by Paula McLain
He looked up. “What?”
“Nothing. You have lovely hands.”
“Do I?” He smiled.
Beyond the pink terrace, the veranda flared out, flat and cool and dark. Fireflies skimmed its surface with plaintive, flickering pulses of desire. “I love it so much here. It’s one of my special places.”
“I have a room,” he said, looking not at me but at the winking tip of his cigarette. “It’s the most charming thing you’ve ever seen. A separate little bungalow with someone’s nice books everywhere and a table made of ivory tusks. Would you like to come for a nightcap?”
Denys’s cottage. He was never there any more, but it made my throat tighten to think the place could belong to anyone else, even for a night.
“That’s sweet of you, but I’m afraid I have to say no. At least for now.”
“I’m being presumptuous again, aren’t I?”
“Maybe so,” I told him. “Sleep well.”
—
The next afternoon Markham asked me to ride out to Njoro with him by car.
“The roads are terrible,” I warned him. “It will take all day.”
“Even better then.”
He didn’t lose his sunny quality even when one of the tyres on the auto blew out on the road with a sharp report, loud as a shotgun. He’d clearly never changed a tyre, so I did it while he watched, as amazed as if I’d pulled the spare from my pocket instead of the boot.
“You’re a remarkable woman,” he said.
“It’s really quite easy.” I poked around for something to wipe my grimy hands on, and finally had to settle for the knees of my slacks.
“Honestly, Beryl. I’ve never met anyone like you. It makes me want to do something rash.”
“Like learn to change a tyre,” I teased.
“Like buy a farm for you.”
“What? You’ve got to be joking.”
“Not at all. We should all get back what we’ve lost if we can. And anyway, it wouldn’t only be for you. I’d love to have that sort of life.”
“We’ve only just met.”
“I told you I was feeling rash,” he said. “But I should also warn you I’m quite serious. I’m not the sort of fellow who minces around when he sees something he wants.”
We got back into the car and drove for several miles more in silence. I didn’t know what to make of what he’d said, and that soon became obvious.
“I’ve made you uncomfortable,” he said after a while.
“Please don’t misunderstand. I really am flattered.”
“And yet?” He smiled sideways at me from behind the wheel. “I feel a large qualification coming. I’ve a special sense for them.”
“I’m just a very proud person. No matter how much I’d love to have a farm like Green Hills, I couldn’t accept such a large gift from you, or from anyone.”
“I’m proud, too,” he said, “and stubborn as well. But it seems obvious to me that we want the same thing. We could be partners in a grand venture. Equally independent, equally stubborn partners.”
I had to smile at that, but didn’t say anything more until we came to Kampi ya Moto Station and began to climb the steep grade. There wasn’t anything left of our farm but a few now-derelict outbuildings and listing paddock fences—but the view from our hill was the same.
“It’s so lovely,” he said, stopping the car and shutting off the motor. “And all this was yours?”
There were my Aberdares, unfurled in blue against the fresher, paler blue of the sky. And the sharp lip of the Menengai Crater, and the darkly fringed Mau Forest humming with life. Even the ruin of my father’s old house didn’t make me sad when I took in everything else. “Yes, it was.”
“Oh, I nearly forgot,” Mansfield said suddenly. He stretched behind him and pulled out an ice bucket he’d hidden well, wedging it against the rear seat. It was half full of tepid water and the curving bottle that had lost any hope of chilling long before. “It will probably be terrible now,” he said as he popped the cork.
“It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “A dear friend once told me that champagne is absolutely compulsory in Kenya. You must belong here after all.”
“You see, then?” He poured for us, into the simple glasses he’d brought along. “What shall we toast?”
I looked past him, through the window glass at the view that had forever been stitched into my heart. “I’ll never forget this place, you know, even if one day it forgets me. I’m glad you wanted to come.”
“Green Hills is a lovely name. What shall we call our farm?”
“You’re going to keep at it until you wear me down, aren’t you?”
“That’s the plan, yes.”
