Page 229 of The Sun Sister

‘Gracious me! You don’t gone and talk like you’re as white as they are!’ Essie laughed.

Despite Cecily’s call to her mother to celebrate rather than mourn, Christmas Day was a muted affair. Mamie and Priscilla came over with their families to exchange presents and have lunch, all three sisters doing their best to cheer up a heartbroken Dorothea.

After lunch, Dorothea retired to her room.

‘Mama absolutely is devastated,’ said Mamie to Cecily.

‘Kiki was her oldest friend, it’s only natural.’

‘That’s as may be, but she saw her no more than every few years. Youlivedwith her when you were first in Africa, and saw her the night she died. Are you okay?’

‘Obviously I’m real sad, Mamie, but, well...I just think that Kiki had run out of hope. And when hope is gone...’

‘I know,’ said Mamie. ‘There’s nothing left. Well now, time for us to be off and get these little horrors into bed.’

Once Cecily had said goodbye to her sisters and their families, and Walter had retreated to his study for a nap, Cecily wandered back into the drawing room. She looked up at the enormous Christmas tree, decorated with so many baubles that there was barely any green to be seen.

She thought of Bill somewhere out on the African plains, the image of him there so at odds with this beautiful Manhattan drawing room.

Is this my home, she wondered,or do I belong back in Kenya with Bill? The truth was that Cecily just didn’t know.

The day after Christmas, with Dorothea locked upstairs in her bedroom, too distressed to venture out, Cecily decided to take Stella on a tour of New York.

Their first stop was Central Park, where Cecily bought Stella a bag of roasted chestnuts and taught her how to peel and eat the piping hot morsels. At the Central Park zoo, Stella waved at the lion in its enclosure, speaking to it in Maa – ‘It is his language, after all,’ she said as Cecily suppressed a chuckle.

Archer then drove them through the busy city streets, and Stella gasped at the bright lights of Times Square, then listened with rapt attention as Cecily pointed out the architecture of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. As dusk fell they indulged in hot chocolates with whipped cream, before Cecily took Stella onto the ice rink at the Rockefeller Center. Clutching each other for support, they slipped and skidded and giggled their way through the crowds.

Through Stella, Cecily began to see her city anew; she fell in love with it and its magical atmosphere all over again. Perhaps it was because she knew they’d be leaving at the end of January that she felt determined to take in as much of it as possible.

Starved of culture as she had been at Paradise Farm, she and her sisters went out to see the latest Broadway shows. She also enjoyed replenishing her wardrobe and actually wearing it out. Her sisters told her that she had ‘grown into her looks’, and after a haircut with Mamie’s stylist, even Cecily began to feel that she wasn’t quite the ugly duckling she’d once considered herself.

‘You’re a head-turner these days,’ Priscilla said with just a hint of envy in her voice as a group of good-looking men on Madison Avenue gave Cecily ‘the eye’, as Priscilla called it. After her long years tucked away in Africa, Cecily felt like a lion released from captivity.

The only sad note in a very jolly post-Christmas week was Kiki’s funeral. The numbers attending were small – many of the New York elite were out of town for the holidays, and besides, Kiki’s life had been lived abroad for years. Cecily helped her father support Dorothea out of the church and on to the wake afterwards, where her mother proceeded to get noticeably tipsy. Cecily could not help but feel that Kiki’s death was the end of an era – not just for her mother, but for her too.

Cecily returned home one afternoon from a trip to the milliner to replace some of her outdated hats to hear a high-pitched giggle coming from her father’s study. Knocking on the door, she found her father with Stella on his lap.

‘Good afternoon, Cecily,’ said Walter. ‘Stella and I were taking a look at the map of the world in my atlas. I was doing my best lion roar, but then she asked me for the sound a zebra made, so I gave what I thought was a good impression of one, but obviously, you didn’t think so, eh, little miss?’ Walter smiled at Stella as she slid off his knee and ran towards Cecily.

‘You haven’t been bothering Mr Huntley-Morgan, have you, Stella?’

‘Not at all,’ Walter said. ‘I found her in here looking at the books on the shelves, and we’ve been having a fine old time. And I’ve told her to call me Walter, by the way, haven’t I?’

Stella nodded shyly.

‘She’s a bright little kid, Cecily. Will her mother be sending her to school back in Kenya?’

‘There aren’t any schools there for a child like Stella, but I’ve been doing my best to teach her to read and write.’

‘She teaches me sums,’ Stella added, her little face serious.

‘All right then, let’s play the game I used to play with Cecily, shall we? What are two and two?’

‘Four.’

‘Three and four?’

‘Seven.’