Circling the Sun (18 page)

T
he name of Karen’s farm was Mbogani, meaning “house in the woods.” Out past her wide lawn, frangipani trees bloomed yellow-white and deep pink. There were palms and mimosa trees, stands of bamboo and thorn trees and banana groves. Six hundred acres of the lower slopes of the ridge had been groomed and tiered for bright green coffee plants. Another portion of her farm was native forest, more was rolling, fragrant grassland, and still more was home to Kikuyu
shambas,
native squatters who tended cattle and goats and grew their own maize and pumpkin and sweet potato crops.

We walked along a trampled footpath through shoulder-high plants and tangled vines to Mbagathi, the house she would be offering Clara. It was only a small bungalow with a tiny veranda, but there were plenty of windows, and around the back stood an arbour and clustering mimosas to keep things cool. I tried to imagine my mother there, resting in the shade, but found I couldn’t conjure her at all without a shiver of anxiety.

“Bror and I lived here first,” Karen explained, “just after we were married. I’m still very fond of it.”

“I met your husband once in town. He’s charming.”

“Isn’t he?” She smiled a complicated smile. “It’s kept me from strangling him any number of times.”

Inside, there were three small bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a sitting room furnished with lamps and a leopard-skin rug. The sofa was like a bed squeezed into one corner, forming a cozy nook. She showed me a pretty French clock on the mantelpiece, a wedding present. Dusting the top of it with her sleeve, she said, “No doubt you’ve heard whispering about my marriage as I have yours.”

“Only a little.”

She shook her head doubtfully. “Ah well, it doesn’t matter. No one really knows how it is with anyone else. That’s the truth. That’s our only real retaliation when the gossip starts to churn.”

I thought of the humiliating jokes and rumours that came with the final days of Green Hills, and how they had seemed to ruin even what had been good. “Maybe that’s the secret to surviving all sorts of trouble, knowing who you are apart from it, I mean.”

“Yes.” She picked up the clock, turning it over in her hand as if to remind herself of its significance. “But like many things, it’s so much easier to admire that stance than to carry it out.”

We left Mbagathi for a tour of her factory, where dozens of Kikuyu women raked through long, narrow tables of coffee cherries that were drying in the sun, going from red to chalk white.

“This whole structure burned to the ground last January.” She plucked up a coffee cherry and rolled it between her palms until the skin split and fell away. “One of God’s little cruelties. I thought it would finish me off at the time, but here I am still.”

“How do you manage? Farming is so difficult.”

“Honestly, I don’t know, sometimes. I’ve risked absolutely everything, but there’s everything to gain, too.”

“Well, I admire your independence. I don’t know many women who could do what you’ve done.”

“Thank you. I have fought for independence here, and freedom, too. More and more I find they’re not at all the same thing.”

It began to rain on our way back. By the time we reached the edge of Karen’s lawn, we were slick and streaming, our boots caked to the knees with red Kikuyu mud. Laughing at the sight of each other, we came around the veranda, beginning to loosen our wet things. There sat Blix, unshaven and covered with dust. He’d raced ahead of the rain, apparently, and now had an uncorked bottle of brandy at his side.

“I’ve arrived just in time. Hello, Beryl. Hello, Tanne, dear.”

Karen said, “I see you’ve made yourself comfortable.”

“It is still my house.”

“So you keep telling me.”

Their teasing had a wicked edge, but under the surface there was more. Some part of whatever had stitched them together was still alive and well. That was obvious even to me.

Karen and I went in to change, and when we reappeared, Blix had settled himself more comfortably and was smoking a pipe. His tobacco smelled exotic, like something he’d found only by belly-crawling through the far reaches of the continent. “You look well, Beryl.”

“So do you. Dr. Turvy must be earning his keep.”

“He’s got you enlisted in that silly game?” Karen turned to Blix. “Where have you been this time?”

“Uganda and then back through Tanganyika with a Vanderbilt—after rhinoceros. I nearly lost him, actually.”

“The Vanderbilt or the rhino?”

“That’s funny, darling. The Vanderbilt. Two lethal-looking males charged straight at him. The man’s very lucky I had the right gun on me.” He turned to me. “A rhino isn’t something you want in your back yard. It’s like a massive snorting locomotive encased in unconquerable hide. When threatened, it will crash through anything, even steel.”

“Weren’t you afraid?”

“Not really.” He smiled. “I had the right gun.”

“If you sit at the Muthaiga Club long enough,” Karen said, “you’ll hear any number of hunters making their kills again. The stories grow bigger and more harrowing with every telling. Bror is the only one I know who makes mountains into molehills instead of the other way round.”

