Leopard at the Door Read online

“Papa,” I had said carefully the next day, when I had him to myself, trying to articulate my concern. “Are you going back home?”

  “Don’t let’s think about it, Rachel,” he said.

  “But if you do—you’ll take me with you. You won’t leave me here?”

  He leaned down, held my head in his hands and kissed my forehead. I had taken it as an agreement but a week later he was gone and my grandparents had enrolled me at a boarding school.

  You need to finish school, my father’s letters had insisted, then you can come home, but I was twelve years old, bewildered and sick for home in an institution that smelled of bleach and wet plimsolls, where we undressed for strip washes once a week in the early-morning dark, and our letters written home were strictly censored. The years looming ahead of me seemed unconquerable. It was as though I had been buried alive. There was always the promise that he would come and visit me, but one year rolled into another and he never came—a new shipment of cattle from England; a fire in one of the barns; the long drought of ’51. Managing Kisima—trying to break in its acres of rough country and extract a profit from them—took up all his time.

  The farm became the repository for all my dreams. The failures at school, the rigid discipline, the pining for my mother, the friends I made but was prepared too easily to lose were resolved in my imagining of a homecoming. Finally the time came, my exams were over, but his letter, when it arrived, was completely unexpected.

  Don’t think of coming back, Rachel. Your life is in England, with your mother’s family. You talk of home, but you have not been here since you were a child. Have you forgotten how isolated we are? Kisima has little to offer a girl of your age—no shops, no movie theaters, no opportunities, nothing but miles of uncut country. This is no place to build a life. It is too far from the people you are familiar with and the world you have grown up in.

  The world you have grown up in. He thought of my childhood as England, but England meant nothing to me. Did he know that each of his letters had been filed away in a box which I kept under my bed at school? That I would wait until Sunday afternoon when all the other children were outside playing games, and lift the lid, inhaling the faint smell of incense and wood fires that carried me home, extracting—in the quiet of the dormitory—every last ounce of sharp pleasure that his letters could give me?

  I scarcely knew my grandparents. I had seen them for a brief few weeks every year—at Christmas and Easter—when I went to stay in the dark, stone house on the outskirts of Hull, where the hours of the day ticked by mercilessly slowly. My grandmother asked me not to walk in the fields beyond the house, forbade me from going into town on my own, and—either out of grief or disapproval—disliked me talking about Kenya. Their lives were quiet and fiercely conservative, dominated by the weekly church meetings and charity teas that my grandmother insisted I attend, dressed in long wool skirts and buttoned blouses. There was no life for me in Hull. Kisima was the only home I had known and its land was my inheritance. I wanted to go back to the place where I was born; see its colors, its people; I wanted to help my father on the farm as my mother had done.

  The day his letter arrived, I bought a ticket on a ship from Southampton to Mombasa, using the entirety of the money that my father had sent me on my eighteenth birthday. I wrote him a note and posted it from Southampton, telling him that I was coming home.

  Now I wonder what we will say to each other after so long. I am caught between an awkwardness that I have come back when he explicitly told me not to, and something else. He chose to leave me behind, decided not to take me home with him. When my mother died I lost two parents, and this betrayal sits sorely within me. A bullet with no exit wound.

  “We’ll stay the night in Nairobi,” Nathaniel says, when he sees I am awake. I nod in agreement; Kisima is too far from Mombasa to make the drive in one day.

  We are at higher altitude here, and the air settles cool against my skin. We drive through the outskirts of town, past a white post-and-rail fence marking off the long gallops of Nairobi’s racetrack. A man is walking in the road in front of us, behind a herd of sheep, a stick resting across his shoulders. Nathaniel slows the car behind them. The sheep stand bleating in the road, their wool filthy and matted, until the man beats the earth around them and they are stirred into scattered motion. We pass a sagging wire fence, children kicking a ball on a dusty patch of earth. Flat-topped acacias cast their latticed shade over huts nestled into the landscape, metal roves winking in the sun. We drive past Kikuyu women with babies tied to their backs, wrapped in scarves, walking into town. A donkey grazes on the side of the road, black barrels strapped to his sides, and beside him, under a lone tree, a man is resting. Clusters of green leaves emerge from the tangle of white thorns above him. His clothes are worn and tattered, and a panga is strung from his belt.