I looked at him, so like Berkeley with his fine smooth hands and his beautiful haircut, and suddenly had a strong urge to kiss him. When I did, his lips were feather-soft. His tongue tasted like champagne.
True to his word, over the next few months Mansfield wore down my doubts and my defences little by little. The farm was one thing—I had always longed for a way to replace Green Hills in my mind and heart after all—but soon I realized he was set on marrying me.
“My divorce from Jock has only just come through. You can’t really think I’m mad enough to try matrimony again?”
“Everything will be different,” he assured me. “We’re different.”
Mansfield did seem to be a rare sort of man. He was nothing like Jock or Frank or Boy Long, and also listened to every tale about my thorny past without batting an eyelash. I’d decided not to keep a single thing from him—not even about Denys and Karen. I couldn’t if our relationship was going to have a prayer. That much I’d learned, and painfully.
“Are you still in love with Denys?” he had wanted to know.
“He chose Karen. There’s nothing I can do to change that.” I watched a small cloud pass over Mansfield’s expression and his mood. “Are you sure you want to get involved with me? My heart’s always been restless, and I can’t promise I’ll be good at any of the dull stuff, the cooking and whatnot.”
“I could have guessed that part.” He smiled. “I’m looking for a companion as much as a lover. Life has been awfully lonely at times. Tell me, do you like me, Beryl?”
“I do. Honestly. I like you so much.”
“I like you, too. And that’s where we’ll begin.”
—
We married four months after Ginger introduced us, in September of 1927. My bouquet was a cluster of lilies and white carnations, which Karen helped select as a gift, but the choice of my dress was mine—a slim crêpe de chine with sleeves that clung to my arms and a long silver fringe that lay over the skirt like a net of stars. I’d cut my hair for the day in a tightly cropped shingle I had done on impulse, liking immediately how free and cool my neck felt without the weight.
D stood in for my father to give me away and cried doing it, dabbing at his face with damp sleeves. Afterwards there was a fine lunch at the Muthaiga, and through it all I tried not to linger overlong on thoughts of Denys. He was off in Tsavo, then Uganda. I had cabled him with an invitation and got no response. I wanted to believe it was jealousy that kept him silent and absent, but it was just as likely that my news hadn’t reached him at all.
I put my horses on the ease list, said goodbye to Ruta, and we then left for several months’ honeymoon in Europe. In Rome we stayed near the Spanish Steps, at the Hassler Hotel, which looked like a nineteenth-century palace to me. Our bed was enormous and draped with gold velvet. The bathtub was Italian marble. The parquet floors had been polished to shine like mirrors. I couldn’t stop wanting to pinch myself to see if it was all some sort of dream.
“The George the Fifth in Paris is even finer,” Mansfield said. When we were there, and I stood gaping at our private view of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées, he said I should wait until I’d seen Claridge’s in London. He was right about that, too. We arrived in Mansfield’s Rolls-Royce, a car beautiful enough to get all the doorm
en hopping. The attention and the gleaming marble, the vases full of flowers and the draping silk, helped to dispel the ghost of my previous trip to London and how knocked sideways I’d been. This wasn’t that. Whenever I started to drift and the past came back too clearly, I watched the trail of our Louis Vuitton trunks.
We had escargot in Paris. Choucroute garnie with sprigs of fresh rosemary. Spaghetti with mussels and black squid ink in Rome. Even better than the meals were the cultural highlights in every city: the opera, the architecture, the views, and the museums. And with every new sight or incomparable view, when I thought, Denys should be here, I tried to ignore that voice. It was disloyal, for a start, and also impossible. Denys had made his choice and I’d made mine—and Mansfield was a good man. I respected and admired him through and through, and if the love I felt for him wasn’t exactly the kind that could send me over the top of a mountain on horseback in the middle of the night, it was quietly solid. He stayed by my side. He held my hand and kissed me over and over, saying, “I’m so happy we’ve found each other. I can hardly believe it’s real.”
—
Mansfield had always been close to his mother, a relationship I was trying to understand, but how could I really? He was keen for her to like me, and thought it important that we get off on the right foot.
