1
SEX OR COFFEE
THE FIRST TIME THE TELEPHONE RANG IT WAS SO late and the sound so unfamiliar that I did
not recognise it. Toni, blissfully asleep, seemed oblivious of everything about him, his
breathing slow and regular while my dream fell into a thousand kaleidoscopic fragments as
waves of nightmarish sound engulfed us with relentless discordance.
I sat up and tried to focus on the luminous clock hands on my bedside table: ten
minutes to midnight. Surely a newly installed telephone had absolutely no right to ring at
such an hour! Besides, who could possibly have discovered our telephone number in a matter
of hours?
"It's bound to be a wrong number," I tried hard. to convince myself,
"and perhaps it isn't our phone at all. Maybe it's the neighbours'."
After a few moments, which seemed like an hour, I decided to take action. Toni would
grumble, he would complain and curse the wretched machine, but I would have to risk that.
It had been I who had insisted that a telephone be installed in the first place, for life
without one, even if I was not practising as a full-time vet, was unthinkable. In my nine
years of county vet duty I had developed, among other ills, a disease known as telephone
jitters, an occupational affliction which is difficult to throw off. I had developed an
eighth sense whereby I seemed to know just when the telephone was about to ring, and
knowing it was my lifeline for emergencies I was not able to pluck up the courage to
disconnect it.
When we arrived in our University house in Nairobi three months before, the telephone
shelf had been empty. I had spent so many hours and days persuading the telephone exchange
that they should install one that in the end they did; the phone was put in and actually
connected (most unusual) during the same week. Toni had just been getting used to its
appearance, was even congratulating me on my success....
I made an effort to clear my brain but it was difficult. We had only gone to bed two
hours before and had been completely exhausted. All day we had opened crates, hung
paintings, tried to find space for all our belongings. We had cursed all our excess
possessions, far more than we really needed. Still, we had been grateful to eat off our
beautiful Bosch pottery plates that night and sleep between our own sheets. I touched Toni
lightly on the arm, then took his hand.
"Darling," I said fatuously, "do you think our telephone is
ringing?"
I didn't want to wake him altogether, but just enough to get his opinion on the matter
of the persistent sound which was coming through the door. He stirred a little and opened
one eye. Our moon lit room, a turmoil of packing cases and woodwool, bookstacks and
wrapping paper exuded a kind of jumbled cosiness scented with mothballs.
"Turn it off" Toni murmured, "go back to sleep."
What could I do, for the ringing tone seemed to be getting louder and more persistent,
seeming to convey a midnight urgency. There was a slim chance that it might be
important, though I could not really imagine how that could be. We had so newly arrived,
like the telephone.
Toni was getting restless. He now sat. up, rubbed his eyes, then opened them both.
"Twentieth century curse," he muttered, "who wants a telephone anyway? It
used to be so peaceful before they put it in."
"But now that it is in you had better answer it"' I urged. "Maybe it's a
call from overseas, from the family." That made him think for a moment and in the end
leap out of bed, almost falling headlong over a crate as he went.
"Toni Harthoorn here," I heard him boom brusquely through the open door. Then
I heard his voice change to a more cordial tone and breathed a sigh of relief. Whoever it
was, was getting civil treatment; it must at least be a friend or a long standing
acquaintance.
"Right," I heard him say, "I'll be right over." He put down the
phone and closed the door. "A case," he said enigmatically. "It's Charles
Hayes." He says some dogs ganged up on Rufus and have injured him. I'd better go and
see."
"Want me to come?" I asked, as I watched him fling on some clothes.
"No," he said gallantly. "You need all the sleep you can get. Just find
me the medical case."
I found the case and opened the front door. Row nice to have a man to answer tile
telephone, and what was more, to go out on night calls. As he started the car I climbed
back into bed and revelled in it. He might yet phone and ask me to come and help, but
probably, from the sound of it it would be a wound that could be stitched in the morning,
when there was some light to see by. I turned off the light and waited. Outside the window
the fruitbat was still sending its radar-like signals, like the rhythmic ping of a strange
new world. "Pinnnnnnnnng." The first time I heard that weird sound I had woken
Toni in alarm. To me it had seemed like some devilish, mechanical device, perhaps buried
in our garden, about to blow up like a time-bomb. "That's only a fruitbat spitting
out the pips, he had said, and had gone back to sleep. Weeks later, Jean Hayes, whom I had
met just after my arrival in Kenya, told me why there were no pips to be found on the lawn
the next morning. The fruitbat ate fruit, she had told me, very much amused, but tile pips
just passed on through, the easy way!
