Circling the Sun (11 page)

I
n all my years of living in the bush, I had never caught malaria or any other of the terrible fevers or plagues. Now I was felled by something just as serious though more difficult to name—an illness of the spirit. I didn’t want to sleep or eat, and nothing made me happy. Nothing made sense. Jock, meanwhile, bustled around me, full of plans for our farm and for us. He had bought up my father’s gristmill, one of the last things to go at auction, and had got it for a song. Though he seemed delighted by the deal, I could barely stand to think that we were profiting from my father’s failure; that our holdings were being built on the bones of Green Hills.

All I could do was turn my attention to the horses. I found a black ledger exactly like the one my father had used and began to mark down everything that happened in the stables every day—the exercise sessions and feeding schedules, the wages of the grooms and equipment to be ordered. I set up a small office in one corner of the stable the way my father had done—just a tiny desk and a lamp and a calendar on the wall with the date of the next race meeting circled boldly. Each day I rose before dawn to be at morning gallops—but it wasn’t enough. More and more a bell tolled through me. It woke me up early and sometimes in the still middle of the night, sending a cold chill up over the surface of my skin.
What have I done?
Can I still mend this? Can I free myself?

Most days, Jock and I were at cross-purposes. The harder I worked, the more he behaved as if I were taking something away from him. He had assumed I would only want what he wanted, I imagined, that I would be happy to throw myself at his aims instead of my own. Sometimes, after he’d had a few too many, I would hear the phonograph start up, and the first lilting bars of “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” Jock had bought the record not long after we were married, saying he wanted a keepsake of our first dance. I had thought the gesture sweet, but when he played it now it was to drive home the fact that I wasn’t the girl he thought he’d married. I wasn’t, of course, and I didn’t know what to do about it either.

Pulling on my robe, I went out into the main room, where he was deep into his cups, humming along with the words, sharply off tune.

A Garden of Eden just made for two

With nothing to mar our joy

I would say such wonderful things to you

There would be such wonderful things to do

“You’re going to feel like hell in the morning. Turn that off and come to bed.”

“Don’t you love me, Beryl?”

“Of course,” I said quickly, woodenly. The truth was that when I measured Jock against my father or
arap
Maina, the men I admired most, he came up disastrously short. But not everything was his fault. Somehow I had thought I could marry a perfect stranger and have it all magically work out. Like the house we lived in, my promises to him had gone up far too fast to be sound. I had lunged at a choice, and it had been the wrong one. “Have some coffee or come to bed.”

“You don’t even try to deny it.” The song finished and the recording hissed. “You care more about that dog,” he said, and got up to move the needle back to the beginning.

Almost overnight, Buller had become ancient and arthritic. He was blind as well as deaf and moved as if he were made entirely of brittle glass. My father would have shot him and been right to do it. I couldn’t, and waited with him instead, sometimes lowering my face to rest just above his gnarled head and telling him things he couldn’t hear, about how brave he’d been and still was.

“He’s
dying,
” I said to Jock, my voice beginning to break. But even at the edge of death, Buller was showing more courage than I was. For most of a year I had been hiding behind my hasty decision, trying not to think about the future or the past. Both were here in the room with us, and the terrible bell was beginning to toll again. I knew it wouldn’t be silent until I thrashed my way out of the mess I had made, no matter how awful that was. There was no other way.

“I want to go and work for Delamere,” I said quickly, before I could change my mind or take it back. “I can learn to train there. My father suggested it before he left and I think it’s a sound move.”

“What? We have our own animals. Why go somewhere else?”

“It isn’t just the work, Jock.
Nothing’s
right between us. You know it as well as I do.”

“We’re just beginning. Give it time.”

“Time won’t do a thing
.
You should have a proper wife, one who wants to care for you and have a dozen children and all of it. That’s not me.”

He turned with the drink in his hand, and I could see the hard edge inside him, its silhouette as clear and sharp as if he were his own faraway mountain. I had caught him off guard. “You
don’t
love me, then.” He said it coldly and cleanly.

“We don’t really even
know
each other. Do we?”

His lips pressed hard together, flat and white, before he spoke. “I’ve never given up on anything in my life. It’s not how I do things. How would it look?”

“How would it look?
Honest,
for one thing. Isn’t it better to own up to things?”

He shook his head almost imperceptibly, small quick movements. “I’d be a laughing stock in town…made a fool of by a girl. My family would be horrified. Humiliated. We actually have a name to protect, you know.”

This was an obvious dig against my father and the bankruptcy scandal, but I couldn’t let it stop me from plunging ahead. “Blame it all on me then. I don’t care. I don’t have anything left to lose.”

“I’m not sure that’s true.”

When he stormed off to bed that night, I still didn’t know where we stood. I slept in front of the hearth, tossing back and forth, feeling alternately too cold and too hot. I thought we would have it out in the morning, but the row lasted for three days. Whatever he was sorting out, it seemed to have less to do with losing me than with the sullying of his reputation, and how the colony might perceive his failings. I understood that. He had married me because it was time to marry, and that was all. His family had expected it of him, to complete the picture of a settled and prosperous life. He certainly wouldn’t let them down now. He was too proud and had always managed to take control of any wayward detail in his life—deep-rooted tree stumps in the field, boulders where a garden should go. He came at every obstacle with muscle and gumption, but he couldn’t simply strong-arm me. Or could he?

