1
Paulina had begun to leam to crochet when she was in Gem and she practised hard as soon as she could persuade Martin to buy her thread and a hook of her own, so that by the end of the first year she had white lacy covers for the table, the suitcases and the top of the cupboard, and they were sufficiendy admired by other people to get her requests to make more, so that she was able to produce thirty or forty shillings each month by making cloths to order. This weighed in Martin’s decision to keep her in Nairobi and not send her home the first year to bring in the harvest. His plot was small enough for his schoolgirl sisters to be able to manage it easily in return for his paying their fees. He was nervous about leaving Paulina at a distance and eager that she should get a baby soon; so at Easter, with news of a place called Ghana ringing in their ears - a new country, people said, which had not been there before, which surprised Paulina - they went together to the home place for three weeks, and then came back together, and though his mother and sisters must have been disappointed to see no signs of a child, they were kind and said nothing.
The elections had come and gone in March, freedom seemed to be nearer, and, though ‘KEM, KEM’ were still common signs, there was no more talk of shooting and few people taken away. From January, Martin had read in a newspaper, Kikuyu could move about freely in Pumwani, but the habit had been lost. The newspapers had been running a series called ‘The Return of the Kikuyu’ and had given a lot of news about the election candidates, though Tom Mboya was the only one whose public addresses were regularly advertised ‘Under the Standard Clock’. Mr Moi and Mr Ngala used to stay at the little guest-house by the church when Parliament was in session and people were surprised that they still felt at home in this simple and smelly place. Ahoya went away - she was getting old now -- but the short one
with glasses and a bicycle still stayed at the mission house and other Europeans came and more classes started.
After the holiday Paulina had hope of another baby. She was wretchedly homesick during the months of nausea for the open fields and familiar small talk of home, but she stuck it out. One morning she came home overtired from digging her small vegetable plot and resolved to rest in the afternoon. But there came a clang of boots, a banging at the door.
‘Who is it?’ She started up nervously, afraid to open.
‘Police, police. Open up.’
‘How do I know?’ she faltered, still half asleep and throbbing with anxiety.
‘You know because I say so,’ somebody shouted, kicking the door.
‘Open, open,’ shouted Amina from the other room, and pleaded with the men - ‘You see she is not well and she does not understand very much Swahili. Her husband has forbidden her to open. That is why she questions.’
Trembling, Paulina drew the bolt and was pushed out of the way by the three policemen who crowded in. They overturned the bed, shook the cupboard until a couple of glasses broke, strewed the contents of the boxes over the floor, then, with another shove and injunctions to make more haste another time, they were gone. She never knew for certain who they were looking for, but two or three Kamba people round the corner were arrested and it was supposed that they must be hiding someone. She leaned back against the upturned leg of the bed where she had come to a halt. Her back was grazed and sore but they had not really hurt her. She started to tug the heavy wooden bed with its crisscross of rubber straps back on its legs, but felt a sharp pain and laid it down again. The fibre mattress and bedding had slipped off on to the floor and there was the print of a dirty boot on the sheet. She sat down on the mattress to get her breath and Amina appeared in the still-open doorway.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked abruptly.
‘A little bit all right,’ replied Paulina.
‘You are lucky. They might have made it much worse for you. Do you forget that the Emergency is still on?’
She did forget sometimes. The elections and the gradual disuse of
the restrictions that were still technically there on the boards (but the boards in Swahili were hard to read) made people feel so much better. Besides, Emergency for her meant living in the town. She had never known Pumwani before and might not have found it very free either.
Amina’s strong arms pulled the bed into place and repiled the suitcases. She was tactful enough not to make the bed up, though Paulina would in any case have been too weak to resist her. Then she lay down again, refusing Amina’s offer of tea or to go and fetch someone to help. Ahoya was gone, and only Ahoya would have spoken her language and understood.
By the time Martin came home one look at her face was enough to tell him that this was serious, and he swallowed his resentment and ran to the mission house himself, but by the time he returned with Bibi Tett it was clear that nothing could be done. This time they did not go to the hospital and he was gentle with her, putting all the blame on the police. She did not dare tell him how bad she had been feeling before they came.
2
In November the time came for them to confirm their wedding in church. He bought her a white cotton dress and scarf as well as a shiny wedding ring. They had a few friends to tea and felt progressive and important. She thought she was beginning another baby but she said nothing about it to Martin, and when two months later she began to bleed again and he found her in tears because of it he beat her and told her she was imagining things. He sent her to his home in February 1958, long before the rains and time for digging and she stayed six months, till the harvest was gathered in and her mother-in-law reported favourably on her hard work and obedience.
