The Clouds Beneath the Sun (59 page)

“So the Maasai saved our lives?”

“Yes. After you had saved Daniel’s life, the Maasai saved yours. The papers are making a lot of that, as a symbol of the new Kenya.”

Natalie was weeping copiously again now, as grief for her father swept over her. “I’m sorry,” she said through her tears. “I’m acting like I’m the only one who’s lost someone. You and Christopher must be devastated.”

He grunted and shook his head. “You are the only one who’s been through a plane crash. Don’t worry about me—about us.” He squeezed his arm around her shoulders and then sat back in his chair.

Natalie lay for a while, sipping her water and not attempting to look at the newspapers.

Her father was dead. Dead. She was surrounded by a cold void. Now she was completely on her own.

Yes, she had saved Daniel’s life. She was glad of that. But, in a sense, it only evened up the score. He had kept her out of harm’s way with those leopards in the sausage tree. Dear Daniel. He was alive, alive to carry on what he was so good at, to become the good ancestor, whose name would be chosen to encourage future generations of Luo.

But her thoughts kept coming back to her father, her dead father.

Thank God Jack was here. He looked so vivid, so strong, so different from the way she felt. He had enough strength for both of them, at least for now, and thank God he hadn’t been piloting the plane. Her father was dead, a barren, colorless nothing, somewhere she couldn’t place or point to, but with Jack here she wasn’t all alone after all, she felt warmer when he was around. Why didn’t he look more wrecked? He had lost his mother and a good friend. Was he putting on an act for her benefit? She reached out her hand for his, the comfort of his firm flesh. She longed for her body to recover enough for physical contact. Once she stopped feeling so weepy she and Jack could … there must be
somewhere
between the burns and the bruises that he could touch her … Natalie closed her eyes. How could she think of that? Her father was dead.

“What I
do
remember, Jack, is that the two engines just stopped, in midair, one after the other.” She wiped her eyes and sniffed. “Why … what would cause that?”

He waited. “The thing I always feared would happen actually did happen.”

They looked at each other.

Natalie’s waist hurt, her eyes were wet, her nose was gummy.

“You remember we parked the plane near those private jets at Nairobi International?”

She sniffed and nodded weakly.

“At lunchtime, after you’d given evidence in court, and the plan was for you and me to hurry back to Kihara, to get you out of harm’s way, I asked Christopher to fill up the Comanche, to save time, since we had to get to the strip before dark.” Jack wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “He was in a hurry, and was having his own flying lesson … he put the wrong fuel in the plane. Jet fuel, not Avgas.”

“Jack!” More tears fell down her cheeks. “No!
No,”
she breathed.

A long silence, as Natalie struggled to take in this news. She drifted off to sleep.

•   •   •

Hours later she wakened. Jack was still there.

So was the cold, empty space that was now her father.

“Where’s Christopher?”

“I don’t know. He’s disappeared.”

“He’s devastated at what he did.”

“Maybe. He tried something similar before. Remember? That boat engine failure on Lake Naivasha.”

“You think this was
deliberate?”
The word died on her lips as she ran short of breath.

“It’s crossed my mind. It should have been you and me on that plane.”

“Why? Why would he do such a thing?”

“The same reason as before, Mgina’s termite in timber: jealousy. Because he thinks … because of our trip to Lamu, me bringing you your dinners when you were ill … he thinks … he’s fallen in love with you like I have. He admitted as much to me the night we had a drink in the hotel, the night before you gave evidence, after I left your room, after we had … he decided that if he couldn’t have you, no one could.”

She sighed and shook her head. “Jealousy wouldn’t do that to someone.”

“I’m not a psychiatrist, Natalie, just a miserable paleontologist with a brand-new Ph.D., but I think he’s done it to me twice now. Look what jealousy did to Russell.”

He got up and prowled the room. She could see that now, today, he looked wrecked. “My mother, your father, and Max were never meant to be on the plane. Only you and I were. The last discussion Christopher was a party to, during the lunch break in the trial, after your appearance in the witness box, before he went off for a flying lesson, was when you and I were planning to fly to the gorge, and everyone else was staying on. Only later was there a change of plan—two changes of plan, in fact, with me staying over in Nairobi, because of the committee meeting, and with Max flying everyone else back to the gorge. Christopher didn’t know that.”

Natalie shook her head again, weakly. “No, no,” she breathed, “you’re wrong. It was an accident, I’m sure of it.” She coughed. Even that hurt. “As we were taking off, I saw Christopher come running out of the departures building and waving. I waved back.” She looked up at Jack.
“He wasn’t waving!
He had realized his mistake and was trying to stop us.”

