Circling the Sun

  “Ah.” He settled himself gruffly in a chair opposite me. “I wondered when that would come up. You’ll be grand at it, girl. Really you will. I’ve always said you were as sharp as a tack.”

  “I’m not so sure.” I made a half-hearted attempt to finish my tea, which had grown cold.

  “Swear you’ll come and see us whenever you can. You have a home here, too. You always will.”

  When I said goodbye, Lady D walked me out to the stable and put her hands on my shoulders. “There’s no girl quite like you, Beryl, and you’re going to do well in Nairobi. You’ll do well anywhere.”

  —

  It was nearly dark when I reached the farm, and the mountains were an inky blue and seemed to shrink and flatten against the distance. Wee MacGregor crested our hill, bringing us to the edge of the paddock, and I saw Kibii heading off towards the path to his village. I thought of calling out to him, but I’d had enough difficult talking for one day, and didn’t know how to tell him I would be leaving soon. I didn’t know how to say goodbye.

  Over the next two and a half years I did my best at school—though my best was hardly up to scratch. I ran away half-a-dozen times, once hiding in a pig hole for three days. Another time I sparked a rebellion that had most of the school bolting onto the plains after me on their bicycles. That got me sacked, finally. My father met my train looking cross but also relieved, as if he understood that sending me away was never going to work.

  But the farm wasn’t at all the place I had left. The world wasn’t the same, actually, and the war had made certain of that. We had heard all the biggest bits of news at school, about the archduke’s assassination, about Kaiser Wilhelm and how nations we’d scarcely heard of had banded together to fight one another. For British East Africa, war meant stopping the land-greedy Germans from taking everything we believed was rightfully ours. Large portions of the protectorate had become battlefields, and men everywhere—Boers and Nandis and white settlers, Kavirondo and Kipsigis warriors—had left their ploughs and mills and shambas to join the King’s African Rifles. Even arap Maina had gone off to fight. During one of my school holidays, Kibii and I stood together at the top of our hill to watch him march off to join his regiment. He held his spear high in one hand and his buffalo-hide shield in the other, and carried himself straight and proud as he walked down the dirt track. He was sent hundreds of miles away, to the border of German East Africa, and handed a rifle in place of his spear. He didn’t know how to use a gun, but of course he would master it. He was the bravest and most self-assured warrior I knew, and I was sure he’d come home with stories, and perhaps enough gold to buy a new wife.

  But before the end of that summer holiday, a messenger came running onto our farm one afternoon, and he told us what had happened so far away. Arap Maina had fought as bravely as he could, but he had died in that distant place and was buried where he fell, without his tribe or family to honour him. Kibii’s face revealed nothing when we heard the news, but he stopped eating and grew thin and angry. I didn’t know how to comfort him or what to think. Arap Maina hadn’t even seemed mortal, and now he was gone.

  “We should find the man who killed your father and plunge a spear into his heart,” I told him.

  “It’s my duty to do this, the moment I become a moran.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I told him. I had loved arap Maina like my own father and was ready to go anywhere and do anything to avenge his death.

  “You are only a girl, Lakwet.”

  “I’m not afraid. I can throw a spear as far as you can.”

  “It’s not possible. Your father would never part with you.”

  “I won’t tell him then. I’ve run away before.”

  “Your words are selfish. Your father loves you, and he is alive.”

  My father meant the world to me. When I was away, I had longed for him every bit as much as I had for the farm, but the war had worked its changes on him, too. When he met my train, his face was so drawn and serious I barely knew how to say hello. We motored up the long hill, and he explained that nearby Nakuru was now a garrison town. The racecourse had become a remounting and transport depot for the troops. Our horses had been conscripted into service, leaving our stables and paddocks more than half empty, but it didn’t matter since all the race meetings were suspended for the duration.

  As soon as we reached the crest, I could see the difference for myself. Hundreds of our workers had gone off with only the clothes on their backs and any weapons they had—guns or spears or bush knives—and some confused idea of glory or honour. The empire had called, and so now they were soldiers of the Crown. It was possible they would be back soon, but for the moment, it was as if someone had turned Green Hills over like a box and shaken its contents out onto the hard ground where they’d blown away.

