Once I decided to say yes to Jock, everything moved with shocking speed. Our clothes were ordered, the priest engaged, paper invitations sent flying far and wide. Emma had very clear ideas about my dress—pearl-trimmed ivory satin with embroidered rosettes and thistles on the train—and since I had no taste myself, I agreed to all her choices. Orange blossoms and long silk ninon for the veil, slippers so thin and fine I couldn’t imagine them lasting beyond the day. When gifts began arriving—a silver cake stand, filigreed napkin rings, a cut-glass bud vase, various cheques written out to Mr. and Mrs. Purves—they were carefully put away in one corner of the house, while things belonging to Daddy and Emma were packed in crates and settled in other corners. It was dizzying to see the farm dissolving as my future was being planned, but I also understood it couldn’t be any other way.
Jock and I didn’t spend more than a few moments alone in the weeks of hurried preparation and manoeuvring. When we were, he squeezed my hands tightly in his and told me how happy we were going to be. He talked about the changes and expansions he would make to our farm. How ambitious he was for our future. How prosperity was surely just around the corner. I latched on to Jock’s dreams, wanting to feel reassured. Hadn’t Green Hills started with nothing long ago? Our new farm would grow and become wonderful, just like that. I had to believe it was possible even as I waited to feel more for Jock himself.
“You’re a fast worker,” Dos squealed when I told her the news. “The last I heard he made you nervous.”
“He still does a bit,” I confessed, “but I’m trying not to let on.”
“It’s not as if we have so many options here,” she said. “I’ll be a farmer’s wife one day, too, I imagine. At least he’s dashing.”
“You think it’s all right, then, that I’m not in love with him?”
“You will be, silly. At least you’ll stay here where you belong—and he’ll take care of you. Even if your father wasn’t moving to Cape Town, he couldn’t look out for you for ever.” She smirked. “Or so mine tells me every chance he gets.”
—
We were married at All Saints on a sun-shocked Wednesday in October, two weeks before my seventeenth birthday. The legal marrying age was eighteen then, but my father thought I was old enough, and that seemed good enough for me. At the church, I walked on his arm, keeping my eyes on Jock to hold me in place, as if I were going into battle with him. It did the trick until I reached him and the starch-collared reverend, and then my heart began to gallop. I worried that everyone could hear it, that they all knew or guessed that I had no love for this man. But love was dubious, too, wasn’t it? It certainly hadn’t done much good for my mother and father, or Emma and my father, for that matter. Maybe being practical was one way to ensure I ended up differently from them? I hoped so as I gripped Jock’s hand, finding the breath to say Yes to the reverend’s long string of difficult questions, and then, I will.
Jock had a pal from the King’s African Rifles who came to stand up for him—the tall and smart-looking Captain Lavender, with bright eyes and a cowlick that swept a wing of golden hair onto his forehead. It was Lavender who drove us to the Norfolk Hotel in Jock’s yellow Bugatti. He sped through the streets of Nairobi, throwing me across the leather backseat towards Jock, so that I nearly bruised myself against his clenched thighs. It had to mean something that he was so strong, I told myself. He would be able to hold me up and direct the forces around my life when my father was gone. I clamped on to that hope and didn’t let it go as we stepped out and onto the long run of wooden steps to the hotel, everyone smiling for us, my dress and veil arranged like fondant, our picture taken for the papers and for all time.