At first she loved being home again, to wake in the dark when the cowbells began to tinkle, to dig by moonlight and in the hot mornings to busy herself with the chores of food preserving and storing: to eat in the evenings under her mother-in-law’s arched roof, with Martin’s younger sisters and brothers clustered round, full of talk and questions, as there was no adult male present to overawe them, and sometimes a sickly calf snorting in^he shadows. She had taken one of the cats into her own little house because of the rats, and became very
fond of him, naming him Pusi, as some people said it in Swahili. The physical work was good for her - she rounded and developed, ate well (for it was not a home where one went short, even before the rains), observed the taboos carefully. She was able to make a short visit to her own mother, who questioned her sharply about Nairobi life, but her mother-in-law, though disappointed at the lack of a child, was more tolerant and the atmosphere of the home was serene.
And yet - and yet she was not the girl of the house any more, but someone’s wife, and friends of her own age came to see her with babies in their arms, or some of them were training as nurses or teachers, but not many of these came visiting. She hugged herself at night and brooded to herself in that afternoon time when there was not much left to do; and when the letter came - a week late, because the school it was addressed to had already closed for the August holiday - she was eager to be off and away.
Martin came again to meet her off the train. It was two years since the first time. She had finished growing now. Her breasts were firm and her eyes knowing. This time her goods were more expertly handled and she had brought a lot of food: so much that he had to give a man two shillings fifty to carry the sacks on a handcart. She had been crocheting industriously even on the train - like a Kikuyu, people said - and this time he did not have to walk home with her, but returned to the shop while she organised her woman’s business.
Back in the house she unloaded the goods and set about storing them. Cold as Nairobi is in August, she needed air, if not exactly fresh air. There hung about the room - how small it looked compared with the houses of home which never need to be cooking-place or wash- place or grainstore as well - a faint strange scent which she could most easily identify as coconut oil. Surely Martin would not use such stuff on his hair? Yet from day to day they all used new things, she reflected, remembering how she had taken that long-disused brassiere, now tight, out of the box for the journey, how knowingly she had opened and closed the windows of the train, how secretly she had gazed at skincream in shops and flimsy combs in bright colours.
She arranged her things, filled the water containers, bargained for a little charcoal with the odd change she had left over from the journey. She greeted Amina and the other house neighbours. Rachel was still
away completing her harvest. She was just getting ready a midday snack preparatory to lying down after a sleepless night of travel when a head paused outside the window, a graceful head with beautifully plaited hair and a nylon wrapper.
‘So you have come,’ said a teasing voice in beautiful coastal Swahili such as one used to taunt an ignorant country wife.
‘I have come but I think I do not know you,’ said Paulina plainly and turned to the charcoal stove.
‘Oh, you have come, and you are the wife of the house?’ continued the voice.
‘Yes, I am Mrs Were,’ announced Paulina, glorying in the foreign name that had once sounded so odd.
‘Oh yes, Mrs Were,’ tinkled the voice, ‘and you are the mother of who?’ and with a peal of laughter she was gone, the ravishing face, the high, brittle voice, as it sounded to Paulina, and sickly sweet smell.
There was another gurgle of Swahili talk, fast and flowery, as the woman passed the front of the house. It was too hard for her to follow - they could always make it too hard if they wanted to.
‘Who was that?’ she called as she heard Amina coming down the corridor.
‘That? Oh, Fatima. She has come to live in the corner house. Don’t take any notice of her. She has more words than sense. I am glad you are back,’ called Amina, a hefty woman whose own liaisons were discreet and long-lasting.
But Paulina’s heart sank and she did not rest well, although she was determined to keep herself alert for the rapturous night to come.
She looked her best and cooked her best and Martin was happy to have her back. They discussed decorously all the news from home and the night was long and full of promise. But somehow a scent of strangeness hung about the room and the stink from outside did not cease to trouble her.
Her crochet work prospered and she began to ask whether they could not think of moving into one of the brick houses that were easier to keep clean and where you would have four walls to yourself. And because there was no chance and not enough money either, Martin would grow angry and go out in the evening. The house was not so oppressive for him as for her since nowadays he habitually came home
late - sometimes it was overtime, sometimes an evening class. People were not so nervous in the evenings as before and occasionally he came after the radios had stopped playing, smelling of beer and not hungry, although he could not afford to drink regularly and did not neglect the housekeeping money or his own appearance.