  In the main house, Mrs. O had made a meal for my homecoming and dressed for it. She was as tidy and pressed as ever, but there were strands of silver along her temples, and fine lines around her eyes, and I found I was seeing her in a new way. My bunkmate for most of the time I was at school was a girl named Doris Waterman—though she liked to be called Dos. Night after night, she’d lean down from her bunk over mine to whisper things, her straight brown hair falling around her face in a curtain. She told me she was an only child and that her father owned a string of shops in town. He also owned the New Stanley Hotel, which was an important gathering place for anyone coming through Nairobi. Anything that happened there, or anywhere nearby, Dos seemed to know.

  “Mrs. Orchardson?” she’d said quizzically when I mentioned her in passing. “Is her husband still in Lumbwa?”

  “What? She’s not married. She’s been living with my father for years.”

  Dos made a clucking sound at my innocence and then proceeded to tell me how, years before, Mr. Orchardson, who was an anthropologist, had taken a Nandi woman for a lover and that she had become pregnant.

  I was shocked. “How do you know that?”

  She shrugged, still half-tipped over the bunk. “Everyone knows. It’s not something that happens every day.”

  “So Mrs. O came to us? To escape her situation there?”

  “Njoro wouldn’t be far enough from Lumbwa for me. It’s so humiliating. And now she and your father aren’t even married.”

  It was as if there’d been clouds over my eyes, puffy and purely white. I hadn’t known anything about the world of adults or the number of thorny things that could happen between men and women. I hadn’t been paying attention, but now the clouds fell away in an instant, leaving the hard facts. My father must have known about Mr. Orchardson and the Nandi woman and either not cared or not given in to worrying about what the connection meant for him. Their current living arrangement was more scandalous than I ever imagined, for she was still married. Perhaps my father was, too. I’d never given the matter much attention, but I did now, feeling that their relationship was another thing that had grown infinitely more complicated in a very complicated world.

  “When will the war end?” I asked my father. “At school everyone kept saying how the fighting is just preventative.” Bright sunlight glinted through the glazed windowpanes on the simple tea service and the oilcloth and hearthstones and cedar panels. Each object was the same as it had been—but the air all around felt different. I was different.

  “They do say that, don’t they? And yet the casualties keep mounting. Twenty thousand in Africa alone.”

  “Will you go off to fight?” I had a hard time keeping my voice steady asking it.

  “No—I promise I won’t. But D has joined up.”

  “When? Why? Surely there are enough men already.”

  My father and Mrs. O exchanged a meaningful look.

  “Daddy? What’s happened? Has D been wounded?”

  “It’s Florence,” Mrs. O said. “She fell very ill not long after your last visit. Her heart gave out.”

  “There was nothing wrong with her heart! She was always as fit as a horse.”

>   “No,” my father said slowly, with great care. “She’d actually been ill for years. No one knew but D.”

  “I don’t understand. Where is she now?”

  My father looked at the backs of his hands. The colour had drained from his face. “She died, Beryl. Six months ago. She’s gone.”

  Six months? “Why did you keep it from me?”

  “We didn’t want to tell you in a telegram,” my father said. “But I don’t know. Maybe we were wrong to wait.”

  “She was a wonderful woman,” Mrs. O said. “I know you loved her very much.”

  I could only look at her numbly. I pushed my chair back and made my way to the stable in a sort of trance, feeling undone. How many dozens of hours had I sat on Lady D’s carpet, drinking her tea and soaking up her words, never knowing she was ill or even weak? Maybe I hadn’t known her at all, not really, and now she was gone. I wouldn’t ever see her again. I’d never even said goodbye.

  In the shabby stable office, I found Buller napping and dropped to my knees, rubbing my face against his brindled coat. He was completely deaf now, and because he hadn’t heard me he was startled—but also happy. He sniffed me everywhere and licked my face, wriggling all the way to his tail. When he flopped to the beaten earth again, I lay my head on him, looking around at my father’s things—his desk with the thick black studbook, his riding helmet and crop, a plate full of pipe ash, yellowed newspapers, and the calendar on the wall. There should have been important dates circled in red. The stable should have been alive with activity, but it was as still as a Nandi burial ground. I had finally come back for good, and yet Green Hills barely felt like home any more. Would it again?

