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Overview
'Completely absorbing, eminently readable... You won't read many better novels this year.' —The Daily Mail
'This exotic novel handles large themes with assurance, tact and knowledge.' —Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland
When Rebecca Laurelson, an English doctor, is forced to leave her post in an East African field hospital, she arrives at her aunt's house on the Indian Ocean and is taken into the heart of a family she has never met before. Amongst the all-night beach parties and cocktail receptions, her attraction for her much younger cousin grows.
But the gilded lives of her aunt Julia's family and their fellow white Africans on the coast are under threat - Islamist terror attacks are on the rise and Rebecca knows more about this violence than she is prepared to divulge. Will she be able to save her new-found family from the violence that encroaches on their seductive lives? Or, amidst growing unrest, will the true reason for her hasty exit from her posting, be unmasked?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770909960 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 04/11/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
The Dhow House is Jean’s seventh novel.
Read an Excerpt
The Dhow House
By Jean McNeil, Susan Renouf
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Jean McNeilAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-996-0
CHAPTER 1
AMANI SUNBIRD
They lived at Kilindoni. There were more dramatic stretches of coast in the country where Bill's father could have built the house, with ivory dunes, beach bars, ancient houses glowing the colour of phosphorous in the sun. There were more beautiful places, from Moholo in the north to Lindi in the south, all along the coast — pwani — that stretches for six hundred kilometres in a shallow arc along the Indian Ocean.
Her first view of it was from the plane, which had flown from the capital and took its approach to the runway along the wave-raked coast. She saw its sweep of beaches protected by a garrison of coral reefs, the jade inlets and tangled mangrove bays. She saw the two giant rivers emptying themselves into the sea, the Mithi in the north and the Sarara farther south. She saw the thin forms of dhows out at sea; from the air they looked like narrow insects with their noses to the wind. All along the coast fishermen still make Homeric journeys, travelling from Moholo to the famed spice islands — Zanzibar, Pemba — in search of the fish they call filusi.
The house was the first to be built on that stretch of the coast. Her uncle's father built it thirty years before the first hotel, Fitzgerald's, installed itself on a curving faction of the beach poised between two coral islets. The beach in front of the house was not the most pristine and sandy but Bill's father chose it for its commanding position above the shore, from where it looked out to a black coral headland called Lion's Rock. At one time there had been short-haired lions on the coast who had adapted to the heat, but by the time of the settlers they were long gone.
Between the house and the coastal highway were fields of pineapple plantations and in a nest of hydroponic greenhouses a Greek-descended agriculturalist named Achilles grew chives for export to France. The white canopies of the greenhouses glinted in the sun, stretched between the coral road that skirted the edge of the land and the access roads of the plantation. In between the spikes of pineapples were fields of a pulsating, almost plastic green where Holstein grazed. The fields were traversed by white-tailed mongoose and hedgehogs, and green mambas whose venom could kill a herd of elephant stone dead in a single bite.
Coconut palms leaned, thin as heiresses, into the sky. Beyond the trees the ocean hissed. White houses lined its shore. In these houses, housekeepers and gardeners wearing green uniforms kept floors of cool cement polished and the branches lopped off trees so that monkeys could not climb inside bedrooms.
It was a place for people whose families had been in the country for generations. Foreign tourists shied away from Kilindoni because the beaches were difficult to find, quarantined by tides; in some places the beach gave way to a network of shallow, smooth cenotes of coral. On either side of Kilindoni the ocean was garlanded with sharp reefs. So it became the preserve of locals, people from the highlands who left the cool upcountry nights and rainy winters to play on the coast.
