African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [140]
It takes hours of gossip to catch up with it all.
We eat supper early. We go to bed early. We get up before the sun. I look to see if the vervet monkey is in his tree down the hill, so we can watch the sunrise together, but the tree has gone the way of all trees, and perhaps the monkey too. Vervet monkeys do appear briefly on the edges of the clearing, play, chasing each other, in the branches–disappear. Youngsters. Not a philosopher among them.
The animals I met last time? Clever little Vicky was run over by a drunk driver at the Club. Old Annie the bull terrier was killed by a wild pig. The lanky ridgeback with legs that splayed and slipped about over the polished cement turned out to be too stupid to live, and found an early grave. The little black cat was allowed to keep a kitten from her last litter but the father was a bush cat, and this kitten, a strong brave young male, took to the bush. He comes to visit his mother, and they sit nose to nose where the trees start behind the house.
A new bull terrier lies on his back and moans with pleasure when the fires are lit in the evening. There is a young black dog, Seamus, part Newfoundland.
What about that great black dog, Tarka, who used to wake me every night by putting his nose into my hand, or my face, lonely because his people were away? He is too old to be running around at nights now, he stays at home. When there is a party at the Club, he stands on the edge of the room, a stiff old dog with a greying muzzle, looking in at young Seamus prancing and jumping among the dancers who say, ‘Look, Seamus is dancing with us–come Seamus, dance with me…’ And the young dog, almost weeping with pride, is steered for a few steps, his front paws carefully held up, while people applaud him. This is the dog who, a few months ago when the Coffee Farmer fell off the dam wall on a black night and could not walk, having cracked his hip, stayed by him, and when the Coffee Farmer was recovered enough to crawl home, adjusted his pace and positioned himself so the farmer could put his weight on his back. It took hours to cover the mile of rough road.
A PARTY
A big dinner party: everyone comes. You would not easily get this food in Britain. The vegetables have never heard of insecticides, fertilizers: they live on compost. No one has heard about hams being injected with water. The smoked beef has not had hormones fed into it.
It is a noisy enjoyable party, with a lot of young people. The little girls of the previous visit have grown up, and are in different parts of the world: there are new little girls, and they are all in love with a handsome young man visiting from Sandhurst. What has happened to the parachutist? Oh, he’s off farming somewhere, doing well, they say.
Not a suggestion in any of this talk of the peevish complaint of six years ago. They might be different people: they are different people, all involved with development projects.
Even more than last time they plan to diversify: the crash of kiwi fruit prices was salutary. And they might be growing one of the most sought-after coffees in the world, but there is a coffee mountain…
These few families are also growing soft fruit, macadamia nuts, pecans, vegetables for the Mutare market, the new small pawpaws. In one kitchen a farmer’s wife began making cheese from the surplus milk: now she cannot produce enough of her cheese to satisfy the hotels and the embassies in the cities. Last time I watched her work on her kitchen table: now she has special rooms kept at the right temperatures, and employs others.
The talk goes like this:
I heard Bob is doing well with his eland, how do you think eland would do up here? (Eland grown like cattle, for meat.)
Zebra…would it be too high for zebra here?
If camembert is a success here, why not try…?
I’m putting in five acres of granadillas this year.
Ostrich feathers are back…
In Peru they…
In Mexico…
In Arizona…
I’m getting fifty more hives of bees. Killer bees they call them in America. They get hysterical about the slightest thing in America.
I said: ‘My brother had