Eight months passed uneasily in this way and with no sign of another baby. She did not catch him with another woman and he did not sleep out except on two occasions when he told her he was going to a wake for a fellow clansman on the other side of town. Each time he borrowed from her ten shillings which she had put aside from her work money to buy more yarn for crochet. Of course she could only get them back by paring the food money, and one day when the charcoal man was dunning Martin to pay the bill and he therefore swore at her for sitting idle with no tablecloth in hand, she found it hard to bear and made a pretext to go and sit in Rachel’s house a little while, but she never went anywhere he could not keep her in his sight.
Fatima returned to jeer at her a number of times, and twice when Martin was home in the early evening she put her head, shiny and evil-scented, right through the little window, begging him to take a stroll with her outside, since she had accounting problems to discuss which might disturb Mrs Were or even wake up the little ones, since they were so quiet that they might be thought not to be there at all.
Martin froze and told her to go to a proper accountant. He had not the time or knowledge to take on outside engagements, he said. But Paulina could not tell from his face whether he was really shocked or only offended, and she knew by now that this kind of invitation occurred commonly in front of Majengo wives and as often as not was eagerly accepted.
She bore it and looked aside. He hardly ever walked out with her now but he found little reason to quarrel with her either. In April she went home again to look after the farm; it was arranged almost without words between them and he did not see her to the train.
She busied herself as usual but the crop was scanty and the work seemed harder than before. One of her sisters-in-law and a giggly friend of hers who had been to school in the town tried to persuade her to get a baby by another man. Although custom was not too hard on this practice she felt a revulsion that it should ever have been
mentioned, and twisted the ring on her left hand till the friend remarked pointedly that it took more than a few prayers to get the job done. Besides, she knew that the fault was not Martin’s, but did not want to discuss the whole painful history with others. Then a remote clansman began to bother her and she found it difficult to keep him away, with no man of the family to hand, though her mother-in-law threatened him with curses if he did not mind his manners.
Months passed in the trivial intimacy of time spent at home. There was always something to talk about - a birth, a death, an illness, an exam, a marriage, a change in the bus route, a new shop open, someone building a new house - and yet rarely anything to think about. Things happened - bridges were flooded, buses collided, schools were upgraded, but in the total picture nothing changed. In Nairobi you got less personal news and yet things changed all the time and you did not need a newspaper or a radio to tell you so.
Paulina would never forget that sunny Id-El-Fitr of 1957 when the air blazed with freedom. Nobody said that anything had happened. You just knew the tide had turned. Things were heard in the air all round you and you could not pinpoint which language you heard them in, even the women knew them, even the standard eight children knew them, and so there was no need to mention them. But for the village someone up above might have decided on a standard seven exam instead of a standard eight, English in class three instead of class five, and yet in the home where you talked and talked nothing ever changed.
On her way back to Nairobi she stopped in Kisumu to visit a neighbour who had gone to take a course in the Homecraft School. Paulina loved it - the neatness, the cleanness of the little rooms, the ovens, the embroidered cloths, the strictness of timekeeping for married women inside the tall fence (like a boarding school, as she imagined it, so safe, so orderly, so free of painful choice). How she would love to go there and keep her home clean and well-provided. She enthused to the teachers about it and they said she was welcome to apply next time. She found it hard to leave. But the train was going and she had bundles to pick up in the care of a home friend now married in Kisumu, and Martin would be waiting. He had written that he was moving house. It was small, but away from Majengo. He
hoped she would be pleased with it. So in another way she was eager to go.
3
It was August 1959. There were still troops at the station but not as many as there used to be. Martin was there, just as he had been three years before, but a trifle smarter, a little more self-confident. This time they swung away from the OTC bus station, after passing the Sikh School and St Peter Clavers, up to where Duke Street crossed River Road and down to the river valley there, where the Indian flats begin that stretch right up into Parklands.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Near Kariokor Market.’
She knew the market, called, as a section of every big town was called, after the place the Carrier Corps had rested. You had to pass a number of pleasant little houses ~ the Indian evangelist used to live in one: she had met him and his wife at some church service - and then opposite were the remains of the old City Council estate which could easily be taken for a barracks, never intended for family houses but only sleeping places for men at work. A cold fear descended upon her - was this what she was expected to come home to, a red-brick box with only a tiny back window the size and shape of the stables she had seen set up for the horses that year she had been taken to the Show? She sat down on her suitcase and could not prevent a tear trickling down her face.
‘But you wanted to move,’ said Martin, making the familiar opening move of an argument. ‘You wanted to get out of Pumwani. What did you think I was finding to please you? Government House?’
The bed filled most of the room. The cupboard was jammed at the back and the boxes were piled under the bed. The table was gone. The chairs were folded against the wall so that you could squeeze your way past to the cupboard. The burner and basins fitted behind the door once you shut it from the inside: the width of the bed prevented it from being fully opened. Her sacks and baskets of food remained outside.
