Everything was so murky suddenly. And it seemed even more unfair that while my future whirled sickeningly, Ruta’s was rolling out exactly as he’d always dreamed. For ten years or more he and I had played at besting each other, practising fearlessness, stretching for more. The games had prepared Ruta for his future, and should have prepared me for mine, too. The manoeuvres had become riskier and more difficult, but maybe each was the same when you got down to it. Jumping had taught me how to jump, hadn’t it? I only had to look at Ruta to know he wasn’t a child any more. Neither was I.
The next afternoon, after I’d practised the pronouncement over and over in my hut, so I could sound certain of myself, I told my father I was going to stay in Njoro.
“Good.” He nodded and tented his fingers, studying me. “I think that’s best. Jock’s sensible and not afraid to dirty his hands. I know he’ll take care of you.”
“I can look out for myself, too,” I bluffed, my pulse thudding in my ears. I had to pause and steady myself to say the next thing. “Can I keep Pegasus?”
“You earned him fair and square. He’s not mine to take back.” He rose to get himself a drink. The peaty odour of scotch flickered up and stung my nose.
“I’d like one of those.”
He looked at me, surprised. “You’ll have to go for water.”
I shook my head.
“All right,” he said. “I guess you’ve earned that, too.” He handed me the rounded heavy glass, and we sat in silence as the sun retreated. I’d had wine and champagne, but this was different. It made me feel older.
“We’ve had a good run here, haven’t we?” he asked.
I nodded, unable to reach words for anything I felt. I looked into my glass, letting the scotch burn through me.
Once I decided to say yes to Jock, everything moved with shocking speed. Our clothes were ordered, the priest engaged, paper invitations sent flying far and wide. Emma had very clear ideas about my dress—pearl-trimmed ivory satin with embroidered rosettes and thistles on the train—and since I had no taste myself, I agreed to all her choices. Orange blossoms and long silk ninon for the veil, slippers so thin and fine I couldn’t imagine them lasting beyond the day. When gifts began arriving—a silver cake stand, filigreed napkin rings, a cut-glass bud vase, various cheques written out to Mr. and Mrs. Purves—they were carefully put away in one corner of the house, while things belonging to Daddy and Emma were packed in crates and settled in other corners. It was dizzying to see the farm dissolving as my future was being planned, but I also understood it couldn’t be any other way.
Jock and I didn’t spend more than a few moments alone in the weeks of hurried preparation and manoeuvring. When we were, he squeezed my hands tightly in his and told me how happy we were going to be. He talked about the changes and expansions he would make to our farm. How ambitious he was for our future. How prosperity was surely just around the corner. I latched on to Jock’s dreams, wanting to feel reassured. Hadn’t Green Hills started with nothing long ago? Our new farm would grow and become wonderful, just like that. I had to believe it was possible even as I waited to feel more for Jock himself.
“You’re a fast worker,” Dos squealed when I told her the news. “The last I heard he made you nervous.”
“He still does a bit,” I confessed, “but I’m trying not to let on.”
“It’s not as if we have so many options here,” she said. “I’ll be a farmer’s wife one day, too, I imagine. At least he’s dashing.”
“You think it’s all right, then, that I’m not in love with him?”
“You will be, silly. At least you’ll stay here where you belong—and he’ll take care of you. Even if your father wasn’t moving to Cape Town, he couldn’t look out for you for ever.” She smirked. “Or so mine tells me every chance he gets.”
—
We were married at All Saints on a sun-shocked Wednesday in October, two weeks before my seventeenth birthday. The legal marrying age was eighteen then, but my father thought I was old enough, and that seemed good enough for me. At the church, I walked on his arm, keeping my eyes on Jock to hold me in place, as if I were going into battle with him. It did the trick until I reached him and the starch-collared reverend, and then my heart began to gallop. I worried that everyone could hear it, that they all knew or guessed that I had no love for this man. But love was dubious, too, wasn’t it? It certainly hadn’t done much good for my mother and father, or Emma and my father, for that matter. Maybe being practical was one way to ensure I ended up differently from them? I hoped so as I gripped Jock’s hand, finding the breath to say Yes to the reverend’s long string of difficult questions, and then, I will.
