“No, I mean inside.” She dragged me to one of the smaller rooms where the boys were huddled together in one bed while a seam in the roofline dripped water down on the blankets. The water was coming straight at them, but they barely had the sense to get out of the way.
“Let’s move the bed,” I suggested.
“Right,” Clara said. She never would have thought of it on her own. That was clear. The boys clambered down, and Clara and I pushed the bed to the other wall.
“It’s wet here, too.”
The second bedroom was a bit drier. We found buckets in the kitchen and moved them around, catching the drips, then went from room to room, trying to find the safest place for the furniture. “It’s hopeless,” Clara said, throwing up her hands.
“Only a little rain.” I sighed. “You boys don’t mind, do you?” But they seemed just as fragile suddenly. Alex had a rumpled bear, a teddy bear, after Roosevelt. He tugged at its ear and looked ready to hide in a cupboard.
“We’ll just have to get through the night,” I suggested. “Tomorrow we’ll see if workers can repair the roof.”
“I think it’s driest here,” my mother said of the couch. “Do you mind if the boys and I have your place?”
“Not at all.” I sighed again.
“Thank you. And it would be lovely if we could have a fire, wouldn’t it, boys?”
The wood was damp and smoked and took a real effort to get going. When I finally did, I was too exhausted to move the beds again. I fell into the first one I came to and curled up in the damp sheets and tried to sleep.
—
It rained buckets all the next day. By mid-afternoon, Clara was at her wits’ end. Karen had come to try and make things suitable, but the downpour wouldn’t stop, and the rain got through everywhere. Finally she moved Clara and the boys into the main house.
“I really am sorry for your trouble,” Karen said again and again.
“It’s not your fault,” Clara assured her, gathering damp bits of her hair into hairpins. But something in her tone told me she did hold Karen responsible—or perhaps me instead. I suppose it wasn’t a great surprise to see she had very little gumption or resilience, and yet it made me sad for her. How dreadful it would be if everything toppled you and you folded in. Rain, for instance, not to mention the loss of a husband. She was so pitiful I shouldn’t have been irritated with her, but I couldn’t help it. By dinnertime, I was too fed up with the whole situation and bolted for Soysambu and my horses—for work, which was never mysterious and never failed to soothe me.
“I’ll be back at the weekend,” I said, and rode off in D’s motorcar through thick and spattering red mud.
By the time I arrived at Mbogani three days later, Clara had already bolted. She’d hired a car to come and take her and the boys back to Nairobi, leaving only a brief note to apologize for the inconvenience.
“I did take care to get the house cleaned up and ready for them,” Karen said. “Rain is rain. What could I have done?”
“I hope she left you some money at least.”
“Not a rupee.”
I was horribly embarrassed. “Let me pay you something.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s not your doing. You can stay and cheer me up, though. I’ve been lonely.”
Late that night the rain began again. This could happen in May and often did—seismic, drenching storms that went on and on, turning the roads into gullies, and gullies into impassable torrents.
“You can’t go back in this,” Karen said the next morning, looking out through the open veranda at the streaming grey sheets.
“D will be wondering about me. I may have to risk it.”
“He’s a reasonable man…occasionally, anyway. You can’t very well swim home.”
Before we’d finished talking, a young Somali boy ran up to the house, nearly naked, with red mud splattered up to his slender hips. “Bedar is on his way,” the boy announced. “He will be here soon.”
Bedar was Denys, obviously. I could read on Karen’s face how happy the news made her as she brought the boy inside and insisted he bathe and change and eat something hearty before returning.
“Denys’s servants are utterly devoted to him,” she told me as she dabbed with a cotton cloth at the wet footprints the boy had left on her tiles. There were servants everywhere, but clearly she liked to work with her hands, and to be useful. “They respect him as if he were one of them. I think they’d lie down in a lion’s mouth if he asked them.”
I felt her guard lowering a little and inched my way closer. “How did you become friends?”
“At a shoot we threw several years ago. He arrived with Delamere and then came down with a terrible fever and had to stay. I had about given up on finding anything like good company here, but then there he was.” She looked up from her work. “Honestly, I’d never met such an intelligent person before. It was the loveliest surprise of that whole year.”