Girl with the Golden Voice (3 page)

‘The aeroplane. You must be wide awake!'

Tom sighed. ‘All right,' and more cheerfully, ‘You know, I'm going to enjoy having you mothering me.'

‘Not mothering, Thomas, wifing.'

‘And making up new words.'

The walk home was much more direct. They parted on the ridge, as usual. It was not worth the risk of coming face to face with Erik or Luka. Tom knew well enough that the askaris on night patrol spent a lot of their time in some well-hidden, cosy nook, but neither of them wanted to take the risk. Their embrace was emotional but brief.

Tom climbed to his bedroom, watched from the top of the stairs by Prince. When Rebecca slid under her sheet, her sister, Martha, stirred and turned but did not waken.

Through the open door of her bedroom, Angela had seen her eldest daughter return to the rondavel. A single second of outside light had illuminated Rebecca's face as she crossed the threshold. The girl seemed to be in a trance. Angela lifted herself on to her elbow to meditate on what she had just fleetingly witnessed. Cold nausea took up instant residence in her gut. It was the pain of foresight, a terror that misery, perhaps tragedy, was waiting along the way for her firstborn, and she herself with no power to help her beautiful child to turn aside from this path to disaster.

ebecca dried her hands on her kikoi as she hurried up the path. The washing would have to wait. She had heard the sound of the engine. Tom was bringing the aeroplane in across the lake. She must be up by the acacia before the wheels touched down on the earth of Crescent Island. Five hours before, standing under that same tree, she had watched the small, white craft rise into the sky and turn south. Wilson Airport was less than half an hour away. Thanks be to God he was almost safe home.

The sun was high now in the blue of the late morning and a breeze blew off the Aberdares. As usual, it was a perfect day for drying the washing of Big House. Her energy level was high even though the night had been almost unbearable. Her sleep had been no more than fitful bouts of dozing. Many a time she had longed to slide from her bed and go out into the chill air of the dark hours. That would have meant confrontation with Mama, always a light sleeper. She was not ready for the stories she would have to make up, stories to cover her truth. Better to be a prisoner in that room where her sisters slept softly and at peace.

So she had twisted and turned and put up with the battering which the poisoned arrows of her thoughts inflicted on her. She was defenceless.

Lucy. How many hundreds of times did she visualise that face? Rebecca had seen a single photograph in Mrs McCall's English magazine.

‘Ah, see this one, Rebecca. Memsahib says that she is a friend of Mister Tom. They were in university together.'

And now that thick, creamy hair, the blue eyes, the square-shouldered body would be here in Naivasha to threaten her hopes and joy. Soon she would be looking on the real, live flesh of this woman.

She was white! She was white! She was white! Without effort she was an insider with Tom's family and friends. She would be instantly welcome at homes and clubs up and down the country. She was Tom's guest, his responsibility. He would have to spend time with her.

She, the house girl, loved Tom, the young master of the house. Tom loved her. But she couldn't tell anyone about her feelings. If Tom returned from Wilson with that woman on his arm and chose never to give another glance to the black house girl, who would care? Who would know?

She had arrived in Big House long before dawn. When she heard Tom's footsteps on the stairs, she ran off. When she had watched the plane out of sight, she went to look for work, something that would demand hard physical effort.

Still the pictures did not go away. Time and again Rebecca saw that haughty English woman pushing her trolley into the arrivals lounge of Jomo Kenyatta. Those confident eyes were looking ‘round for Tom and he was smiling his welcome to Nairobi. She could feel the soft touch of the blonde hair as he pulled her towards him for a kiss of greeting.

She forced herself to watch the scene play over and over with its subtle variations. Panic soon shifted to moments of sheer terror. She was about to lose him. She had lost him. Full stop!

Overcome by a rush of exhaustion, she flopped into an armchair. The terror had scorched her mind, leaving it burned out, empty. She sat with head down, eyes shut. She had bottomed out. Deep inside all emotion was numbed and there was a kind of peace.

Eventually little shoots of guilt reminded her of her work. Her physical energy began a new surge and with it came unexpected glimmerings of hope. She reminded herself that she, too, had input into this situation. She had a choice. She could do nothing and trust that in some unlikely way events would work out for her. No, that would not suit her. It would be a dangerous waste of time and boring, too. Better to act, do something, scratch the minx's eyes out, anything. She would come up with the details later.

The wheels of the white craft reached down for its home strip. Waterbuck and wildebeeste lumbered from its path. Within a minute Tom had brought her down, buzzed her along the dusty runway and shut down in the glade close to the shed that was out of Rebecca's view. The morning air reclaimed its silence. As she began her slow wander back to work, a single burst of female laughter came wafting towards her from the island.

Normally mother and daughter enjoyed the companionship of their time together in the laundry garden. It was pleasant, creative work in a beautiful setting. A huge grassy area at the back of the house had been set aside for the job. It caught the sun until late afternoon, perfect for drying. The slope was mown regularly right up to the borders of bougainvillea, flame and banana. A cei-apple hedge, heavy with little, yellow fruits, masked the house from where the two women stood on rough stone slabs set in front of deep stainless steel troughs.

There was an abundance of hot water available close by. They drew it in buckets from a tap fixed to a long, hump-backed, brick furnace heated at the open end by handfuls of wood. It had been built on the jua kali principles of engineering by Tim Hutchinson, a Kericho tea-planter. He had based it on what he had seen in the boilers of old steam locomotives, close set lines of copper piping. It was fast and efficient.

The suds bubbled up under the crash of heavy pails of water. Angela and Rebecca plunged their arms deep to work the clothes backwards and forwards in rhythmic movements.

