“Do you mean the gossip?”
She nodded. “It’s such a small town, Nairobi. So provincial—which is funny considering how vast Kenya is. You’d think we were all crouched up next to one another, whispering between windows, instead of hundreds and hundreds of miles apart.”
“I hate it. Why do people hunger to know every nasty thing? Shouldn’t some things be private?”
“Does it trouble you that much, what others think?” Her face was sharply and darkly beautiful—and her deep-set onyx eyes had an intensity I hadn’t seen very often. She was older than me by ten or fifteen years, I guessed, but her attractiveness was hard to ignore.
“I just feel a bit over my head sometimes. I think I was too young to get married.”
“If it were another man, the right man, age might not be an issue. The rightness of the match changes everything.”
“You’re a romantic then.”
“A romantic?” She smiled. “I never thought so, but lately I don’t know. I’ve come to think differently about love and marriage. It’s not a proper philosophy. I don’t want to bore you, in any case.” She fell quiet for a moment, and a small speckled owl glided towards her from an open window on the porch, as if she’d called it silently. It settled on her shoulder. “This is Minerva. She always turns up for company…or maybe it’s the biscuits.”
The name of Karen’s farm was Mbogani, meaning “house in the woods.” Out past her wide lawn, frangipani trees bloomed yellow-white and deep pink. There were palms and mimosa trees, stands of bamboo and thorn trees and banana groves. Six hundred acres of the lower slopes of the ridge had been groomed and tiered for bright green coffee plants. Another portion of her farm was native forest, more was rolling, fragrant grassland, and still more was home to Kikuyu shambas, native squatters who tended cattle and goats and grew their own maize and pumpkin and sweet potato crops.
We walked along a trampled footpath through shoulder-high plants and tangled vines to Mbagathi, the house she would be offering Clara. It was only a small bungalow with a tiny veranda, but there were plenty of windows, and around the back stood an arbour and clustering mimosas to keep things cool. I tried to imagine my mother there, resting in the shade, but found I couldn’t conjure her at all without a shiver of anxiety.
“Bror and I lived here first,” Karen explained, “just after we were married. I’m still very fond of it.”
“I met your husband once in town. He’s charming.”
“Isn’t he?” She smiled a complicated smile. “It’s kept me from strangling him any number of times.”
Inside, there were three small bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a sitting room furnished with lamps and a leopard-skin rug. The sofa was like a bed squeezed into one corner, forming a cozy nook. She showed me a pretty French clock on the mantelpiece, a wedding present. Dusting the top of it with her sleeve, she said, “No doubt you’ve heard whispering about my marriage as I have yours.”
“Only a little.”
She shook her head doubtfully. “Ah well, it doesn’t matter. No one really knows how it is with anyone else. That’s the truth. That’s our only real retaliation when the gossip starts to churn.”
I thought of the humiliating jokes and rumours that came with the final days of Green Hills, and how they had seemed to ruin even what had been good. “Maybe that’s the secret to surviving all sorts of trouble, knowing who you are apart from it, I mean.”
“Yes.” She picked up the clock, turning it over in her hand as if to remind herself of its significance. “But like many things, it’s so much easier to admire that stance than to carry it out.”
—
We left Mbagathi for a tour of her factory, where dozens of Kikuyu women raked through long, narrow tables of coffee cherries that were drying in the sun, going from red to chalk white.
“This whole structure burned to the ground last January.” She plucked up a coffee cherry and rolled it between her palms until the skin split and fell away. “One of God’s little cruelties. I thought it would finish me off at the time, but here I am still.”
“How do you manage? Farming is so difficult.”
“Honestly, I don’t know, sometimes. I’ve risked absolutely everything, but there’s everything to gain, too.”
“Well, I admire your independence. I don’t know many women who could do what you’ve done.”
“Thank you. I have fought for independence here, and freedom, too. More and more I find they’re not at all the same thing.”