The Other Language(65)
Margaret Dobson—Margie to her friends—back in the days of old Mombasa had been a celebrated beauty, with the perfect marriage and the perfect children. A slender blonde with light blue eyes, she bought her wardrobe in England and always had a string of cultured pearls dangling around her neck. For Mrs. D’Costa she’d been just an acquaintance—they didn’t belong to the same Mombasa circles—but Anne had always admired her style from afar. Thus it was with extreme pleasure and surprise that two years after the terrible accident she learned that Margie and her husband, Keith, were looking to leave Mombasa to retire on the south coast and were coming to look at the Wiltons’ plot of land. News of their visit had reached her via Saleem, the old askari who still lived on the premises, looking after the empty house. He came almost every evening to drink a cup of masala chai with her cook, Hamisi, to shake off the loneliness. The two men sat on the baraza outside the kitchen talking in Digo. Mrs. D’Costa enjoyed the sound of their soft cackles that seeped from the backyard into the house while she read a book with Pickle and Chutney snoring at her feet.
As soon as she heard that Margie and Keith were coming to pay a second visit to the property, Mrs. D’Costa sent Hamisi over to the house next door with a note asking the Dobsons to stop by for tea. She then instructed him to bring out the nicer cups and to serve tea under the flame tree on the lawn, where they could have a good view of the sea. For the occasion she washed her hair, put it into rollers and wore a dress with a large floral print.
“It would be lovely if you came to live here,” she said, pouring the tea into the floral porcelain cups. How exciting to have the Dobsons, of all people, sitting on her wicker chairs looking out at the ocean.
“Yes, it would. Wouldn’t it, Keith?” Margie asked her husband, her face eager and cautious at once; she was clearly afraid to commit herself without his approval. He nodded briefly, seemingly impatient with this impromptu tea party, and looked the other way.
He was tall and imposing, quite handsome still. As a young man he’d had a classic appeal, dark haired, with a roguish face with thick eyebrows over green eyes. That wild Irish look that aged well. He had maintained his stature and bulk. Time seemed to have only made him more interesting.
Margie had been the one to keep the conversation alive. After commenting on the tragedy that had ended Lionel’s and Prudence’s lives she noted that it seemed that many of their old friends had followed a similar journey: from their society days at the club, the up-country safaris with the children and ayahs in tow, to retirement on a quiet beach, looking forward to silence and lots to read. Mrs. D’Costa agreed, out of politeness, despite the fact that she’d never been part of the “society days” at the club nor had she been on safaris with ayahs. Clearly Margie had no recollection of how distant their life had been from hers in the days when she and Keith had pink gin at the club every evening. In fact, so many years later, none of her white friends seemed to remember how different things had been before Independence, Mrs. D’Costa thought, but she wasn’t the kind of person who would make a sarcastic remark. She disliked feeling any bitterness.
The sea glowed like an iridescent sheet of mercury. A heron flew low over its still surface, and one could hear the sound of its wings flapping. Two fishermen came walking from the other end of the beach in their tattered shorts, squatted on their haunches by the edge of the water and started to wash themselves, rubbing white sand on their dark skin, in the bluish light of dusk.
“Look at that reef, Keith,” Margie said encouragingly in her lilting voice. “It’s just like a gouache, isn’t it?”
Her husband didn’t answer.
“You could start painting again,” she added.
Keith ignored her. He lifted a stale Barvita biscuit from the plastic tray but put it back. He’d never possessed good social skills, that much Mrs. D’Costa remembered about him. He was always brooding, intimidating; the rare times they’d met in the past she’d never dared start a conversation with him. But now that the Dobsons had landed on her turf, she was the one who was supposed to show them the ropes. If they came here they’d have to rely on her, at least in the beginning.
“It’s very peaceful indeed, this beach,” Keith finally conceded, perhaps with a hint of sarcasm.
“I hope peace is what you’re looking for,” Mrs. D’Costa said, an eyebrow raised, “because here you’ll find plenty of it.”
On the first of each month Mrs. D’Costa drove the twenty miles to the small junction that people proudly called town and stopped at the hardware store to pay the rent. The so-called town was a mix of moldy one-story buildings in need of whitewashing clustered around the post office, the hardware store, the gas station and the bank. A line of wooden stalls along the main road sold wrinkled vegetables and dried fish. The butcher’s sign had ribs and loins drawn by a childish hand. Slabs of meat covered in flies hung on hooks against the bright blue wall. Young men shielded by cheap sunglasses and rasta hats were smoking ganja by the bus station, while the eternal Bob Marley song blared from a portable radio from one of the wooden shacks that sold fries, hard-boiled eggs and sweet masala chai.
Mrs. D’Costa didn’t dislike coming to town, didn’t think of it as charmless or ugly. The memory of European architecture for her had faded, and these days she couldn’t recall much of the geography there and hardly ever thought about it anyway. To her the town was just any African town and she expected nothing more of it other than what it offered.