Jock had a pal from the King’s African Rifles who came to stand up for him—the tall and smart-looking Captain Lavender, with bright eyes and a cowlick that swept a wing of golden hair onto his forehead. It was Lavender who drove us to the Norfolk Hotel in Jock’s yellow Bugatti. He sped through the streets of Nairobi, throwing me across the leather backseat towards Jock, so that I nearly bruised myself against his clenched thighs. It had to mean something that he was so strong, I told myself. He would be able to hold me up and direct the forces around my life when my father was gone. I clamped on to that hope and didn’t let it go as we stepped out and onto the long run of wooden steps to the hotel, everyone smiling for us, my dress and veil arranged like fondant, our picture taken for the papers and for all time.
One hundred guests were herded into the dining room, which was dressed as finely as the place could muster. The event had flushed out the up-country—the farmers who’d become soldiers, then farmers again. D was there, his hair long and wild under a ribboned helmet. A scabbard swung out from his belt, whacking at the air as he turned and tried to kiss me. He had given us a generous cheque and let me know, a little sentimentally, that if I ever needed him I had only to call out and he’d be there. His promise touched me and made me feel a little steadier as I carried myself from guest to guest, holding the yards of silk ninon in my hands so I could walk without tripping.
Under buttery gravy, there was the ubiquitous tommie steak with buttons of potatoes and pearled onions. My father was paying through the nose for the champagne, so I drank as much as I could, every time it came round. When I danced later, my feet were slightly numb and tingled as I backed across the parquet, led by D and every farmer who could scoot away from his wife. Finally I reached my father. He looked dashing that night, but also sad. There were long lines around his mouth, and his eyes seemed tired and far away.
“Are you happy?” he asked.
I nodded into his shoulder and squeezed him more tightly.
In the wee hours, Lavender chauffeured us again, this time to the Muthaiga Country Club, to a square room lit with a single crystal lamp. A broad bed swam with chenille.
Jock and I didn’t know each other. I felt that now, seeing the dense shape he made in the room and wondering, in a dizzy way, how it would be when we lay down. I was drunk and glad for that when Jock’s hands tugged at my buttons. His tongue flicked around the inside of my mouth, both sour from the wine. I tried to match him, to be good at it—to catch up with what was happening. His mouth was hot on my neck. His hands dropped to push here and there along my body. We fell to the bed, and there was an absurd moment when he tried to squeeze between my legs, my long narrow skirt resisting him, and me trying to help. I laughed and realized instantly that was the wrong thing.
What did I know about sex? Nothing except what I saw in our paddocks or had heard from Kibii about the games young Kip boys and girls played in the dark. I’d no idea what to do or how to arrange myself to be taken—but I did know that something meaningful had changed. Jock had been hard—I’d felt the stiff knot of his groin against my leg and hip—but that was gone now. Before I knew what was happening, he rolled off me and onto his back, his arm coming up to shield his eyes as if there were a glaring lamp in the room instead of shadows.
“I’m sorry,” I finally said.
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“No, no. I’m just done in. It’s been a long day.” He rose on his elbow to give me a smacking kiss on the side of my cheek, and then turned away again to settle his pillow under him, punching it into place.
I studied the lines of his neck and shoulders, my mind whirring. What had I done or not done? Was it that I’d laughed at him—at us? As I lay there feeling stunned and confused, Jock began to snore lightly. How could he sleep at such a moment? It was our wedding night, and I was alone.
I kicked my way out of my dress and then washed my face in the basin, stripping off the paint and the waxy lipstick, being careful not to look in the mirror. I had packed only a flimsy nightgown, something Emma had found in a lace shop, and it was cold against my skin. Back in bed, I stretched out next to Jock’s hulking form. He made a solid mountain, seeming to take up even more space now that he was unconscious. He breathed on gutturally, dreaming his unknowable dreams while I lay there in the dark, willing myself to sleep.
