“Well, she’s got plenty of sun, hasn’t she?”
Later, when Jock and I were alone in our room dressing for dinner, I studied myself in the full-length looking glass. I wasn’t used to frocks and stockings, or the strapped high-heeled shoes that were the fashion then. My stocking seams wouldn’t line up straight. My new underthings, bought in Nairobi with Emma’s instructions, pinched at my waist and under my arms. I felt like an impostor.
“Don’t fret,” Jock said. He sat on the bed, tightening the elastic on his braces. “You look fine.”
I reached behind me to adjust the stockings again. “Your mother doesn’t like me.”
“She just doesn’t want to lose me. That’s how mothers are.” He’d spoken the words so lightly, but they stung. What would I know about it?
“She looks down her nose at me,” I said.
“Don’t be silly. You’re my wife.” He got up and came to take my hands, giving them a strong, reassuring squeeze—but as soon as he let go, his words clattered to the floor. I didn’t feel old enough to be anyone’s wife, or that I knew enough or had lived enough, or understood the essential things. I didn’t know how to say any of this to Jock, either. That I was afraid of the promises we’d made. That late at night as I lay beside him in bed I felt lonely and numb, as if some part of me had died.
“Please kiss me,” I said, and he did, and though I leaned against him and tried to meet the kiss and to take it in, I couldn’t quite feel it. I couldn’t feel us.
—
I had never spent so much time by the sea, and hated the way the air thickened with salt and sat on my skin and made me always long for a bath. I was far more comfortable with dust. Here, moisture puddled on everything and seeped into the walls, swelling the windows shut. Black spores of mould grew on the walls of the houses, ageing them like a skin.
“It seems wrong,” I said to Jock. “Bombay is drowning, when at home we’d kill for even a little of it.”
“It’s not as if India has stolen Njoro’s rain. And we are here. Try to enjoy it.”
Jock seemed to like playing the role of tour guide at first, proudly showing me the bright bazaars smelling of curry and onion chutneys; turbanned, swaying sitar players; the polo fields and the Turf Club, which was so rich and manicured its gleaming grass put ours in Nairobi to shame. I held his hand and listened, wanting to forget all about the trouble at home. We were newlyweds, after all—but when evening came things fell apart. We’d been married for several weeks now, and I could count on one hand the number of times we’d actually had sex. The first had been on the voyage to India. I’d been seasick for much of it, particularly when we launched away from land at the Gulf of Aden and headed out into the Arabian Sea. The horizon stretched and pitched, when I could stand to look at it.
Before the nausea set in, we had managed to make love on my narrow bunk, but the whole thing was such a tangle of elbows and knees and bumping chins, I barely knew the thing was happening before it was over. Afterwards, he kissed my cheek and said, “That was lovely, sweetheart.” Then he crawled out of my bunk and into his, while I was left feeling just as lost and confused as I had been on our wedding night.
Jock’s drinking didn’t help matters. At four o’clock every afternoon when we were in Bombay, we met the rest of the family on the veranda for cocktails. There was a ritual to it, I learned very quickly, every feature played out to the letter, how much ice went in, how much lime, the air filling with a tangy zest that I felt at the back of my throat. Jock’s uncle Ogden was pink faced, and always at the gin before anyone but Jock, settling in his chair under the jacaranda tree and dark, forever-noisy jackdaws.
“These birds have become our personal housekeepers in India,” Ogden explained with a strange note of pride, gesturing to a flock in the courtyard. “If not for them, the streets would be overrun with rubbish.”
I watched one delicately pluck at the carcass of a mouse, then peck at a hillock of pale-pink sand. “What’s he doing?” I asked.
“Cleaning his gullet,” Ogden explained. “A bit like rinsing your mouth after dinner.”