Mackenzie Ford

by The Clouds Beneath the Sun (v5)

  “For the couple concerned, maybe. But what about if they have children?”

  “I suppose the pill makes that less likely. Women will have more control now. That has to be good, don’t you think?”

  He shrugged. “In one way, yes. Yes, of course. But say we start having fewer children as a result … is that a good thing?”

  Natalie chewed on a chicken leg. “The other night, by the campfire, when your mother shooed you away—”

  “Yes, I’ve been meaning to ask … what was all that about?”

  “Some of it was private, but she did say, at one point, that you are her best hope for giving her grandchildren, that you like children. Where does that come from?”

  He shrugged again. “I shouldn’t have to explain that, surely. Doesn’t everyone want children? Don’t you?”

  She nodded. “I suppose I do want children, yes, but I haven’t thought much about it. I had an affair with a married man. I was very happy … he had two children, there was never any question of … of me having a child with him. Children were never talked about.”

  When he didn’t say anything immediately, she went on, “Your mother seems to think that neither Christopher nor your sisters is as likely to have children as you.”

  Jack finished chewing some chicken. “I suppose it’s true that Christopher doesn’t have the interest in children that I have. But Virginia is a doctor, doing good works in Palestine. She and her husband think that having children now would hamper their work, and they are right. But they’ll have children at some point. And Beth … she’s impulsive, noisy, she’s just as likely to get pregnant as she is to have an abortion, or get married in Las Vegas.” He grinned, biting into his tomato. “Our mother doesn’t really understand Beth.”

  “And she understands the rest of you?”

  “She thinks she does.”

  “Does she interfere much in your lives?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The night she shooed you away from the campfire, when she came to sit with me, she had a proposal, to intervene with my father. I thought it … I thought it well meaning but very … I didn’t welcome it, it wasn’t her place to do … what she suggested doing.”

  “Oh yes, that sounds like our mother all right. She’s always matchmaking for us, when we were at school she was always writing to the headmaster if we showed some gap in our learning that she found alarming. Our mother never sits back and lets life go past. She has definite views about shaping the future. Did she agree to do as you asked?”

  “What do you mean?” Natalie, in the process of chewing her tomato, spilled some juice on her hand.

  “I mean: if you asked her not to interfere, did she agree not to? If you left it ambiguous, she is quite capable of taking matters into her own hands and proceeding anyway.”

  “Oh no. There was nothing ambiguous about my reaction. If she has intervened with my father after that … I shall be … you’ll be able to hear my roar from very far away.”

  They both sat in silence for a while, eating.

  “See the elephants,” Jack said at length, pointing. “Near those trees.”

  Natalie nodded.

  Heat shimmered above the lake, making the reeds a green-gray mass of abstract lines. The hubbub of the flamingos was as loud as ever.

  “Speaking of ambiguity,” said Natalie after another pause, “your mother told me that she has learned to live with the ambiguity of your grandfather’s death. Do you think that’s true?”

  Jack didn’t reply straight away. When he did, it was to say, “I’m not sure I follow what you mean. What was ambiguous about my grandfather’s death?”

  “Was it an accident or suicide? Come on, Jack, that’s obvious.”

  He thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said then. “Tell me first why you were talking about his death to begin with.”

  Natalie wasn’t sure she wanted to get into all that but she had started the conversation and Jack’s question was reasonable.

  “The night I spent with her, in her tent, the night after Richard was killed, we got talking and she asked me about myself, and in particular why I received so few letters. I told her about Dominic but I also told her about the death of my own mother.” Natalie repeated to Jack what she had told Eleanor weeks earlier. “And when I told her there was doubt about whether my mother had deliberately set fire to her bedclothes, she told me about the way your grandfather had died.”

  Jack let a long silence elapse. The wind was stiffening. Grains of sand were blown against the flesh of their legs.

  “There was nothing ambiguous about my grandfather’s death. It was suicide.”

  Natalie looked at Jack. “How can you know that? He was cleaning his gun, wasn’t he?”

