The Other Language(63)
The Wiltons were eager for their friend to become their neighbor. Now that they were reaching their seventies, they were beginning to feel lonelier and were longing for a bit of company. When he heard that her husband had passed away, Lionel immediately called Mrs. D’Costa and told her about the empty cottage next door to them.
Without thinking about it twice, she’d enthusiastically agreed to move there. Actually she was relieved to let go of the big house and its happy memories now that her children had married and gone off to England, Australia and Durban. She had always tried to see change as a good thing and not to be afraid of it.
Her new landlord, a Mr. Khan who owned the hardware store twenty miles down the road, had agreed to have some work done to the cottage, since nobody had lived in it for a very long time and it was in a state of disrepair. He was quite relieved when Mrs. Anne D’Costa showed up at the store, inquiring if he’d agree to rent it to her. Though what she could afford to pay was minimal, he was happy for the income, and that someone would occupy the place. She asked him to replace the thatch roof with tin, to whitewash the walls and have one of his workers cut the mangle of weeds and bushes that strangled the trees. He was pleased to find out that Mrs. D’Costa was an easy tenant with few demands. She didn’t expect him to replace the old pipes or the haphazard wires that were snaking from the walls, nor did she seem to mind the yellowing Bakelite switches and fuse boxes dating back to the fifties. She had done enough maintenance while running a household of six, and now that she was alone she didn’t feel like being fussy about housekeeping anymore.
The Wiltons had welcomed Anne on her first night in the cottage with a strong vodka tonic. They sat on squeaking plastic chairs out on their veranda just as the full moon was about to bob up from the horizon.
“Welcome to our private paradise, my dear!” said Lionel, raising his glass. “You must come over for sundowners every evening!”
He still wore faded khaki shorts, knee socks and desert shoes, just as he did when she’d met him right before Kenya Independence, and he still combed what was left of his sandy hair on the side. But his body had shrunk and shriveled since then and his liver-spotted hand trembled slightly when he held up a glass.
“We’ll see about that, Lionel. We’ll see,” Mrs. D’Costa said jokingly. “I am not going to inflict my presence on a daily basis, I wouldn’t want you to get sick of me too soon.”
“That’s an order, Anne! I won’t compromise!” Lionel said, adding a generous splash of vodka to her glass.
Prudence poked him lightly with her elbow.
“Lionel, please let poor Anne be. She’ll do as she pleases. You’ll scare her away if you insist.” She shook her head and poured herself another drink.
“Don’t pay attention to him, Anne. He has become such a bully, this husband of mine.”
Prudence had put on quite a lot of weight since her days at the Little Theatre, but her roundness seemed to lend her a more youthful air. Men used to fall in love with her all the time, Mrs. D’Costa remembered. She had a lovely figure and a quirky taste in clothes back in the Mombasa days. Gamine, charming: that’s how people described her whenever Prudence came up in conversation. And quite rightly; she had been a lovely girl indeed.
Now Prudence wore Bata plastic slippers and large caftans that helped conceal her frame. She had cut her thick hair short and let it go white. She had spent too many years in the sun, and her face was a web of wrinkles. It didn’t matter, Mrs. D’Costa thought with relief: they had all aged in the sun and at the same pace so why should any of them mind the way they’d changed? They had known one another for so long, shouldn’t they be like family by now? And besides, as far as she was concerned, she believed she looked better now than when she’d just met the Wiltons. She had been a flat-chested, mousy girl with thick glasses, just twenty-one years old. An alien, really, who had just landed in the heat of Mombasa from the Scottish fog.
When Anne and her husband, Victor, met in college at Edinburgh, it was almost love at first sight. Victor D’Costa was a handsome, quiet young man. His family was originally from Goa, but in the thirties his grandfather had migrated to Kenya to work for the railroad company.
In those days in Edinburgh it was rare to see a student with brown skin on a university campus. Anne felt a bit of an outsider herself; she didn’t have many friends either, coming as she did from a poor, uneducated family in Glasgow. She noticed how the rest of the students either ignored Victor or plain avoided him, and was drawn to him exactly for this reason. As she got to know Victor, she grew more in awe of his impeccable manners, his kindness and wit. Actually she found him far more sophisticated than most of the students who snubbed him.
In 1952, right after their wedding (a small affair, neither had money to spend on the ceremony), the couple had sailed off to Mombasa to stay with his family. She’d immediately agreed to follow him there; she wasn’t leaving much behind anyway: a stuffy rented room that smelled of cabbage, her father’s drinking and her mother’s dreariness. There was also a surly brother she never got on with.
She wasn’t ready for so much brightness.
The East African light was blinding as their ship approached the coast; even at eight in the morning the air was redolent of cloves and sweet flowers. She could smell water in that heat. The clothes clung to her skin.