A Spear of Summer Grass

4



Inside the office, a squirrelly fellow with coppery hair—the lieutenant governor, I imagined—was scribbling on some papers and pursing his lips thoughtfully. No doubt he was keeping me waiting to impress upon me the significance of his position, so I looked around and waited for him to get tired of his own importance. After a few minutes he glanced up, peering thoughtfully through a pair of spectacles that needed polishing.

“Miss Delilah Drummond? I am Oswell Fraser, Lieutenant Governor of the Kenya colony.”

I smiled widely to show there were no hard feelings for his less-than-polite welcome, but he continued to scowl at me.

“Now, I understand your stepfather has pulled a few strings with the governor on your behalf.”

I shrugged. “Well, I wouldn’t say—”

“I would,” he cut in sharply. “And I want you to know that it won’t do you any good. Not now. Sir William has found it necessary to return to England and expects to be there for some weeks. In his absence, I am acting governor.” He finished this with a little preen of his mustache.

“How nice for you,” I began, but he lifted a hand.

“I have no wish to spend any more time upon this matter than necessary, so permit me to press on. I am well aware of your reputation, Miss Drummond, and I have no doubt you expect to have as grand a time here in Kenya as you have around the rest of the world. But let me speak with perfect frankness. I will not have it.”

He was so earnest I smothered a laugh and put on my best expression of wide-eyed innocence. I even batted my lashes a few times, but he was entirely immune.

“I am quite serious, Miss Drummond. There are circumstances afoot just now which make it imperative that the colonists here conduct themselves with decorum and respectability. This includes you.”

I gave him a winsome smile. “Mr. Fraser, really, I cannot imagine how you have come to have such a terrible opinion of me, but I assure you I have no intention of misbehaving.”

“Misbehaving?” He reached for the sheet of paper and began to read from it. “Arrested for stealing a car outside a Harlem nightclub and driving it into the Hudson River. Caught in flagrante with a judge’s eighteen-year-old son in Dallas. Fined for swimming nude in the Seine. Need I continue?”

“Those incidents were taken entirely out of context, I assure you.”

“I doubt it,” he returned primly. He put the sheet aside, letting it drop from his fingertips as if he could not bear to touch it. “They, and the other incidents chronicled in this report, speak to a lifetime of poor decisions and irresponsible, sometimes criminal, behavior. And if this were not enough, I happen to be married to a former schoolmate of yours. Annabel has been extremely forthright about your antics in Switzerland.”

“Oh, dear Annabel!” I said faintly. I remembered her well. A mousy girl with forgettable features and thick ankles. She had taken immense pleasure in carrying tales to the headmistress and then gloating over my punishments. “How is she? Please pass along my regards.”

He refused to thaw even at this little bit of polite flummery. “Remember what I said, Miss Drummond. These are significant times for this colony. I will not have your behavior or anyone else’s coming between us and our ultimate independence from London.”

“Is that why the governor has returned to England?”

To my surprise, at this he actually unbent a trifle. “Well, yes. Parliament has convened a committee to study the feasibility of permitting self-rule here in Kenya.”

I remembered what the ship’s captain had told me. “You mean like they did last year in Rhodesia?”

His mouth dropped open. “I am astonished that you are aware of it, but yes, that’s it precisely.”

“And you and the governor naturally believe that the committee, and by extension Parliament itself, will look more favourably upon the subject of self-rule if the colonists are seen as hardworking and respectable folk.”

“Quite,” he said, his voice marginally warmer. “You see, with decisions being made so far away in London, it’s terribly difficult to ensure that the decisions are the right ones. Take the question of Indian land ownership—” And he did. He took the question and ran with it for the better part of the next quarter of an hour. I smiled and nodded and looked deeply interested, a trick I learned from Mossy when I was five. Men always fell for it, and if you were careful enough to make the occasional “hmmm” sound they thought you were pondering deeply. This freed you to think of stockings or whether he was going to try to kiss you. Not that I wondered the latter about Mr. Fraser. One look at those thin damp lips would have been enough to put me off kissing forever.

At last he finished, and he rose, bringing the interview to a close. “So you see why it’s so very important that you behave yourself, Miss Drummond. And in that vein, I think it best if you proceed to Fairlight without delay.”

“Without delay? But Mr. Fraser, I had thought to spend a few days in Nairobi, meet the members of the club, that sort of thing.”

He shook his head. “Out of the question. In fact, I have arranged for you to be taken to Fairlight first thing tomorrow morning. You will, of course, be welcomed at the Norfolk Hotel for tonight only. Please oblige me in this.”

I hesitated, and then it occurred to me that with the governor out of the colony, Fraser was the most powerful man around. It might not be such a bad thing to have him in my debt.

I shook his hand again and said, in an appropriately sober tone, “Very well, Mr. Fraser. I shall take your excellent advice. You may rely upon me.”

