dear mother has some nerve, given where she’s come up from!’ she said. Crafty old Crofty knew her business. She helped Agnes withdraw money from the trust that had come into effect two years earlier. She accompanied them on their train to Liverpool and arranged for tickets for the next voyage on the Braemar Castle to Mombasa – Agnes in First Class, Ronald in Third. ‘Common enough to have a Negro porter,’ she said. ‘Just don’t act like you’re equals.’
For two weeks, Agnes and Ronald travelled in parallel across the Indian Ocean, conversing discreetly, eating separately. When the ship docked in Mombasa, they met as planned at the exit. Ronald bowed slightly, ‘Madam,’ he said, and guided her down the plank and off the ship, his hand lightly grazing her arm and her back. They were both thrumming with joy. It was a relief to be in contact again – they had just reached that stage of love when bodies become mutually addicted. They stood a moment on the bustling dock together, the murmurous rumble of the city before them, the low roar of the sea behind.
In between the pinkening passengers disembarking, brown boys raced around calling out their services. Ronald whistled for one. Though he was sweating and uncomfortable in his new suit – ordered specially for him at Hogg’s, Sir Stewart’s London tailor – he was glad to have it on. He felt his body relax into the familiar gestures of hierarchy. He pointed, instructing a boy to carry their trunks as he steered Agnes by the elbow through the motley crowd towards the cars cross-hatching the square directly in front of the docks. He secured a Model T Ford taxi and negotiated the price with the driver as the boy loaded their trunks into the boot. He paid the boy in British shillings – docking his tip for his open-mouthed stare at Agnes, whose sweat had drenched her dress transparent – and helped her into the cracked leather interior.
‘Old Town,’ he said to the driver, who had taken up the boy’s stare as if they had simply changed shifts. Ronald shut his door with a creaky bang and off they went, slowly navigating the throng.
After one night here in Mombasa to recover from the long sea crossing, they would take a car to Nairobi and fly to Mpika. Then they would pick up his cousin’s car and drive west to Shiwa Ng’andu, the closest thing to a British estate in all of Northern Rhodesia. There, Agnes could be wined and dined and cocooned in English custom, smoothing her transition into Africa. Ronald also felt obliged to express his gratitude for the bursary he had received from Sir Stewart Gore-Browne to study in England, to express how honoured he was to be one of the great man’s ‘sponsored boys’. In truth, Ronald was keen to stage a prodigal son’s return. His white bride-to-be would be like a trophy on his arm as he mounted the hill of cypress trees and entered through the gates to Shiwa Ng’andu.
‘But what is it?’ asked Agnes. ‘I know it’s your family home, but what is the history of this…She-war Nigandoo?’
During his time at university, Ronald had learned that ‘history’ was the word the English used for the record of every time a white man encountered something he had never seen and promptly claimed it as his own, often renaming it for good measure. History, in short, was the annals of the bully on the playground. This, he knew, was what Agnes would expect to hear. So Ronald skipped the real story: the southern migration of the Bemba tribe from the north in the seventeenth century, the battles with other tribes and the bargains with Arab slave traders that had left only a straggling group of warriors wandering the great plateau with its many lakes, carting around a wooden carving of a crocodile, their chitimukulu’s totem, until one day, in the valley at the base of a circle of rocky hills, they came across a sapphire lake, shiwa, with a dead crocodile, ng’andu, on its shores – a sign that they should settle there. Instead Ronald began the story with a white man, one he knew Agnes would recognise from her Grandpa Percy’s stories.
‘No!’ she exclaimed. ‘The most famous man who ever lived in Africa? He died there?’
The driver, so pimply it looked like his cheeks were crammed with seeds, gawked from the rearview mirror. Ronald gave him a look, mentally docked his