“If I had it, why would I sign?”
She smiled and sighed. “We’re going to have to find you a handsome benefactor.”
“A man?” I balked. I could barely stand the thought after the gauntlet I’d run.
“Think of them as sponsors, darling. Any man would be lucky to parade you around on his arm in exchange for some nice gifts. Jewellery preferably.” She smiled again. “That might just get you through.”
Cockie was curvy and a full head shorter than I was, so none of her things would do for me, but she took me shopping, and also over to a wealthy friend’s to raid her cupboards. I was grateful she wanted to look out for me and to help me sort out my current state. But I didn’t much feel like myself in London. In truth, I hadn’t felt one hundred per cent right since the sea voyage from Mombasa, when nausea had kept me green to the gills and chained to my bunk below decks. The dizziness had lingered long after I had my feet on dry land—but once I’d arrived in Belgravia, it had faded and been replaced by general fatigue. I was reluctant to mention anything to Cockie, but she saw it for herself soon enough and began to canvass me about my symptoms.
“You might have the influenza, darling. People die from it over here. Go and see my surgeon.”
“But I’ve never caught any kind of fever.”
“Everything’s different here, though. Please go, won’t you? Do it for me.”
In general I avoided modern medicine and had ever since arap Maina had told Kibii and me about the crazy mzungu doctors that took blood out of someone else’s body to cure you. He had scoffed, waving his hand at the ludicrousness of white men, and Kibii and I had shuddered, thinking of someone else’s sticky red life snaking through our veins. Could you even be yourself after something like that?
Cockie wouldn’t hear my protests. She dragged me along to the surgery, where the doctor took my temperature, felt my pulse, and asked me all sorts of questions about my journey and recent habits. Finally he declared me right as rain. “A little constipation at most,” he said, and recommended cod-liver oil in a handful of doses.
“Aren’t you glad you went, though?” Cockie asked in the cab back to West Halkin Street. “Now your mind will be at ease.”
But it wasn’t. Something still wasn’t right with me, and it wasn’t constipation. I thanked her and went back to Dorking again, keen for a rest from town and its pace. Boy and Genessee were just as warm and patient with me as they had been before—but there came a morning in my snug bed in Dorking when it all added up, the nausea and dizziness and fatigue. The way I was growing rounder under borrowed clothes. I tried to remember the last time I’d had my monthly bleeding and couldn’t. I reached under the down quilt and rested my hands on my waist, which had thickened considerably over the last few weeks. I’d blamed that on buttered crumpets and clotted cream—but now the truth arrived all at once.
I lay back on the pillow feeling reality slide around me like a carousel. Birth control was a dodgy thing. Since the end of the war men could get hold of condoms, but they were stiff and crude, susceptible to breaking and tearing. Mostly the man pulled out before anything happened, or you tried to avoid the more dangerous times of the month, as I had done with Boy when we were still involved. But with Denys, everything had happened so quickly that I’d done nothing. Now I was in dire straits. If I’d been at home, I might have gone to one of the native women in the Somali village and asked for a tea made from pennyroyal or scale-leaf juniper and hoped that would solve the problem—but here, in England?
I curled more deeply into the bed and thought about Denys. It was cruel that one night in his arms had got me into such trouble. And I couldn’t fool myself that he’d be happy to learn I was carrying his child. Family life was too constricting for him—he’d made that clear from the beginning. But where did that leave me? I was twenty-one with no husband to count on, no parents to speak of, not in practical terms, and thousands of miles from the world I knew best—my home. And time was not on my side.
Later that day, I made my excuses to Boy and Genessee, thanked them for all their kindnesses, and boarded the train back to London with a prickling dread.
—