, thinking she would be sad without her sister. Mary Ann rejoiced to be alone with her parents and back on the mountain, where she always wanted to be.

  ‘Jane’s so popular,’ Dorothy would say with pride and some sorrow. Jane wrote about the wonderful time she was having at Ol Ilyopita with Cynthia Lavering, at her family’s enormous farm in Kenya; Sir George and Lady Lavering, Jane noted. She had been to the Nairobi races in the Hallams’ box with Stefanella Hallam; Mr Hallam owned the best racehorses in Africa, Jane explained.

  ‘Jane’s making fine friends,’ Bob Jenkins would say, awed that his daughter bloomed in the fashionable society of Kenya where he would have felt out of place and miserable.

  Bragging, Mary Ann thought, big fat show-off: a hideous offence. But who cared, the more Jane stayed away from Kilimanjaro the better.

  They would never guess how Jane sucked up to Cynthia and Stefi, the richest, grandest, prettiest girls in school, and how brutally they mocked and rejected her. Nor how she had wooed their mothers, at a school festivity, clinging wistfully to the great ladies until the mothers gave the desired invitations and ordered their daughters to be civil. There were no further visits in those realms of splendour, as Cynthia and Stefi turned sullen and unmanageable; but Jane continued to write to her parents about the Laverings and the Hallams, while accepting third and fourth best offers of hospitality. She hated Cynthia and Stefi who made her beg for what should be hers by right. And she was determined that one day she would be where she belonged, at the very top, looking down.

  Bob and Dorothy were to blame, of course, aside from the mysteries of genes and chromosomes. They had read no books on child psychology or any other psychology and believed in their simple old-fashioned way that love was the best guide in rearing the young.

  ‘You’re my little princess,’ Bob would say, holding Jane’s hand, parading her through the lounge for all to admire.

  ‘You look like a little princess,’ Dorothy would say, smoothing a new dress, giving an extra brush stroke to shining yellow hair.

  To Mary Ann, Bob would say, ‘Be my good little girl and bring home a fine report this term.’

  And Dorothy would say, ‘Tidy your room, darling, don’t dawdle, there’s my good little girl.’

  So they bent their twigs, as parents do, with the best intentions. Jane had to conclude she was a princess in exile since princesses do not stem from pub-keepers with ‘The customer is always right’ as their royal motto. Mary Ann had to conclude that being a good girl was the highest aim in life, or despise her parents as fools. The Jenkins’ friends and neighbours agreed unanimously that Bob and Dorothy were making a perfect mess of Jane though Mary Ann was a dear little thing.

  Jane was a beauty, no getting around that fact. Mary Ann accepted that fact as she accepted Jane’s cast-off, cut-down clothing. It was pointless to resent being plain and plain girls automatically got second best in everything. While Jane took singing lessons in London, she learned shorthand and typing in Mombasa because her parents needed a competent secretary. If Jane wanted to dazzle London, let the silly bitch go to it; her life was here on the mountain, helping to run the hotel. Everyone couldn’t be beautiful; she was happy as she was. Jane, for all her looks and privileges and the blind adulation of her parents, never seemed happy.

  When she returned from the secretarial college and worked with them every day as an equal, Mary Ann finally understood her parents and forgave them. They were loving and humble and very much ugly ducklings and, for no explicable reason, after six years of marriage when hope was gone, they had produced this swan, Jane. Mary Ann realized that Jane was the achievement of their lives, not the hotel. It had never occurred to them that building a hotel 7,000 feet up Kilimanjaro, out of sight of the famous sugar loaf top, on a bad road, was an act of folly. Ignorant and confident, they had built and worked, built more and worked more; the hotel, filling no previously felt want, was a success from the beginning.

  But Jane was a dispensation from heaven, a miracle. Merely by looking at a photograph of Jane they felt singled out for divine favour. Mary Ann, small and cosy and dark, was what they might have expected: an ordinary person like themselves, to be loved, not worshipped.