  After a while my father came in and looked at us there on the floor. “I know she meant the world to you.” He paused. “This is a lot to come home to, but sooner or later it will all get sorted.”

  I was desperate to believe he was telling the truth, that the worst of our troubles were behind us, that everything that had tumbled into chaos could still be set right again. I wanted that as much as I had ever wanted anything. “The war won’t last for ever, will it?” I asked him, my voice catching.

  “It can’t,” he replied. “Nothing does.”

  When the March rains fell over the plains and the ragged face of the escarpment, six million yellow flowers cracked open all at once. Red-and-white butterflies, the ones that looked like peppermint sticks, flashed in twists against the sparkling air.

  But in 1919, the rains didn’t come. Not the soaking April storms when one inky cloud could levitate for hours spilling everything it had, and not the short daily November rains that winked on and off as if they ran on a system of pulleys. Nothing came that year, and the plains and the bush all went sand coloured. Everywhere you looked seemed to shrink and curdle with dryness. Along the banks of Lake Nakuru, the waterline receded and collapsed, leaving powdery green mould and strange curls of dried lichen. The villages were silent, their herds emaciated. My father scoured the horizon line like every other up-country farmer within a hundred miles of Nairobi and saw no smudge of cloud anywhere, or even a single shadow on the sun.

  I was sixteen now and full of restless feelings. In his study, I watched my father cup his chin solemnly and stare into his ledger with hooded, bloodshot eyes. Scotch before breakfast, neat.

  I leaned over the back of his chair to tuck my chin between his neck and shoulder. He smelled like hot cotton, like the sky. “You should go back to bed.”

  “I haven’t been to bed.”

  “No, I suppose you haven’t.”

  The night before, he and Emma (I had taken to calling her that since I’d come home) had been invited to a small evening party in Nakuru, racing types, I suspected. I didn’t understand how Emma kept herself up so well on the farm. Though lined and softened, her skin was still fair. She was slim, and her clothes moved well when she walked—a thing I might have managed to pull off if I’d stayed at school with the other girls instead of here, in the middle of the bush, in slacks and dusty knee-high boots.

  “You really could make more of an effort, Beryl,” Emma had said before they left for Nakuru. “Come to town with us.”

  I was better off at home. After they roared down the dirt track in Daddy’s Hudson, I tucked in by the cedar-wood fire to read, liking and needing the quiet. But not long after I’d gone to bed, they were home again, whispering fiercely to each other as they crossed the yard from the car. He’d done something or she thought he had, their voices growing louder and more tense, and I wondered what had set them off. Sometimes things in town could turn volatile if Emma felt snubbed. She’d long been living openly as my father’s common-law wife, but as I grew older I saw things that had been invisible to me before, like how even if she and Daddy seemed ready to throw off the usual conventions or at least ignore them, the colony at large couldn’t. Many of the neighbouring farmers’ wives had effectively shut Emma out. Even in town, as I’d learned from Dos, the arrangement was seen as disgraceful, no matter how much time had passed, no matter how conservative they seemed in other ways.

  But if tensions from the outside world stirred the pot at home, at least Emma seemed ready to drop any nonsense about my needing a governess or schooling. Her efforts now were aimed at my manners and appearance—such as they were. She was forever trying to get me to wash more, to wear a frock instead of trousers. Gloves were essential if I ever wanted to keep my hands nice, and didn’t I know that any proper young lady wore a hat outdoors?

  She also seemed more insistent than ever that I shouldn’t spend time with Kibii or any of the young men from the Kip village. “It was bad enough when you were children, but now…well, it’s not seemly.”

  Seemly? “I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

  “Emma’s right,” my father agreed. “It’s just not done.”

  Though I continued to fight both of them on principle, the fact was I rarely saw Kibii now. When I came back to the farm from Nairobi, he began to walk three paces behind me when we went to the stables together for gallops.

  “What are you up to?” I asked the first time I noticed him doing it.

  “You are the memsahib. This is what’s proper.”

  “I’m the same as I have been, you ninny. Stop it.”

