A Change in Altitude

by Anita Shreve

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2009 by Anita Shreve

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Author’s Note: This is a work of fiction. The events described are imaginary and the characters are fictitious. It is not intended that any reader infer that these settings and incidents are real or that the events actually happened.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-07174-1

  Contents

  Copyright

  Also by Anita Shreve

  Part Two

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY ANITA SHREVE

  Testimony

  Body Surfing

  A Wedding in December

  Light on Snow

  All He Ever Wanted

  Sea Glass

  The Last Time They Met

  Fortune’s Rocks

  The Pilot’s Wife

  The Weight of Water

  Resistance

  Where or When

  Strange Fits of Passion

  Eden Close

  For Ginger Barber

  a cognizant original v5 release october 04 2010

  Part One

  “We’re climbing Mount Kenya. Not this Saturday, but the next.”

  Patrick made the announcement as he moved into the guest room of the Big House, the plumbing in their own small cottage currently disabled. Patrick spoke of the climb without fanfare, as he might a party in two weeks’ time. They were young, each twenty-eight. They’d been in the country three months.

  Despite the heat, Patrick’s shirt still held its creases. James, whose black skin shone blue in the planes of his face, washed their clothes in a bathtub, hung them to dry, and pressed them with an iron that made the fabric hiss. Not even the equator could undo James’s creases.

  Patrick set his doctor bag and his briefcase on the floor. He had shaved his beard as a gesture of respect but wore his black hair longer than most.

  “Arthur’s arranging it. It takes four days. Porters will carry the provisions.”

  When Margaret and Patrick’s toilet in the cottage had ceased to function, they’d temporarily moved in with their landlords, Arthur and Diana, who lived two hundred feet away in the larger house on the property.

  “We’ll camp?” Margaret asked.

  “There are huts.”

  In a few minutes, Margaret would dress for dinner. Under her palm, she could feel the distinctive stitching of the white coverlet. “I’d better buy hiking boots,” she said.

  Beyond the casement window, there was birdsong, noisy until early evening, when the day would be snuffed out, at the same hour, every day, summer or winter. In Africa, Margaret often felt dazed, as if something shiny had hurt her eyes.

  “Who will go?” she asked.

  “Arthur and Diana. You and me. Arthur mentioned another couple, but I forget their names.”

  “You can take the days off?”

  Patrick shrugged his shoulders, indicating a flexible schedule. He moved to the bed and sat beside Margaret, making a deep V in the soft mattress. Despite the heat, he wore long trousers, another gesture of respect. In Kenya, African men emerged from mud-and-wattle huts in suits to drive matatus or to sell scrap metal or to cut meat. To dress casually was to flaunt the ability to do so, as well as to advertise oneself as an American. Only American and German tourists dressed like children.

  “You okay?” Patrick asked.

  His eyes were light blue, sensitive to the sun. When outdoors, he always wore dark glasses.

  “I’m fine,” Margaret said.

  “You seem quiet.”

  “How was your day?”

  “I was mostly at the hospital. What time is dinner?”

  The house ran with the precision of a father’s watch. They had been Diana and Arthur’s guests for five days, a decent plumber apparently difficult to obtain. First a message had to be sent—the plumber didn’t own a telephone—and the problem described. A fee would have to be negotiated, and then transportation sorted. The particular plumber Diana liked was said to be visiting his wife in Limuru. It was unclear when he would return.

  Margaret wanted to ask if another plumber could be found, but to do so would be to seem ungrateful for the hospitality. Patrick and Margaret were, after all, being housed and fed.

  “Seven,” Margaret said of dinner.

  Patrick asked her if she had ever climbed a mountain. As he did so, he took her hand. He often took Margaret’s hand, in public as well as in private. It meant I am suddenly thinking of you.

  Though Patrick and Margaret had been together for two years—married five months—entire landscapes of their individual pasts were unknown to the other. Margaret told Patrick that she had once climbed Mount Monadnock, a lesser New England peak. Patrick said that he hadn’t ever climbed a mountain, being a city boy from Chicago.

  The smell of boiling horse meat made its way into the bedroom. It was an awful smell, and Margaret was certain she would never get used to it. The meat was for the dogs.

  “Do we need, I don’t know, instruction?” Margaret asked.

  “I’m sure Arthur will have it all in hand.”

  The meat would be something James had purchased at the duka earlier in the day, the blood soaking the Kenya Morning Tribune used to wrap it. It would not be any different from the beef Margaret bought for Patrick and herself, the steaks too fresh, not aged, and therefore tough, tasting of animal. “How tall is Mount Kenya?”

  “Seventeen thousand feet, give or take.”

  “That’s over three miles high.”

  “We’re already a mile above sea level just sitting here. And I think we probably gain some altitude driving to the mountain.”

  “So Kilimanjaro is higher?” Margaret asked.

  “Higher but easier. I think you simply walk to the top. In large circles. It takes a while, but most amateurs can handle it. It’s supposed to be fairly boring.”

