Leopard at the Door Read online

  ALSO BY JENNIFER MCVEIGH

  The Fever Tree

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Jenny McVeigh Ltd.

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  Ebook ISBN: 9780399575174

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McVeigh, Jennifer, author.

  Title: Leopard at the door / Jennifer McVeigh.

  Description: New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016030856 | ISBN 9780399158254 (hardback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Coming of Age. Classification: LCC PR6113.C835 L46 2017 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030856

  p. cm.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY JENNIFER MCVEIGH

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  EPILOGUE

  POSTSCRIPT

  A GLOSSARY OF KITCHEN SWAHILI

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I

  1952. Mombasa, Kenya.

  The steward has said we will dock at 9:00 o’clock, but I am too excited to sleep, and I walk onto deck in the dark, long before the sun comes up, watching for the first sight of land. I pull a packet of cigarettes from my coat pocket, light one and inhale, smoke curling up into the warm night sky. My heart beats out a rhythm born of long anticipation. After six years I am finally coming home.

  The lamp casts a small pool of light onto a black metal bench. Someone has left a book behind. The Settler’s Guide to Up-Country Swahili: Exercises for the Soldier, Settler, Miner, Merchant and Their Wives. I open it and cast my eye over the introduction: “This book aims at teaching, in a simple way, just that degree of Swahili that is understood and talked by the average intelligent up-country native.” A curious use of adjectives, not something you would find in England. It is a long time since I have used my Swahili and I wonder how much will come back to me. The book starts with greetings, and I turn the phrases over silently on my tongue, enjoying the familiar rhythm of the words: Jambo, Bwana. Jambo, Memsaab. Habari gani hapa? Habari mzuri tu, Bwana. What’s the news here? Only good news, master. I slip the book into my pocket, unconsciously reciting the phrases as I stare out into the dark, waiting for our arrival.

  An hour later the sun rises huge and heavy from the horizon. Through a screen of mist I make out the shadow of Mombasa Island. A couple wander onto deck, clutching cups of coffee and bread rolls, whispering excitedly. My eyes are fixed on what lies ahead. Green coconut palms and a scattering of white buildings emerge out of water so blue that I realize I have forgotten the meaning of color. The sky is clear and limitless. In England—a country in the grip of rationing, where the sun struggles to illuminate even the clearest winter day—no one has understood my descriptions of the sky in Kenya. My skin burns in the early-morning sun, my neck damp beneath the weight of my hair. The white sails of the Arab dhows soar like the wings of huge, prehistoric birds, their decks crammed so full of men, grinning and shouting, clinging to every mast, that sinking seems an inevitability.

  They shout up their greetings in Swahili. “Karibu.” Welcome. And I grin down at them, waving.

  We dock, and I step giddily down the gangplank into a city that smells of fish, of salt, of acrid wood smoke and sewage—the smell of a city whose people live life outdoors under a hot sun—down into the sweltering heat of the customs sheds where I am left waiting, sweating for a few hours before being released onto the small, crowded streets of Mombasa’s port.

  Bougainvillea tumble over white walls, purple, orange, crimson red, amidst the trumpets of white datura flowers and clusters of pink hibiscus. Dhow captains spread their intricately woven carpets on the street for sale, beating out the dust in thick clouds. Porters in bare feet and white lunghis pad across the hot cobbles between piles of old newspaper and fish bones, past the Arab men dressed in white robes, who sit on low wooden stools drinking tea. I can smell roasting fish rising from a charcoal fire tended by two sailors in brightly colored kikoys, who stand prodding the coals, spitting out jets of red betel nut into the street, while others unload their cargo—boxes of fish, dates, henna, great piles of copper wire. Indian women in saris gossip in close groups. I stand and watch, dazzled by so much noise and color, happiness soaring inside me. I have escaped England. I am back in Africa. But I am not home yet. There are still over four hundred miles to travel, up-country, before I see the farm, before I see my father.

  “Aleela,” a voice says behind me, and a hand touches me on the shoulder. Aleela—“she cries” in Swahili. It was the name the Africans had given me as a baby, when I was born healthy, after my mother had given birth to a child who never breathed.

  I turn and see Kahiki, our headman, standing there, his stick in one hand.

  “Jambo,” I say, smiling as hard as I have ever smiled in my life.

  “Jambo sana,” he answers, his eyes smiling back at me, grasping my outstretched hand in his sinewy one. And—just like that—I have come home.