“Hmm.” Jack, by the window, shrugged. “He tried to stop you only after he realized who was on the plane.”

“Don’t say that!
Don’t say that!
” She thought back to Christopher’s late-night visit to her room in the hotel, when he had asked her to marry him and she had raised the subject of the boating accident on Lake Naivasha. Reminding him of that surely had nothing to do with Christopher’s behavior?

She refused to believe that either.

“You must look for him, Jack. He mustn’t do a Kees. He’s done a dreadful thing and in some ways it will be worse for him if it
was
an accident.” She coughed again. “You were always parking near the jets, near the jet fuel—can you honestly say you are free of all blame?”

A long silence.

Natalie tried hard to remember the look on Christopher’s face as he had gestured at the Comanche as Max raced the aircraft down the big runway at Nairobi International. But she’d been through too much. Those memories, nearer the crash, just wouldn’t behave.

Jack prowled around the room. He’d lost his mother, poor man, but she was too weak to offer him any support. She’d make it up to him. Oh, how she’d make it up to him.

Her father was dead.

She cried herself to sleep again.

•   •   •

The next morning when she awakened, Jack was still there. He hadn’t shaved and he hadn’t changed his clothes. It didn’t matter: he was there. She ate some fruit and drank some water. The ring of pain around her middle hadn’t gone away. In a weak voice she said, “We haven’t talked about Ndekei, Marongo, Richard Sutton Senior, Russell North. What’s happened—anything?”

“More than you could know.” He prowled the room again as he talked. “The first thing to say is … did you, by any chance, notice that Peter Jeavons was in court? He’s the man who—”

“Yes, yes, of course, that’s who it was. The British minister of science, but a lawyer by training. Who came to visit us in the camp and whose constituency is near where … where my father lived. I did notice someone whose face I couldn’t put a name to. I remember thinking it was curious.”

“Curious—yes, but good for us.” Jack leaned against the windowsill. “It seems he was very taken with what he saw in the gorge and what we are achieving and trying to achieve. At the same time he was distressed by your dilemma.” Jack parted the slats of the Venetian blinds and looked out of the window again. “You may remember that when he was in the gorge, having dinner, it was around the time my mother had received that letter from the honors committee, proposing to give her a title, make her a dame, and she had refused. Remember that he tried to persuade my mother to accept the gong?”

“Yes, yes I do. But what does that have to do—?”

“I’m coming to that. The conversation at dinner gave Jeavons an idea—he’s obviously a born politician. He went back to Britain and did a little research on John Tudor’s family—that’s right, the judge. It appears that Tudor has two brothers back in London. One is a barrister and has been knighted, the other works as a private secretary in Buckingham Palace and almost certainly
will
be knighted when he retires—it goes with the job. Jeavons came back here with a message from the honors committee, which, with preparations for the independence conference in full swing, was mindful of what sort of result was to be preferred in the Ndekei trial.”

“You mean—?”

“I don’t know what you are thinking but Jeavons, who is a lawyer after all, went through the evidence with Tudor, before the trial. That’s probably what they were discussing at the Karibu Club on Christmas Eve, when Christopher saw them. And they found an acceptable way out, one that let you give your evidence but after which Ndekei was released. In return, Tudor is to be made Lord Tudor of Kilimai—that’s the suburb of Nairobi where he lives—and he will retire and return to Britain grander than either of his brothers.”

She shifted her frame in bed. The pain around her middle was easier if she moved every so often. “But that’s … that’s—”

“A fix, yes, and very possibly criminal.” Jack came away from the window and sat on the bed. He kissed her forehead. “But you weren’t party to the plan, you didn’t know what deal the politicians were cooking, so your hands are clean. I don’t expect you to like it, Dr. Nelson, but Jeavons got you off the hook with Richard Sutton, it’s all tidied up and hasn’t put a cloud over the independence talks. So I suggest you grin and bear it.”

“I’ll bet Sutton’s not grinning.”

“That’s the other piece of good news. Marongo made quite a song and dance when Ndekei was acquitted—politicians always look for quick political capital—and it got quite up Sutton’s nose. He saw you give evidence, he saw how you didn’t wilt under cross-examination, how you insisted on your viewpoint. He liked it that you were respectful about his son, in public.”

Jack lifted her hand to his cheek and rubbed his rough stubble over her skin, smiling. Get used to it, he was saying. This is the state of my beard every morning, when you wake up.

