Mrs. D’Costa was sitting on a mat in the shade of a doum palm, next to Ruth, who’d brought a fat paperback. For the occasion (she hardly ever went down to the beach anymore), she’d put on a large straw hat that flopped slightly on one side and a wildly colored sundress that she hadn’t worn since the seventies; she also wore a pair of very dark sunglasses, so heavily covered in a film of dust that she saw everything in a blur. She looked like a blind woman. The children had once more been slightly intimidated by her strangeness and were splashing in the water at a safe distance while the dogs ran, barking madly after the herons.
Ruth lifted her eyes from her book. “Where are you originally from, Mrs. D’Costa?” She had a soft, rounded American accent; something about her had seemed more relaxed and easier than all the others.
“A little town near Glasgow, a mining town. That’s so long ago, I nearly forget what it looked like.”
“My grandparents came from the bogs of Scotland too. I’ve never been there. I’d like to go one day.”
“It shows in your coloring that you have Scottish blood. Such beautiful hair you have.”
“Thank you. And what is D’Costa? An Italian name?”
“Oh no, dear, that’s Portuguese. My husband’s family came from Goa.”
Ruth closed the book, suddenly interested.
“Goa, you mean in India? How interesting. What did your husband do?”
“He was a pediatrician.”
“And how did you two meet?”
“In college, in Edinburgh. I never got my degree, but he did. He was an excellent doctor.”
“Did you have children?”
“Three, Dana, Philip and Ralph. They all got married and live abroad now.”
“And …” Ruth lingered, uncertain whether it might be rude to ask. “Do you think they feel more Indian or more Scottish?”
“Neither one nor the other, probably …” Anne thought for a moment. “They’ve never been to either place. We no longer have any family there, you see.”
Ruth nodded.
“They feel Kenyan, I suppose,” Mrs. D’Costa said, even though she wasn’t sure at this point what her children felt anymore.
“And have you known Margie and Keith a long time?”
“Yes, since the late fifties …”
She hesitated for a moment. Ruth kept looking at her, waiting for her to go on, as though she knew there was something else Mrs. D’Costa wanted to say.
“But we were never close friends. We belonged to very different worlds,” Mrs. D’Costa said, and, looking back into Ruth’s straightforward gaze, felt good saying it to her.
She felt strangely at ease with this young woman. Ruth seemed earnest, considerate. Mrs. D’Costa realized it had been a long time since anybody had showed interest in the story of her life. She looked out toward the water. It was lovely, the way the afternoon light skimmed the surface in shimmering sparks.
“In those days, if you were an expat, your life revolved pretty much around the Mombasa Club. That’s where everyone met,” she said. “Your whole social life took place there. Margie and Keith were a very popular couple, of course.”
“Yes, they took us all to lunch there when we came one Christmas,” Ruth said. “It still has that old colonial atmosphere. We had visions of people wearing white linen, drinking sundowners on the terrace under the fans.” She laughed, as if to let on she’d found the place ridiculous.
Mrs. D’Costa took off the dark glasses and slowly wiped the sheen of dirt off them with the hem of her dress. She cleared her throat.
“The thing was that before Independence, if you were married to an African, or an Indian … actually to anybody who wasn’t British, or white for that matter …”
She paused and then put the glasses back on.
“Yes?”
“Well, you couldn’t be a member of the club, you see. It was a very … separate society, in those days. Well, we couldn’t even go to the same restaurants,” she said hesitantly, as if it still shamed her to admit that such a thing had happened.
Ruth’s eyes widened. “Really?”
“Of course, dear. If we were sick they wouldn’t take us at the Mombasa Hospital. We had to go to Coast General”—Mrs. D’Costa’s voice hardened—“which was hell on earth. Oh yes, that’s what it was like.”
She felt some of her old anger rise to her cheeks. It struck her how certain feelings, no matter how deeply buried, would still come up in a matter of seconds, as if woken by a siren.
“That is totally insane,” Ruth said.
Mrs. D’Costa tipped back the flopping side of the hat.
“Naturally everything changed after Independence. But by that point my husband couldn’t give a flying hoot about getting into the club.” She laughed. “We were never that kind of people, you know; I mean, having sundowners on the terrace under the fans, as you put it.”
She smiled at Ruth. “We drank cheap vodka on our own veranda!”
“Good for you.” Ruth shook her head in disbelief but didn’t laugh or even smile. “Wow. But I didn’t realize that even right before Independence it would be like that here. That in Kenya people in your situation would be so …” She paused, searching for the appropriate word. “Excluded.”
Mrs. D’Costa recoiled slightly at the word.
“We did have some perfectly nice white Kenyan friends, and English ones of course, like Prudence and Lionel Wilton, who were more progressive in that sense. But in general, I’d say that white people weren’t used to mixed couples, in those days.”
“It must have been very difficult for you.” Ruth spoke softly and turned to her with sympathy.
“Well, yes, but no. I had three beautiful children, a lovely house. A loving husband. He came from a very good Goan family. My relatives were super people.”
“Of course, of course,” Ruth said, aware that her reaction may have embarrassed the older woman.
“And we had other friends, of course. Swahili, Somali, Omani. Mombasa was—and still is—a very cosmopolitan town, you know.” Anne paused for a moment, then added cheerfully, “We were constantly invited to their weddings. Fabulous parties, they lasted for days!”
Anne had learned back then, and had never forgotten, Victor’s rule number one: never hold a grudge. We have each other, he used to say to her, and that was what counted.
How difficult had it really been for her? Mrs. D’Costa thought for a moment. She could hardly remember, so much of that past had faded already, and besides, she’d learned to keep the bad, hurt feelings to herself. She had always avoided talking about them to her husband or her children. It would’ve been a burden on them. And at the time she had no close friends who were in her “situation,” as Ruth had put it. In fact, she hadn’t known anyone who was.
There were things Ruth didn’t understand about her British in-laws either, she was saying. All that talk about accents and public schools. She sometimes joked with Tim about how England to this day still had its own caste system.
“Scots versus Brits.” Mrs. D’Costa laughed. “Such an old story.”
“May I?” Ruth gently lifted the side of the hat, which kept falling over Mrs. D’Costa’s eye.
“Thank you, dear. It’s quite an old hat, I’m afraid.”
“It’s a sweet hat.” Ruth looked at her with a kind of tenderness. “Don’t you throw it out. It suits you, Anne.”
There was a short silence. They both turned their eyes to the children, who were intent on digging a tunnel in the sand.
“I am so grateful that our kids are growing up in the twenty-first century in America,” Ruth said.
“Yes,” said Mrs. D’Costa, “it’s a great advantage, isn’t it?”
She often wondered about her own children. She and Victor had done everything they could to give them all they needed. And yet, she knew that their lives must have been more complicated than what she was ready to admit at the time. Maybe she had tried too hard to follow her husband’s rule, to stick to the bright side of things.
There were questions she hardly ever dared ask herself. Why had all of her children left Kenya and gone to live elsewhere? Perhaps they had had to bury their hurts and resentments, when they were small. Had she made a mistake by never encouraging them to talk about it?
Maybe some of what she’d then called optimism would today be called denial.