The Weather in Africa Page 3

  She was staring at Paul Nbaigu, hypnotized, when he turned to her and something unknown happened: she felt herself drawn into his eyes as if they had widened like black caves and she was physically pulled into them. At the same moment, mindlessly, she knew that electricity now moved both ways, that he too felt this hot demanding warmth on his body. She blinked, to break the spell; and they looked at each other, startled, sharing absolute knowledge without words.

  Jane did not suggest joining Paul Nbaigu for dinner but sat with her family, lost to everything except the sensation of spinning in a whirlpool, voiceless with terror, and compelled by inescapable force to the dark sucking centre.

  ‘Aren’t you hungry, darling?’ Bob asked.

  ‘No, Daddy.’ Surprised she could speak and surprised by that voice, someone else’s. Her own voice was screaming silently, No! No! No! to another question.

  ‘You don’t look well, Jane,’ Dorothy said. ‘You haven’t forgotten to take your Nivaquine? They say there’s a lot of malaria in Nairobi now. There never used to be, before, but everything’s so changed.’

  Mary Ann was silent too, though eating heartily. An Englishman had arrived that afternoon, in a scarred Landrover, and asked a magical question: what was the best way from here into the rain forest? She told him, longing to ask why, and he obliged without questioning. ‘I’m a botanist,’ he said, and was amazed by the delighted warmth of her smile. Now Mary Ann was debating whether she could seek him out, after dinner, without seeming pushy; wondering, beyond that, if he would let her go along some time to watch and learn.

  Mary Ann was settled in the lounge, chatting to a tall skinny Englishman, whose neck was also tall and skinny and badly reddened by sun, obviously a newcomer getting his first dose of the climate, with a skin all wrong for it. Jane pretended to be casual about the guests’ register: Paul Nbaigu was in room 24. Second floor of the main building, and there was no reason for her to go up the wide wooden stairs. The family lived in a log cabin of their own, like the bungalows only larger and set back in a private garden west of the hotel buildings. Mr and Mrs Jenkins would circulate a bit, asking the guests pleasant questions about their day, available for complaints or requests, and then take a torch to light their way home. Mary Ann seemed glued where she was, hanging on the Englishman’s words. Jane roamed through the bar and lounge and stepped out to the verandah, useful at night for brief stargazing if cloud permitted or it wasn’t raining; in all cases too cold to linger. Paul Nbaigu must be in his room.

  She felt now like a sleepwalker at the edge of the whirlpool, dreaming her helplessness and the force that pulled her. She had stopped thinking of her parents, Mary Ann or any inquisitive guests; she was not thinking at all; she was moving slowly towards the powerful drowning centre. She did not knock at the door of room 24; she turned the knob and entered. He was waiting for her.

  He locked the door and turned off the light; a gleam came from the lighted bathroom. He took her face in his hands and kissed her once, but kissing was not what they needed. In silence, in the shadowed room, they got rid of their clothes, pulling them off and dropping them on the floor. Then he held her, close against him, the whole length of their bodies pressed hard together. He groaned softly, softer than a whisper. She felt deaf and blind; all sensation was direct and overwhelming through the skin. He lifted her and laid her on the bed. They made no sound, and muffled the final wrenching cries against each other’s bodies.

  Much later, Paul Nbaigu looked at the luminous dial of his watch. ‘Go now,’ he said. Jane obeyed, collecting her clothes from the floor and dressing herself without care. The man lay silent on the bed. When she had her hand on the doorknob, he said, ‘Tomorrow’. No other words had been spoken. She moved as secretly as a hunting cat and was not seen or heard on the way to the Jenkins bungalow. The family was asleep; in the morning they would not question her. Adults could not live together if they spent their time questioning. Presumably she had stayed in the lounge, perhaps playing bridge.

