A Walking Guide Page 3
—
Of the two new arrivals, Faria Duclos turned most heads—an impossibly skinny, hollow-cheeked woman with wild, jet-black hair, who looked like an icon of the sixties and the Rolling Stones. She carried a worn Leica camera in a scuffed leather pouch on her belt, and seemed indifferent to most things beyond the images she saw in the range finder. Joe Shelby was the more gregarious, athletic and lithe, carrying with him a roguish scent of danger that drew men and women alike into the orbit he spun around his anecdotes and war stories. Watching them circulate—he talking, laughing, making people laugh with him, she photographing people who had not requested that intimacy—Eva Kimberly thought of classroom physics where she had learned the explosive impact of particles fired into fissionable material.
“Who on earth invited the circus?” Eva Kimberly murmured to Jeremy Davenport.
“Guilty as charged,” he said. “Trying to get them interested in a wildlife conservation story.”
“Who? Captain Wilderness or Mata Hari?”
—
Among the Naivasha set, nobody volunteered a liking for reporters with their intrusiveness, their questions, their penchant for articles comparing the white tribe in its most recent incarnation to the decadents of a bygone generation who thrived on cocaine and promiscuity. Journalists were busybodies, trouble causers, outsiders who failed to understand the delicate balances of white life in Africa, the ties that bound farm owners to their staff, their servants, the almost feudal innocence of this mutual dependence. Journalists saw the world in stark, literally black-and-white terms of master and slave, exploiter and exploited. They snuffled for secrets like truffle dogs. And, my God, the White Highlands of Kenya had plenty of secrets, though none that should ever be permitted to surface in the overseas press, in the scandal sheets of London and New York.
For all that, the strangers could never be completely repulsed or ignored. The tribe craved news from beyond the perimeter fence, and the arrival of Joe Shelby and Faria Duclos stirred the curiosity and whetted the appetite for word of what went on, beyond the bougainvillea hedges and the gymkhanas and the scuttlebutt. Over the alfresco lunch around the barbecue, women clustered to Joe Shelby, deploying well-practiced arts of flattery with their inquiries about Rwanda—what he had seen, what he had felt, among the massacred, the wounded, the soldiers with uneasy fingers on bloodstained machetes, cocked rifles. Playing the expected part, he responded with tales of horror that confirmed Africa’s natural order of savagery and induced luxurious shudders of relief: it had not been here, at least, it had not been among their people that the murderous blades had reaped their grim harvest.
None of them took umbrage, either, at the photographer who moved among them, taking celluloid imprints of their souls, as if this confirmed their importance, dusted their ritual with the glitter of celebrity. And Joe Shelby told a good story, with skilled ease, heightening the hazards while deprecating his own part in their chronicling. Had he been afraid? “I laugh in the face of danger.” It was a remark he attributed to an American colleague, but the inference was that he, too, rejected fear.
He was, they all said later, a true war correspondent, an adventurer, “the real thing.” Yet, with an accent that fell somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, with cadences of southern Africa and middle England, overlaid with Americanisms, who would have guessed then that home was somewhere at the end of a rocky track in Cumbria?
—
The African light seemed to pick out every spiky leaf on the acacia trees by the lake. Eva Kimberly remembered the pod of gray-pink hippopotami with their barking chorus carrying easily across the lake, the marabou storks that circled the gathering like vultures awaiting their turn at the kill, the kites that hovered above, utterly still, and the mocking, hardy-har call of the ungainly, comedy-act birds called hornbills. She remembered the unblemished azure skies and she remembered her resentment at the outsiders’ intrusion, her flush of annoyance that they would take her to be some kind of colonial stereotype. Standing alongside Jeremy under the scarlet blooms and deep shade of a flame tree, in a broad-brimmed straw hat and her long, Edwardian dress, nibbling a Pimms, she must have resembled a player on the set of White Mischief, as if she were just one more Kenyan popsy, an ornamental lotus-eater. And that was certainly not the case, as she had quickly pointed out when Jeremy Davenport introduced them. Meeting Joe Shelby’s vaguely impudent stare, she listed her achievements—her fund-raising boutique in one of Nairobi’s five-star watering holes, her work in preventive medicine and vocational training—almost as if she were presenting her C.V. to a prospective employer.