  “Where are we staying?” I ask, when he turns off the main road. The car rattles past the green lawns of a golf course. I don’t remember this part of town.

  “The Muthaiga Club.”

  “My father isn’t a member.” I am worried that he has got the wrong idea. The Muthaiga Country Club is for private members, the wealthier settlers of Kenya Colony; the second sons of English gentry who have been here for generations, not the farmers like my father who came out after the first war and bought their fifty thousand acres with loans from the government.

  “It’s all right. I’ve told them to expect you,” he says. “I’m meeting clients there in the morning. We’ll head off after that.”

  The road takes us past a row of squat, single-story buildings set back behind freshly painted blue railings. There is something about the institutional neatness of the place, a coldness—like a premonition—which makes the hairs on my arms stand on end.

  “Is it a prison?” I ask, trying to get a better look.

  “Mathari Mental Hospital,” Nathaniel says, “for Kenya Colony’s insane.”

  “People who are mad?”

  “Mad, epileptic, and more than likely a handful who simply don’t toe the line.” He runs a hand over his beard and shakes his head in mocking respect. “The codes of conduct in Kenya are unspoken but not to be transgressed.”

  “What codes of conduct?” I ask, hearing the irony in his voice, but not quite understanding.

  He looks at me, as if assessing my age, as if he might have overestimated me. Then says, “It doesn’t do to let the side down in Kenya. Europeans have to keep up appearances, set a good example to the Africans—no seedy living, no fraternizing with the labor. And those who don’t—well, the colony gets rid of them as best they can.”

  Then it is behind us, and we are driving up to the Muthaiga Club—a deep pink building with white colonnades and a red-tiled roof, bordered with immaculate lawns. It sits comfortably under the shade of acacias.

  Kahiki jumps out and hands our luggage down to the porter.

  “Eleven o’clock tomorrow?” Nathaniel asks in Swahili, shaking his hand.

  “Sawa sawa,” Kahiki replies, nodding his good night and walking around the back of the building to the African quarters.

  I follow Nathaniel Logan through the doors of the club. Inside, the walls are paneled with dark wood and lined with English hunting prints. The air is thick with cigar smoke and the low murmur of voices.

  We eat dinner at the hotel bar and I feel, for a moment, very alone. As if reading my thoughts, Nathaniel Logan asks, “When did you last see each other?”

  “My father and I?”

  He nods.

  “Not for six years.”

  He pushes his plate away and offers me a small, thin cigar from a silver case. I take one, and he leans forward to light it, then lights his own, drawing deeply, looking at me over clouds of dark smoke. “He never came to England?”

  I shake my head, giving in to the strength of the smoke, its grip on my lungs, the looseness it brings to my thoughts. It i
s strange to hear it articulated, my father’s absence. Boarding school was full of girls who had been left behind. Our lot was unremarkable.

  “He sent you back to go to school?”

  “Partly,” I say, breathing out smoke. “I went back when my mother died. He left me with my grandparents.” He looks right at me. His gaze is too direct. I swallow down the sudden urge to cry. “He couldn’t come. It was too difficult for him to get away from the farm.”

  “Well, I’m sure that’s true,” he says, looking away and drawing on his cigar, but his words hold no reassurance.

  A man with a long, black mustache passes our table. He clasps a hand on Nathaniel Logan’s shoulder. “Are you back in the land of the living?”

  “Not yet,” Nathaniel says, shaking his head.

  “Damn it, Logan—why bury yourself in Laikipia with your cameras, when you could be on safari with me?”

  “Who is he?” I ask when the man has gone.

  “Just another English aristocrat, cast adrift in Africa. He’s been trying to persuade me to track elephant for him. He wants a record set of tusks.”

