Circling the Sun by Paula McLain
“I’m sorry I look a fright.” Karen extended her hand to Clara. “Today we’re busy with a harvest.”
“Beryl explained all you do here on the ride out. I admire what you’ve taken on. And your house and lawn are so beautiful.” Clara swept around in an appreciative circle.
“You’ll want some tea—or sandwiches?”
The boys perked up at the mention of more food, but Clara shushed them. “We’ve had our tea.”
“I’ll ride out to the house with you then. Let me just change my shoes.”
—
We motored along the winding road to Mbagathi while the sweet-smelling trees pushed in at us through the windows of the car.
“Oh, it’s quaint,” Clara said when we arrived. “We’ll be very snug here.”
“You’ll be staying for a while, too, Beryl?” Karen asked.
“I hadn’t thought.” I stalled, wondering how comfortable I’d be. Clara was a stranger, and a complicated one at that.
“But of course you must. We haven’t caught up properly.” Clara turned to the boys, who were already down in the dust watching a Hercules beetle towering forward with a twig in its staglike pincers. “Tell her we need her.”
“Yes,” Ivan said. Alex grunted, never taking his eyes from the beetle.
“It’s settled then.”
Karen lent us her cook and her houseboy, and left my mother with the names of several Kikuyu totos who would be there the next day ready to work if Clara would have them.
When she left, Clara said, “I wouldn’t have whispered a word while the baroness was here, but the house is a little simple, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so. No one’s lived here for a while.”
“It’s much smaller than I imagined.”
“There are three bedrooms, and you are three.”
“Not for tonight,” she clarified.
“But I can sleep anywhere. I’m not fussy.”
“That’s a wonderful skill, Beryl. You always were the toughest of us.”
I flinched, involuntarily, and rearranged myself in my chair. “Dickie’s been jockeying, you said?”
“Yes, and very good at it. Do you remember how he could ride?”
I nodded vaguely.
“I know he’d want to be here now, but he hasn’t been feeling well. He never had a strong constitution, as you know.”
I remembered so little…skinned knees when the farm was raw and full of obstacles. Him kicking me once, hard, in my side as we fought over a toy. But even that was too much, in a way. It would have been simpler to have forgotten every last stitch.
“He’s going to send money as soon as he can, naturally,” she went on, her eyes beginning to well up again. “Forgive a silly woman, Beryl. Forgive me.”
—
That night, I tossed and turned on the sofa near the hearth, feeling unsettled by Clara, her strange combination of neediness and amnesia. I found myself wishing that I hadn’t answered her first telegram or that she hadn’t thought to send it. But we were here now, stuck in a curious limbo.
Sometime past midnight, long after the fire had died away, it began to rain. I heard the pattering getting louder, and then Clara appeared, kneeling at my side. She wore a nightgown and robe, and held a guttering candle. Her feet were bare and her hair tumbled down her back, making her look very young. “It’s pouring.”
“Try to ignore it. We get lots of rain at this time of year.”
“No, I mean inside.” She dragged me to one of the smaller rooms where the boys were huddled together in one bed while a seam in the roofline dripped water down on the blankets. The water was coming straight at them, but they barely had the sense to get out of the way.
“Let’s move the bed,” I suggested.
“Right,” Clara said. She never would have thought of it on her own. That was clear. The boys clambered down, and Clara and I pushed the bed to the other wall.
“It’s wet here, too.”
The second bedroom was a bit drier. We found buckets in the kitchen and moved them around, catching the drips, then went from room to room, trying to find the safest place for the furniture. “It’s hopeless,” Clara said, throwing up her hands.
“Only a little rain.” I sighed. “You boys don’t mind, do you?” But they seemed just as fragile suddenly. Alex had a rumpled bear, a teddy bear, after Roosevelt. He tugged at its ear and looked ready to hide in a cupboard.
“We’ll just have to get through the night,” I suggested. “Tomorrow we’ll see if workers can repair the roof.”
“I think it’s driest here,” my mother said of the couch. “Do you mind if the boys and I have your place?”
“Not at all.” I sighed again.
“Thank you. And it would be lovely if we could have a fire, wouldn’t it, boys?”
The wood was damp and smoked and took a real effort to get going. When I finally did, I was too exhausted to move the beds again. I fell into the first one I came to and curled up in the damp sheets and tried to sleep.
—
It rained buckets all the next day. By mid-afternoon, Clara was at her wits’ end. Karen had come to try and make things suitable, but the downpour wouldn’t stop, and the rain got through everywhere. Finally she moved Clara and the boys into the main house.
“I really am sorry for your trouble,” Karen said again and again.
“It’s not your fault,” Clara assured her, gathering damp bits of her hair into hairpins. But something in her tone told me she did hold Karen responsible—or perhaps me instead. I suppose it wasn’t a great surprise to see she had very little gumption or resilience, and yet it made me sad for her. How dreadful it would be if everything toppled you and you folded in. Rain, for instance, not to mention the loss of a husband. She was so pitiful I shouldn’t have been irritated with her, but I couldn’t help it. By dinnertime, I was too fed up with the whole situation and bolted for Soysambu and my horses—for work, which was never mysterious and never failed to soothe me.