One night Storm would tell her how forty or fifty years before — for him an epoch away, but for her a graspable previous age — the ranchers and big game hunters of the north would converge on Kilindoni at Easter, at Christmas and New Year, and celebrate the fruit of their destruction by hooking marlin and sailfish off its fertile coasts. Then, the Indian Ocean had been thick with whales — sei, killer, pilot, sperm, humpback — and an abundant marine life had fed on sea grass, including finfish and five species of marine turtle. Its brackish mangroves were studded with Goliath and purple herons, which stepped like dignitaries through mud, feeding on prawns and the mud crabs sold as delicacies in tourist restaurants. The Amani sunbird, the eastern nicator, Fischer's turaco and the green barbet were plentiful, then; they threaded through lianas and sedges in the hot coastal forest where it was thirty degrees by eight o'clock in the morning.
She knew little of this before she arrived. She had only a few hours in the capital, sitting in a corner in Anthony's office, underneath the severed head of a buffalo killed by the embassy's previous owner, and which no one had managed to remove.
But she'd looked up Kilindoni on Google Earth. And so she knew that the plantation extended inland, its rolling hills of pineapple and cultivated sisal feeding on the moisture of the ocean. A parcel of it hugged the coast, and it was here she would find their house. Across a shallow inlet, five kilometres away, was the village of Kilindoni. There, mosques and Christian churches sat side by side, their mabati roofs shimmering the heat. From the banks of the creek dhows slid out of the harbour at dawn and pied kingfishers dove into the sea.
* * *
"Would you like me to stop so I can throw that away?"
Chocolate veined down her hands and pooled on her wrists. "It melts quickly, doesn't it?" She tried to stem the flow with her tongue.
The night before, in her hotel in Bahari ya Manda, her first night on the coast, the heat had kept her awake, along with the drill-buzz of the fan and the mosquitoes who had staked out her bed before she had dropped the net. But also, she was charged with a sense of anticipation so fierce her heart pounded, an alloy of dread and excitement she had felt only once or twice in her life.
Then night capsized to a tropics dawn. Birds whose calls she could not recognize sang with languid conviction. On the other side of the curtain the sun was already white-hot, at seven in the morning. The heat was a hot stone slab. In Gariseb the nights were cool. In July and August — the equatorial winter — it went down to ten degrees at night. She would wake in her tent with her breath suspended in the air and scramble for a fleece.
The drive would take an hour, Vincent told her. She had to close her eyes at times, when the juggernaut long-distance buses bore down on them from the opposite direction, their bulk straying into their lane and forcing Vincent to hug the rim of the road. They drove with the windows open and she heard the birds whose calls she had been learning on her computer for some months now. Some were familiar to her: the dark-capped bulbul and the common bulbul, locally abundant birds with melodious, sweet calls. They sounded as if they were arguing — a long-married couple who could finish the other's sentences: I just said, I just meant, no you didn't ...
She felt her body begin to succumb to a kind of melting. The heat alone seemed to want to convince her of this. Everything will be easier now. You will see.
The coastal highway shone like a black snake in the heat. They passed ragged towns of evangelical churches and motorcycle taxis, slim women barefoot, skirts made of a bright material, printed patterns of pineapples or suns and moons wrapped tight around their legs.
Black Africa — this was what Mike the army major had called it. The term struck her. "What do you mean 'black'? Is there a White Africa?" she'd asked him. "Sure," he'd said. Mike had been her boss and she was young then, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and so did not dispute his casting of the continent in chess-piece colours. Before she came to work in Gariseb she'd not thought much about Africa at all, she realized now. She'd taken it to be a continent-country, undifferentiated, like Antarctica or Australia.
"Why are they all dead?" She turned to face Vincent, who drove with stern concentration.
"What?"
"Those trees. Do they always look like that?"
The fat grey leafless forms had begun to appear north of the village of Larona, like bloated skeletons. Their girths were big enough to house a small bar. They looked less like trees than spirits.
Vincent's head gives the slightest of shakes. She saw words moving on his lips before they were discarded into a hesitant smile. He might have learned that to dispute what white people said brought only trouble.
"They're alive," he said, finally.
"It's so hot," she said.
"This is the time we call winter," Vincent said. "In summer it is five degrees hotter. This is, how do you call it ... the down season?"
"The off-season."
