I studied the bird, and then two others swooping in to fight over a smear of crushed mango on the stones, pecking with sharp beaks at each other’s throats, ready to fight to the death. Somehow they made me sad and long for home more than I already did. Too much was new about India, and the days had no anchor. Jock might have fallen for the bold girl I was when I was fourteen, but he didn’t really know me any more than I knew him. We were strangers, and also together nearly all the time. I kept telling myself it would be easier when we were at home on our own farm, with work to do. It had to be.
One night at the Purveses’, the table was set with a feast that hardened and grew cold because Jock’s mother had tipped back so much gin she’d forgotten the cook had called us in long before. She listed in the darkening courtyard and finally leaned into a potted palm and closed her eyes. No one else seemed to notice or care.
“Let’s go up to bed,” I said to Jock.
“What?” He tried to fix his bloodshot eyes on my face, lip-reading.
“I’m exhausted,” I said.
“I’ll be right behind you.”
I walked past the dining room with a table full of thickened and filmed-over curries, the servants too afraid to clear them away. In the bathroom, I climbed into the soaking tub lined with painted tiles. One was of a tiger, though age had faded his stripes to a tired beige. Somewhere in India, real tigers roamed, hungry and roaring as Paddy had once roared. It was an awful thought, but in a way, I knew I would rather be wherever the tigers were, or even back in the muddy pig hole I’d spent several nights in the time I’d run away from school. At least then I had known what I was up against. I lowered myself into the stinging water and waited there for Jock until it ran cold, then filled it again. Finally I went to bed and curled up on the apricot silk sheets, shaking a little.
Dear Dos, I wrote on a picture postcard the next day, Bombay is beautiful and glamorous. We’ve been to the Turf Club nearly every day where Jock and the other members are showing me how polo is really done. You should see it all one day.
I looked at the words I’d written, knowing I ought to be telling her, or someone, how miserable I felt, but didn’t know where to begin. And what would it change anyway? I chewed on my pen, thinking of what I might add. Finally, I signed my new married name and left the card to be posted.
We were nearly four months in Bombay, and when we returned, British East Africa didn’t exist any more. The details of the armistice had finally been settled, and the protectorate dissolved. We were Kenya now, after our tallest mountain—a proper colony, with the graveyards to prove it. Africans and white settlers had died in the tens of thousands during wartime. Drought had stolen thousands more, and so had the Spanish flu. Disease tore through towns and villages taking the thinnest and smallest, children and young men, and new wives like me. Demobilized farmers and herdsmen came home in despair, not knowing how they might begin again.
I felt much the same way. At Green Hills, I expected to find my father and Emma packed and on the verge of departure. That had been part of my plan—to spend the worst of the dismantlement in Bombay—but the farm hadn’t even been sold yet. My father hadn’t made a move.
“I’m going to eke things out here as long as possible,” he tried to explain. “If I can win a few more races, I might draw better buyers.”
“Oh,” I said, while inside my chest, everything shifted and slid. I had run headlong into marrying Jock, believing there wasn’t any other way—but now it was clear I would have had another full year to think it all through. A year to stay at home and ease into the idea, getting to know Jock better, or perhaps—just perhaps—for some other thing or choice to show itself. I felt ill even thinking about it. Why hadn’t I waited?
“You and Jock want to come for dinner?” my father asked lightly, but this too seemed like a slap. I would never be more than an invited guest now. My home was elsewhere.
—
The next few months were among the hardest of my life. Jock’s farm had nearly the same views as Green Hills, and the same feel to the air—but I couldn’t quite convince myself I belonged there.
The sun went down early in our valley—never a moment after 6:00 p.m.—and by the time it set, every night, no matter what else was happening, Jock had washed and was inside at our bar cart, doctoring a whisky. When we were still in Bombay, I told myself his drinking was a family affair that belonged to those nights, like the jackdaws and the tang of tamarind, but once we were home Jock kept up the same pace on his own. After dinner was cleared away, he’d smoke and pour a second. There was something tender and almost loving in the way he cradled the glass, as if it were his oldest friend, the thing that would always get him through—but through what exactly?
I rarely knew what Jock was thinking. He worked hard, as hard as my father ever had, but the greater part of him was turned in on himself, as if there were a fixed screen just behind his eyes and no way to get through it. My father hadn’t exactly been emotional. It was possible that all men were difficult to read, but I had to live with Jock through every long evening, and the silence was often deadly. And if I tried to talk to him or, God forbid, ask him to take it easy on the whisky, he’d lash out.
“Oh, sod off, Beryl. It’s all easy for you, isn’t it?”
“What is?”