War Cry

In front of her stood a low fence made of three striped poles on top of each other. The polo club’s gymkhana committee had decided to make this a particularly gentle challenge to the riders, for just beyond it stood the last and hardest jump: a vicious triple combination of a plain rail fence, another hay-bale and rail, and finally an oxer, each with just a single stride between them. Some competitors had scraped the first element of the triple, hit the second and simply crashed into the third, completely unable to manage another jump. None apart from Percy had managed to get through without at least one fence down.

Saffron had to clear it. She summoned every shred of energy she still had in her and rode along the side of the ring nearest to the spectators, her mind replaying the pattern of steps she would need to enter the triple combination at the perfect point, going at just the right speed. She barely even thought of the poles as Kipipiri jumped over them.

As the pony’s hind hooves passed over the jump, Saffron thought she heard a bump behind her. She glanced back and saw that the top pole had been rattled but it seemed to still be in place, so she thought no more of it. She barely even saw the people flashing by beside her, nor did she hear the faint gasp they emitted as she approached the first element. She met it perfectly, jumped the rail, kept Kippy balanced through her next stride, made it across the second rail, kicked on and then pulled so hard on the reins that she more or less picked up her pony and hauled her over the oxer.

I did it! I did it! Saffron thought exultantly as she galloped towards the finishing line. She crossed it and slowed Kipipiri to a trot as they exited the ring. She saw her father running towards her, dodging in and out of the applauding spectators and gave him a great big wave. But he didn’t wave back.

Saffron frowned. Why isn’t he smiling?

And then she heard the loudspeaker and felt as though she had been kicked in the tummy by a horse’s hoof as the announcer called out, ‘Oh, I say! What awfully bad luck for plucky Saffron Courtney, hitting the last-but-one fence when she was so close to a clear round. My goodness, that pole took an age to fall off! So that means the winner’s rosette goes to Percy Toynton. Well played, young man!’

Saffron hardly knew what was happening as her groom took hold of Kipipiri’s bridle. All she could think was, How could I knock down that silly, stupid, simple little pole? Her eyes had suddenly filled with tears and she could barely see her father Leon as he lifted her out of the saddle and hugged her to his chest, holding her tight before gently putting her down on the ground.

She leaned against him, wrapping her arms around his legs as he stroked her hair. ‘I’m better than Percy, I know I am,’ Saffron sobbed. And then she looked up, her face as furious as it was miserable and wailed. ‘I lost, Daddy, I lost! I can’t believe it … I lost!’

Leon had long since learned that there was no point trying to reason with Saffron at times like this. Her temper was as fierce as an African storm, but cleared as quickly and then the sun came out in her just as it did over the savannah, and it shone just as brightly too.

She pulled herself away from him, tore her hat off her head and kicked it across the ground.

Leon heard a disapproving, ‘Harrumph!’ behind him and turned to see Major Brett frowning at the display of juvenile female anger. ‘You should read that little madam some Kipling, Courtney.’

‘Because she’s behaving like a monkey from The Jungle Book?’ Leon asked.

The major did not spot the presence of humour, or perhaps did not feel this was the time and place for frivolity. ‘Good God, man, of course not! I’m referring to that poem. You know, triumph and disaster, impostors, treat them both the same and so forth.’

‘Ah, but my daughter is a Courtney, and we’ve never been able to live up to such lofty ideals. Either we triumph, or it is a disaster.’

‘Well that’s not a very British way of seeing things, I must say.’

Leon smiled. ‘In many ways we’re not very British. Besides, that poem you were quoting, “If”—’

‘Absolutely, that’s the one.’

‘As I recall, Kipling wrote it for his son, who died in the war, poor lad.’

‘Believe he did, yes, rotten show.’

‘And the point of the whole thing is summed up in the final line which is, if memory serves, “And – which is more – you’ll be a man, my son.”’

‘Quite so, damned good advice, too.’

‘Yes, to a boy it is. But Saffron is my daughter. She’s a little girl. And not even Rudyard Kipling is going to turn her into a man.’

Darling Leon, how good of you to come,’ said Lady Idina Hay.

‘My pleasure,’ Leon replied. A select few members of the gymkhana crowd had been invited back to the Hays’ house, Slains, which was named after Josslyn Hay’s ancestral home, to have dinner and stay the night afterwards. Leon had thought twice before accepting the invitation. Idina, a short, slight woman with huge, captivating eyes, who matched her husband in his appetite and seductive power, had swiftly become as much of a source of scandal to Kenyan society as she had been in London. Now on her third marriage, with armies of lovers besides, she was apt to greet guests while lying naked in a green onyx bath; to entertain while wearing nothing but a flimsy cotton wrap, tied at the bust in the native style, with nothing underneath; and to hand guests a bowl filled with keys to the Slains’ bedrooms, invite them to take one, inform them which room it opened and suggest that they slept with whomever they found within it.

‘Apparently it’s impossible for the servants,’ Eva had said, when she passed on the gossip on to Leon. ‘They pick up all the dirty laundry off the floor, get it all cleaned and pressed but then have absolutely no idea whom to return it to.’

