“Do you still love him?”
“I wish I could say no. But Africa sets you up to feel things you’re not prepared for. I came to believe we could have everything…children, devotion, fidelity.” She shut her eyes and opened them again, the pupils flaring black. “Maybe he’s not capable of loving just one woman. Or perhaps he is, but not me. He was never faithful, not even in the beginning, and that’s what I keep coming back to, how I thought I knew what I had bargained for when I married Bror, when actually I had very little idea of any of it.”
I took a bolstering swallow of Calvados. “You could be talking about my marriage. That’s just how I feel.”
“And will you get your divorce, do you think?”
“I hope so. I’m afraid to apply any pressure just now.”
“We’re all of us afraid of many things, but if you make yourself smaller or let your fear confine you, then you really aren’t your own person at all—are you? The real question is whether or not you will risk what it takes to be happy.”
She was referring to Jock, but her words made me think of other things, too.
“Are you happy, Karen?”
“Not yet. But I mean to be.”
Through a series of telegrams, everything was settled with Clara very quickly. The house was going to be perfect, she insisted, and fell over herself to thank me. But even this much intimacy felt confusing. I hadn’t had a mother for more than sixteen years, and didn’t have the slightest idea how to behave with her, even on paper. I struggled with every line, wondering how affectionate I should be, or how aloof. I had no practise with any of this—there wasn’t even a word for what we were now, not mother and daughter, but not utterly estranged. It was bewildering.
In one message from Clara, I learned that my brother, Dickie, had been in Kenya for many years and was currently up north in Eldoret, jockeying for a good stable there. I couldn’t quite believe it. Dickie had been here, in my world, without my being aware of it? What did it mean? Would we all somehow come to know one another as a family again? Did I want that? Was it even possible?
I was still tumbling with conflicting feelings when Clara arrived at the tail end of May. As I set off to meet her at the Norfolk Hotel in a motorcar I’d borrowed from D, my hands shook and my throat felt full of knots. Sweat sprang up under my arms and behind my knees like a bout of mysterious fever. It was all I could do not to run for cover when she and the boys came down and met me in the tea room. I had tried to remember what she looked like, wondering if I’d even recognize her, but I needn’t have. We had the same face, with identical high checkbones and foreheads, the same pale-blue eyes. Looking at her gave me a strange, lurching feeling—as if I were meeting myself as a lost ghost—and I was glad the boys were there to pull me out of the sensation. They were seven and nine, blond and clean and combed and shy at first. They half hid behind their mother as she took me in her arms. Unprepared, I bumped her hat with my elbow and pulled away, feeling stung and confused. I didn’t want her embrace, but just what did I want?
“How was the voyage?” I managed.
“The waves were bigger than anything,” Ivan, the older one, said.
“Ivan was sick all over the side of the boat,” Alex broke in proudly. “Twice.”
“It was a trial,” Clara confirmed. “But we’re here now.”
We moved to a narrow table, where the boys fell on plates of biscuits as if they’d been caged. “You really are too beautiful,” Clara exclaimed. “And married now, I understand.”
I didn’t know how to answer her, and so only nodded.
“Harry was the joy of my life.” Clara’s mouth trembled. Her eyes silvered with tears. “You’ve no idea how hard it’s been, with the debts and the uncertainty. And now I’m alone again.”
As she dabbed at her tears with a handkerchief, I stared at her, feeling slightly stunned. For some reason, I thought she might try to explain herself or apologize. That she might ask regretfully about Clutt, or want to know how things had really been for me. But she was very much caught up in her own sad story, this recent one, as if there weren’t any other.
“Mbagathi is beautiful,” I said, making an effort to plunge ahead. “The boys will love it there. They can run around to their hearts’ content, and maybe even go to school. The baroness has found a teacher for the Kikuyu children on her land.”
“You really have been my saviour, Beryl. I knew I could count on you.” She sniffed loudly. “Isn’t your sister marvellous, boys?”
I was their sister, and also a stranger, a fact that didn’t seem to rattle them as much as it did me. Ivan ignored Clara completely. Alex glanced up with his lips covered in biscuit crumbs, and then dived back in.