  Patrick changed out of his brown leather everyday shoes, which were covered with mud. If he left the shoes outside the door in the evening, they would be clean in the morning.

  “We don’t walk?”

  “We climb. We hike. Parts of it will be rough.”

  Margaret imagined Diana’s Land Rover, packed with gear, journeying through the shimmering lime-green tea plantations she’d seen only from a distance.

  The guest room seemed to have been designed for a writer or a scholar. Margaret sometimes sat at the heavy carved desk, on which an antique typewriter had been placed. She’d tried it once, wincing at the hard thwacks the keys made, as if something delicate and tentative were being announced with a tattoo.

  The desk chair had carved arms and a nearly silver patina. On the walls were photographs of people she could not identify, a wooden shield that had perhaps been used in battle, and a sunburst design of spears. The books were leather-bound and uniform and, to judge from their condition, often read. Margaret imagined an early settler, the books all there were available to him of the printed word in Nairobi, reading and rereading them by lantern light. Sh
e sometimes held one in her hands.

  On the other side of the room was a skirted dressing table of the sort one used to see in old movies. On its glass surface were cut-crystal jars with silver tops. Perhaps the room had belonged to Diana’s parents when they built the house in the late 1940s. They’d come out from England after the war to try their hand with horses. Margaret picked up a picture of the couple, extravagantly dressed, looking as though they were about to head off to a party at the Muthaiga Country Club. The father’s face was weathered; the mother had a small, sweet smile. Diana, as a child, would constantly have heard that she resembled her father.

  Margaret thought about the story of the young Masai who’d been invited by an American benefactor to use his wit and innate intelligence to make a go of it in New York City. Two months after the young man’s arrival, he jumped to his death from his tenth-story apartment window. She thought the Masai’s heart must have grieved for the Rift Valley or that his senses had been violated by the city’s gray geometry. The anecdote was meant to be a cautionary tale, though Margaret was never quite sure what exactly was being cautioned. One shouldn’t be taken out of one’s environment? Or, if so, might one, at any moment, be subject to dangerous derangement?

  Already there seemed to be an inability to adapt. Once, when Patrick and Margaret left town for a long weekend to travel to the Serengeti, they returned to a cottage from which the contents of their bedroom had been emptied. The only thing not touched was Margaret’s underwear drawer, in which she had kept their passports. This proved a lesson they’d been taught at the beginning of their stay: keep your valuables in your underwear drawer; no African man would touch a woman’s underthings. The police came, looked at the bedroom, pointed to a broken window, and said, Aha. It wasn’t an inside job. Did anyone dislike them? Wish them harm? The case was never solved.

  Patrick and Margaret bought a new bed and had a lock installed between the bedroom and the living room. They later learned from the inspector that nearly everyone had those sorts of locks; hadn’t anyone ever mentioned them to the couple before? It was their third theft in six weeks. Margaret’s wallet had been stolen from her straw bag at the market, and one morning, as Patrick had walked out of the cottage on his way to the hospital, he’d found their secondhand Peugeot on cement blocks. All four tires had been taken during the night.

  Margaret understood the thieving in a purely intellectual way. The distance between those who were comfortable and those who were not was a precipice an expatriate stood upon, the ground beneath subject at any moment to erosion. In her body, she knew fear; morally, the thieving felt like reparation. She had learned to tuck her purse under her arm and disliked herself for doing it. She tipped James generously for washing their clothes. She was fairly certain this was not the custom, but it made her feel better. James never refused the money.

  Patrick wouldn’t ask Margaret what she had done that day, the question a prickly one, because she hadn’t yet found a job. He didn’t seem to mind, but she did. If he had asked her, though, she’d have told him that she had walked the dirt roads of Langata with her camera, taking photographs of the askaris in their long greatcoats, their pangas at the ready, or of the signs that read Mbwa Kali, Fierce Dog, at the gates of large houses. She also snapped pictures of the delicate falling branches of the jacaranda and of the scarlet-orange-pink bursts of color in the bougainvillea, a plant that grew like a weed and covered stone walls and rooftops. The other doctors at the hospital, she knew, viewed Patrick’s residence in Langata, an expatriate haven, as suspect. But Margaret had fallen in love with the cottage in Langata quite by accident.

  The Peugeot had stopped along a paved road as she was on her way to view a flat. Arthur, finishing his workday, had slowed down to inquire if she was all right. She might have guessed at his motives—a mixture of protectiveness and perhaps opportunity: a young white woman in a skirt, stranded at the side of the road behind a white Peugeot, newly purchased but decidedly secondhand; perhaps a lemon. The Peugeot had simply ceased to move, giving no warning.

  Arthur rolled down his window and called across the front seat, “You all right?”

  Margaret walked to the place where he had parked, white face trusting white face. Had he been an African, she wondered later, would she have waved the man away? Arthur would not take no for an answer, and she was grateful for the help. He tried to start the car in case the problem was simply a lack of petrol; Margaret was, after all, a woman. He would call from his house, he said; he was headed home. He knew of a mechanic who would take care of her. He used those words. Take care of you.

