Page 70 of The Sun Sister

Now fully awake, Cecily was aware of how incredibly thirsty she was. Pulling the top off the flask, she gulped back some lukewarm water that had a slightly sour aftertaste. There was another knock at her door, and a young Negro girl with wiry hair that looked as though a razor had been taken to it, so close did it sit next to her scalp, entered the room. She was wearing a simple cotton dress, beige in colour, that hung off her slender frame. She looked to be around thirteen or fourteen...Little more than a child, Cecily thought.

‘Bwana, your bath drawn.’ The girl indicated the door behind her, then beckoned to Cecily.

Reluctantly, Cecily climbed out of bed and followed her next door into a room that held a large tub and a lavatory with an enormous wooden seat. It looked rather like a throne.

Muratha indicated the bar of soap, flannel and the pile of cotton towels folded neatly beside the bath. ‘Okay,bwana?’

‘Okay, thank you,’ Cecily nodded and smiled at her.

If Cecily had ever felt she’d ‘luxuriated’ in a bath before, she now knew she hadn’t known the true meaning of the word. The journey had begun in Southampton and had taken three – or was it maybe four? – days. They had made several stops to refuel the plane, the last of which had been somewhere called Kisumu by Lake Victoria, although Cecily had lost all sense of time and direction by that point. She had staggered off the small plane and Kiki had ushered her into a tin hut beside the airfield, where they’d merely thrown some water over themselves before boarding another flight headed (eventually) for Nairobi. Her body had not seen a bar of soap the entire time. Nor had it seen sleep, or for that matter peace of mind, since she’d left England...

Having soaked herself thoroughly, Cecily surveyed the water around her, which looked distinctly murky and had a layer of grit floating around the edges of the tub. She longed to climb into another bath to clean off, but there was no time and who knew how many gallons human hands had had to carry in to fillthis– there was no faucet that she could see.

Back in her room, Cecily comforted herself with the fact that Kiki’s house was certainly not the mud hut she’d been expecting. With its large square-paned windows, high ceilings and wooden floors, it reminded Cecily of the old colonial houses she’d seen in Boston. The bedroom itself was painted white, which set off the oriental furniture. A heavy wood-framed bed sat in the centre, above which hung a strange contraption made up of what looked like netting. Cecily walked to one of the windows and for the first time looked out upon her surroundings.

She put a hand to her mouth as she gasped out loud. Kiki’s words had not done this landscape justice. The sun hung low in the still blue sky, casting a stream of golden light onto strange-looking trees with flat tops. The lawns of Mundui House curved gracefully down to the shores of a vast lake, the water reflecting the tones of the sky as colourful birds glided through the trees. The colours seemed more vivid than anything she had ever seen before.

‘Wow!’ she said softly to herself, because the view was almost ‘biblical’, as one of her friends at Vassar (who was studying theology, of course) had liked to say.

For the first time since she’d left England’s shores, her pulse – which had raced madly whenever she’d remembered what she had done with Julius, not to mention when she’d been bounced through the skies over land and sea for the past few days – began to slow slightly. She opened the window and leant her face into the blast of warmth, hearing the calls of unknown birds and animals and thinking that EnglandandAmerica seemed so very far away right now. This was another country – another world – and Cecily had the sudden and oddest feeling that it was a place that would shape the rest of her life.

‘Bwana?’ a timid voice came from behind her and pulled Cecily out of her reverie.

‘I...yes, hello.’

‘No, no, no!’ Muratha, the young maid, stepped towards her. ‘Never, never,’ she said as she shut the window firmly. ‘Not night,’ she added, wagging her finger. ‘Mbu.’

‘Pardon me?’

The girl flapped her fingers and made a small buzzing sound, then indicated the swathe of netting above the bed.

‘Oh! You mean mosquitoes?’

‘Yes, yes,bwana. Very bad.’ Muratha slid her finger across her throat and added an agonised expression, then pulled the window firmly shut and fastened it as if mosquitoes could open locks. ‘No at night. Understand?’

‘I do, yes,’ Cecily nodded exaggeratedly, thinking of the quinine that apparently warded off malaria, which her mother had insisted on adding to the medical box their family doctor had prescribed to bring with her.

She watched as the girl went to the closet and took out her dress for tonight.

‘Help you?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Hakuna matata, bwana,’ Muratha answered and ducked out of the room.

‘Darrrling!’ Kiki greeted Cecily on the terrace as she was escorted out by Aleeki. ‘Just in time.’ Kiki took her arm and led her across the terrace, then through the strange flat-topped trees that grew outwards rather than upwards, to the water’s edge. ‘I’m so glad no one else has arrived and we can share your first sunset alone. Isn’t it just spectacular?’

‘Yes,’ Cecily breathed, watching the sun set the sky alight with bursts of oranges and reds as it retreated after a long day. A high-pitched chorus of cicadas struck up and filled the warm air with their vibrations. The cacophony made Cecily shiver, goosebumps rising on her skin despite the heat. As the sun finally plummeted beneath the horizon, the noise intensified in the now purple dusk.

‘Don’t be frightened, honey, it’s only all the insects, birds and animals saying goodnight to each other. Or at least, that’s what I like to think, until we hear the growl of a lion on the terrace at three in the morning!’ she tittered. ‘I’m only teasing you, or at least, it’s only ever happened once before. And the good news is no one got eaten. When you’re recovered from the journey, we’ll take you out into the Bush on a safari.’

A sudden ripple in the still waters of the lake caught Cecily’s eye.

‘Oh, that’s just a hippopotamus going for his nightly swim,’ shrugged Kiki, lighting one of her endless cigarettes in its long ivory holder. ‘They’re so very ugly and enormous, and I’m amazed they don’t sink, but they’re dears really. As long as we don’t disturb them, they don’t disturb us.’ Kiki blew the smoke out of her nose slowly. ‘That’s the key to life in Africa: we have to respect what was here first. Both the people and the animals.’

A mosquito suddenly buzzed in Cecily’s ear and she brushed it away, wondering whether she should respect it.

‘And don’t worry about those,’ said Kiki, catching her movement. ‘You’ll inevitably get bitten – hopefully you won’t die of malaria – and then you’ll be a local and immune. And aloe vera works a treat on the bites. Champagne?’ Kiki asked her as they walked back up to the terrace where a number of Kiki’s staff – all dressed in variations of beige cotton – were setting up the bar on a table. Cecily recognised Aleeki, who had helped her earlier. His clothes set him apart from the other servants. As well as a grey waistcoat, he wore a long piece of checked fabric fastened at the waist which looked more like a skirt than pants. A snug patterned cap that resembled a fez sat on his grizzled head. He regarded Cecily with his dark serious eyes, and gestured to the bar.