  Mary Ann found the day difficult. The cook had forgotten suddenly and entirely how to make apple pie. This sort of amnesia was frequent and why not? Africans never ate the European food, had no idea how it should taste and merely remembered -except for lapses -how to cook it and how it was supposed to look when done. Five houseboys sent word they were at death’s door having got drunk on village homebrew the night before; the hotel was full. Three Landrovers were out of commission just when everyone seemed bent on making the cold bumpy trip to the Bismarck Hut to watch the sun rise or set over the vast gleaming top of the mountain. Several guests had objected to their bar bills which were inaccurate. The barman, who wrote the chits, had in his eyes a look which Mary Ann knew well; he was withdrawn into the dream world that Europeans cannot penetrate or imagine; all his outside actions were meaningless, he was living elsewhere. Routine, nothing special, nothing to get fussed about. But today Mary Ann was absorbed by what Jim Withers, the botanist, had said last night; she was repeating it to herself; she needed time to sort it out.

  He explained himself, he thought simply and clearly, and left Mary Ann baffled.

  ‘I’ve got a grant for a year,’ Dr Withers said. ‘Another scientific carpet-bagger. If it keeps up like this, there’ll be more scientists than business men here, all carpet-bagging like crazy. Poor Africa. Anyway I comfort myself that I’m harmless, don’t cost anyone here a penny and won’t destroy anything. It’s my sabbatical, I’m a botany don in a university you’ll not have heard of, and I’ve got this grant to work up a survey of the plant ecology of the montane rain forest. Best luck that ever happened to me. I’ve always wanted to come to Africa but lacked the lolly, of course.’

  What could it all mean?

  Then they talked about the rain forest; slowly, it seemed that Mary Ann was doing the talking. He listened and said, seriously, ‘Look, this is damned unfair. You should have the grant and make the survey and get the recognition. It’s your bailiwick and you know it like the back of your hand. Let’s do it together, you sign the work too; I’ll see you get paid, if need be I’ll split the grant. It can’t cost much to live here, specially as I’ll be camping.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Mary Ann said, ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it; besides there’s the hotel. My parents have practically turned it over to us, you see.’

  ‘Well, if you can’t take time off for fieldwork during the week, I can bring samples and consult you, and you could surely get away on Sundays. I mean it, I want to work with you. It’s purely selfish of me, you could save me all sorts of time and keep me from making dumb mistakes.’

  Heaven, Mary Ann thought. For the first time in her life, something she wanted to do with all her heart. Not work at all, plain bliss. He was called Doctor, she found out, because he was a Ph.D.; and don meant professor, far better than dear long-lost Miss Peabody.

  She was not going to lose this chance. If the hotel fell apart that might make Daddy and Mummy see how lunatic they were, she didn’t care, Jane wasn’t the only one who had the right to a life of her own. And Dr Withers did indeed need her badly. Mary Ann thought he was wonderfully sporting and eager but not very practical. She hired a safari servant, despite his protests (‘I can cook and look after myself, I’m not used to servants’). But camping, Mary Ann explained, was an occupation in itself: gathering firewood and making fires, boiling water, washing up, washing clothes, even if he cooked for himself which was a good idea; and besides someone had to help him in the forest. No, it would be unwise to set up his tent actually in the rain forest, too damp and gloomy, but she knew a sort of glade by a stream where she’d always thought she’d like to stay.

  In the late afternoon, between tea and dinner when not much could happen at the hotel, Mary Ann drove up the track and bumped across country to Dr Withers’ site, a grassy slope shaded by wild fig and mvule and podo trees, with a stream between high banks, the water creaming around boulders and smooth over brown pebble
s. She counted a day ruined if she could not come; her heart lifted when she saw the neat camp. The big tent that was Jim’s home and office, Koroga’s small tent, the thatched cookhouse lean-to with firewood stacked to keep dry, the careful circle of stones around the charred camp fire, the tarpaulin-screened latrine, the unscreened shower bucket hanging from a branch.

  Jim learned a little Swahili before he came; Koroga knew some English after three years at a mission school but Jim had asked Mary Ann to translate in Chagga his one firm order. ‘I didn’t come here to spoil the ecology,’ Jim said. ‘Please explain to Koroga that we’ll leave no muck behind us, we’ll keep this place clean, we bury or burn. I never saw anywhere more beautiful and we won’t pollute the stream either, we share the latrine. Get that across to Koroga like a darling. I’ll raise the roof if I see one tin thrown in the bushes.’

