Circling the Sun (33 page)

T
he safari was set to depart, and Karen was throwing a royal dinner Denys had helped her secure—no doubt a peacekeeping concession. She couldn’t go to Government House because of social protocol, but the princes could very well come to her. She made it worth their while, too, serving an incomparable meal with so many courses and small delicacies I quickly lost count. There was ham poached in champagne with tiny jewel-like strawberries and tart, plump pomegranate seeds, a mushroom croustade with truffles and cream. When Karen’s cook, Kamante, came in bearing the dessert, a fat and perfectly browned rum baba, I thought he might float away with pride.

I watched Karen closely, too, certain she must be feeling this evening as one of her finest moments, but under the powder and jet-black kohl, her eyes were lined and exhausted looking. The safari plan had evolved, and Blix was now going along, too, as Denys’s right-hand man. One safari had turned into several, beginning with a foray into Uganda, with other later trips into Tanganyika—and Cockie had been invited to go along as Blix’s wife, and also safari hostess, making sure the water was hot for baths at the end of the day, and that Dr. Turvy had wired in prescriptions for plenty of gin. Karen was left in the lurch, and she was livid about it, I soon learned.

The culmination of the evening was a Kikuyu
ngoma,
the largest of these I had ever seen. Several thousand dancers gathered from tribes all over the area, their chiefs joining forces to give the princes a picture they’d never forget. The central bonfire licked up at the sky. Several smaller blazes encircled it, like brilliant spokes around a gleaming hub. The drum music rose and fell in great rippling crescendos, while male and female dancers flung themselves rhythmically in moves too ancient and complex ever to chart.

I watched it all remembering the
ngomas
of my childhood, when Kibii and I would sneak out together until dawn, transfixed and also confused by the sensual responses the dancers awoke in us, feelings we didn’t yet have names for. I had changed many times since those days, my skin shed again and again. I would still know Lakwet if she crept out of the shadows to stand in the firelight, but would she recognize me?

On her veranda, Karen had hung two blazing beacons, ships’ lanterns that she’d once brought back from Denmark for Berkeley, and which had been returned to her after his death. Watching the
ngoma
a distance away, Denys stood under one of these, his weight on one foot and his other foot cocked, his shoulder resting on a blue fieldstone pillar. Mansfield stood near the other—the two of them arranged as symmetrically as doorways into two different worlds. I couldn’t help but be struck by the thought that fate might have lined things up differently. In some other time, or on another plane, Denys might have been my husband, and this child been his child. I’d have felt differently about everything then, happy and excited about the future instead of worried and sad. But here and now, the die was cast. Even, God help me, if some hidden part of me was still waiting for Denys to love me, to turn from Karen and claim me for his own, what did that matter? It wasn’t to be.

I looked away from both men and back towards the fire, where the flames rose, copper and gold, blaze blue and white, the sparks thrown up and raining down again like the ashes of fallen stars.

A few days later, I found myself rapping at the door of Ruta and Kimaru’s hut, after the day’s work was done. Their kitchen smelled of spices and stewed meat. Asis was now four years old, with his father’s high square forehead and his confidence, too. He liked to stand on the beaten-earth floor by the table and leap as high into the air as he possibly could, looking so like Kibii it could stop my heart.

“He will be an excellent
moran,
don’t you think?” Kimaru asked.

“He’ll be perfect,” I agreed, and then finally confessed to Ruta that I would soon have a child, too.

“Yes, Beru,” he said lightly. Of course he already knew. It had been ridiculous of me to think he hadn’t. “And our sons will play together as we did, will they not?”

“They will,” I agreed. “Maybe they’ll even hunt. We both remember how…I do.”

“A
moran
never forgets,” he replied.

“You’re my family, Ruta. You and Asis and Kimaru, too. I hope you know that.”

He nodded, his eyes rich and black. I had the feeling that if I looked deeply enough into them I would see all the years of our childhood played out one marvellous day at a time. And in that moment, I felt the faintest stirrings of hope about this baby. None of it would be easy, but if Ruta was here to remind me of who I really was, it might be all right. I would still have to weather England and Mansfield’s mother without him—but come the summer we’d bring the baby home. Melela would be my son’s Green Hills. If I thought of it that way, the future wasn’t nearly so terrifying.

“What does your father say?” Ruta asked.

“He doesn’t know yet.”

“Ah,” he said, and then repeated a Swahili phrase he’d challenged me with years before,
“A new thing is good, though it be a sore place.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said, and left him to his dinner.

C
onfinement
is one of those funny old-fashioned words that say so much more than they mean to. I had mine in Swiftsden with Mansfield’s mother, who made everything easy for me in one way, and a personalized piece of hell in another. I slept in a beautiful room and had a lady’s maid, and didn’t lift a finger, even to pour my own tea. It was obvious she meant to lavish this child with everything befitting a Markham. I wasn’t really a Markham myself, and she made that expressly clear, all without saying a word.

I sailed from Mombasa alone, leaving Ruta and my father in charge of the horses. Mansfield joined me in January, and was there for the birth, on 25 February 1929, a day so bitterly cold the pipes clanged and threatened to burst in the nursing home in Eaton Square. The windows to the street had glazed over, blanketing out the world, and I found myself fixing on that opaque smear as I bore down. I had been given laughing gas and some sort of sedative. Both made me shake and believe I might snap into pieces. Clutching, strangling pains came in rhythms I had no control over. My knees shook. My hands quivered on the damp sheets.

Hours later, with a final sickening push, Gervase fell out of my body. I craned to see him, and won only the briefest glimpse of his puckered face, the tiny chest slick with blood, before the doctors took him away. I was still lurching in the grip of the drugs. I had no idea what was happening and could only lie there, prodded by the nurses to hold still.

