The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [57]
Regina opened the bathroom door, and the light flooded the bedroom. She wasn’t wearing the nightgown, but instead had wrapped a kitenge cloth around her hips. He would never know whether the gesture was deliberate or merely unconscious, but his heart ratcheted within his chest. She switched off the bathroom light and stood provocatively in the doorway, her breasts white globes in the moonlight. He had only seconds, if that, before she would see his hesitation and cover herself. And then the rest of the night would be tears and apologies, words that both of them would regret. In the distance, as he sometimes did during the night, he heard the sound of drums, of people singing. Kikuyu Catholics, he knew, returning from a midnight service. An awakened ibis cawed in the night, and a donkey, disturbed, made its raw and awful cry. Thomas walked toward his wife and prepared to tell her she was beautiful.
—I don’t understand. It’s a Sunday.
—I promised Ndegwa.
—Promised him what?
—That I’d visit his wife.
—What good will that do?
—None, probably. It’s just a promise, Regina.
—Why didn’t you tell me you’d had a drink with the man?
He walked to the car, always surprised that it was still in the driveway. Inside the house, Regina was fuming and might be still when he returned later in the evening. He’d invited her to come along, but, either truly stubborn or simply needing to study, she had refused his half-hearted offer. Yet not before she’d told him (arms crossed, her mouth aggrieved) that she had planned a picnic in the Ngong Hills for later in the day, a picnic that would now obviously have to be scrapped. He had winced for her lie, though he’d been relieved when she’d said finally that the trip would simply take too long. He had wanted desperately to be alone.
He left the jacaranda-shaded driveway and made his way along Windy Ridge Road toward the center of town, marveling, as he often did, at the hedges of Karen — thick, impenetrable walls that hid estates from less-privileged eyes. Karen, named for its most famous citizen, Karen Blixen (I had a farm in Africa. . . .), had once been an almost exclusively white enclave, a kind of mini-Cotswolds with rolling farms and white-fenced stables and an Anglo-expatriate fondness for racing horses and excessive drinking. Now, scattered amongst the signs at the ends of driveways were African names as well — Mwangi and Kariuki and Njonjo — wealthy Luo or Kikuyu or Kalinjin, an African elite, the money often made mysteriously through politics. And always, at the ends of these driveways, the ubiquitous signs: Mbwa Kali. Fierce Dog.
The Escort lurched along the Ngong Road into Nairobi, its tattered muffler announcing itself rudely to anyone at the racecourse or in the Ngong Forest. He negotiated the streets of the city, quiet now on a Sunday morning, and left Nairobi for Limuru, the scenery a kind of diary of time spent in the country: the Impala Club, where he played tennis with the Kenyan executive for Olivetti; the Arboretum, where he and Regina had once fallen asleep after making love; and the house of a UNICEF administrator, where he had gotten drunk nostalgically on scotch. He had been out to the Ndegwa shamba only the once, and he hoped he would remember the way to the outskirts of the central Highlands, once called “the Happy Valley” for the sexual license and alcoholic excess of the Anglo-Kenyan expatriates who had owned the large wheat and pyrethrum plantations. The Mau Mau rebellion and Independence had put an end to the party, the vast farms broken into smaller plots, on which bananas, cassavas, beans, potatoes, and tea now grew. The green of the tea plantations was a color that awed Thomas every time he saw it: a seemingly iridescent emerald that contained within it the essence of both light and water.
In Limuru, he bought a packet of Players at a duka and asked directions to the Ndegwa shamba, noting the practiced manner in which the shopkeeper gave them,