  “Do you hunt?”

  “I used to.”

  “Why don’t you go?”

  “Because I’m driving you up to your farm,” Nathaniel says, smiling at me, and taking a long pull on his beer. “Besides, I don’t go in for killing anymore.” He grinds his cigar out in the silver ashtray. “I’ve had my fun. I’ll leave it to the rest of them.”

  I realize that I like Nathaniel Logan. Years of boarding school have taught me to be wary of people who mold themselves too easily to the common cause, but he seems to keep himself just enough apart from people to make his own judgment.

  At eight o’clock a hush falls over the dining room. The men put down their cards, and the women stop their chatting. Across the room comes the sound of Big Ben chiming in London. It is the news broadcast from England, and the men and women strain forward in their seats to hear the voice, brittle with distance, emanating from the radio. The BBC Overseas Service, the sound of home, exercises its power over all of us. There is news from England: a crash at an aviation display and the death of the first British pilot to exceed the speed of sound; the Ministry of Food announces the end of thirteen years of tea rationing. At the end of the broadcast there is a local report from East Africa. Fifty-eight unexplained grass fires broke out today on farms around Nyeri, destroying thousands of acres of prime grazing. Local farmers are attributing the fires to the secret society Mau Mau. It follows reports of mass oathing ceremonies across the region, and the murder last week of several Kikuyu who refused to take the Mau Mau oath. A curfew has been imposed. Meanwhile the Roman Catholic Bishop at Nyeri declares that he will excommunicate any Catholic who supports the Mau Mau secret society or takes its oath. He confirmed that there had been desecration of pictures of Christ in the Nyeri area.

  On the ship the news of a secret society whose members have taken oaths to kill white men and throw them off their farms had seemed alarmist and unreal; there have been no reports of violence against Europeans, only against the Kikuyu who resist the movement. And yet hearing it here—in this small room clouded with the breath and smoke of the men and women whose lives like mine are intertwined with it—is like seeing a dark shape stir itself and shake off sleep. Nyeri is over a hundred miles from Kisima, but in Kenya a hundred miles is not such a great distance.

  Nathaniel Logan has his camera out of his case. He is standing against the wall of the room taking photographs. I see the scene through his lens—the women in their evening dresses, looking at each other with glittering eyes, the men leaning back in their chairs, cheeks reddened by whiskey, the waiters hovering in their red fezzes, their black faces carved into that familiar, unmoving attitude of subservience.

  “I thought you photographed animals,” I say, when he comes back to the table.

  “Technically people are animals,” he says, smiling and putting down his camera. “But I don’t just work for the museum. I write for newspapers.”

  “About what?”

  “Archaeology, natural history, anything newsworthy.”

  “And what will you write about this?”

  “That these good people feel under threat. That they will put whatever pressure is necessary on their government to protect them.”

  “And will it?”

  “Protect them?” He puts the lens cap back on his camera. “We’re seeing collective punishments, suppression of the Kikuyu press, closure of independent African schools. I’d say they were certainly trying.”

  “Which is a good thing,” I say, hearing the reticence in his voice.

  “I try to stay out of politics in this country.” He rubs a hand over his beard and smiles ruefully at me. “Gets me into trouble.”

  The man at the table next to us drains his glass of whiskey, pushes back his chair and says, to no one in particular, “This country is going to the fucking dogs.” He limps out of the room.

  Later, in the small single room on the ground floor of the Muthaiga Club, the story of Briar Rose catches at the edges of my waking mind. She sleeps for a hundred years, but that isn’t the magic. The magic is that the castle sleeps with her so that when she wakes the world is just as she left it—her mother, her father, even the animals are there just as they had been when tragedy struck. I want the farm to be that way, and the thought that it might not be is eating me alive. After all—my mother is dead. How can anything be the same again?