I wondered, as the minutes ticked by, what Toni was doing. Rufus, the young male
Situtunga antelope, was kept in a garden enclosure behind the Hayes' home which w as only
five minutes drive away from our house. He had been brought from Uganda, where these swamp
antelope are much more common than in Kenya, as a three-month-old, bright-red, long-haired
calf. He had become very tame. They hoped to keep him in Nairobi until he became sexually
mature and until they could find him a Situtunga wife. After that they would both go to
Crescent Island, the Hayes' recently acquired wildlife sanctuary. We had visited the
island, which lies on Lake Naivasha, shortly after arriving in Kenya. Winding upwards and
west out of the city environs I had gasped in awe and amazement at the breathtaking sight
which met us at the halfway halt at the top: the valley in the earth's crust known as the
Rift.
Just after the last bend which opens up the overwhelming vista, stands a tiny church
like a rock of the Lord to remind the passer-by that such an unearthly sight as he has
just beheld is not a mundane everyday affair but a piece of beauty specially created to
put man in touch with his own soul. The volcanic peaks can be seen from this point, their
charred black-grey inclines evidence that their eruptions stirred the earth not so very
many thousands of years before. Looking down into the thick jungles and the red-tipped
aloes reminds one where one is; looking across the Rift Valley, at early morning a haze of
softest shades of gold-grey-purple, makes one lose all sense of time and place. Only the
white flitting butterflies, arriving in droves as the sun warms the mountainside, bring
one back to earth.
Soon the lake, famous throughout the world for its diverse population of birds, appears
like a blue void nestling in the valley; then the island, its truly crescent moon form
framed by the hills beyond. The reverberating, haunting call of the fish eagle welcomed us
as we reached the shore, the white-throat thrown back as he sounded his territorial note.
To me, so new to the tropics, he epitomised Africa; he and the yellow-green-stemmed
fever-trees, reflecting the burning sun. Flocks of sacred ibis, which I had always thought
of as being most rare, were gathering food on the lakeside fields, quite indifferent to
our coming. The saddlebill stork, largest and most spectacular of all storks, had chosen
the island as his home. The "Tommy" gazelle were multiplying, reedbuck, duiker
and water- buck had found their way into the marshland stretches when the waterlevel was
low enough to expose the causeway. Crescent would be just the place for Rufus and if he
had a mate to anchor him he might not be tempted to swim away ... that is, if he survived
the damage of a pack of dogs. How often during the course of my practice years, had I been
asked to repair the wounds inflicted by those sharp, long canine teeth...
If the Hayes' kept an antelope in their garden perhaps other city-dwellers kept similar
creatures in theirs. It might yet transpire that our wildlife practice, apart from our
outgoing upcountry calls, might be more substantial than we had imagined.
Why was Toni taking so long? I did not want to fall asleep in case he called me and in
any case I wanted to be awake enough to be able to talk coherently to him when he
returned. He had left a whole hour ago and by this time was probably drinking coffee with
Charles, with both of them taking it in turn to put the wildlife world to rights. I put on
the light; it was almost two o'clock. I got up and put on the kettle, ashamed of my
thoughts, determined to have the tea pot ready for the time Toni came home, tired and
thirsty, perhaps, from his midnight case.
How my life had changed, I thought, as I watched the kettle boil. For six months, since
Toni and I had been married in London, I had lived the most fantastic life, beginning in
America. Toni was long overdue for his study leave and had been awarded a Rockefeller
Fellowship. Though only one man's allowance, we lived on it in comfort for six months -
and later on so did Gail and Guy, two growing and permanently ravenous children. We were
being loaned two cars and a house, and lived like kings - I, lazy and care-free, enjoying
all that Colorado had to offer between spring and autumn of that year.
