“Why? We’re doing all right as we are.”
Before my father could say anything more, the silly klaxon punched through the air over the hill. We heard the low metallic clanking of the motorized buggy, and as it nosed into view, I saw Emma at the wheel, bouncing on the hard leather seat. She pulled up to us, idling. “Where’s your hat, Beryl? You’ll get freckles in this sun.”
—
I wasn’t sure how our success in Nairobi could dissolve so quickly, but that night at dinner my father was silent and remote, while Emma came forward, peevish about the soup. It was a thin broth with turbot and potatoes and small coins of leeks.
“The fish is off. Don’t you think, Charles?” She pushed her bowl away and raised her voice to call the houseboy, Kamotho. When he appeared in his white coat and small velvet fez, Emma told him it should all go back.
“And we’ll eat what, bread and butter?” My father put up a hand to stay the confused Kamotho. “Leave it alone, Emma.”
“Now you care what I do? That’s rich.” Her words clattered in the air above the table.
“What is this all about?” I finally brought myself to ask.
My father looked pained. He asked Kamotho to leave us, and as the boy slunk off gratefully, I wished that I could join him. I didn’t want to hear what came next. “It’s the damned rupee,” he finally said, squeezing one of his hands in the other. “I went to bed last week owing five thousand and now it’s seventy-five hundred, with eight per cent interest on all of it. I can’t climb out this time.”
“He’s taken a training post in Cape Town,” Emma pronounced coldly. “The farm is finished.”
“What?” I felt myself rocking dangerously off centre.
“Farming’s a gamble, Beryl. It always has been.”
“And Cape Town isn’t a gamble?” I shook my head, barely able to grasp what was happening.
“They love horses there. I’ll make a fresh start. Maybe the change will be lucky.”
“Lucky,” I repeated flatly.
In my room that night, I turned the lamp lower and lay there feeling stunned. Shadows came creeping and sighing over my bed, the posts still hung with beads and pouches of feathery animal bones. It gave me a kind of vertigo thinking about how quickly my whole life could shift away from under me. Our stables were still filled and perfectly run—eighty-four matchless animals that had won my father a golden reputation and strings of solid wins. In the morning, the stable bell would ring and everyone and everything would wake as they always had. The mill would turn, the horses would canter and stamp in the paddock and churn loose hay in their boxes—but none of it was real any more. We lived on a ghost farm.
When the moon climbed above the camphor trees beside my hut, light streamed in through the open windows, yellowing the tops of the shelves and boxes. I dressed quickly in trousers and moccasins and a long-sleeved shirt and then headed out into the cool dry night. There was to be a ngoma that night, as there always was for full moons—a tribal dance of the young Kikuyu men and women, up the high embankment at the far edge of the forest. I headed there with Buller at my heels, listening for anything that might want to do me harm and thinking about my father.
Earlier that night, I’d found him behind his paper-strewn desk working on the lists he’d begun to collect of interested buyers for the horses. The surrender in it seemed to have cut new lines around his brown eyes.
“Is Emma going along to Cape Town?” I asked him.
“Of course.”
“Will I go?”
“If that’s what you want.”
Gooseflesh prickled the back of my neck. “What else would I do?”
“Stay here and make your own start as a farmer’s wife, I suppose.”
“Marry Jock?” My words came out in an unsteady rush.
“It’s clear he’s ready to settle down, and he wants you.”
“I’m only sixteen.”
“Well”—he shrugged—“no one’s forcing you. If you want to come along, we’ll be starting all over from the beginning, working for someone else.”
He returned to his lists and I studied the top of his head, the skin pale pink and vulnerable-looking under his thinning brown hair. Had I heard a hesitation in his voice? He said it was up to me, but something in his tone seemed to be nudging me gently away from Cape Town. “Does Emma not want me to go?”
“Honestly, Beryl.” He glanced up from shuffling his lists, looking exasperated. “I have so much to worry about at the moment. This has nothing to do with you.”
I went off to bed then, but I hadn’t slept much or been able to think about anything else. Maybe my father’s hard choices didn’t have anything to do with me, but they were upending my life all the same and forcing me to make hard choices of my own, ones I had hoped never to make.