“She’ll have certain expectations of what you’re supposed to be,” he told me.
“What do you mean?”
“Africa is Africa. When we’ve finished here we can hide away and behave however we like. But Mother and her friends aren’t very advanced in their views.”
I thought he was speaking of politics until we arrived at Elizabeth Arden. He’d booked me in for a full day of beautification and dropped me at the red door before I had time to protest. He took himself to Bond Street, and then to Harrods, while I was prodded and primped to within an inch of my life. My brows were plucked bare and drawn on with kohl. My upper lip and legs were waxed and buffed and my lips stained the deepest red I’d ever seen.
“How is this meant to please your mother?” I asked him at the end of the process. I felt naked with so much paint on. I wanted to hide behind my hands.
“It’s perfect. You’re exquisite. She won’t be able to resist you, don’t you see?”
“I’m worried…not that she won’t like me, but that it matters so much to you. The whole scenario.”
“Everything’s going to be fine,” he assured me. “You’ll see.”
Off we went to Swiftsden, the manor house where Mansfield’s mother lived with her second husband, Colonel O’Hea. He was fifteen years younger than she, and neither of the Markham boys had much patience with him. I found him plump and silent, whereas Mrs. O’Hea was plump and full of opinions about everything. When I tried to shake her hand, she accepted only the tips of my fingers.
“Enchantée,” she murmured—though she didn’t seem remotely enchanted—and settled herself in the best chair to lecture me on the accomplishments of her prizewinning hounds.
At that first tea, I couldn’t stop imagining how Mansfield’s mother would have reacted to me as I was the day I turned up at Cockie’s door with no coat at all, my hands chapped and blue, and my toes nearly frozen off. In Paris and then Milan, Mansfield had taken me to the best couturiers. I had all the right clothes now. Silk stockings, a fur stole, a diamond bracelet that slid up and down my arm like Bishon Singh’s long-ago kara. Mansfield had been so generous. I thought he wanted to buy me beautiful things because they were beautiful, but now that I’d run the gauntlet of Elizabeth Arden and stood in his mother’s jewel box of a parlour, I had to wonder if every gift had in fact been for her.
“She can hardly think I’m a society type,” I told him when we were alone in our room. He sat on the edge of the burnished-looking silk bedspread, while at a long vanity table I swatted roughly at the back of my shingle with a silver-handled brush. “What’s the point of all this fuss? My poor eyebrows will never grow back.”
“Don’t be cross, darling. It’s only for a short while, and then we’ll wear our old clothes again and have a lovely new life.”
“I feel like an impostor.”
“But you’re not, don’t you see? This isn’t dressing-up. You are elegant under everything.”
“And what if I wore my slacks? And behaved like myself? Would she throw me out?”
“Please be patient, Beryl. Mother isn’t modern like you.”
I didn’t want to quarrel, so I told Mansfield I would try. But in the end, the only way we could survive our time at Swiftsden was to divide and conquer. Mansfield looked after his mother, and the chauffeur looked after me. I was driven to London for long excursions, and taken round all the tourists’ haunts: London Bridge and Westminster Abbey and Big Ben. I saw the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, the red-suited sentries filing in and out as if they had cogs and wheels. Afterwards, I went to the cinema to see The Battle of the Somme, the projector and illusion of life transfixing me the way so much about London did—electric lights and electric kettles, music streaming out onto Oxford Street from a Magnavox loudspeaker. But the film’s images of war were terrible. Men crouched in ditches, cowering in pain and terror that made me think of arap Maina, hoping to God he hadn’t died that way. I missed Ruta, and wished he could have been there beside me in the dark theatre, though undoubtedly he would have been just as waylaid by it all, or even more so.
A few days later, Mansfield left his mother’s side long enough to take me to Newmarket to look at a stallion. Mansfield thought we might want some new blood for our fresh start.
“I want us to be true partners in this,” he said. “We’ll find land wherever you like, and stock our stables with the finest horses we can find. You’ll show me everything. I want to learn it all and to be a part of the big decisions.”
