Read 1982 - An Ice-Cream War for Free Online Page B

joyous moments of his life to set the great Decorticator in motion, its engine belching smoke, the webbing drive belts flapping and cracking, the tin shed echoing to the crunch and clang of the flails as the bundies of sisal leaves were fed into the jaws of the machine by his terrified farm boys.
    It was now almost dark and the sun was dropping behind the Pare hills, sending their blue shadows advancing across the orange lake. Temple had travelled faster than he expected. He got Saleh to unharness the oxen, supervising the careful unloading and storing of the coffee seedlings, and looked in briefly on the dark gleaming mass of the Decorticator before he trudged up the hill to the house.
    Matilda, his wife, was sitting on the verandah reading, a book propped on her pregnant belly. She had a neat, bright face with round, very dark brown eyes. After Kermit Roosevelt had dismissed him, Temple had found temporary work with the American Industrial Mission near Nairobi, where his expertise had come in useful in the teaching of rudimentary engineering skills to the orphans, the mission housed and cared for. Matilda’s father, the Rev. Norman Espie, ran a mission a few miles away. Temple was sent to supervise the erection of a water tower and met Matilda. It was something about her enormous calm that attracted him and encouraged him to think of staying to make his future in the new and growing colony. The day he received notification that his savings had been transferred from Sturgis to the Bank of India, Nairobi, he proposed and was, with only a night intervening to allow further reflection, accepted.
    Matilda looked up at the sound of his footsteps.
    “Hello, dear,” she said, returning to her book. “Have a nice trip?”
    “I did,” Temple said. His wife never ceased to astonish him: he might have popped out for ten minutes. “Very interesting. And successful.” He chose his words carefully, conscious of the creeping onset of guilt as he bent to kiss the top of her head. He had a sudden image of the oiled, compliant whore in the Kitumoinee Hotel. Now, in his home, with his wife, family and farm around him, he wondered what had possessed him to visit the place.
    “How are you?” he said, a flood of tenderness making his voice tremble. He cleared his throat. “Everything go fine? No problems?”
    “What?” Matilda said, looking up and squinting at him. “Oh yes. All well.”
    “Good,” Temple said. “Good, good, good.” He sat down. There was a tray with a tea pot and milk jug on it. He cupped his hands round the pot.
    “Coldish now, I should think,” Matilda said. “Why not have a peg?”
    Temple squeezed her hand. “I think I will. Join me?” But she hadn’t heard, she was reading again.
    Temple went into the house. The dining room table was covered with the residue of some disgusting meal. Enamel plates, glasses and cutlery were assembled haphazardly on its surface among damp spills and pieces of food. His children had been fed, that at least was something. He went through into the kitchen. This room was practically bare. In the centre of the floor stood a table. In a corner was a stoneware water filter and a large meatsafe, a fly-proofed cupboard whose four legs stood in small tins of water to protect it against invasion by the ants that swarmed everywhere on floor and walls. Along one of these walls was a three foot-high concrete trough, filled with charcoal and covered in thick iron grilles. It was on this crude instrument that all their cooking was done. Temple walked to the back door. In the gathering dusk he could just make out, beyond the privy and a huge pile of firewood, his cook and houseboy’s shamba, an untidy collection of woven and thatched straw and grass huts and ill-tended vegetable plots. He saw the plump figure of the ayah waddling up the hill, his baby daughter Emily balanced on her hip.
    “Ayah,” he shouted. She was Indian, inherited from Matilda’s family, and spoke English.