A Walking Guide Read online

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  Her curled, rust-red hair nestled on the black, furry collar of the heavy coat, an affirmation of light in the northern gloom. Even now, in September, with the season’s changing, the horizons were closing, the hours receding, shrinking into a perpetual gloaming. When the European winter came, the African summer beckoned and, on this chill morning, she felt the pull away from his mountains to her savanna, her beaches, the sour smell of Africa and woodsmoke, the upstairs-downstairs counterpoint of mortar and pestle in the servants’ compound and high-altitude tennis balls on the rolled, clay court. Together they called London home, defining it as their apartment overlooking the Bill Brandt lampposts and rolling greenery of Primrose Hill in London. But home, really, was far to the south, in a continent that did not really offer a home to people of her kind anymore. Home for a generation or two, but home for all that, in the sense that home is an anchor, a set of familiar references, a place where the surprises are all expected.

  Joe Shelby had once boasted he had no home beyond the fitful, feckless world of the wandering expatriate remote from the burdensome ties of taxes and voters’ rolls and fixed coordinates. “I’m their shitholes man,” he said to explain why he seemed to be constantly heading for the airport with his flak jacket in his carry-on bag, his laptop over his shoulder. “I go to the places no one else wants to go.”

  Only after she burned her own bridges, abandoned her own, true home to follow him, had she discovered that—for all the exotic stamps in his passport—home, in reality, was such an alien place of rock and rain as this. That, she thought, would explain the penchant for shitholes.

  —

  “Have you got everything?” Wasn’t this what western women traditionally asked? Have you got your sandwiches and thermos, dear, your newspaper and season ticket for the train?—questions just as applicable to sons as husbands, to quaintly forgetful menfolk in general, to relationships, unlike theirs, based on promises and routines.

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, you know. Loo paper. Matches. Salt. Condoms. Whatever.”

  “Condoms?”

  “Just in case. You might meet somebody.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It was supposed to be a joke. Never mind. You’re nervous, aren’t you?”

  “Let’s not fight.”

  “No. Let’s not fight.”

  It was time now to make a start. The route seemed unfamiliar, yet, not too many years back—yesterday in his memories—this had been his stomping ground. The walk to Dow Crag was merely the warm-up, the preliminary to the grapple with unyielding granite on rock-climbing routes pioneered years ago. Eliminate A. Gordon and Craig’s. Down-to-earth names for climbs ranked at a middling level of severity that nonetheless brought the fierce joy of conquest and survival. Now, the walk itself was the challenge—the meandering start through the first band of woodland and the old mine workings, then crossing the Walna Scar Road and on to the tiny, dark lake called Goat’s Water before the rocky scramble to the foot of the crag. There he would veer sharply left to South Rake—the rock climbers’ easy way down—to strive for the summit ridge and the first peak, first of the expedition, first in years, first since his strength had begun to ebb inexplicably a bare six months ago, leaving him with a useless arm and a trailing leg.

  Almost overnight, his mobility had been curtailed. Like the Kafka figure who awakes as a carapaced beetle, he had collided with the first tremblings of disability. Running, even jogging, tennis or squash—all that was now denied. Movement required a focused mental effort, hardly the best qualification for the scrapes and close calls that drew him to his job. He needed two hands to shave or clean his teeth. In hotel rooms, he wrote his articles with his bad arm balanced precariously on crossed legs, hunched like Quasimodo. Or he simply wrote one-handed, the worst punishment of all, stemming the flow of thoughts behind a crude barrage of physical inability. He had no idea what had cursed him in this way, still less why he had been selected for malediction or by whom. The ailment was anonymous, capricious, attacking like a guerrilla fighter with ambushes and concealed mines, armed with the element of cruel surprise and the advantage of unpredictability. He had no way of knowing when or where the next attack would come, the next worsening. He knew only that it would come and he prayed it would hold off for three more days to allow him a chance for one last triumph, alone in this inhospitable terrain where the seasons played tricks and there were no shortcuts.