  Jim and Koroga were always there, back from cutting their way through the forest, collecting samples. The big plastic bags full of the day’s haul lay beside the table where Jim sorted the samples and wrote his observations in the field notebooks. Plant presses were drying on two charcoal braziers. If Koroga was not washing or ironing their clothes, he might be practising with obvious delight his new skill of mounting samples with Bexol. Jim said that Koroga’s hands, with the dried bits of leaf and flower and that oil can of plastic glue, were more adept than his; just as he said the accuracy of Mary Ann’s line drawings in Indian ink made his look like baby bungling. ‘What would I do without you both?’ Jim asked. She adored the feeling of this place, three workers in the vineyards of science.

  She had returned Jim’s paint-box and delivered a watercolour sketch and her information on the habits and habitat of a plant with a narrow pointed leaf and three-petalled lavender flower when Jim suddenly put his arm around her and laughed and said, ‘You know what you are? You’re the most wonderful odd little creature who ever lived.’ And kissed the top of her head. That made Mary Ann shy, but the next day he had forgotten his outburst and was asking about a spidery moss. Mary Ann found it intoxicating and incredible that a professor should make notes on what she said.

  Jane had become less of a nuisance. She went off to Dar where she said there were many travel agents, as yet unapproached; and then to Arusha, another haven for travel agents. When at home, Jane seemed detached and rather sleepy. She made no further exhibitions with Paul Nbaigu, who stayed at the hotel more often now; and Mary Ann thought it a good thing that Jane spent so little time with the guests, not having been sure that the guests were as charmed by Jane’s queenly intrusions as Daddy believed.

  Paul Nbaigu had never had a white woman before. He imagined them cold and proud and thought probably their skin would be clammy, fish-belly white. Jane must be in a class by herself. She was the most passionate and insatiable woman in his wide experience. Sometimes he felt they were eating each other, swallowing each other whole, not just copulating. There was none of the teasing and joking you got with African girls; Jane looked at him, he looked at her, they didn’t need more to set them on fire. He hated to admit any of the backwardness of his people but a lot of African girls were still circumcised and you never knew how much they were fooling you and how much they felt. With Jane, you knew. And he had tested her good and proper, he wasn’t taking any Memsaab stuff, he made jolly sure she worshipped every inch of his black skin. Beautiful, my God, she was beautiful, and the easy stylish way she wore those clothes that came from Paris and Rome and London. All for him, all to himself, and no other black man before him.

  On the other hand, he had to be careful. He did not mean to risk his job for her. A few top African people had European wives, but they were the old boys, in at the start. He doubted whether even a European mistress would be wise nowadays. He intended to end up a Cabinet Minister and saw no reason why not. Though he lusted for her, simply thinking about her made him sweat, he was going to tell Jane she had to stop following him around. She wasn’t exactly invisible and he wasn’t unknown, being an official; and it began to look dicey the way she was in Dar or Arusha when he was, and he couldn’t chance coming to Travellers’ Rest so often either. The local Co-ops might begin to wonder why he showed up all the time and make inquiries at the Ministry in Dar and nothing good would come of that.

  When he explained to Jane, she beat against his chest with her fists and cried out with such anguish that he clamped his hand over her mouth. Then she wept in shuddering sobs, the way his womenfolk wept at a death. Nothing would calm her except his body, and he had a frightening vision of an octopus, strong white writhing arms holding him, crushing him. Later he said it again, coldly, ‘The way I want or not at all.’ Then, curiously, ‘Don’t you ever think about your family? What if they got wind of this? They wouldn’t be very happy.’

  ‘I don’t care, I don’t care. I don’t care about anything except you.’

  ‘You care about me, pretty Jane, from the waist down. If you really cared about me, you’d care about my career too.’

  ‘Oh, career! Don’t be ridiculous! What sort of career is there in a stupid little tinpot African country?’