The spiky plantations receded, taking many of the bloated trees with them. Now lush trees with thin cascading leaves draped themselves close to the road. Through them she could see the gnarled knots of mangroves.
"We are getting closer now."
Vincent turned the wheel and a dust lane swallowed them. She still held her chocolate ice cream, now melted to brown sludge. It was her first ice cream in months, bought at the Manda Bay shopping mall café. In the same café, a low-lit, wood-hued place filled with white faces, she'd bought bread, a couple of good French loaves. She couldn't think what else to bring to Julia, for the family. They might have everything.
Now they were driving under dark-leaved drooping trees. She knew the house overlooked the ocean; she could smell salt and kelp. A feeling seized her then, an odd belated sense of remorse. She could tell Vincent to turn around right now. He would do her bidding, just as he had for hundreds of erratic tourists, people from distant, wealthy countries who could not make up their minds and who were never happy.
The first thing she saw of the house was a white wall, perhaps seven feet high. Above its ramparts were the dark heads of palms. As they approached, the white of the wall seemed to gleam brighter, as if lit from inside by some kind of fluorescence. In the centre of the wall was a dark-wooded gate with grilles of inset ironwork, so glossy and black it looked as if it were made of wet ink. Bougainvillea draped over the walls in pink cascades. On the ground their smashed and wilted petals pooled.
She cast a look at Vincent. His mouth was working silently again, practising and discarding words. She'd been about to say — what? — some obscure apology for the opulence they were about to enter. This is not me. I am not one of these people.
Then they were through the wall's aperture and the ironwork portal was on either side and they were gliding along a long dark driveway, pursued by a dog. She locked eyes with the dog, which loped soundlessly beside them. He was brown-black, a thick bullish Doberman. She was glad they were in the car. The dog's eyes were seeds.
The back door of the house was slightly ajar. In it stood a woman dressed in a purple sheath of semi-transparent material. This was an aged version of the woman she'd seen in a very few photographs, with her sand-blond hair and trim body.
She got out of the car. She had every intention of walking up to her aunt and putting her arms around her but at the last moment she saw that this was not what her aunt expected. She held herself very upright and thrust her hand out in front of her.
"How fantastic you've come," her aunt said, taking her hand. Her grip was firm. She did not try to embrace her.
A stab in her stomach. It was raw and unexpected. She put her hand to her abdomen.
"Come inside."
She followed the purple of her aunt's dress into the house only to stop in the middle of a very large, high-ceilinged room. Something was missing. Then she understood: the house had no wall. The living room dissolved into a garden; there, palm trees shaded a lawn. Beyond it was a square of tourmaline water, and beyond the pool was the ocean. Along its shore was a fringe of grey ridged rock. She went forward, drawn by the sight of the waves breaking. She found herself standing in front of a swimming pool whose edge dispersed into the horizon.
"What's that?"
Her aunt looked out to sea. "What do you mean?"
"That grey rock."
"Coral."
"Is it dead?"
"No, it's alive. It's low tide now. At low tide the coral is exposed."
The sky was covered in a thin greasy layer of cloud. The ocean stared back at her.
"Nice view, isn't it? We never tire of it." Her aunt's heels — she hadn't noticed she was wearing shoes; somehow shoes seemed useless in this open cathedral — slapped against her feet. Her aunt was wearing those shoes with no back; what were they called? She had forgotten her entire shoe vocabulary. She had worn one pair of trainers and one pair of flip-flops for the last four months.
Through her aunt's purple kaftan she could see her swimsuit, a bikini balanced on coat hanger hips and aquiline thighs. Julia might be fifty-five, even sixty. There was not an ounce of fat or wrinkle. Looking at her aunt ignited an unfamiliar trill inside her, a tinny vibration.
"Are you alone here?"
Her question sounded wrong, but it was too late to recall it.
"Bill is in town, on business. The boys are out fishing. Or sailing. You'll meet them all tonight."
"The boys?" She was sure Julia had a son and a daughter.