‘Have to hang them up,’ said Martin gruffly, ‘like we do in the kitchen at home. People hang their bicycles, even, from the roof. No other way.’
‘There are too many. They can’t possibly fit. Oh, how I have tried to make it nice for you, and you bring me this! My covers . . . tablecloths . . .’
‘All in the boxes. Don’t worry. Have to make ends meet - we’ll find someone to store for us if needs be. I’ve only just come here; don’t know many people.’ And with that he was off.
A few other women were washing in basins outside the row of houses and one was cooking gruel for a couple of children. They did not speak till Martin was gone, then the nearest came over and introduced herself. She was a Mkamba and staying only briefly with her husband. The children lived in the country, she said, and went to school. She travelled only with the two-year-old. Life was too hard in the town, but she had come to get money, a new dress and medicine for her mother-in-law. On your own, she supposed, without children, you could put up with it. In the lines they were mostly men alone or young boys sharing a room, but in good weather you could do a lot outside.
Paulina was not very communicative. She pulled out the two chairs and set her goods on them, off the dusty road where the chickens pecked and the sanitation was no better than in Majengo. She fitted what foodstuffs she could into the cupboard and roped a bunch of bananas over the rafters but she could not deal with the heavy sacks of flour and beans that a handcart had helped them to bring. At last she dragged them on to the floor where the chairs had been and left the chairs outside, resolving to lay them on the bed if she should need to go far away. Then she bolted the door and lay down to close her eyes on her troubles.
Martin came with some rope and boxes and tried to hoist the heavy sacks while she made him tea, which helped her to feel a little more at home, but he couldn’t manage it, so they moved some of the produce into cardboard boxes which swayed perilously above the bed and he went to ask an uncle of his to house the sacks and came home with two hefty schoolboys to help carry them. So they managed, but of course when she went next month to refill the boxes from the sacks they were lower than they had been. ‘It must be the housemaid,’ they said.
One of the first women Paulina ran to for comfort was Rachel, but Rachel had problems of her own. Her ayah had just been dehvered of a
baby. Ordinarily, of course, she would have sent the girl home in disgrace long before, but she had concealed herself for a long time and never showed very big, so at the end Rachel was really taken unawares. In any case the girl was so clever, and in her refusal to talk dropped so many speaking hints, that Rachel was half persuaded that it was her husband’s baby and that the girl would have to stay on as nyar ot, a junior wife from her own clan. In that case it would not do to stir up trouble, especially as he was grumpy and unheeding of her complaints about getting the work done. Perhaps, in fact, he suspected himself. But when the time came the baby shocked them all by being palpably white - pink, that is to say, and wrinkled, browneyed, of course, but with unmistakably gingery hair and a long nose. One of the young soldiers? A poUceman? By force or for money? The girl remained silent and apparently unmoved, but Rachel’s husband was so furious - disappointed, perhaps? - that something had to be done. Paulina found the girl rocking the baby back and forth on the step with a sly, secret smile. Rachel had given her an old towel and a dress for it. It was a girl and was going to be called Joyce. But of course she could not take it home. There it would be an alarm and a laughing-stock, something that society could not absorb as the lighter-skinned tribes had sometimes absorbed their bastards. And she could not stay here for fear of the master’s anger. But where else could she go, unskilled and cumbered with the child? Within a few days a solution presented itself to the satisfaction of all parties . Amina came over with a splendid shawl for the baby and sat down to negotiate. She was getting into middle life, she said, and had no child. In a coastal family light skins and long noses were quite acceptable. If the father were not pressing his claim - the girl mother looked down with a grimace - she would adopt the baby and bring it up at her own expense, but it must not be claimed back. It would never know its parentage.
Rachel was openly relieved. The whole situation was an embarrassment to her. The girl made a half-hearted plea for money but obviously she too had a burden to dispose of. She agreed to give the child up provided - and her insistence surprised everyone - she should be brought up as a Christian and retain the name Joyce. To this Amina cheerfully agreed - after all, it was a white baby. A form of
agreement was drawn up by someone from the mosque in characters none of the signatories could make out. The child’s mother was given a new dress and the train fare to Kisumu and departed the next afternoon with a heavy bundle which she had somehow managed to conceal in a friend’s house. She was the more shapely for her recent confinement, a big strong girl with thin ankles and sullen eyes, more smirking with the pride of achievement than chastened by her public shame. Even Paulina felt it could not be long before she was back in town.
