“I don’t have the heart for racing just now,” I told him. “I can’t seem to think about anything from the old days. I don’t want to sit on a horse, and I don’t want to smell the paddock. I’m going to learn to fly.”
“I see,” he said, and was quiet for a moment. “And where will we go for this flying?”
The word we nearly did me in, filling me full of tender holes. “How about Nairobi?”
—
We moved to the Muthaiga Club, where I rented Denys’s old cottage, and Ruta and his family found a house in the native quarter nearby. The sight of Asis running alongside his mother or clambering into Ruta’s arms had me missing Gervase so much it was often almost enough to double me over. According to Mansfield’s letters, he was still fragile but getting stronger all the time. Along with news, Mansfield had also begun sending a small allowance. Though he had been aggressive with threats of divorce when I was still in London, now he dragged his heels on the actual proceedings. But it didn’t matter. He would see things through when he was ready, and I found I didn’t champ at the bit to be fully free of him the way I had when things were so impossible with Jock. I was a mother, but couldn’t hold my child in my arms. Freedom didn’t mean the same thing that it had before. Nothing did.
One day Karen came to my cottage for drinks, and I was surprised to learn she’d been in England, too, just past the time of my well-publicized tangle with the Markhams and the monarchy.
“I can’t imagine how awful it all was,” she said. I’d told her a little about Mansfield and Gervase, but kept the most painful details to myself.
“I’m not the only supposed courtesan on Fleet Street. Some other girl will come along soon, and everyone will forget about me.”
“If that was a wager, I wouldn’t take it.” She sighed and touched her drink to her lips, her gaze turning inwards for a moment. “While you were away, I had locusts at the farm, and then frost. Everything withered. It’s why I went over, to see if there was any way Denys could help save me from my debts.”
“And was there?”
“No,” she said quietly. “He’s promised to take me flying, though, when he returns. The princes are coming back for more safaris, too, though no doubt you already know that.”
“David needs his lion.”
“Naturally,” she said bitterly.
“It’s not all terrible. You know how much Denys has wanted his plane.”
“Yes. And now there are more clients grovelling to throw in with him than he could ever accommodate. I should be happy for him, shouldn’t I? And yet I’m afraid it will ruin us.” Her eyes were lined and impenetrable. I had no idea if she was sharing the truth with me—that she and Denys were near the end—or spinning out a dramatic story. I wasn’t sure how their unfolding drama affected me, either. But it did.
—
Denys returned a few months later and began to make arrangements for the princes’ next visit. I didn’t see him at first but heard from Cockie that he was planning to move into town from Ngong.
“Tania has given back his ring,” she told me when we met in town for lunch. “Apparently the separation is mutual, but that doesn’t mean it’s not killing her.”
“What do you suppose finally broke them?”
“She wanted more than he is capable of.”
“That’s no one’s fault. They both tried as hard as they could, didn’t they?” I paused, trying to find words for my tangled feelings. “We can only go to the limits of ourselves—I’ve learned that if nothing else. Anything more and we give too much away. Then we’re not good for anyone.”
“She may have to sell the farm, you know. After everything, and all her fighting for it. She’s been undeniably brave.”
“She’s been a warrior,” I agreed. And she had. For nearly two decades, Karen had set her complete self on the line, gambling against impossible odds, mortgaging everything, loving her land too much to let it fail. And yet it would fail. I could scarcely imagine Ngong—or Kenya—without her. “The only happy thing I can think of is that you have Blix finally. Was it worth everything you went through to win him?”
“I don’t know.” She twisted the ring on her finger, a square yellow diamond bright as the sun. “I’m not sure it matters anyway. I couldn’t have made any other choice. He is my heart. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I told her. “I think I do.”
—
I was reading in bed a few nights later, in my cottage, when Denys came rapping on the door. I knew it was him before I answered. I’d been waiting for weeks—for years. But this time I knew he’d come.
