In all my years of living in the bush, I had never caught malaria or any other of the terrible fevers or plagues. Now I was felled by something just as serious though more difficult to name—an illness of the spirit. I didn’t want to sleep or eat, and nothing made me happy. Nothing made sense. Jock, meanwhile, bustled around me, full of plans for our farm and for us. He had bought up my father’s gristmill, one of the last things to go at auction, and had got it for a song. Though he seemed delighted by the deal, I could barely stand to think that we were profiting from my father’s failure; that our holdings were being built on the bones of Green Hills.
All I could do was turn my attention to the horses. I found a black ledger exactly like the one my father had used and began to mark down everything that happened in the stables every day—the exercise sessions and feeding schedules, the wages of the grooms and equipment to be ordered. I set up a small office in one corner of the stable the way my father had done—just a tiny desk and a lamp and a calendar on the wall with the date of the next race meeting circled boldly. Each day I rose before dawn to be at morning gallops—but it wasn’t enough. More and more a bell tolled through me. It woke me up early and sometimes in the still middle of the night, sending a cold chill up over the surface of my skin. What have I done? Can I still mend this? Can I free myself?
Most days, Jock and I were at cross-purposes. The harder I worked, the more he behaved as if I were taking something away from him. He had assumed I would only want what he wanted, I imagined, that I would be happy to throw myself at his aims instead of my own. Sometimes, after he’d had a few too many, I would hear the phonograph start up, and the first lilting bars of “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” Jock had bought the record not long after we were married, saying he wanted a keepsake of our first dance. I had thought the gesture sweet, but when he played it now it was to drive home the fact that I wasn’t the girl he thought he’d married. I wasn’t, of course, and I didn’t know what to do about it either.
Pulling on my robe, I went out into the main room, where he was deep into his cups, humming along with the words, sharply off tune.
A Garden of Eden just made for two
With nothing to mar our joy
I would say such wonderful things to you
There would be such wonderful things to do
“You’re going to feel like hell in the morning. Turn that off and come to bed.”
“Don’t you love me, Beryl?”
“Of course,” I said quickly, woodenly. The truth was that when I measured Jock against my father or arap Maina, the men I admired most, he came up disastrously short. But not everything was his fault. Somehow I had thought I could marry a perfect stranger and have it all magically work out. Like the house we lived in, my promises to him had gone up far too fast to be sound. I had lunged at a choice, and it had been the wrong one. “Have some coffee or come to bed.”
“You don’t even try to deny it.” The song finished and the recording hissed. “You care more about that dog,” he said, and got up to move the needle back to the beginning.
Almost overnight, Buller had become ancient and arthritic. He was blind as well as deaf and moved as if he were made entirely of brittle glass. My father would have shot him and been right to do it. I couldn’t, and waited with him instead, sometimes lowering my face to rest just above his gnarled head and telling him things he couldn’t hear, about how brave he’d been and still was.
“He’s dying,” I said to Jock, my voice beginning to break. But even at the edge of death, Buller was showing more courage than I was. For most of a year I had been hiding behind my hasty decision, trying not to think about the future or the past. Both were here in the room with us, and the terrible bell was beginning to toll again. I knew it wouldn’t be silent until I thrashed my way out of the mess I had made, no matter how awful that was. There was no other way.
“I want to go and work for Delamere,” I said quickly, before I could change my mind or take it back. “I can learn to train there. My father suggested it before he left and I think it’s a sound move.”
“What? We have our own animals. Why go somewhere else?”
“It isn’t just the work, Jock. Nothing’s right between us. You know it as well as I do.”
“We’re just beginning. Give it time.”
“Time won’t do a thing. You should have a proper wife, one who wants to care for you and have a dozen children and all of it. That’s not me.”
He turned with the drink in his hand, and I could see the hard edge inside him, its silhouette as clear and sharp as if he were his own faraway mountain. I had caught him off guard. “You don’t love me, then.” He said it coldly and cleanly.