A Spear of Summer Grass

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Quentin laughed out loud, a sure sign that the champagne was getting to him.

I fixed him with my most winsome expression. “You can do a favour for me while I’m away.”

“Anything,” was the prompt reply.

“I have garaged my car in London.” I reached into my tiny beaded bag and pulled out the key. I flipped it into his champagne glass. “Take her out and drive her once in a while.”

He stared at the key as the bubbles foamed around it. “The Hispano-Suiza? But it’s brand new!”

It was indeed. I’d only taken possession of it two months before. I had cooled my heels for half a year waiting for them to get the colour just right. I had instructed them to paint it the same scarlet as my lipstick, which the dealer couldn’t seem to understand until I had left a crimson souvenir of my kiss on the wall of his office. I had ordered it upholstered in leopard, and whenever I drove it I felt savagely stylish, a modern-day Boadicea in her chariot.

“That’s why I want it driven,” I told Quentin. “She’s like any female. If she sits around doing nothing for a year, she’ll rust up. And something that pretty deserves to be taken out for a ride and shown off.”

He fished into the glass and withdrew the key, wearing an expression of such wonder you’d have thought I just dropped the crown jewels into his lap. He dried the key carefully on his handkerchief and tucked it into his pocket. Cornelia wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t care and neither did Quentin.

Just then the Negro orchestra struck up a dance tune, something sensual and throbbing, and Quentin stood, holding out his hand to me. “Dance?” I rose and he smiled at Dora. “We’ll have the next one, shall we?”

Dora waved him off and I went into his arms. Quentin was a heavenly dancer, and there was something deliciously familiar about our bodies moving together.

“I have missed this, you know,” he said, his lips brushing my ear.

“Don’t, darling,” I said lightly. “Your mustache is tickling me.”

“You never complained before.”

“I never had the chance. I always meant to make you shave it off when we’d been married for a year.”

His arm tightened. The drums grew more insistent. “Sometimes I think I was a very great fool to let you go.”

“Don’t get nostalgic,” I told him firmly. “You are far better off with Cornelia. And you have the twins.”

“The twins are dyspeptic and nearsighted. They take after their mother.”

I laughed as he spun me into a series of complicated steps then swung me back into his arms. He felt solid under my touch. There had never been anything of the soft Englishman about Quentin. He was far too fond of cricket and polo for that.

I ran a happy hand over the curve of his shoulder and felt him shudder.

“Delilah, unless you plan on inviting me up for the night—”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. We both knew I would. We’d spent more nights together since our divorce than we had during our marriage. Not when I was married to Misha, of course. That would have been entirely wrong. But it seemed very silly not to enjoy a quick roll in the hay when we both happened to be in the same city. After all, it wasn’t as though Cornelia had anything to fear from me. I had had him and I had let him go. I wasn’t about to take him back again. In fact, I rather thought I might be doing her a service. He was always jolly after a night with me; it must have made him easier to live with. Besides that, he was so lashed with guilt he invariably went home with an expensive present for Cornelia. I smiled up into Quentin’s eyes and wondered what she’d be getting this time. I had seen some divine little emerald clips in the Cartier window on the Rue de la Paix. I made a note to tell him about them.

We danced and the orchestra played on.

* * *

The next morning I waved goodbye to Paris through the haze of a modest hangover. Dora, who had restricted herself to two glasses of champagne, was appallingly chipper. Paris had dressed in her best to see us off. A warm spring sun peeked through the pearl-grey skirts of early morning fog, and a light breeze stirred the new leaves on the Champs-Élysées as if waving farewell.

“It might at least be bucketing down with rain,” I muttered irritably. I was further annoyed that Mossy had sent Weatherby to make certain I made the train to Marseilles. “Tell me, Mr. Weatherby, do you plan to come as far as Mombasa with us? Or do you trust us to navigate the Suez on our own?”

Weatherby wisely ignored the jibe. He handed over a thick morocco case stuffed with papers and bank notes. “Here are your travel documents, Miss Drummond, as well as a little travelling money from Sir Nigel in case you should meet with unexpected expenses. There are letters of introduction as well.”