There had been an altercation, somewhere in the throng, near the drinks marquee, an indistinct confrontation apparently involving Faria Duclos and one of the Masai elders.
“Better sort it out,” Jeremy Davenport said, glancing at Joe Shelby with one eyebrow raised—a staged, quizzical look that she knew well. “I invited her, after all.”
“Faria can look after herself,” Joe Shelby said, taking another pull on a bottle of cold Tusker beer. How odd it seemed to her later that Jeremy Davenport had been the one to introduce her to him, and to abandon her like this, in the shade of a flame tree.
“You seem very sure of her,” she said and, to her surprise, he laughed with the merest edge of bitterness.
“The one thing about Faria is that you can never be sure of her. As soon as you think you can, she does something to make sure you aren’t. We go way back.”
“And you? Can she be sure of you?”
“She never asked.”
—
The altercation with the Masai elder, it seemed, erupted after the French photographer woman had made some remark about what, if anything, the old man wore beneath his red robe. Or was the mystery as closely held as the Scots with their kilts? The question had, apparently, been put with some humor. The elder had taken umbrage. The woman had tried to take his photograph and he had raised his carved stick toward her. Jeremy Davenport intervened, stepping between them, speaking to the elder in his own language, in the respectful cadences due a senior representative of his people. He returned with the spindle-thin Frenchwoman giggling and hanging on his arm. “ ’E save me from the savages,” she said, bursting into laughter. Her eyes, Eva Kimberly noticed, were bloodshot, as were Joe Shelby’s and she assumed they had sampled the local marijuana that was sold quite openly—ready-rolled into cigarettes—in the Nairobi marketplace. Why else would she laugh so much? What was so hilarious about upsetting a respected elder, a man of wisdom and dignity? Joe Shelby said nothing. Jeremy Davenport shifted uncomfortably.
“Oops. Sorree,” the woman said, exaggerating her heavy French accent to fill the awkward silence, hamming it up as if she enjoyed Eva Kimberly’s embarrassment. “I make a fuck-up. Non?”
Yes was the answer to that. Yes, she made a fuck-up. She made a fuck-up at the Kimberly annual gathering and she continued making fuck-ups wherever she went. She arrived at the Muthaiga Club and smoked marijuana, quite openly, on the terrace. She photographed the presidential guard with its rifles and reflective shades, and was duly arrested, forcing the French ambassador to intervene for her release in what the French newspapers called a diplomatic incident. She leaped from her car in the Nairobi game park and approached a pride of lion on foot, against all the rules, beating a retreat only when a young male lion began padding toward her.
“She’s crazy,” Joe Shelby said at Naivasha. “In fact, she’s even crazier than usual.”
“I rather think,” said Eva Kimberly, “that there’s a method to her madness, and it’s directed at you.”
As the party wound down, well into the darkness, and the guests departed with a handshake and a congratulatory nod to Eva Kimberly and her father, Joe Shelby said he would quite like to interview her and Jeremy Davenport said: well, that’s a new word for it. Jeremy Davenport said he was hoping to persuade the French photographer woman to do a feature on his safari business for worldwide syndication. But, still, you
could not yet say that Eva Kimberly and Joe Shelby had met in that sense of the word.
The intrusion of the two journalists might simply have become a memory, a fleeting, comic interlude that Eva Kimberly would recall with wry amusement once time had softened her irritation.
