Circling the Sun

by Paula McLain

  “Oh, Frank dear,” Idina said. “That’s why we invite you. You have the best toys.”

  “And a keen taste in women,” Joss said, reaching for the bag.

  “You are delicious-looking,” Idina agreed. “Though I can’t quite imagine how Frank got his hooks into you. Nothing personal, Frank.” She cut her eyes at him, smiling. “But you aren’t exactly Sir Galahad.”

  “Frank’s been a good friend,” I said.

  “What would we do without friends?” Idina lolled onto her back, letting her legs swing to one side. Her sarong-like shift slid up past her pale thighs.

  “You’re lily white!” Honor exclaimed. “Why don’t you roast here like everyone else?”

  “She’s a vampire.” Joss laughed. “She has no blood of her own at all, only borrowed blood, and whisky.”

  “That’s right, my lion,” she purred. “It’s why I’ll be immortal.”

  “As long as you don’t leave me alone,” Joss said, and bent over a line he’d made with the cocaine on a tray. He had a rolled paper cone and gave a tremendous snort.

  We lay there in the spotted shade until the daylight lengthened and turned gold, and then went to dress for dinner. The bedroom assigned to Frank and me was plush with rugs and throws and elaborately scrolled and painted antique furniture. The bed was massive, and folded silk pyjamas nestled on the two rounded pillows, gifts from Idina.

  “I told you about the pyjamas,” Frank said, stepping out of his corduroy trousers. His legs were thick and furred above the elastic of his socks. “They’re all right, aren’t they? You seem rattled.”

  “It’s all just a little empty. Everything seems to be an entertainment for them—especially people. I don’t really understand that kind of sport.”

  “Maybe if you drank more, you’d relax.”

  “I don’t want to lose my head.”

  “No chance of that.” He laughed. “You might have a better time, though.”

  “I’m fine,” I insisted, wanting the matter dropped and the day over. I rolled down my stockings and manoeuvred out of my damp brassière just as the door opened without a knock. Joss stood there.

  “Hello, darlings.” A friendly and expansive smile painted his face. “Do you have everything you need?”

  I felt my spine tighten and resisted the urge to cover myself. That kind of modesty would be shockingly priggish here. “Yes, thank you.”

  “Idina wants to see you before dinner, Beryl. She’s just down the hall, last door on the right.” He winked and went out again, and I gave Frank an exasperated look.

  He shrugged and worked at the bone buttons on his pyjamas. I could tell he was drunk by the thick way he moved, and felt a flaring of old feelings, like a visiting ghost. Frank wasn’t at all like Jock, but I didn’t want to see him like this all the same. “You can’t really blame him,” he said.

  “No? Maybe I’ll blame you instead then.”

  “I see we’re feeling feisty.” He came round to where I stood and reached for me.

  “Please, Frank.” I pulled away.

  “It’s one dinner. We’ll leave tomorrow if you like.”

  “Nobody works. I don’t know what on earth they do with their time.”

  “If you have enough money you can play for ever, I suppose.”

  “Work does more than pay your way.” My own intensity surprised me. “It gives you a reason to go on.”

  “You do need a drink,” he said, turning to his mirror.

  —

  Idina’s bedroom was three times the size of ours, with a sprawling bed loaded down with silky furs. A great gilt mirror hung above it. I’d never seen such a thing.

  “I’m in here,” Idina sang out from the bathroom. I found her there in an enormous jet-green onyx tub. She soaked in it up to her chin, the perfumed water leaking steam. “Those fit you perfectly.” She nodded at the pyjamas. “Do you like them?”

  “They’re lovely, thank you.” I knew I sounded stiff from the way she eyed me and reached for her smooth black cigarette holder, lighting a match with damp fingers.

  “You didn’t mind what I said earlier, about Frank?”

  “It’s fine. I’m just tired.”

  She drew in on the holder, and then blew out smoke in a cloud, never taking her eyes from me. “I wouldn’t want to be blonde,” she said, “but yours is lovely.”

  “It’s horsehair.” I lifted up a strand and let it fall. “It won’t stay put no matter what I do.”