Amina proved unexpectedly expert with powder and feeding bottle and soon afterwards approached the pastor about baptism for the child but bowed to the rule that since there was no Christian parent Joyce must make her own profession when she could read and write. The baby made a good pretext for Paulina to come and see Amina from time to time. Little by little she built up a picture of a world quite remote from her own, a world of gay wrappers and jingling bracelets and perfumes and spicy dishes, where slim men with bony features came and went, for what purpose one was never quite aware, and of town houses where these urbane traditions from the coast somehow collected themselves despite the bare crumbling wails and the outlandish cold. Even some of the stories burned themselves into her mind, lively fantastic stories with expressions in them that no nice Luo girl would use and that, had you asked her, she would not have thought she knew the Swahili for, and long afterwards she drew on them to amuse the children she looked after and to reprove their carelessness in the national language.
4
Paulina used to sit outside crocheting and contriving a profit from her crochet despite the dust and the smells from ordure and market refuse, and sometimes she went to Rachel’s with her work or to Susanna’s, and kept on and on about Homecraft until Martin wrote letters about it and found references for her and helped her a bit with reading and writing. So in March 1960, with the Kenya African National Union newly formed and politicians beginning to show their teeth, she set off for home to see to the harvest and from there in August she joined the Homecraft Training School in Kisumu. By the
time she left, Joyce was sitting up and already had a coquettish air, with little gold rings in her ears, a bangle on her arm and someone to play with whenever she required attention. And by the time training started the name of Jomo Kenyatta was loudly in the air and his picture - which she had never seen before - on the front pages of the newspapers. The Emergency had ended officially in January, though a lot of people were still in detention, and in March KANU was formed, with a lot of jockeying for position and a row over whether Kenyatta could officially be its leader while still detained as a public enemy.
In May the African Elected Members, with threats of resignation, insisted on being allowed to visit him, and somehow overnight he turned out to be Mr Kenyatta, referred to on the radio with guarded respect. And of the KANU people Martin’s idol Tom Mboya had once more emerged as a leader - even Jaramogi admitted it to his face after all the manoeuvring to keep him out of the Kiambu conference. People said he had traded in the People’s Convention Party for the secretaryship, and indeed no one heard of the PCP again, even the Nyanza branch which had only just been formed. Martin was present at that Adult Education Rally at Bahati where Tom finished his speech, debonair and controlled as ever, and then rushed away to the meeting which had been arranged to exclude him. There was challenge in the air, not to say scholarships to America. The least one could do was to learn to bake cakes in a real oven and sing Swahili songs.
Paulina was the youngest woman in the Homecraft class, and they cold-shouldered her because she had no child and very little education. The European praised her - which made it worse - because she was not leaving any baby behind and was eager to improve her home. The others lectured her in private. There was nothing wrong with their homes. They needed no improving. The object of the course was to get a job as a club leader so as to teach other women and make money. You could embroider tablecloths and make money. If you lived in a town you could even make cakes for money.
She pointed out shyly that she had already sold some crochet work and had helped Rachel make mandasi for sale when she was without an ayah, only to be daunted by the array of tablecloths shaken out before
her and the learned discourses on styles and prices. In a week or two, however, the women learned to get on together. Some were frankly grateful to be away from the demands of husbands and the labour of child-rearing, some congratulating themselves on refuge from a petulant mother-in-law or importunate neighbours while the husband laboured in Mombasa or Eldoret. A few were frustrated and made the most of free afternoons. Some were worried about their children, gleaning from the bus station news of coughs, bruises and extra school demands. Joanna wept openly that she knew her girls would not eat properly while she was away, but girls they all were, and her husband so mean that he would not let them eat corn on the cob (the soft young maize vanished too quickly for his liking and all must be stored and ground for flour), so she looked for work to help her along against the day he would decide to waste no more school fees on daughters. Janet was widowed and had a son at Maseno High School to provide for. A saved Christian, she had refused to be inherited. Paulina loved to hear her witness to spiritual things. At the same time, she reflected, second husbands would rarely contribute to school expenses, so Janet was not really worse off for her refusal. Tabitha, who was always grumbling that she should have got into High School (High School if you please! Not one girl in a thousand had the chance to go to High School) had to leave before the end of the course because her youngest child, whom she had abruptly stopped breast-feeding at ten months in order to enter, died of diarrhoea. The staff said it was a pity she could not finish because she would have been such a good teacher.
