to intrude, but—”
“You were forever sorry.” He pulled up a chair for her between him and an older woman, who shot her an icy smile. “Eleanor works for Pathfinder: opulent funding, international profile and well run—” he paused—“for a waste of time. But Ms Merritt has risen high. From hard work, no doubt. She cares about humanity. Ms Merritt,” he submitted to the group, “is a good person.”
“Not always,” she defended. “Sometimes I’m a shrew.”
Calvin laughed. “I would love to see it. Promise me.”
He had called her bluff. She could hardly remember being a shrew; not because she was gracious but because she was a coward. Eleanor vented her temper exclusively on objects—pens that wouldn’t write, cars that wouldn’t start, the telephones-cum-doorstops that littered any Third World posting. The more peaceable her relations with people, the more the inanimate teemed with malevolence.
“The Pathfinder Fund,” Calvin explained, “belongs to that dogged IUD-in-the-dyke school, flogging the odd condom while the population happily doubles every eighteen years. When the fertility rate plummets from 6.9 to 6.87, they take credit, and Ford slips them a cheque.”
“It is incredibly arrogant,” said Eleanor, “to march into someone else’s culture and tell them how many children to have. Raising the status of women and giving them power over their own reproduction is the best way to reduce the birth rate—”
“There is nothing wrong with arrogance,” said Calvin, “so long as you are right.”
“Besides,” interjected the upright, withered woman at Eleanor’s side, “improving the status of women is not pursued as an end in itself, but with an eye to a declining birth rate. You do not get your funding from Ford by promising to give women control over their lives, but by claiming you can reduce population growth. It’s duplicitous. If they were no guiding hand of population control, you wouldn’t pull in any money, would you?”
“All that matters,” Calvin dismissed, “is that family planning does not work. I am reminded of those women in Delhi employed by the city to mow metropolitan lawns. They use scissors. I picture those tiny clinics pitched in the middle of oblivious, fecund hordes much like Eleanor sent to mow the whole of Tsavo game park with her Swiss Army knife.”
Eleanor hugged her elbows. Calvin put a hand on her knee. “You think I’m criticizing you. No, I’m agog you keep snipping away. It’s bloody marvellous.”
“Can you suggest what else there is to do?”
“We sorted things out for India not ten minutes ago,” he noted brightly. “Institute free amniocentesis. As soon as the mother finds out it’s a girl, the foetus mysteriously disappears. Produce an entire generation of sons. In sixty, seventy years 840 million Asians would die out completely. Neat, don’t you agree?”
Eleanor was acutely sensitive to when people were waiting for her to leave. Calvin stopped her. “Dinner?”
He’d ridiculed her work. He’d abused her in front of his friends. Eleanor said she’d be delighted, and worried what to wear.
Described in guidebooks as “a restaurant that wouldn’t look out of place in Bavaria or rural England”, The Horseman was in the heart of Karen, if Karen could be said to have one. Named after Karen Blixen, the suburb was one of the last white enclaves of Kenya, museumed with mummified women who got too much sun when they were young, women who never carried their own groceries. They were the last of the English to say frightfully. Yet they still gave their change to little boys outside the dukas, and Karen’s beggars were flush.
Aware that ladies are advised to arrive at engagements a tad late, Eleanor took a taxi to Karen early.
“Madam! Please, madam!”
In the car-park she was accosted by a hawker carrying some heavy black—thing. It took her a moment to discern the object, at which point she was hooked into a dialogue that would cost her. “Only 150, I work very hard, madam! You see, msuri sana. Please, madam! I have six children and they are so hungry …”
The kempt and ingenuous young man held before her a carving of an enormous African family. The carving was awful enough to start with, but had been mucked over with tar. Eleanor was reluctant to touch it.
“I don’t—” she fumbled. “I’m travelling, I can’t—”
“Please, madam!”
The please-madams were not going to stop. She could not claim to have no money, she could not simply walk away from a man who was speaking to her, and some forms of freedom must be bought.
Consequently, she met Calvin in the lounge of The Horseman trying to keep the big dark monster from her dress.
“For me? You shouldn’t have.”
“I shouldn’t have,” she confessed woefully. “He wouldn’t go away.”
“There’s the most miraculous word in the English language: no. Most children learn it before the age of two.”
“This is just what I need,” she said, as the head waiter led them to their table, glancing at her souvenir with disapproval. “A carving of the happy twelve-child family for my clinic.”
“You haven’t changed,” Calvin lamented.
Eleanor could no more focus on the menu than on conference papers at Trattoria. The prospect of food was mildly revolting: a warning sign. In the company of men she’d no interest in she was voracious.
Calvin decided for them both. “The game,” he announced, “is delectable.” His smile implied a double entendre that went right past her.
“So,” he began. “You’re still so passionate?”
She blushed. “In what regard?”
“About your work,” he amended. “The underprivileged and oppressed and that.”
“If you mean have I become jaded—”
“Like me.”
“I didn’t say—”
“I said. But it’s hard to picture you jaded.”
“I could learn. I see it happen in aid workers every day. You keep working and it doesn’t make any difference until eventually you find your efforts comic. But when you start finding all sympathy maudlin and all goodwill suspect, you think you’ve gotten wise, that you’ve caught the world on, when really you’ve just gotten mean.”
“You think I’m mean?”
“You were, a little,” she admitted. “At the KICC this afternoon. This is Eleanor, Exhibit A: the hopeless family planning worker, beavering away in her little clinics among the—‘fecund hordes’?”
He smiled and said as gently as one can say such a thing, “You still don’t have a sense of humour.”
“I don’t see why it’s always so hilarious to believe in something.”