Throwing on my dressing gown, I turned up the lamp and poured us each a generous glass of scotch. Even tired and unshaven, with a nasty scrape along the back of one arm, he looked like a piece of heaven to me. We sat without speaking for a long time, until I thought that it almost didn’t matter what we found words for or didn’t. His breathing steadied me. The rise and fall of his chest, the soft creaking of the chair under his weight, and his fine rounded fingers locking around the base of the glass.
“How’s your aeroplane?” I finally asked.
“Perfect. I’d no idea I’d love it so much. And it could help business, too. The last time I was up I spotted three different herds of elephants, four massive bulls. For numbers like that, I could be out for weeks, drive hundreds of miles.”
“What? Scout for them from the air then, and wire ahead to camp?”
He nodded. “Not bad, right?”
“Not bad.” I smiled.
We fell quiet again, listening to the sounds of the insects in the grass and the jacaranda. “I heard Karen may have to sell her farm,” I told him.
“She’s looking at the very darkest side of things. I’m worried about her, but she’s asked me not to visit. If we don’t keep our distance now, we might just lose everything. Even our lovely memories.”
I set down my drink and went to him, resting my knees in front of his chair and taking his hands. “I have so much respect for her, you know. She’s the most remarkable woman.”
“Yes.” He looked at me carefully, almost solemnly, as if he were trying to read my features like an ancient text. The lamp threw a dark wand over part of his face, but his eyes gleamed, soft and amber coloured. They reminded me of Berkeley’s Falernian wine. Of lions in the grass.
“Will you teach me to fly?”
“I couldn’t take your life in my hands. Not when I’ve just got the hang of this myself.” He said nothing of his own life, or of Maia Carberry’s, how her plane had smoked and steamed on the Ngong Road for hours, keeping the authorities from even trying to recover her and Dudley’s remains. I wouldn’t have expected him to.
“I’m going to do it anyway.”
“Good. I’ll be back in three months,” he said. “We’ll go up and you can show me everything you’ve learned. We’ll head over to the coast, or out on safari together. We never did get those six days, did we?”
I thought of Pegasus and the elephants and the dissolving bridge, of Denys’s boy running twenty miles in bare feet to break my heart. “No, we didn’t.”
A great deal had happened to Tom Campbell Black since the day we met by the side of the road in Molo. He’d got the aeroplane he’d dreamed of and learned to master it, becoming the managing director and chief pilot at Wilson Airways in Nairobi, a spanking-new flying operation that ferried paying passengers and did courier work. He had also recently made the headlines by rescuing a world-famous German war pilot, Ernst Udet, whose plane had gone down in the desert. When I searched him out to ask about lessons, he didn’t seem at all surprised to see me again, saying, “I always knew you were going to fly. I could see it in the stars.”
“I see. So that’s why you made a long, grand speech about aeroplanes and freedom and the clouds and nothing holding you back? That was all for me?”
“What? Don’t I look like a mystic?”
“As long as you agree to teach me,” I said, l
aughing, “you can be as mysterious as you like.”
—
We began in the early morning over a peacefully sleeping Nairobi. The aerodrome was as ramshackle then as the town of Nairobi had been only thirty years before, tin and glass and hope standing tiptoe at the edge of emptiness.
Tom had never had a student before, but in a way, that didn’t matter. Most of flying was instinct and intuition, with a few do-or-die rules thrown in on top. “Trust your compass” was one of these. “Your own judgement will go haywire sometimes. The horizon will lie to you, too, when you can see it. It’s bound to. But this needle”—he pointed with no small drama—“this will tell you where you should be going. Not where you are. Put your faith there, and you’ll catch up eventually.”
The plane we used was set up for dual instruction. I could learn the instruments and the feel of the rudder bar with him on hand to catch my mistakes. There were earphones we could use to talk to each other, but soon Tom stopped wanting to use them. “You’re going to have to find out where you’re misstepping on your own,” he told me. “I can keep correcting you, but what would be the point?”
