“It doesn’t matter,” I said, feeling numb. “No one can parcel up Africa or even defend it. It doesn’t belong to anyone.”
“Except the Africans, you mean.”
“More than anyone else, I suppose. Or maybe we’re all daft to think we can own even a stitch of it.”
“Will you go home again? Is that what’s on your mind today?”
“How?” I looked off across the meadow, where a goshawk moved slowly and beautifully in a flat plane, gliding along without seeming to move even a muscle. “If I had wings, maybe.”
The stone wall that cut the rich green field was knee high and derelict in that English country way meant to be charming, toppled in places and crawling with mosses. I stood and walked slowly, tugging at a nest of dead leaves and crushing them to powder in my hands. That one night with Denys, at Kekopey, he had been tender with me and absolutely real. He’d looked into my eyes, and I had felt that he saw who and what I was at my centre. I understood him, too, that was the thing—and knew he couldn’t ever belong to anyone. But that didn’t help me now. My heart had been battered and kicked, and I didn’t hold out hope that anything would offer a cure, anything except going home. I had to find a way.
In a little while, Cockie moved through the meadow to join me. Quietly, she sat on the edge of the wall.
“How did you ever get the money?” I asked her. “For the doctor.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m not sure. Tell me.”
“Frank Greswolde.”
“Frank?” He was an old friend from the colony—another horse owner my father had known well when I was a girl. Cockie and I had seen him the month before at a party in London, along with an entire clutch of London’s showier well-to-do. He hadn’t seemed all that interested in me, except to see how Clutt was—and I had no idea how he was.
“Frank has a good heart.”
“He has deep pockets, you mean.”
“Honestly, Beryl. A man can have both. When I told him—very discreetly—how in need you were, he insisted on helping.”
“So this is what you meant by sponsor. What does he expect in return?”
“I don’t think he has any ulterior motives. He probably only wants to go around with you when you’re feeling up to it. There’s nothing terribly wrong with that.”
For her there wasn’t; that was obvious—but I hated even the idea of being obligated to a benefactor, no matter what stripe or what he wanted in return. I wouldn’t need anything, not if I could help it. I also didn’t see another way, not immediately. “Let’s go back to London then,” I said. “I want to get on with it.”
“Don’t get Frank wrong, darling. I’m sure you can do whatever you like with him, or nothing.”
“It doesn’t matter in any case,” I told her. “I’ve nothing left to lose.”
The port of Mombasa was a snarled and fabulous thing, full of cargo vessels and fishing dinghies, their flat decks hung with curled, drying shark meat or buckets of eels. The arcing seafront pulsed with heat and trolleys and droves of oxen. Pink and yellow bungalows climbed the slopes of low hills, their pale-green tin roofs sharp against the colour of fat baobab trees, which were nearly purple. The smell of fish and dust and dung throbbed in the air like a loving assault as I leaned into the railing, watching my home country get nearer and wider, clearer and wilder. Around my neck rested a fat and glossy string of pearls. I wore a white silk dress that cut me right everywhere. Near my hand on the rail rested Frank’s hand. It had a right to be there. I had become his girl.
“Should we stay in Mombasa for a few days?” Frank asked. “Or drive down the coast?” He stood next to me, his large belly touching the white painted railing. A porter had brought us each a glass of wine. He sipped his and faced me, so that I could see the puckering scar under his right eye, below a dark eye patch. He’d lost that eye shooting several years before, and though it gave him a hardened look, he wasn’t hard. At least not to me.
“I’m ready for home,” I told him.
“I suppose all the rumpus has died down. It’s been six months.”
“That’s a lifetime in the colony,” I said, and hoped I was right.
A gold ring sat on one of Frank’s pinkie fingers, squat and square with a watery blue beryl stone. He’d got it in London and been excited to show me. “Pure beryl is colourless,” he’d said then, “but this was the prettiest.”
“It’s like the African sky.”