1982 - An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd Read Free Book Online

“Call Joseph,” he instructed. His voice carried to the shamba because shouts and screams of excitement promptly rose up from it, and the small pale bodies of his two boys, Glenway and Walker, hurtled from behind one of the huts and ran breathlessly towards him screaming “Papa, Papa!” in their shrill young voices.
    He felt a twinge of irritation at Matilda’s complacency. The boys were not meant to play in the cook’s shamba. It was annoying to come back from a long and arduous journey to find the house in a mess and his instructions so heedlessly flouted. His two boys—Glenway nearly four and Walker nearly three—reached him and jumped up and down, tugging at his trousers and jacket. He picked them both up. Joseph, the houseboy, loped grinning behind them.
    “Joseph,” Temple ordered, “one whisky and water, on the verandah, quickly.” Joseph ran off to get the whisky while Temple set his two boys back on the ground and then walked round towards the front, holding their hands.
    He paused at the side for a moment, looking over his farm: the drying racks, the trolley lines, the factory, the neat rows of sisal and linseed stretching out to the shores of Lake Jipe, now dark and opaque. All around the crickets were trilling, somewhere a hyena barked. He saw Saleh and the farm boys walking back down the road to the village where the farm workers lived, a mile or so away on the banks of the thickly wooded river—the Lumi—that flowed into Lake Jipe. Over to his left, some distance off and invisible in the dark, was a small grove of wild fig trees which contained the grave of his third child, an unnamed baby girl, who had barely lived for a day.
    Glenway pulled at his arm. “Come on, Papa,” he said. “Let’s go in.” Temple looked down at his children. He found it strange that they spoke with English accents—said ‘P’pah’ instead of ‘Poppa’. It was an indication, he ruefully admitted, of the amount of time he spent with them. They walked round to the front of the house. Matilda still sat on the verandah, an oil lamp on the table illuminating her book. In the dining room he could see Joseph clearing away the remains of the children’s meal. He felt the comforting presence of his family form around him, the reassuring familiarity of the things he owned and the things he had grown or made occupying their appointed places in the gathering dark—from the two hundred fragile green shoots of the coffee seedlings to the imposing bulk of the Decorticator; from the thousands of sisal and linseed plants to the fences he’d erected at his land’s perimeter just a few yards from the border with German East.
    They were like pinions that fixed him to the soil; clamps that fastened and bound him to this new life he’d chosen. He ruffled his son’s hair, enjoying the pleasant sensations, his heart big with self-satisfaction and pride.
    “Where did you go?” Walker asked him as they climbed the steps to the verandah.
    “To another country,” Temple said.
    “What did you do there?”
    “I bought some coffee plants and…” he paused, sensing the beginnings of a blush spread across his cheeks. “And, guess what, I saw a big battleship and lots of soldiers.”
    “Soldiers,” Glenway said, his eyes gleaming. “Are they going to fight in a war?”
    Temple laughed. “Did you hear that, Matilda? A war? Don’t be silly, Glenway. There isn’t going to be a war. Well, at least not here in Africa, anyways.”

Chapter 4
    24 July 1914,
Ashurst, Kent, England
    Felix Cobb stepped out of the train at Ashurst station. He put his bags down on the platform, took off his glasses and folded them away in their case. The wrought iron railings behind the station building had been recently repainted and bright tubs of geraniums stood evenly spaced out along the length of the platform.
    The train puffed off and Felix realized he had been the only passenger to get out. For a second he thought he’d left his hat on the