Circling the Sun (25 page)

Idina launched us forward. “Once upon a time, before Kenya was Kenya, I hadn’t even met my lion and didn’t know how smitten and changed I would be.”

“You
are
sweet to me,” Joss said, beaming a little dementedly in the firelight. “Once upon a time, before Kenya was Kenya, I bathed with Tallulah Bankhead in a tub brimming with champagne.”

“Didn’t that tickle?” Charles scoffed. Idina didn’t bat an eyelash.

“In the nicest way,” he purred. “Now you, Beryl.”

“I’m too drunk,” I said, trying to avoid the game altogether.

“Oh, posh!” Joss cried. “You’re dead sober. Play along, please.”

“Can’t we have cards instead? I don’t understand the rules of this one.”

“You need only to say something true about the past.”

Only?
The game was placid and tame and, yes, childish on the surface. But the point was to see if you could force the mouse you’d cornered to show you its insides. I didn’t want to tell these people a single thing about myself, particularly from the precious past. Finally I said, “Once upon a time, before Kenya was Kenya, I put a dead black mamba snake in my governess’s bed.”

“Aha! I knew you had some nastiness in you!” Joss said.

“Remind me not to make you angry,” Idina added.

“Show us what you do with
Frank’s
black mamba.” Charles cackled like an idiotic schoolboy, and everyone laughed along.

The game went round and round—on and on—and it seemed I would only be able to play, or even survive the night, if I did get drunk. It was difficult to catch up with this crowd. I had to make a real effort, and when I finally succeeded, I succeeded too well. The whisky made me maudlin, and for every confession I managed to reveal aloud, another unspoken confession thrummed through me and threatened to bring me down.
Before Kenya was Kenya, Green Hills was alive and my father loved me. I could jump as high as Kibii and walk through the forest without making a sound. I could bring a warthog out of its hole by crinkling paper. I could be eaten by a lion and live. I could do anything,
for I was in heaven still.

By midnight, when everyone had grown glittery-eyed and nearly delirious, Idina moved onto another game. She made us sit in a circle and blow a feather into the centre. Whomever the feather landed nearest would be our bedmate for the night. At first I thought she was joking, but when Honor blew her feather into Frank’s lap, the pair simply got up and walked down the hall, Frank’s back wide and square next to Honor’s slim form, while no one so much as leered at them. My head swam with the whisky. Everything tipped and receded in a tunnel effect. Sounds reached me with a slight delay. Now Idina seemed to be laughing because Charles had got on his hands and knees and was bringing the feather to her with his teeth.

“But I’m old hat for you, darling.” She pretended to swat at him with her cigarette holder. “You can’t want me.”

“It’s all a blur.” He laughed. “Show me again.”

When the two had lurched off down the hall, I looked at Joss, feeling nauseated. I had drunk much too much. My tongue was thick and coated in my mouth. My eyes felt heavy and dull. “I’m going to bed.”

His eyes were glassy and mirrorlike. “Isn’t that the point?”

“No, really. I don’t feel well.”

“I have something for that.” He stroked the inside of my thigh, his hand like a pressing iron through the silk. He moved to kiss me and I pulled away reflexively. When he looked at me again, his eyes had come into focus more. “Frank said you might be a little cool at first, but that I shouldn’t give up.”

“What?”

“Don’t play the lamb, Beryl. We all of us know you’ve been around.”

I wasn’t at all surprised by Joss, but if Frank had meant to throw me to the wolves by bringing me here, he had another thing coming. Without a word I stood and walked down the hall, but the door to our room was closed. I banged at it with the flat of my hand. Only laughter came back.

“Frank!” I shouted, but he wouldn’t answer me.

The hall was dark, and all the other doors were shut tight. Not knowing what else to do, I locked myself in one of the bathrooms and sat on the floor, waiting for morning. I knew the night would be long indeed, but I had things to remember…things I wouldn’t have shared earlier, not for all the money in the world.
Before Kenya was Kenya, I threw a spear and a
rungu
club. I loved a horse with wings. I never felt alone or small. I was Lakwet.

