The Weather in Africa Page 6

  ‘Oh yes, I agree, Dr Ramtullah. I’ll take her to Nairobi as soon as possible, that’s much the best. But would it be all right if I told my parents they mustn’t come to see Jane? She might be upset or they might.’

  ‘That is very wise, Miss Jane must be having complete rest. You will be telephoning me, I will inform of everything.’

  In the Landrover, driving back slowly to the hotel, Mary Ann said: ‘Jagi, what driver brought this Landrover round?’

  ‘Moses.’

  ‘Did you say anything to him?’

  ‘No Memsaab Mariani, only to bring the car.’

  ‘And when you were looking around the back stairs and the hall, did you talk to any of the staff?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you and I are the only ones who know about this, Jagi.’

  ‘Yes, Memsaab Mariani.’

  ‘No one else must ever know, Jagi. If anyone does know, it will be because you have spoken. I do not ask this for Memsaab Janny, but for my father and mother. They have been friends of your family for a long time, Jagi. I remember when your sister Nyamburu pierced her foot on a nail my mother took her to hospital and looked after her and her foot was very big with poison coming from it and she would have died if my mother had not helped. Do you remember, Jagi?’

  ‘Yes, Memsaab Mariani.’

  ‘Then it will be a secret between us. Tell me, whose room was Memsaab Janny in?’

  ‘Paul Nbaigu,’ Jagi said promptly. ‘That maridadi Swahili from Dar. It was the first time Memsaab Janny went to his room before night.’

  Mary Ann hung on to the wheel. Her hands felt weak, she was afraid her unstable body might do something violent like vomit or faint. There must not be a car accident. She stopped the Landrover at the side of the road, the motor idling, and leaned her forehead against the steering wheel. If I’m not careful, she thought, I’ll start screaming and crying hysterically myself. So it was not Jane’s drinking, not nearly that and all the Africans knew. Jane, who was so beastly to the watu, Jane of all women. It’s ended now; I’ll get her to Nairobi and then back to Europe; I’ll do murder to keep this from Daddy and Mummy.

  Jagi had waited silently, behaving as if he were not there. Mary Ann straightened up and took deep breaths, testing herself. It was safe to drive on and safe to speak. She couldn’t lose her grip again until she had cleared away this awful mess and sent Jane far far from Kilimanjaro.

  ‘Jagi, I want you to pack Mr Nbaigu’s things and bring them to me, when no one is in the office. He will not be staying at the hotel again.’

  ‘Good,’ Jagi said. Well, that was one help; evidently the hotel Africans didn’t like Mr Nbaigu any more than the Chagga coffee farmers did.

  Bob and Dorothy were beside themselves with anxiety but Mary Ann kept reassuring them, Dr Ramtullah reported that Jane was resting calmly, there was nothing at all to worry about. Believing Mary Ann’s story without question, Bob and Dorothy blamed themselves bitterly for having accepted Jane’s sacrifice; were it not for them, she would be singing in Europe instead of recovering from a nervous collapse in Moshi. They failed to notice the pinched, drawn face of their younger daughter. Dorothy said, ‘If Dr Ramtullah thinks it’s better for you to look after Jane, darling, please forget about the hotel; Daddy and I can handle everything. You just take care of Jane.’

  Mary Ann stole enough time to help Jim find a new camp site. Jim was glowing with joy because the Herbarium in Nairobi seemed to think he had come up with a new species of Piperaceae, though they were sending the sample to Kew Gardens for a final opinion. Immortality within his grasp: his name attached to a plant. He was also tense with hope because he had finally had a brainwave about how to manage life, yet did not tell Mary Ann lest his scheme turn out a disappointment. He felt crafty and unclean but supposed that if you managed life a certain amount of cunning and dirt rubbed off on you.