  “Somehow the effect works.” She pulled on her cigarette again and then waved the smoke away. “Your eyes are good, too, like chips of blue glass.”

  “Do I get to go through all of your features now?”

  “I’m praising you, darling. You seem to like it when men look you over.”

  “I don’t—unless it’s the right man.”

  “Do tell,” she said with a laugh. “I’m starved for a little indiscretion.”

  “Maybe you should get into town more.”

  She laughed again, as if I weren’t being a perfect bitch, and then said, “Whom are you in love with?”

  “No one.”

  “Really? I thought it might be Finch Hatton.” She arched an eyebrow, waiting for my reaction. I would rather have died than give her one. “Don’t you think Karen is a little demanding for him? Poor Tania…how she sighs when he goes.”

  “I didn’t know you two were even acquainted,” I said, feeling a need to defend Karen.

  “But of course we are. I adore her. I just don’t think she’s the one to hold Denys. There’s nothing wild in her.”

  “No one admires only wildness.” Somehow I couldn’t stand to hear Idina make Karen out to be so small. She was many things, but not that. “They have a great deal to talk about.”

  “Do you think so? If you ask me, he’s too good at being a bachelor. Why choose one when you can have a dozen?”

  “He probably can have dozens.” Heat tightened my throat. I hadn’t spoken of Denys in a long time, and never to a stranger. “But it doesn’t really cut both ways, does it?”

  “Why not? Women can have plenty of lovers, too. Dozens upon dozens, as long as they’re clever and don’t crow about it.”

  “But it never plays out that way. Someone always knows.”

  “You’re not doing it right then,” she pronounced. With a swishing sound, she stood up. Slick water glazed her white-pink skin. Her perfect body was like art, or a carefully sculpted dish on a platter. She didn’t even reach for the towel but simply stood there and let me look at her, knowing I would feel awkward turning away.

  I flushed, resenting her and the life she lived. If she was the model for discretion and polish, I wasn’t interested. “Maybe I don’t want to do it right,” I said.

  Her eyes crinkled, but without any humour. “I don’t believe you, darling. Everyone always wants more. Why else are we here?”

  —

  Dinner was served at a long low table near the fire. It was always cool at night in the highlands, but this blaze was also meant to be ornamental. It set the room glowing and Idina’s cheeks, too, as she held court at the far end of the table. The wide hearth opened just behind her, glinting along the tips of her hair. Above her, a twisted set of buffalo horns stabbed out from a wooden plaque.

  There was something about Idina that reminded me of a hunting kestrel or kite. It was her hard, bright eyes as well as her words—the expectation that everyone was just like she was, constantly hungry, with little concern for who might get hurt along the way, or how. I couldn’t understand why Frank would want to spend time with this crowd. They were bored, naughty children with highballs and morphine and sex for their toys. People were toys, too. Idina had invited me into her bathroom to bat at me like a mouse, curious about whether I would freeze or run. Now she began a game, which was another version of the same manoeuvre. It was a parlour game where everyone contributed a line to a story that moved in a circle. The point was confession.

  Idina launche
d us forward. “Once upon a time, before Kenya was Kenya, I hadn’t even met my lion and didn’t know how smitten and changed I would be.”

  “You are sweet to me,” Joss said, beaming a little dementedly in the firelight. “Once upon a time, before Kenya was Kenya, I bathed with Tallulah Bankhead in a tub brimming with champagne.”

  “Didn’t that tickle?” Charles scoffed. Idina didn’t bat an eyelash.

  “In the nicest way,” he purred. “Now you, Beryl.”

  “I’m too drunk,” I said, trying to avoid the game altogether.

  “Oh, posh!” Joss cried. “You’re dead sober. Play along, please.”

  “Can’t we have cards instead? I don’t understand the rules of this one.”

  “You need only to say something true about the past.”

  Only? The game was placid and tame and, yes, childish on the surface. But the point was to see if you could force the mouse you’d cornered to show you its insides. I didn’t want to tell these people a single thing about myself, particularly from the precious past. Finally I said, “Once upon a time, before Kenya was Kenya, I put a dead black mamba snake in my governess’s bed.”