Tonight, however, Idina was on her best behaviour and was dressed as if for the smartest salons of Paris in an impossibly short, translucent but just about decent dress of fluttering, champagne-coloured silk chiffon. Leon felt sure Eva would be able to identify it in an instant as being the work of some celebrated designer of whom he had never heard.

‘So sorry to hear that Eva wasn’t up to it,’ Idina said, as if reading his mind.

‘Well, she gets jolly tired, lugging the baby around inside her,’ he replied. ‘She swears it must be a boy, says it’s twice the size Saffy was at the same stage. So she’s gone back to Lusima with Saffy and the pony.’

‘She’s not driving, I hope!’

‘She wanted to, you know. Absolutely determined to get behind the wheel. But I put my foot down and said absolutely not. So Loikot, my estate manager, is taking her back in the Rolls. He’ll be back for me tomorrow.’

Idina laughed. ‘You’re the only man in Kenya who would even think of driving on the appalling, unmade roads in such a wildly extravagant car!’

‘On the contrary, it’s an extremely tough, practical machine. It was built as an armoured car, spent the war charging around Arabia and Mesopotamia. When peace came the army had far more than they needed, so I bought one. I smartened it up a bit, but underneath it’s still a military vehicle,’ Leon grinned at Idina. ‘If the balloon ever goes up again, I can weld on some armour plating, stick a gun turret over the passenger seats and drive straight off to war.’

‘Perhaps I should get one,’ Idina mused. ‘I have my Hispano–Suiza, of course and she’s a wonderful thing.’

‘I’ll say. At least as grand as my Roller, and that silver stork on the bonnet rivals the Spirit of Ecstasy for style.’

‘True, but she’d still rather be toddling around Mayfair than bumping about on the dirt tracks of Africa … Now I must get on and make sure dinner is being prepared properly,’ Idina concluded. ‘Just because one is a long way from home, that’s no excuse for lowering one’s standards.’

Apart from swapping the room keys, thought Leon, heading off to get dressed for dinner. Unless they do that in Mayfair, too.

The guests had gathered for drinks before dinner and split along gender lines, with the men, all dressed in white tie and tails, engaged in one set of conversations and the ladies, like a flock of brilliantly plumaged hummingbirds, all gathered in another. Leon Courtney was cradling a whisky in his hand as he talked with a small group that included his host, Josslyn Hay. The two men stood out from the rest, both because they were taller than the others, but also because they were so obviously the dominant males in that particular pack: a pair of magnets for watching female eyes.

‘I rather think I’m going to make a play for Leon Courtney,’ said the Honourable Amelia Cory-Porter, a well-dressed, brightly painted young divorcée with fashionably short, bobbed hair who had decided to lie low in Kenya until the fuss over her marriage, which had been ended by her adultery, died down. ‘He is quite utterly scrumptious, don’t you think?’

‘Darling, you’ll be wasting your time,’ Idina Hay informed her. ‘Leon Courtney’s the only man in the whole of Kenya who refuses to sleep with anyone other than his wife. He barely even eyes one up. It’s quite disconcerting, actually. Makes me wonder if I’m losing my touch.’

Amelia looked startled, as if confronted by an entirely new and unexpected aspect of human behaviour. ‘Refuses sex? Really? That hardly seems natural, especially when his wife is in no condition to oblige him. You don’t suppose he’s secretly a queer, do you?’

‘Heavens, no! I have it on good authority that in his younger days, he was quite the ladies’ man. But the moment he clapped eyes on Eva, he fell head over heels in love and he’s been besotted ever since.’

‘I suppose one can’t blame him,’ said Amelia, though her air of disapproval was plain. ‘I saw her at the gymkhana and she’s perfectly lovely. What is it they say in romantic novels – eyes like limpid pools? She has those, all right. But even so, she’s enormously pregnant. No one expects a chap to live like a monk these days just because his wife’s blown up like a barrage balloon.’

‘Well perhaps Leon Courtney’s just an old-fashioned gentleman.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly. You know as well as I do that there’s never been any such thing. But anyway, darling, do tell all about Eva. It’s very strange. I thought I could detect a Northumbrian lilt in her voice – Daddy used to go shooting up there and we’d all go up with him, so I know the accent from the staff and gamekeepers and so forth. But I’ve heard that she’s actually a German, is that so?’

‘Well,’ said Idina as the two women moved fractionally closer together, like conspirators sharing a deadly secret, ‘the real British East Africa hands, like Florence Delamere, who’ve been here for years and years, can still remember the first time Eva pitched up in Nairobi, about a year or so before the war. Some ghastly German industrialist arrived in town on the most lavish safari anyone had ever seen, accompanied by a magnificent open motor car in which to go hunting, numerous lorries to cart all his baggage and two huge aeroplanes, made by his own company.’

‘Good lord, what an extraordinary show,’ Amelia said, clearly impressed by such a display of power and wealth.

‘Absolutely,’ Idina agreed. ‘Of course, the whole town turned out to see the flying machines, but by the end of the day there was just as much talk about the ravishing creature who was parading around on the industrialist’s arm, making no bones whatever about being his mistress and calling herself Eva von something-or-other.’

‘And that was the same Eva I saw today?’

‘Indeed she was. And guess who was the white hunter acting as the Germans’ guide?’

‘Goodness, was it Leon Courtney?’