The next morning at Nairobi Station we climbed aboard the train that would take us to Mombasa, and then onto the ship that would ferry us to India for our honeymoon.
I was Beryl Purves—and still a virgin.
In Bombay the air was full of spices and the crying sitars of street musicians. White bungalows crowded the lanes, with peeling shutters that closed at the hottest part of every day and then opened again at night when the sky went red and deep purple. We stayed with Jock’s aunt and uncle, in their compound below the posh Malabar Hill. Jock’s parents and two of his three brothers were there, having come to see if I was up to snuff. I wanted to have a long look at them all, too—the new family I’d won, as if in a lottery.
On the voyage, Jock had told me how his family had moved to India from Edinburgh when he was a boy, but I found it hard to remember details of landholdings and business mergers when I stood and looked at them—a band of ruddy, high-boned Scots in a silky brown Indian sea. Jock’s mother was the pinkest of all, like a flamingo in bright silk. She wore her auburn hair in a high coil that was being quietly taken over by strands of pure white. Jock’s father, Dr. William, was a version of Jock, with strong-looking hands and bright blue eyes that winked at me, trying to put me at ease, as his wife asked a string of questions that weren’t really questions.
“You’re very tall, aren’t you?” she kept saying. “Unnaturally so, don’t you think, Will?”
“I don’t think I’d go so far as to say unnatural, darling…. ” His brogue tipped the ends of his sentences up expectantly. I always thought he was about to say something more, but then he didn’t.
Jock patted my knee nervously. “It means she’s healthy, Mother.”
“Well, she’s got plenty of sun, hasn’t she?”
Later, when Jock and I were alone in our room dressing for dinner, I studied myself in the full-length looking glass. I wasn’t used to frocks and stockings, or the strapped high-heeled shoes that were the fashion then. My stocking seams wouldn’t line up straight. My new underthings, bought in Nairobi with Emma’s instructions, pinched at my waist and under my arms. I felt like an impostor.
“Don’t fret,” Jock said. He sat on the bed, tightening the elastic on his braces. “You look fine.”
I reached behind me to adjust the stockings again. “Your mother doesn’t like me.”
“She just doesn’t want to lose me. That’s how mothers are.” He’d spoken the words so lightly, but they stung. What would I know about it?
“She looks down her nose at me,” I said.
“Don’t be silly. You’re my wife.” He got up and came to take my hands, giving them a strong, reassuring squeeze—but as soon as he let go, his words clattered to the floor. I didn’t feel old enough to be anyone’s wife, or that I knew enough or had lived enough, or understood the essential things. I didn’t know how to say any of this to Jock, either. That I was afraid of the promises we’d made. That late at night as I lay beside him in bed I felt lonely and numb, as if some part of me had died.
“Please kiss me,” I said, and he did, and though I leaned against him and tried to meet the kiss and to take it in, I couldn’t quite feel it. I couldn’t feel us.
—
I had never spent so much time by the sea, and hated the way the air thickened with salt and sat on my skin and made me always long for a bath. I was far more comfortable with dust. Here, moisture puddled on everything and seeped into the walls, swelling the windows shut. Black spores of mould grew on the walls of the houses, ageing them like a skin.
“It seems wrong,” I said to Jock. “Bombay is drowning, when at home we’d kill for even a little of it.”
“It’s not as if India has stolen Njoro’s rain. And we are here. Try to enjoy it.”
Jock seemed to like playing the role of tour guide at first, proudly showing me the bright bazaars smelling of curry and onion chutneys; turbanned, swaying sitar players; the polo fields and the Turf Club, which was so rich and manicured its gleaming grass put ours in Nairobi to shame. I held his hand and listened, wanting to forget all about the trouble at home. We were newlyweds, after all—but when evening came things fell apart. We’d been married for several weeks now, and I could count on one hand the number of times we’d actually had sex. The first had been on the voyage to India. I’d been seasick for much of it, particularly when we launched away from land at the Gulf of Aden and headed out into the Arabian Sea. The horizon stretched and pitched, when I could stand to look at it.