He was right, of course. The throttle, the angle of the joystick, the tail skid and wing flaps and elevators—each element needed to become something I could feel and know—and even fail at occasionally, especially at the beginning. Sometimes the Moth’s weight sagged, and she lost altitude, dropping towards the sun-bleached grass and the rocks, everything hurtling at great speed. There were unpredictable downdraughts near the mountains. The propeller could sputter out as quick as a breath, or weather could come up from nowhere. You could land in sansevieria, ripping your wings to tatters, or sideslip and crack the undercarriage. You could hit buried roots or clods or the deep snag of a pig hole and bust the struts, grounding yourself or worse. You could practise and practise and read all the signs correctly, and still founder. And yet the challenges felt exactly right to me. They brought me alive in a way I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
“I want my B-class licence,” I told Denys when he came back to town. “I could be the only professional female pilot in Africa.”
“You don’t want much.” He laughed. “But you broke the same sort of new territory as a trainer, didn’t you?”
“I suppose so. This feels different, though. It’s just you and your instincts up there, isn’t it? The challenge of that feels new every time.” I was quiet for a while and then felt my way towards something I’d only just begun to realize. “After what happened with Gervase, I began to wonder if I’d ever find my way again.”
“You’ll see your son soon,” he said softly. “Mansfield can’t fend you off for ever.”
“I won’t let him. I would never give up on Gervase the way my mother did me. I couldn’t.”
“Sometimes when you’re hurting, it helps to throw yourself at something that will take your weight.”
I nodded.
“Just promise me you’ll be careful when you fly.”
“I promise,” I said. “You know, Ruta has made the leap without a hitch somehow. He seems as exhilarated by the whole business as I am, and Tom says he has the makings of a damned fine mechanic.”
The sun had set and I lit the hurricane lamp while Denys dug a book out of his satchel and then stretched out in a chair, his long legs crossed. He read aloud to me as I curled next to him, both of our bodies in a warm arc of light. For nearly ten years I’d wanted this…this exactly. Is he really here? I thought. Am I? Denys read on, his voice rising and falling, while a leopard moth that had got caught in the curtains stopped struggling for a moment, and realized it was free.
Denys was between safaris, and there was a window, a very small one, for the two of us to go out alone. We made for southern Masailand, aiming at the Mara River with a team of Africans including Denys’s man, Billea, and a Kikuyu boy, Kamau, he often travelled with. It was impossibly dry, and yet past Lake Province we saw countless animals—buffalo and rhino and shaggy lion, gazelles of every shade and variety. The golden slopes and shimmering flatlands swarmed with life.
Denys was most himself in wild places. Through a pair of smudgy field glasses, he could gauge a set of kudu horns, or the weight of still hanging ivory. He knew how to shoot anything, with no miscalculation, and could skin an animal so quickly and with such precision there was almost no blood in it. But he was just as keen not to shoot or kill, not if he didn’t have to, using his camera instead. Photographic safaris were a new idea then, and he believed cameras had the power to change hunting, the sporting idea of it. Hunters could have Africa without taking any of it away—without ruining it.
On safari, I saw Denys in sharper relief than I ever had. He had an infallible compass, and a way of seeing everything as if he knew it would never be there exactly the same again. More than anyone I’d known, Denys understood how nothing ever holds still for us, or should. The trick is learning to take things as they come and fully, too, with no resistance or fear, not trying to grip them too tightly or make them bend. I knew all this from my Lakwet days, but being with him helped me remember it, and feel it all again powerfully.
—
For most of a day we walked through alkali flats, the white crust like a frosted layer of salt that rose in a powder when your boots punched through. We wore the chalk on us everywhere—up to our knees, in the creases of our fingers clenching the rifle strap, down in the cavity between my breasts, and in my mouth, too. I couldn’t keep it out and stopped trying. I couldn’t keep anything out, I realized, and that was something I loved about Africa. The way it got at you from the outside in and never let up, and never let you go.