  The only common ground among the physicians was this: had it been cancer or AIDS or a more familiar condition, there might have been an element of explanation or prediction; but his condition was less charted, moving mysteriously in the secret, hidden places of the nervous system. It could be X, they said, it could be Y. It had not yet fully revealed its symptoms and its cause might never be known. But he had no wish to go gently into the twilight of disability, or into that good night he had seen so often engulfing others in the sprawled indignity of sudden death from cross fire or massacre or battle. He had no wish to become one of those plucky souls in wheelchairs, beyond movement or speech but stubbornly insisting on remaining alive when, really, they had no further use for themselves and had become a burden on everyone else.

  In the planning for his expedition, he had studied ordnance survey maps and detailed guides, finding them efficient but inadequate. What he was really looking for was a walking guide that showed a way backward, not forward, to the center of the mystery, to the point of wholeness where past and present were reconciled. Before it was too late, above all, Joe Shelby wanted a haven where all his dreams—fulfilled and unfulfilled—might dock and be tethered as one.

  —

  She interrupted the reverie.

  “Was it open?” She knew he had asked the priest at the austere, granite church of St. Luke’s for a private blessing on the morning of his start. She imagined that an appropriate donation to the church roof fund would have been made.

  “The chapel? Yes.”

  “Then you’re squared away with the almighty, at least. It’s only three days. And I’ll see you at the other end with a big hug and a bottle of champagne.”

  “You know it’s only . . .”

  “Please don’t say it’s only one last trot . . .”

  “Around the paddock. But it was your idea, you know.”

  “I know,” she said, reaching into her coat for a handkerchief to dab at the corner of her eye. “It’s only the wind.”

  From a pocket of his shirt he withdrew a small, gift-wrapped package.

  “You can open it, if you want.”

  She eased off the silver paper to reveal a black notebook held closed with a built-in thong of elastic.

  “It’s supposed to be modeled on the kind Hemingway used. It’s Italian. I thought you might like it. Just in case.”

  “In case? In case what?”

  He shrugged and smiled, put his good arm around her for a final, brusque embrace and turned, leaving her to contemplate his offering: was she now to chronicle her thoughts, match them to his? Could he do nothing without the support of words on paper that could enshrine falsehood just as easily as they bore testament?

  —

  The track led between gray, drystone walls made of chunks of rock and slate laid painstakingly alongside and on top of one another, without cement, solid structures held together by the artfulness of their construction. The walls themselves encased fields which the sheep of the district had been trained over generations to regard as home, however far they roamed on the mountainside above. Local farmers called this instinct hefting and she understood that people, too, were tethered by invisible forces that drew them back to a geographic point they might stray from but never escape.

  He would not turn to wave, but she followed his movements nonetheless, her hands pushed deep into her coat pockets, a cigarette smoldering by her foot where she had dropped it for the final embrace. If she pretended, she could see in him something of what he had been—the slender height of his body,
the unkempt shock of straw-colored hair. But the retractable aluminum walking poles, the clumsy swing of his left leg denied all pretense, and her recall of what Joe Shelby had been—what she had been—returned with all its sharp corners and rough edges, without the secret harmony that held the drystone wall in place.

  Chapter Two

  NAIVASHA, KENYA. SEPTEMBER 1999

  How do people meet? And what, anyhow, is this notion of “meeting”? At dinner parties, when all else fails, people ask: and where did you two meet? And what kind of answer do they expect? Oh, you know, I just gave him a quick blow job while his wife’s back was turned and we sort of took it from there? A conversation stopper indeed. A head turner. An imposer of sudden silence. Of course people did not say that. “Meeting” is a sanitized term, with the deception built in, assumed, not evoked. Of course, they “met” only after the divorce was finalized and the kids had gotten used to the idea and the spoils and friends had been reallocated. Of course, they did not “meet” in separate hotel rooms paid for in cash and with false names in the register. Of course, they “met” and bluebirds sang. Deception, especially, must be camouflaged, for that is its nature, couched in its own traitor’s tongue, as if it never took place at all.