“But he didn’t like the judge’s decision and he most certainly didn’t like Marongo’s crowing. Sutton came to Nairobi to be magnanimous and get the credit for it. In the end he had nothing to be magnanimous about. Their deal is off and he’s returned to New York and won’t be coming back.”

“And Russell?”

“Upstaged by Jeavons. He’s gone too.”

“Jeavons has been very busy.”

“He certainly has. I got an inkling of it before … Remember I was in a long committee meeting?”

“I think so.”

“Well, we’d just had word from London that, as part of an educational-scientific collaboration between Britain and post-independence Kenya, the British—thanks to Jeavons, the science minister—were proposing a Kihara Institute of Human Origins, with a ten-year budget, and for which they are quite happy to give Marongo the credit, providing he hands in his Kalashnikovs. Sutton’s withdrawal left Marongo high and dry, the more so as one or two of the papers here went for him after the trial ended, saying he was more interested in politics than justice. But Jeavons’s plan rescued him, politically, and after those Maasai villagers saw you pulling Daniel from the plane, a white person saving the life of a black person, Marongo has swung back to us, praising the fairness of white justice, praising you and your work, welcoming the new institute, and proposing—wait for it—that my mother be buried in the gorge, as a mark of respect for what she achieved.”

Jack again smiled briefly at her. “You have to hand it to Marongo. He’s as good a politician as Jeavons. The symmetry is eye catching. What started in a burial ground ends in one too.”

14
LAMENT

F
or as far as the eye could see, Maasai figures wrapped in dark red cloaks stood on the low ridges of the rolling Serengeti hills that surrounded the quartzite gash of Kihara Gorge. The late afternoon sun was still hot but not the fireball it had been earlier and there were clouds low on the horizon. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty dark-green four-wheeled vehicles were parked neatly in a row on the lip of the gorge, overlooking RSK, Richard Sutton’s Korongo. A wind was beginning to stir.

In front of what looked like a small cave in the wall of the gorge stood Aldwai with his rifle. Next to him, with shovels, stood three Maasai. They had dug the grave and would fill it in later.

Two parallel lines of people stood at right angles to the wall of the gorge on either side of the grave. One was made up of Maasai elders, with Marongo at the distant end. The other line was made up of personnel from the camp, plus the minister of justice from Nairobi, who hadn’t gone to the conference in London, the deputy minister of education, representatives of the university, the president of the Karibu Club, Henry Radcliffe from the Bell-Ryder Foundation, and Natalie and Jack opposite Marongo.

It was Natalie’s second day out of hospital. Jack had flown her to the gorge in a rented aircraft. She knew she had to get back in a plane sooner or later. The pain around her middle was under control, with drugs, and the crutches helped.

Christopher wasn’t there. He hadn’t been found.

There were to be sandwiches and drinks back in the camp afterwards, a short reception so that those who had to fly back to Nairobi could leave before dark.

A box was brought from the Land Rover nearest the grave site. A very small box, Eleanor’s remains, carried by Beth, her daughter—Jack and Christopher’s sister—who had arrived from Boston. Virginia and her husband had come from Palestine. They were at Beth’s side.

Maxwell Sandys was being buried in Nairobi. Owen Nelson’s funeral would come later, at the church in Lincolnshire where Violette, his wife, Natalie’s mother, was buried. Owen had always believed he would be reunited with his wife one day. Natalie didn’t share that view, but she knew that their remains belonged together. For now his were in a box, in her room, in the hotel in Nairobi. She fought back tears just thinking of them.

Beth, a beautiful, slim blond woman, was holding up well, Natalie thought. She held herself erect, had a firm step, not a hair on her head was out of place. There could be no doubt she was Eleanor’s daughter. Virginia, tall in the Deacon way, was more tearful but comforted by her husband.

As Beth and Virginia reached the lines of people, Marongo stepped forward. He gripped the staff he always held at gatherings and raised it high. At this, the Maasai began to sing. A slow, lilting melody gradually spread around the hills, through a vast choir of hundreds in which Marongo showed himself as having a fine voice.

Across the gorge, Natalie could see Mgina, with Endole and his other wives, all singing in unison. Mgina: she never had found out if the young woman was anything more than she seemed.

“Ah, I know this,” whispered Jack. “It’s a lament called ‘The Clouds Beneath the Sun,’ and is about Ollantashante and his exploits on the battlefield, ending with his heroic death.” He gasped. “Am I mistaken or is that Mutevu Ndekei across the gorge?”