I saw the flicker of doubt in his eyes and knew that Annabel would be getting an earful that night. I took my leave then, passing the scruffy villain from the platform on my way out. Before the door shut, I had just enough time to hear Fraser say, “Blast you, Ryder, what have you done now? Couldn’t you have thrashed the man on his own property instead of the middle of Nairobi station with a hundred witnesses?”

The pirate gave a laugh as the door closed behind him, and I left, adjusting my fur and frowning at the blood on my shoes. So much for decorum and respectability. All I had done was step off a train and got my knuckles rapped for it while the great white hunter knocked a man’s teeth out and was clapped on the shoulder. Men!

* * *

I found Dodo waiting at the Norfolk. She had already checked in and unpacked what we needed for the evening. She clucked and fretted over my ruined shoes while I tidied myself up and told her what Mr. Fraser had had to say on the subject of my arrival in Kenya.

“That’s the price of leading a notorious life,” she said, primming her lips as she sponged at my shoes.

I blew out a smoke ring and lay back in the bath. “I prefer to think of it as energetic. What do you fancy, Dodo? Shall we wear something inappropriate and scandalise the rustics tonight?”

“We shall not. I have already ordered dinner to be served here in our rooms, and our transportation will apparently be here immediately after breakfast, which is also to be served in private.”

I pulled a face at her. “I’m not a leper, you know. Notoriety isn’t contagious.”

She didn’t reply, and why would she? We both knew it wasn’t true. Notoriety was indeed contagious. If you were a carrier, decent people didn’t care to spend time with you lest they come down with it. Infamy was an infection most folks could do without, even if the price for it was living a very small and colourless life. They were beige people in a beige world, and Dora was one of them.

But she had been a swell sport about being dragged off to the wilds of Africa. I could give her an evening of good behavior.

I rose from the tub and dried myself off, dusting thoroughly with rice powder scented with mimosa. I pulled on my favourite Japanese kimono—raw peacock silk embroidered in silver—and slid my feet into satin mules. I unpacked the phonograph and opened a bottle of gin.

“We can have a party, just the two of us,” I told Dora, and by the time dinner was served, she was wearing the window curtain as a Roman toga and an open handbag on her head in place of a crown. She was cataloguing dolefully the men she had loved and never kissed, and didn’t even stop when the waiters began piling dishes on the table. They served up a lovely dinner and I tipped them lavishly as Dora started in on Quentin.

“He has the handsomest mustache. I always wondered what it would be like to kiss a man with a mustache.”

I refilled her glass. “You ought to have asked him. He might have obliged you. Quentin is a very obliging fellow.”

It was proof of her advanced state of intoxication that she even considered it. She shook her head, then put both hands up to stop her head from moving.

“No, I don’t think so. I seem to remember he’s married.”

“To Cornelia,” I supplied, ever helpful.

“But that doesn’t ever stop you.” She seemed genuinely mystified.

I shrugged. “I got there first. I have a prior claim.”

She struggled a moment to count on her fingers. “No, that isn’t right, it isn’t right at all. He was betrothed to Cornelia when he met you.”

“I didn’t say I got to his heart first, Do. I got there first,” I explained with a pointed look at her crotch.

She shrieked and pulled her toga even tighter, although I don’t know why she bothered. She had tied it over her clothes and was as safe as a vestal virgin, especially in my company. I had several friends with Sapphic proclivities, but I never joined them. I always liked to be the prettiest one in the bed, so I stuck solely with men. Of course, Misha had come damned close to beating me on that score. He had had the face of a Renaissance angel. I always suspected that was one of the reasons our marriage had failed.

“You were the smart one,” she told me, staring into the contents of her glass as if she wasn’t entirely sure where the gin had come from. “I should have got it over early. Now it’s too late. Things have probably grown shut. You know, inside,” she wailed, commencing to weep into the bread basket. “And you don’t even feel the sin of it, do you? You don’t even care that it’s so wrong, so criminally wrong.”

She continued to sob. I rose and slid my hands under her arms and hefted her up. For her bulk, she was surprisingly light on her feet. It was almost like handling a child, and she curled into my shoulder as I helped her to her bedroom.

“You’re tight, Dora. No more gin for you.”

She nodded and immediately groaned. “Why does this hotel have spinning rooms?”

“I think it came with the gin, darling.”

“Oh, that makes sense.”

I pulled the covers to her chin and turned out the light. “Nighty-night, Dodo.”

“Oh, I’m not sleepy,” she announced before turning over and promptly letting out a howler of a snore.

I returned to the table and pushed the food away. I poured myself another gin and lit another cigarette. After a minute I got up and turned out the light and stepped out onto the private veranda. It was late, and Nairobi had settled into the uneasy sleep of a town that straddles the edge between here and there. I could hear an animal cry in the night, a shriek that unsettled my blood. The moon was waning, but the stars shone high overhead, slanting silver light over the slumbering town. Somewhere nearby a monkey chattered in the trees and a drunk was singing a maudlin song in mournful French. I ground out my cigarette and took in a deep, long breath, drinking in Africa, strange and wonderful Africa. And as the stars winked out, one by one, I took myself off to bed and slept the dreamless sleep of a traveller.