I stayed in England for the remainder of 1929, often going out to the Aero Club in Piccadilly. There was something soothing and even healing in watching aeroplanes stitch through the vacant blue over Shellbeach, glinting silver needles pulling thread. It was there that I ran into Denys, on a sheer October day. He had on a snug leather jacket and an aviator’s scarf around his neck and was walking towards me across the terrace café, near one of the great hangars. I could scarcely believe it for a moment—as if I’d dreamed him. Then we rushed towards one another without any thought or awkwardness, like two people who had found each other at the end of the world.
“My God, it’s good to see you.” I gripped his hand, unable to let it go. “How are you here?”
“To get my flying hours in. The royal fiasco netted me the funds to finally buy the aeroplane I’ve always wanted. She’s a lovely gold Gipsy Moth. I’ll ship her back to Mombasa if we’re both still standing in six months.” He meant him and the plane. After Maia’s tragedy, I was surprised to hear him be so bold, but that was Denys.
“They’re beautiful machines.” I looked up to where a bright de Havilland waggled and straightened again. “They make me think of grace.”
“You’ve been through the wringer, I know.”
“You never liked Mansfield, did you?” I ventured. “You were always chilly near us.”
“I wanted you to be happy…. I’ve always wanted that. But it surprised me when you married him. Honestly, I always thought you were too much of a free spirit for any sort of confinement. That we were alike in that way.”
“Maybe that’s what botched up things from the beginning. Who can say? But everything’s tipped over now. I don’t know what will happen to the farm or my horses, or even what to care about saving.”
“You should learn to fly.”
“Me?” I asked. “Does it feel as open up there as it looks from here?”
“Even more.”
“Sounds like heaven then,” I told him. “Save some of it for me.”
—
Over the next few weeks, until I left for home, Denys and I met every day for lunch at the aerodrome, in sun or rain. I was as drawn to him as I’d ever been, and though part of me was longing to kiss and hold him near, it also felt wrong to have these desires when Gervase was still so vulnerable, and the wreckage of my marriage smoked in pieces around me. But Denys was my friend, too, and I needed one. He told me everything he was learning in the air, and I fell on each detail, happy to have something new to think about.
“It does seem like pure freedom,” I told him. “If you can forget about the risk, that is.”
“The fear never completely goes away. It makes everything sharper.”
I nodded, understanding exactly what he meant. Even as a child I’d had it in me to test and challenge myself. Though I had sometimes forgotten that girl, she came back clearly when I looked into the sky, so sharp and blue it was a sort of window. Maybe I would fly, too. Maybe that’s why Denys and I had had these days together at the aerodrome, and why I had begun to feel less low and desperate. The idea of it—of a future with wings—made the truest sort of sense, and began to cure me. Denys did, too. Just sitting near him helped me remember who I was in better times, stronger and surer, ready to look ahead, to face what came next without fear.
“Have you ever imagined us together,” I asked him one day. “A time or place…a world, even, where we could be together? Simply, I mean, without trying to ruin one another, or wanting more than the other could give?”
His smile came slowly. His hazel eyes, when I looked into them, were bottomless. “What about this place? This moment?” He reached for my hand and we sat like that, side by side, for a few more precious minutes, while over our heads a silver Moth glinted like star fire and dipped its wings sideways, and passed behind a cloud.
At the end of March 1930 I sailed home. I went briefly to Melela, to see my father and Ruta and our horses. It was harder than I ever imagined to find words to explain that Gervase was still in England, that they might never even meet him. My father wanted to go after Mansfield, as if we could spar across an ocean and change anything. Ruta was quieter, and also terribly sad for me, I knew. He seemed to guess immediately that the farm had lost its bloom.
“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?”