  But we were neither of us the same as before, and I felt that as clearly as I saw the changes in my body when I undressed at night, the rounding and lengthening of my new curves. Kibii’s arms and legs were muscled where they’d once been soft and boyish, and his face had hardened, too. I felt myself drawn to him, the polished look of his skin, and the strong length of his thigh beneath his shuka. He was beautiful, but when I tried to touch him casually, testing the waters, he flinched.

  “Stop, Beru.”

  “Why not? Aren’t you even a little curious?”

  “Don’t be stupid. Do you want to get me killed?”

  When he stormed off, I was left feeling stung and rejected, but deep down I knew he was right. Neither of our worlds would have permitted that sort of touch between us for a minute, and the situation could have quickly become terrible for both of us. But I missed Kibii. Things had once been so simple and good between us, when we weren’t afraid of anything, when we’d hunted in perfect lockstep. I remembered running for miles looking for an occupied warthog hole with arap Maina, and then stooping to crinkle paper outside the mouth of its den. This was what you did to call out the pig, the noise working to aggravate the animal in some way I didn’t understand but rarely saw fail. Kibii and I did everything arap Maina asked of us and came home with the body of a large boar slung between us like a fleshy hammock. The hair on its haunches was like crisp black wire. Its mouth was frozen and clenched in death, bearing an expression of stubbornness I admired. My end of the stick bit heavily into my hands and felt exactly right. This was what the pig weighed, what the day weighed.

  My God, how I wanted to live like that again! I wanted to see arap Maina, to follow him soundlessly through jagged elep
hant grass, to laugh with Kibii lightly over anything or nothing. But he was nearly fifteen now. When his circumcision ceremony arrived, he would become the warrior he was always meant to be. In all the time I’d known him, he’d never stopped dreaming of and longing for that day, but somehow, as I’d listened to him over the years, I’d managed to ignore how the ceremony would take away the boy I knew for ever and also the fierce warrior girl who had loved him. It already had. Those children were gone.

  In his stable office, my father folded his ledger and reached for a drink though he’d only recently finished his morning coffee. “You’re going to run Pegasus today?” he asked me.

  “A mile and a quarter at half speed. His head’s been a little low. I thought I’d try the chain snaffle.”

  “Good girl,” he said, but his eyes were flat and detached as I ran through the rest of the morning’s duties—which of the horses were on gallop day, which were resting or in tendon boots, the feed ordered, deliveries scheduled. Since I’d failed at boarding school, this was my life. He organized the breeding and ran the farm, and I was his head boy. I wanted to be indispensable, but I would settle for being useful.

  The groom, Toombo, had brushed Pegasus’s coat to a lacquer and now boosted me into the saddle. At two, Pegasus was massive already—a notch more than seventeen hands. I was tall, too—nearly six foot now—but I felt like a leaf in the saddle.

  In the yard, the morning was as clear as glass—the same as the last ten or twenty or a hundred mornings. We passed under the large wattle tree where a pair of grey-whiskered vervets chattered from one of the lower branches. They looked like two old men with their leathery black hands and thin, disappointed faces. They’d come down from the forest or escarpment looking for water, but our cisterns had run desperately low, and we had none to offer.

  Over the hill, the dirt track stretched down and away through broadly terraced fields. In better days, our crops had spread around us in every direction, rich and green. When you walked through the chest-high maize, your foot would sink into the moist earth up to your ankle. Now the leaves curled and cracked. The mill still ran continuously, grinding posho that then waited in canvas bags to honour our contracts. Grain-filled rail carriages still streamed away from our station at Kampi ya Moto towards Nairobi, but no one was getting rich from any of it. My father had borrowed against chits at high interest and then borrowed more. The rupee was plummeting like a grouse full of bird shot. Where it was now, no one really knew. The creditors seemed constantly to change their minds, and my father’s debts slid up and down a ladder almost daily. But our horses had to eat. They needed crimped oats, bran, boiled barley—not bleached patches of lucerne. My father had built his bloodstock from love and gut instinct and the thick black studbook with lists of names going all the way back to sires like magnificent princes. These were the finest horses there were. He wasn’t going to let anyone or anything take an inch more without a fight, not after he had worked so hard.