When Denys fell asleep again, I dressed without a sound, slipping out of the house and down to Galbraith’s stables to borrow a horse. The horse might take a little explaining the next day, I knew, but not as much as my face when I wouldn’t be able to hide what had happened. The pony was a sure-footed Arab, and though it was dark when we set out, I wasn’t afraid. Within a few miles, pale light began to thicken to the east and then the sun rose clean and sharp, the same intense colour as the flamingos resting in the shallows of Elmenteita. As I came nearer the water’s edge, I could see them beginning to stir as a group, as if they were all knitted together beneath the surface. When they fed, they fed in twos and threes, sieving the muddy water for one another, pulling along in S-shaped wading strides.
I’d seen this same picture hundreds of times, but today it seemed to mean something else. The lake was as still as a skin, as if this were the first morning of the world. I stopped to let the pony drink his fill, and when I mounted again I clucked him from a walk into a canter, and the flamingos rose and turned like a tide. They swept one way over the rim of the lake, all pale bellies and furled wings, and then twisted back as a single body, a gyration of colour that swept me up inside it. I had been sleeping, I realized. Since the moment my father had told me the farm was finished, I’d been asleep or on the run or both. Now, there was sun on the water and the sound of a thousand flamingos beating the air. I didn’t know what would happen now. How it would be with Denys and Karen, or how all these snarled feelings inside me would be set to rights. I had no earthly idea of any of it, but at least I was awake now. At least there was that.
—
Four days later, D threw a New Year’s party at a hotel he owned in Nakuru. Everyone came dressed in his or her very finest to ring out 1923 with bright paper horns and bring 1924 down from the place it waited, the newness of it like a length of unmarked cloth. The band members were promised caviar and all the champagne they could guzzle if they would play until dawn. The small parquet dance floor was a riotous mass of swinging arms and legs.
“How’s your heart these days?” I asked Berkeley when we danced. He wore a bright red Christmas tie, but there were dark smudges beneath his eyes, and his skin was ashy.
“A little battered, but still ticking. How’s yours?”
“About the same, actually.”
We waltzed past a table where Denys and Karen sat talking, he in a brilliant-white suit, and she in yards of black taffeta that bared her pale shoulders. It made my chest hurt to look at them. I hadn’t spoken to or even seen Denys since I had crept from his bed like a thief. I hadn’t been in touch with Karen since her shooting party and didn’t know how I would begin to behave normally with either of them. Normal was gone for good now.
When the song had finished, I excused myself to find a drink. It took me ages to push my way through to the bar, and by the time I had, Karen was there already. Her long ebony cigarette holder sculpted the space between us.
“Happy New Year, Beryl.”
“Happy New Year.” I leaned to kiss her on the cheek. Guilt surged through me in small waves. “How are you?”
“Up to my neck. My shareholders want me to sell the farm.”
“Are things really that bad?”
“Nearly always.” Her teeth clicked on the ebony holder as she pulled in smoke, releasing it slowly, revealing nothing. That was Karen. Her words were so full they made you think you knew everything about her, but it was a magician’s trick. The truth was she kept her secrets closest when she said them outright.
I said, “Having Denys around must help.” I was struggling to be natural.
“Yes, it means everything to me. Do you know I die a little whenever he goes away?”
I felt my chest tighten. Her poetic flair was the same as ever, but something in her tone made me wonder if she was warning me somehow, or staking her claim. I watched the angles of her cheekbones through the quivering smoke, thinking of how good she was at reading people. I was “the child” to her, but it was possible she sensed what had changed. That she tasted it on the air.
“Can you convince your shareholders to give you one last chance?”
“I’ve had it already. Twice, actually—but I’ll have to do something. I might marry for instance.”
“Aren’t you still married?” I managed.
“Of course. I’m just thinking ahead.” She looked down her angular nose at me. “Or perhaps I’ll give up everything and move away to China, or Marseilles.”
“You don’t really mean that.”
“Sometimes…it’s a fantasy I have of beginning again. Surely you have one, too.”
“Of leaving Kenya? I’ve never thought of that. I wouldn’t be the same anywhere else.”
“You might change your mind one day, though. If you’re hurting enough.” She fixed me with one of her looks, her eyes arrowing through me, and then she moved away.