by Paula McLain
“This isn’t any of your business.” A knot along Jock’s square jaw twitched. His mouth had hardened into a line.
“Your wife happens to work for me, so I’d say it is.”
I was sure Jock was going to lunge for Boy. He was much the taller and broader man and could have wrecked Boy without trying—but some tide inside him turned, like a switch going off, and he thought better of it for the moment. “You should be careful, Beryl,” he said icily, without taking his eyes from Boy’s face. Then he stormed away.
“Charming,” Boy said when Jock had gone, but I could hear that his voice wasn’t entirely steady.
“Thanks for sticking your neck out for me. Can I buy you a drink? I could do with one.”
We went to the bar for a bottle and some glasses, and then took them out onto one of the low verandas. Over the textured pink wall, I could make out the ghost of the croquet lawn where brightly painted wickets curved into the grass at intervals, and the post sat waiting for someone’s shiny mallet. People passed in and out of the main door, porters and bellmen in white gloves, but we were almost entirely in shadow.
“I never thought I’d get married,” I told Boy as he poured for us. Scotch spilled into the squat glasses with reassuring lapping noises. “I should have left well enough alone.”
“You don’t need to explain.”
“I’m not sure I could anyway.”
As we sat in silence for several minutes, I watched his face and hands. Both were mottled grey and soft-looking in the dimness. His earring was the only thing glinting, as if it caught the light from some other time or place.
“I’ve stopped trying to understand people,” he said. “Horses and sheep make a damned sight more sense.”
I nodded. It had always been the same for me. “Do you think I’m silly to want this? Life as a trainer, I mean?”
He shook his head. “I see you trying to be tough skinned, but that makes sense. As a woman you’ll have to work twice as hard for everything. I’m not sure I could do it.” He lit a cigarette and drew on it, the end flaring red in the dark. When he released the held smoke, he looked at me. “I think you’re rather brave, actually.”
Was I brave? I hoped so. I gazed back at him, his thick ivory bracelets, the native-looking piece of bone on a leather thong around his neck, his shirt the colour of the sea when everyone wore khaki. He was such a character, really, but he was here. And I knew he wanted me. I had a split second to consider what I was doing before I reached for his cigarette and put it out against the pale-pink wall. He leaned into me, opening my mouth with his, his tongue smooth and hot. I didn’t think of resisting him or about anything else. One of his hands grazed the front of my blouse. The other slipped between my knees with a warm pressure I couldn’t help responding to. A hunger for touch, for this, seemed to be coming up from the bottom of me. Maybe it had always been there, sleeping like an animal. I had no idea. I ran my hand along his thigh, twisting into him, and pressed my lips and teeth against his neck.
“You’re dangerous.” He whispered it.
“You mean Jock?”
“And you’re awfully young.”
“Do you want to stop?”
“No.”
We didn’t talk any more that night. Somehow, the feel of his skin and his mouth on mine didn’t have anything to do with the rest of my life. They had no cost and no consequences—or so it seemed to me. Night sounds climbed the cool air beyond the veranda wall, and all thought of caution slipped away.
It was late when I got back to Eastleigh. I fell into my cot feeling too chafed and hard kissed to sleep, but I did sleep. Just after dawn, I rose to do my work as ever. There was another race to prepare for, and the things that had happened with Boy and, before that, with Jock had to be swept off to the side of my attention. I wouldn’t have known what to do about them anyway.
Jock didn’t turn up until after my second horse, Shadow Country, had run and came a respectable third. Instead of appearing the way he had the day before, stepping into my limelight, he waited until after the clamour had cleared and then approached me as if nothing at all were amiss between us, trailed by Cockie Birkbeck and a slight, dark-haired fellow who wasn’t a bit like Bror Blixen. He turned out to be her husband, Ben.
If I gave Cockie a curious look, she didn’t seem rattled. Instead, she congratulated me on the day’s race, and then Jock explained that Ben was thinking about getting more seriously into horses and suggested the four of us get a drink.
