William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

Wheech-Browning patted the pockets of his jacket, and loosened his tie.

“Would you mind awfully if I cadged a ciggie off you, Smith? I must have lost mine when I was thrown.”

Temple took out a packet of cigarettes and offered him one.

“Dumb animals, eh?” Wheech-Browning said, exhaling smoke and looking at his mule. “Thought I’d got a real bargain. And talking of bargains,” he said, noticing the crates in Temple’s waggon, “what’ve you got there?”

“Coffee seedlings,” Temple said.

“Coffee? Here? Think they’ll grow, old chap?”

“Well, we won’t know till we try.”

“Got a point there, I suppose. Where did you get them? Nairobi? Nakuru?”

“No. I got them in Dar.”

“German East? Good Lord, how fascinating. Tell me, what’s it like? I’m hoping to get down to Dar for the exhibition thing in August. Our consul there was at Cambridge with a cousin of mine. How did you find the wa-Germani?”

“It’s a nice place,” Temple said. “Clean and neat. Efficient too — in Dar, certainly. But it was like an armed camp. Soldiers everywhere.”

“What you’d expect, really. Typical Hun mentality, always marching about.” He paused. “Well look Smith, mustn’t keep you. Thanks for catching my mule. Let’s hope the beastly thing’s more tranquil on the ride home. Don’t want to land on my arse again.”

He walked over and mounted the mule, an operation that was, for him, as easy as getting on a bicycle. When his feet were in the stirrups they were only six inches from the ground.

“Gee up,” Wheech-Browning ordered, and the mule obediently started walking in the direction of Taveta. Temple tried to stop himself from smiling at the ridiculous sight.

“Seems fine,” Wheech-Browning shouted over his shoulder. Then, “Oh, by the way, can you drop in and see me some time next week?”

Temple frowned. “Why?” he called.

“Those coffee seedlings from German East,” Wheech-Browning yelled. “You’ve got to pay me the customs duty on them.”

Temple was still cursing Wheech-Browning when he came in sight of his farm some thirty minutes later. ‘Smithville’, as he grandiosely referred to it, did not present an attractive aspect to the eye. His house was built on a small hill; or rather, it was being built. The two storey wooden frame house had been incomplete now for over two years. The ground floor, consisting of a dining room, sitting room and kitchen, was in working order, but only two of the three bedrooms on the floor above were habitable. The third bedroom, above the kitchen, had walls, a floor, but no roof. It had been left incomplete not so much through want of funds or building expertise but through lack of energy, all of that commodity having been claimed by and directed towards the construction of the sisal factory which, unfortunately for the house, still remained the centre of Temple’s world.

From the house the land sloped gently away towards the small patch of water — some two miles distant — that was Lake Jipe. Across the border in German East (which ran beyond the lake) rose the Pare hills, along whose other side Temple had travelled that morning in the train from Bangui to Moshi.

At the moment Temple’s farm was divided into plots of sisal, with their great spiky leaves like hugely enlarged pineapple crowns, and fields of linseed plants. At the foot of the hill on which the house stood was the ‘factory’. This was a large corrugated iron shed which contained Temple’s pride and joy: the Finnegan and Zabriskie sisal ‘Decorticator’, a towering, massive threshing machine that pulverized the stiff sisal leaves into limp bundies of fibrous hemp. A smaller shed beside it contained smaller, more domestic-sized crushers for processing the linseed berries. Grouped around this central nub of the ‘factory’ were other shaky lean-tos, relics of failed enterprises of the past.

A large number of fenced-off wooden pens had served first as a pig farm, which had flourished for nine months before swine-fever had decimated the entire herd in a fortnight. Undeterred, Temple had immediately adapted the enclosures for ostrich farming, raising the fencing until it stood six feet high, and taking out some of the intervening walls. He had bought thirty ostriches at considerable expense and had been looking forward to his first harvest of feathers and the outcome of his breeding efforts — eight huge eggs had been laid by the hens — when disaster struck for the second time. One night a pride of lions had broken in and killed every bird. The ostriches trapped in their corral had been absurdly easy prey, their long necks an inviting target and broken with one swipe of a paw or crunch of teeth. Temple could still recall the shock of witnessing the result of the massacre, standing knee-deep in feathers, surrounded by his ravaged, mangled flock. Ostrich farming had proved a costly failure. All the recompense he had received was a week of superb omelettes — for breakfast, lunch and supper — as he and his family had sadly eaten their way through the clutch of eggs.

All the same, Smithville had survived, sustained by the reliable but boring sisal and linseed. Temple had invested in the Decorticator as much in an attempt to liven up the business of farming as to save him the processing fees he had to pay if the hemp was made at Voi. Theoretically, his forty acres of sisal did not warrant the erection of the factory, but it had swiftly become one of the most exciting and 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?”