Circling the Sun (22 page)

I
n the weeks that followed, gossip filtered to me at Soysambu from all over the colony. Apparently my exposure at the St. Leger had set tongues wagging about Boy again. Jock had got wind of it and figured he’d had enough. The details of my marriage were all common knowledge now. Maybe they always had been—but thankfully I didn’t hear a whisper about my night with Denys. Somehow that secret was safely tucked away even if nothing else was.

D stayed in town, mending, while Boy was preparing to up sticks. He’d left his job at the ranch and booked a passage to England.

“I’m finally going to marry my girl in Dorking,” he said, throwing bits of pirate-bright clothing into his duffel bag. “I feel a bit strange leaving you in the lurch.”

“It’s all right,” I told him. “I see why you’d want to go.”

Though he didn’t look up from his duffel, I saw how he struggled with his pride. “If you ever need anything, I hope you’ll search me out.”

“In Dorking?” I looked at him sceptically.

“Why not? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“We are,” I said, and kissed him on the cheek.

After Boy had gone, my conscience continued to prickle and sting, keeping me awake at night. I had always told myself that leaving Jock and running around with Boy wasn’t any worse than what anyone else did in the colony. But at Soysambu, there were now rumours among the ranch hands that Jock had threatened to shoot Boy if he ever saw him in town. That’s why he’d run to Dorking.

I felt alone and overwhelmed and dearly wished my father were nearby. I needed the anchor of his presence and also his advice. Should I try to ignore the gossip, or was there something I could do to help it all blow over? And how would I begin to deal with Jock, when he’d become such a loose and desperate cannon?

When D came home, he was incredibly fragile and shaken. He would be in bed a full six months while he recovered.

“I feel terrible for what Jock did,” I told him while the nurse settled his bedclothes and changed his bandages. I’d said it dozens of times, but couldn’t seem to stop.

“I know.” D had a plaster on one arm up to the shoulder. His neck was in a stiff brace. “The thing is, the community is protective of me. More than I am of myself.”

“What do you mean?”

He asked the nurse to leave us for a moment and then said, “I’ve tried to keep your name out of it, but when the colony chooses to feel scandalized, it doesn’t let up.”

I felt a rippling of humiliation and also outrage, the two feelings twisted up in each other. “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me,” I lied.

“I don’t have that luxury.” He lowered his eyes to his hands on the neatly folded sheets. “I think you should stay away from the races for a while.”

“And do what? Work is the only thing I have.”

“People will forget eventually, but it’s fresh now. They want your head on a stake.”

“Why not Jock’s head? He’s the one who’s gone mad.”

He shrugged. “We’re all very liberal until something shines a light on us. Somehow everyone understands a husband’s jealous raging more than a wife’s…indiscretions. It’s not fair, but what is?”

“You’re firing me then.”

“I think of you as a daughter, Beryl. You’ll always have a place here.”

I swallowed hard. My mouth was dry as chalk. “I don’t blame you, D. It’s what I deserve.”

“Who knows what anyone deserves? We like to play judge and jury, but we’re all a rotten mess under our skins.” He reached for my arm and patted it. “Come back when the fire dies down. And take good care of yourself.”

Scalding tears threatened, but I fought them back. I nodded and thanked him, and then walked out of his room on shaky legs.

I didn’t know where to go. My mother and Dickie were out of the question. Cockie was away in London visiting family. Berkeley was too worried about me, too perceptive, and I would never go to Karen now. I had betrayed her—that was the only way to see it—and if I still liked and admired her, no matter what I felt for Denys, well, that was a puzzle for me to work out on my own. In any case, I’d probably already lost her respect—and Denys’s, too.

It was painful how much respect seemed to matter now that my life was under glass. It reminded me of Green Hills and the scandal around my father’s bankruptcy. He had a tougher skin than I had, and the gossip hadn’t really seemed to touch him. I wished again, fiercely, that he were here to guide me now. I felt shaken to the core, right down to my bones. All I could think of was getting away from the colony as quickly as possible, away from prying eyes and wagging tongues. Even Cape Town wasn’t far enough. But what place was? I thought and thought, turning the problem over and turning out my pockets. I had about sixty pounds all told, almost nothing. How much would nothing get me? Just how far could I go?

T
inned chestnuts and sugared almonds in a window at Fortnum & Mason. Candy-striped cotton shirts and cravats and handkerchiefs dressing the shopfront mannequins on Regent Street. Lorry drivers standing on their horns, clamouring for the right of way. The sights and sounds of London were dizzying and overwhelming. And then there was the cold. I’d left Mombasa on a sultry day. Standing at the ship’s rail, I watched Kilinidi Harbour shrink away, a warm wind blowing through my hair and thin blouse. In London, sooty snow clogged the cobbles. The walking was icy, and my boots were all wrong, and so were my clothes. I didn’t own an overcoat or galoshes and had only one address in my pocket to guide me on my way—for Boy Long and his new wife, Genessee, in Dorking. In so many respects, it was odd to turn up at the home of my ex-lover, but after what we’d been through I believed him when he let me know I could lean on him. And I trusted him. That meant everything.

