Circling the Sun

by Paula McLain

  When Pegasus and I reached the open track, we paused and settled, getting our bearings, then I opened him up. He charged out like a coiled spring, lengthening along the flat grade, thrusting through the rhythms of his stride—fast and perfect, close to flying.

  I had foaled him myself when I was fourteen and home for a spring holiday—watching Coquette’s trembling labour and overjoyed that I could be there for it. Coquette had delivered healthy foals every few years since the terrible birth of Apollo and the coming of the siafu ants, but I still didn’t want to leave her side for a moment and took to sleeping in her loose box for the last few weeks. When the foal finally came, I broke open the slick, translucent birth sac with my hands and gently tugged him by his small perfect front hoofs into the loose straw bed. I nearly shook with happiness and relief. It was the first time I’d ever been midwife on my own, and there’d been no mishaps. My father had trusted me and didn’t come into the stable at all until dawn as I held Pegasus in my arms, a bundle of wet heat and bony folded limbs.

  “Well done,” he said from the stable door. He seemed to know that even the dusty tip of his boot in the loose box would lessen what I’d carried off without him. “You brought him to life. I suppose he’s yours now.”

  “Mine?” I’d never owned anything or thought I should—happily grooming, handling, feeding, and worrying over my father’s animals for years. But somehow this miraculous animal belonged to me: a bit of grace I hadn’t even known I was desperate for.

  When Pegasus and I finished our run, we made for home the long way, around the northern perimeter of the valley where it furled out in an unbroken sweep. A neighbour had recently snapped up the adjoining parcel, and I saw signs of him now. Newly set fence posts stood as straight as matchsticks where there’d been only open land and unmarred emptiness. I traced the line they made and soon reached the farmer, hatless and barrel-chested, with a spool of wire over his shoulder. He was stringing it with a hammer and claw and staples, the muscles of his arms going taut as he drew the wire hard against the post and secured it. He didn’t stop working until Pegasus and I stood five feet from him. Then he smiled up at me, his collar dark with fresh perspiration. “You’re trampling my pasture.”

  I knew he was joking—there was no pasture yet, or much of anything finished—but I could tell it would all be marvellous one day. You could see it in the way he’d set the posts so well. “I can’t believe your house is up,” I said. He’d made it look more suited for town than the bush, with a shingle roof instead of thatch and real glass at the windows.

  “It’s nothing like your father’s place.” He’d already guessed who I was then. Shielding his eyes with the back of his arm, he squinted up at me. “I met him years ago, when I was laid up near here with the Madras volunteers.”

  “You were wounded?”

  “Dysentery, actually. My whole troop had it. Loads of men died.”

  “That sounds awful.”

  “It was.” The smallest hint of a Scottish brogue rolled from behind his tongue. “But there were a few pleasures. One day some of us went off hunting down in the Rongai Valley, and you were there. A good-looking native boy was with you, too, and you were both crack shots.” He smiled, flashing neat square teeth. “You don’t remember me.”

  I scanned his face—the squared-off jaw and strong chin and cornflower-blue eyes—looking for something familiar. “Sorry,” I finally admitted. “There were so many soldiers around then.”

  “You’ve grown up.”

  “Daddy says I might never stop growing. I passed him a while ago.”

  He smiled and continued to look up at me in a way that made me wonder if there was something else I was meant to say or do. I couldn’t imagine what. All I knew of men beyond farm life and work were the warm, confusing thoughts I sometimes had late at night now, about being touched or taken, thoughts that could make my cheeks hot even when I was alone in my hut.

  “Well, it’s nice to see you again.” He reached for his spool of wire without moving his eyes from mine.

  “Good luck,” I told him, and then nudged Pegasus away, glad to be leaving him there with his fence posts, to be turning for home with the sun at my back.

  —

  “I met our new neighbour,” I said at dinner that night, sawing at a slab of Thomsons’-gazelle steak with the tip of my knife.

  “Purves,” my father said. “He’s done a lot with that land.”

  “This is the ex-captain you were telling me about, Charles?” Emma asked from her end of the table. “He’s a good-looking fellow. I saw him in town.”

  “He’s a hard worker, I’ll say that.”

  “What did you think of him, Beryl?”

  I shrugged. “He’s all right, I suppose.”

  “It wouldn’t kill you to make more of an effort socially,” she said. “Do you know anyone your age?”

  “My age? He has to be thirty.”

  “Farm life is going to harden you, you know. You think you’ll be young and beautiful for ever and that you’ll have plenty of chances, but it doesn’t work like that.”

  “She’s only sixteen, Em,” my father said. “She has plenty of time.”

  “That’s what you think. We’re not helping, keeping her out here with no company. School didn’t do a thing—not that she was there long. She’s wild. She doesn’t know how to make conversation.”

  “Why are we talking about manners and society, when there are real problems to think about?” I pushed my plate away in frustration.

  “One day you will want to attract a man,” Emma said, glaring at me pointedly. “Your father and I have to prepare you for that.”