Life in Kisumu went on evenly, sunny in the morning, scorching in the afternoon, with a wind suddenly blowing up before dark, thunder storms sometimes and dust devils nearly every day. Occasionally they were allowed to cross the road in the evening to see films of football matches or life in foreign countries at the Victoria Social Centre. Grown-up people would be playing games with a bat and ball in the open courtyard inside, and there was a bar in the same building and a library, but only for English books. Sometimes there were dances and from the security of their cottages they could hear the band playing late at night. Paulina had never seen a ‘cinema’ before. But she was good at netball when she got over her shyness. It was not customary for married women to play with schoolgirls, however large and old, and
she would not have liked Martin to see her doing it.
She found her way round Kisumu quite soon. It was a manageable kind of place for anyone who preened herself on knowing Nairobi. She was already familiar with the old railway station and further along the lake the new station was being built. From there you could walk along the lakeside towards the place where hippos come to the surface, but not easily, for the lake level was rising and you could see trees and a few buildings sticking up out of the water. It made her feel uneasy, thinking of the old story of the unwelcoming village swamped under the lake, but she could not think of anything very wicked she had done and in any case the life of the town seemed to go on undisturbed.
She measured out the inland end of the town, past the Catholic church, and explored in the other direction up past the little park as far as St Peter’s, where she had twice gone with ladies of the St Stephen’s congregation because a young white couple were trying there to overcome the legacy of recent days when Africans had not been allowed in that church. But the centre of the students’ social life was, of course, the market and the bus station beside it, where news could be gathered from one’s home, one’s mother’s home and even from Nairobi. Something lively was always going on here, and all the communities of Kisumu gathered to do their shopping - which interested her now that she was seriously learning about cooking - so that as well as the essential maize, beans and alot you could get an avocado pear for fifteen cents or a grapefruit for ten. Foreigners did not demur at paying twenty cents each for eggs and more than a shilling for a pineapple.
Here women who lived in the town would keep their stalls going from day to day and those who came from outside witli a sackful of produce or a couple of bunches of bananas would haggle over them witli the licensed seller. Whole smelly busloads of fish would come up from Uyoma, and it felt a bit like Nairobi when people surged round the buses selling biscuits, sweets, handkerchieves and medicines. But because the people were fewer of each group they mixed more. The Nubian ladies with their ample robes and superb basketware knew Luo as well as good Swahili, and the litde Ahmaddiyah missionary, an Asian with an earnest face and a lambskin cap, would always stop to discuss his MusUm interpretation of the Christian Bible with anyone
who would take him seriously. Ja-abu was always about with his enormous trumpet made of pieces of gourd and thermos flasks and tubing tied together with bits of cloth, his cheeks so distended that they sagged limply when not gathering in the tremendous wind required to blow a blast as of doom, his feet heavy with bells swaddled in sacking so that the ankles would not be rubbed, a merry song of local application for anyone who paid him and a not so cheerful one for those who refused. The Church of Christ in Africa, a new thing since Paulina had left home to be married, was always out and about at that time too. Bishop Matthew eager to entice former Anglicans to his side, but Paulina did not see reason to change: she sided with the Brethren - although she had not come forward to be saved herself - against those whose greater love militated against church disciphne. (She twisted her wedding ring often enough, wondering whether it would be strong enough to stave off disaster, and pondered the promises of Sarah and Hannah as against the wiles of Pumwani.) Now two years old, the new church was already threatened by a split in its own ranks, and soon to lose the old blind archdeacon and a serviceable vehicle. The conflict had led to burnings of churches and neighbouring congregations vying with one another who should sing the same familiar canticles the louder. Jubilate in one classroom overlapping the reading of the gospel in another. But Paulina valued the neatness and form of the old church, particularly the Kisumu buildings in contrast with the simple country ones, and felt she understood their order and hierarchy. There was litde of the rebel about her.
Her course results were good and she was appointed club leader at the centre nearest her husband’s home. There was even talk of setting up a second centre, which would have brought her earnings to a fabulous total in the as yet undemanding village economy. Naturally there were strong objections from the committees to her appointment, but the European leader brushed these aside. To appoint a slip of a girl? One who was not sidetracked by old-fashioned ways and was still full of enthusiasm. A childless woman? All the more time she would have to apply herself to the work. A young woman away from her husband? But all the women were away from their husbands. That was Luo custom, the European explained, and they preferred it so. The wife was then like a single woman, occupied and earning money.
(A fat lot she knew about it.) A person without influential relations? Of course. That was to be the mark of the new society.
The inevitable happened. Balls of crochet cotton disappeared from the stores or turned up, tangled and muddy, in the corner of the classroom where the club met. Rumours ran round about a haison with the lecherous brother-in-law who had pestered her before. A crazed old woman was encouraged to hang about the homestead telling stories of unresponsive wives who had been threatened with barrenness. But Paulina’s mother-in-law backed her up, out of liking for the girl and appreciation, also, of her contribution to the home, and she mastered her temper and got good results from her club and literacy classes. She never went back to Kariokor.