W
hen we returned from Slains two days later, Frank immediately retreated to his hunting cabin and I made plans to leave him. There wasn’t any panic in my actions. I packed slowly and carefully, filling my rucksack with things from my life before. Everything Frank had given me I left in the bureau—the money, too. I wasn’t angry with him. I wasn’t angry with anyone, I only wanted to find my own way, and to be sure of what I stood for again.

There were a few clues about what I might do next. Before I left London, Cockie had mentioned Westerland, a stable in Molo. Her cousin Gerry Alexander ran things there, and she thought the place might do for a second start. I had no idea if gossip about me had threaded that far north, or if Gerry was even in need of a trainer, but I trusted Cockie to help set me on the right path. First, though, I needed to go home.

After following the main road north to Naivasha, I headed east the least travelled way, straight into the open bush. Piled stones and gold grasses gave way to red dust and thorn trees, and unbroken savannah. The steady rhythm of Pegasus’s plates rang out. He seemed to know we weren’t going out for a casual ride, but didn’t balk at any of it, not the terrain or the eerie quiet, not even when a mammoth bushpig charged from a ravine a hundred yards ahead, storming over the path on squat, split hooves, squealing its rage at being startled. Pegasus only bobbed his head once, then pushed on with steady, smooth legs.

Finally we began to climb again, and to see the greening rim of the Mau Forest at the escarpment’s far side, dense trees and knuckled ridges, the land rolling out in the view I loved better than any other—Menengai, Rongai, the blue and furling Aberdares.

I found Jock inside just finishing lunch. I had wanted to catch him off guard and did, his face blanching before he pushed back from the table, twisting his linen napkin in his hand. “I can imagine why you’re here.”

“You didn’t answer my letters.”

“I thought maybe you’d change your mind.”

“Really?” I couldn’t believe him.

“No. I don’t know. Nothing has gone the way I planned.”

“I could say the same,” I told him. Part of me felt an urge to drag out all the casualties in our long, weary battle, to name everything and let him hear just what he’d cost me. But I had done my part, too. The losses were on my head as well. “Please, Jock. Just say you’ll give me the divorce. This has all gone on long enough.”

He stood and went to the window overlooking the valley. “I should have found a way to make it work. That’s what I keep thinking.”

“When the papers are drawn up, I’ll send them.”

He sighed loud and long, and then faced me. “Yes. All right.” His eyes met mine for a moment, and in those cold blue discs I finally saw—after all this time—a shadow of contrition, of real regret. “Goodbye, Beryl.”

“So long,” I said, and when I walked through the door, knowing I would never return, a great and old weight unfurled from my shoulders and lifted off into the sky.

I headed straight for Green Hills, where the tall grass had grown up thickly and what was still standing of the stables and main house had begun to tip irrevocably towards the earth. The mill was long gone and the fields overgrown, as if the land was taking it all back. I thought of the work my father had done, and the happiness we’d known—but I didn’t feel empty for some reason. I had the pure sense that I couldn’t ever truly lose the past, or forget what any of it had meant. To one side of the path that led into the forest, a high pile of stones stood marking Buller’s grave. I stopped Pegasus and held his lead while I sat for a while, remembering the day I had buried him. I had dug at the packed earth until the hole was deep enough so that no hyena would find him. Not even a stone had shifted from the cairn. Buller was safe in his long sleep—his grizzled scars and his victories. No unworthy predator could ever touch him.

Winding down the hill, I traced the path to the Kip village and tied Pegasus to the thorn lattice of the
boma.
When I entered the compound, a young woman named Jebbta was the first to notice me. I hadn’t seen her for years, not since we were both girls, but I wasn’t all that surprised when she turned from where she stood in her yard to see a baby threaded around her hip, round as a gourd.

“You are welcome, memsahib. Come.”

I approached her and then reached to touch the silky plait of the child on her hip, then the sheen of his shoulder. Jebbta had grown into a proper woman, with a woman’s burdens. That was the way things worked in the Kip village. Nothing had changed there.

“Is this your only child, Jebbta?”

“The youngest. And your children, memsahib?”

“I have none.”

“Are you not married?”

“No. Not any longer.”