It had been like a six-month honeymoon! The children had, for the first three months,
remained with their father in South Africa and continued their schooling. That had given
us time to adjust a little to our new surroundings - and to each other. Toni, acting as
courier for M99, the morphine-like substance which up to that time had only been in use in
Africa, for the immobilisation of large wild animals, had not told anyone that he was
bringing a four-day-old wife. It had been a little awkward since he had not, until the
last moment, known for certain whether I would be able to come at all, married or
otherwise. But the news preceded us across the Atlantic. At a conference held in Cambridge
on the day after our marriage, a very good friend, who had in fact asked Toni to transport
the drug in the first place, had whispered the burning question in my ear. "You two
look so radiant, its unnatural; tell me, how long HAVE you been married?"
I'm not sure what Toni's answer would have been had he been the one who was asked. He
was feeling extraordinarily shy about the fact that the girl with him was a brand-new
spouse, and did his best to pass us off as an "old married couple". "Thirty
hours, but please don't mention it to anyone or my life won't be worth living."
"Of course not," he had nodded, enormously pleased with his secret, but
nevertheless he had made it his business to see that our hosts in New York knew about us,
and that, on arrival, after being shepherded to one of the most sumptuous hotels, we would
be left in peace for the weekend.
That had been the beginning of an amazing journey. Wherever we went we met kindness and
generosity. We toured the country, covering a great part of it, for Toni lectured in
fifteen veterinary schools. We saw in bears in the snow, blinking in the sunlight as they
emerged from their hibernations; we saw streamlined cities, and deserted beautiful
rockland heights and lake-lands which America's millions had not yet discovered or did not
want to know. Eventually, when the children arrived, we settled in at Fort Collins so that
Toni could continue his researches into the effect of an antidote to M99 with an equally
odd code number, M285! He had chosen Colorado State University because, as he said
jokingly, it seemed to be more like Africa than anywhere else - 5,000 feet, the Nairobi
altitude, and in the distance, snow-covered mountains whose refreshing breeze cooled the
mid-summer air of the West.
What a change it had been not to practise, not to be a public servant but a lady
of leisure, drinking in new experiences and new horizons. I knew this could not continue
and secretly hoped that there would be some interesting work to do in my new homeland. But
what and where I had no idea. It would not be full-time vet practice, that I knew already.
Toni had insisted that I had him to take care of now and that I would be finding it
a full-time job! But there might be other things, exciting new fields of wildlife
conservation, more writing - that is, if I found anything to write about!
If! And here I was, in Nairobi, barely unpacked, involved in wild animal practice and
flights into the unknown in small planes piloted by men who rarely knew the way better
than I did. My days may have seemed very full before, yet in the light of what I had
already discovered since I had married Toni, any life, however busy, is only part-time if
there is not a man to take care of.
At last I heard the door. Toni came breezing in, swinging his black medical bag as if
it were an umbrella. He was humming a tune, a sure sign that he was either very upset or
very happy, and from the expression on his face I judged the latter. "Like some
tea?" I suggested. "It's already made."
"Let's have it in bed, and I'll tell you about Rufus," he said as he closed
the front door. He had found a deep tear-wound on the back of the thigh and an injury on
the chin and horn caused by his efforts to escape when the dog-pack had burst in upon him.
"Time tomorrow to stitch it and clean it up," he added. "It will take some
of your best invisible mending to restore the tissues. I have given him an antibiotic
injection and packed the wound with acriflavine soaked gauze."
Late though the hour was, we were now wide awake, and so was Skimpy, disturbed by the
commotion, crying for milk. I suppose it was only fair; if we were going to have a late
(early) tea session, then she should also be allowed to satisfy her thirst. Once more I
got up and this time Toni stayed in bed. "Worse than having a baby," he
complained. "if she were a real baby at least I'd have somewhere to dry my
socks!"
Poor Toni, the bat-eared fox did sleep in the airing cupboard at night, the only
consistently warm place in the whole house. I took her out and gave her part of an already
prepared bottle; not her full six o'clock ration, but just enough (I hoped fervently) to
keep her quiet until getting-up time, only four hours away.