  “Aha! I knew you had some nastiness in you!” Joss said.

  “Remind me not to make you angry,” Idina added.

  “Show us what you do with Frank’s black mamba.” Charles cackled like an idiotic schoolboy, and everyone laughed along.

  The game went round and round—on and on—and it seemed I would only be able to play, or even survive the night, if I did get drunk. It was difficult to catch up with this crowd. I had to make a real effort, and when I finally succeeded, I succeeded too well. The whisky made me maudlin, and for every confession I managed to reveal aloud, another unspoken confession thrummed through me and threatened to bring me down. Before Kenya was Kenya, Green Hills was alive and my father loved me. I could jump as high as Kibii and walk through the forest without making a sound. I could bring a warthog out of its hole by crinkling paper. I could be eaten by a lion and live. I could do anything, for I was in heaven still.

  By midnight, when everyone had grown glittery-eyed and nearly delirious, Idina moved onto another game. She made us sit in a circle and blow a feather into the centre. Whomever the feather landed nearest would be our bedmate for the night. At first I thought she was joking, but when Honor blew her feather into Frank’s lap, the pair simply got up and walked down the hall, Frank’s back wide and square next to Honor’s slim form, while no one so much as leered at them. My head swam with the whisky. Everything tipped and receded in a tunnel effect. Sounds reached me with a slight delay. Now Idina seemed to be laughing because Charles had got on his hands and knees and was bringing the feather to her with his teeth.

  “But I’m old hat for you, darling.” She pretended to swat at him with her cigarette holder. “You can’t want me.”

  “It’s all a blur.” He laughed. “Show me again.”

  When the two had lurched off down the hall, I looked at Joss, feeling nauseated. I had drunk much too much. My tongue was thick and coated in my mouth. My eyes felt heavy and dull. “I’m going to bed.”

  His eyes were glassy and mirrorlike. “Isn’t that the point?”

  “No, really. I don’t feel well.”

  “I have something for that.” He stroked the inside of my thigh, his hand like a pressing iron through the silk. He moved to kiss me and I pulled away reflexively. When he looked at me again, his eyes had come into focus more. “Frank said you might be a little cool at first, but that I shouldn’t give up.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t play the lamb, Beryl. We all of us know you’ve been around.”

  I wasn’t at all surprised by Joss, but if Frank had meant to throw me to the wolves by bringing me here, he had another thing coming. Without a word I stood and walked down the hall, but the door to our room was closed. I banged at it with the flat of my hand. Only laughter came back.

  “Frank!” I shouted, but he wouldn’t answer me.

  The hall was dark, and all the other doors were shut tight. Not knowing what else to do, I locked myself in one of the bathrooms and sat on the floor, waiting for morning. I knew the night would be long indeed, but I had things to remember…things I wouldn’t have shared earlier, not for all the money in the world. Before Kenya was Kenya, I threw a spear and a rungu club. I loved a horse with wings. I never felt alone or small. I was Lakwet.

  When we returned from Slains two days later, Frank immediately retreated to his hunting cabin and I made plans to leave him. There wasn’t any panic in my actions. I packed slowly and carefully, filling my rucksack with things from my life before. Everything Frank had given me I left in the bureau—the money, too. I wasn’t angry with him. I wasn’t angry with anyone, I only wanted to find my own way, and to be sure of what I stood for again.

  There were a few clues about what I might do next. Before I left London, Cockie had mentioned Westerland, a stable in Molo. Her cousin Gerry Alexander ran things there, and she thought the place might do for a second start. I had no idea if gossip about me had threaded that far north, or if Gerry was even in need of a trainer, but I trusted Cockie to help set me on the right path. First, though, I needed to go home.

  After following the main road north to Naivasha, I headed east the least travelled way, straight into the open bush. Piled stones and gold grasses gave way to red dust and thorn trees, and unbroken savannah. The steady rhythm of Pegasus’s plates rang out. He seemed to know we weren’t going out for a casual ride, but didn’t balk at any of it, not the terrain or the eerie quiet, not even when a mammoth bushpig charged from a ravine a hundred yards ahead, storming over the path on squat, split hooves, squealing its rage at being startled. Pegasus only bobbed his head once, then pushed on with steady, smooth legs.