  Jack drank some water. “He left a message.”

  “What? What kind of message? What did it say? Your mother never mentioned a note.”

  He nodded. “It wasn’t a formal note, so she chose to ignore it.” He swallowed more water. “He was a vicar, Natalie, remember that, and a missionary. Next to the body was a Bible. It had a ribbon attached to it, one of those ribbons that help you keep your place in books. When we opened the Bible at the place where the ribbon was, it was the Book of Ecclesiastes and five lines were underlined.” He turned his head to her. “I have never forgotten them …

  “‘He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow … Therefore, I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me … Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof …’

  “I’d say that’s pretty clear, wouldn’t you?”

  A long silence passed.

  Jack looked out across the lake. “I think my grandfather was holding the book when he died, and he was holding it because he had lost faith in it, lost confidence in the story it told, and he was hoping against hope that what he was doing would bring him some peace of mind, redemption. I think that when my mother talks of ambiguity, the only ambiguity was whether Gideon Taylor achieved the equanimity, the solace, the peace he sought, or whether he merely achieved oblivion. And I think she told you the lie that she did to help you, to make you feel less cold, less alone, less abandoned.”

  He reached out and put his hand on Natalie’s arm. “And now I have … I have robbed you of whatever comfort you derived from my mother’s version of reality.”

  He passed her some water. “I can’t tell whether you are shocked or bewildered or disappointed or angry, but I know I want to be the one to tell you, and that it’s fortunate we are here, in this magical but very cut-off place, where you can digest what I say before attacking my mother with all your guns, for misleading you. Or attack me, for disabusing you. She was trying to help, but I’ve seen how strong you are, how resilient, self-reliant.” He smiled. “And lithe!”

  He nodded. “I know you prefer the truth, however unpleasant, and you’d probably have found out sooner or later about my mother’s … manipulation of reality, and maybe in a way that would have done a lot of damage.”

  They sat on, the wind slightly rocking the small plane.

  Natalie wrestled with her thoughts, with what Jack had said. He was right in his observation, in that her feelings veered from anger to shock to bewilderment. Worst of all, she felt used by Eleanor and, yes, manipulated, cheated.

  She drank more water; her shock and bewilderment were giving way to anger. “When you have all these children you say you want, Jack, are you going to intervene in their lives like your mother interferes in yours?”

  He put his hand on her arm again. “Parents can’t help but interfere in their children’s lives. That’s what being a parent is, it’s how they show they care. And, much of the time, especially when children are young, parents do know better. I agree that, as they get older, children come to know their own minds—”

  “But what gave your mother the right to—”

  “Nothing did. It’s not a question of rights, Natalie, it’s a question of negotiating our way thr
ough whatever life throws in our path. My mother was trying to help you. I know you don’t see it that way, for the moment anyway, but she was. And maybe she did help. Although there was no ambiguity over her father’s death, it sounds as though there was over your mother’s.”

  “But she pretended—!”

  He looked at her and squeezed her arm. “Don’t we pretend all the time?” He smiled. “When we flew back from Nairobi, both you and I pretended not to notice that you had left undone a button in your shirt that is usually done up. And the first chance you had to do it up, while I was distracted, you did. I noticed straight away but pretended not to.” He squeezed her arm again. “I’m not saying all pretenses are as important as others. I’m just asking you not to judge my mother too harshly. Not because she’s my mother but because you are going through a bit of a roller coaster just now, and she was trying to help.”

  Natalie unconsciously checked the button on her shirt, the one Jack had referred to. She noticed what she was doing and smiled at him sheepishly.

  “All right, all right. I’ll calm down. But can you please tell your mother to lay off, that I don’t need help all the time, that I can be safely left alone to clean a gun, that I’m not going to set fire to my tent with a cigarette, that I can sort out my own problems myself.” She breathed out heavily. “It should be obvious by now, from the discoveries I have been making, that whatever is happening inside me doesn’t affect my concentration on our work.”

  “We can all see that, Natalie. Relax. I’ve put the record straight. Let’s go on from there.”