On the third evening, Jock finally sat down across from me, his eyes flat as chips of flint. “This isn’t something you can bury in the sand and forget about, Beryl. Go and work for Delamere if that’s what you’re going to do, but you’ll go as my wife.”

“We’ll be pretending then? For how long?”

He shrugged. “Don’t forget you need me, too. Your father’s horses are half mine now, and you can’t care for them on a pauper’s salary.”

“You’ll hold my horses ransom? For God’s sake, Jock, you know how much they mean to me.”

“Then don’t test me. I don’t want to look like a damned fool, and you can’t afford to buy me out.” His voice was like a stranger’s, but it was possible we’d never stopped being strangers, both of us. Either way, I doubted if I would ever be able to reach him again. “You’ve been making such a stink about honesty,” he went on. “Is this honest enough for you?”

W
hen I rode away from Jock’s farm a week later, I took nothing that I couldn’t tie onto the back of my saddle—pyjamas, a toothbrush and comb, a second pair of slacks, a man’s shirt in heavy cotton. For Pegasus I carried a thick rug and brush, several pounds of crushed oats, and a small, tarnished blacksmith’s knife. It felt wonderful to be riding out in the bush and travelling so lightly, but I was also leaving much unsettled behind me. It was a devil’s bargain I had struck with Jock. He owned my freedom, and the only way I could wrest it from him was by getting the licence. That came first, and then hard work and a chance, just a chance, at winning. Everything would have to fall into place perfectly—a terrifying thought—for me to ever be fully independent. I would have to hope for that, and give it everything I had.

Soysambu lay at the edge of the Rift’s great undulating fold, in one of the narrower regions of the highlands, between Elmenteita and Lake Nakuru, where Delamere’s stock had ten thousand acres to graze in relative comfort and safety. D had turned to sheep mostly—Masai ewes with deep brown coats so heavy and knotted they were almost unrecognizable as sheep. At Equator Ranch a decade before, his debut lambing had turned out only six surviving animals of four thousand ewes. Undaunted, he had burned through more of his inheritance (eighty thousand pounds, some claimed), replaced his stock, learned his hard lessons, and was now the most successful large-scale rancher in all of Kenya.

Not everyone admired him. In town or at the track, many people gave D a wide berth, trying to avoid an argument or a lecture about “the Indian problem.” He was louder than anyone about how we needed to sever our ties with that country once and for all. He was also land greedy and full of bluster, and impossible to argue with—but Lady D had always seen what was good in him, and I did, too. He worked harder than anyone I knew—twelve or sixteen hours a day, out with his herd along the rolling hills. He was passionate and indomitable, and in the time I’d known him—my whole life, really—he’d only ever been kind to me.

“Beryl, dear,” he barked when I arrived. He had broken down his rifle and was polishing the butt with tender precision. His long hair was a thicket. “So you want to be a trainer like Clutt, do you? I can’t imagine it will be an easy life.”

“I’m not after an easy life.”

“Maybe not.” He looked at me plainly. “But I’ve never seen anyone near as young as you with a proper English trainer’s licence. And I expect I don’t have to tell you you’ll be the only woman.”

“Somebody has to be the first at everything.”

“You wouldn’t be running away from Jock, would you?” His eyes had softened. I found I had trouble meeting them. “I was married for a very long time, you remember. I know how tricky things can get.”

“Don’t worry about me. All I need is a clear job to do. I don’t want any special treatment either. I’ll bunk in the stables like everyone else.”

“All right, all right. I won’t pry and I won’t coddle you, but if you ever do need anything I hope you know you can come to me.”

I nodded.

“I can be a sentimental old bastard, can’t I? C’mon, let’s get you settled.”

D showed me to a small wooden cottage beyond the far paddock. Inside, there was a camp bed and a scarred wide-planked floor, and a single hurricane lamp hanging on a wall peg. The room wasn’t much bigger than the stall Pegasus was sleeping in, and it was cold, too. He told me the terms of my stay—
indenture
was more like it—and where and to whom I’d report the next day.

“You said no special treatment,” he said, eyeing me as if he expected me to turn and run on the spot.

“I’ll be fine,” I promised him, then said good night. After he left, I built a small fire, boiled bitter coffee, and then ate tinned meat, cold, with the tip of my knife. Finally I curled up in the narrow bed, chilly and still a little hungry. I looked up into the shadows on the ceiling and thought about my father. He had written me only a few sparse letters since he’d moved to Cape Town, barely enough words to fill a teaspoon, let alone the yawning gap he’d left in my life. I missed him awfully, like someone who’d died—and yet just now, in my cold cot, I felt strangely close to him. It was
his
life I was reaching for in coming here, and if I couldn’t have my father back, exactly, maybe not ever, I could have the rightness of looking in the same direction, of stepping into his shadow with my own. I didn’t know a thing about marriage or men—that had been proven well enough. But I did know horses. For the first time in a long time, I was exactly where I should be.