Cockie’s surgeon seemed surprised to see me again—and a little put out, actually. He’d sent me packing with my cod-liver oil, and here I was again like a cat at the door. But a few additional weeks had made the problem quite clear. As Cockie waited in a small sitting room, I lay back on his table and squeezed my eyes shut. He poked and prodded, and I took myself away, thinking of Njoro instead—the curving of our dirt track down the maize-gold hill, the flat, still sky, and morning heat trembling up from the dust. If only I could be home, I told myself, I could bear anything.
“You’re several months gone,” the surgeon told me when I sat up again. He cleared his throat and turned away while the whole room lurched.
“How did you miss it before?” Cockie nearly shouted when the doctor made his pronouncement again, in his private office. The room was drenched with dewy April light. There was a deep-blue ink blotter on his broad leather desk. Near my crossed ankles stood a bone-tidy rubbish bin that seemed never to have touched actual rubbish.
“It isn’t an exact science.”
“Five weeks ago you said she was constipated! You never really examined her. Now things are so much worse.” Cockie continued to harass him, and I sat in my chair, as still as a tombstone. My vision blurred at the edges, as if I were looking down a long, indeterminate tunnel.
“Certain young women have been known to cross into France under these…circumstances,” he said without quite looking at either of us.
“Is there time for France?” I asked.
“Perhaps not,” he finally admitted. With a little more badgering he gave us an address, saying, “I never sent you. I’ve never seen you at all.”
I knew only the sketchiest stories of the kind of place he meant, where women in trouble got “taken care of.” I shuddered, terrified in the cab home from the surgeon’s, panic like clenched metal pooled around my heart. “I’ve no idea where I’ll find the money,” I told Cockie.
“I know.” She looked out the window, then sighed deeply and squeezed my hand. “Let me think.”
—
As it turned out, there was almost no time to spare. Two days later, we drove to a little room on Brook Street. Cockie hadn’t pressed me with questions, hadn’t shown me anything but utter warmth and kindness, but in the cab I couldn’t hold in the truth a moment longer. “The baby is Denys’s,” I said. Stinging tears burned trails down my cheeks and onto my borrowed collar.
“Denys’s? Oh, darling. I had no idea how complicated things had got at home. You don’t want to tell him first?”
I shook my head. “It’s no use. Can you see him marrying me? And Karen hasn’t the slightest idea about us. It would steal her happiness—Denys’s, too. I couldn’t live with myself.”
Cockie let out a long exhalation, nodding, and then bit her lip. “I wish I could take some of the pain away for you or make something easier.”
“No one can do that. And anyway, I brought it all on myself.”
“Don’t be silly, Beryl. You’re still a child.”
“I’m not, though,” I told her. Not any more.
I recovered—if that truly is the word—in Dorking with Boy and Genessee. I told them I’d been downed by fever and let them park me in the sun near a sprawling plane tree. I drank gallons of English tea and tried to look at magazines, feeling grief stricken and sick at heart. Though my rational mind knew I had lunged at the only possible solution, that didn’t comfort me in the least. Denys and I had created the promise, the essence, of life together, and I had wilfully destroyed it. That there had never been even a remote possibility that he would be happy about this pregnancy and want to make a life with me felt sadder still. The world didn’t exist where I could show him how much I cared or what I truly wanted. I knew too much to even dream of such a place.
Several times each day I traced the curving stone wall slowly, all the way down the hill to the hedgerow and back again, trying to right myself, and yet stuck on the same difficult thoughts. Denys would never know this terrible secret, that I had carried his child. Karen wouldn’t either, and yet we were all stitched together so deeply now, and in such a complex pattern, that I couldn’t clear my mind of either of them. The light in Dorking was dappled, not piercing. There were goshawks cresting over the plane tree, not Ngong’s magnificent eagles—but at the centre of my mind and my heart as well, I spent a good part of every day travelling home.
Strangely, the newspapers were full of Kenya, too. No matter how aggressively D’s Vigilance Committee and others like it had fought, the Devonshire White Paper had taken full hold, and rumblings of African rights were growing louder. As for the Asiatics, it was now being touted that they might one day be counted in the electoral role and own land in the highlands. These were new and threatening sentiments on the wind, and though none of it would resolve at any time soon, even the notion of such change was shocking.
“You know,” Cockie remarked when she took the train out to visit me at the end of May, “The Times goes on and on about how greedy we settlers are, how we’ve muddied up the colony they gave us and overrun everything. But they also have to print a map of Kenya every time they run a story. Otherwise, Londoners might not know it actually exists.” She flipped the paper closed.