Free The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley Page B

make him comfortable. Now he is like a man who is always being bitten by
siafu.
’ Soon he was called bwana Bado Kwisha, which means: not yet finished – a phrase that he was fond of using when the Kikuyu showed signs of knocking off for the day.
    I thought him very old, as he was over thirty. He was not bad-looking,although at first he seemed to us under-nourished and pasty-faced, with a stupid toothbrush moustache. But he had good, dog-like brown eyes and thick, wavy, chestnut hair, and when the sun had cooked him he lost the under-done appearance he had started with, his shoulders grew wider, and even his moustache became more impressive.
    On our other side was the Dutchman, Mr Roos. The land immediately across the river was taken up by a Scot called Jock Nimmo who was always away shooting elephants. After a while he dumped a wife there to make a show of development. The regulations required every settler to spend a certain sum on his land within, I think, the first five years, and to do a certain amount in the way of clearing bush, fencing, cultivating, and putting up buildings. Anyone who failed to do this lost his land. As Mr Nimmo was a hunter, not a farmer, he left all this to his wife. Tilly thought that was why he married her. Why had she married him? It can hardly have been for security or for companionship, and must have been a disappointment if it was for love. She was a nursing sister from Edinburgh who had come out to the Nairobi hospital, and that was where Jock Nimmo had met her. Soon after their marriage he had left her in the bush with a drunken headman, a few unreliable Kikuyu, and some implements and untrained oxen, and had gone off to poach ivory in the Belgian Congo, with a promise that he would take her to the races on his return.
    Mrs Nimmo was not much interested in coffee-planting, and was shocked by what she called the ‘heathen immorality’ of the natives. When Tilly inquired what she meant, she could hardly bring herself to speak of the sights she had seen. Tilly, hoping for some spicy revelations, sent me away. Afterwards she said to Robin:
    ‘The woman’s of! her head. All she’s worried about is that the boys don’t wear trousers. And she a nurse! Besides, what about kilts?’
    ‘Not in Edinburgh,’ Robin said with a flash of Highland snobbery.
    Mrs Nimmo had hoped to put nursing behind her, and disliked references to her former profession. She asked Tilly and myself to tea and produced a silver-plated teapot, fluted tea-cupsdecorated with rosebud-chains, thin bread-and-butter and many sweet and puffy little cakes which I greatly enjoyed. Each plate sat on a lace doily. Conversation was difficult. Mrs Nimmo wanted to talk about Edinburgh society, the new Governor’s pretty daughters, and a controversy then splitting the world of fashion in regard to sleeves, as to whether they should be open, or gathered in at the wrist; whereas Tilly’s mind was running on such topics as pleuro-pneumonia among oxen, twisted taproots in coffee seedlings, and rumours of an outbreak of bubonic plague.
    ‘I’m afraid I was a great disappointment,’ Tilly admitted regretfully afterwards. ‘The other only white woman for twenty miles and absolutely ignorant about the latest fashion in sleeves.’
    Early one morning a panting messenger arrived with a chit which said: ‘Please come at once. I have a loose murderer.’ Robin collected a mule and crossed the river by a new foot-bridge he had made. When he came back several hours later he remarked:
    ‘She’s an extraordinary woman. She goes on as if anything below a man’s neck gives her the vapours, and there she was gaily strapping up a sliced buttock and a gashed tummy as if she thoroughly enjoyed it, as I think she did. Really it was a ghastly sight – the fellow had his skull laid open and one eye half chopped out as well – and when I remarked about it she said: “Ah, weel, I’ve seen worse at the Infirmary on a Saturday night.”’
    The