I looked at her slantwise, wondering what she might know, and from what source. “We’re good friends, of course.”
“He tries so hard with Tania.” She clenched the wheel with pale-yellow kidskin gloves. “But I’m not sure he can really put anyone else at the centre.”
Frankly, Ginger was surprising me. I had only ever heard her chatter about shallow things: lace and waistlines, engagements and puddings. I preferred this real talk. “Many people can’t,” I said. “Does love really have to look one way for it to count?”
“You’re far more understanding of the whole thing than I’d ever be.”
“Really? You and Ben haven’t exactly had a conventional courtship.” I swallowed and felt small knives, wishing I had ice or chilled custard for my throat, or that the dust would settle. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a bitch. I really do wish you two the best.”
“It’s all right. I waited a long time for him without knowing if he would ever be free. Is that stupidity or courage?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “Maybe it’s both.”
After Ginger and Ben were married, she began to play hostess at their farm, Mgunga, and seemed particularly keen on new guests or visitors to Africa. She loved to throw dinner parties, always perfect in a silk frock with a string of pearls that nearly swept her knees. I had a few things I could dust off for polite company but generally wore slacks, instead, and a crisp man’s shirt. That’s what I chose for a dinner party she threw in June, thinking more about how odd it was to be invited back to Njoro as a guest. Their property was less than a mile from Green Hills, and as I traced the familiar road in my new car, nostalgia rose up to meet me. Little had changed and also everything.
Sir Charles and Mansfield Markham were brothers. They had come to Kenya looking for a winter home for their well-to-do mother, who’d had her fill of London’s icy damp. They’d found a suitable villa very nearby in the Rongai Valley, which was where Ginger had stumbled on them. Once she’d finished fêting them properly, they were going to go off on safari, hunting elephant with Blix.
Mansfield was twenty-two, well shaved, and genteel. His skin was as smooth as butter, his hands milky, without the slightest sign of wear. At dinner, I noticed him watching me while his brother seemed distracted by the full platter of gazelle steaks. I didn’t have the heart to tell Charles there was little variety here, and that he’d likely be eating nothing else for months and months.
“My people are from Nottinghamshire,” Mansfield told me, his trimmed nails tracing the heavy base of his water glass. “Like Robin Hood.”
“You don’t look very swashbuckling.”
“No? I keep trying.” He smiled and his nice teeth showed. “Ginger tells me you train horses. That’s unusual.”
“Is that a polite way of saying masculine?”
“Er, no.” He blushed.
Later I found myself facing him over brandy in the low, broad sitting room, where he began to explain what he had said before. “I’m not all that masculine myself, actually. When I was a boy I was sickly and spent too much time with the gardener, learning the Latin names of plants. I garden for sport. My mother gives me sets of white handkerchiefs at Christmas when she gives Charles rifles.”
“Handkerchiefs are useful.”
“Yes.” His eyes crinkled. “Though perhaps not in Kenya.”
“What would you choose instead?”
“For myself? I don’t know. Maybe what you all have here. This is marvellous country. I have a feeling it could bring out the best in anyone.”
“I’ve never wanted to be anywhere else. I grew up just the other side of the hill. My father had the most wonderful horse farm. It was my whole life.”
“What happened to it?”
“Money trouble. It’s crass to talk about such things, though, isn’t it?”
“It’s real. That’s my feeling.”
I didn’t know what it was about Mansfield that put me at ease, but before long I found myself telling him a story about how once an enraged stallion had attacked Wee MacGregor while I sat atop him. The two of them had gone at it as if I didn’t exist. It seemed like a matter of life or death, and then just as suddenly they backed away from each other.
“Weren’t you afraid?”
“Of course…but also fascinated. I felt as if I was witnessing something private and rare. The animals had forgotten about me.”
“You’re much closer to Robin Hood than I am, aren’t you?” he asked after listening keenly.
“Would white handkerchiefs save me?”
“I hope not.”
—
The next day, when the Markham brothers had gone off to join Blix, I drove to Nairobi for a few days to take care of some business. I’d arranged to stay at the club and returned there, that first night, to find Mansfield at the bar with the best bottle of wine he could find.
“There you are,” he said, clearly relieved. “I thought I’d missed you.”