5

“When in doubt, dust.”

This advice, passed on to Didymus Kigali by his father, who had been in domestic service before him, had proved sound and sensible.

It certainly served him well. Kigali soon discovered that brandishing his yellow duster, with its faint whiff of Brasso that remained no matter how thoroughly he washed it, brought some important benefits.

For a start, if you were polishing the brass fittings on the windows, your employer was unlikely to accuse you of being a “loafer”, or even worse, a “lazy loafer”, which was as serious an accusation as could be levelled at a house steward in Kuwisha.

It was not a guarantee against an accusation of being “cheeky”. But that was “politics”, and Kigali steered clear of politics.

What was more, dusting was an activity that induced a sense of order in the universe. “All is well when you dust well,” and once again his father’s observation had proven true over the years, passing the test of time.

And finally it seemed to make you invisible to the settlers who employed you, something Kigali was at a loss to explain. But many were the times he had been a witness to, or within earshot of, a row between madam and master, both apparently oblivious to the presence of a black man as they traded insults or exchanged blows.

To these three reasons for dusting, all evidence of his late father’s wisdom, Kigali had added a fourth – albeit with some diffidence, for he was far from certain that his father would have approved.

Dusting and polishing gave him the chance to reflect on Life, and compose his weekly Admonition, or sermon, as other churches called it. Indeed his maiden Admonition, which had been widely praised by his fellow elders, had been composed while dusting the books that occupied one complete wall in Furniver’s flat.

The theme had been a controversial one. Members of the sect had been increasingly subject to taunts, particularly from the youth who were loyal to traditional faiths. They scoffed at the absence of any material manifestations of the Lamb’s presence, much to the anger of militants in the sect who were becoming increasingly hard to restrain in the face of provocative chants.

“No church, never naked, No home, nothing sacred”, ran the latest sally.

After much dusting and a great deal of deliberation, Didymus Kigali chose his maiden Admonition to speak out.

Standing on a termite mound, surrounded by tens of thousands of Lambs, Kigali gently mocked the materialism of other faiths.

“They ask where are our churches? Where are the big houses for our leaders? Where are our altars?”

“Admonish,” some in the huge open-air congregation in the city park called out.

“Admonish!” The call was taken up as the spirit of the people responded to Kigali’s theme.

“They must look around.”

“Admonish!” they cried.

“The very world, created for His people by our Blessed Lord, is the meeting place of the followers of the Lamb.”

“Admonish!”

“The hills around us are our altar, the trees are our canopies, and our home is in the hearts of our people!”

As one, the congregation raised the index finger of their left hand and thrust their fingers towards the blue sky:

“Admonished! Admonished! Admonished!”

It had been a triumph, and Kigali’s only regret was that his father had not been alive to attend his subsequent induction as an elder. The old man, who had witnessed the arrival of the white settlers with their bibles and bullets, had died a staunch animist.

The next day, as he polished Furniver’s life-size bronze cast of a lion’s paw print, Kigali pondered the question he regularly asked himself: would his father have taken up the faith of the Church of the Blessed Lamb? It seemed unlikely. But of one thing Kigali was sure: his father would have been proud of him.

Noises from the bathroom indicated that Furniver was going about his daily ablutions. Any minute now he would emerge, trailing that curious smell the steward had recently started noticing, like a bad aftershave. Kigali was starting to fear the worst. He renewed his polishing with especial vigour. His yellow duster snapped and cracked as he turned the brass to gleaming gold, but his heart was not in it, and his mind failed to resolve his predicament.

Kigali greeted Edward Furniver’s entry into the flat’s kitchen by gently clearing his throat, just one of a repertoire of conversational coughs that was quite remarkable in its range.

It included the rumble of the alarm cough, the persistency of the drawing attention cough, the murmur of interrogative cough, the reassuringly affirmative cough, and the obedient obsequious cough. Add variations of tone and pitch, and the result was a mini vocabulary, but one in which the context was all-important.

Didymus Kigali did not cough in a vacuum, however. Edward Furniver, founder, manager and sole employee of the Kireba Cooperative Savings Bank, played his part.

Just as Kigali used his coughs, Furniver used ums, ers, pauses, rise and fall, and tone, well as a number of all-purpose basic words including thingy, and wotsit.

Kigali’s opening cough had brought a response from Furniver, who politely produced a modest rumble in his throat.

Early morning pleasantries over, Kigali coughed again, indicating that he was all ears for whatever Furniver wished to raise.

“Mr, er, Mr Kigali, um,” Edward Furniver began.