  On the shoreline at Naivasha, on the lawns of thick, springy kikuyu grass stretching down to the water, Eva Kimberly is standing next to Jeremy Davenport. It is this moment of togetherness—an informal reception line of two, a dynastic couple—that she will come to associate with the question of when people meet, how they meet, how they define their meeting. She is thinking: when did they meet, she and Jeremy Davenport? Was it when, as toddlers, they shared a bathtub? Was it when they played tennis and rode gymkhana ponies together because their parents owned neighboring ranches and socialized? Or did they only really “meet” when consummation overtook them in her late teens, when she finally succumbed to Jeremy Davenport’s wayward campaign that seemed to have meandered through many preliminary skirmishes before arriving at the citadel of her virginity?

  But they have met. They are a couple. Jeremy runs photo safaris for wealthy, usually American clients who delight in his post-Hemingway blend of canvas and champagne, candles and hot showers in the bush. The men love his stories and lore of the savanna. The women love his white hunter looks and tanned calf muscles. Eva has a primary school and preventive medicine clinic in the Rift Valley which she finances by selling Masai and Samburu artifacts along with other Africana in a boutique at the capital’s most expensive hotel. One day, clearly, they will marry. They have met and will remain met.

  Until this day at Naivasha.

  The venue is her father’s garden party in the grounds of a lakeside hotel which, every year, he hires in its entirety for the weekend, both to stage the event and to provide accommodation for guests who traveled hundreds, even thousands, of miles in four-wheel-drive cars and private airplanes to attend—and for other guests, and there were always some, who found it simply too trying to make their way home after hours of sunlit libation. Among a certain segment of her society, invitations were coveted, guarded jealously. For this was a tribal rite, a reaffirmation of a certain way of doing things, of being, a throwback—in reality—to an era of luxury and predictability whose memory would not easily be relinquished. People had been known to fly in from London and Cape Town and New York for the event.

  From the earliest, golden memories of childhood, Eva Kimberly had never ceased to enjoy the day with its grand buffet and spit-roast of lamb and suckling pig, its champagne and strawberries, its sequences of toasts and speeches. She recalled herself as a young girl, dressed in her newest, prettiest clothes that came still wrapped in packages from London, dodging between the burly adults, the ministers and ranchers and hunters, craning for a glimpse of her parents—always at one another’s side, regal and amusing and feted by everyone. And, since the death of her mother in a safari accident, she had become its principal organizer, anxious—for her father’s sake as much as her own—to balance any new blood on the guest list against the codes and protocols built up over the decades that had made the event such a high point in the social calendar.

  The Kimberlys called the gathering their family birthday, commemorating the day—almost a century earlier—when the first of the Kimberlys, Josiah, stepped from the puffing train at Nairobi and breathed the sweet air of the African uplands. With his commission and credibility newly minted in the campaigns further south, Josiah Kimberly had set out to make his mark, farming and hunting, in the heyday of colonial settlement. Only in the most secret of family conclaves, over very late whiskies and far beyond the hearing of eavesdroppers, was it acknowledged that Josiah Kimberly had been anything less than an officer and gentleman, that his sojourn on the diamond and gold fields “down south” had been marked by anything less than probity. But, whatever those lapses, hinted at but never explained, Josiah Kimberly had founded a dynasty that had both contributed to and survived the land’s many torments. The Kimberlys traced their history through the highest councils of colonial administration and through the booms and busts of coffee plantations and safari concessions, beach developments and the shoals of sleeping partnerships with government ministers who turned out to rank among the corrupt of the earth. There had, of course, been the bad apples, the black sheep, the dark horses—Kimberlys cited in the malicious gossip of the pink gin set at the Muthaiga Club, or mentioned in the closed police archive of the Delves Broughton murder case, or ranked among the sybarites of the Happy Valley people, whose Djinn Palace stood on the same shores of this same lake as her father had chosen for his annual celebration. But, overall, the Kimberlys had preserved the impression of aristocracy, a post-colonial elite, the kind of people who bred polo ponies and knew where they stood, with deference, in this remote continent.

