by Paula McLain
“Tell me why this is happening, Sonny. You know how hard I’ve worked.”
“It’s the worst sort of shame, Beryl. If I had any choice, I wouldn’t take her. I was all set to ride Wrack, but now he’s broken down. He’ll run again, but not this time.”
“Wrack’s out?”
“For now, yes.”
“Then Wise Child’s sure to win. Goddamn it, Sonny. I have to have this!”
“I don’t know what to say, kid. Gooch isn’t likely to change his mind.” He pressed his teeth together hard, making the muscles in his jaw jump. “I’ll tell you one thing, though, everyone on the track will know what’s what. You’ve done the work with her. All I’m getting is the ride.”
When he’d gone I stared at the wall, my heart shuddering in place. There had been times in my life when I might have deserved this sort of comeuppance. I couldn’t pretend otherwise. Eric’s wife had no doubt heard an earful of gossip about me, but I hadn’t so much as put a finger on him. I had worried over Wise Child, nurtured and babied her, loved her. Now she’d been taken from my stables, my hands.
Not even Ruta could talk to me.
At the post, ten horses ripple and stamp, their jockeys light, brilliant as feathers. They’re poised to run, dying to run, and when the starter gives his signal, they do. Ruta stands behind me in Delamere’s box. We both feel Wise Child in the field, quivering like music. Every horse is glorious. Each has a story and a magnificent will, blood and muscle, clean legs and flying tail—but none of them is like her. They none of them have her strength.
Sonny knows how to get everything from our filly, but little by little. One pulsing beat at a time. He intuits when to coax her or hold her back, or inch her into a waiting, almost infinitesimal gap. She has speed and smoothness, and a reserve of something else, something undefined—but will it be enough?
Soon, everyone in the grandstand comes to their feet, craning to see bits of coloured silk above churning legs, the stakes high or negligible. None of that matters. The money is an afterthought, something to play at, shells on a table. The horses, though. The horses live, and Wise Child is more soulful and alive than she has ever been or ever will be. She gains on a black stallion, then a chestnut, and a creamy filly. Flank and rail, shadow and silky animal grace. At the final turn she has the lead. A nose at first, then a body length. Two.
Ruta puts a hand on my shoulder. My stomach leaps into my throat, my ears. There isn’t a sound in the crowd of thousands, none that I can hear. Somewhere Eric Gooch is watching with his wife, dying a little to see his horse in front. But he won’t see what I see. No one knows what to look for except me and Ruta, and Sonny. How Wise Child lists from the rail. A snag, a falter, a flickering sway that amounts to less than a fraction of a moment. Her legs are going. They’ve done all they can for her.
The field closes on her as I lurch backwards, into Ruta’s chest. I feel his steady drumming heart with my whole body, the beating of a long-ago ngoma, the pounding of arap Maina’s fist against the taut hide of his shield, and that’s how I can bear the rest of it, when I want to cry and scream and go to her, stopping the race. Everything. Can’t the world see that she’s thrown all of herself on that track, and that it isn’t enough?
Then, somehow, from a place beyond sense or strategy, she breaks forward, unpinned from her body’s flaws and marvels. It’s only courage that takes her the final distance. Only grit. When her muzzle hits the tape, the crowd releases the flare of a single collective cheer. Even the losers have triumphed with her, for she has shown them something more than a race.
There is a bright blur of thrown tickets, bodies crowding the rails and gate. The band begins to play. Only Ruta and I are still. Our girl has done more than win. With those legs, with not much more than her heart, she’s broken the St. Leger record.
Even when he was very old, and horses were behind him, and Africa, too, Sonny Bumpus would keep a silver cigarette case in his pocket that I’d engraved for him with Wise Child’s name and the date of our St. Leger. He was fond of taking it out and stroking the warm and gleaming top with his thumb, ready to tell anyone who would listen about the ride of his life, and how I’d brought back Wise Child from a near-crippled state to produce one of the greatest victories in the history of racing.
