Circling the Sun (10 page)

W
e were nearly four months in Bombay, and when we returned, British East Africa didn’t exist any more. The details of the armistice had finally been settled, and the protectorate dissolved. We were Kenya now, after our tallest mountain—a proper colony, with the graveyards to prove it. Africans and white settlers had died in the tens of thousands during wartime. Drought had stolen thousands more, and so had the Spanish flu. Disease tore through towns and villages taking the thinnest and smallest, children and young men, and new wives like me. Demobilized farmers and herdsmen came home in despair, not knowing how they might begin again.

I felt much the same way. At Green Hills, I expected to find my father and Emma packed and on the verge of departure. That had been part of my plan—to spend the worst of the dismantlement in Bombay—but the farm hadn’t even been sold yet. My father hadn’t made a move.

“I’m going to eke things out here as long as possible,” he tried to explain. “If I can win a few more races, I might draw better buyers.”

“Oh,” I said, while inside my chest, everything shifted and slid. I had run headlong into marrying Jock, believing there wasn’t any other way—but now it was clear I would have had another full year to think it all through. A year to stay at home and ease into the idea, getting to know Jock better, or perhaps—just perhaps—for some other thing or choice to show itself. I felt ill even thinking about it. Why hadn’t I waited?

“You and Jock want to come for dinner?” my father asked lightly, but this too seemed like a slap. I would never be more than an invited guest now. My home was elsewhere.

The next few months were among the hardest of my life. Jock’s farm had nearly the same views as Green Hills, and the same feel to the air—but I couldn’t quite convince myself I belonged there.

The sun went down early in our valley—never a moment after 6:00 p.m.—and by the time it set, every night, no matter what else was happening, Jock had washed and was inside at our bar cart, doctoring a whisky. When we were still in Bombay, I told myself his drinking was a family affair that belonged to those nights, like the jackdaws and the tang of tamarind, but once we were home Jock kept up the same pace on his own. After dinner was cleared away, he’d smoke and pour a second. There was something tender and almost loving in the way he cradled the glass, as if it were his oldest friend, the thing that would always get him through—but through what exactly?

I rarely knew what Jock was thinking. He worked hard, as hard as my father ever had, but the greater part of him was turned in on himself, as if there were a fixed screen just behind his eyes and no way to get through it. My father hadn’t exactly been emotional. It was possible that all men were difficult to read, but I had to live with Jock through every long evening, and the silence was often deadly. And if I tried to talk to him or, God forbid, ask him to take it easy on the whisky, he’d lash out.

“Oh, sod off, Beryl. It’s all easy for you, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

But he waved me off, turning away.

“If there are pressures…,” I said quietly, guessing my way towards him.

“What would you know about it?”

“I wouldn’t. I don’t.” I waited for him to fill in the gaps, but he didn’t seem to know how. I certainly didn’t, either. I kept wishing Lady D were still here to give me encouragement or advice—or even Dos elbowing me in the ribs and saying,
Go on then, you have to
talk
to him. Try harder.
Left to my own devices, I’d poke the fire or find a book, or turn to the training ledger, going over the next day’s lists. I buried my head in work and tried not to give my doubts any air—as if that would silence them. But it wasn’t just Jock I doubted. There was furniture all around us. There were accounts to keep and meals to prepare, and beds to make and kisses to be had.
This is marriage,
I kept telling myself. People everywhere did this every day. Why, then, did it feel so strange and wrong for me?

Some nights I would try to close the distance and make love to Jock. In our room under the mosquito netting, I would slip my leg over his broad hip and search out his mouth in the dark. His tongue was warm and limp, whisky flavoured. I pushed on anyway, manoeuvring my way deeper into the kiss, straddling his waist while he kept his eyes closed. I kissed them and pushed up his cotton shirt with my hands, moving lower, my lips brushing the thick hair on his chest, circling his navel. I breathed along his belly, and he released a small groan. His skin was salty and warm, and he was responding to my kisses a little at a time. I hovered over the top of him, cupping him gently with my hand, and then, hardly daring to breathe, lowered myself onto him. But it was too late. Before I had even begun to move, he softened inside me. I tried to kiss him, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. Finally, I pulled down my nightgown and lay beside him, humiliated. He must have been humiliated, too, but he wouldn’t let me in.

“I’m sorry I’m no good, Beryl,” he said. “I’ve just got too much on my mind.”

“What? Tell me.”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Please, Jock. I really do want to know.”

“Running this place is a huge burden, you realize. If we fail, it will be my fault.” He let loose a sigh. “I’m trying my damnedest.”

“I am, too.”

“Well then, that’s all we can do, isn’t it?” He kissed me chastely with dry lips. “Good night, sweetheart.”

“Good night.”

I tried to fall asleep then, but as he breathed deeply, already off in a separate world, I was filled with a childish longing for my bed at Green Hills. I wanted to be in my old hut with the paraffin-box furniture and the shadows I knew by heart. I wanted time to reverse and leave me in a place I recognized. I wanted to go home.

“I wish I knew what to do about Jock,” I told Dos in town a few months later. She was busy with school and harried, but I’d coaxed her into meeting me at the Norfolk for tea and sandwiches. “I thought sex would be the easy part.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about it. There aren’t any boys at Miss Seccombe’s. The ones I meet at dances push and prod, but it doesn’t really go anywhere.”