  II

  We come out onto the main road, into a cacophony of beeping and shouting. There has been an accident. A truck carrying pigs has turned over in the middle of the road and the traffic is at a standstill. A crowd of Africans gather round, watching. Tight rolls of pig flesh squeeze out of the slatted sides, their squeals sharpening the gloopy midday heat. Downers, my uncle used to call them; pigs which were all cut up. He owns Uplands—the bacon factory which supplies Kenya’s Europeans and safari outfits with the sausages, hams and pork pies that remind them of home.

  We nudge our way past, the pigs grunting as they struggle to find a footing on the small slither of space which forms the side panel of the truck. Those who do find a foothold on the floor are being crushed under the weight of those on top. The truck emits a dark, dense heat, palpable with the wet stench of their panic and the dry chafing of their bristles.

  They must
have been on their way to the train which would take them to the factory. They’ll be loaded anyway, once they get the truck back on the road; and finished off when they get there. I look away, struggling to suppress the memories which are threatening to take shape inside me. I have forgotten this other side of Kenya: a raw physicality that has no shame in the inevitability of pain.

  The jeep is parked just beyond the truck. Kahiki throws my luggage into the back and I see a man of about my father’s age, with a closely cut blond beard and a dark, suntanned face, making his way through the crowd toward us. He is wearing tattered khaki shorts and desert boots, and he holds a black camera in one hand. He is broad and tall, and moves easily, though his face is creased with sun and age.

  “You’re Rachel?” He holds out a large hand and grasps mine in his. “Nathaniel Logan.”

  “Hi,” I say, unsure why he is here. His voice has the mellow, slow drawl of an American. He is a curious mix of down at heel and well kitted out.

  He gets into the driver’s seat, and I realize, with a swallow of disappointment, what I hadn’t trusted myself to ask Kahiki—that my father has not come to meet me.

  Nathaniel Logan leans over and opens the passenger door with one hand. “Your father asked me to pick you up. He’s stuck at the farm. They’ve had some trouble with the harvest.”

  He stows his camera in a box, then glances up at me, still standing in the street. “Hey, kiddo, it’s not so bad. I won’t bite.”

  I swing myself up into the passenger seat. Kahiki is in the back. The American starts the engine and hands me a bunch of bananas, toy size and sunflower yellow. I tear one off the bunch, peel it and bite into an almost impossible sweetness—after three weeks of tinned food on the ship, the sensation of something so sun soaked and sweet makes me catch my breath.

  “The truck turned over an hour ago.” Nathaniel pulls the jeep out into the road, his hand on the horn, the crowd parting to let us through.

  “Why don’t they let the pigs out?”

  “They don’t want even more of a mess.”

  Once we have maneuvered onto the clear road, he looks at me and smiles. “First time back in a long while?”

  “Six years.”

  “I’ll bet you missed it like hell.”

  I smile back at him. He has just about summed it up.

  The white houses of Mombasa give way to lush vegetation, banana palms and fruit trees. He must sense the question in my silence, because he says, “I was coming as far as Nairobi anyway. I needed to buy some gear.” He gestures at the back of the jeep and I see a tarpaulin strapped over the boot. “Trying to keep the dust out. Damn stuff corrodes the kit.”

  “How do you know my father?”

  “I’ve been staying at Matabele for the last couple of months.”

  “With the Markhams?” Matabele bordered our farm, though it was more than an hour’s drive from Kisima. Lillian Markham had been my mother’s closest friend, and we had written to each other over the last six years. “What are you doing up there?” Our corner of Kenya was out of the way, and we rarely had visitors who weren’t farmers.

  “I’m working for the American Museum of Natural History. Trying to track white rhino. I’ve found some good specimens up in Laikipia, near the Markhams’ farm.”

  “To hunt?”

  “To photograph. This man”—he turns in his seat and grins at Kahiki—“found them for me. One of the best trackers I’ve ever met.”

  Kahiki nods at Nathaniel, which is as close as he comes to smiling. He is Dorobo. He is small and strong, and made of muscle. He has quick eyes and clever hands. He carved wooden toys for me as a child, his knife shaping the wood into a lioness or baboon so real it was as though his hands had coaxed it into life. He knew the land better than anyone else on the farm—he could track any bird or animal. He could find the claw marks of a leopard on a yellow-barked acacia, and tell you how long before he had climbed down, and when he had last made a kill. He hunted with a bow and arrow, and I used to love watching the flick of the thin arrow floating high up into the air, its soft flight belying the deadly accuracy of its aim. It was Kahiki who set the trap for a lioness who was raiding my father’s cattle; who found an elephant tusk buried deep in the earth which weighed nearly ninety pounds, the largest ever recorded on our land.

  “You used to take me into the forest, and call for the honey guide bird—do you remember?” I ask Kahiki in Swahili.

  “Yes, Aleela. And you would not eat the honey in the forest for fear that the bees would come back for you.”

