former inner self was being matched by an expansion of his outer self. Then, feeling that he was talking too much about himself, he asked what she’d been doing lately. The usual: scrounging after aid grants, visiting refugee camps, finding sponsors abroad, obtaining visas. Recently she’d befriended a young Kenyan craftsman who was trying to start his own shop. Lived in one of those corrugated iron shanties that line the Ngong road. No electricity or running water. She’d helped him find space where he could begin turning out tables and chairs for sale at the roadside.
“He’s related in some way to my housekeeper, so I took him on.” She sighed. “Wes would say, rich bitch with a guilty conscience.”
Fitzhugh bowed his head, pretending to an interest in the dessert menu. “I have a confession to make. When I first saw your place, I thought something like that myself, yes? Not rich bitch. A daughter of colonials, making up for the sins of the fathers.”
“Can’t say I blame you—”
The waiter interrupted, asking if they’d decided. Just coffee, said Diana. Fitzhugh followed suit, in the interest of his waistline.
“But I really think I do what I do because I love this place,” she resumed. “It is my country as much as it’s yours or anyone else’s. Oh, it was so exciting here, the first few years after independence, wasn’t it? All that hope and promise.”
Her tone was eulogistic. But now, she went on, Kenya, like the whole of black Africa, appeared to be devolving, not into the primitive conditions before European conquest but into chaos. The temptation to write it off as hopeless was irresistible, and she rather thought that much of the world had written it off. She hadn’t because she couldn’t, and she couldn’t because she loved her country and her continent too much. Couldn’t imagine herself living anywhere else, certainly not in the damp gloom of her ancestors’ homeland. The hope and promise had not been entirely extinguished. She was trying, with small actions like assisting the young craftsman, to keep the fragile flame burning. And with larger actions as well, like the White Papers she wrote for foundations and governmental aid agencies, pleading with them to do their bit to arrest Africa’s whirl to the bottom. She compared it to a family’s intervention on behalf of a relative destroying himself with alcohol or drugs. You do it because he’s your blood. Well, Africa was in everyone’s blood, from America to China, wasn’t it? This was where Lucy stood upright one gray dawn a million years ago and left in the mud of the Olduvai Gorge the footprints of the true Eve. The ribs and femurs and mandibles of her children were buried in African soil. Diana tilted her body forward; she seemed to be lit from within. If everyone turned their back on Africa, it would not merely fall further and further behind, it could very well lead the world into a dark and lawless tomorrow . . . then abruptly, she shook her head. “Goodness! Listen to me!”
He was, as attentively as ever he’d listened to anyone. How glad he was that he’d chosen to spend these hours with her.
“That was beautiful, Diana.”
“But a bit too—too philosophical? Maybe pretentious?”
“No.” She who’d claimed a portion of his heart from the moment he’d first seen her now owned it all, and she’d seized his mind with it. He surrendered. He would not try to argue himself out of the emotion roaring through him. It wasn’t an emotion that had ever submitted to reason. The only thing left to do was to express it, if he could marshal the courage.
“Another confession,” he said. “That day when Malachy . . . when you came to the door? Malachy had told me how old you were.”
“Fifty-one last month,” she said, in a neutral voice.
“When you came to the door, I was expecting—I wasn’t expecting you to look the way you did, the way you do.”
“Vitamins and lots of riding.” She laughed. She didn’t want the conversation to go where he was taking it. She stroked his forearm. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make light of it. I believe you’ve said more lovely things to me than I’ve heard the past year.”
“I wasn’t intending to say lovely things. I was, am, well, you’re as beautiful inside as you are outside.” God, he thought, did I really say something that trite?