I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Jock to grab hold of me again, to threaten or warn me, or for him to do something—anything—to suggest he had somehow learned about Boy Long. But it seemed this moment was all about business.
“When Ben finds the right horse, you should train him,” Jock said when we were settled with cocktails at a watering hole.
“If Delamere will spare you,” Ben added. “I’m also keen on your part of the country. There’s a plot of land near your place I’ve had my eye on.”
We set a date for the couple to come out and have a look at Njoro, and then Cockie made it clear that all this business talk was dull, and we two girls excused ourselves and moved to a table of our own. When we’d settled out of earshot, she said, “Sorry if Blix and I scared you away last night. It’s not often we’re alone. Being married to other people will do that.” She made a face and took off her cloche hat, patting her honey-coloured hair. “We met when he took Ben and me on safari. Blix always seduces the wives if he’s given enough time. He likes them trembling with fear, I suppose…at the precipice of mortal danger.” She raised a feathery eyebrow. “I don’t think he counted on keeping me, but that was almost two years ago.”
“That’s a long time for things to be so intricate. Does Ben suspect?”
“I think so, not that we have the bad taste to talk about it. He’s got his own entanglements, too.” She gave me a complicated smile. “You’ve heard the joke, haven’t you? Are you married or do you live in Kenya?”
“That’s funny.” I shook my head. “And sort of awful, too.” Only the day before, Cockie’s dark joke wouldn’t have included me, but now it did. “Is love always such a mess, do you suppose?”
“Maybe not everywhere, but the rules are different here. It’s sort of assumed you’ll have dalliances or go crazy…but discretion still plays an essential part. You can do anything as long as the right people stay shielded. And the funny thing is, that doesn’t always mean your spouse.”
I absorbed her words slowly, a sobering sort of schooling on the ways of a world that had always resided somewhere else, for other people. “And you’ll carry on like this?”
“You say it as if I’m doomed. It’s not as bad as all that.” She reached for the bottle on the table between us and freshened our drinks. “Ben isn’t hard to manage, but Blix’s wife, Karen, likes the title too much to part with it. He’s made her a baroness.” She sighed. “The whole thing has got rather baroque. Karen and I are friends, or were, in any case. Blix asked her for a divorce and told her he was in love with me, probably thinking it would soften the blow.” She shook her head. “Now she won’t speak to me.”
“Why would anyone fight to stay married if they knew the other desperately wanted to leave?” I was thinking of Jock, of course.
“I don’t pretend to understand any of it,” Cockie breathed, “but Karen seems determined to test Blix at every step.”
I had never been good at sharing my thoughts and feelings the way she was doing so easily, but her openness made me want to try. I also wanted her advice…some bit of wisdom that might help see me through my present tangle. “I was too young to get married,” I told her, glancing behind me to make sure Jock and Ben were still distracted by each other. “Now I’m trying to pull away, but Jock won’t hear of it.”
“That must be hard,” she said. “But honestly, if I hadn’t had the bad luck of falling in love, I can’t say I’d be keen for a divorce, either.”
“Y
ou wouldn’t want to be free, just on your own?”
“To do what?”
“Live, I suppose. Make your own choices or mistakes, without anyone telling you what you can and can’t do.”
She shook her head as if I’d said something absurd. “Society does that, darling, even if there isn’t a strapping husband on hand. Haven’t you learned that yet? I’m not sure anyone gets what they want. Not really.”
“But you’re trying now.” I felt exasperated and a little confused. “You sound cynical, but you’re in love with Blix.”
“I know.” Her forehead wrinkled prettily as she frowned. “Isn’t that the silliest thing you ever heard?”
—
When I returned to Soysambu the next day, and for weeks afterwards, I continued to puzzle over what Cockie had said, wondering what her situation and bits of guidance actually meant for me. By her estimation, an affair was as de rigueur for the colonists as quinine tablets were for fever—a way to weather or temporarily forget marital unhappiness. But Boy wasn’t really an affair, was he? What he offered was purer and more animal than what Cockie was embroiled in with Blix, or so I was telling myself. Besides, it felt wonderful.