5
The seasons and years passed, in the dry one harder digging and less palatable food, in the wet one heavy mud dragging at one’s feet on the way to the club and women staying away because they were busy in the fields. And news coming in all the time - meetings, conferences, appointments. Martin had a lot to say about these when he came, but he didn’t speak much of his personal plans and ambitions. Black men were coming into power but white men were still the ones you went to see at the Town Hall or the hospital. Once a year he came home to spend his leave. Once a year during recess Paulina travelled to Nairobi, but there she was more like a visitor than a wife. Martin had moved to share a single room with a friend and had all his meals out to save the expense of entertaining. The friend obligingly found another place to sleep when Paulina arrived and she cooked for the three of them, scrubbed and crocheted and visited her old friends, but the focus of her life had changed. Martin was getting fatter. He drank beer but no spirits and had improved his position in the firm after getting a certificate. He did not beat her when he had evidence that there was still no baby on the way but threatened that he would do so if she was not faithful to him. She did not ask him for any pledge of faithfulness in return. What would be the use?
Her house at home was neat and comfortable. She had bought a new bed and mattress, a food cupboard and some upright chairs as well as helping her mother-in-law, out of her income from the club. She did
some crochet and a little sewing for other families and made regular trips to Kisumu for shopping. She wanted to ask Martin to help her buy a sewing-machine but hesitated because in some places, she heard, this was the gift given to sweeten the first wife for the arrival of the second.
All this time the vision of Uhuru was growing larger and larger. Delegations came and went to London for complicated talks. There were black ministers. There was going to be a black prime minister. It was a bit hard to imagine, but after all they had got used to having a black bishop long before there was a secondary school headmaster who was not foreign. One by one Emergency restrictions, which Paulina felt she knew more about than anyone in her home place, were broken down. Kenyatta was first moved, then freed, then elected. At home people got restless. Stones were thrown. A European was left to die when his car fell into a river near Maseno, although someone had dived far enough down to get his watch and his clothes. Institutions were confused with the foreigners who ran them. When a college bus overturned, villagers refused to help right it till assistance was called from outside. Several students were worse injured than they need have been and one girl lost a leg. Paulina could not understand it all, though they listened regularly to the shopkeeper’s radio in the market. People one looked up to were changing and moving, but the country and the country people did not seem to change much and she could not make out what was the advantage of being free. And yet she had become free, in a sense, of Martin, and she had changed. She provided for herself, lived by herself. Although she had obligations to him she neither hungered for him nor expected him from day to day. She made decisions for herself, of course, what to buy, what train to travel on: whether there were more momentous decisions - resolutely she closed her mind to them and considered how to teach the women about changes her supervisors said were coming.
All 1960 Martin waited in hope. Paulina would finish the course. She would be a credit to him. She would have an income and then, surely, as a grown-up person, she should have a child.
He moved to Makadara with the intention that his house-rent, charcoal, lamp-oil, would be saved by sharing with another man, and, perhaps, a little bit, to please Paulina when she came. Bus fares would
be needed, at least on wet days, but surely they would pool their vegetable and maize meal and very little would have to be bought for cash. But somehow it didn’t turn out like that. Aduogi was often behind with rent and always seemed to be waiting for a bag of maize meal that had not come from home. One night, coming in late, he kicked the lamp so that it broke, and Martin had to pay for a new glass and then for all the oil, since he needed light to study by and Aduogi insisted that a small tin with a wick was good enough for him. Once their supplies were finished Martin stopped sharing food with him. Then there were textbooks for evening classes and his younger sisters were getting into higher classes at school too. He was a bit disappointed that Paulina had not offered to pay for them. Of course she didn’t need anything from him, but then they were no longer earning their fees by having to harvest for him. He visited Fatima occasionally in her room - she was skilful, but domineering as well as expensive ~ and after all he was still a married man, so he never let her come to his room in Makadara or in Kariokor either. He wished that he had never let her come in Pumwani. Perhaps she had put the evil eye on them.
6
In April 1961 he went home on leave and expended all his affection on Paulina, who had done so well, but although she wrote to him whenever someone was travelling to Nairobi there was no hint of a pregnancy. In August 1%1 she visited him and he went home again at Christmas and the next April, but to no effect. In May 1962 he came back to Nairobi to find the house dirty and rent and charcoal owing, so he kicked Aduogi out. He was now earning three hundred and fifty a month after passing his exams and decided he could afford to live alone.