  Margaret studied the man. He had mud-brown hair and dark eyes, a cleft in his chin, and white teeth inside an easy smile. The bottom half of his face didn’t seem to match the top.

  In Arthur’s Mercedes, Margaret was introduced to the sudden beauty of the manicured gardens and the tall hedges of Langata, a kind of suburb of Nairobi. He turned and stopped at the bottom of a long drive. An askari, greatcoat over his bare legs, hopped up to open Arthur’s gate. Arthur never acknowledged the man. The path to the house was lined with jacaranda petals that made a purple carpet to the front door. The two-story home was made of stone with mullioned windows. All around her was a busy foreground of bright blossoms Margaret didn’t know the names of. Beyond the garden was a striking expanse of cornflower sky, as saturated a color as she had ever seen. It must have to do, she thought, with the equatorial sun, a distinctive angle of light.

  Arthur, offering Margaret a drink, made the appropriate calls. The car was being towed to a garage, where mechanics would repair it. Margaret became aware of her own bare legs, particularly when Arthur’s wife, Diana, clearly disconcerted to see a visitor she hadn’t been told about, entered the room. The wife took note, she saw, of the drink. Arthur explained, and Margaret was treated to Diana’s first smile: a sudden sharp surprise. Margaret called Patrick at the hospital to tell him that they’d been invited to dinner in Langata. She had to make the call with Arthur in the room and so sounded more enthusiastic than she actually felt, perhaps even a little breathless. Margaret could hear Patrick’s gentle complaint at the other end.

  At dinner the first night, another invitation was extended. A guesthouse on the property was vacant. Arthur named a sum less than the one Patrick and Margaret had been prepared to pay for the flat she’d intended to view. Diana suggested that Margaret and Patrick, who’d taken a bus out from Nairobi, stay the night and view the cottage in the morning, when they would be able to see it in the daylight. In bed that night, Patrick was wary—perhaps he had heard, before Margaret had, the faint tumble of a lock. They held each other tightly on the foreign mattress as if reestablishing themselves as a couple, as if an act of resistance were called for.

  In the morning, they viewed the guesthouse, a white stucco cottage with a red tiled roof, surrounded by pink and orange bougainvillea. The cottage had a sitting room with a small table swathed in a vermilion-and-yellow khanga. The kitchen had a Dutch door; the bedroom had a bathroom. The floor was polished wood in an intricate parquet pattern. The walls were white; the windows, mullioned glass. Even in America—or especially in America—Patrick and Margaret had never lived in such a beautiful place. Before the car had given out, they had been living over a nightclub at the Ngong Road Hotel. Prior to that, they had endured a grim stay at the Hotel Nairobi, where the sink and toilet had been encrusted with filth, where cockroaches had fled whenever Margaret had opened the bathroom door. She thought that Patrick must have seen, that morning, her desire for the cottage, and so he gave up his mild political objections.

  The guesthouse was far enough away from Arthur and Diana’s house to suggest a measure of autonomy. Diana insisted that the two couples would hardly ever see one another: Arthur worked all the hours of the day as head of sales at Colgate-Palmolive; Diana bred Rhodesian ridgebacks and had little time for people. All this seemed fine. Or Margaret made it so.

  That afternoon, James had taken a photograph of Mar
garet and Patrick. The picture was of Margaret in a chair just beyond the Dutch door of their new cottage in Africa. She had on a white sundress. Her skin was a deep red—Indian red, her mother used to call it. Margaret’s hair was dishwater blond, though dishwater didn’t really resemble her hair color, a light brown with hints of brass. Her skin seemed painted on and shiny.

  Behind her, Patrick was standing in a short-sleeved white shirt with a tie. He had a healthy-looking tan and hair that might or might not have been washed in several days. In the picture, it looked lank. His face was in shadow, sunglasses shading his eyes.

  James was serious when working Margaret’s Nikon, but he grinned as he handed the camera back to her.

  At the Big House, James cooked the meals, set the table, served the food, cleared the dishes away, and then washed them. Patrick and Margaret didn’t have servants. Only recently had Diana sent James over to the cottage to wash their clothes. Though Margaret had been advised early on to hire someone to do the chore, the task seemed too intimate to farm out. She had tried to wash the clothes in the bathtub, but she hadn’t been able to get all the soap out. When Patrick developed a rash around his neck, Margaret capitulated. She cooked and served their dinners, however, and Patrick did the dishes. It seemed a straw victory. Not to employ a servant was to deny an African a job.

  At dinner on the evening of that first mention of the climb, Arthur, his wet hair still grooved from his comb, spoke of hypoxia.

  “The lungs fill up with blood,” he said, setting Patrick and Margaret straight. “Typically four or five people a year die climbing Mount Kenya. Usually it’s the fit German climbers who hop off the plane in Nairobi, head straight for the mountain, and practically run up it. They often get into trouble because they haven’t allowed their bodies to acclimate to the height and the thinner air. The slower you climb and the longer it takes, the better off you are.”