Sonny was a good egg. He had had that moment of perfect flight, but he gave the greater part of the glory to me. And though Eric Gooch never came crawling to give Wise Child back, or even thank me, most of the colony was ready to praise my accomplishments. Later that season, Ruta and I had a string of validating wins. Welsh Guard triumphed at Eldoret, Melton Pie took the Christmas Handicap, and our own Pegasus won gold at three gymkhanas running.
In February, I began to train Dovedale, a horse of Ben Birkbeck’s, and when I met him at D’s hotel in Nakuru to talk over our strategy, Ginger Mayer was on his arm. I hadn’t seen very much of her since Karen’s shooting party, but she looked lovely and content now, her bright red hair pulled back on one side with a jewelled clip, her pale skin flawless. On her left hand sat a fat pearl ring. Apparently, she and Ben were engaged. She’d made quick work of it, too; his divorce from Cockie had been finalized only months before.
“The wedding will be here at the hotel,” Ginger said, tapping her fingertips on her collarbone, just above the teal silk collar of her dress.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by any of it. Colony life was so small and confined the same people kept popping up in different combinations. Of course Ginger was marrying Ben. Who else was there, after all? But if I’d ever had any patience for the way things worked here, I was losing it. It was like watching fortune’s wheel spinning over and over—spilling bodies that struggled to climb on again, clinging for dear life. I had done my fair share of falling, and I felt exhausted now. I also wasn’t entirely myself. The weather had been so dry lately that it had got into my throat, stinging whenever I swallowed. My ears felt as if they were padded with searing cotton. My eyes burned.
“You should see my doctor in Nairobi,” Ginger insisted later.
“Nonsense,” I told her. “I’ll be all right when it rains again.”
“You work for me now.” She laughed, only pretending to be serious. “Just promise me you’ll see him.”
By the time I got to Nairobi, fever had taken me over. I shook with chills, wondering if malaria had finally got its hooks into me, or typhus, or black water fever, or any of the other deathly ailments that had plagued settlers in Kenya for fifty years. Ginger’s doctor wanted to plunge me into an ice bath straight away. Apparently I had tonsillitis, and he wanted to operate.
“I don’t like doctors,” I told him, reaching for my jacket. “I’ll keep my own blood, thank you very much.”
“The infection’s not going away. You’ll go septic if you keep this up. You wouldn’t want to be the girl who died from bum tonsils, would you?”
And so he operated. I fought only a little as the paper cone soaked with ether was pushed over my nose. Everything spun and hollowed with blackness, and when I finally came to again, climbing into consciousness as through a dense fog, I saw Denys’s familiar face, the light through spotty shades making a smeary sort of halo around him.
“You’re back,” I croaked.
He patted his own throat, pantomiming that I shouldn’t try to speak. “Ginger made me swear to come and see you. I think she was worried her doctor might do you in.” He smiled ruefully. “Glad to see he didn’t.”
Behind him, a nurse in a prim tricornered hat fussed with another patient’s bedding. I wished she would go away and leave us alone. I wanted to ask how he’d been, and if he’d missed me, and what would happen now. As it was, I could barely swallow.
“Tania would have come, but she hasn’t been well,” he said. “The farm is desperate and she’s been so low I’m afraid she might hurt herself.” He saw my eyes widen and explained, “She’s threatened it before. Her father went that way, you know.” He paused, thinking, and I could see how he st
ruggled with every word. Denys didn’t easily discuss matters of the heart, and then there was the complex puzzle of connection between us three. He clearly didn’t want to be speaking of Karen with me, and yet I was deeply involved on both sides.
“I’ve arranged for a neighbour, Ingrid Lindstrom, to stay with her when I go away on safari,” he went on. “Tania shouldn’t be alone now, and she shouldn’t worry about anything.”
“She can’t know about us.” I risked a whisper. “I understand that.” Of course I did.