Natalie looked to where Jack indicated.

“You’re right. And Atape.”

Natalie had never heard anything so beautiful as the lament. Jack explained that it concerned a raid on the Maasai villages by another tribe, who had assembled on a windy night, when their movements had been masked by the sound of whistling thorn. Ollantashante had single-handedly blocked a path up from the gorge, while reinforcements had been alerted. He had himself been killed after slaying a score of the enemy.

“Marongo once asked me to translate this song into English,” whispered Jack. “I forget most of it but not the last lines, which were very beautiful, about how, at the end of a whole day’s battle, the clouds cover the sun, the wind dies, the thorn stops whistling and dies to a moan, the enemy withdraws, beaten, but the land remains:

“Across the gorge, the day sinks with a hum,
A little beauty lost, a little less to come
.

“That’s not a literal translation, of course, but it keeps to the spirit.”

Natalie began to weep. She was getting used to weeping now.

Jack took her arm and they moved out of the line and stood on the other side of Beth and Virginia from Marongo.

Jack knew, as his sisters knew, that Eleanor had always wished to be buried with Jock in Nairobi. But Jack also knew—as his mother would have insisted—that Marongo’s offer could not be refused. Eleanor would have approved Jack’s decision, he knew that too. Natalie realized that, politically, the burial would cement the relationship between the Maasai and the paleontologists as nothing else would.

As the singing continued, Marongo, Beth, Virginia, Jack, and Natalie approached the small hole dug in the wall of the gorge. Standing to one side was a Maasai warrior in full regalia, black and white stone jewelry, a long red cloak, a staff made from whistling thorn. As Beth and the others got close, he stepped forward and placed a toy spear on the top of the box she was carrying.

“It is their way,” said Jack. “The spear is to help on the other side. And it means Eleanor had warrior status. She was not just an ordinary person. It’s a mark of respect.”

Now Aldwai stepped forward. He raised his old rifle and fired three times into the air. A flock of birds in some nearby acacia trees scattered against the clouds beginning to cover the sun.

Beth bent down and placed the box in the hole. She pushed it further in and stood back.

The men who had dug the hole moved forward to fill it. As they did so the singing stopped and a single voice, a fine baritone, was left to sing solo.

“That,” murmured Jack, “is to emphasize that our journey to the other side is one that we take alone.”

Natalie, as so often before, marveled at the simple beauty of Maasai symbolism.

As the hole was filled in and the gravediggers stood back, the soloist fell silent. Now there was just the wind.

Marongo turned and put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “At last your kind are buried here. This land is your land as much as it is ours.” He nodded, smiled, and turned away.

Natalie realized that what he had said wasn’t true but that politically it was the right thing to say.

Along the hills the Maasai dispersed. In no time they were gone.

“Listen,” said Jack.

The wind had risen. The thorn was beginning to moan.

Natalie was weeping again. “It’s like the land itself is saying goodbye.”

•   •   •

“Look, Jack, stop, please stop.”

He braked. He and Natalie were traveling back to the camp together. Beth, Virginia, and the others were in different vehicles.

They were on the plain, with a thicket of fig and acacia trees directly in front of them.

“See, it’s like a replay of what we saw that other time, on the way to Karatu. In those trees, there, two giraffes, standing close, almost as if they are kissing and, between their legs, a baby giraffe, protected.”

She pointed.

“Your bush eyes are better than mine now.”

They sat watching the giraffes.

“Don’t you think giraffes are the most
elegant
of animals?”

She nodded. “Graceful.”

“And they move around in twos or families, not herds, like lovers who know some great big secret. You once said that about musicians but I think it applies to giraffes as well.”

She smiled and nodded.

The giraffes seemed in no mood to hurry, occasionally looking in their direction, but not letting the infant out from under their legs.

“We should get back,” said Jack. But he made no attempt to move either and Natalie and he sat for several minutes more without speaking, just looking.

He was clean-shaven today—no stubble: he had just buried his mother. But he still looked wrecked.

The wind on the plain was still strong. The moaning of the thorn was all around them. The light was beginning to change. More clouds were moving their way. The short rains were not over.

Natalie shifted in her seat, to get more comfortable. If she sat still for long, her middle started to ache.

A brace of guinea fowl moved in front of the Land Rover.

Jack leaned his head against the glass of the side window as the vehicle rocked in the wind again.