  III

  I wake in the middle of the night, my heart pounding. I am in the grip of a memory so strong that it bleeds its panic out of the dream into my waking. As a child, I learned not to think about it, to control it, but Africa is unraveling the past, and now it has come back, hot and alive, to haunt me. I go to the bathroom, draw water from the tap and splash my face until my skin is hard and cold as stone, but when I climb back into bed the memory still sticks to me. The squealing of the pigs in the truck has awakened it. I squeeze my eyes shut but it follows me into the darkness; there is no holding it back.

  —

  IT IS 6 SEPTEMBER 1946. I know the date because I have been counting the days on the calendar until my parents come home. I am twelve years old, staying with my uncle Eliot—my father’s brother—in his house at the meat factory near Limuru. There is a strike on and my uncle—instead of sitting down to lunch with me in the quiet of the dining room—is up at the factory. I am sprawled on the newly cut floorboards, sharply aromatic, reading an encyclopedia, with Juno, my puppy, snapping at flies and making small charges at my hair. My parents are in England—this is their first trip away from Kisima. My uncle is not married, and he is awkward with children—I am unsure how to behave in his company. The days are long and quiet, but I am happy to be left alone.

  The managers’ cottages are built at the back of the factory, far enough away that you can almost, but not quite, forget it is there. The slaughterhouse is open every day but Sunday, and it processes nearly twenty-six thousand pigs a year. I take a pencil and a bit of paper and do the calculation. Close to a hundred pigs a day. From Monday to Saturday the metal machinery grinds on, and it is difficult not to think about the steady stream of animals being butchered just a few hundred yards away.

  When I arrived at the factory, my uncle took me onto the killing floor. I stood transfixed, the smell of warm blood, of wet metal in my mouth, the clanging of machinery roaring in my ears. I couldn’t tear my eyes away—the long line of pigs toiling up the chute, heads down in protest; pressed inexorably forward by the steel paddle; the turning of the great metal wheel; the pig jerked off its feet, so that it hung upside down, screeching, until it was carried within reach of the African with the knife; the silence that came with a long gush of blood. I wanted to leave, but he kept me there, talking. “Much more efficient than a man with a knife at the back of his shop,” but all I could hear was the squealing.
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  My uncle has mechanized the process as far as he is able—within minutes the pigs are boiled, scraped, burned to remove hair, gutted, beheaded and cut into two halves—but they can’t be silenced. Death is still death.

  Nothing is wasted—the livers, hearts and glands are sold, intestines are cleaned and salted and used as sausage skins. The backbones and pig heads—still with some fresh meat on them—are sold to the Africans for food. “We use everything but the squeals,” my uncle says with pride. When the wind blows in the wrong direction the stench from the rendering house lines the back of your throat and makes you choke. That is where they tank the scraps—huge vats of blood, gristle and bones, boiled down and the fat pumped off to make soap, glue and fertilizer. I have never been in—no visitors are allowed—but when the fires are burning the smell of rot hangs like a pall over the cottages.

  Today the strike has shut down the machines—the Africans have put down their knives and aprons—and everything is as quiet as a Sunday. My uncle left breakfast in a hurry, expressly forbidding me to go up to the factory, and I am on my own as I am most days, listening to the hornbill rapping at the window and the rhythmic slice of the gardener’s blades as he shears the grass outside.

  Juno pricks up her ears, listening for something, letting out a low, purring growl, and I laugh at her earnestness, ruffling her coat with my hand. I found her on the farm two months ago and took her in, and I was happy when my uncle agreed to let me bring her to the factory. She is a squirming ball of warm fur with needle-sharp teeth and sleek oversized ears; all gold, with three black paws, and a ripple of fur down her back like my parents’ lion dogs.

  Now she growls and scrambles, slipping across the floorboards to the door before I even hear the car pull up. Then I hear the crunch of tires and the engine cuts. Through the open door I can see a man stepping out of the car.

  “Miss Fullsmith?” he asks as I pad out onto the porch, unsticking my dress from my legs and blinking in the hot sun. He licks his lips, dry in the heat, and looks up at me.