I gave him a smile so thin and sharp I could have cut glass with it. “How perfectly Edwardian.”

Weatherby stiffened. “You might find it helpful to know certain people in Kenya. The governor, for instance.”

“Will I?”

He drew in a deep breath and seemed to make a grab for his patience. “Miss Drummond, I don’t think you fully comprehend the circumstances. Single women are not permitted to settle in Kenya. Sir Nigel took considerable pains to secure your entry. The governor himself issued permission.”

He brandished a piece of paper covered with official stamps. I peered at the signature. “Sir William Kendall.”

“As I say, the governor – and an old friend of your stepfather’s from his Kenya days. No doubt he will prove a useful connection in your new life in Kenya.”

I shoved the permit into the portfolio and handed it to Dora. “It’s very kind of Nigel to take so much trouble, but I don’t have a new life in Kenya, Mr. Weatherby. I am going for a short stay until everyone stops being so difficult about things. When the headlines have faded away, I’ll be back,” I told him. I would have said more, but just then there was a bit of a commotion on the platform. There was the sound of running footsteps, some jostling, and above it all, the baying of hounds hot on the scent.

“There she is!” It was the photographers, and before they could snap a decent picture, Weatherby had shoved me onto the train and slammed the door, very nearly stranding Dora on the platform. She fought her way onto the train, leaving the pack of reporters scrambling in her wake.

“Honestly,” Dora muttered. Her hat had somehow gotten crushed in the scrum and she was staring at it mournfully.

“Don’t bother trying to fix it, Dodo. It’s an improvement,” I told her. I moved to the window and let it down. Instantly, the photographers rushed the train, shouting and setting off flashbulbs. I gave them a mildly vulgar gesture and a wide smile. “Take all the pictures you want, boys. I’m headed to Africa!”

* * *

My high spirits had evaporated by the time we boarded the ship at Marseilles. I was no stranger to travel. I liked to keep on the move, one step ahead of everybody, heading wherever my whims carried me. What I resented was being told that I had to go. It was quite hurtful, really. Mossy had weathered any number of scandalous stories in the press and she’d never been exiled. Of course, none of her husbands had ever died in mysterious circumstances. She’d divorced all except my father, poor Peregrine Drummond, known to all and sundry as Pink. He’d gone off to fight in the Boer War just after their honeymoon without even knowing I was on the way. He had died of dysentery before lifting his rifle – a sad footnote to what Mossy said had been a hell of a life. He had been adventuresome and charming and handsome as the devil, and no one could quite believe that he had died puking into a bucket. It was a distinctly mundane way to go.

Since Mossy might well have been carrying the heir to the Drummond title, she’d spent her pregnancy sitting around at the family estate, waiting to pup. As soon as she went into labour, my father’s five brothers descended upon Cherryvale from London, pacing outside Mossy’s room until the doctor emerged with the news that the eldest of them was now the undisputed heir to their father’s title. Mossy told me she could hear the champagne corks and hushed whoops through the door. They needn’t have bothered to keep it down. If she’d been mother to the heir she’d have been forced to stay at Cherryvale with her in-laws. Since I was a girl – and of no particular interest to anyone – she was free to go. The prospect of leaving thrilled her so much she would have happily bought them a round of champagne herself.

As it was, she packed me up as soon as she could walk and we decamped to a suite at the Savoy with Ingeborg and room service to look after us. Mossy never returned to Cherryvale, but I went back for school holidays while my grandparents were alive. They spent most of their time correcting my posture and my accent. I eventually stopped slouching thanks to enforced hours walking the long picture gallery at Cherryvale with a copy of Fordyce’s Sermons on my head, but the long Louisiana drawl that had made itself at home on my tongue never left. It got thicker every summer when I went back to Reveille, but mellowed each school term when the girls made fun of me and I tried to hide it. I never did get the hang of those flat English vowels, and I eventually realised it was just easier to pummel the first girl who mocked me. I was chucked out of four schools for fighting, and Mossy despaired of ever making a lady of me.