“It’s time, Natalie. Time to answer my question, I mean. When I first saw you, all those weeks ago, I fell for you almost immediately … Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, you put them all to one side … But I didn’t show it … I thought you were so beautiful you must have someone back home, or maybe you and Christopher had something together, and you certainly were jealous of your privacy. I was slow in getting going—I always am, I call it wheel spin.”

He smiled briefly and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

“But…
but
—that word again—after our two nights in Nairobi, after our trip to Ngorongoro, seeing you at the controls of the Comanche, with the headphones over your ears, you looked so beautiful, so alive, so
vivid
… as I once told you, I knew my mind and I knew it then, instantly.”

He threw the empty water bottle on the backseat of the Land Rover.

“I always hoped, when I was growing up, that I would fall in love the way I fell in love with you. It was … I was happier in Lamu picking sea-urchin needles out of your knee than I have ever been. And yes, I plead guilty. On Boxing Day I did ogle you in your bikini. I ogled and ogled and ogled. I had never seen someone so desirable within my reach.”

“I can’t marry you, Jack.”

“What?
” It was said faintly, as if the air had barely left his lungs. “Please, no, don’t say—”

“I
can’
t!”

Jack was fighting for air. “I … I …” He shook his head.
“No!
”

She reached out and put her hand on his arm. “You were wonderful to me in hospital. I will never forget that. And before the crash, you enlarged my life. Flying, snorkeling, I’ve even got a sneaking feeling for jazz.” She smiled sadly. “And I realize … politics … you’ve opened my eyes.” She caressed his arm with her fingers.

“But… there is something you don’t know.” She reached up and touched his chin, forcing him to look at her. “You don’t know it because I didn’t know it myself until yesterday, when Dr. Stone could leave it no longer. He had delayed telling me because he didn’t think I was strong enough, strong enough physically or mentally, but since I was being discharged yesterday—discharged early so I could come to the funeral—he had no choice.”

Her lips were dry. She ran her tongue along them. “You remember I thought I was more ill than Jonas said? You recommended a doctor who was an expert in tropical diseases, someone I never got round to consulting?”

Jack nodded. He couldn’t speak. He was rigid with despair.

“My hands were tingling, I had headaches all the time … I never recognized the signs and neither did you—the tick typhus misled us.” She squeezed his arm. “I was pregnant, Jack.”

Her voice broke. “In the crash, I lost a baby. We lost a son.”

Jack stopped breathing. The smallest of sobs escaped from his throat. He swallowed hard.

“My memory around the time of the crash is still patchy. But some of my memories are coming back and one of the things I remember is feeling a lot of pain around my middle.” She shifted again. “A pain I still have.”

The moan of the thorn turned briefly to a whistle.

“What Dr. Stone also told me yesterday was that the ring of pain around my middle is there because, in the crash, when we bounced off those rocks, and the plane turned over, and landed on its side, my pelvis was broken in two places—jagged breaks that he put right in the operation when he took out the … the dead baby.” Natalie looked away, at the vast expanse of the Serengeti. “But … he operated only after those jagged breaks had sliced into my fallopian tubes and … punctured my womb … punctured it beyond …”

Natalie’s eyes were watering again. She had said enough.

She looked back to Jack. “I can never have children.”

Jack swallowed again, and looked away.

Neither of them said anything for a time, until Natalie whispered, “What was your girlfriend’s name, the one who died of leukemia?”

Jack was looking into the distance. “Roxanna.”

“You wouldn’t marry her because she didn’t want children, though she might have changed her mind had she not died. How much … how much worse would it be for you … if children were an impossibility?”

When Dr. Stone had told her, at first Natalie hadn’t known what to do, or say. His news was so unexpected, so bewildering, so
unwanted
, that she had floundered as to what to feel.

Then it had started. It was as if a dizzying cloud of blackness had spread slowly over her. A tide of something—something scalding and chilling at the same time—had swept along her skin, like when she had shed her nightdress over her head when she was a girl.

She had felt tired, exhausted,
cheated
. She was sure she would choke. She had struggled for air. She could hear her pulse drumming in her ears, her skin was damp with sweat. She was diminished, she was less than she had been, she was tainted, less than whole, less than a person, broken, sullied, and soiled. How many more awful words were there to describe how she felt?

She could never have a son, to honor the name of her dead father.

To Jack, she managed to say, “I told you, once, I have hardly ever given children a thought. Now I can think about them only in their absence. A door that had never been opened for me has been closed for always.”

Natalie was openly weeping now, her body wracked by rugged sobs. Spittle formed in webs at the corners of her mouth. Her tears redoubled. Her sight was a blur of shifting splinters of light.