She tipped her head back and forth as if to say she understood, but she was only being polite. At the outdoor hearth fire, yellow flames licked up the sides of a black pot, the smells of the bubbling grain inside making me feel hungry in a way I’d forgotten. “I’ve come for
arap
Ruta, Jebbta. Is he nearby?”

“No, memsahib, he hunts with the others.”

“Oh, yes. Will you tell him I was here and that I asked for him?”

“Yes. He will be sorry to have missed such a friend.”

Molo was eighteen miles north and west from Njoro, and stood on a plateau at the top of the Mau Escarpment, ten thousand feet nearer the stars. The elevation made it dramatically different from home. Icy streams and rivulets ran through dense bracken; woolly sheep grazed on low, misted hillsides. I passed farms, but they were mostly pyrethrum crops, miles and miles of the white chrysanthemums that flourished in the highlands, their dried heads used as insecticide when ground into powder. They were striking now, the bushes snowy and rounded as drifts. It
did
snow in the highlands, and I wondered if I was ready for that.

The small village was a clustering of battered wooden houses and shops, tin roofs and thatched ones, cold hammered streets. It was a harder place than Njoro or Nakuru or Gilgil, and I saw instantly that it would be more difficult to love. At the first café I came to, I tethered Pegasus and went in to enquire about Westerland. With a very few questions, I learned what I needed to know, and more, too—that the neighbouring estate, Inglewood Farm, was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Carsdale-Luck, the stodgy couple I’d met at Karen’s shooting party the year before. I hadn’t developed any relationship with either of them in the handful of days we were thrown together, but as I made my way towards Westerland, I tried to think how I might stitch the two opportunities together. The scheme would take some fast talking, but I did have wins behind me. I knew my trade and could prove it; I would only need time and a little faith.

Cockie’s cousin Gerry turned out to be a warm and level-headed fellow. Cockie had already sung my praises in a long letter, and he was ready to let me have a try with a two-year-old bay stud, the Baron, which he owned along with a silent partner, Tom Campbell Black. The Baron had yet to find his footing, but he had fire and plenty of guts, too. I knew I could do something with him and also with Wrack, a yearling stud sired by Camciscan, the star of my father’s breeding roster from days long past. Wrack belonged to the Carsdale-Lucks, who had also agreed to take a chance on me. They had given me a nimble filly, too, Melton Pie, and a hut on their property and the use of one of their houseboys as a groom.

“With Camciscan’s blood, Wrack is sure to have some winning in him,” I promised the couple when they came to watch us work. George Carsdale-Luck smoked spiced cigars that made the paddock around him smell like cloves and Christmas. His wife, Viola, was forever perspiring even in Molo’s chill, with always-damp collars and a host of paper fans. She stood at the edge of the track as I ran Wrack a mile and a quarter at half speed, and then said, as I paraded him by, “I haven’t seen many women in this line of work. Aren’t you afraid it will coarsen you?”

“No. I never think of that.”

There was more than a whiff of Emma Orchardson in Viola. If I let her, I thought, she might go on to suggest I wear a hat and gloves, but my rough edges weren’t going to matter a whit once Wrack hit a win and good money. I had only a few short months—just until July to get him ready for the Produce Stakes, which would be run in Nairobi. Until then, I would work hard and not let myself get distracted.

Throwing myself into training was easy to do in Molo. I rose before dawn, toiled all day, and fell into bed exhausted. Only sometimes very late at night did I let myself think about what might be happening at the Muthaiga Club, what joke Berkeley might be telling, with what in his glass, what the women wore dancing or at tea, and if anyone ever mentioned my name, even in passing. If it was a very long night, and sleep didn’t come at all, I would let every guard down and think of Denys. Perhaps he was sloped in one of Karen’s low leather chairs by the millstone table, reading Walt Whitman and listening to some new recording on the gramophone. Or in his storybook cottage at the Muthaiga, sipping at nice scotch, or off in the Congo, or in Masai country after ivory or kudu or lion, and looking up, just then, at the same tangle of stars I could see from my windows.

How close people could be to us when they had gone as far away as possible, to the edges of the map. How unforgettable.