you’d stop talking to me like I’m a bad pupil and you’re a headmistress.”
“I’m sorry, but I feel I have to. You have your suspicions about him?”
He gave her an abridgment of his conversation with Douglas. When he was finished, she stared at him, her head wreathed by the hibiscus blossoms behind her. Her beauty was poignant because he knew he was losing her, if he hadn’t lost her already.
“What you’re telling me,” she said, “is that you know he did exactly what Tara says he did, but that you’ve chosen to believe otherwise. It’s easier that way, I suppose.”
“Pardon me?”
“I don’t understand why you haven’t quit him. We have all misjudged him, but I don’t see how you can go on associating yourself with an unscrupulous bastard who thinks nothing of ruining my friend and disrupting, oh, perhaps a hundred other lives at the same time.”
“Why, to eat, Diana, that’s why. I associate myself with him to eat.”
“I am quite sure you could find other work,” she said, as if Kenya were an Eden of job opportunities. “And if you couldn’t, I could help you. I know plenty of people. In the meantime—”
“In the meantime, you have plenty of money.”
She said nothing, and he took her silence as assent.
“There are enough people who think I’m a fortune hunter. I can just hear what they’d say if I were out of work.”
“You’re imagining things. But whatever they think or don’t think, I think that in this instance you ought to swallow your pride and—”
“My pride?” he interrupted, half rising from his seat. “You think that’s all it is, my pride?” He looked around, taking in the rambling house, large enough for several African families, and the guest house, large enough for two or three more, and the garden and the stable and the grounds with acreage sufficient for a shamba yet supporting only grass and fruitless trees and inedible flowers, and his old resentment of wealth and privilege boiled up with a quickness and violence that told him it must have been simmering closer to the surface than he’d realized. “You have no idea what it’s like to be out of work, do you? No idea what it’s like to wonder how you shall manage for the next week, much less the rest of your life. How could you? You’ve been deprived of that experience, but you think I should quit based on a suspicion and live off you like a parasite?”
“I meant nothing of the kind.”
“I’m not surprised,” he went on, carried helplessly forward on the tide of his anger and hatred, yes, hatred of everything the house and the grounds and the useless trees and flowers represented. “This”—his arm swept out—“was built by parasites. And this whole town is a nest of parasites. Parasites on the skin of this country.”
She looked at him with wounded astonishment, mouthing the word parasite. Only then did he shake off the spell of rage and come back to himself. His mind clearing, he saw that his outburst had been fatal. He might as well have struck her. “Not you!” he said. “I didn’t mean you! I love you, and I am so sorry—”
“Please”—she raised a palm—“no need for apologies. Thanks for making your feelings ever so much clearer. I am a parasite among parasites. And thanks for making things ever so much easier for me, darling.” She uttered the term of endearment to make it sound like anything but, then said with a terrible resolve, “I can’t marry you.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying!” he pleaded. “Let’s calm ourselves and talk this through.”
“I am perfectly calm and know precisely what I’m saying. I can’t marry a man who thinks what you do of me. And I can’t marry a man who knows the right thing to do and doesn’t do it, because—oh, Christ . . . you seemed so strong that day in Tsavo, but I misjudged you.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong. I want to keep my job. It is as simple and basic as that.”
“No, it isn’t. Your American is who you’re in love with, or with something he stands for or pretends he stands for even though he stands only for himself. But be warned. I’ve seen Douglas’s sort before. He’s fucked Tara, and one day he’ll get around to fucking you.”
Fitzhugh stood, feeling sorrow, regret, and bitterness all at once. For the moment, bitterness had the greater share. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said. “You had your