“Nothing does with us, either; that’s what I mean. And we never talk about it. I feel so in the dark about everything.”

“Does he not like to do it then?”

“How should I know?” I watched Dos divide the crusts of her sandwich away from the good bits—pale butter and chopped ham—thinking how lucky she was to have only exams to worry about. “Don’t you sometimes wish we were still thirteen?”

“God, no.” She pulled a face. “You don’t, either.”

“It was so much simpler, though.” I sighed. “Jock has lived twice as long as I have, and he’s fought in a war. He should know things and take charge, shouldn’t he?” I sighed again, feeling exasperated. “It’s what men
do.
”

“I’m hardly an expert.” She shrugged. “And I don’t really know Jock.”

“Come stay with us for a while,” I urged. “I need someone on my side, and it could be fun, too. Like the old days.”

“I’ve got exams, remember? And when they’re done, I’m off to Dublin to stay with my mum’s family for a year. I’ve told you all about it.”

“But you
can’t
go away. You’re my only friend.”

“Oh, Burl. Maybe things aren’t as bad as they seem.” But she didn’t get any further. I surprised us both by bursting into tears.

Over the months that followed, though I wasn’t involved any more, I watched my father win the Naval and Military Cup, the War Memorial Cup, the Myberg-Hiddell, and the prestigious East African Standard Gold—and yet very few good buyers came sniffing around. News had already begun to leak out that Green Hills had gone belly-up. It didn’t seem to matter that my father had been a pioneer in the colony, with a gold-flocked reputation; the same newspapers that had once touted his victories were full of gossip about the bankruptcy. Several editors speculated about the causes, and the
Nairobi Leader
even published a jeering little poem:

They speak of a trainer named Clutterbuck

Who enjoyed the most absolute an’ utter luck,

Now he’s turning his tables,

And selling his stables,

In fact he is putting his shutter up.

My father seemed to take it on the chin or pretended to, but I was mortified to see our failings at Green Hills so publicly exposed. I wanted everyone to remember what was marvellous about our farm, how it had been built up from nothing at all, how happy we’d been there. But after sixteen years of impossibly hard work and high standards, now all anyone wanted to talk about was its failure. Green Hills had become a dark joke, and my father a cautionary tale, someone to pity.

The auction process dragged on for several gruelling months. Buyers came, haggling over the price of wheelbarrows and pitchforks and riding tack. Like a puzzle box emptied out on the floor and picked over by strangers, the outbuildings were dismantled piece by piece and stick by stick—the groom’s cottage, the stables, and the house. The horses were sold off at alarming bargain prices that made my stomach twist—all but sixteen that Jock and I were to hold on to until the right price could be fetched, and Pegasus, of course.

“You can’t let Cam go for less than five hundred pounds,” my father reminded me the day he left. I had travelled as far as Nairobi to see him off. At the railway station, livestock was being loaded and unloaded with commotion and clouds of red dust.
Totos
dragged or carried trunks and boxes twice their size. One wrestled with a swooping yellowed ivory tusk as if he were dancing with it, while Emma fussed with her hat.

After years of pelting me with advice and restrictions, Emma had nothing left to say now. Nor did I. I could barely remember why I had fought her so much. She seemed just as lost as I was. Squeezing my hand once, she hurried up the three sooty steps to the carriage, and that was that.

“Let us know if you need anything,” my father said. His hands worked over the brim of his hat, turning and turning it.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine,” I said, though I wasn’t at all sure that was true.

“One day you might want to train for other owners, maybe even for Delamere. You’ve got the right base and you’ve the instincts.”

“Get my trainer’s licence, you mean? Has a woman done that?”

“Maybe not. But there aren’t any rules against it.”

“I could try…. ” I let the words trail away.

“Take care of yourself and work hard.”

“I will, Daddy.”

Neither one of us had ever been good at voicing our feelings. I told him I would miss him, and then watched him board his train, the back of his shoulders defiantly straight under his jacket. His departure had been months and months in coming, and still I wasn’t nearly ready. Did he know how much I loved him? How sick and raw I felt to have lost all we’d shared?

A red-jacketed porter hurried by me with a heavy steamer trunk, and I felt a rushing up of memory. At four, I had stared at the shrinking train that carried my mother away, black smoke rising, distance between us stretching by the moment. Lakwet had learned how to bear her loss—how to live in the world her leaving had changed, and find good things, and run hard, and grow stronger. Where was that fierce girl now? I didn’t feel any whisper of her stirring in me. I also had no way of knowing how much I was yet supposed to weather—when my father might return, or even
if
he would.

The soot-black engine groaned in readiness. A sharp whistle pealed, and my heart turned over sickeningly. Finally, I had no choice but to walk away.

Almost as soon as I arrived back at Njoro, it began to rain for the first time in over a year. The sky went black, splitting open with a deluge that didn’t want to stop. Five inches fell in two days, and when the storm had finally cleared, and our long drought had ended, the land went green again. Flowers sprang across the plains in every colour you could think of. The air was thick with jasmine and coffee blossoms, juniper berries, and eucalyptus. Kenya had only been sleeping, the rain said now. All that had died could live again—except Green Hills.