I was relieved to hear it. Our shared dream of a horse farm had cemented us from the beginning—but at Swiftsden, under his mother’s imperious gaze, I’d begun to have my doubts. Her opinion seemed to matter far too much to him there. The spine went right out of him when she was around, almost as if she were a grand puppeteer, and he made only of cloth and string. But in Newmarket, he squeezed my hand hard as we moved towards the stables. Of course he wanted a new life in Kenya just as much as I wanted Green Hills back. He meant to be his own man, to claim new territory, and to do it all with me by his side. Until that day, I would have to trust him and myself, too.
—
Messenger Boy was a towering red roan with a flaxen tail and mane, and a bright kind of fire whipping through him. He was the biggest stallion I’d ever seen and one of the most beautiful. His dame, Fifinella, was a derby and steeplechase winner; his father, Hurry On, was unbeaten, and one of the greatest sires of racehorses in the world. But though Mansfield and I were thrilled by him instantly, his trainer, Fred Darling, had a sobering story to tell.
“He’s not going to make anything easy for you,” Fred said. “I can’t lie about that.”
The full truth was he’d put Fred in hospital once. Not long after that, he’d killed a groom, trapping him in the stable and attacking him with his powerful hoofs and teeth. It was murder, pure and simple. If Messenger Boy had been a man, he would have got the chop for it; as it was, he’d been banned from racing in England. Kenya could give him a second chance, though.
“Can he be tamed?” Mansfield wanted to know.
“That’s hard to say. I wouldn’t do it.”
“I want a go at him,” I said, watching the way the sun glinted flame red through the stud’s flared nostrils.
“You’re not afraid?” Mansfield asked, reaching for my hand.
“I am. But we can’t leave him here to be chained up like a dog.” For some reason, Messenger Boy made me think of Paddy, of the difficult line between wild, natural things and the civilized world. “He’s still got something good in him. Anyone can see that.”
Mansfield’s hand clenched mine. I knew he was rattled by what we’d learned.
“Will he win derbies?”
“If Ruta were here, he would say His legs are powerful as a leopard’s or His heart is like a wildebeest’s,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.
“All right then, how much for leopard legs?” Mansfield said to Darling, drawing out his chequebook.
Denys and Mansfield had never met. When we drove out to Mbogani on a bright, dry afternoon, just after we’d returned from England, I was a little out of breath thinking about how they might size each other up. We’d brought back the new buttercup-yellow Rolls-Royce. My dress was from Worth, my rope of pearls from Asprey. Perversely, I wanted both Denys and Karen to see all of it—and me—to full advantage. I wasn’t a waif any longer, or a child. But when we arrived only Karen’s majordomo, Farah, was on hand.
“They are out walking, msabu,” he said cordially. “Up to Lamwia, to the site of their graves.”
“They’re still very much alive,” I said to Mansfield, when he gave me a curious look. “They’re just overly romantic that way.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “I love romance.” He opened the rear door, and the three dogs we’d been travelling with rolled out onto the lawn, a borzoi, a pretty red setter, and a young blue deerhound that we’d brought back as a gift for Karen. The dogs leaped and yelped, happy to be free, while I couldn’t stop looking up into the hills, wondering if Karen and Denys could see us, and when they’d come.
—
“You look well, Beryl,” Denys said later on the veranda. My dress had been crushed from sitting by then, and I was feeling tired and a little nervous at seeing him. He kissed me quickly. “Congratulations.”
Mansfield was a full head shorter, but so had Berkeley been. I found myself hoping that Denys saw what I did in Mansfield, and also what Mansfield saw in me.
“We went to the National Gallery,” I said, feeling myself flush crimson, “and the Bolshoi Ballet in Rome.” I was bursting to tell him all we’d done and how I was changed.
“How marvellous,” he said several times, evenly, as I talked and talked. “Good for you both,” but there was no real feeling behind his words. He seemed politely indifferent to everything.