Bobby Cade, curator of the animal orphanage of the Nairobi National Park, had asked me
to take her. There had been a litter of six born in the fox's lair, two of which turned
out to be weaklings. I had never seen them at close quarters before. Though the father
fox, unlike other canine animals, fiercely guarded his brood, Bobby allowed me to enter
the enclosure, instructing me to move slowly and quietly. I fell in love with the two
runts at once. They lay huddled together, alone and neglected, the mother quite
disinterested in any but the four well-matched lusty pups. I picked them up and stroked
them; they had the smallest pointed faces and softest fur, enormous ears, ochre-grey-brown
bodies with a bushy black-tipped tail. "Take them," Bobby had said. "If you
don't, they will die anyway. Not much chance of survival," he added as an
afterthought, "but try if you like."
I wanted to try very much, though one of the two seemed hardly alive. I got a baby
bottle of the doll variety and a teat and Bobby helped me to compose a formula. We decided
on a human vitamin supplement and a feeding routine. It would be a four-hourly schedule
and lots of warmth and love and care. My family were delighted when they saw them but sad
when the tiniest died during the first night. The second, though minute, seemed more
robust, and we named her "Skimpy". She grew well and fast, body and voice. Her
call, sometimes issuing from the strangest, most remote places, was a God-send, since
without it we might often have spent hours searching for her. How like a bird it sounded.
Its intensity was so great that the hovering eagle, its natural enemy, must have found it
very easy prey; that is, if sound as well as sight helped them to locate their food.
"Come to bed," Toni commanded from the bedroom, "or it won't be worth
it." Four hours would help stave off exhaustion a little, yet when I did eventually
climb into bed I found it hard to get to sleep. Toni turned off the light, bid me a tender
good night and dropped off. I listened for the sonar bat, now a familiar sound, but heard
soft rain falling instead. On the roof, in the trees, on the ground.
We had arrived in our new home country in the rain. Kenya, so beautiful, looked drab
and limp and unwelcoming to me on that October day. Toni had travelled ahead of us from
Rome where my sister, more devoted to the world of Arts than Wildlife, was living at the
time and where we had all been subjected to a few days of "seeing ruins". We saw
so many, interspersed with glorious cathedrals and ancient cobblestone squares, that by
the time we touched down in Nairobi we were exhausted. Looking back upon it I see that it
was just if not intended revenge, for I had so often "dragged" my sister into
wildlife sanctuaries which she abhorred and which she has sworn never to enter again.
I spent my first month in devoted domesticity - just that. In the past I had always
interspersed my work with domestic labours, such as ministering to the children and farm
animals, arranging our menus, caring for and organising our faithful servants and
entertaining our friends. I now devoted myself ENTIRELY to such things, and felt the
strangeness and impermanence of it at once. I walked everywhere on foot, for our house,
though attached to a large, treed and incredibly wild garden, stood only ten minutes from
the city centre.
Walking is the way to discover a city, discover its pulse and its rhythm. I found
Nairobi utterly exciting and exotic. A combination of East and West, a blending of colour
and personality into one modern throbbing heart of Africa, fringed by a country which
contained a people struggling for existence and advancement. From the Eastern incense-rich
streets of the Bazaar, I would wander across to the international society of tall modern
buildings; embassies, information centres and charming, well-appointed coffee houses where
one could sit and listen and look with pleasure and with wonder at the variety of homo
sapiens. All this to the accompaniment of the most delicious aroma of Kenya coffee, said
to be the best in the world.
I grew to love Nairobi and Kenya more quickly than I would ever have imagined,
especially after the first impression on our day of arrival, when the heavens had poured
forth their abundance. That day, I had been nervous, to say the least, yet the children
had hardly been able to contain their excitement. My greatest misgivings had sprung from
the uncertainty of HOW the new marriage would work, knowing full well that much of success
or failure would depend on me. Apart from anything else, I had forgotten how to live with
a man in every sense, and having been dragged by Fate out of my furrow of glorious
complacence, I had at first resented having to give consideration to another demanding and
ever-present human being. He, living in his world of science at cloud-level from which he
rarely descended, was more than a little shocked that I expected him to descend to me at
frequent intervals, including all meal-times!