  It was the turning point. He did not desire her less but saw her now as the enemy, like all whites, in her heart despising his country and his people and thus himself and his hopes. To Jane, they were servants, people without faces, meant to take orders. She would obey him, Paul decided, and she would eat dirt and like it, and then finally she would beg forgiveness for insulting his nation. Jane followed him to Dar once more. Paul had never told her where he lived. Before, he had come discreetly to her hotel room late at night. This time Paul refused to see her and she had the sense – not because of her family or her reputation but from her knowledge of Paul – not to pursue him to his office or waylay him outside the Ministry door.

  Jane returned to Kilimanjaro and waited, suffering the agony of withdrawal symptoms. Dorothy wanted to call the doctor in Moshi but Jane said she was only tired, for God’s sake leave me alone, let me rest in bed, send trays from time to time and please please please will everyone get the hell out and stay out. Mary Ann was too involved with botany and Jim Withers to pay much attention. ‘Temperament,’ Mary Ann said. ‘After all, she’s the famous singer, Janina.’ The parents were distressed by both their girls: one seemed to be hysterically ailing and the other seemed heartlessly indifferent.

  Mary Ann was concerned about Jim. February was supposed to be a dry month but instead was one long drip; the man had lived in his tent for six weeks and would soon be growing moss, not studying it. He would turn against the place; he would want to move; Mary Ann could not bear the thought. No, of course not, Jim was a scientist with work to do, and she had never seen a man so concentrated and so disciplined. She had also never seen a man so constantly exuberantly happy. Until the last few weeks. Now something was the matter. Perhaps he only needed a break, a rest, and surely he would enjoy a hot bath. She suggested that he weekend at the hotel.

  ‘Darling Mary Ann,’ said Jim. ‘It’s a beauty hotel but it’s expensive as it has a right to be. And my branch of science is not spoiled with money. I’ve got to stretch that grant a good long way. Besides, this home you chose for me is the best I’ve ever had. The richest man in England would envy me; imagine having trout out of your own stream for breakfast.’

  So Koroga was poaching upstream with poison in the time-honoured Chagga way. Mary Ann gave Koroga a sharp look, Koroga smiled innocently, and Mary Ann decided to forget it. In fact, good for Koroga if trout at breakfast made Jim happy.

  ‘I consider that I am living in the lap of luxury,’ said Dr Withers who meant it but also pined for a hot bath and something longer, wider and softer than his canvas cot.

  ‘You had a very expensive room. We’ve got much cheaper ones. Though I wish you’d come as my parents’ guest. We invite friends all the time.’

  This was not true and would have resulted in early bankruptcy. Mary Ann knew Jim would not accept that invitation but she could quickly whip the price card off th
e room door, and there would be no problem with her parents in making special arrangements about his bill.

  ‘We’ll see, and thank you,’ Dr Withers said. ‘We really ought to set up as a permanent team. You know everything and I can look up the names. Now help me place this uninspiring growth. It’s Haloragidaceae, the water milfoil family, of which there are eight genera and …’

  ‘How much is your grant?’ Mary Ann asked sternly, because she was so afraid of offending him.

  ‘£2,500. Sounds a lot but the Landrover and the camping stuff and air fares all come out of it. I told you my branch of science isn’t overwhelmed with money. If I could find a poisonous grass or a flower that killed on touch, and think of a way to plant them wherever our rulers dreamed up an enemy, I’d get a grant of millions. But nobody, I promise you, gives a hoot for botany except some scientists and little old ladies who like to press wild flowers.’

  ‘And me,’ Mary Ann said.

  ‘Yes, and you, bless you.’

  ‘Please come to the hotel for the weekend.’

  ‘Mary Ann, I should tell you that I’m married.’

  She hoped and prayed that her face showed nothing, not knowing until this minute that there would be anything to show. Now she knew, and it was heavy sad knowledge.

  ‘I don’t see how that affects having a bath,’ she said.

  ‘No. But it affects me. You see, I’m in love with you. And I don’t know what to do. I’m thirty-six and badly married and I have two children and no money to mention and I clamber around the forest all day thinking of you and when you’ll come and when I’m not doing that I think about Adele and how frightful it will be to go home to her and then I think about Billy and Mike.’