“You didn’t have much of a choice,” I said. “I saw that.”
He cleared his throat gruffly, and shook his head, a long lock of his near-white hair leaping on his collar. “If you ever need anything, I want you to come to me. You’re still so young. I’ve forgotten that sometimes. When Florence and I were your age, we didn’t have enough sense combined to scratch our own backsides.” He met my eyes and I felt whatever was left of my humiliation rinse away. I had learned some hard lessons, but they had been important ones.
“I will, D. Thank you.”
From Berkeley’s long shaded veranda, I heard the slow melodic strains start up from the gramophone. Denys stood over the flared cone and hissing needle, and D and I walked over together to join him.
“Don’t you hate Beethoven?” D asked.
A faint pink blaze of feeling moved over Denys’s high cheekbones. “Berkeley doesn’t.”
We stayed for a long time, toasting Berkeley’s fineness and his life, lingering over every story of him we knew, until the sky thickened with grey-clotted clouds and the light began to fail. When nearly everyone else had gone, Denys said, “Come back to Ngong with me.”
“I have Pegasus.”
“I can bring you back for him.”
“All right,” I answered, as if this happened all the time, and I wasn’t crumbling inside, full of confusion and lingering hurt, disappointment and desire, all of it swirling riotously through me.
On the drive, we talked very little. The threatening sky finally opened properly, and a slow, constant equatorial rain began. It rinsed over the window glass and pattered soft drums over the leather top. He didn’t take my hand, didn’t say a word about what he wanted, nor did I. There was so much unspoken terrain between us that we couldn’t make our way to the simplest phrases.
When we drew close to Karen’s farm, he veered off the main road early, towards Mbagathi, and I understood. He wouldn’t be with me in her house, with her things looking on. That was their space together. We would have to make a place that was new and only ours.
Denys cut the engine, and we ran into the house, dripping, but it was wet there, too. More than a year had passed since my mother’s strained visit and, if anything, the roof was even less reliable. The rain came in everywhere, and we ducked and dodged as we built a fire. It fretted and smoked, the wood damp. He searched out a bottle of good brandy, and we drank without glasses, passing the neck back and forth between us. Even with the rain and the hissing cedar wood in the hearth, I could hear us both breathing.
“Why didn’t Berkeley ever marry?” I asked him.
“He did, in his way. There was a Somali woman in his household he was involved with for many years. They were devoted to one another.”
“What, for years? And no one knew?”
“There’s tolerance in the colony for certain things, but not for that.”
It all made perfect sense now, how Berkeley had kept his distance from the women in the colony, how coy he always was when I questioned him about romantic entanglements. It made me happy to know he’d had love in his life, but what had it cost him? How heavy was the secret he kept? “Do you think there’ll ever be room in the world for that kind of attachment?” I asked.
“I’d like to think so,” he said, “but the odds don’t look very good.”
When the brandy was nearly gone, he led me to the small back bedroom and wordlessly peeled off my clothes, his lips on my eyelids, fingertips stroking the insides of my wrists. We lay down in a crush of warm limbs. He buried his face in my hair and neck, his movements so tender I could barely stand it. As desperate as I was for his nearness, I was haunted by the last time we were together, and all the days between. My heart galloped loudly. I worried it might burst.
“I don’t know what this is between us,” I was able to say, finally. “Maybe we’ll never have anything beyond this moment.” I touched him, the cage of his ribs and chest rising and settling with his breathing. Our shadows painted the wall. “But I do care for you, Denys.”
“I care for you, too, Beryl. You’re an extraordinary woman. Surely you know that.”
Part of me wanted to lay everything bare then—to tell the truth about London. To ask him about Karen, and just how he made sense of it all for himself. But in another way I didn’t believe anything would be solved by talking or explaining. We’d made our choices, separately and together, hadn’t we? We were who we were.
Coming to my knees, I traced the hollows of his collarbones, cupping shadows, his broad neck and shoulders and forearms. I was memorizing him with my hands. “If you had another life to live,” I asked him, “would you change anything?”