“I’ll be back at the weekend,” I said, and rode off in D’s motorcar through thick and spattering red mud.
By the time I arrived at Mbogani three days later, Clara had already bolted. She’d hired a car to come and take her and the boys back to Nairobi, leaving only a brief note to apologize for the inconvenience.
“I did take care to get the house cleaned up and ready for them,” Karen said. “Rain is rain. What could I have done?”
“I hope she left you some money at least.”
“Not a rupee.”
I was horribly embarrassed. “Let me pay you something.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s not your doing. You can stay and cheer me up, though. I’ve been lonely.”
Late that night the rain began again. This could happen in May and often did—seismic, drenching storms that went on and on, turning the roads into gullies, and gullies into impassable torrents.
“You can’t go back in this,” Karen said the next morning, looking out through the open veranda at the streaming grey sheets.
“D will be wondering about me. I may have to risk it.”
“He’s a reasonable man…occasionally, anyway. You can’t very well swim home.”
Before we’d finished talking, a young Somali boy ran up to the house, nearly naked, with red mud splattered up to his slender hips. “Bedar is on his way,” the boy announced. “He will be here soon.”
Bedar was Denys, obviously. I could read on Karen’s face how happy the news made her as she brought the boy inside and insisted he bathe and change and eat something hearty before returning.
“Denys’s servants are utterly devoted to him,” she told me as she dabbed with a cotton cloth at the wet footprints the boy had left on her tiles. There were servants everywhere, but clearly she liked to work with her hands, and to be useful. “They respect him as if he were one of them. I think they’d lie down in a lion’s mouth if he asked them.”
I felt her guard lowering a little and inche
“At a shoot we threw several years ago. He arrived with Delamere and then came down with a terrible fever and had to stay. I had about given up on finding anything like good company here, but then there he was.” She looked up from her work. “Honestly, I’d never met such an intelligent person before. It was the loveliest surprise of that whole year.”
“Even with a fever?”
“Yes, even so.” She smiled. “But then I went away home, and after that he did, and it’s only lately that we’re back to our friendship, you see. I feel very fortunate.” She stood up and wiped her hands on her apron. Beyond the open door the sky was thick and low and the rain went on and on. “I’ll have one of the boys fetch your horse if you’d like. Unless you’ll reconsider.”
I thought of the slick miles to Soysambu, and then of Denys’s hazel eyes and his laughter. I wanted to see him again, and also to know how he and Karen were together. “I may have to,” I told her. “It’s not going to stop.”
—
All that day Karen stayed focused on Denys’s imminent arrival, dreaming up dinner menus and getting her servants to polish the house from top to bottom. Finally, Denys’s Somali boy came running into sight again, and Denys himself followed not long after, wet to the skin but somehow cheerful. He rode up, unflappably, while his equally undaunted Somali man, Billea, walked.
“It’s a little embarrassing to be held up by rain when you’ve managed quite well,” I confessed after we’d said our hellos.
“I haven’t told you about the bits where my horse was up to his neck.” He squinted at me, and then took off his hat, water pouring from the brim. “Besides, it’s nice to see you.”
Karen whisked him away deep into the house to get comfortable before dinner while I took myself into the library, suddenly nervous. I wasn’t sure why, but as I tried to page through a pile of Thackeray novels and travel books Karen had set aside for me, I found myself reading the same snatches over and over again, holding on to nothing, while from her perch nearby, the little owl Minerva swivelled her head and looked at me with great, round unblinking eyes. She was the size of a feathered apple, with a glossy beak like the tip of a buttonhook. I went over to her and tried to show her I was a friend, petting her with one finger as Karen had done, and finally she seemed convinced.
Maybe my feelings were only bald insecurity, I thought, looking again at the thick stack of books. Denys and Karen were each so intelligent…and together they might make me feel a fool. Would it have killed me to stay at school for a few years and glean some knowledge that had nothing to do with horses or farming or hunting with Kibii? I had been so anxious to be back at home, thrusting myself at what I knew, that I couldn’t imagine any part of book learning that might be useful. Now it was probably too late. I could try to soak up a few titbits from the Thackeray and possibly sound clever at dinner, but that would be acting a part, trying to be some version of Karen. “Stupid,” I said, irritated with myself, while Minerva stretched out one striped yellow claw. For better or worse, I was who I was. It would have to do.
—
Denys was starved for talk after so many weeks in the bush. During the meal of scented tomato water, blanched tiny lettuces, and turbot in a hollandaise that melted on the spoon, he told us how he’d come back through the North Country. Near Eldoret, he’d stopped at some property he owned and had seen and heard evidence of tourists hunting wild game from their motorcars and leaving the carcasses to rot.
“My God.” I had never heard of such a thing. “It’s slaughter.”
“I blame Teddy Roosevelt,” he said. “Those photographs of him straddling slain elephants like some sort of buccaneer. It came off too glamorous. Too easy.”