  Finally we began to climb again, and to see the greening rim of the Mau Forest at the escarpment’s far side, dense trees and knuckled ridges, the land rolling out in the view I loved better than any other—Menengai, Rongai, the blue and furling Aberdares.

  —

  I found Jock inside just finishing lunch. I had wanted to catch him off guard and did, his face blanching before he pushed back from the table, twisting his linen napkin in his hand. “I can imagine why you’re here.”

  “You didn’t answer my letters.”

  “I thought maybe you’d change your mind.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t believe him.

  “No. I don’t know. Nothing has gone the way I planned.”

  “I could say the same,” I told him. Part of me felt an urge to drag out all the casualties in our long, weary battle, to name everything and let him hear just what he’d cost me. But I had done my part, too. The losses were on my head as well. “Please, Jock. Just say you’ll give me the divorce. This has all gone on long enough.”

  He stood and went to the window overlooking the valley. “I should have found a way to make it work. That’s what I keep thinking.”

  “When the papers are drawn up, I’ll send them.”

  He sighed loud and long, and then faced me. “Yes. All right.” His eyes met mine for a moment, and in those cold blue discs I finally saw—after all this time—a shadow of contrition, of real regret. “Goodbye, Beryl.”

  “So long,” I said, and when I walked through the door, knowing I would never return, a great and old weight unfurled from my shoulders and lifted off into the sky.

  —

  I headed straight for Green Hills, where the tall grass had grown up thickly and what was still standing of the stables and main house had begun to tip irrevocably towards the earth. The mill was long gone and the fields overgrown, as if the land was taking it all back. I thought of the work my father had done, and the happiness we’d known—but I didn’t feel empty for some reason. I had the pure sense that I couldn’t ever truly lose the past, or forget what any of it had meant. To one side of the path that led into the forest, a high pile of stones stood marking Buller’s grave. I stopped
Pegasus and held his lead while I sat for a while, remembering the day I had buried him. I had dug at the packed earth until the hole was deep enough so that no hyena would find him. Not even a stone had shifted from the cairn. Buller was safe in his long sleep—his grizzled scars and his victories. No unworthy predator could ever touch him.

  Winding down the hill, I traced the path to the Kip village and tied Pegasus to the thorn lattice of the boma. When I entered the compound, a young woman named Jebbta was the first to notice me. I hadn’t seen her for years, not since we were both girls, but I wasn’t all that surprised when she turned from where she stood in her yard to see a baby threaded around her hip, round as a gourd.

  “You are welcome, memsahib. Come.”

  I approached her and then reached to touch the silky plait of the child on her hip, then the sheen of his shoulder. Jebbta had grown into a proper woman, with a woman’s burdens. That was the way things worked in the Kip village. Nothing had changed there.

  “Is this your only child, Jebbta?”

  “The youngest. And your children, memsahib?”

  “I have none.”

  “Are you not married?”

  “No. Not any longer.”

  She tipped her head back and forth as if to say she understood, but she was only being polite. At the outdoor hearth fire, yellow flames licked up the sides of a black pot, the smells of the bubbling grain inside making me feel hungry in a way I’d forgotten. “I’ve come for arap Ruta, Jebbta. Is he nearby?”

  “No, memsahib, he hunts with the others.”

  “Oh, yes. Will you tell him I was here and that I asked for him?”

  “Yes. He will be sorry to have missed such a friend.”

  —

  Molo was eighteen miles north and west from Njoro, and stood on a plateau at the top of the Mau Escarpment, ten thousand feet nearer the stars. The elevation made it dramatically different from home. Icy streams and rivulets ran through dense bracken; woolly sheep grazed on low, misted hillsides. I passed farms, but they were mostly pyrethrum crops, miles and miles of the white chrysanthemums that flourished in the highlands, their dried heads used as insecticide when ground into powder. They were striking now, the bushes snowy and rounded as drifts. It did snow in the highlands, and I wondered if I was ready for that.