During the first month we were so busy that we hardly noticed we were married, except
at meal-times and at night in bed. I still found it strange to climb into bed with a
six-foot-six individual who pulled the sheets and blankets in his direction whenever he
moved. Neither of us snored, which made the nocturnal adjustments, often the most
difficult, easier. The children had to unlearn the habit of charging into the bedroom as
they had been wont to do in my bachelor days, and seemed to find it no hardship. Guy
stopped, by special request, walking entirely on his heels in the dawn hours of the
morning. Gail began to accept the fact that she had to share me with a grown-up man when
hitherto she had shared me only with her small brother.
After a month of voluntary domesticity, I decided that the time had come to go to work.
Toni, appreciative of what I was doing to the house, realising that I was nearing the end
of my domestic researches and that I needed a fuller life, encouraged me to break out of
the home routine but didn't know in which direction. "Hope you don't get into
mischief," he mocked, "or join the coffee and bridge elite of Nairobi. What do
you want to do?" I didn't know the answer to his question then, but I was sure I
would not be playing bridge to keep myself busy. Besides, my father had, years before,
discouraged me from playing a card game, which he felt was well beyond my I.Q. "You
just haven't that kind of logic," he had said, to my dismay. My mother, also a bridge
expert, had kindly, but firmly, agreed with his dictum. It was then, as a third-year vet
student, that I had turned to poker and had become very adept at it, thus vindicating my
genius at cards and blaming my parents when- ever I could for having driven me to
gambling!
"I am going out to look for work," I had announced one morning. "Today
is the day, so don't be surprised at anything." Perhaps it was the magic of the
Jacaranda blue or the sight of the first European stork, saluting as he hovered over the
river pool at the bottom of our garden. It was English autumn but here it was spring, time
for action and new horizons.
"But what will you do, where will you go?" Toni looked a little worried at my
champagne mood and was quite dumbfounded when I confessed that I didn't know the answer
but would think about it the moment he left.
I watched his figure disappearing down the rocky incline among the Frangipani blossoms.
The preclinical school was only seven minutes walk away - seven minutes, that is, of his
long-leg time, but nearly twice as long for me!
When he had become a tiny figure among the trees, I poured myself some more tea, took
it down into the morning sun, and thought. As I wasn't going to practise full-time, it had
to be some thing else. It would be nice if I could continue my children's broadcasts, or
write more stories about animals.
The only way to find that kind of work was to go to the Voice of Kenya, the local
broadcasting station, whose receiving towers were almost visible from our house, and make
personal contact. I gathered together a few samples of my stories, put on walking shoes
and set off; excited as any explorer on a new mission. Within minutes of leaving our house
I reached the "University Way", mingling with the gay crowd on the wide
pavements, a cross section of humanity of every colour and creed. Exquisite Indian lady
students in saris and Punjabi dress, turbaned Sikhs and unturbaned sallow-skinned faces of
the East mixed freely with Africans from every part of the vast continent. Some primitive,
some sophisticated with books under their arms, headed for class, beggars, pathetic,
entreating, businessmen, tradesmen, shoppers, uncaring of the cripples on the pavements.
Large Mercedes cars, tiny rattletraps, convertibles - every thing going at horrific speed
and with relentless disregard for their fellows on the road or on the pavement. I had
heard Nairobi is a most dangerous city to drive in. Very soon, as soon as I had my own
car, I would be part of the road-hogs and the screaming-brake mob!
Coming so recently from South Africa, I yet found no strangeness in the multi-racial
atmosphere and way of life of Kenya. I had always had friends among the African and Asian
community and the code of life had affected me very little. "Why don't you
vote?" my community-conscious sister often asked me. "How can you live in a
country and be such an irresponsible citizen? You don't even read the newspapers!"
"But how can I possibly decide who to vote for, when I know so many charming, good
people of each party. Rather than make the wrong decision, isn't it better just to
abstain?" I had no political aspirations or understanding, had never had time for
conscience campaigns or party fireworks, I had left those to other, more nation building
individuals whom I admired immensely for their ability of knowing which way to cast their
vote.
