Circling the Sun (30 page)

T
rue to his word, over the next few months Mansfield wore down my doubts and my defences little by little. The farm was one thing—I had always longed for a way to replace Green Hills in my mind and heart after all—but soon I realized he was set on marrying me.

“My divorce from Jock has only just come through. You can’t really think I’m mad enough to try matrimony again?”

“Everything will be different,” he assured me. “
We’re
different.”

Mansfield did seem to be a rare sort of man. He was nothing like Jock or Frank or Boy Long, and also listened to every tale about my thorny past without batting an eyelash. I’d decided not to keep a single thing from him—not even about Denys and Karen. I couldn’t if our relationship was going to have a prayer. That much I’d learned, and painfully.

“Are you still in love with Denys?” he had wanted to know.

“He chose Karen. There’s nothing I can do to change that.” I watched a small cloud pass over Mansfield’s expression and his mood. “Are you sure you want to get involved with me? My heart’s always been restless, and I can’t promise I’ll be good at any of the dull stuff, the cooking and whatnot.”

“I could have guessed that part.” He smiled. “I’m looking for a companion as much as a lover. Life has been awfully lonely at times. Tell me, do you like me, Beryl?”

“I do. Honestly. I like you so much.”

“I like you, too. And that’s where we’ll begin.”

We married four months after Ginger introduced us, in September of 1927. My bouquet was a cluster of lilies and white carnations, which Karen helped select as a gift, but the choice of my dress was mine—a slim crêpe de chine with sleeves that clung to my arms and a long silver fringe that lay over the skirt like a net of stars. I’d cut my hair for the day in a tightly cropped shingle I had done on impulse, liking immediately how free and cool my neck felt without the weight.

D stood in for my father to give me away and cried doing it, dabbing at his face with damp sleeves. Afterwards there was a fine lunch at the Muthaiga, and through it all I tried not to linger overlong on thoughts of Denys. He was off in Tsavo, then Uganda. I had cabled him with an invitation and got no response. I wanted to believe it was jealousy that kept him silent and absent, but it was just as likely that my news hadn’t reached him at all.

I put my horses on the ease list, said goodbye to Ruta, and we then left for several months’ honeymoon in Europe. In Rome we stayed near the Spanish Steps, at the Hassler Hotel, which looked like a nineteenth-century palace to me. Our bed was enormous and draped with gold velvet. The bathtub was Italian marble. The parquet floors had been polished to shine like mirrors. I couldn’t stop wanting to pinch myself to see if it was all some sort of dream.

“The George the Fifth in Paris is even finer,” Mansfield said. When we were there, and I stood gaping at our private view of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées, he said I should wait until I’d seen Claridge’s in London. He was right about that, too. We arrived in Mansfield’s Rolls-Royce, a car beautiful enough to get all the doormen hopping. The attention and the gleaming marble, the vases full of flowers and the draping silk, helped to dispel the ghost of my previous trip to London and how knocked sideways I’d been. This wasn’t that. Whenever I started to drift and the past came back too clearly, I watched the trail of our Louis Vuitton trunks.

We had escargot in Paris. Choucroute garnie with sprigs of fresh rosemary. Spaghetti with mussels and black squid ink in Rome. Even better than the meals were the cultural highlights in every city: the opera, the architecture, the views, and the museums. And with every new sight or incomparable view, when I thought,
Denys should be here,
I tried to ignore that voice. It was disloyal, for a start, and also impossible. Denys had made his choice and I’d made mine—and Mansfield was a good man. I respected and admired him through and through, and if the love I felt for him wasn’t exactly the kind that could send me over the top of a mountain on horseback in the middle of the night, it was quietly solid. He stayed by my side. He held my hand and kissed me over and over, saying, “I’m so happy we’ve found each other. I can hardly believe it’s real.”

Mansfield had always been close to his mother, a relationship I was trying to understand, but how could I really? He was keen for her to like me, and thought it important that we get off on the right foot.

“She’ll have certain expectations of what you’re supposed to be,” he told me.

“What do you mean?”

“Africa is Africa. When we’ve finished here we can hide away and behave however we like. But Mother and her friends aren’t very advanced in their views.”

I thought he was speaking of politics until we arrived at Elizabeth Arden. He’d booked me in for a full day of beautification and dropped me at the red door before I had time to protest. He took himself to Bond Street, and then to Harrods, while I was prodded and primped to within an inch of my life. My brows were plucked bare and drawn on with kohl. My upper lip and legs were waxed and buffed and my lips stained the deepest red I’d ever seen.

“How is this meant to please your mother?” I asked him at the end of the process. I felt naked with so much paint on. I wanted to hide behind my hands.

“It’s perfect. You’re exquisite. She won’t be able to resist you, don’t you see?”

“I’m worried…not that she won’t like me, but that it matters so much to you. The whole scenario.”

