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
