I watched it all remembering the ngomas of my childhood, when Kibii and I would sneak out together until dawn, transfixed and also confused by the sensual responses the dancers awoke in us, feelings we didn’t yet have names for. I had changed many times since those days, my skin shed again and again. I would still know Lakwet if she crept out of the shadows to stand in the firelight, but would she recognize me?
On her veranda, Karen had hung two blazing beacons, ships’ lanterns that she’d once brought back from Denmark for Berkeley, and which had been returned to her after his death. Watching the ngoma a distance away, Denys stood under one of these, his weight on one foot and his other foot cocked, his shoulder resting on a blue fieldstone pillar. Mansfield stood near the other—the two of them arranged as symmetrically as doorways into two different worlds. I couldn’t help but be struck by the thought that fate might have lined things up differently. In some other time, or on another plane, Denys might have been my husband, and this child been his child. I’d have felt differently about everything then, happy and excited about the future instead of worried and sad. But here and now, the die was cast. Even, God help me, if some hidden part of me was still waiting for Denys to love me, to turn from Karen and claim me for his own, what did that matter? It wasn’t to be.
I looked away from both men and back towards the fire, where the flames rose, copper and gold, blaze blue and white, the sparks thrown up and raining down again like the ashes of fallen stars.
—
A few days later, I found myself rapping at the door of Ruta and Kimaru’s hut, after the day’s work was done. Their kitchen smelled of spices and stewed meat. Asis was now four years old, with his father’s high square forehead and his confidence, too. He liked to stand on the beaten-earth floor by the table and leap as high into the air as he possibly could, looking so like Kibii it could stop my heart.
“He will be an excellent moran, don’t you think?” Kimaru asked.
“He’ll be perfect,” I agreed, and then finally confessed to Ruta that I would soon have a child, too.
“Yes, Beru,” he said lightly. Of course he already knew. It had been ridiculous of me to think he hadn’t. “And our sons will play together as we did, will they not?”
“They will,” I agreed. “Maybe they’ll even hunt. We both remember how…I do.”
“A moran never forgets,” he replied.
“You’re my family, Ruta. You and Asis and Kimaru, too. I hope you know that.”
He nodded, his eyes rich and black. I had the feeling that if I looked deeply enough into them I would see all the years of our childhood played out one marvellous day at a time. And in that moment, I felt the faintest stirrings of hope about this baby. None of it would be easy, but if Ruta was here to remind me of who I really was, it might be all right. I would still have to weather England and Mansfield’s mother without him—but come the summer we’d bring the baby home. Melela would be my son’s Green Hills. If I thought of it that way, the future wasn’t nearly so terrifying.
“What does your father say?” Ruta asked.
“He doesn’t know yet.”
“Ah,” he said, and then repeated a Swahili phrase he’d challenged me with years before, “A new thing is good, though it be a sore place.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said, and left him to his dinner.
Confinement is one of those funny old-fashioned words that say so much more than they mean to. I had mine in Swiftsden with Mansfield’s mother, who made everything easy for me in one way, and a personalized piece of hell in another. I slept in a beautiful room and had a lady’s maid, and didn’t lift a finger, even to pour my own tea. It was obvious she meant to lavish this child with everything befitting a Markham. I wasn’t really a Markham myself, and she made that expressly clear, all without saying a word.
I sailed from Mombasa alone, leaving Ruta and my father in charge of the horses. Mansfield joined me in January, and was there for the birth, on 25 February 1929, a day so bitterly cold the pipes clanged and threatened to burst in the nursing home in Eaton Square. The windows to the street had glazed over, blanketing out the world, and I found myself fixing on that opaque smear as I bore down. I had been given laughing gas and some sort of sedative. Both made me shake and believe I might snap into pieces. Clutching, strangling pains came in rhythms I had no control over. My knees shook. My hands quivered on the damp sheets.
Hours later, with a final sickening push, Gervase fell out of my body. I craned to see him, and won only the briefest glimpse of his puckered face, the tiny chest slick with blood, before the doctors took him away. I was still lurching in the grip of the drugs. I had no idea what was happening and could only lie there, prodded by the nurses to hold still.
No one was telling me anything—not why they’d taken my baby or if he was even alive. I struggled with the nurses, and then slapped one, and finally they sedated me. When I came to, Mansfield was in my room looking waxen and drawn. The baby wasn’t right, he began to explain. He was dangerously small and he was missing things that should be there. The anus hadn’t ever formed, nor the rectum.