“The wedding will be here at the hotel,” Ginger said, tapping her fingertips on her collarbone, just above the teal silk collar of her dress.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by any of it. Colony life was so small and confined the same people kept popping up in different combinations. Of course Ginger was marrying Ben. Who else was there, after all? But if I’d ever had any patience for the way things worked here, I was losing it. It was like watching fortune’s wheel spinning over and over—spilling bodies that struggled to climb on again, clinging for dear life. I had done my fair share of falling, and I felt exhausted now. I also wasn’t entirely myself. The weather had been so dry lately that it had got into my throat, stinging whenever I swallowed. My ears felt as if they were padded with searing cotton. My eyes burned.
“You should see my doctor in Nairobi,” Ginger insisted later.
“Nonsense,” I told her. “I’ll be all right when it rains again.”
“You work for me now.” She laughed, only pretending to be serious. “Just promise me you’ll see him.”
By the time I got to Nairobi, fever had taken me over. I shook with chills, wondering if malaria had finally got its hooks into me, or typhus, or black water fever, or any of the other deathly ailments that had plagued settlers in Kenya for fifty years. Ginger’s doctor wanted to plunge me into an ice bath straight away. Apparently I had tonsillitis, and he wanted to operate.
“I don’t like doctors,” I told him, reaching for my jacket. “I’ll keep my own blood, thank you very much.”
“The infection’s not going away. You’ll go septic if you keep this up. You wouldn’t want to be the girl who died from bum tonsils, would you?”
And so he operated. I fought only a little as the paper cone soaked with ether was pushed over my nose. Everything spun and hollowed with blackness, and when I finally came to again, climbing into consciousness as through a dense fog, I saw Denys’s familiar face, the light through spotty shades making a smeary sort of halo around him.
“You’re back,” I croaked.
He patted his own throat, pantomiming that I shouldn’t try to speak. “Ginger made me swear to come and see you. I think she was worried her doctor might do you in.” He smiled ruefully. “Glad to see he didn’t.”
Behind him, a nurse in a prim tricornered hat fussed with another patient’s bedding. I wished she would go away and leave us alone. I wanted to ask how he’d been, and if he’d missed me, and what would happen now. As it was, I could barely swallow.
“Tania would have come, but she hasn’t been well,” he said. “The farm is desperate and she’s been so low I’m afraid she might hurt herself.” He saw my eyes widen and explained, “She’s threatened it before. Her father went that way, you know.” He paused, thinking, and I could see how he struggled with every word. Denys didn’t easily discuss matters of the heart, and then there was the complex puzzle of connection between us three. He clearly didn’t want to be speaking of Karen with me, and yet I was deeply involved on both sides.
“I’ve arranged for a neighbour, Ingrid Lindstrom, to stay with her when I go away on safari,” he went on. “Tania shouldn’t be alone now, and she shouldn’t worry about anything.”
“She can’t know about us.” I risked a whisper. “I understand that.” Of course I did.
He looked away to where the shadow of my bedrails stood sketched on the bumpy wall. The dark slanted lines were like the bars of a prison cell. “I never seem to know what to say to you, Beryl.”
“This is goodbye then.”
“For now.”
I closed my eyes, feeling the tendrils of exhaustion wanting to pull me under, into medicine-thick sleep. I had always known I couldn’t have Denys—he wasn’t for having. His spirit was too free for that. I understood that too well, and yet I’d believed we could go on as we had, stealing what time we could, living each marvellous moment as it came. But that was finished. It had to be.
“Beryl,” I heard him say, but I didn’t answer. When I awoke again later, the room was dark and he was gone.
—
Ginger picked me up the next week and drove me back to my lodgings in Nakuru so I wouldn’t have to suffer the train. My throat ached, and my encounter with Denys had left me saddened and raw. Whether or not he married Karen, the bond they had was too complicated and too gripping for either of them ever to separate. Somehow, I would have to find a way to wish them happiness. I did care for them both, as confusing as that was.
“You’re still not up to snuff, are you?” Ginger asked. I’d been quiet, watching the road rise and fall in front of the car, the wheels dipping into ruts so deep they sometimes made my teeth jar. “I shouldn’t get involved,” she went on delicately. “Denys is such a lovable person, isn’t he?”