“Except for Denys, you mean,” Blix corrected.

“And Denys. Yes.” She didn’t seem remotely flustered at hearing Denys’s name roll from her husband’s lips. And Blix had said it so easily I couldn’t imagine that Denys was Karen’s lover. Still, the whole dance was fascinating. “Did you see him out there?” she wanted to know.

Blix shook his head. “They say he’s gone west, into the Congo.”

“What’s that country like?” I asked him.

“Very, very dark.” He sipped at his brandy. “They have every kind of snake there, and some say cannibals.”

“Are you trying to scare me?” Karen narrowed her eyes.

“No, inspire you. Tanne scribbles stories all the time, did you know, Beryl? She’s quite good, actually.”

“I’ll tell you one by the fire some night.” She waved away his praise. “I’m more of a storyteller than a writer in any case.”

“Denys mentioned you loved stories here.”

“Oh, we do,” she insisted. “And Bror is awfully skilled at them as well. Perhaps he’ll play Scheherazade for us tonight.”

“If I don’t have to pretend to be a virgin,” he said, and we all laughed.

That evening we had dinner on the veranda. The Ngong Hills went plum coloured and almost hypnotically still as Blix treated us to more tales from his Vanderbilt safari. One rolled easily into the next. He had dozens and dozens of them and didn’t fall silent for more than a few minutes at a time as Karen’s cook, Kamante, brought us a string of dishes. There was lightly breaded chicken in a cream sauce, roasted vegetables with herbs, a corn pudding studded with mushrooms and thyme, ripe cheese, and oranges. Blix kept our glasses filled, and by the time we reached the final course, I was floating because of the wine, and also surprised at how very much I liked these two. There wasn’t anything simple about them, and I preferred that, and trusted it. My life wasn’t simple either.

When a hooked moon had risen into the sky, and we’d had our pudding and our Calvados and our coffee, Blix said good night and began his journey back to town.

“Isn’t he a little too tight to be driving?” I asked her.

“I don’t think he can drive any other way.” She was silent for several minutes, looking out into the dark. “He’s asked me for a divorce. That’s why he came.”

I knew from Cockie he’d asked more than once, but also that it would be cruel to let on. “Will you give him one?”

She shrugged. “How would it be to have two Baronesses Blixen in the colony? There’s not room, you see. One would be elbowed out and forgotten.”

“I can’t imagine anyone forgetting you,” I said. I wasn’t flattering her. I truly couldn’t.

“Well, we shall see.”

“How is it you’ve managed to stay friends?”

“We were friends before we were anything else. It was his younger brother Hans I was taken with. This was long ago, in Denmark. Bror became my confidant when Hans married another.” She paused and shook her head so that her long silver earrings tinkled.

“Younger brother? He couldn’t have offered you a title then?”

“No. Only love.” She smiled darkly. “But it wasn’t to be. And then Bror thought of this, a new start in Africa. If only it hadn’t brought a mountain of debt.”

“Do you still love him?”

“I wish I could say no. But Africa sets you up to feel things you’re not prepared for. I came to believe we could have everything…children, devotion, fidelity.” She shut her eyes and opened them again, the pupils flaring black. “Maybe he’s not capable of loving just one woman. Or perhaps he is, but not me. He was never faithful, not even in the beginning, and that’s what I keep coming back to, how I thought I knew what I had bargained for when I married Bror, when actually I had very little idea of any of it.”

I took a bolstering swallow of Calvados. “You could be talking about my marriage. That’s just how I feel.”

“And will you get
your
divorce, do you think?”

“I hope so. I’m afraid to apply any pressure just now.”

“We’re all of us afraid of many things, but if you make yourself smaller or let your fear confine you, then you really aren’t your own person at all—are you? The real question is whether or not you will risk what it takes to be happy.”

She was referring to Jock, but her words made me think of other things, too.

“Are
you
happy, Karen?”

“Not yet. But I mean to be.”

T
hrough a series of telegrams, everything was settled with Clara very quickly. The house was going to be perfect, she insisted, and fell over herself to thank me. But even this much intimacy felt confusing. I hadn’t had a mother for more than sixteen years, and didn’t have the slightest idea how to behave with her, even on paper. I struggled with every line, wondering how affectionate I should be, or how aloof. I had no practise with any of this—there wasn’t even a word for what we were now, not mother and daughter, but not utterly estranged. It was bewildering.