But I did master the social graces – most of them anyway – and I made my debut in London in 1911. Mossy had been barred from Court on account of her divorces and it was left to my Drummond aunt to bring me out properly. She did it with little grace and less enthusiasm, and I suspected some money might have changed hands. But I fixed my fancy Prince of Wales feathers to my hair and rode to the palace in a carriage and made my double curtsey to the king and queen. The next night I went to my first debutante ball and two days later I eloped with a black-haired boy from Devonshire whose family almost disowned him for marrying an American with nothing but scandal for a dowry.

Johnny didn’t care. All he wanted was me, and since all I wanted was him, it worked out just fine. The Colonel came through with a handsome present of cash and Johnny had a little family money. He wanted to write, so I bought him a typewriter as a wedding present and he would sit at our little kitchen table pecking away as I burned the chops. He read me his articles and bits of his novel every evening as I eventually figured out how not to scorch things, and by the time his book was finished, I had even learned to make a proper soufflé. We were proud of each other, and everything we did seemed new, as if it was the first time it had ever been done. Whether it was sex or prose or jam on toast, we invented it. There was something fine about our time together, and when I took the memories out to look at them, I peered hard to find a shadow somewhere. Did the mirror crack when I sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched him shave? Did I spill salt when I fixed his eggs? Did an owl come to roost in the rafters of the attic? I had been brought up on omens, nursed on portents. Not from Mossy. She was a new creation, a modern woman, although I had spied her telling her rosary when she didn’t think I saw.

But there were the others. The Colonel’s withered old mother, Granny Miette, her keeper Teenie, and Teenie’s daughter, Angele. They were the guardians of my childhood summers at Reveille, and they kept the old ways. They knew that not everything is as it seems and that if you look closely enough, you can see the shadows of what’s to come in the bright light of your own happiness. Time is slower in Louisiana, each minute dripping past like cold molasses. Plenty of time to see if you want to and you know where to look.

I never looked in those days with Johnny. When I opened a closet and something fluttered out of the corner of my eye, I told myself it was just moths and nothing more, and I hung lavender and cedar to drive them away. When I peered in a cupboard and saw a shadow scurry past, I said it was mice and bought a cat, the meanest mouser I could find. I sent to Reveille for golden strands of vetiver and carried the dry grass in a small bundle in my pocket. It was the scent of sunlight and home, pungent and earthy and cedar-green-smelling, and I sewed a handful of it in the uniform that Johnny put on in 1914.

The uniform came back – or at least pieces of it did. Germans blew him to bits during the Battle of the Marne, and I don’t remember much of what happened after that. A black curtain has fallen over that time, and I don’t ever pull it back to look behind. It’s a place I don’t visit in my memories, and it was a long while before I came out of it. When I emerged, I chopped off my hair and hemmed up my skirts and set out to see what I’d been missing in the world. It had been an interesting ride, no doubt about it, but things had gotten a little out of hand to land me with banishment to Africa. I had handled my affairs with style and even a little discretion from time to time. But the world could be a hard place on a girl who was just out for a little fun, and I felt mightily put upon as the train churned into the station at Marseilles.

At the sight of the ship, my spirits perked right up. I had had a choice of sailing with a British outfit or later with a German one, but I had refused point blank to cross to Mombasa with a bunch of Krauts. I was still holding a bit of a grudge over Johnny and wasn’t inclined to give them a penny of my money. Sailing a week earlier meant missing the closing of Cocteau’s Antigone, but I was not about to budge. And when I saw the crew, I didn’t even mind giving up the Chanel costumes or the Picasso sets. The boys were absolutely darling, each and every one of them, and for the next fortnight, I nursed my grievances in style. The deck steward made certain my chair was always in the best spot, near the sun but comfortably shaded as we moved south. As soon as I settled myself each morning, he was there with a travelling rug and a cup of hot bouillon. The dining steward dampened my tablecloth lightly so my plate wouldn’t slide in rough seas and the wine wouldn’t spill on my French silks. The older officers took turns escorting me onto the dance floor, and the younger ones gathered up empty bottles by the armful. We composed messages to seal inside, each one sillier than the last, and hurled them overboard until the captain put a stop to it. But he made up for it by inviting me to sit at his table for the rest of the voyage, and I discovered he was the best dancer of the lot. Poor Dodo was violently seasick and spent the entire trip holed up in her cabin with a basin between her knees and a compress on her brow.

