“I couldn’t survive without my mother’s love,” Karen said. “I write to her every week, on Sunday, and live for the letters she sends. This week I’ll tell her about you and say you look like the Mona Lisa. Would you ever let me paint you? You’d make a wonderful picture, just as you are now. Lovely, and also a little lost.”
I flushed at her description, feeling pried at. She spoke so frankly, but it was her eyes, too, and how nothing seemed to escape her. “Those things don’t really show on my face, do they?”
“I’m sorry, try not to mind me. People interest me so much. They’re such wonderful puzzles. Think of it. Half the time we’ve no idea what we’re doing, but we live anyway.”
“Yes,” Denys said. “Searching out something important and going astray look exactly the same for a while, in fact.” He stretched and resettled himself like a rangy tomcat in the sun. “Sometimes no one knows the difference, especially not the poor damned pilgrim.” He winked at me, almost imperceptibly. “Now how about a story? No supper without a tale.”
I’d been thinking of what I might tell them and had finally settled on Paddy and that day at the Elkingtons’ farm. Wanting to hold their attention, I described everything I remembered from the beginning, and slowly—the ride out to Kabete Station and my father’s speech about lions. Bishon Singh and his endless turban, the gooseberry bushes and the sizzling crack of Jim Elkington’s kiboko. After a while, I forgot that I was trying to draw Denys and Karen in and became engrossed myself, almost as if I’d forgotten what was going to happen and how it all turned out.
“You must have been absolutely terrified,” Karen said when I’d finished. “I can’t think many have lived through such a thing.”
“I was, yes. But later I came to see it as a kind of initiation.”
“I’ll bet it was important for you. We all have those moments—though not always so dramatic.” Denys paused, looking into the fire. “They’re meant to test us and change us, I think. To make plain what it means to risk everything.”
The room grew quiet for a time. I thought of what Denys had said and watched the two of them smoke in silence. Finally, Denys pulled a pocket-sized volume from inside his brown velvet jacket. “I found a small gem in a bookshop when I was in London. It’s called Leaves of Grass.” He opened to a dog-eared page and held it out to me, saying I should read for us.
“God, no. I’ll butcher it.”
“You won’t. I thought of this one particularly for you.”
I shook my head.
“You do it, Denys,” Karen said, saving me, “in Beryl’s honour.”
“?‘I think I could turn and live with animals,’?” he read aloud,
“they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins…. ”
He recited the words simply, not at all theatrically, but they had their own gravity and drama. The poem seemed to be about how naturally dignified animals are and how their lives make more sense than those of humans, which are cluttered with greed and self-pity and talk of a distant God. It was something I’d always believed. He finished with this passage:
“A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,
Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,
Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,
Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.”
“It’s wonderful,” I said quietly. “May I borrow it?”
“Of course.” He handed the little volume to me, light as a feather and still warm from his holding it.
I said good night and went off to my room, perching under a lamp to read over more of the poems. The house grew still around me, but after a while it occurred to me that I was hearing sounds coming from down the hall. Mbogani wasn’t all that large, and the noises—though muffled—were unmistakable. Denys and Karen were making love.
I closed the book in my hands, feeling a small surge of adrenaline. I’d been so certain they were only close friends. Why had I thought that? Blix had said Denys’s name so lightly that night he’d come here, but perhaps that only meant he’d come to accept Denys’s place in Karen’s life. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed that these two would be drawn together. They were both beautiful and interesting, full of deep water, as the Kips would say. And no matter what Berkeley had said about Denys being elusive in love, he and Karen had an obvious bond. I could see that clearly.
I turned to the book again, leafing through to the animal poem Denys had recited for me, but the black type jumped. Beyond several walls, the lovers were whispering things to each other, their bodies blending with shadows, coming together and apart. Their affair had nothing to do with me, and yet I couldn’t stop thinking of them. Finally, I turned out the lamp and pulled the pillow up around my ears, wanting only to go to sleep.