  “Emma thinks you should have a coming-out party,” he explained, cupping the heavy base of his scotch glass.

  “You’ve got to be joking. Out where?”

  “You know perfectly well these things are done, Beryl. Even here. It’s important to be known in society and to develop some grace. You might not think it matters now, but you will.”

  “I have all the society I need here,” I said, meaning Buller and our horses.

  “It’s one night, Beryl.”

  “And a new dress,” Emma added, as if this were any kind of draw.

  “We’ve already made arrangements with the hotel,” my father said with finality, and I knew it had been settled long before.

  Nairobi had grown in leaps since I was there at school. Ten thousand people now perched on the scrubby verge of the Athi Plains with the tin-roofed shops and public houses and the noisy and colourful bazaar. Even this much civilization was a wonder. The town had been formed accidentally when the Uganda railway was being forged between Mombasa and Lake Victoria in 1899. A flimsy headquarters went up, then an anchovy-tin shack the workers had dubbed “the Railhead Club,” then more shacks and tents, and when the railway finally moved on, a town was left in its wake.

  But even then, no one guessed how important the railway would become for the British Empire and the whole of the continent. Building the route was expensive, and maintaining it even more so. Colonial officials concocted a scheme to draw white settlers to the area by offering parcels of land for nearly nothing. Retired soldiers like my father and D received additional land as part of a pension. And this was how the colony went up, man by man, farm by farm, with Nairobi as its steadily beating heart.

  By 1919, there was a Government House with a ballroom on Nairobi’s central hill, a racetrack, and three good hotels. To reach town, we only had to board the train and travel one hundred and thirteen miles through dusty bush and red murram mud and papyrus swamp. A full day spent on the sooty, lurching iron contraption so I could stand in a rented room at the New Stanley Hotel, in a frock the colour of egg custard.

  The frock was probably very pretty. Emma had picked it out and insisted it was perfect—but the stiff lace crimped too high on my neck and gave me a rash I couldn’t scratch at. There was a crown of roses, too—tight yellow-pink buds sewn together in a circlet. I kept looki
ng in the mirror, wondering if I looked right and hoping I did.

  “What do you think, really?” I asked Dos, who stood behind me in her slip, pulling pins from her bobbed brown hair.

  “You’re lovely, but stop scratching, will you? Everyone will think you’ve got fleas.”

  Dos was still a student—currently at Miss Seccombe’s in town—and we had almost nothing in common. She was curvy, brown, and tiny in her blue lace frock, good at conversation and the usual pleasantries, easy in the company of others. I was rail thin, a head taller than Dos, even in flat shoes—and far more comfortable talking to horses and dogs than people. We were as mismatched as two sixteen-year-old girls could be, but I was still fond of Dos and glad she was here.

  At 10:00 p.m. sharp, according to a silly British custom, I gripped my father’s arm on the stairs. I only ever saw him in dusty khakis and sun helmet, but his dark tails and white shirtfront looked natural on him, reminding me of the life he’d led before, in England. There, I would have been formally presented to the king at court, in a procession of other well-born young women in pearls and gloves and ostrich feathers, curtsying my heart out. In this far-flung colony, where sovereignty was a flag and a notion and sometimes a few rousing verses of “God Save the King” that had everyone in tears, I was brought out to a hotel ballroom full of ranchers, former soldiers, and Afrikaners, all soaped clean and half-pickled. A five-piece band played the lilting opening to “If You Were the Only Girl in the World,” the cue for my father and me to take our turn on the dance floor.

  “I’m going to step on your toes now,” I warned.

  “Go on, then. I won’t make faces and give you away.”

  He danced beautifully, and I did my best to keep up, concentrating on his grey wool tailcoat, which smelled faintly of the cedar chest it had been pulled from the day before. I had to hunch a bit to keep from towering over him, and this made me feel more awkward than I already did.

  “You know, they don’t hand out manuals for the tough stuff,” he said as the band slowed. “I haven’t always known what to do as a father, but somehow you’ve turned out all right.”

  Before I could really take in what he’d said, or make the moment last, he stepped away in one move, passing my right hand to Lord Delamere.

  “Look at you, Beryl. Pretty as a filly,” D said.

  He had come out of the war looking older by a dozen years. There were deep lines around his eyes, and his hair had gone white in a bad bout of fever, but he’d come through. I rarely saw him now. He still owned Equator Ranch but had moved on to another ranching operation south and east of us, on the chalky shores of Lake Elmenteita.

  “Florence should be here,” he said against my shoulder. “She would have been so proud.”

  I felt a sharp plunging sensation from the tender way D had said her name and told him I still thought about her every day. “It’s not fair she’s gone.”

  “Not a bit.” And then he kissed my cheek before smoothly passing me on to the next in line.