  An only child, Eva Kimberly was the last scion and the first to know for certain that her tribe’s tenure was coming to an end, that the welcome had been overstayed. Her ancestors had frolicked—indifferent, it almost seemed, to any offense they might have given—but her generation had become the dynasty’s conscience, the payback. The African families who sent their festering sick to her clinic in the Rift Valley and their shoeless children to her school were her new family. Where the whites and the Kimberlys ended, the Masai and Samburu began—infuriating, needy, proud, ungrateful, the burden previous generations had ignored. The garden party was the last rekindling of the old days, when the banner of a distant crown fluttered over the colony. Settler farmers in pressed safari suits mingled with onetime white hunters and African government ministers, local chiefs and elders of the Masai, Asian traders, expatriate engineers.

  Washed up on this shoreline came the rogues and flotsam too, accorded a place at the annual table out of habit and pity, tied to Africa because other parts of the globe made too many demands on their frailties—minor aristocrats whose family jewels had long since been squandered, people with secrets and sins they covered under geography’s cloak, far from the place of commission. Others, like her father, Neville, were the stalwarts, the tribal elders who had steered their people from the colonial era into a modus vivendi with a newer order, putting their shoulders to the independence wheel in the belief that skin color alone did not define the right to call Africa home.

  —

  Eva Kimberly is standing with Jeremy Davenport, surveying the motley. She has been in the Rift Valley, among her adopted tribe, and is wearing a floral, shin-length cotton dress, very retro, to hide the bites of many insects on her long, horse-and-tennis-muscled thighs. The bites have come from sleeping in huts that resemble collapsed chocolate cakes covered in gray thatch. Jeremy, as is his wont, is wearing a tailored, light-olive and meticulously pressed safari suit with a short-sleeved jacket, long trousers and brushed, tan suede shoes. He is a caricature, she a leading lady. Anywhere else you would think they were heading for a fancy-dress party or a movie set. But they are not out of place among the crimson Masai robes and polished spears, the turquoise saris
of the Asian women and the gaudy yellow and black kangas of the ministers’ wives with their towering headdresses. There is even the occasional gray morning suit—as if this were Buckingham Palace.

  For the first time, Eva’s father has permitted her and Jeremy a share of the guest list—a ritual passing on, a broad hint to them that his longevity can no longer be taken for granted, that, perhaps, he has suddenly realized he is mortal and all this will soon be theirs so they had best make their marital disposals. She has invited a sprinkling of aid workers—young Scandinavians and Germans in sandals who ooze guilt toward one people of one color and quite arbitrary indignation toward people of their own hue, usually, in their case, a painful, raucous pink rather than white or tan. She has chosen, also, some of the people from her business, and some of the younger people she knows in Nairobi among the diplomatic corps. She has invited the most senior of the elders from her Rift Valley projects, but none of the patients or lesser workers, whose eyes would bulge at the sight of this plenty, this munificence, this excess, whose lives would henceforth be corroded with envy and resentment.

  Jeremy’s choices are the people who arrive late, in open jeeps, already tipsy, parking their bush chariots alongside the more staid ranks of Volvo estates and Land Cruisers and, still, a dusty Rolls Royce or two. He hints that he may have invited another couple he bumped into at a bar at Karen and may have put his foot in it because they are not quite top drawer—a war reporter and his photographette, his moll, fresh in from Rwanda. She is slightly angry only because of the way he mentions the female, the moll, in that dismissive, can’t-stand-the-sight-of-her voice men use when they are trying to disguise the hots.

  —

  They arrived on rented motorcycles, bandannas around their heads. They wore jeans and bush shirts, and sleeveless vests with multiple pockets, offering no compromise with the dress code of the day—national or tribal. They saw Jeremy and waved, but did not offer themselves for introduction to Eva Kimberly. Jeremy Davenport had depicted them as a couple, but she could see the definition was loose, as in those relationships where the bonding has worn away, like an old building that has seen too many bad times and can barely weather another storm. Joe Shelby and Faria Duclos arrived together, but did not speak to one another. When they entered the great crowd around the barbecue pits and the long trestle tables groaning with vats of Pimms and tubs of ice-cold Tusker beer, they did not reach for one another the way some couples do in a new and strange environment, turning to one another to get their bearings, set their social compass. They had no plan in common. They had no need of each other’s comfort. And if she could see that, so, too, could Jeremy Davenport. Was this, she often asked herself later, the point at which they “met,” she and Joe Shelby?