After a year of fumbling and embarrassing encounters with Jock, I was finally learning what sex was, and that I liked it. Boy would come into my cottage at night and wake me by roughly pressing against me, his hands everywhere before I was fully conscious. He had none of Jock’s tentativeness, and I found I wasn’t shy with him, either. I could move any way I liked and not spook him. I could turn him away and not hurt his feelings, because feelings had nothing to do with any of it.
One night he found me alone in the stable and led me to an empty loose box without saying a word. Turning me over onto a hay bale, his hands came around to the waist of my cotton shirt and tugged it open roughly. My ribs rocked against the bale and my teeth caught on bits of hay. Afterwards, he stretched out naked without a flicker of modesty, his arms crossed behind him. “You don’t seem like the same girl who snubbed me for several months running.”
“I don’t know what sort of girl I am any more, to tell the truth.” I rested one of my hands on his chest, lightly stroking the thatch of springy dark hair. “I grew up with the Kips. For them, sex doesn’t get all tangled up with guilt or expectations. It’s something you do with your body, like hunting.”
“There are people who’d tell you we’re exactly like the animals. Same appetites, same urges. It’s a nice idea.”
“But you don’t believe it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Someone always seems to get hurt.”
“It shouldn’t have to be like that. We have our eyes open, don’t we?”
“Of course we do. Your husband’s still in the picture, though. Does he have his eyes open?”
“Now you’re trying to rub my nose in it.”
“I’m not,” he said as he easily pulled me on top of him. “How could I be?”
—
The following Saturday when I went home to Njoro, Ben and Cockie’s car stood in our yard with luggage strapped to the boot. I parked D’s wagon behind it and rounded the veranda to see them sitting comfortably at our rattan table in the shade, having cocktails with Jock.
“We’ve saved you some ice,” Cockie said. She wore a loose silk dress and a hat with sheer netting that fell to the bridge of her nose. She looked lovely in it, and I was happy to see her. Her and Ben’s company would make my time in Njoro much more bearable than usual.
Jock fetched me a drink—a scarlet-laced Pimm’s with fresh lemon and orange peel over chipped ice, pretty as a picture—but he had an odd look on his face, and he didn’t try to give me his usual perfunctory peck on the cheek.
“Everything all right?” I asked.
“Yes.” He didn’t meet my eyes.
“You’ve really done wonders with the place,” Ben said. Before turning to ranching, he had been a major in the King’s African Rifles, and there was something military about him still, a precision and a clipped composure. With neatly trimmed dark hair and fine, straight features, he was considerably better-looking than Blix—but I already guessed he didn’t have Blix’s humour or his sense of adventure.
“Jock is the miracle worker,” I conceded. “There’s nothing he can’t plough or hammer into place.”
“Except maybe my wife.” He said it easily, almost cheerfully, as though the barb were harmless. Ben and Cockie laughed, and I tried to join them. I’d never been good at reading Jock, and certainly wasn’t now that we were living apart.
“We’ve just bought the parcel next door,” Cockie said. “We’ll have to play bridge at the weekends. I adore cards,” she went on. “Though Ben here would rather eat knives.”
Barasa came to refill our ice bucket, and we all had another while the sun rose a little higher in the sky—but I couldn’t shake the distinct feeling that something was off with Jock. Maybe he was punishing me for the scene at the Muthaiga when he’d stormed away half pissed. Maybe the whole façade of our arrangement was finally starting to wear and crack. Whatever was happening, Cockie clearly felt it, too. When the four of us headed over to admire their new property before dinner, she clasped my elbow, letting the men get well ahead of us.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t. But by the time we settled before the fire later that evening, things became clearer as they unravelled. Jock drank too much at dinner, and his eyes took on a troubling sheen. I recognized this as a kind of warning—the first stone along the path to a good row—and hoped he would think twice with the Birkbecks here.
“How will you follow up your success for the next race meeting?” Ben asked from the sofa while the fire made cheerful crinkling noises. “Care to share some of your secrets?”