Before the nausea set in, we had managed to make love on my narrow bunk, but the whole thing was such a tangle of elbows and knees and bumping chins, I barely knew the thing was happening before it was over. Afterwards, he kissed my cheek and said, “That was lovely, sweetheart.” Then he crawled out of my bunk and into his, while I was left feeling just as lost and confused as I had been on our wedding night.
Jock’s drinking didn’t help matters. At four o’clock every afternoon when we were in Bombay, we met the rest of the family on the veranda for cocktails. There was a ritual to it, I learned very quickly, every feature played out to the letter, how much ice went in, how much lime, the air filling with a tangy zest that I felt at the back of my throat. Jock’s uncle Ogden was pink faced, and always at the gin before anyone but Jock, settling in his chair under the jacaranda tree and dark, forever-noisy jackdaws.
“These birds have become our personal housekeepers in India,” Ogden explained with a strange note of pride, gesturing to a flock in the courtyard. “If not for them, the streets would be overrun with rubbish.”
I watched one delicately pluck at the carcass of a mouse, then peck at a hillock of pale-pink sand. “What’s he doing?” I asked.
“Cleaning his gullet,” Ogden explained. “A bit like rinsing your mouth after dinner.”
I studied the bird, and then two others swooping in to fight over a smear of crushed mango on the stones, pecking with sharp beaks at each other’s throats, ready to fight to the death. Somehow they made me sad and long for home more than I already did. Too much was new about India, and the days had no anchor. Jock might have fallen for the bold girl I was when I was fourteen, but he didn’t really know me any more than I knew him. We were strangers, and also together nearly all the time. I kept telling myself it would be easier when we were at home on our own farm, with work to do. It had to be.
One night at the Purveses’, the table was set with a feast that hardened and grew cold because Jock’s mother had tipped back so much gin she’d forgotten the cook had called us in long before. She listed in the darkening courtyard and finally leaned into a potted palm and closed her eyes. No one else seemed to notice or care.
“Let’s go up to bed,” I said to Jock.
“What?” He tried to fix his bloodshot eyes on my face, lip-reading.
“I’m exhausted,” I said.
“I’ll be right behind you.”
I walked past the dining room with a table full of thickened and filmed-over curries, the servants too afraid to cle
ar them away. In the bathroom, I climbed into the soaking tub lined with painted tiles. One was of a tiger, though age had faded his stripes to a tired beige. Somewhere in India, real tigers roamed, hungry and roaring as Paddy had once roared. It was an awful thought, but in a way, I knew I would rather be wherever the tigers were, or even back in the muddy pig hole I’d spent several nights in the time I’d run away from school. At least then I had known what I was up against. I lowered myself into the stinging water and waited there for Jock until it ran cold, then filled it again. Finally I went to bed and curled up on the apricot silk sheets, shaking a little.
Dear Dos, I wrote on a picture postcard the next day, Bombay is beautiful and glamorous. We’ve been to the Turf Club nearly every day where Jock and the other members are showing me how polo is really done. You should see it all one day.
I looked at the words I’d written, knowing I ought to be telling her, or someone, how miserable I felt, but didn’t know where to begin. And what would it change anyway? I chewed on my pen, thinking of what I might add. Finally, I signed my new married name and left the card to be posted.
We were nearly four months in Bombay, and when we returned, British East Africa didn’t exist any more. The details of the armistice had finally been settled, and the protectorate dissolved. We were Kenya now, after our tallest mountain—a proper colony, with the graveyards to prove it. Africans and white settlers had died in the tens of thousands during wartime. Drought had stolen thousands more, and so had the Spanish flu. Disease tore through towns and villages taking the thinnest and smallest, children and young men, and new wives like me. Demobilized farmers and herdsmen came home in despair, not knowing how they might begin again.
I felt much the same way. At Green Hills, I expected to find my father and Emma packed and on the verge of departure. That had been part of my plan—to spend the worst of the dismantlement in Bombay—but the farm hadn’t even been sold yet. My father hadn’t made a move.