  It took me several dances to clear the dip in my mood, but the fellows partnering me didn’t seem to notice or mind. For an hour or more I was spun in a press of warm shaved faces, strong hands and damp ones, good dancers and ones with clumsy sidesteps. I tasted champagne on the back of my tongue as a lone trumpet swooned the verses I knew but didn’t sing:

  A Garden of Eden just made for two

  With nothing to mar our joy

  I would say such wonderful things to you

  There would be such wonderful things to do

  If you were the only girl in the world

  And then there was Jock—Purves, as my father called him—looking a good deal cleaner than he had done twisting fence wire and more handsome now that we were nose to nose. When he spun me close, I smelled shaving powder and gin, and though I didn’t have the slightest bit of experience with men or swooning, I could tell by Dos’s look, as we came past her table again, that it was high time I learned.

  There were lots of men like Jock in town—discharged soldiers who’d taken their Settlement Allotment and snatched up acreage, trying to reinvent themselves in a purposeful way—but few were as handsome. He was strong-looking and squared off everywhere, shoulders and jaw and chin. This was what a man was supposed to be, I thought, if you could build him from scratch and break him in like new land.

  “Is your fence still standing?” I asked him.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Any number of things.” I laughed. “Starting with marauding elephants.”

  “You think I’m funny.”

  “No…” I let my voice trail off.

  “A certain kind of man comes to Africa and builds fences. Is that what you think?”

  “How should I know?” I threw out. “I’m only sixteen.”

  “You were never sixteen.”

  He was flattering me, but I didn’t mind much. I’d had three glasses of champagne by then, and everything was beginning to seem wonderful—Jock’s dark jacket under my hand, the band in an alcove opposite the bar. The tuba was a golden blur. The horn player seemed to be winking at me. And then there were the other partnered girls sailing by us in silk dresses, gardenias tucked like stars into their hair.

  “Where did all these girls come from? I’ve never seen half of them.”

  He glanced around. “You outshine them.”

  Out on the farm, there’d been no occasion to flirt. I hadn’t learned how to try to draw a man in, so I simply said what I thought, even though it stamped me as insecure. “Emma says I don’t paint well.”

  “All that rouge and face powder has to come off at some point. Maybe it’s better you don’t.” We danced for half a minute in silence, and then he said, “These town girls all come from the same box of sweets, anyway. I think I’ll marry you instead.”

  “What?” I breathed, caught off guard.

  He grinned, his teeth neat and shiny and square. “You are wearing a white dress.”

  “Oh.” I leaned back in his arms and felt my head go woozy.

  —

  Sometime later I went to sit near Dos at one of the cloth-draped tables. Her chin was propped up on one of her hands. A gin fizz foamed in the other. “He’s lovely,” she said.

  “You dance with him then. He makes me nervous.”

  “He hasn’t looked at me twice.”

  “How do you know?”

  She laughed at me. “Really, Beryl. You’re so thick.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” I glared at her. “It’s all so stupid anyway. Half the fellows have sweat pouring off them, and the other half look right over my shoulder as if I’m not there. Well, at least the ones who’re tall enough.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, softening. “I was only teasing. You’ll learn.”

  I made a face at her and pulled at the neck of my dress. “Want a smoke?”

  “You go. It might be my only chance for a little male attention.”

  “You look grand.”

  She smiled. “I’ll look better with you outside.”

  —

  On the street, it was dark in the way only Africa can be. I took a deep breath, tasting dust and eucalyptus, and moved past the smeary lights of the veranda. In the small park across the road, smooth clay had been spread like a dusting of confectioners’ sugar, and a dotted line of dwarf gum trees newly planted for effect. This was Nairobi trying to civilize itself, but a greater emptiness stretched out beyond it, ready to swallow every last stitch of all of us. I loved that about Africa and hoped it would never change. Strolling, I felt the dark tug at me, and a pleasant itch to be out of my dress, out of my skin even.

  “You look like Diana,” an English voice said, startling me.

  A man stood in the street behind me in a well-fitting evening jacket and trousers, both white as the moon. “I’m sorry?”

  “Diana the huntress,” he clarified. “From the Romans.” He was drunk, I realized, but still pleasant for all that. A fat bottle of wine
sloshed against his leg, and when he smiled I saw he had a wonderful face, at least in the dark. “I’m Finch Hatton…or maybe I’m Virbius.”

  “More Romans?”

  “That’s right.” He looked at me more closely, tipping his head. He was taller than I was, when so very few men were. “You look as if you’ve been to a party.”

  “So do you. This one’s for me.” I pointed my chin in the direction of the hotel.

  “Your wedding party?”

  I laughed. “My coming out.”

  “Good, then. Never marry. Dianas don’t, as a rule.”

  He stepped a little nearer, and I could better see his face under the rim of his dark bowler. His eyes were large and heavily lidded. His cheekbones were strong, and his nose was sharp and fine. “Do you feel ready for society, then?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. Can anyone tell you when you’re grown up?”

  Another man came around the corner near the hotel and was walking towards us with purpose. He carried himself like a prince, too, and had a thick, combed moustache, reddish hair, and no hat. “Denys, finally,” he said with a dramatic sigh. “You’ve led me quite a chase.” He bowed at the waist in a way that was probably meant to be funny. “Berkeley Cole at your service.”