He looked away to where the shadow of my bedrails stood sketched on the bumpy wall. The dark slanted lines were like the bars of a prison cell. “I never seem to know what to say to you, Beryl.”
“This is goodbye then.”
“For now.”
I closed my eyes, feeling the tendrils of exhaustion wanting to pull me under, into medicine-thick sleep. I had always known I couldn’t have Denys—he wasn’t for having. His spirit was too free for that. I understood that too well, and yet I’d believed we could go on as we had, stealing what time we could, living each marvellous moment as it came. But that was finished. It had to be.
“Beryl,” I heard him say, but I didn’t answer. When I awoke again later, the room was dark and he was gone.
—
Ginger picked me up the next week and drove me back to my lodgings in Nakuru so I wouldn’t have to suffer the train. My throat ached, and my encounter with Denys had left me saddened and raw. Whether or not he married Karen, the bond they had was too complicated and too gripping for either of them ever to separate. Somehow, I would have to find a way to wish them happiness. I did care for them both, as confusing as that was.
“You’re still not up to snuff, are you?” Ginger asked. I’d been quiet, watching the road rise and fall in front of the car, the wheels dipping into ruts so deep they sometimes made my teeth jar. “I shouldn’t get involved,” she went on delicately. “Denys is such a lovable person, isn’t he?”
I looked at her slantwise, wondering what she might know, and from what source. “We’re good friends, of course.”
“He tries so hard with Tania.” She clenched the wheel with pale-yellow kidskin gloves. “But I’m not sure he can really put anyone else at the centre.”
Frankly, Ginger was surprising me. I had only ever heard her chatter about shallow things: lace and waistlines, engagements and puddings. I preferred this real talk. “Many people can’t,” I said. “Does love really have to look one way for it to count?”
“You’re far more understanding of the whole thing than I’d ever be.”
“Really? You and Ben haven’t exactly had a conventional courtship.” I swallowed and felt small knives, wishing I had ice or chilled custard for my throat, or that the dust would settle. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a bitch. I really do wish you two the best.”
“It’s all right. I waited a long time for him without knowing if he would ever be free. Is that stupidity or courage?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “Maybe it’s both.”
After Ginger and Ben were married, she began to play hostess at their farm, Mgunga, and seemed particularly keen on new guests or visitors to Africa. She loved to throw dinner parties, always perfect in a silk frock with a string of pearls that nearly swept her knees. I had a few things I could dust off for polite company but generally wore slacks, instead, and a crisp man’s shirt. That’s what I chose for a dinner party she threw in June, thinking more about how odd it was to be invited back to Njoro as a guest. Their property was less than a mile from Green Hills, and as I traced the familiar road in my new car, nostalgia rose up to meet me. Little had changed and also everything.
Sir Charles and Mansfield Markham were brothers. They had come to Kenya looking for a winter home for their well-to-do mother, who’d had her fill of London’s icy damp. They’d found a suitable villa very nearby in the Rongai Valley, which was where Ginger had stumbled on them. Once she’d finished fêting them properly, they were going to go off on safari, hunting elephant with Blix.
Mansfield was twenty-two, well shaved, and genteel. His skin was as smooth as butter, his hands milky, without the slightest sign of wear. At dinner, I noticed him watching me while his brother seemed distracted by the full platter of gazelle steaks. I didn’t have the heart to tell Charles there was little variety here, and that he’d likely be eating nothing else for months and months.
“My people are from Nottinghamshire,” Mansfield told me, his trimmed nails tracing the heavy base of his water glass. “Like Robin Hood.”
“You don’t look very swashbuckling.”
“No? I keep trying.” He smiled and his nice teeth showed. “Ginger tells me you train horses. That’s unusual.”
“Is that a polite way of saying masculine?”
“Er, no.” He blushed.
Later I found myself facing him over brandy in the low, broad sitting room, where he began to explain what he had said before. “I’m not all that masculine myself, actually. When I was a boy I was sickly and spent too much time with the gardener, learning the Latin names of plants. I garden for sport. My mother gives me sets of white handkerchiefs at Christmas when she gives Charles rifles.”