Voice of Kenya was guarded and protected and I had to state my business to a very
charming, uniformed man on duty, who gave me a slip to be signed and returned, then took
me up the winding stairs to my destination - Children's Broadcasts. Ann Greer, in charge
of that section, was delighted by my promise to bring her children's stories adapted for
radio. Ever pregnant, delightful, fresh complexioned, forthright, she was a well-spoken
Alice-in-Wonderlandish sort of person, just what I had always expected to find in a
Children's Hour centre of operations. She was very interested to hear of my previous work
with schoolchildren, live broadcasts including animals, where question time was the great
and essential feature, the new and vital approach for attracting the young into the world
of animals.
Writing for children had come out of itself, for my twosome had been reared on my own
invented stories from the time they could understand what I was telling. I had had no
intention of ever committing them to paper until one day my son Guy, then very small, and
at the argumentative and critical stage, had interrupted my story about the zebra who had
lost her stripes by insisting that I had told it differently on the previous occasion.
"No, no, that's not how it happened," he said over and over again.
"But I made it up in the first place," I pleaded, "so I can do what I
like with it."
"Oh no you can't!" Gail, older by eighteen months did not agree at all.
"Once it is told one way it has to stay that way. I'll finish it for
you." And so, in spite of the fact that she had the mumps and was supposed to feel
very poorly indeed, she had commenced the story of Zoe the Zebra all over again, and I had
to admit in the end that she was right and that I had been wrong.
"Why don't you write it all down?" my little nephew, Alan, had said,
"like you wrote down the story of the runaway sandals for my birthday. Then no one
can quarrel about it."
I did write them down and finally after they had been published, I had adapted them for
radio. I wrote more and more and tested my material on many children of different ages.
They and they alone were my judges. If they wept too profusely, or if they did not once
change expression, into the waste-paper basket the pages would go, torn to shreds. It
would take me a long time to become a confident children's writer, so confident that I
myself would know what was suitable without consulting my infantile judges.
I was deeply immersed in my new venture when Toni came home for lunch that day. The
idea that there was work to do, that someone actually wanted something that I was
about to create, electrified me into immediate action. Instead of waiting for my new
spouse on the doorstep with open arms, lunch neatly laid out, he found my head immersed in
the typewriter among reams of foolscap paper.
"How about lunch and me?" he had said, a little hurt. He encouraged me to
work, but he also expected me to be "just there" when he needed me. That was
often, daily and constantly, not only giving help with his own experiments and wildlife
research but also at home and in bed. When it was coffee time, coffee had to be there,
plenty of it and piping hot. When it was time for sex, something similar applied and he
certainly hated to be kept waiting!
There was promise of turbulent days ahead, but nothing that could not be overcome with
humour and patience. The ability to laugh at and with each other is what would count in
the end and if we managed that, then there was nothing to fear - even if I did sometimes
forget to bake a cake or omit to serve coffee at the correct moment.
"Hey, wake up!"
"There he goes again," I thought sleepily. "I wonder what he wants
now?" My sex and coffee dreams merged into stark reality, Jenny, our maid from
Uganda, must have been knocking on the door for some time.
"Karibu" (Come in), Toni had called lustily, and each time I wondered anew
how his vocal organ could stand the strain of such violent early morning usage.
"Don't move." A full cup of steaming liquid was balanced more or less above
my head, and above it Toni's grinning, unshaven face. "Can you manage?" he said
invitingly. "Its just the right temperature. Then we can discuss what we are going to
do to Rufus, and when."
Between sips we planned the day, giving our veterinary job two hours. I was helping
Toni with his research work at the laboratory at the time and still had to finish that
week's radio play. I HAD to bake a cake to keep the children happy - and some of our own
special high protein bread, which many of our friends, who shared our lunch hour, were
beginning to enjoy with us. Toni had warned me that our house would never turn into the
sort of free-for-all menage I had kept before where people and animals, friend, stray or
sick, had always been welcome. My courage had flagged a little at his pronouncement, yet
deep down I knew that if I could make him really happy, even try to rise to his cloud
level sometimes, then anything could happen - and it did!
