“Daddy says I might never stop growing. I passed him a while ago.”
He smiled and continued to look up at me in a way that made me wonder if there was something else I was meant to say or do. I couldn’t imagine what. All I knew of men beyond farm life and work were the warm, confusing thoughts I sometimes had late at night now, about being touched or taken, thoughts that could make my cheeks hot even when I was alone in my hut.
“Well, it’s nice to see you again.” He reached for his spool of wire without moving his eyes from mine.
“Good luck,” I told him, and then nudged Pegasus away, glad to be leaving him there with his fence posts, to be turning for home with the sun at my back.
—
“I met our new neighbour,” I said at dinner that night, sawing at a slab of Thomsons’-gazelle steak with the tip of my knife.
“Purves,” my father said. “He’s done a lot with that land.”
“This is the ex-captain you were telling me about, Charles?” Emma asked from her end of the table. “He’s a good-looking fellow. I saw him in town.”
“He’s a hard worker, I’ll say that.”
“What did you think of him, Beryl?”
I shrugged. “He’s all right, I suppose.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to make more of an effort socially,” she said. “Do you know anyone your age?”
“My age? He has to be thirty.”
“Farm life is going to harden you, you know. You think you’ll be young and beautiful for ever and that you’ll have plenty of chances, but it doesn’t work like that.”
“She’s only sixteen, Em,” my father said. “She has plenty of time.”
“That’s what you think. We’re not helping, keeping her out here with no company. School didn’t do a thing—not that she was there long. She’s wild. She doesn’t know how to make conversation.”
“Why are we talking about manners and society, when there are real problems to think about?” I pushed my plate away in frustration.
“One day you will want to attract a man,” Emma said, glaring at me pointedly. “Your father and I have to prepare you for that.”
“Emma thinks you should have a coming-out party,” he explained, cupping the heavy base of his scotch glass.
“You’ve got to be joking. Out where?”
“You know perfectly well these things are done, Beryl. Even here. It’s important to be known in society and to develop some grace. You might not think it matters now, but you will.”
“I have all the society I need here,” I said, meaning Buller and our horses.
“It’s one night, Beryl.”
“And a new dress,” Emma added, as if this were any kind of draw.
“We’ve already made arrangements with the hotel,” my father said with finality, and I knew it had been settled long before.
Nairobi had grown in leaps since I was there at school. Ten thousand people now perched on the scrubby verge of the Athi Plains with the tin-roofed shops and public houses and the noisy and colourful bazaar. Even this much civilization was a wonder. The town had been formed accidentally when the Uganda railway was being forged between Mombasa and Lake Victoria in 1899. A flimsy headquarters went up, then an anchovy-tin shack the workers had dubbed “the Railhead Club,” then more shacks and tents, and when the railway finally moved on, a town was left in its wake.
But even then, no one guessed how important the railway would become for the British Empire and the whole of the continent. Building the route was expensive, and maintaining it even more so. Colonial officials concocted a scheme to draw white settlers to the area by offering parcels of land for nearly nothing. Retired soldiers like my father and D received additional land as part of a pension. And this was how the colony went up, man by man, farm by farm, with Nairobi as its steadily beating heart.
By 1919, there was a Government House with a ballroom on Nairobi’s central hill, a racetrack, and three good hotels. To reach town, we only had to board the train and travel one hundred and thirteen miles through dusty bush and red murram mud and papyrus swamp. A full day spent on the sooty, lurching iron contraption so I could stand in a rented room at the New Stanley Hotel, in a frock the colour of egg custard.
The frock was probably very pretty. Emma had picked it out and insisted it was perfect—but the stiff lace crimped too high on my neck and gave me a rash I couldn’t scratch at. There was a crown of roses, too—tight yellow-pink buds sewn together in a circlet. I kept looking in the mirror, wondering if I looked right and hoping I did.
“What do you think, really?” I asked Dos, who stood behind me in her slip, pulling pins from her bobbed brown hair.