The Bolter by Osborne Frances

Author:Osborne, Frances [Osborne, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2009-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

And then, exactly one year after Idina had brought Joss to Kenya, after just about the length of time her marriage to Charles Gordon had lasted there, Idina discovered she was pregnant.

CHAPTER 16

RUMOURS WERE RIFE THAT IDINA’S BABY WAS NOT HER husband’s. She had made as many enemies as friends in Kenya. Stories of wild parties at Slains were hotly debated – often genteelly avoiding the detail of the subject matter itself. Those outside Idina and Joss’s charmed circle of invitees were split. Some, especially those who had been received more conventionally by Idina, refused to believe that such an elegant and intelligent woman might behave in this way – or how they could have failed to spot the signs of such salacious activity. Others nursed grudges over being left off the invitation list – even if events were a little too fast for their taste.

Idina’s geographical neighbours, whom she barely knew, found themselves being quizzed as to the goings-on up at the Hays’. One, Mrs Case, was so embarrassed at her ignorance that she sent her watu up to Slains to talk to the servants. Tales of confusion as to whom the laundry collected from each bedroom should be returned raced back down the hill to be widely disseminated. These were fuelled by Joss’s bragging about his conquests at Muthaiga, dividing the women he had slept with into ‘droopers, boopers and super boopers’.1 And Kenya’s chattering classes began to worry.

Just as the upper classes back in Britain feared the publicity of divorces among their ranks, so the middle-class settler farmers and the more prudish émigré aristocrats feared that the Hays’ misdemeanours undermined the settlers’ cause. The farmers were ceaselessly at loggerheads with the colonial government over how much control they themselves could have over the colony and the extent to which their interests should be balanced against those of the native Kenyans and the other immigrant population flooding in from India. The settler farmers’ argument was that they had worked extremely hard to turn virgin land into good farming soil and that they had therefore earned some legal and physical protection for their interests. If the settlers were seen to be a bunch of wife-swapping sybarites and in any sense ‘going native’ they would lose their moral authority and appear less safe pairs of hands for the British colony.

British colonial authority had, like class divisions back Home, long been based upon notional difference. And these differences must, the colonial ethos went, be adhered to. Whatever the greater comfort of the native way of life, the Englishman abroad must not succumb. British hours must be kept – no siesta – British food must be served and British standards of dress must be adhered to, however kali (burning) the sun. For men this was suits. For women, skirts or dresses. These must suggest a life of propriety and hard work. It was also vital that sun hats were worn at every opportunity to emphasise the superior fragility of white skin. These were the rules.

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