“Maybe you should tell him that soon, then.”
I tried to force back my emotions while we rested in silence for a few minutes. Berkeley would have to be fine somehow, and what of Denys? Could we be friends again after all that had happened?
“Come out to Mbogani sometime,” he said when I readied myself to leave. “I’ll stand you a drink.”
“I thought you said Karen’s away.”
“She is. You’re always welcome, though.”
“Oh” was all I could say. Then I stood and leaned in to him for a moment, brushing his smooth-shaved skin with my lips. “Good night, Denys.”
—
The next day I rode to Solio, arriving near the cocktail hour. Knowing Berkeley, I half expected him to be out in the yard, a bottle of champagne in each hand, but he was confined to bed. It broke my heart to see him there, frail and bloodless, small-looking as a child.
“Beryl, you angel,” he said when I handed him a fat cigar I’d brought him from Nakuru. “Light it for me, will you? I’m not sure I have the breath.”
“I didn’t know how bad things were. I would have come before.”
“What do you mean?” he feigned. His colouring was so off even his lovely teeth seemed grey. His voice was weak. “Do you know the farm has never been more profitable? I’m just now getting the hang of things. Just in time.” He tried to sit up, and I leaned over to help, gathering pillows to prop him up while his Somali servants looked on severely. “They’re not sure you should be touching me,” he whispered. “There aren’t usually beautiful women in my bed.”
“I don’t believe that for a second. You’re a prince, Berkeley. You really are the best of them.”
“Except for minor bits of me.” He gazed at the cigar I’d placed in his hand, the wraithlike curlicues of silvery smoke twisting higher before trailing away to nothing. “But I’ll go out like the great poets, won’t I, full of fire and deep soundings?”
“Don’t go at all, you rat. Please don’t.”
He closed his eyes. “All right. Not today.”
I found glasses for us and he told me where to search out the very best wine, at the back of a cupboard near his bed.
“It’s Falernian, this bottle.” He held it up to the light. “It’s one of the few wines that’s got the stamp of the ancient Romans. Some think it’s the best wine in the world.”
“You don’t want to waste it on me, then.”
“Poor beautiful Beryl. Are you sure you can’t marry me? You could have my fortune when I die and raise scandals as my young widow.”
“Poor beautiful Berkeley. You always talk such a good game, but tell me, who truly has your heart?”
“Ah, that.” He coughed into his shirt cuff. “That’s a very great secret.” Through dark-fringed lashes, his brown eyes had a soft fire about them, as if he already knew what waited for him, past this life into the next. “Grab a book and read something out to me, will you? I’m feeling lonely for verse.”
“I have something,” I said quietly, and began to say out my Whitman lines, from “Song of Myself,” the ones I had managed to keep close to me for years now. I didn’t think I could look at him and go on, so I focused on his fine pale hands on the snow-white blanket, the pale-blue moons low on his clipped fingernails, the small nicks of scars, the failing veins.
When I’d finished we sat quietly for a while. He swirled the wine in his glass. “It’s the loveliest colour of amber, isn’t it? Like lions in the grass.”
“Exactly like that.”
“Now begin again, but more slowly this time. I don’t want to miss anything.”
I started again from the beginning while his breath grew more and more quiet, his eyes softening and then closing. There was a slight smile on his waxen lips, and his spiked lashes were like fragile ferns on his cheeks. How could I ever say goodbye? I couldn’t, I wouldn’t. But I kissed him before I left, tasting Falernian wine.
The long rains began, with towering storms moving through every few days, but the day of Berkeley’s funeral was startlingly clear. He wanted to be buried at home, on the banks of his river, which carried, he had always sworn, perfect glacier water all the way from Mount Kenya. Along a bend that curved like a woman’s waist and hip, the river water sang over black basalt stones and riddled layers of peat. At that place, we watched Berkeley go into the ground, while starlings and flycatchers rang bell-clear scales through the canopy.
Dozens of friends were there. Blix had come all the way from Somaliland, and still wore inches of pale-yellow dust on him. D’s eyes looked sombre under his curving sun helmet, but once the final words were said and the earth mounded up over Berkeley’s coffin, he came to me and gripped my hands lightly and didn’t let them go for a long time. “I felt like a terrible shit for sending you away, you know,” he said.