She and Jeremy were anyhow due to retreat for a vacation at the Kimberly beach house at Jadini, on the Indian Ocean coast. And, had the two strangers simply left town, then Eva and Jeremy would have returned from the coast to find life reset in familiar rhythms. But, for reasons Eva never quite understood, the journalists’ distant, faceless editors ordered that they stay on in Nairobi for a while and the two of them seemed to be on everyone’s guest list, a novelty attraction, an amusing diversion from the usual fare of expatriate chitchat and veiled, resentful commentary on the corruption of the presidential elite. She caught glimpses of them at cocktail parties and buffet dinners on the lawns of diplomatic residences. She saw one or the other of them in the Member’s Enclosure at the Ngong racetrack. She heard secondhand stories of furious, public rows between them, apparently involving retaliatory accusations of cowardice and insanity. They were, Joe Shelby told her, in a holding pattern, awaiting a possible new assignment further south where yet one more crisis seemed to be brewing. “They’ll only want it if it’s boom-boom,” Joe Shelby said. “The comic likes boom-boom.” She became aware that her encounters with Joe Shelby were not really coincidences: with his lover less and less in evidence, Joe Shelby seemed to be seeking her out. He dropped by her boutique, feigning surprise at meeting her, although her staff told her he had visited several times and asked when she would be available. He cornered her at receptions, monopolizing her conversation. His suggestion of an interview turned out to be no more than a pretext for morning coffee and an invitation to dinner. He barely bothered to open his notebook, still less take notes. Her friends reported that he asked many questions about her, about Jeremy and their relationship. She found the attention unsettling, all the more so when she awoke one morning at Jeremy’s home in Karen, on the outskirts of town, to find herself wondering whether Joe Shelby would arrange another casual encounter, and hoping he would. Once, in the early hours, she stopped herself from using his name as she embraced her fiancé’s slender, naked flank. She found she was expecting Joe Shelby to cross her path at some stage every day. But she had not been expecting it when Jeremy Davenport sprang the news that he would be away for a couple of days on safari. With Faria Duclos.
“Finally interested the photographer in the safari business,” he said, as if volunteering for punishment. “She wants to update her wildlife portfolio.”
“Well, that’s certainly a new word for it.”
JADINI, KENYA. SEPTEMBER 1999
The afternoon breeze, stiffening as it blew onshore, clattered among the palms above her chosen place in the coral sand. The beach started where the low wall around the Kimberly mansion ended. Behind her, the house was quiet, its blue shutters closed. Every detail of its dazzling white stucco, its red-tiled roof, was familiar. This was the house her father had built before it became fashionable to maintain a place at the coast, on the very front line between Africa and ocean. This was the place she had spent thirty Christmases and most of her birthdays and New Years. Why go anywhere else? Why follow the trails to Mauritius or the Caribbean or Marbella when you had your own, personal three acres of paradise, with all-year staff and fishermen who came to the door each morning offering a catch still fresh from the ocean; where the wizened, shrunken retainers who now called you madam had once carried you as an infant on their broad, strong backs, wrapped in a kanga cloth. Eva Kimberly had taken her first steps in this house, uttered her first words of Swahili and English. It was as much part of her as she was bound to it.
She sloughed off her faded, favorite kikoyi in stripes of ocher and lemon, and laid it flat on the sand. At her feet, the beach—dazzlingly bright—stretched down deserted to the water. Gone were the days when hordes of German tourists would jog up and down in regimented, aerobic bands: with crime and malpractice corroding her native land, mass tourism was little more than a memory. Even at the family beach house, guards were required around the clock and no one ventured far outside after dark.
Under the wide brim of a straw sun hat, Eva Kimberly narrowed her eyes to peer out towards the reef where the Indian Ocean pounded on the barrier of coral reef in a line of fierce white breakers. At her side, she laid out her minimalist beach equipment—lotion, cigarettes, novel—but she had no incentive to read about the adventures of others when her own life seemed to be spinning, throwing off fantastic sparks. Since Naivasha, it was as if a hidden treasure had been prised open in her imagination—dare she say, in her heart?—just enough to offer glimpses, but no more than that, of alternatives, possibilities.