He could afford it since - the thought nagged him - he had no dependants other than the sisters wanting school fees. That was enough. Paulina could sew their uniforms for them. But although he could go out for a few beers on a Saturday night, for a cheap film show or a lecture or an evangelical meeting on a Sunday afternoon, get an occasional newspaper or a copy of Drum magazine, though it was no longer such a struggle to appear at work in a clean collar and tie or to
put in a contribution at a Freedom meeting, still it was a dull sort of life, trudging home to wash and make tea and perhaps sew on a few buttons before it got too dark, revising a few pages of marketing or salesmanship if no one came to call, beating your head all day about paper sizes and type specimens and fitting cards to envelopes. Once he had found it exciting: now he saw it as only the footslogging of the new world which others were beginning to penetrate with motorbikes and Mercedes. If he went to visit his uncles and cousins they were always agonising over nursery school fees, starting fishponds, contributing to cattle-dips, sending students overseas: one way and another pride and pocket were constantly touched.
So he was quite pleased one Saturday when Fauzia came to call. She was a kid sister of Fatima, staying at an aunt’s house near his while trying to get into a secretarial course. She did his ironing for him and accepted a Coke from the corner shop, chattering away about her schooldays at the coast and the superior facilities of Nairobi.
She came more often. The aunt beat her, she complained, and the colleges were always asking for more money before offering a place. Somehow she was soon staying the night. He put his foot down when Paulina came in August 1962, and had to pay the aunt to keep her mouth shut, but he was not sorry when Paulina, so neat, so prim, so dutiful, went away again and Fauzia returned, giggling, perfumed and with a sound Swahili erotic education to warm his bed and spice his food. After all, she was a young, clean girl who might give him a child. He was nearly thirty. It was his right to have a child and he was not going to pay dowry again without being sure.
Martin began to grow fatter and to talk more. Fauzia was attentive and not more demanding than one would expect of a young girl not long out of school. In the daytime she visited her people and they sometimes gave her dresses and things. The room seemed to be full of little pots and jars, but he didn’t mind: he had been starved of a feminine presence for so long.
In November Fauzia’s aunt made a formal call for which tea and sweet cakes were produced and the table laid with Paulina’s crocheted cloths. The bed was concealed behind a highly coloured hanging which was to be made into a dress afterwards.
The aunt spoke at length in flowery Swahili which Martin did not
try too hard to follow about marriage customs and the formality of gifts. She had a great thirst for knowledge, she said, and was eager to find out in what way Luo and Christian custom differed from her own. Martin reluctantly handed over two pounds in an envelope and asserted that in his custom dowry could not bring good fortune unless the former marriage was first terminated by the infidelity or sterility of the wife or the agreement of all parties. Of course, he added, his mother, brothers and his unfortunately bewitched wife all willed his happiness, and the greatest sign of God’s blessing was the gift of children, which could convince the whole family that he had found favour before the Lord. He had every intention of taking formal steps when his brothers and his former wife could see for themselves that love could override all barriers of tribe and creed.
He was very careful not to commit himself, and the aunt took her leave suggesting wordily that generosity was the quality most likely to evoke the desired gifts of God. The little room seemed to grow cold as Fauzia escorted her aunt away, chattering shrilly. Only a couple of chairs had enlarged the furnishings since Pumwani days and Fauzia had brought her own boxes to store her clothes in. The makeshift curtain looked thin and likely to fade - he had paid more than it was worth - and he had no serious thought of taking this butterfly creature home to mud floors and the care of heavy children. If he had any plan at all it was, vaguely, to retain the child and let her go her way. He did not get much reading done nowadays and there were no signs of dowry payments accumulating in the Post Office Savings Bank.
Deliberately he went out to visit some relations and talk about the constitutional conference and the state of the parties. He had been careful not to let them think of Fauzia as anything other than a casual girl friend. They would not find that worth mentioning in their letters home. Meanwhile Fauzia’s aunt had opened the envelope and reacted with indignation to the small amount she found in it. Fauzia wept and cajoled that night, but he could not put much heart into consoling her. She stayed away for two days but then crept back; it was the middle of the month and times were hard.
At Christmas he resolutely went home, taking a dress-length for his mother and a teapot for Paulina, but she was prostrated with a bad period both days and he returned to Nairobi with anger boiling up in
him. Fauzia was not in the house when he arrived, stiff and red-eyed from lack of sleep, in the early hours of the first working day. She later explained that she had been frightened to stay alone in the house and had gone to her sister’s. He did not ask which sister.
CHAPTER