  He had written two letters, the first to the head of his department, with some colour photos, some drawings, and many notes included. He said that this montane rain forest was an unspoiled marvel and deserved more than a year’s study; he would like an extra year, he felt sure he could guarantee then a definitive survey of the plant ecology. Would Dr Harvey put in a word for him with the Murchison Foundation, suggesting an extension of his grant? Obviously this work would redound to the credit of their department and their university (ah, the slyness when you began to manipulate events). There was a financial problem because he realized the university could not pay his salary after the end of the sabbatical year; he would therefore need more assistance to support his family in England, but less money out here. And naturally all this depended on Dr Harvey keeping his place open, in case Dr Harvey agreed on the value of his Kilimanjaro research. Pompous old Harvey, Jim Withers thought, and a fine pompous letter to match.

  The second letter went to his wife Adele and jumped the gun. In it, he announced that he would be staying an extra year on the mountain to complete his study and would of course make the best financial arrangements he could for her and the children, but an extension of his grant would not equal his regular salary. This letter caused him some anxiety. If Adele rang Dr Harvey to protest or gum the works, she would learn he was lying in his teeth but he decided Adele was too brainless to be as crafty as he had become.

  He expected Adele to have a fit, not because her beloved husband was missed and longed for, but because a woman needs a man around the house for odd jobs and because of the promised money shortage. Adele was neither bad-looking nor old, thirty-two now, and just the sort of woman to mate with a chap who sold insurance or frigidaires or cars, a steady small businessman type, interested as she was in boring useful gadgets and what the neighbours thought and what the neighbours owned.

  As for the boys, he could not be certain of Adele’s emotions except that the boys were her property, which was the tricky angle, for she was a great believer in property. On the other hand, they got on her nerves; she was the kind of mother who shouted and administered slaps and complained of the endless work of rearing the young. Dr Withers could not believe that his wife loved anyone though admitting that, since he was not a mother, he had no way of knowing how maternal instincts worked when the crunch came.

  He was banking on Adele to look out for another breadwinner and man about the house, and then to realize that two lively untidy little boys might discourage a future second husband. At aged eight and five Billy and Mike were too young to be harmed by their mother’s lack of intelligence and by the meanness of her standards and ambitions, though they could, he reflected sadly, be having a pretty dull cramped year now. But if only if only Adele left him, Billy and Mike would have Mary Ann for a mother and then choirs of angels would sing and all would be beer and skittles.

  He had sent the letters ten days ago. Dr Withers would not permit himself to fret about the answers, having determined that three weeks was the correct waiting period. Meanwhile he had this new section of the forest to explore and Mary Ann was overburdened with her overpainted, overdressed sister who seemed to have developed a nervous breakdown from frustrated vanity.

  In the parents’ car, driving to Nairobi, Jane was sullen.

  ‘This is all absolute nonsense,’ she said.

  ‘Dr Ramtullah doesn’t think so,’ Mary Ann said, ‘And you’re under doctor’s orders.’

  ‘If you imagine I’m going to hang around the Nairobi hospital for months, you’re mad.’

  ‘Until the doctors say it’s all right to leave, that’s all. What do you plan to do afterwards?’

  Mary Ann chanced looking sideways at her sister. Jane was thin and pale and a tightness around the mouth showed the bitter shape of things to come and her hair lay flat and lifeless on her head. At Mary Ann’s question, there had been a sudden involuntary sagging of shoulders and face, a sigh or a groan repressed. Then Jane lifted her head and Mary Ann had to admire her. Everything was wrong with Jane, she was an appalling person, but now when she was wrecked, Jane’s conceit began
to look like pride and took on the quality of bravery.

  ‘I’ll go to Europe, of course,’ Jane said, head high. ‘I was a fool to come home, Daddy and Mummy aren’t doddering, they can run the hotel perfectly well without my help. I’m through with Africa. It’s the dreariest backward nothing place there is.’

  Jagi told Mary Ann when she got home, exhausted from the long drive, that Paul Nbaigu had come to the hotel and been informed by Kibia at the desk that there were no vacant rooms and when he asked for Memsaab Janny Kibia said that Memsaab Janny had gone to Nairobi and was not returning to Kilimanjaro. Thank God for that, Mary Ann thought, no scene, no argument for the parents to hear. She spoke to Kibia saying that he must remember, if Mr Nbaigu came again in a couple of months as he had before, there were never any vacant rooms since Mr Nbaigu was not the sort of guest they wanted.

