Matilda looked up at the sound of his footsteps.
“Hello, dear,” she said, returning to her book. “Have a nice trip?”
“I did,” Temple said. His wife never ceased to astonish him: he might have popped out for ten minutes. “Very interesting. And successful.” He chose his words carefully, conscious of the creeping onset of guilt as he bent to kiss the top of her head. He had a sudden image of the oiled, compliant whore in the Kitumoinee Hotel. Now, in his home, with his wife, family and farm around him, he wondered what had possessed him to visit the place.
“How are you?” he said, a flood of tenderness making his voice tremble. He cleared his throat. “Everything go fine? No problems?”
“What?” Matilda said, looking up and squinting at him. “Oh yes. All well.”
“Good,” Temple said. “Good, good, good.” He sat down. There was a tray with a tea pot and milk jug on it. He cupped his hands round the pot.
“Coldish now, I should think,” Matilda said. “Why not have a peg?”
Temple squeezed her hand. “I think I will. Join me?” But she hadn’t heard, she was reading again.
Temple went into the house. The dining room table was covered with the residue of some disgusting meal. Enamel plates, glasses and cutlery were assembled haphazardly on its surface among damp spills and pieces of food. His children had been fed, that at least was something. He went through into the kitchen. This room was practically bare. In the centre of the floor stood a table. In a corner was a stoneware water filter and a large meatsafe, a fly-proofed cupboard whose four legs stood in small tins of water to protect it against invasion by the ants that swarmed everywhere on floor and walls. Along one of these walls was a three foot-high concrete trough, filled with charcoal and covered in thick iron grilles. It was on this crude instrument that all their cooking was done. Temple walked to the back door. In the gathering dusk he could just make out, beyond the privy and a huge pile of firewood, his cook and houseboy’s shamba, an untidy collection of woven and thatched straw and grass huts and ill-tended vegetable plots. He saw the plump figure of the ayah waddling up the hill, his baby daughter Emily balanced on her hip.
“Ayah,” he shouted. She was Indian, inherited from Matilda’s family, and spoke English. “Call Joseph,” he instructed. His voice carried to the shamba because shouts and screams of excitement promptly rose up from it, and the small pale bodies of his two boys, Glenway and Walker, hurtled from behind one of the huts and ran breathlessly towards him screaming “Papa, Papa!” in their shrill young voices.
He felt a twinge of irritation at Matilda’s complacency. The boys were not meant to play in the cook’s shamba. It was annoying to come back from a long and arduous journey to find the house in a mess and his instructions so heedlessly flouted. His two boys — Glenway nearly four and Walker nearly three — reached him and jumped up and down, tugging at his trousers and jacket. He picked them both up. Joseph, the houseboy, loped grinning behind them.
“Joseph,” Temple ordered, “one whisky and water, on the verandah, quickly.” Joseph ran off to get the whisky while Temple set his two boys back on the ground and then walked round towards the front, holding their hands.
He paused at the side for a moment, looking over his farm: the drying racks, the trolley lines, the factory, the neat rows of sisal and linseed stretching out to the shores of Lake Jipe, now dark and opaque. All around the crickets were trilling, somewhere a hyena barked. He saw Saleh and the farm boys walking back down the road to the village where the farm workers lived, a mile or so away on the banks of the thickly wooded river — the Lumi — that flowed into Lake Jipe. Over to his left, some distance off and invisible in the dark, was a small grove of wild fig trees which contained the grave of his third child, an unnamed baby girl, who had barely lived for a day.
Glenway pulled at his arm. “Come on, Papa,” he said. “Let’s go in.” Temple looked down at his children. He found it strange that they spoke with English accents — said ‘P’pah’ instead of ‘Poppa’. It was an indication, he ruefully admitted, of the amount of time he spent with them. They walked round to the front of the house. Matilda still sat on the verandah, an oil lamp on the table illuminating her book. In the dining room he could see Joseph clearing away the remains of the children’s meal. He felt the comforting presence of his family form around him, the reassuring familiarity of the things he owned and the things he had grown or made occupying their appointed places in the gathering dark — from the two hundred fragile green shoots of the coffee seedlings to the imposing bulk of the Decorticator; from the thousands of sisal and linseed plants to the fences he’d erected at his land’s perimeter just a few yards from the border with German East.
They were like pinions that fixed him to the soil; clamps that fastened and bound him to this new life he’d chosen. He ruffled his son’s hair, enjoying the pleasant sensations, his heart big with self-satisfaction and pride.
“Where did you go?” Walker asked him as they climbed the steps to the verandah.
“To another country,” Temple said.
“What did you do there?”
“I bought some coffee plants and…” he paused, sensing the beginnings of a blush spread across his cheeks. “And, guess what, I saw a big battleship and lots of soldiers.”
“Soldiers,” Glenway said, his eyes gleaming. “Are they going to fight in a war?”
Temple laughed. “Did you hear that, Matilda? A war? Don’t be silly, Glenway. There isn’t going to be a war. Well, at least not here in Africa, anyways.”
4: 24 July 1914, Ashurst, Kent, England
Felix Cobb stepped out of the train at Ashurst station. He put his bags down on the platform, took off his glasses and folded them away in their case. The wrought iron railings behind the station building had been recently repainted and bright tubs of geraniums stood evenly spaced out along the length of the platform.
The train puffed off and Felix realized he had been the only passenger to get out. For a second he thought he’d left his hat on the train before he remembered that he and Holland had decided to go about bareheaded. He waited a little longer. It was clear no one had come to meet him. He felt the irrational hatred of his family, which he’d vowed to keep banked down this weekend, flare up inside him. Typical, he thought: a family of soldiers and they can’t even organize someone to meet me off the train. He picked up his suitcases and walked out of the station, handing his ticket to the sleepy collector on the way.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning and the sun blazed down from a washed-out blue sky. Felix felt his clothes heavy on his body. He wore an old tweed jacket and navy blue serge trousers, a new soft-collared bright emerald green flannel shirt and a red tie. Both these last items had been purchased the day before on Holland’s instructions.
Felix ran his finger between the prickly collar and his moist, chafing neck. The stationyard was also empty, except for two horse-drawn drays from which chums of milk were being unloaded. The boys hefting the churns looked not much younger than him, sixteen or seventeen. They wore large flat caps, collarless shirts with the sleeves rolled up, coarse woollen trousers that stopped at the ankles, and heavy, clumsy-looking boots. Felix sensed he was being scrutinized. He tried to look at ease and approachable, hoping his coloured shirt would proclaim him an ally. He wished he was still carrying the book he had been reading on the train — it was Kropotkin’s Social Anarchy after all — but realized that, even if the two boys could have read the name of the author, it would be unlikely to have much significance for them. Instead he kicked casually at a pebble and whistled a couple of bars of ‘All Night Long He Calls Her’, a tune he’d come to like recently. He tapped his pockets, wondering if he had time for a cigarette. Perhaps he should set off and walk the mile into Ashurst village: he could get someone to take him out to the house from there.