“Is there something you want to tell me?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t. But by the time we settled before the fire later that evening, things became clearer as they unravelled. Jock drank too much at dinner, and his eyes took on a troubling sheen. I recognized this as a kind of warning—the first stone along the path to a good row—and hoped he would think twice with the Birkbecks here.
“How will you follow up your success for the next race meeting?” Ben asked from the sofa while the fire made cheerful crinkling noises. “Care to share some of your secrets?”
“When I train your horses, I’ll share all of them,” I said.
Ben laughed thinly. It seemed he’d felt the tension in the room, too, and now was trying to plot a strategic way to safely steer us back on course. He rose and made a sweep of the room. “I say, Jock, but this is a beauty.” He meant the broad smooth Arab door that Jock had bought for the house not long after we were married. Like the phonograph, it was a sign of prosperity, and Jock was proud of it. The wood of the door was a rich puzzle of knots, with an overlay of carvings the artisan had painstakingly worked into the surface.
“It’s lovely,” Cockie said. “Wherever did you find it?”
“Lamu,” Jock said. “I’ve been thinking of improving it, though.”
“What?” She laughed. “It’s a relic, isn’t it? You wouldn’t really touch it.”
“I might.” He slid over the last word strangely, his tongue too thick and uncontrolled. He was drunker than I thought.
“Let’s have a game.” I reached for the deck of cards, but Jock wasn’t listening. He strode out of the room only long enough for Cockie to give me a questioning look and then came back again with a wooden mallet he’d found in the kitchen. It was a kitchen tool, meant for tenderizing meat, but he was beyond caring about proper uses. While we watched, he dragged over a chair and climbed on top of it to pound a small copper peg into the upper-right-hand corner of the door with the mallet, hammering away.
“Every time my wife has an indiscretion I’m going to add a nail,” he said to the door. I couldn’t see his expression and couldn’t bear to look at Cockie or Ben. “It might be the only way we’ll be able to keep track.”
“Good God, Jock,” I cried, horrified. Somehow he’d learned about Boy, then, and this was how he was exacting revenge, with an all-out scene in front of new friends. When he whirled round with the mallet, it balanced in his hand for a moment like a rungu club, his eyes glittering. “Get down.”
“Just one by my count, is that right?” he asked me, and then turned to Ben. “Unless you’ve had her, too.”
“Stop!” I yelled as Cockie’s face went deathly white. One of Jock’s knees buckled, and he tipped off the chair, tumbling to the floor. The mallet flew away from him, whipping over my left shoulder, and bouncing with a thudding clatter off the window casement. Thank goodness for instincts. I had ducked at precisely the right moment. Another few inches or portion of a second and the mallet would have cracked me on the head. Then we really would have had a story.
As Jock scrambled to find his feet again, Ben hurried to Cockie, and they made for the other room just as Barasa arrived.
“Please help bwana to bed,” I told him, and soon I could hear them in the other room, a thump of shoes and shuffling of bedclothes. When I found the Birkbecks, they told me they were heading back to town. I was mortified. “At least wait till morning,” I said. “It will be safer then.”
“We’re nothing if not intrepid,” Cockie said gently. She signalled to Ben to go and pack their things and when he’d gone said, “I don’t know what you’ve done, darling, but I can tell you there are things men don’t want to know. And with us here, too…I suppose he had to show you he was still in charge.”
“You don’t mean to say he was justified in acting that way?”
“No.” She sighed. But it seemed as if she was saying precisely that.
“I’m a disaster at marriage, and now at infidelity, too?”
She laughed soberly. “None of this is easy, I know. You’re so young, and everyone makes great lurching mistakes sometimes. You really will work it out one day. For now, though, you’ve got to eat humble pie.”