When I got to Dorking, it was a bit of a shock to see that Boy was a different character here. He’d left the pirate back in Kenya and wore houndstooth trousers and fitted shirts with braces and fine, polished oxford shoes. Genessee called him Casmere, not Boy, so I did, too.

Thankfully Genessee was warm and kind, and also tall. She graciously lent me some of her clothes so I could go out without being stared at or catching my death—and it was in her knitted suit with Boy’s directions that I made my way by train to West Halkin Street in the fashionable Belgravia neighbourhood of London to search out Cockie.

It was late afternoon when I turned up at her house unannounced. I didn’t know much about Cockie’s family situation, but clearly there were resources somewhere. She was within spitting distance of Buckingham Palace, and the townhouse stood in a long, regal row of matching neighbours, all in a creamy stone, with black iron balustrades and deep front entrances. I screwed up my courage to knock at the grand door, but I needn’t have. Only the maid was at home. She looked me over, coatless as I was, seeming to place me as some sort of poor relation. I stared at my dripping feet on the marble in the foyer and couldn’t think of any message to leave. Finally I hurried back out into the cold again without even giving the girl my name.

I didn’t want to go all the way back to Dorking, so I wandered around Hyde Park and Piccadilly Circus and Berkeley Square until my toes froze solid, then found a hotel in Soho that wasn’t too dear. The next morning I went back, but Cockie was out again, at Harrods.

“Please wait,” the maid said. “She’s asked me to keep you here.”

When Cockie finally arrived, just before lunch, she threw her bags down and lunged at my arm. “Beryl! I somehow knew it was you. How did you get here?”

“It’s a terrible story.” I took in her plump good health, her lovely skirt and shoes and draping fur coat caught with snowflakes. Except for the coat she hadn’t altered much from the last time I’d seen her in Nairobi, and yet, for me, everything had changed. “Could we have a nip of brandy first?”

It took a long while before I could get the whole sordid affair out—in pieces—and even then there were bits of it I wouldn’t touch. I didn’t speak of Denys at all, or the way things with Karen had grown so uncertain. Thankfully, Cockie listened quietly, and held her worst faces for the end.

“Surely D will have you back when the waters are calm again.”

“I don’t know that he should. He’s got a reputation to protect.”

“Life is full of messes. Your mistakes aren’t bigger than anyone else’s.”

“I know that…but the brunt of them didn’t only fall on me. That’s what’s hard to live with.”

She nodded, seeming to consider this. “Where’s Jock now?”

“The last I heard he was running off into the night in Nakuru. I can’t imagine he’ll fight a divorce now.”

“Maybe not. But as long as you’re married, you can get financial support.”

“What? Take money from him? I’d rather starve.”

“Where else will it come from then?” She looked at my clothes, which were passable for country fare, but wouldn’t see me through in Belgravia. “You can’t have much.”

“I’ll find a way to work or something. Honestly, I
will
find my feet again. I always seem to.”

No matter how much I tried to reassure her, Cockie was worried about me and keen to be a sort of guardian angel. I stayed with her for the next few weeks and let her take me along to parties and introduce me to the best sorts of people. She also gently tried to explain the way money worked in London. I’d never been savvy about funds and had only ever known the chit system. In Kenya, shop owners would give you credit for anything you needed, stringing you out for years even in lean times. But in London, apparently you didn’t sign for anything unless you had the money to hand.

“If I had it, why would I sign?”

She smiled and sighed. “We’re going to have to find you a handsome benefactor.”

“A man?” I balked. I could barely stand the thought after the gauntlet I’d run.

“Think of them as sponsors, darling. Any man would be lucky to parade you around on his arm in exchange for some nice gifts. Jewellery preferably.” She smiled again. “That might just get you through.”

Cockie was curvy and a full head shorter than I was, so none of her things would do for me, but she took me shopping, and also over to a wealthy friend’s to raid her cupboards. I was grateful she wanted to look out for me and to help me sort out my current state. But I didn’t much feel like myself in London. In truth, I hadn’t felt one hundred per cent right since the sea voyage from Mombasa, when nausea had kept me green to the gills and chained to my bunk below decks. The dizziness had lingered long after I had my feet on dry land—but once I’d arrived in Belgravia, it had faded and been replaced by general fatigue. I was reluctant to mention anything to Cockie, but she saw it for herself soon enough and began to canvass me about my symptoms.

“You might have the influenza, darling. People die from it over here. Go and see my surgeon.”

“But I’ve never caught any kind of fever.”

“Everything’s different here, though. Please go, won’t you? Do it for me.”

In general I avoided modern medicine and had ever since
arap
Maina had told Kibii and me about the crazy
mzungu
doctors that took blood out of someone else’s body to cure you. He had scoffed, waving his hand at the ludicrousness of white men, and Kibii and I had shuddered, thinking of someone else’s sticky red life snaking through our veins. Could you even be yourself after something like that?