  ‘He will not be coming back,’ Kibia assured her. ‘I hear from a man in the Co-op office he lost his job.’

  Not only Jane had seen Paul Nbaigu and the giggling little African girl. Two old women, weeding invisibly and silently under nearby coffee bushes, had seen and heard. They told the girl’s father, who beat the child until she could neither sit nor stand, and they told the manager of the Co-op. He in turn informed Paul Nbaigu’s boss at the Ministry in Dar. The farm people were furious; it was a grave affront and an indecency. This city African, not of their tribe, came to them in his fancy clothes, speaking his fancy Swahili, and debauched one of their girls for his morning entertainment.

  Paul’s boss called him in and said Paul was the biggest damn fool he ever met in his life, if Paul was so randy why not hire a tart in Moshi, and Paul was sacked on the spot. The boss wanted no scandal which would reflect on his section. Both Paul and his superior knew Paul was finished in government work. Mr Mabari would not stick his neck out by covering for Paul or slipping him into another department. Mr Mabari, to keep this dirty little scandal from his own administrative record, said he would accept Paul’s resignation and if Paul could get a job in private industry he would write a non-committal recommendation.

  Paul knew there was no appeal, and besides he would be well advised to go quickly and quietly for they might look more closely into his behaviour if he made a fuss, and thus learn of the cheating on time and work. The top boss of all would be outraged enough by the story of the Chagga girl, and unforgiving about dishonesty towards the government.

  Paul walked through Dar, red-eyed with hate and shaking with panic. Jane, he muttered to himself, walking on the hot pavements, past the Asian shops, past the reek of dried fish by the market, on the dirt lane that led to the small house with its flaking white-washed plaster where four African families lived. Back to the stinking rooms shared with his mother and younger sisters. Jane did it; Jane had picked up his life and smashed it. He was twenty-five and all he had worked for and dreamed of was lost. The years at a mission school when he was such a Christ-loving book-bound kid he wouldn’t even listen to a dirty joke for fear the missionaries would guess and he would lose what he lived for: the scholarship to Makerere. Slave jobs in vacations, ‘Carry the basket, Memsaab?’, ‘Paper, Bwana?’, a kid anybody could kick around for a few shillings. And finally Makerere, the dream come true.

  Maybe he had been a little wild, how could he help it, it was the first time in his life that he had what he wanted, God he was so happy, free, somebody, wearing a short red academic gown in hall, living like a European, maybe he didn’t study enough, they could have given him a second chance. Europeans feared an African with spunk, they couldn’t wait to chuck him out. And how he had grovelled and scraped to get a desk job in the Ministry, where boredom was like pain until, only a year ago, he started to climb, with a car, off on the roads, an official, the liaison between Dar and the upcountry peasants. The months at Makerere and this year, out of twenty-five years; less than two years of the kind of life he had longed for and worked for and suffered for. Jane did it.

  He banged through the room where his mother as usual was washing other people’s clothes, shouting at her that he’d been fired, thrown out, ruined, all because of a lying ugly whore.

  ‘Don’t shout at me,’ his mother said. She was a fat strong-willed woman, long since abandoned by Paul’s father, who had raised six children and took no nonsense from any of them. Paul was the clever one, and also the worthless one. Her pride in his looks, education, success, had withered into doubt. If a man was no good inside himself all the fine clothes and fine ways would not hide it forever. ‘And don’t shout about that woman whoever she is. A man who lets a woman mess up his life can blame himself. You won’t find me crying for you. And you better get a job fast, boy, because Mama isn’t going to feed you.’

  No. He would not plod from office to office, where signs on the doors said: Hakuna Kazi – there is no work. And wait and beg and gratefully, if he was lucky, take a little clerk’s job under some unschooled African or sharp Asian, with a serene white man far off in an air-conditioned office, like a king ruling them all. Jane would pay; Jane would provide the work and good work, clean work, pleasant, well-paid work. There was plenty he could do in that grand hotel of hers. And if she didn’t feel like it, he knew how to get his way. He’d tell her stupid cheerful old Daddy what kind of daughter Jane was, he’d tell the whole hotel full of rich wazungu coming to his country to have a nice time looking at animals and mountains, he’d make such a bad noise they’d hear it all over Tanzania. But now he had no car; the car belonged to the job, not to him. His hate for Jane festered like an infected wound during the ten-hour jolting ride in a bus, surrounded by Africans smelling of dirt and poverty, laughing and babbling like idiots mile after mile.

