“Your talent’s never been in question, has it?” I tried to ignore him, but he went on. “This will be good for business.”
Just like that, the flush of pride and gratitude I’d felt after Dynasty’s win winked out of me. He was pouncing on my success. When Dynasty was led into the winner’s enclosure and one of the newspapermen asked for my name and a photo, Jock stepped in to spell out Purves carefully. His hand stayed on my elbow or the small of my back like an immovable tether, but none of it was about me. He was only thinking of what greater notice meant for the possibility of new grain contracts or additions to our bloodstock.
Later it would come to me how this win meant more for him than me, strangely. As Dynasty’s trainer, I would receive a percentage of her prize money. If I one day managed to get her placed regularly, I might glean a good-enough salary to win financial independence, but that was a distant dream. Jock still had plenty of leverage as he loomed at my side, cheerfully considering his own gain as my husband and my keeper. It was shocking how quickly we’d become adversaries.
“Do you suppose there will one day be female trainers in England?” one of the newspapermen asked.
“I haven’t given it any thought,” I said. I posed for the photo, wanting to elbow Jock hard in the ribs—to send him right out of my circle and my light. Instead, I smiled.
—
D had always known how to celebrate. That night, as the liquor ran freely, he made red-faced elaborate toasts and took to the dance floor with any number of smartly dressed women while a five-piece band played whatever he asked, bribed by good champagne.
The Muthaiga Club was the very best Nairobi had to offer. Three miles from the centre of Nairobi, it was an oasis, with pebbled walls pink as a flamingo’s feather. Behind them, club members felt they’d earned the right to be there, to be waited on deferentially at one moment and surrender all restraint the next. You could bask by the tennis courts with your tall glass of gin and chipped ice, stable your best horse, whack glossy croquet balls over glossy bits of trimmed lawn, hire a European chauffeur to take you around, or simply get good and drunk on one of the blue-screened terraces.
I loved the club as much as anyone—the sitting rooms all done in dark hardwood flooring, the loose chintz-covered sofas and Persian carpets and framed hunting spoils—but I was still out of sorts. Jock had remained clamped to my side so completely I couldn’t enjoy myself for a moment. It was only when D came over with a nice bottle of aged whisky to share with Jock that I was able to bolt for the bar in the other room, slinking along the wall to escape notice.
The bodies on the dance floor were frenzied, as if everyone worried the night might pass before they’d reach their portion of happiness or forgetting. Race days always whipped everyone up into this state, and as the party had been going on for most of the day, the waiters and porters all looked exhausted from trying to keep up. When I got to the cocktail bar, the queue was several bodies deep.
“You could wither away waiting for gin here,” the woman just in front of me warned. She spoke with a clipped English accent and was tall and slim, wearing a deep-green Ascot gown and a matching ostrich-feather hat. “Thank God I planned ahead.” She reached into a small jet-bead handbag and pulled out a silver flask, handing it to me.
I thanked her and fumbled with the tiny silver stopper while she smiled.
“Good show today, by the way. I’m Cockie Birkbeck. We met at a race meeting years ago. I’m actually distantly related to you, on your mother’s side.”
The mention of my mother instantly unsettled me, as it always had. I took a healthy sip, feeling the fire in my nose and throat, and passed back the pretty flask. “I don’t remember meeting you.”
“Oh, it was ages ago. You were a child then and I was…younger. Don’t you despise this dry climate? It splits and shrivels everything, and gives you ten years for every two.”
“You’re beautiful,” I said plainly.
“Aren’t you a lamb for saying so? I’ll bet you’re still wishing that you were older, particularly in the world you’re in, elbowing around with burly men in the paddock?” She laughed and then tapped the shoulder of the man in front of her. “Can’t you speed things up, Blix? We’re languishing here.”
He turned and gave her a grin that was somehow youthful as well as hungry-looking. “That sounds vaguely sexual.”
“Everything’s vaguely sexual for you.”
He winked. “Don’t you love that about me?” He was stocky with a thick neck and squared shoulders, and his round face still had something of the schoolboy in it, though he must have been thirty or more.
“Bror Blixen, this is Beryl Clutterbuck.”
“It’s Purves now, actually,” I said awkwardly. “I’m married.”