“I thought his hunting was a scheme to collect specimens for museums,” Karen said.
“Don’t let the museum piece fool you. He was a sportsman through and through.” Denys pushed his chair back from the table and lit a cigar. “It’s not Roosevelt that gets to me so much as what he started. These animals shouldn’t die for nothing. Because someone gets drunk and loads a rifle.”
“Perhaps there could be a law one day,” Karen said.
“Perhaps. But in the meantime, I hope I don’t run into one of these joyriders, or I won’t be responsible for my actions.”
“You’re trying to hold on to paradise.” Karen’s eyes simmered in the candlelight, intense and deeply black. “Denys remembers too well how unspoiled things were in the early days,” she told me.
“So do I. It’s hard to forget.”
“Beryl’s mother was here for a short time,” Karen explained to Denys and then said, “I thought she was going to be a tenant at Mbagathi.”
“Oh,” he said. “I assumed your mother had died.”
“It’s all right. You wouldn’t be very far off. She went away when I was very young.”
“I couldn’t survive without my mother’s love,” Karen said. “I write to her every week, on Sunday, and live for the letters she sends. This week I’ll tell her about you and say you look like the Mona Lisa. Would you ever let me paint you? You’d make a wonderful picture, just as you are now. Lovely, and also a little lost.”
I flushed at her description, feeling pried at. She spoke so frankly, but it was her eyes, too, and how nothing seemed to escape her. “Those things don’t really show on my face, do they?”
“I’m sorry, try not to mind me. People interest me so much. They’re such wonderful puzzles. Think of it. Half the time we’ve no idea what we’re doing, but we live anyway.”
“Yes,” Denys said. “Searching out something important and going astray look exactly the same for a while, in fact.” He stretched and resettled himself like a rangy tomcat in the sun. “Sometimes no one knows the difference, especially not the poor damned pilgrim.” He winked at me, almost imperceptibly. “Now how about a story? No supper without a tale.”
I’d been thinking of what I might tell them and had finally settled on Paddy and that day at the Elkingtons’ farm. Wanting to hold their attention, I described everything I remembered from the beginning, and slowly—the ride out to Kabete Station and my father’s speech about lions. Bishon Singh and his endless turban, the gooseberry bushes and the sizzling crack of Jim Elkington’s kiboko. After a while, I forgot that I was trying to draw Denys and Karen in and became engrossed myself, almost as if I’d forgotten what was going to happen and how it all turned out.
“You must have been absolutely terrified,” Karen said when I’d finished. “I can’t think many have lived through such a thing.”
“I was, yes. But later I came to see it as a kind of initiation.”
“I’ll bet it was important for you. We all have those moments—though not always so dramatic.” Denys paused, looking into the fire. “They’re meant to test us and change us, I think. To make plain what it means to risk everything.”
The room grew quiet for a time. I thought of what Denys had said and watched the two of them smoke in silence. Finally, Denys pulled a pocket-sized volume from inside his brown velvet jacket. “I found a small gem in a bookshop when I was in London. It’s called Leaves of Grass.” He opened to a dog-eared page and held it out to me, saying I should read for us.
“God, no. I’ll butcher it.”
“You won’t. I thought of this one particularly for you.”
I shook my head.
“You do it, Denys,” Karen said, saving me, “in Beryl’s honour.”
“ ‘I think I could turn and live with animals,’ ” he read aloud,
“they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins…. ”
He recited the words simply, not at all theatrically, but they had their own gravity and drama. The poem seemed to be about how naturally dignified animals are and how their
“A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,
Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,
Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,
Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.”
“It’s wonderful,” I said quietly. “May I borrow it?”
“Of course.” He handed the little volume to me, light as a feather and still warm from his holding it.
I said good night and went off to my room, perching under a lamp to read over more of the poems. The house grew still around me, but after a while it occurred to me that I was hearing sounds coming from down the hall. Mbogani wasn’t all that large, and the noises—though muffled—were unmistakable. Denys and Karen were making love.
I closed the book in my hands, feeling a small surge of adrenaline. I’d been so certain they were only close friends. Why had I thought that? Blix had said Denys’s name so lightly that night he’d come here, but perhaps that only meant he’d come to accept Denys’s place in Karen’s life. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed that these two would be drawn together. They were both beautiful and interesting, full of deep water, as the Kips would say. And no matter what Berkeley had said about Denys being elusive in love, he and Karen had an obvious bond. I could see that clearly.
I turned to the book again, leafing through to the animal poem Denys had recited for me, but the black type jumped. Beyond several walls, the lovers were whispering things to each other, their bodies blending with shadows, coming together and apart. Their affair had nothing to do with me, and yet I couldn’t stop thinking of them. Finally, I turned out the lamp and pulled the pillow up around my ears, wanting only to go to sleep.
—
The next day the clouds parted and the sky went a deep fresh blue, and we went out on a small shooting expedition. Ostriches had got into the garden and plucked through most of the baby lettuces. There were dung and feathers everywhere as the birds lurched through the patch taking what they wanted.