Cockie wouldn’t hear my protests. She dragged me along to the surgery, where the doctor took my temperature, felt my pulse, and asked me all sorts of questions about my journey and recent habits. Finally he declared me right as rain. “A little constipation at most,” he said, and recommended cod-liver oil in a handful of doses.

“Aren’t you glad you went, though?” Cockie asked in the cab back to West Halkin Street. “Now your mind will be at ease.”

But it wasn’t. Something still wasn’t right with me, and it wasn’t constipation. I thanked her and went back to Dorking again, keen for a rest from town and its pace. Boy and Genessee were just as warm and patient with me as they had been before—but there came a morning in my snug bed in Dorking when it all added up, the nausea and dizziness and fatigue. The way I was growing rounder under borrowed clothes. I tried to remember the last time I’d had my monthly bleeding and couldn’t. I reached under the down quilt and rested my hands on my waist, which had thickened considerably over the last few weeks. I’d blamed that on buttered crumpets and clotted cream—but now the truth arrived all at once.

I lay back on the pillow feeling reality slide around me like a carousel. Birth control was a dodgy thing. Since the end of the war men could get hold of condoms, but they were stiff and crude, susceptible to breaking and tearing. Mostly the man pulled out before anything happened, or you tried to avoid the more dangerous times of the month, as I had done with Boy when we were still involved. But with Denys, everything had happened so quickly that I’d done nothing. Now I was in dire straits. If I’d been at home, I might have gone to one of the native women in the Somali village and asked for a tea made from pennyroyal or scale-leaf juniper and hoped that would solve the problem—but here, in England?

I curled more deeply into the bed and thought about Denys. It was cruel that one night in his arms had got me into such trouble. And I couldn’t fool myself that he’d be happy to learn I was carrying his child. Family life was too constricting for him—he’d made that clear from the beginning. But where did that leave me? I was twenty-one with no husband to count on, no parents to speak of, not in practical terms, and thousands of miles from the world I knew best—my home. And time was not on my side.

Later that day, I made my excuses to Boy and Genessee, thanked them for all their kindnesses, and boarded the train back to London with a prickling dread.

Cockie’s surgeon seemed surprised to see me again—and a little put out, actually. He’d sent me packing with my cod-liver oil, and here I was again like a cat at the door. But a few additional weeks had made the problem quite clear. As Cockie waited in a small sitting room, I lay back on his table and squeezed my eyes shut. He poked and prodded, and I took myself away, thinking of Njoro instead—the curving of our dirt track down the maize-gold hill, the flat, still sky, and morning heat trembling up from the dust. If only I could be home, I told myself, I could bear anything.

“You’re several months gone,” the surgeon told me when I sat up again. He cleared his throat and turned away while the whole room lurched.

“How did you miss it
before?
” Cockie nearly shouted when the doctor made his pronouncement again, in his private office. The room was drenched with dewy April light. There was a deep-blue ink blotter on his broad leather desk. Near my crossed ankles stood a bone-tidy rubbish bin that seemed never to have touched actual rubbish.

“It isn’t an exact science.”

“Five weeks ago you said she was constipated! You never really examined her. Now things are so much worse.” Cockie continued to harass him, and I sat in my chair, as still as a tombstone. My vision blurred at the edges, as if I were looking down a long, indeterminate tunnel.

“Certain young women have been known to cross into France under these…circumstances,” he said without quite looking at either of us.

“Is there time for France?” I asked.

“Perhaps not,” he finally admitted. With a little more badgering he gave us an address, saying, “I never sent you. I’ve never seen you at all.”

I knew only the sketchiest stories of the kind of place he meant, where women in trouble got “taken care of.” I shuddered, terrified in the cab home from the surgeon’s, panic like clenched metal pooled around my heart. “I’ve no idea where I’ll find the money,” I told Cockie.

“I know.” She looked out the window, then sighed deeply and squeezed my hand. “Let me think.”

As it turned out, there was almost no time to spare. Two days later, we drove to a little room on Brook Street. Cockie hadn’t pressed me with questions, hadn’t shown me anything but utter warmth and kindness, but in the cab I couldn’t hold in the truth a moment longer. “The baby is Denys’s,” I said. Stinging tears burned trails down my cheeks and onto my borrowed collar.

“Denys’s? Oh, darling. I had no idea how complicated things had got at home. You don’t want to tell him first?”

I shook my head. “It’s no use. Can you see him marrying me? And Karen hasn’t the slightest idea about us. It would steal her happiness—Denys’s, too. I couldn’t live with myself.”

Cockie let out a long exhalation, nodding, and then bit her lip. “I wish I could take some of the pain away for you or make something easier.”

“No one can do that. And anyway, I brought it all on myself.”

“Don’t be silly, Beryl. You’re still a child.”

“I’m not, though,” I told her. Not any more.