An Unsuitable Woman. Kat Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ Chapter Twenty-Five

       Chapter Twenty-Six

       Chapter Twenty-Seven

       Chapter Twenty-Eight

       Chapter Twenty-Nine

       Chapter Thirty

       Chapter Thirty-One

       Chapter Thirty-Two

       Historical Note

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       Also by Kat Gordon

       About the Publisher

      Her heart stopped at 20:57 exactly. She had looked at her watch only moments before, and asked the totos to turn on a lamp. She had been reading and hadn’t noticed it getting dark until her eyes had smarted suddenly with the strain.

      It had been a warm evening – a warm end to a hot, sticky day that had wrapped itself around her, dampening her upper lip and armpits and the backs of her knees – and she was wearing a thin blue cardigan over the white dress. It made her laugh, wearing white, after everything that had happened, or maybe it made her cry. She stopped the totos again and asked for some tea. Her stomach was still delicate. Her whole body had changed since childbirth, in fact. But she didn’t like to think about that.

      She turned her head towards the door, as if she’d heard a noise outside. A crunch and a low purr, but not an animal’s; this was a car pulling up. She wondered for a moment if it was Theo – he often dropped by unannounced. She held the book up. She didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to see anyone, except the totos passing in and out of the shadows cast by the lamp.

      Through the screen door she could smell the magnolia tree, and the roses she’d planted. The sweetness of the flowers mingled with the sharpness of the limes that the totos used to polish the furniture, filling the room with a powerful haze. It made her feel tired, or was that the sudden quiet? The cicadas had stopped their humming, and she couldn’t even hear the water. Peace.

      A toto stood in front of her with the cup of tea and she shook her head. She’d changed her mind. She didn’t want tea, she didn’t want anything. Go back to the kitchen, she said. Or anywhere; just stay out of this room. She closed her eyes.

      The bullet went through the book first; she hadn’t lowered it. Maybe that was the reason there was so little blood, just a small, dark hole in her chest over her heart. When the totos found her, her eyes were open and clear. They said it almost looked as if she was smiling.

Part One

       Chapter One

      The station was big and crowded with no benches or stalls, just two signs, one reading ‘Mombasa’, and the other ‘Upper-class passengers and luggage’. Most of it was open to the hot November sun and the flies.

      After a few minutes I found a porter, and led him back to my family: my father, mopping his forehead, my mother, tapping her foot, and my twelve-year-old sister Maud, melting against the pile of trunks holding books and clothes and everything else that hadn’t been sent on ahead to the new house at Lake Naivasha.

      ‘There you are, Theo,’ my father said. He waved our tickets and two pennies in front of the porter, ‘Load our luggage into the carriages, there’s a good man.’

      ‘Yes, Bwana Miller,’ the porter said. He was wearing a thick navy jacket and trousers. As he picked up the first of our trunks I saw he had dark circles under his armpits. He smelled different to the Africans in Tanganyika, less spicy and more sour.

      Our carriages were two square compartments with an interconnecting door and mosquito screens attached to the window frames. I sat next to the window on a green-cushioned bench and my mother and Maud sat with me. Smartly dressed train guards checked our tickets and bowed to my father as he strode around the two rooms, explaining little features here and there. My father was an engineer, now Director of the same railway that in 1896 he’d come out to Africa to build.

      I rested my forehead against the cool glass of our carriage window. We’d spent the last two weeks in Dar es Salaam, and if we were still there I would have been stretched out along the jetty with Maud and Lucy – the daughter of my father’s friends – soaking up the warmth of the wood beneath us, and listening to the shouts of the men unloading fish and spices along the harbour. In front of us, moored dhows would be bumping gently against each other in the waves, and kingfishers dive-bombing the water in flashes of blue and orange. Across the bay was Zanzibar, home to the sultan. One afternoon I’d taken my father’s binoculars out to look at the island, a stretch of brilliant white sand dotted with palms and matched by the whitewashed palace and fort at its edge. To the left I could see an Indian banyan tree, alive with vervet monkeys, and behind that, the shaded labyrinthine streets of Stone Town. Children darted in and out of focus, rusted-red iron roofs sloped upwards, and bedsheets, used in the place of curtains, flailed outwards in the breeze. ‘That’s the breath of God,’ Maud said, when I showed her. I didn’t see how Kenya could be better than that.

      Along the train, doors began to slam.

      ‘Theo, open the window, please,’ my mother said.

      ‘Perhaps we should leave it closed,’ my father said. ‘It gets quite dusty later on.’

      My mother frowned, and he hurriedly waved at me to do as she said.

      With the window open the carriage began to smell. Home – Scotland – had smelled clean, like heather, or salt when the breeze blew straight from the ocean. And then in the spring and autumn the rain would come, hammering the earth and releasing the rich smell of peat from it. Africa smelled too much – fishy, peppery, rotting, and smoky all at once – and at first I’d thought I was going to pass out in the confusion. Now I could occasionally make something out: the sour, animal scent of a donkey, or the sweetness of the mimosa that spilled over the white fences surrounding the Europeans’ houses. Or caramel, from the sugared nuts a man was selling on the platform.

      ‘That’s hardly any better,’ my mother said, peeling off her gloves, and I pressed myself against the back of my seat to be further away from her. She was seventeen years younger than my father, and I knew that men found her beautiful. To me, however, she was only unpredictable. Sometimes she would nuzzle me, rubbing her nose against my cheek and gently pulling my hair, and other times she would fly at me, cuffing me around my head. My last tutor had quit when my mother – whose own schooling was stopped at thirteen – overheard me stumbling on my arithmetic and ran into the room to slap me across the face, shouting the right answers. After that I was sent to boarding school.

      ‘When are we going to leave?’ she said. ‘Can’t you have a word with someone, William?’

      ‘Just a few more minutes.’

      Maud traced an outline with her finger over the mesh of the mosquito screen. ‘Will we come back to Mombasa?’

      ‘Another time,’ my father said. СКАЧАТЬ