I was feeling much better indeed by the time we sailed into Mombasa, past the old Portuguese fort of St. Jesus. I had asked the officers endless questions about the place and they talked over each other until I scarcely got a word in edgewise. I learned quite a bit about Mombasa, although my knowledge was rather limited to places that might appeal to sailors. If I needed a tipple or a tattoo or a two-dollar whore, I knew just the spots, but five-star hotels seemed in short supply. They told me if we sailed into port early in the morning, I could make straight for Nairobi on the noon train, heading up-country to where the white settlers had carved out a settlement for themselves. The captain had an uncle who had gone up-country and he regaled me with tales of hippos in the gardens and leopards in the trees. I knew a bit from Nigel’s stories as well, but the captain’s knowledge was somewhat fresher and he offered me his guidebook as a reference.

“Be careful with the natives,” he warned. “Don’t let them take advantage of you. If you need advice, find an Englishman who’s been there and knows the drill. Make sure you visit the club in Nairobi. It’s the best place to get a bit of society and all the news. They won’t let you join, naturally, since you are a lady, but you would be permitted inside as the guest of a member. You will want to mix with your own kind, of course, but mind you steer clear of politics.”

“Politics! In a backwater like this?” I teased.

The captain had lovely eyes, but the expression in them was so serious it dampened the effect. “Definitely. Rhodesia gained its independence from the Crown last year, and there are those who feel that Kenya ought to be next.”

“And will England let her go as easily as she did Rhodesia?”

A slight furrow plowed its way between his brows. “Difficult to say. You see, England doesn’t care about Africa itself, not really. It’s all about control of the Suez.” He flipped open the guidebook and pointed on the map. “France, England and Germany have all established colonies in Africa to keep a close eye upon the Suez. At present, we have the advantage,” he said with a tinge of British pride, “but we may not keep it. It all depends on Whitehall and how nervous they are about India.” He traced a line from India westward, through the Arabian Sea, into the Gulf of Aden and then a sharp turn up the slender length of the Red Sea to the Suez at the tip of Egypt. “See there? Whoever controls Egypt controls the Suez, and through it, all the riches of India.”

I picked up the long slender line of the Nile. One branch, the Blue, curved into Ethiopia, but the other snaked through Uganda and trailed off somewhere beyond. “And whoever controls the Nile controls Egypt.”

“They do,” he conceded. “For now, we Brits control Egypt and the Suez is safe, but matters could change if the ultimate source of the White Nile is discovered to be in hostile territory.”

“Reason enough for England to hold onto Kenya,” I observed.

“Not just that,” he said, slowly folding up the map. “England has an obligation to the Indians who have come to settle here.”

“Indians? In Kenya?”

“Thousands,” he said grimly. “Now, they did their part during the war and no doubt about it. But one cannot deny that it has complicated matters here to no end. They are agitating for the right to own land, and some at Whitehall are inclined to give it them.”

“That can’t make the white colonists very happy.”

“Tensions are running high, and you’d do well to avoid any appearance of taking sides. Not that anyone would expect so lovely a lady to trouble herself with such things,” he added. I was a little surprised at his gallantry.

“Now, don’t you even think of flirting with me,” I warned him with a light tap to the arm. “I know you have a wife back in Southampton.”

He gave me a rueful smile. “That I do. But I can still appreciate innocent and congenial company.”

“So long as we both understand that the company will remain innocent,” I returned with an arch glance.

He laughed and freshened my drink. “My vessel and myself are at your disposal, Miss Drummond. How may we amuse you?”

I cocked my head to the side and pretended to think. “I would like to steer the ship.”