No one was telling me anything—not why they’d taken my baby or if he was even alive. I struggled with the nurses, and then slapped one, and finally they sedated me. When I came to, Mansfield was in my room looking waxen and drawn. The baby wasn’t right, he began to explain. He was dangerously small and he was missing things that should be there. The anus hadn’t ever formed, nor the rectum.

“What?” I still felt thick and sedated. “How?”

“The doctors say it happens sometimes.” He’d been biting at his lip again. I could see a pale lilac-coloured bruise blooming. “But what if the riding did it, Beryl?”

“Could it have? Is that what you think?”

“Mother’s sure it couldn’t have helped things.”

“Oh.” His words thudded at the back of my skull. “What can they do for him?”

“There’s surgery. If he’s strong enough, there might be several, actually. But he’s not strong now. He’s so small. His breathing isn’t good. They’re saying we should prepare for the worst.”

When Mansfield left my room, I gathered the sheets and blankets around me, but couldn’t begin to feel warm. Our son might die. The very thought had me shaking again—lost and sick and utterly helpless.

In my Lakwet days, I was at the Kip
shamba
once when a maimed child was born. It had a small stump where one of the legs should have been, the skin pink and raw, puzzle-stitched. No one tried to shield any of this tragedy from Kibii or me. The child would either live or it wouldn’t—it was up to their god. That night the mother placed the babe just outside the door to her hut and slept, as the rest of the tribe did, without answering its cries. The theory went that if the oxen didn’t trample it, the child was meant to live. But that night, a predator came and took it away—probably a leopard or hyena. That was thought to be the god’s will, too.

Would Gervase make it through his surgery, or even his first night? Was some god going to punish me by taking him—or did everything that happened to us on earth come down to a blind roll of clicking dice, without any more reason or plan than chance? I wasn’t sure what I believed and had never learned to pray. I didn’t know how to surrender to fate, either—so I hummed an old African song under my breath as I waited, one full of thin courage
…Kali kama Simba, sisi Askari wote ni hodari.
Fierce like the lion are we, soldiers all are brave.

A
stonishingly, Gervase survived his first precarious days of life. The doctors attached a strange sort of bag to his belly, and fed him through tiny snaking tubes in his nose. He gained an ounce, and then lost two. He came down with jaundice, and they put him under bright lamps. For the most part, we were kept from him because he couldn’t be exposed to even the faintest risk of germs. I saw him only twice as I recuperated in the nursing home, and both times I felt punched in the heart. He was so frail and defenceless—like a broken bird.

On the day before Gervase’s surgery, Mansfield came to my room looking pale and defeated. “I know it’s too soon to be talking about all of this, but if he makes it, I want Gervase to go to Swiftsden for his recovery. Mother can make sure he gets the very best care.”

“Of course, if the doctors approve it.” For myself, I hated Swiftsden, but Gervase came first.

“And what will you do?” he went on. “When you’re released from the hospital?”

“What do you mean? I want to be where Gervase is, obviously.”

“I assumed you’d want to go back home.”

“One day, yes. When we can all go together. What is this about, Mansfield?”

He turned and went to the window, pacing before it, his feet stitching the dark floorboards. The weather was still terrible, and all the panes were rimed over with greenish-looking ice that gave Mansfield’s skin a ghostly cast. He looked different to me now that we’d come to England—not just more pallid, but weaker in spirit, too—almost as if he were reverting to his boyhood self, that invalid who’d spent most of his youth in bed, poring over the Latin names of flowers.

“I’m not sure I’ll go back to Kenya,” he said. “It seems more and more clear…how different we are. I feel a little foolish about it.”

“Foolish to marry me? Why are you saying this now? We’ve made a life together. Do you mean to throw it away?”

“I wanted a new chance; I did. But maybe I was just playing a role. Or you were.”

I felt the room lurch. “I don’t understand. The farm is my whole life, and we have Gervase now. We’re bound to him.”

“I know that,” he said wearily. Then he went to talk to the doctor while everything we’d said—and hadn’t—hung in the room like a cold, crimped fog.

I could scarcely catch up. Mansfield and I had been at odds sometimes, and had never been an ideal match—but we’d wanted the same things and had been friends. Now any affection seemed to have dissolved as quickly as the sun had. It was a different season here, in more ways than one.

While I was still fretting over all of this, I heard a flurry of footsteps outside the door. I assumed Mansfield had returned with news from the doctor, but it was Prince Harry who’d come.

“You’re supposed to be on safari,” I said, taking in the shock of him. His fine grey suit looked as if it had been drawn onto his body. He didn’t belong in a nursing home on Gerald Road.

“Everything was postponed. I imagine you’ve been too caught up here to know, but my father developed a lung infection. It was a do-or-die situation, but he’s recovered. What of you? I didn’t even know you were expecting, and then there you were in
The
Times.
One son born to one Markham, Beryl, at Gerald Road. You’re a wily one.”

“I wasn’t ready for anyone to know. Now the baby’s in trouble, too.” I felt my face crumpling and wondered if I were about to cry in front of royalty. Would that appear in
The
Times,
too?

“I’m sorry. I heard. What can I do?”

“If you really want to help, you can make sure the surgeon is the very best. You must know who’s good around here, and who can be trusted. He’s still so small. Did you see him?”

Harry shook his head just as two nurses came in and pretended to busy themselves with linens. Obviously they were addled by having royalty in their midst and wanted a closer view.

“I’m happy to look into the surgeon,” he said, ignoring them. “And please don’t hesitate to ring me if you need anything else, anything at all.”

“Thank you. I’m so worried.”

“Of course you are.” He reached for my hand and squeezed it, and then leaned over and pressed his lips to the back of my wrist. It was a harmless gesture, meant only to show concern, but the nurses turned and gaped. Their square caps tipped towards us like flowers, or like megaphones.