Denys was happy and cheerful all day, though he’d drunk most of the fifth of gin we’d shared the night before. It was a mystery to me, how he threw it off. His blood must have been thick indeed, for it carried enough malaria to sink an ox, and yet he never fevered and never went down. The sun was an anvil on the top of my head, shoulders, and neck, where fresh sweat poured and wetted my collar. My clothes hung on me, the wet salt from my body drying in rings. I was breathing hard, and hearing my own breath rise raggedly. But we had our distance to cover. What was tiredness? The porters moved ahead in a line, and when my vision blurred, the slim lines of their bodies against the great whiteness of the plain looked like human geometry. Limbs became sticks and sharp dashes, an equation of simple perseverance.
Just past midday, we stopped and rested in the muddled shade beneath a great baobab tree. It was squat and wide, with ribboning, undulating bark like a skirt of some sort, or like wings. This one hung with fruit in pale-brown drooping pods, and with the baboons feasting on them. Several sat on a branch over our heads, and we could hear them cracking open the fruit, a musical rattle, like maracas. A rain of the powdery meat fell on the ground around us, into the short yellow grass, and stray spat seeds, too, and baboon droppings, which smelled foul.
“We could move off,” Denys said when I grimaced, “or shoot them.”
I knew he wasn’t serious about the shooting, and joked, “Not on my account. I could probably lie down in the shit and drop off to sleep this minute.”
He laughed. “The physical effort changes you. You grow a tougher skin.”
“Mine was pretty tough to begin with.”
“Yes, I knew that straight away.”
I looked at him, wondering what else he’d felt when we first met—if he had sensed a jangling of recognition as I had, the sharp and familiar tolling of a bell, as if we were meant to know each other. “Did you ever imagine we might somehow end up here?”
“Under this terrible tree?” He laughed. “I’m not sure,” he said, as more dusty powder fell around us from above. “But I could grow to like it.”
—
By evening we’d reached the river and set up camp. We ate a young kudu that Denys had shot and skinned that morning, and then drank our coffee, staring into the fire as it snapped and spiralled, purplish smoke rising.
“Tania chased of
f a pair of lions once with only a rawhide whip,” he said. “She and Blix were on a cattle drive. He’d gone off to shoot something for their dinner when there was a loud commotion among the cattle. The porters scattered like mice, and it was only poor Tania standing there while each of the lions climbed up on the backs of their quarry. The rifles were packed away in the trunks, ridiculously enough.”
“So she whipped them away? That was brave of her.”
“Yes, she has even more courage than you’d think.”
We had been careful lately not to speak too much of Karen, for the farm had been sold, and it was clear she was going away. “You have plenty of reasons to love her,” I ventured.
“And admire her,” he said.
“Even better, for my money.”
“I would never have made her a good husband, though. She must have known that deep down.”
“It’s funny what we fight for, even when we know it’s impossible. Did she manage to save the oxen?”
“One, yes. The other they ate for dinner when Blix came back empty-handed.”
“It all worked out neatly then.”
“That time, yes.”
From far off, we heard the high monkeylike chirping of hyenas, the laughing you hear tell of, though it’s always sounded slightly mournful to me. The smoke billowed in a surge, as if it were trying to call out, too, to the horizon perhaps, or the just-stirring stars.
“It wouldn’t be such a bad life, you know, to be a lion,” Denys said. “The whole of Africa is his buffet. He takes what he wants, when he wants, without over-exerting himself.”
“He has a wife, too, though, doesn’t he.” It wasn’t a question.
“One wife at a time,” he clarified.
Then, while the fire rose and smoked and threatened to singe our feet, he spoke out Walt Whitman, because I asked him to. He said the words to me and to the stars while I grew more and more still. I was thinking about how I had struggled and strained for years, as Karen had, and towards things that were disastrous for me. And yet maybe that was unavoidable. The pilgrims and the lost often did look the same, as Denys had once told me, and it was possible everyone ended up in the same place no matter which path we took or how often we fell to our knees, undoubtedly wiser for all of it.