In one message from Clara, I learned that my brother, Dickie, had been in Kenya for many years and was currently up north in Eldoret, jockeying for a good stable there. I couldn’t quite believe it. Dickie had been here, in my world, without my being aware of it? What did it mean? Would we all somehow come to know one another as a family again? Did I want that? Was it even possible?

I was still tumbling with conflicting feelings when Clara arrived at the tail end of May. As I set off to meet her at the Norfolk Hotel in a motorcar I’d borrowed from D, my hands shook and my throat felt full of knots. Sweat sprang up under my arms and behind my knees like a bout of mysterious fever. It was all I could do not to run for cover when she and the boys came down and met me in the tea room. I had tried to remember what she looked like, wondering if I’d even recognize her, but I needn’t have. We had the same face, with identical high checkbones and foreheads, the same pale-blue eyes. Looking at her gave me a strange, lurching feeling—as if I were meeting myself as a lost ghost—and I was glad the boys were there to pull me out of the sensation. They were seven and nine, blond and clean and combed and shy at first. They half hid behind their mother as she took me in her arms. Unprepared, I bumped her hat with my elbow and pulled away, feeling stung and confused. I didn’t want her embrace, but just what did I want?

“How was the voyage?” I managed.

“The waves were bigger than anything,” Ivan, the older one, said.

“Ivan was sick all over the side of the boat,” Alex broke in proudly. “Twice.”

“It was a trial,” Clara confirmed. “But we’re here now.”

We moved to a narrow table, where the boys fell on plates of biscuits as if they’d been caged. “You really are
too
beautiful,” Clara exclaimed. “And married now, I understand.”

I didn’t know how to answer her, and so only nodded.

“Harry was the joy of my life.” Clara’s mouth trembled. Her eyes silvered with tears. “You’ve no idea how hard it’s been, with the debts and the uncertainty. And now I’m alone again.”

As she dabbed at her tears with a handkerchief, I stared at her, feeling slightly stunned. For some reason, I thought she might try to explain herself or apologize. That she might ask regretfully about Clutt, or want to know how things had really been for me. But she was very much caught up in her own sad story, this recent one, as if there weren’t any other.

“Mbagathi is beautiful,” I said, making an effort to plunge ahead. “The boys will love it there. They can run around to their hearts’ content, and maybe even go to school. The baroness has found a teacher for the Kikuyu children on her land.”

“You really have been my saviour, Beryl. I knew I could count on you.” She sniffed loudly. “Isn’t your sister marvellous, boys?”

I was their sister, and also a stranger, a fact that didn’t seem to rattle them as much as it did me. Ivan ignored Clara completely. Alex glanced up with his lips covered in biscuit crumbs, and then dived back in.

Two hours later, I drove them away from the hotel, the boys spitting over the open sides of the borrowed car into the dust. Clara chided them distractedly, and then said, “I just can’t get over how much Nairobi has changed. It’s a proper town now. You should have seen it back then.”

“Well, you’ve been gone a long time.”

“In those days you couldn’t walk for the goats. A postal office no bigger than a can of beans. No proper shops. No one to talk to.” She swatted at the still-spitting boys with her handkerchief, and turned around. “I just can’t get over it.”

She didn’t seem embarrassed to be speaking of the past with me. She didn’t seem to remember I
was
a part of her past in the colony, in fact. Though maybe that was best, when I thought about it—if we could treat each other more impartially, as if there were nothing to apologize or make amends for. As if nothing had been lost. Then perhaps there might not be any further pain ahead. I hoped not as I squeezed the steering wheel with my gloved hands, pointing us out of town on the rutted road and towards Mbogani.

It had been more than a month since my last visit to Karen’s. I went to the main house first. Karen was up the slope at the factory but heard the motor and came running, her hair windblown, a fingerprint of coffee dust on her cheek. There was no sign of Denys anywhere. Perhaps he was away still—or again.

“I’m sorry I look a fright.” Karen extended her hand to Clara. “Today we’re busy with a harvest.”

“Beryl explained all you do here on the ride out. I admire what you’ve taken on. And your house and lawn are so beautiful.” Clara swept around in an appreciative circle.

“You’ll want some tea—or sandwiches?”

The boys perked up at the mention of more food, but Clara shushed them. “We’ve had our tea.”

“I’ll ride out to the house with you then. Let me just change my shoes.”

We motored along the winding road to Mbagathi while the sweet-smelling trees pushed in at us through the windows of the car.

“Oh, it’s quaint,” Clara said when we arrived. “We’ll be very snug here.”

“You’ll be staying for a while, too, Beryl?” Karen asked.