  I laugh—remembering. “The bird would lead us to a hive nesting in the branches of a tree and Kahiki would rub sticks into fire, and smoke out the bees. When we had collected what we wanted we used to leave the comb for the honey guide—” I smile at Kahiki. “You always said that the bird would next time lead us to a mamba if we did not.”

  “And it is true,” he replies, his yellowing brown eyes soft on mine.

  “Kahiki used to walk with my mother,” I say, feeling a sliver of pain in remembering, but pleasure too in sharing this, like the turning of a tooth. I can see the sitting room where she worked at Kisima, the shelves crammed full of strange objects gathered from the land. And the early-morning walks along the narrow tracks which spun like spider’s webs through the dense bush, Kahiki in front, his bow in one hand, my mother’s footsteps just behind my own. “She used to collect things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Fossils, bones, bits of stone. Anything that hadn’t moved in a thousand years. That’s what my father used to say.”

  “She was interested in paleontology?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, realizing as I say it that there is very little that I do know. I knew her only as my mother; the feel of her hands, rough and warm against my skin, the dry smell of the sun on her hair, the quick laugh that transformed her face. “She used to say that the first humans came from Africa.” I have not remembered it until now, and I realize that this is what Kenya will do for me. It will unlock those hidden places, and bring them out tight and full of pain.

  “It’s not impossible. Darwin thought it might be true.” He glances at me as he drives. “Are you interested in natural history?”

  I shake my head. “I was a child when I left Kenya. I didn’t know anything about natural history.” And as I say it I hear the bitter edge to my voice: that my mother eludes me; that I did not know her better.

  I turn in my seat, asking Kahiki about the farm, his children, my father, eager for any news he can give me, and happy to find that my Swahili is coming back to me.

  “They are good,” Kahiki says, nodding his head. “All good, Aleela,” but he is not a man who likes to talk, and I will have to wait until I am home to see how things are at the farm.

  We drive through the outskirts of Mombasa, past the corrugated shacks and roadside stalls that make up the straggling edges of the city. Nathaniel overtakes two police jeeps, the officers dressed in soft khaki shirts tucked into holsters, rifles pointing in the air. One of the soldiers takes off his red beret and puckers his mouth in a silent whistle as we drive past. I look away, embarrassed in front of Kahiki and the American.

  “What kind of trouble with the harvest?” I ask, remembering what Nathaniel had said.

  “A couple of nights ago someone broke into the barns at Kisima. Your father had just brought in the grain. They didn’t take much—a few bags. The police are making inquiries.”

  “Was anyone hurt?” The newspapers on the ship were littered with stories of Mau Mau—the secret society which had sprung up in Kenya. It was said that they wanted to unite the Kikuyu and overthrow the whites.

  “No.” He glances at me. “It was more than likely a simple case of theft.”

  But nothing more than a bag of sugar had ever gone missing at the farm. Who would risk breaking into my father’s barn
s?

  When sleep washes over me I am standing by the dam at Kisima. My mother is kneeling on the bank with her back to me, slacks hitched, her fingers feeling for something buried in the earth. Her blond hair is plaited—the same plait she used to work into my own hair, my scalp tingling with the tug of her fingers. The sun glows through the fine hairs that have worked loose, and she draws one arm across her face to wipe the sweat from her eyes. I run toward her—Mama! With a flood of relief I see that she has heard me, but as she turns the dream dissolves and I have not seen her face. I jolt awake. The car rattles over the road. Nathaniel Logan is driving, one elbow resting on the open window.

  I must have slept for longer than I thought. We are in open country. The plains of the central highlands stretch into the hazy distance like the shimmering, tawny back of a lion. Herds of wildebeest and zebra mingle in the long grass, and far off I can see elephant moving, their bodies silhouetted against the afternoon sky like dark storm clouds. The smell of the dry road, the rolling grasslands, the warmth of the sun against my skin make the last six years seem almost as though they were a dream.

  I draw a finger across my forearm, through the yellow dust that has settled on the blond hairs. My first night in England, I crept down the carpeted stairs of my grandparents’ house, unable to sleep, unused to the sound of the rain spitting cold and damp against the window.

  “And you honestly believe she will be happy here?” My father was asking, unaware of me crouched on the stairs, listening.

  “Of course she will. This is the right place for her. Think of her education. The friends she will make.” My grandmother, a woman I had met only a few hours before, paused. “You can’t be selfish about this, Robert. She has lost her mother. She needs rest and the chance to recover. The stability of an English school, it’s what she should have been given years ago. We can provide all of those things.” I could hear her voice deftly untying the elaborate knot that links a parent to his child.