“Everything’s going to be fine,” he assured me. “You’ll see.”

Off we went to Swiftsden, the manor house where Mansfield’s mother lived with her second husband, Colonel O’Hea. He was fifteen years younger than she, and neither of the Markham boys had much patience with him. I found him plump and silent, whereas Mrs. O’Hea was plump and full of opinions about everything. When I tried to shake her hand, she accepted only the tips of my fingers.

“Enchantée,”
she murmured—though she didn’t seem remotely enchanted—and settled herself in the best chair to lecture me on the accomplishments of her prizewinning hounds.

At that first tea, I couldn’t stop imagining how Mansfield’s mother would have reacted to me as I was the day I turned up at Cockie’s door with no coat at all, my hands chapped and blue, and my toes nearly frozen off. In Paris and then Milan, Mansfield had taken me to the best couturiers. I had all the right clothes now. Silk stockings, a fur stole, a diamond bracelet that slid up and down my arm like Bishon Singh’s long-ago
kara.
Mansfield had been so generous. I thought he wanted to buy me beautiful things
because
they were beautiful, but now that I’d run the gauntlet of Elizabeth Arden and stood in his mother’s jewel box of a parlour, I had to wonder if every gift had in fact been for her.

“She can hardly think I’m a society type,” I told him when we were alone in our room. He sat on the edge of the burnished-looking silk bedspread, while at a long vanity table I swatted roughly at the back of my shingle with a silver-handled brush. “What’s the point of all this fuss? My poor eyebrows will never grow back.”

“Don’t be cross, darling. It’s only for a short while, and then we’ll wear our old clothes again and have a lovely new life.”

“I feel like an impostor.”

“But you’re not, don’t you see? This isn’t dressing-up. You
are
elegant under everything.”

“And what if I wore my slacks? And behaved like myself? Would she throw me out?”

“Please be patient, Beryl. Mother isn’t modern like you.”

I didn’t want to quarrel, so I told Mansfield I would try. But in the end, the only way we could survive our time at Swiftsden was to divide and conquer. Mansfield looked after his mother, and the chauffeur looked after me. I was driven to London for long excursions, and taken round all the tourists’ haunts: London Bridge and Westminster Abbey and Big Ben. I saw the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, the red-suited sentries filing in and out as if they had cogs and wheels. Afterwards, I went to the cinema to see
The Battle of the Somme,
the projector and illusion of life transfixing me the way so much about London did—electric lights and electric kettles, music streaming out onto Oxford Street from a Magnavox loudspeaker. But the film’s images of war were terrible. Men crouched in ditches, cowering in pain and terror that made me think of
arap
Maina, hoping to God he hadn’t died that way. I missed Ruta, and wished he could have been there beside me in the dark theatre, though undoubtedly he would have been just as waylaid by it all, or even more so.

A few days later, Mansfield left his mother’s side long enough to take me to Newmarket to look at a stallion. Mansfield thought we might want some new blood for our fresh start.

“I want us to be true partners in this,” he said. “We’ll find land wherever you like, and stock our stables with the finest horses we can find. You’ll show me everything. I want to learn it all and to be a part of the big decisions.”

I was relieved to hear it. Our shared dream of a horse farm had cemented us from the beginning—but at Swiftsden, under his mother’s imperious gaze, I’d begun to have my doubts. Her opinion seemed to matter far too much to him there. The spine went right out of him when she was around, almost as if she were a grand puppeteer, and he made only of cloth and string. But in Newmarket, he squeezed my hand hard as we moved towards the stables. Of course he wanted a new life in Kenya just as much as I wanted Green Hills back. He meant to be his own man, to claim new territory, and to do it all with me by his side. Until that day, I would have to trust him and myself, too.

Messenger Boy was a towering red roan with a flaxen tail and mane, and a bright kind of fire whipping through him. He was the biggest stallion I’d ever seen and one of the most beautiful. His dame, Fifinella, was a derby and steeplechase winner; his father, Hurry On, was unbeaten, and one of the greatest sires of racehorses in the world. But though Mansfield and I were thrilled by him instantly, his trainer, Fred Darling, had a sobering story to tell.

“He’s not going to make anything easy for you,” Fred said. “I can’t lie about that.”

The full truth was he’d put Fred in hospital once. Not long after that, he’d killed a groom, trapping him in the stable and attacking him with his powerful hoofs and teeth. It was murder, pure and simple. If Messenger Boy had been a man, he would have got the chop for it; as it was, he’d been banned from racing in England. Kenya could give him a second chance, though.

“Can he be tamed?” Mansfield wanted to know.

“That’s hard to say. I wouldn’t do it.”

“I want a go at him,” I said, watching the way the sun glinted flame red through the stud’s flared nostrils.

“You’re not afraid?” Mansfield asked, reaching for my hand.