“Handkerchiefs are useful.”
“Yes.” His eyes crinkled. “Though perhaps not in Kenya.”
“What would you choose instead?”
“For myself? I don’t know. Maybe what you all have here. This is marvellous country. I have a feeling it could bring out the best in anyone.”
“I’ve never wanted to be anywhere else. I grew up just the other side of the hill. My father had the most wonderful horse farm. It was my whole life.”
“What happened to it?”
“Money trouble. It’s crass to talk about such things, though, isn’t it?”
“It’s real. That’s my feeling.”
I didn’t know what it was about Mansfield that put me at ease, but before long I found myself telling him a story about how once an enraged stallion had attacked Wee MacGregor while I sat atop him. The two of them had gone at it as if I didn’t exist. It seemed like a matter of life or death, and then just as suddenly they backed away from each other.
“Weren’t you afraid?”
“Of course…but also fascinated. I felt as if I was witnessing something private and rare. The animals had forgotten about me.”
“You’re much closer to Robin Hood than I am, aren’t you?” he asked after listening keenly.
“Would white handkerchiefs save me?”
“I hope not.”
—
The next day, when the Markham brothers had gone off to join Blix, I drove to Nairobi for a few days to take care of some business. I’d arranged to stay at the club and returned there, that first night, to find Mansfield at the bar with the best bottle of wine he could find.
“There you are,” he said, clearly relieved. “I thought I’d missed you.”
“I thought you were off to find elephant.”
“I was. But we only got as far as Kampi ya Moto before I told Blix to turn the lorry round. I had to see about a girl.”
I felt myself flush. “Did you read that in a book?”
“Sorry. I don’t mean to be presumptuous. I just couldn’t stop thinking about you. Do you have other plans for dinner?”
“I should lie and say I do. That would teach you.”
“It might.” He smiled. “Or I might hang around for another day and ask you again.”
Presumptuous as he was, I found myself liking Mansfield. He set us up in the darkest corner of the dining room, and as the courses came and went, he refilled my glass before it was half empty, and leaned over to light my cigarette as soon as I thought to reach for one. His solicitousness reminded me of Frank, but he didn’t have a whit of Frank’s coarseness.
“I loved your stories from the other night. I think I would have been another person entirely if I’d grown up here, as you did.”
“What was
the matter with your lot?”
“I was too coddled, for one thing. Too cared for, if that makes any sense.”
I nodded. “I’ve sometimes thought that being loved a little less than others can actually make a person, rather than ruin them.”
“I can hardly imagine someone not loving you. When I move to Kenya we’re going to be great friends.”
“What? You’ll pick up and settle here, just like that?”
“Why not? I’ve been drifting for years, wondering what on earth to do with my inheritance. This seems such a clear direction.”
The word inheritance seemed to flutter over the table. “I’ve never known how to handle money,” I told him. “I’m not sure I understand it.”
“Nor do I. Maybe that’s why it sticks to me like glue.”
I picked up my brandy and rolled the globe of the glass in my palms. “Only trouble sticks to me with any regularity…but I’m learning to think that can shape a person, too.”
“You’re going to force me to say it, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“That you have a wonderful shape.”
—
After dinner he trailed me to the veranda and lit my cigarette with a heavy silver lighter that bore his initials, MM, in a deeply stamped scroll. This was obviously part of the spoils of being a Markham from Nottinghamshire. But I could tell he’d grown up with beauty, too. And culture. He had perfect manners and the kind of optimism that came when you knew that if life didn’t go exactly your way one moment, you could change its mind the next.
As he bent to light his own cigarette, I watched the smooth movement of his hands, feeling there was something awfully familiar about him. Then it struck me. It was Berkeley he reminded me of, in his compactness and dark, slim composure. His easy cultured manner. They were cut from the same cloth.