He could no more call his elderly, grey-haired steward Didymus than Kigali could call Furniver anything other than “sir”.

“Suh,” said Kigali.

He gave Furniver time to gather his thoughts, and while he waited reviewed the admirable qualities of his employer. Edward Furniver, Didymus Kigali had no doubt, was a good man. And this was not because of what Furniver had said to Charity, who had passed on an expurgated version to Mildred, who had in turn told her husband.

“Put my foot down on this one,” Furniver had insisted soon after his arrival in Kireba. “It’s one thing to have a chap old enough to be my dad working for me, who wears an all-white kit that makes him look like a bloody elderly cricketer in shorts, and who keeps count of my underpants. But I’m not letting him live under a couple of plastic bags or two, stretched over a few sticks!”

Mildred had not been particularly happy at the move to the new house, for it meant a longer walk to Harrods every day, but changed her mind when its corrugated tin roof held up without a single leak during the storms that had left much of the slum under a foot of water.

In the opinion of Kigali, Furniver had a further virtue.

“Never has he spoken about having talks behind the kia,” Kigali told Mildred. “Never!”

He shook his grizzled, peppercorn head.

“Never.”

He continued to rub the brass lever on the kitchen window. Then he stopped. Furniver was trying to communicate. Kigali resumed rubbing and dusting while his employer marshalled his thoughts.

“We need to, um, clear the, er, air. Indeed. Air. Um. Clear.

“Clear, the, um, air,” Furniver repeated in an attempt to be helpful.

Kigali thought furiously.

Air . . . clear . . . insects . . . spray?

“We already have air clear, suh,” preceding his response with an uncertain cough. Mosquitoes were a menace and Kigali sprayed Doom, the “Fast-kill all insect killer”, every day at dusk. He had checked the night before, and there were at least three unused cans of Doom in the kitchen cupboard.

Nevertheless, Kigali gave another cough, deferential, yes, but nonetheless the tone indicated that the subject was not closed should Furniver wish to pursue it.

Furniver provided a conciliatory “um” in return, and tried again: “No, um, no, Mr Kigali . . .” Surely he was making himself plain?

Kigali coughed, encouragingly.

Furniver took the initiative.

“The, er, the, um, Vaseline thingy.”

That was easy, thought Kigali, mistakenly.

“In the bathroom cupboard, suh.”

Too easy. Kigali rebuked himself as the penny dropped.

He could have kicked himself for failing to recognise Furniver’s concern.

“For jipu, suh,” he quickly added.

Surely the poor man didn’t have another one.

There had been an embarrassing misunderstanding when he had encountered Furniver, naked, inspecting an excruciatingly itchy bump in the cleft of his posterior. It was the result of an egg, laid by a fly known as a jipu, in a pair of underpants hung in the sun to dry, which had burrowed into Furniver’s pink flesh.

Years of experience had taught Kuwisha settlers and their servants that the best way to deal with the menace of the jipu was to ensure that one’s steward, or “boy” as they were known in pre-independence days, ironed one’s underwear with a very hot iron – and failure to do this was, understandably, a sackable offence.

But if by ill-chance, or neglect, a jipu egg survived this preemptive hot iron, there was only one course of action: a dollop of Vaseline petroleum jelly smeared over the itchy bump soon overwhelmed the maggot and forced it to emerge for air.

It was while Furniver was preparing to tackle his affliction that Kigali had entered his employer’s bedroom with a cup of tea. To say he was shocked by what he saw does not do justice to the steward’s trauma.

“Even baboons,” a distraught Kigali had told his wife Mildred, “even baboons, I have never seen doing that thing with finger – and Vaseline.”

Ever since that unfortunate episode, happily resolved when Charity took Furniver to Cousin Mercy’s clinic to have the jipu seen to, Kigali had watched Furniver’s underpants like a hawk circling the veld.

Kigali coughed again. Not so much a cough as a gentle conciliatory clearing of the throat.

“Quite. My fault. Hot iron. Chap at the club warned me. Didn’t check. Jipu, er.”

Furniver had completed his confession.

There was no more to say, really.

Mr Kigali coughed appreciatively in turn, and both men averted their eyes.

The matter was closed.

But Furniver’s decency did nothing to help Kigali resolve the other delicate matter that disturbed him so deeply. Indeed it made it all the more difficult. The more he thought about it, the more he was inclined to blame Charity. A wise madam never asked her steward to report on her man’s drinking habits.

His father’s words came back to him: “Do not take sides, Didymus, never. No-one can say who will win in a battle between madam and master. One thing I tell you – the house boy who interferes will always lose. That is for sure.”