In no time the drying lines were transformed into billowing sails of colour puffed up by the breeze.

‘They're coming!'

The new guest was on the full tour of the house straight away. Angela had been expecting this and was ready. Rebecca was lost in a daydream.

‘Who, Mama?'

For the second time she heard that new laughter. For the second time she left her post without a word. She hurried off, making sure that she was moving away from the direction of the sound of the voices. She wasn't ready for a direct confrontation.

The door to the lower sitting room was open. She burst in noisily, mumbling to herself.

‘Child, what are you chattering about?'

Rebecca realised her mistake too late. She had come into the darkened room where Rafaella was having her quiet time.

Rafaella and Rebecca shared a special bond. In the days when she was mistress of Londiani, Rafaella had known all her people, especially those in the rondavel village. She saved them money by bulk buying necessities like flour and sugar from Gilani wholesalers in Nakuru. She made sure that they received good medical attention. For over thirty years she and Don sponsored a local boy's education in boarding schools in Nairobi. Only once did they regret a choice. That boy was clever, perhaps the cleverest of the lot, but he ended up in the town jail in Nyharuru, tripped up by his own financial trickery.

Ten years before, when it was time to pick a new boy, she and Don fell out. Rafaella was proposing the unthinkable.

‘What about Stephen Kamau's eldest girl?'

‘Girl? Never, Raf. You know it wouldn't work out.'

‘You know the one I mean? Rebecca. She sang at the wedding of Arabella and Joshua.'

‘Oh, for sure, I know the one. Pretty thing.'

‘Not pretty, dear. Beautiful, at eleven.'

‘And at the end of five years, where then?'

‘There's not a boy to touch her for quickness. This one's special, Don. Let's take the risk.'

Rebecca had gone to the city school, won their prizes, passed their examinations and won their hearts with her singing and then returned to the village.

Rafaella never asked Rebecca why she turned down the chance to study in Australia. It troubled her that Don might have been right after all. What if they had helped to educate her out of her happiness? One day a self-assured and accomplished woman might suffer anger and frustration at the monotony of village life in Africa.

Don had been dead six months. Her lover and friend had deserted her. The pain was as raw as ever. It was the middle of June and the long rains had just ended, leaving the meadow grass between the rondavels and Big House thick and rich. Rafaella was walking two of the dogs there as the twilight was closing into full darkness, her favourite time of day.

In those days she didn't travel far from Londiani. When she did, it was almost always to go a little further north, to the Coulson home, a large farmhouse in Gilgil, for a gathering of the witches. These strong, compassionate women had loved her through the agonies of denial, grief and anger. But nobody, nothing could shift that enduring, numbing sense of loss that made a mockery of so much of the joy that she and Don had shared. It was too private, too deep.

But the girl! In the three-quarter darkness, the unmistakable voice, the rich soprano, enveloped her like an aura. Rafaella stopped to look across the line of trees. The tall Italian lady had aged well, hardly aged physically since her first days in Londiani. In the shadows you could see her silhouette. Her figure was slim with a narrow waist and her breasts full. She was vain about her appearance, felt guilty when she drew admiring glances from men of all ages. On a shallow mound at the far end the other silhouette stood, arms outstretched towards Longonot. The lyric was in a dialect that she did not recognise, the melody was poignant, powerful and defiant. The deep longing that reverberated from it took her by surprise, touched the essence of her grief and, on the instant, gave it new perspective. With no effort on her part, something inside her had shifted, a tension had been released. The sensation was exhilarating.

The singing came to an end, the girl moved off but the spell held. The leaping and the snapping of the kelpie and the blue heeler interrupted the flow. The dogs were reminding her that it was past feeding time. She turned for home. At every step she expected the numbing heaviness to return.

She fed the dogs and sat down with the family for dinner.

After a time she became aware that Tom was watching her closely. She smiled down into her soup and waited for the questions. Tom held back. Perhaps he sensed that something new was going on in his grandmother's head, something delicate that must not be disturbed. It was something good. Her eyes told him that. The hunted look, the tense weariness was gone. She was coming back to them.

After three or four days she knew that the shift was real. A kind of distance had sprung up between her and the memory of Don. She was able to look back on their wonderful years together as an entity that was complete. The wound was healing to a scar. Perhaps soon she must think of moving on. The thought of this brought a rush of guilt. That, too, melted quickly away.

In the months that followed Rafaella and Rebecca were often together in that lower sitting room. Rafaella had to convince Angela that it was all right for her daughter to be idling away her time like that when there was proper work to be done. Sometimes their idling was to read poetry to each other in English, Swahili, Italian and French. Sometimes Rebecca would sing. Sometimes there was a proper idleness when they sat quietly like a pair of quakers, speaking only when the compulsion to do so was too strong.

The family all noticed the stages in what Maura came to call Rafaella's return. She began again to take an active part in discussions about farm business. She and Poppy Taylor, a widow from Ololushwa Farm up the road towards Hell's Gate, went on outings together. The landmark visit was the week they spent in the arid lands around Lake Baringo and Lake Bogoria.

Sheila du Fond, one of the Gilgil witches, had her home on a small island out in the milky-green warm waters of Baringo. There was no proper house, just a shelter built on the highest patch of land with the front open to the humid air. It was basic living with her rusting boxes neatly organised in one corner and her radio tuned to BBC World Service on her table. The tiny atoll had rich soil and there was no shortage of fresh water. Sheila's greatest luxury was her fibreglass long-boat powered by a motor to give her a lifeline to the mainland and the world.