Above our heads, the sky was a brimming treasure box. Some of the stars seemed to want to pull free and leap down onto my shoulders—and though these were the only ones I had ever known, I believed Denys when he said they were the finest. I thought I might believe anything he said, in fact, even though we had just met. He had that in him.
“Do you know any Keats?” Denys asked after several minutes of stillness. Then, when I was clearly confused, “It’s poetry.”
“Oh, I don’t know any poetry.”
“Berkeley, give us something about the stars.”
“Hmm,” Berkeley mused. “How about Shelley?
“Wrap thy form in a mantle gray,
Star-inwrought!
Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day;
Kiss her until she be wearied out,
Then wander o’er city, and sea, and land,
Touching all with thine opiate wand…”
“?‘Kiss her until she be wearied out,’?” Denys repeated. “That’s the best bit, isn’t it, and Berkeley does it so well.”
“Wonderful.” My father had read the classics to me by firelight sometimes, but that had felt like school. This was more like a song, and also like being alone in the wild with your thoughts. Somehow it was both at the same time.
While Shelley’s words still hung there, Denys began to recite something else, quietly, as if only for himself:
“This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, death and the stars.”
The words were so natural for him they took no effort at all. You couldn’t learn that, no matter how much you tried. Even I recognized it, feeling a little small. “That’s Shelley again?”
“Whitman, actually.” He smiled at me.
“Should I be embarrassed not to have heard of him? I told you I don’t know anything about poetry.”
“It only takes practise, you know. If you really want to learn, do it. Take some poetry every day.”
“Like your quinine for malaria,” Berkeley added. “A measure of good champagne helps, too. I don’t know what it is about Africa, but champagne is absolutely compulsory here.”
Without any further ceremony, Denys tipped his hat to me, and then the two men moved off down the road, turning a corner and passing out of sight. They might have been headed to another party, or to white steeds waiting to whisk them off to an enchanted palace. I would have believed a magic carpet as well, or any storybook ending. They were that lovely, and now they were gone.
—
“Are you drunk?” Emma said when I went back inside.
“I might be.”
She pursed her lips tightly, fed up, and moved off just as Jock was stepping towards me.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” he said, taking my arm.
Without saying anything I reached for the champagne flute he held and downed it in one go. It was a dramatic gesture, but there were bits of verse still swirling in my head like the milky trails of stars. There was the picture of two beautiful men in white jackets at the untamed edge of town, and the idea that the world was far bigger than I’d ever imagined and that all sorts of things would happen to me. Things already were happening to change my life for ever, even if I didn’t quite know what they meant. There was only the promise for the moment, as exhilarating as the feeling of champagne fizzing and dancing on my tongue. Compulsory, Berkeley Cole had called it.
“Let’s have some more of this,” I told Jock, lifting the glass. And then, as we made our way towards the bar, “Do you know any poetry?”
A few weeks later, my father and I met the train from Nairobi at Kampi ya Moto Station, down the hill from our farm. The engine settled and breathed hard in place, like a small dragon home from war. Smoke chuffed and streamed out behind, marring the flat sky, while half-a-dozen men bent in two alongside the sooty freight cars, readying a wooden ramp. Six of our horses were returning home victorious from the Turf Club in town—including Cam, Bar One, and my Pegasus. Cam had taken the cup and a hundred-pound purse, but now, as we stood on the short platform and waited for Emma to come round with the Hudson, my father didn’t want to talk about our winning runs. He wanted to talk about Jock.
“Do you like him at all?” he asked, looking up the hill into the sun.
“I suppose he’s all right. He’ll make that farm work.”
He chewed lightly for a moment at the corner of his lip. “He will.” And then: “He’s serious about you.”
“What?” I spun on him. “We’ve only just met.”
He smiled wryly. “I’m not sure that’s a detriment in marriage.”
“Why is everyone so keen to find me a husband? I’m too young for all of that.”
“Not really. There’re plenty of girls your age who’ve been dreaming about husbands and families for years. You’ll want to be taken care of one day, won’t you?”