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He drains his glass of milk and hands it back to her. ‘Thank you, good lady.’ Dominic bows to her and she nearly swoons. I usher him to the door before all this adoration goes to his head.
As I do, Mrs Duston whispers in my ear. ‘You are a very lucky lady, Janie. Very lucky, indeed. He’s such a poppet.’
‘Thank you.’
All the ladies come to the door and wave Dominic goodbye, giggling as they do. We duly wave in return. I march back down the road towards Little Cottage in the darkness, Dominic in step beside me.
‘A poppet?’ I say when we turn the corner and are out of sight. It’s only then that we both burst out laughing.
Chapter Sixty
So the weeks continue in the same sort of way. I’m pretty much snubbed at work and every afternoon Dominic works his charm on the impressionable ladies of Nashley. Most days when I get home, neither he nor the cat are there so I go and fish them both out of some elderly lady’s cottage. Dominic has usually been chopping wood or gardening or fixing things that need repairing or sitting in front of the fire telling stories of Africa and his own village while they, in turn, ply him with hot milk and porridge. Dominic, it seems, is settling in nicely – at least in Nashley. And he’s stopped banging his head on the low cottage beams now. So that must be a good sign, right?
At night, it’s a different matter. He finds it difficult to lie in bed and exists on two to three hours of sleep at the most. So in the wee small hours, he gets up and patrols around the village. The only concession to the cold is that he wears his new coat over his shuka and slips on his trainers. Archie is slung around his shoulders like a scarf.
‘We’ll do something today,’ I promise him as we finish breakfast. ‘I’ll take you out to look at some of the countryside round here.’
‘I would like that,’ he says. ‘It is important for me to know my new home, the nature, so I can be in harmony with it.’
‘Right.’ I wonder how much use I’ll be to him there, as I’m not first and foremost known as a nature lover.
‘Before that I must practise my jumping,’ Dominic says. ‘I cannot be happy if I do not jump.’
‘You could do something else now you’re here,’ I suggest. ‘Take up another sport, perhaps.’
He looks at me as if I am mad. ‘But I am a Maasai warrior,’ he reminds me. ‘Jumping is very important. I cannot be content if I do not jump.’
‘OK,’ I say with a shrug. Jumping it is. ‘I’ll clean up here and then I need to pop down to the post office with a couple of things.’ We’re sending a few T-shirts and other bits back to Dominic’s family. ‘You go out and jump to your heart’s content.’
‘I would like a stick,’ Dominic says. ‘A tall stick.’
A stick? Where am I going to find a stick? Then a light bulb pings in my brain and I trot off to the utility room. I unscrew the head on my outdoor broom and hand him the stout wooden handle. ‘This do?’
‘This is a good stick,’ he says happily, and then takes himself outside.
The day is cold and there was a hard frost early this morning. When Dominic and Archie returned from their dawn patrol, my reformed cat had frosty whiskers. But now it’s sunny and bright, the sky a sharp summery blue.
I lean on the windowsill and watch as Dominic starts to jump, springing high into the air. He chants as he does. There are worse habits to contend with, I think with a smile. Though I wonder idly whether we’ll have rows in the future about how much time he spends jumping when he should be taking the bins out and that sort of thing. Is it a novelty that will wear off? It takes me all my time to do half an hour on the Wii Fit but jumping, it seems, is as necessary to Dominic as breathing is.
Dominic seems to be settling in well, but he still refuses to eat anything but porridge or drink anything other than milk. Will he ever, I ponder, be able to spend more than a couple of hours at a time in bed, or be comfortable in Western clothes? He’s only been here for a few weeks so I can’t expect too much and I sincerely hope that, in time, he will be completely at home in Nashley, that we will always have a full and happy relationship. Occasionally, when I catch glimpses of Dominic’s culture that are embedded so deeply in him,t I wonder if I have done the right thing in bringing him here. No doubt it’s the right thing for me, but is it the right thing for him?
I don’t want to interrupt him, so I turn away from the window, pick up my shopping bag and the parcel that I need to weigh and set out for the post office. As I open the door, an unwelcome visitor is standing there.