"Storm and his friend."
"Oh," she said. "Thank you so much for having me."
The look that passed across her aunt's face then, and which was almost instantly banished, was one of annoyance. It was replaced by a bright smile. "Nonsense. You're family."
For the last few days she had been trying to remember Julia. In the end she failed to conjure up a single image. Her mother's sister had come to England every two years, "to shop," her mother had said, with a brittle laugh. She must have been twelve, thirteen, and this fragment had lodged itself in her mind, even then. Distant relatives, she remembered her mother saying, the hurt sing-song in her voice, we were never a close family. These phrases — distant relatives, close family — had rung in her mind for weeks afterward. She did not know enough about family to ask her mother how a sister could ever be a distant relative, no matter how far away she lived.
A thin woman wearing a flowered dress and a pale scarf around her head appeared and she was shown to a room upstairs. Everything in the house was the colour of sand, or variations on it: ivory walls, a bleached white mosquito net, skirting boards painted the palest of peach. She saw wooden sculptures, gnarled pieces of driftwood tucked in cool corners. On the walls hung baleful African masks. Some sort of lantern made from Bombay Sapphire gin bottles were placed at intervals around the house where they threw a swimming pool light.
When the woman — she hadn't caught her name, but she was almost certainly Julia's housekeeper — left, she sat on the bed. The river of thought flowed again, as if it had never been dammed.
Why had she thrown herself on these people's hospitality? She'd seen the bar as her aunt led her out onto the house's stage in front of the ocean. Three types of whisky, four brands of gin. Gariseb was dry. She had gone four months without even a beer. The night before in Bahari ya Manda she'd been too tired to down the Duma beer the barman gave her, inexplicably, as a gift. She drank three mouthfuls and went to bed, even though sleep eluded her.
Kitten heels. Yes that's what they were. She'd never liked them; they were dainty and threatening at once. Only a certain kind of woman would wear such shoes, a woman under the impression that she would not have to run for her life, that she would not have to walk home for twenty miles along the side of the highway after her car had been commandeered by rebels.
The sea roared. It was closer now. She'd imagined the Indian Ocean would be calm, a minor ocean, pacified by warmth. But sharks patrolled the waters here — bull sharks, blacktip reef sharks, even great whites had been known to stray north from their usual feeding grounds in the cool Mozambique channel. This was another thing she learned from Google, in Anthony's office, after she received Julia's invitation.
She went to the window. The tide had come in, fast. The breakers had disappeared and the sea undulated now, its surface unbroken by coral. Waves pounded the low cliff on which the house was perched.
She sat on the bed. On the desk by the window were two photos. They sat in frames made out of dark wood. Their original colour was faded by the sun.
She picked one up. A boy stared at the camera as if it were an adversary, his face static, a fish dangling from a hook in his hand. Behind him was a beach. Hair spiralled from underneath a baseball cap. A girl's photo showed her seated at a long table of other young people against a stone wall — a castle or stately home. England, for certain. She knew Julia's daughter had studied there so this must be Lucy. With her dark hair and dark eyes, Lucy looked like a different species from the boy in the other photo, who must be her brother, Storm. She studied their features and could find little, apart from Julia's patrician nose, in common. Lucy would be coming home soon, Julia had said in her email, in the middle of August. They would meet each other then.
The middle of August. What would she do in this house for a week, let alone two months? She would have to make an excuse to leave early. She would find some way of staying in the capital until she returned to Gariseb. By then enough time would have passed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Dhow House by Jean McNeil, Susan Renouf. Copyright © 2017 Jean McNeil. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue,I. Amani sunbird,
II. Black-bellied bustard,
III. Red-chested cuckoo,
IV. Amur falcon,
V. Nubian nightjar,
VI. Augur buzzard,
VII. Hartlaub's turaco,
VIII. African sacred ibis,
IX. Northern carmine bee-eater,
Acknowledgements,
Short Glossary of Swahili Terms,
About the Author,
Copyright,