Wairimu delighted in the different food smells, horse smells, tobacco smells and cosmetic smells that wafted across the pavement from each group. She was interested and amazed by the skin colours and textures, more various than she had dreamed of, and the voices that ranged from gruff and guttural to shrill and staccato like those the old people said you used to hear at night when the forests were thick and full of life.
She was summoned from her reverie by the kitchen attendant. Clothes would be brought tomorrow, they were told. Everyone was expected to be very clean and to be wearing something decent underneath so that they could be fitted without making anybody ashamed. Please remind everyone to be ready early in the morning. Well, there was some pleasure still in getting a new dress, just as there used to be in selecting the six goatskins, turning and matching them this way and that to make the best of the colours and the patterns. Of course she would remind the ladies and inspect them too. Seventy-eight years had never yet taught her to mind her own business.
The local donors’ committee had come up with thirty dresses and two of the ladies had come down to distribute them. It was an occasion they always enjoyed, an opportunity to give pleasure through their generosity and to show how free they were with the old women, patting them on the shoulder and helping to pull the garments over their flabby chests. It was an agony for Matron, who knew that the gifts got together must vary greatly in their appeal and durability, and also that at least half of them would be too small. One of the ladies was an Asian diplomat’s wife, the other a Kenyan lawyer, glad to find excuses to get out of the house during her maternity leave. She had hopefully brought along a sewing kit for alterations, but Matron was envisaging long weeks of complaint as she presided, smiling, over the coffee and biscuits. She wrote out a list of the residents under the headings large, medium and small and advised the visitors to divide the dresses in the same way to reduce the area of dispute, and to call in ten ladies at a time. Then she firmly withdrew. Let the charge of favouritism land on other heads for the time being.
Of course the residents enjoyed themselves at first, holding up and fitting, admiring themselves in a mirror brought for the purpose from Matron’s quarters, having photographs taken. But as the actual allocations were made discontent began to show. In the large category Rahel was no problem: if it was long enough, not much else mattered. Priscilla was so used to fitting into things that the shirt-waist that was too narrow for any of the other tall women suited her very well: it happened, in fact, to be trimly cut and sedate in colour. Sophia got hold of the most glamorous dress of all.
‘You’ll be able to put a buibui over it when it wears into holes,’ Mama Chungu commented acidly.
Bessie was easy-going in the medium class. She was used to regarding a dress as a raw item that would go through various metamorphoses before it dropped into grey and musty rags. Nekesa was satisfied with the print dress she got, though they had to borrow a wide belt from another outfit to cover the gap at the waist fastening. The ‘small’ group were the most constrained, most having substantial muscles, in spite of their apparent skinniness, compared with the teachers and secretaries from whom the clothes had come, but Wairimu managed to land a sturdy dress with red and purple flowers by leaving the zip undone under her shuka.
‘You see,’ she said next day, pouting, ‘Sophia got the best of the dresses. She always comes in for favours.’
‘It fitted her,’ Priscilla answered patiently. ‘I liked it, but it would have hung like a sack on me. And you are shorter – it would not fit you.’
‘I am not saying I wanted it. But they favour her. Just because she is a convert. Why didn’t they send her back to Mombasa?’
‘Why didn’t they send you and me back to Nyeri? Because there is no one to look after us there. But for her it is worse, because she is now a Christian and some of the family would take revenge on her. I hear that her son will not even have her name mentioned in his house.’
‘Sophia, Sophia,’ repeated Wairimu. ‘We hear it often enough for goodness sake. Fat and flabby and flaunting herself like a young girl. Look at her hands – never did a hard day’s work in her life. And all those bangles – jingili, jingili, jingili!’
Wairimu tossed her head in a way that might once have been called flaunting and remembered just in time that it was forbidden to spit on the cement floor.
‘Work for them is different,’ said Priscilla gently. She did not feel at all gentle, remembering how long it was since she had held a hoe herself. Remembering that she was as tall as Sophia and had once had heavy limbs and loins that would have rounded out with bearing children, breasts that were eager to be filled and fill again.
She had seen Mombasa several times, the first long ago in the war days when Jim was a baby and she had gone down with Mrs Bateson during the school holidays to help. Mr Bateson was busy on the farm and could not go. She had seen, even then, that the women worked. Those outside the town dug their vegetables and kept their chickens and goats, but inside were people who lived on money like Europeans. They traded, made sweets or mandazi for sale, sewed, plaited mats or baskets, bargained at great length, looked after their homes with satisfaction. True, in that hot sun and staying close to home, you might have thought them lazy in movement. But they were not lazy in the things that concerned them.
Sophia was pleased with the new dress. It had cunning pleats and big sleeves and a pattern of sequins. Some diplomatic lady of mature age and figure had once had it made for cocktails, for leisurely hours on ships or terraces. She felt queenly in it, as she remembered in her young womanhood poring for hours over materials in the bazaar and making them up with such long delight to emphasise every good point in her figure. So that one shuddered with pleasure, even under the modest buibui, waiting for the other women to pull and touch and handle the fine work. This one would be hard to wash, she knew, especially in cold water, to dry in a dusty compound, but one could not always be prudent, and in a place like this death stalked around the corner: one need not for ever be thinking of making things last.
As a child she had been taught to be careful, but not too careful. In her pleasure at the new dress she dared to think back to those days – endlessly warm days; even when the rain pelted down and made streams of the alleys of the old town, pools all over the too-flat roads of the new town, you were paddling in warm water, still comfortable. You were always crowded, but not in want, and the air was fragrant with spices, oiled bodies, coffee, fish, salt, tar. Perhaps this was why the Refuge always felt so empty, the vacant atmosphere of disinfectant and boiled potatoes, the clean earthy smell that clung to these Kikuyu women and the sour, outlandish, yesterday’s gruel of those others from the west. It was not that she did not like them, but they seemed to lack any notion of pattern, ordered their words in grunts and cackles.
She remembered as a little girl the excitement of people always coming and going. The rails still ran through the streets all the way down to Kilindini port, with trolleys pushed by men in uniform, carrying Europeans and other important people or crates and parcels for the big ships. In spite of the conflict between Arab and Swahili, everyone took notice when the town crier went round, with his buffalo horn and little stick, to make the announcements, or when the elders turned out richly dressed for the seasonal religious ceremonies. She remembered the lamplight procession and the fireworks after they heard that the Great War was over and that King George had won it, and the other time, when she was about ten years old, that Swahili and Somali had all at once been lumped together with the ‘natives’ from inland and had to carry passes. At least Mombasa prided itself on still having more civilised men than other places, exempt from some of the ‘native’ ordinances because they could read and write, interpret from Arabic to Swahili or English, and were engaged in government service or skilled