“I hadn’t thought.” I stalled, wondering how comfortable I’d be. Clara was a stranger, and a complicated one at that.

“But of course you must. We haven’t caught up properly.” Clara turned to the boys, who were already down in the dust watching a Hercules beetle towering forward with a twig in its staglike pincers. “Tell her we need her.”

“Yes,” Ivan said. Alex grunted, never taking his eyes from the beetle.

“It’s settled then.”

Karen lent us her cook and her houseboy, and left my mother with the names of several Kikuyu
totos
who would be there the next day ready to work if Clara would have them.

When she left, Clara said, “I wouldn’t have whispered a word while the baroness was here, but the house
is
a little simple, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so. No one’s lived here for a while.”

“It’s much smaller than I imagined.”

“There are three bedrooms, and you are three.”

“Not for tonight,” she clarified.

“But I can sleep anywhere. I’m not fussy.”

“That’s a wonderful skill, Beryl. You always were the toughest of us.”

I flinched, involuntarily, and rearranged myself in my chair. “Dickie’s been jockeying, you said?”

“Yes, and very good at it. Do you remember how he could ride?”

I nodded vaguely.

“I know he’d want to be here now, but he hasn’t been feeling well. He never had a strong constitution, as you know.”

I remembered so little…skinned knees when the farm was raw and full of obstacles. Him kicking me once, hard, in my side as we fought over a toy. But even that was too much, in a way. It would have been simpler to have forgotten every last stitch.

“He’s going to send money as soon as he can, naturally,” she went on, her eyes beginning to well up again. “Forgive a silly woman, Beryl. Forgive me.”

That night, I tossed and turned on the sofa near the hearth, feeling unsettled by Clara, her strange combination of neediness and amnesia. I found myself wishing that I hadn’t answered her first telegram or that she hadn’t thought to send it. But we were here now, stuck in a curious limbo.

Sometime past midnight, long after the fire had died away, it began to rain. I heard the pattering getting louder, and then Clara appeared, kneeling at my side. She wore a nightgown and robe, and held a guttering candle. Her feet were bare and her hair tumbled down her back, making her look very young. “It’s pouring.”

“Try to ignore it. We get lots of rain at this time of year.”

“No, I mean inside.” She dragged me to one of the smaller rooms where the boys were huddled together in one bed while a seam in the roofline dripped water down on the blankets. The water was coming straight at them, but they barely had the sense to get out of the way.

“Let’s move the bed,” I suggested.

“Right,” Clara said. She never would have thought of it on her own. That was clear. The boys clambered down, and Clara and I pushed the bed to the other wall.

“It’s wet here, too.”

The second bedroom was a bit drier. We found buckets in the kitchen and moved them around, catching the drips, then went from room to room, trying to find the safest place for the furniture. “It’s hopeless,” Clara said, throwing up her hands.

“Only a little rain.” I sighed. “You boys don’t mind, do you?” But they seemed just as fragile suddenly. Alex had a rumpled bear, a teddy bear, after Roosevelt. He tugged at its ear and looked ready to hide in a cupboard.

“We’ll just have to get through the night,” I suggested. “Tomorrow we’ll see if workers can repair the roof.”

“I think it’s driest here,” my mother said of the couch. “Do you mind if the boys and I have your place?”

“Not at all.” I sighed again.

“Thank you. And it would be lovely if we could have a fire, wouldn’t it, boys?”

The wood was damp and smoked and took a real effort to get going. When I finally did, I was too exhausted to move the beds again. I fell into the first one I came to and curled up in the damp sheets and tried to sleep.

It rained buckets all the next day. By mid-afternoon, Clara was at her wits’ end. Karen had come to try and make things suitable, but the downpour wouldn’t stop, and the rain got through everywhere. Finally she moved Clara and the boys into the main house.

“I really am sorry for your trouble,” Karen said again and again.

“It’s not your fault,” Clara assured her, gathering damp bits of her hair into hairpins. But something in her tone told me she
did
hold Karen responsible—or perhaps me instead. I suppose it wasn’t a great surprise to see she had very little gumption or resilience, and yet it made me sad for her. How dreadful it would be if everything toppled you and you folded in. Rain, for instance, not to mention the loss of a husband. She was so pitiful I shouldn’t have been irritated with her, but I couldn’t help it. By dinnertime, I was too fed up with the whole situation and bolted for Soysambu and my horses—for work, which was never mysterious and never failed to soothe me.

“I’ll be back at the weekend,” I said, and rode off in D’s motorcar through thick and spattering red mud.