“When I train your horses, I’ll share all of them,” I said.
Ben laughed thinly. It seemed he’d felt the tension in the room, too, and now was trying to plot a strategic way to safely steer us back on course. He rose and made a sweep of the room. “I say, Jock, but this is a beauty.” He meant the broad smooth Arab door that Jock had bought for the house not long after we were married. Like the phonograph, it was a sign of prosperity, and Jock was proud of it. The wood of the door was a rich puzzle of knots, with an overlay of carvings the artisan had painstakingly worked into the surface.
“It’s lovely,” Cockie said. “Wherever did you find it?”
“Lamu,” Jock said. “I’ve been thinking of improving it, though.”
“What?” She laughed. “It’s a relic, isn’t it? You wouldn’t really touch it.”
“I might.” He slid over the last word strangely, his tongue too thick and uncontrolled. He was drunker than I thought.
“Let’s have a game.” I reached for the deck of cards, but Jock wasn’t listening. He strode out of the room only long enough for Cockie to give me a questioning look and then came back again with a wooden mallet he’d found in the kitchen. It was a kitchen tool, meant for tenderizing meat, but he was beyond caring about proper uses. While we watched, he dragged over a chair and climbed on top of it to pound a small copper peg into the upper-right-hand corner of the door with the mallet, hammering away.
“Every time my wife has an indiscretion I’m going to add a nail,” he said to the door. I couldn’t see his expression and couldn’t bear to look at Cockie or Ben. “It might be the only way we’ll be able to keep track.”
“Good God, Jock,” I cried, horrified. Somehow he’d learned about Boy, then, and this was how he was exacting revenge, with an all-out scene in front of new friends. When he whirled round with the mallet, it balanced in his hand for a moment like a rungu club, his eyes glittering. “Get down.”
“Just one by my count, is that right?” he asked me, and then turned to Ben. “Unless you’ve had her, too.”
“Stop!” I yelled as Cockie’s face went deathly white. One of Jock’s knees buckled, and
he tipped off the chair, tumbling to the floor. The mallet flew away from him, whipping over my left shoulder, and bouncing with a thudding clatter off the window casement. Thank goodness for instincts. I had ducked at precisely the right moment. Another few inches or portion of a second and the mallet would have cracked me on the head. Then we really would have had a story.
As Jock scrambled to find his feet again, Ben hurried to Cockie, and they made for the other room just as Barasa arrived.
“Please help bwana to bed,” I told him, and soon I could hear them in the other room, a thump of shoes and shuffling of bedclothes. When I found the Birkbecks, they told me they were heading back to town. I was mortified. “At least wait till morning,” I said. “It will be safer then.”
“We’re nothing if not intrepid,” Cockie said gently. She signalled to Ben to go and pack their things and when he’d gone said, “I don’t know what you’ve done, darling, but I can tell you there are things men don’t want to know. And with us here, too…I suppose he had to show you he was still in charge.”
“You don’t mean to say he was justified in acting that way?”
“No.” She sighed. But it seemed as if she was saying precisely that.
“I’m a disaster at marriage, and now at infidelity, too?”
She laughed soberly. “None of this is easy, I know. You’re so young, and everyone makes great lurching mistakes sometimes. You really will work it out one day. For now, though, you’ve got to eat humble pie.”
I walked them out, and after their Ford’s quavering headlamps had passed from sight, I was alone with the Southern stars. How had I got here, exactly? The shadowy Aberdares were the same as they had ever been and the forest sounds, too, and yet I wasn’t. I’d forgotten myself. I’d let one dodgy, fearful choice roll into another, somehow thinking that through this twisting and sticky route, I could still arrive at freedom. Arap Maina would have clucked and shaken his head to see me. Lady D would have gazed at me with those wise grey eyes of hers and said—what? That I had to eat humble pie? I didn’t think so. And what of my father? He had raised me to be strong and self-sufficient—and I wasn’t that now. Not by a long shot.