The two outsiders seemed to have spread themselves around town, invited themselves to lunches and dinners—the toast and talk of Nairobi. Well and good. They would come. They would go. The outsiders always moved on, returned to their safe little worlds, where societies had been trammeled into uniformity, where life straddled the median line, remote from the poles of elation and terror that framed Africa. They would go on, like bees, sucking the nectar of one blossom before abandoning it; or like vultures, watching for the kill then feeding off it. Joe Shelby had told her he lived in Rome and was about to move to London. She tried to imagine what that might be like, how it might be to drive home without scanning the rearview mirror for assailants, without the sentries at the gate and the Rottweilers loose among the frangipani. On vacations in Europe or the United States, she was sometimes struck by the pointless bustle, the breathless pace, the quickened, strident voices. Just standing in the maelstrom of JFK or Heathrow, you saw people with more value in the shoes on their feet or the coats on their backs than her people in the Rift Valley might earn in a year or a lifetime. But, once she had overcome her reservations, once she had unpacked her bags in a hotel room or apartment, she secretly relished the idea of not sleeping behind the locked steel of a rape-cage, of living without a handgun in the bedside drawer, far from the Sisyphean struggle against corruption, theft, indifference—the elements that composed Africa’s great, fatalistic chronicles of threadbare survival. She encountered them in miniature at her school and clinic. But how could outsiders ever understand the despair when the antibiotics were stolen, when the nurse had no transport to attend the sick, when the officials wanted their cut before approving the importation of the most basic medicines? How could she explain that it came as no real surprise when one of her ambulances was ambushed by marauding Turkana tribesmen? Or that the funerals for those killed in the ambush might themselves become arenas of retribution? In western, modern lands, gratification seemed to come instantly, without the arduous negotiation that accompanied the smallest transaction among her people. Yet, how rarely would a life in London or New York be illuminated by the brilliant smile of a child rising in health after a bout of malaria, or of a mother’s survival after a difficult birth, or the capricious appearance of a man with a spear, come to offer some modest gift for a brother’s cure? But how much of your soul did you need to invest for those rare, sparkling moments?
—
A bright orange and red sail had appeared, scudding just inside the reef where the gusting, strengthening afternoon breeze almost lifted a Windsurfer and its rider from the water. Its presence was unusual: few outsiders visited these days; even fewer chose to besport themselves in hazardous pastimes that might result in injury and a visit to a hospital overwhelmed by the ravages of AIDS. The board rose onto its tail, churning the stiller waters inside the reef into a slender, white wake. It was dangerous sailing. The lagoon was mined with jagged coral heads, just below the surface, and a fall could easily lead to severe laceration. Whoever was on the board seemed to possess some expertise, for, as the wind strengthened, the rider stepped back onto its very tail, pulling the sail tight onto the boom so that the whole rig seemed to be barely in contact with the water.
Above her head, she heard the palms rattle as the wind gusted and the Windsurfer, now almost directly ahead of her, turned downwind. She knew the rider would be girding to take the full brunt of the onshore wind in anticipation of downwind acceleration, tipping the board to slice across the water in a fine arc of ever-gathering speed, directly towards her place on the beach.
—
“I’m glad it’s you. I’d hate to make an entrance like that again. The coral’s vicious.”
“I thought you laughed . . .”
“In the face of danger?”
From a waterproof yachting bag lashed to the foot of the Windsurfer’s mast, he withdrew a dewy half-bottle of Moët and Chandon, wrapped in a cooling sleeve, and a single, red rose that had become crumpled on its ride at sea.
He was out of sight now, beyond the Torver woods. Six months earlier, just before his condition revealed itself, they had strolled on the Lake District’s many shores: for Naivasha read Derwentwater, for Mombasa read Coniston. Looking up at the distant fells, he had recited summit names from memory—Skiddaw and Blencathra, Wetherlam and Swirl How, Great End and Scafell Pike. He had pointed at slabs of granite and labeled the routes traced by climbers’ ropes with their old-fashioned grades: difficult or severe, very severe or extreme.