Rahel sighed.
‘Whether that old lady really left us alone or tried to work witchcraft on us I couldn’t say. Or whether the evil that my husband had seen during the war preyed upon him and upon us after he died. He just collapsed and died, you know, in 1952. Same time as the old king. He would have liked that. Great ones for kings and generals the army people used to be. Of course, we hadn’t started thinking about Uhuru then.’
‘I had,’ insisted Wairimu.
‘Well, I suppose you had, and our top people had; but I hadn’t. That’s all.’
Rahel held her peace. Since 1947 she had dealt with these Kikuyu people, their history of loss and assimilation, their long, hidden malice, their quick calculations and the terrible bent backs of their burdened women. She wanted to shout at them to hold their heads up. Was that only because she was a soldier’s wife or because she had grown up to a graceful carriage and a steadily balanced water-pot? Was it because her ancestral land had been protected by the mosquito and the tsetse fly or because plain speaking, back in her father’s time, had matched the British in their own stiff-necked way?
She subsided back into sleep, dreaming of grainy millet porridge with bitter greens (for in recent years she had quite gone off fish heads), of the cool earthy corner of the house where the filled water-pots were stored according to their use, of drums in different rhythms and starched uniforms with gleaming buttons. When the Community Nurses came they were astonished at the improvement, but let her rest.
CHAPTER TWO
Mary was taking Wairimu’s pulse and the old lady was looking at her attentively. She knew that she must be quiet till the count was finished.
‘You’re Mary, aren’t you?’ said Wairimu. ‘You looked after me before.’
‘That’s right. It’s clever of you to remember.’
‘I remember because I used to be like you once, though you may not believe it. Only more flighty, perhaps.’
The girl smiled, and the old lady was gratified to see her that much better.
‘There’s something the matter, though, isn’t there? You don’t look well to me. Are you – overdue – is that it?’
‘No I’m not.’
‘Sorry, you think me rude. It is only that when you get old you can tell: perhaps that only means you have nothing to do except minding other people’s business. I think I would be a nurse if I were young now. But in my day there were only two choices, picking coffee or looking after men.’
‘And which did you do?’
‘Both.’
‘And I bet you didn’t miss out on a good time either.’
‘You can say that again. And you?’
The weariness came back into Mary’s face.
‘I guess if I’d been young then I’d have done both too. I’m still a student and – don’t tell anyone, now – last month I did think I was pregnant. Thank God I’m not. But what I do know is that I wouldn’t have had any help if I had been. He didn’t even answer my letter. Well, I suppose it’s better to find out too soon than too late, but it depresses you, doesn’t it?’
‘The old, old story,’ said Wairimu softly. ‘You don’t imagine there would have been such punishments for getting into trouble in our old laws, do you, if it hadn’t happened pretty often? Is he a student too?’
‘A student doctor. Nurses are just there to be trodden under their feet, I guess. My big brother warned me already. He helped to educate me and he would be just furious if he knew. He’s engaged to my friend Gertrude, the tall one over there, and I’m certain he’ll treat her right.’
‘Yes, I had an elder brother too,’ smiled Wairimu. ‘He died long ago, of course. He was the first one to tell me about Nairobi and I’m sure afterwards he wished he hadn’t. But cheer up. They say what can’t be cured must be endured, and old age is one of those things you can’t cure.’
Wairimu thought the young man would take her to Nairobi. Years afterwards she saw how foolish that had been, but when a fairy-tale figure appears in your life, do you not expect the surroundings also to burst into a fairy-tale? It was many years later that she saw children creating a fantastic world of drama in their playground and acting up to it. Then she realised how it had been with her in those few passionate days. Or like the film of Adam and Eve which she had seen in some outdoor church arena, with the serpent wriggling up all over again and someone in a seat behind her shouting out loud, ‘You fool, don’t eat it – don’t EAT it!’ and subsiding with a hiss of despair as the sempiternal wrong was enacted once more.
She knew him, of course. He was Waitito the son of Njuguna. Nobody came as close to home as that without your knowing his name. He had probably come to visit his friend and age-mate, Nyambura’s brother. But again it was days before she began seriously to wonder why Nyambura had not accompanied her to the river that morning, and she never put the question afterwards; what would be the good? As though there were not more serpents than one wriggling through the dirt, and how would Eve know – Eve who was older, after all, than Mumbi, if she remembered it right, though what she had learned afterwards never seemed so clear in her head as what had actually happened in those far-off days – how could she know that the serpent was not one of the good gifts she was surrounded with? It was something that had worried her once upon a time when she was having church lessons, time hanging heavy those days on her hands and limbs, how did those first people find out that they must fear a caterpillar but crunch up a locust, that a goat was good to eat but not a dog, that nettles could be tamed by water and fire but bright berries might kill. Perhaps the first Eve found these things only when she was put outside the garden, but Mumbi had the whole mountain.
The young man kept the golden haze about him even when he drew her out of the path into the chilly shade of the trees, and if he could put a spell on her so far outside custom (for even when custom was customarily broken there was a time and place for it, a known penalty and a known outcome), must he not also draw her into that world where custom did not rule?
She asked a lot of questions, those three days, about Nairobi, but he said it was not easy to get a place to build there and on the fourth day he vanished and there was no one she dared ask. Later she heard that he had come to arrange his marriage and he bought the girl, Miriam, a white cloth dress and had a service for her in the mission church, but before that happened Wairimu was away in the coffee.
She used to wander away from the other girls and sit thinking. Her mother was worried and asked if she was ill. What, otherwise, was there to think about? If she feared her daughter was pregnant, there was soon clear evidence that she was not. They even asked if she was displeased with the marriage they were arranging. It was not that either. He was healthy and good-looking enough and as yet unmarried. It was not even that she would not pass the test of virginity, though that too was frightening. It was more that she had touched a magic world and been left behind.
To go to the coffee was also a new thing. It was one way of choosing for yourself. Otherwise for girls there was almost no choice. Boys might choose school or be marshalled into school, and as a consequence they might be chosen for one kind of work or another – in the time of the Great War, recently ended, many boys and men had been forced to go either to work or to fight – but for girls there were very few school places and as yet little choice: when you came home again there was still the marriage to be arranged. It was rumoured that the Sisters might try to keep the girls with them, but in fact the novitiate was not started till later when converts showed they really wanted it: the girl had no alternative to marriage until the coffee came.
You had to walk for about three hours – one of the other girls had pointed out the way. So, since it was not safe to go before light, you had better make an excuse for fetching water