  He felt fouled when he got off that rickety bus in Moshi, stinking like all the other passengers, his clothes rumpled and sweaty, and now he had to take another bus up the winding mountain road and walk through the dust. He had come to this hotel before in a car, as well put together as a European, stopping always in a Moshi petrol station first to groom himself in the lavatory, changing his shirt and suit if need be. He arrived as an equal with the guests or better because he was a government man and they were only foreign tourists and if any of them stepped out of line they could be deported; he, Paul, could report them, he had power and they had none. Now he came on foot, tired, soiled, an African out of work, like any of his people, the poor and faceless, and he felt with shame that he belonged at the back door, not in the reception hall. The cold hostility of Kibia at the desk, the flat unsmiling stares of the hotel servants, finished him.

  He was defenceless among enemies and afraid. If he made a noise here, Mr Jenkins would call the police. The Europeans always won. They had the money and the real power and they thought ahead and were quiet as snakes and knew what they were doing, and his people were slaves who would serve them, even against their own kind. He walked back down the drive to wait at the lower bus stop. He didn’t walk, he shuffled. The strength was gone from the magnificent body which had been his certain source of pride.

  Counting every shilling now, Paul spent the night in a cheap African hotel in Moshi. He lay on the lumpy kapok mattress on the iron cot and heard through the slat walls the disgusting sounds of his people, loudly attending to the night’s business: peeing, belching, drinking, laughing, talking at the top of their lungs, fornicating, snoring, to the tune of whiney Indian music and solemn news broadcasts on their transistor radios. He felt imprisoned, a man alone, everything lost except his one possession: hatred. Hatred for Jane, for white people everywhere, men and women alike: this passion clamped over his mind forever.

  He wanted to kill them, he had no other desire. All that sleepless night he thought of this: kill them, any of them, all of them. By morning he had thought of a way, without going to jail, and rose with gummed hot eyes and a sour taste in his mouth but no longer ashamed of his filth and stench and his loss of place in the world. He had a new nobler place: he would make his way to the southern frontier and join a camp of Freedom Fight
ers and sooner or later it would be given to him: the chance to kill white people. He could not reach Jane but there were others, and he knew what he wanted, he would not forget or waver. He would be the sword of vengeance and they would come to fear him before he was through.

  Mary Ann brought the two letters, since Jim used the hotel as his mail address, but he would not read them while she was there lest they be dusty answers and he had to conceal defeat. However Dr Withers could not conceal his distraction and Mary Ann, puzzled and rather hurt, left early. Presently Koroga thought his Bwana must be drunk for he was laughing and talking in a loud voice. ‘God bless us every one!’ Dr Withers said, hugging himself and laughing like a lunatic. ‘Oh too good to be true! Too good to be true!’ This called for a celebration; first of all he would have a large whisky, normally rationed because of expense, and read both letters again. Tomorrow he would drive to Moshi and on the way invite Mary Ann to a dinner party for two. He wanted special luxuries for the feast: a tin of pâté, a cake, and a bottle of wine. Could he wait until tomorrow night or should he ask her for lunch? No, dinner, so she wouldn’t have to hurry back to that cannibal hotel which ate her alive, but would have hours for talking and planning.

  Adele had never given him a gift like this; he could almost hear her high complaining voice as he read. He savoured the typical longed-for abuse. Jim, not she, had destroyed this marriage; she knew her duty but Jim felt no obligation to anyone except himself. Did he expect her to sit alone in England another whole hard year, coping with the boys by herself, with not even enough money? She had kept her vows faithfully, but now considered herself free. Unlike Jim, who traipsed off whenever he got a chance – remember Wales, Switzerland, and every weekend he could manage, if he couldn’t go farther, he’d leave her for Kew Gardens – there was a reliable steady man in Reading, Mr Billingsley, who owned a large furniture store.