“I am. But we can’t leave him here to be chained up like a dog.” For some reason, Messenger Boy made me think of Paddy, of the difficult line between wild, natural things and the civilized world. “He’s still got something good in him. Anyone can see that.”

Mansfield’s hand clenched mine. I knew he was rattled by what we’d learned. “Will he win derbies?”

“If Ruta were here, he would say
His legs are powerful as a leopard’s
or
His heart is like a wildebeest’s,
” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

“All right then, how much for leopard legs?” Mansfield said to Darling, drawing out his chequebook.

D
enys and Mansfield had never met. When we drove out to Mbogani on a bright, dry afternoon, just after we’d returned from England, I was a little out of breath thinking about how they might size each other up. We’d brought back the new buttercup-yellow Rolls-Royce. My dress was from Worth, my rope of pearls from Asprey. Perversely, I wanted both Denys and Karen to see all of it—and me—to full advantage. I wasn’t a waif any longer, or a child. But when we arrived only Karen’s majordomo, Farah, was on hand.

“They are out walking,
msabu,
” he said cordially. “Up to Lamwia, to the site of their graves.”

“They’re still very much alive,” I said to Mansfield, when he gave me a curious look. “They’re just overly romantic that way.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “I love romance.” He opened the rear door, and the three dogs we’d been travelling with rolled out onto the lawn, a borzoi, a pretty red setter, and a young blue deerhound that we’d brought back as a gift for Karen. The dogs leaped and yelped, happy to be free, while I couldn’t stop looking up into the hills, wondering if Karen and Denys could see us, and when they’d come.

“You look well, Beryl,” Denys said later on the veranda. My dress had been crushed from sitting by then, and I was feeling tired and a little nervous at seeing him. He kissed me quickly. “Congratulations.”

Mansfield was a full head shorter, but so had Berkeley been. I found myself hoping that Denys saw what I did in Mansfield, and also what Mansfield saw in me.

“We went to the National Gallery,” I said, feeling myself flush crimson, “and the Bolshoi Ballet in Rome.” I was bursting to tell him all we’d done and how I was changed.

“How marvellous,” he said several times, evenly, as I talked and talked. “Good for you both,” but there was no real feeling behind his words. He seemed politely indifferent to everything.

Karen was clearly taken with her new hound, which had rich grey eyes and a ruff of wiry whiskers around her long nose. “She’s delicious. You were a dear to think of me, especially since I’ve been lonely without Minerva.” Apparently, just the month before, the pretty house owl had flown into the wooden blinds and got tangled in the cords and strangled to death. “We shouldn’t care so much about animals,” she said. “It’s dangerous.”

“I can tell you the animals aren’t overconcerned about us,” Denys said, settling back into his chair.

“Of course they are,” she countered, reaching for the hound’s damp soft muzzle. “Minerva was awfully fond of me, and so are my dogs.”

“We ring the dinner gong and they run to us. That’s common sense, not love. Not loyalty, either.”

“He’s in one of his black moods,” she explained to us, as if he weren’t there.

“Where are you off to next?” I asked Denys, dying to change the subject.

“To Rejaf. I’m taking some clients down the Nile.”

“How exotic,” Mansfield said, drawing on his cigar. “It sounds like a Hollywood film.”

“The mosquitoes would tell you otherwise.”

“I’ve always wanted to see the Nile,” I said.

“It’s hardly a moving target,” he said, and then got up to see about something inside the house.

Karen raised her eyebrows at me.
Black mood,
her look said, but I felt slapped. I’d played out this encounter dozens of times on the ship back to Kenya, wondering how it would feel to see Denys again now that my situation had changed. I was married, and altered in other ways, too. I very much meant to be happy and wanted him to realize that—but he was behaving so oddly and being cold to everyone. Nothing was going as planned.

“You’re going to buy land then?” Karen asked us. Her voice sounded strained.

“Yes, perhaps up near Elburgon.”

“So far up-country?”

“The price is right, and there’s a beautiful garden. Mansfield loves a good garden.”

“That I do.” He smiled and got up to pour brandy for us from a crystal decanter, looking at home with Karen’s lovely things. “I’ll just go and see about Denys. He probably needs a drink.”

“You’re well situated now, aren’t you?” Karen said when he’d gone. I could feel something new in her gaze, maybe an unspoken question about whether my marriage to Mansfield was the real article or a sham. Whatever it meant, it made me uncomfortable. “You look awfully well.”

“It’s the pearls,” I said.

“You’ve worn pearls before.”

She meant when I’d been with Frank Greswolde, not that she would ever have had the bad taste to mention it. But surely she could see that Mansfield wasn’t just any man ready to pay my way. He wasn’t a
sponsor
—Cockie’s terrible word—but my husband.

The dog whimpered in a dream at Karen’s feet, flinching and twitching her paws. “We strike such dark bargains for love, don’t we?”

Do we?
I thought as Karen settled the hound with one hand, like a mother and her babe. But I didn’t answer her.