  Neither of the girls talked to each other or their parents or anyone else about their years away from Kilimanjaro. Jane buried memory under layers of pride. Pride had kept her going and pride reminded her that she was Janina, temporarily resting at her family’s stylish hotel in East Africa until her agent proposed a worthwhile engagement. But waking at night from a bad blurred dream, she could not forget the last memory. The Savoy, in Harrogate: the too large chilly provincial dining room and the terrible band and the clients, often gathered in determinedly hearty conventions, middle-aged, middle-class, safely accompanied by their wives. She had finished her number, microphone returned to Sammy, the band leader, herself slipping behind the curtain to her dressing room, when she was stopped by a voice from the past.

  ‘Hello, love. Don’t you recognize old friends?’

  He was fatter and more common but also richer; he looked oiled with prosperity. Jeff Parks, her secretly married husband of less than a year; a man, scarcely a man then, who had walked out on her when she was twenty-one. She remembered every instant of that final scene and every word. He’d said, ‘You’re as cold and limp in bed as a slab of plaice. And you better live in Africa where you’ve got all those blacks to do the work, no man wants to come home to a pigsty and feed off tinned beans. And besides that, Goldilocks, you’ll never be Lena Horne, never, got it? You’ll never never never make the Savoy.’ Then he left, and his face was alight with relief and gaiety as he closed the door behind him.

  Now he said, ‘Congratulations, Goldilocks. You made it after all. The Savoy.’

  Jane fled from him; she did not cry then, as she had not cried when she was twenty-one. She stood in this bleak cubicle where no artist could ever have received baskets of flowers, throngs of admirers, flattering telegrams, and stared at her face. Her eyes looked crazy with fear. She left a note for the manager, mentioning a cable from home, packed her bags and caught the night train for London. She kept the taxi while she cashed a cheque at the London bank where, year after year, Bob and Dorothy deposited her allowance; it was the least they could do to help their gifted child, all alone in the costly cities of Europe. Then she drove to the airport and waited until she could get a seat on a plane for Dar-es-Salaam.

  The road had been long and stony and cold: singing in coffee bars on the King’s Road, and later in shabby nightclu
bs in Soho, snubbing men, after Jeff Parks, not wanting them anyway, wanting only her name, Janina, on billboards, in newspapers, on records, engagements in great hotels, the stage, films: fame. Then the Left Bank in Paris, a series of basement boîtes, hateful people to work with and the male customers assuming that a girl nightclub singer was also a whore. And always the dead time, between jobs, resting in smelly hotels, listening to her gramophone, practising before the mirror, patting her face with creams and astringents, brushing her hair, exercising her body, fighting off loneliness and doubt and four walls. Until Rome.

  In Rome, there was Luigi, three years younger though she never told him, and beautiful with tight black curls and a glorious profile and satiny olive skin and eyes to drown in and a soft voice murmuring praise and tenderness. He worked as a salesman in a men’s shop on the Via Francescina; he was poor but superbly dressed, they made a stunning couple as they walked arm in arm along the Via Veneto. Her allowance and salary were enough for them both.

  With his touch, Luigi woke the frozen sleeping princess at last. She had not imagined that life held such wild happiness; her singing showed it. Five months of unclouded delight. She felt young and carefree, protected, truly loved, a woman fulfilled. The solitude and ugliness of the past vanished; she had Luigi, the golden present in this magical city, the glowing future. One night Luigi came to the Club Aphrodite glum and Luigi was never glum, always gay, warm, proud of her, passionate. He said he’d lost his job but did not say the boss called him a lazy bum who better find a rich old American to keep him like all the other lazy bums. He was sick of Rome, Luigi said, noisy shoving people; everything cost too much. He was going back to his paese, anyway he’d been getting angry letters from his mother, telling him his duty was to return, his wife was about to drop another bambino. The third, Luigi said, making a face, shrugging his shoulders.