  Jack was right, she told herself. He had cleared the air. She found herself feeling cleaner, clearer-headed, less entangled in her past. Was it what had been said, or simply his presence? He had that effect on her; she had noticed that before.

  Changing her tone, she said, “I find it faintly indecent that you pay so much attention to one of my shirt buttons.”

  “Then you know nothing about men … or about some women,” he replied. “I found it… exciting is the wrong word. Erotic, that’s it. For a while, I thought you’d done it deliberately—”

  “What—?”

  “Watch out!” cried Jack, scrambling to his feet. “Lions. Leave the plates. Get in the plane.”

  She quickly did as she was told. Without looking to see where the lions were, or how many there were, she climbed into the plane, Jack after her, with the picnic basket. He closed the door and they both watched as a pride of five lions, three females and two males, walked by. They sniffed at the plane, the table and chairs, licked the plates, and then walked on to some dunes about thirty yards away.

  “Let’s get some air in here,” Jack said, and opened one of the side windows, which had a metal clip on its rear edge.

  “The males’ manes are black,” said Natalie after a pause.

  “Yes, it’s a local adaptation. The reeds by the lake here are very dark and the black manes help camouflage the lions when they are hunting.”

  Three of the lions now appeared to be resting, but one, a male, was sniffing around a female.

  “This looks interesting,” said Jack. “I think they are going to copulate.”

  She stared at him. “Do you like watching animals have sex? Sounds sick to me.”

  “That’s just your Christian upbringing getting in the way. My interest is purely scientific. Ah—here we go.”

  They watched as the male lion mounted the female, gave a few thrusts, bared its teeth in what could have been a grimace, or a grin, and then withdrew.

  Jack looked at his watch. “Eight seconds.”

  “How romantic.”

  “But the purpose has been achieved—impregnation. It makes sense, in the wild, with a lot of predators around, to get it over with quickly.”

  “Do you think the lioness is happy with the arrangement?”

  “She doesn’t know any different, so I don’t see why not. It’s as risky for her as for him, so the quicker it’s all over, the safer they both are.”

  The lions were moving on.

  She used the binoculars Jack kept in the plane to focus on the lions as they drifted off.

  “I nearly married an only child.” He said this as he put his water bottle on the backseat.

  “What happened?”

  “She died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Leukemia.”

  He peeled an orange and offered it to her. She took it.

  “Are you over it? Over her?”

  “It was nearly a decade ago, so yes.” He looked across to where the lions had all but disappeared. “I’ve not been in a hurry.”

  She handed him back some slices of orange. “Does that mean you are now?”

  “No, but… you can’t always let life slip by. You have to act. I agree with my mother there. The next five years in Kenya are going to be taken up with the transition to independence. There’ll be a lot of politics. By the end of that time I’ll be nearly forty, on the late side to have children—”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I do, yes. I don’t want to be sixty when my children are at university. Children matter to me.”

  With his fingers he gripped the door handle.

  She leaned forward. “So you are in a hurry. That could be dangerous. Are you feeling broody?”

  He rubbed his fingers over his chin. “Horrible word. Let’s just say that time is at the back of my mind, and that I can foresee a turbulent era coming up.” He opened the door, got down, and helped her out of the plane. He began folding up the chairs and she did the same.

  Holding the table, he said, “Do you get broody?”

  She made a face and shook her head. “It hasn’t happened yet, no. The idea of children, the possibility, is always there, of course, but I don’t feel any pressure of time.”

  “Where do you want to be when you are fifty? A professor? A professor and a wife? A professor and a wife and a mother?”

  She shook her head vehemently. “I haven’t thought about it! Honestly. I find your questions faintly … faintly …”

  The hubbub from the flamingos was, if anything, louder than ever. Although it wasn’t late, shadows were beginning to encroach on the crater, its mountainous walls being so high.

  “Faintly what?”

  She shrugged. “You seem so … you have your plane, your record player, your political committee in Nairobi, you are confident about the future here in Kenya, you seem to know such a lot of people wherever you go. Until now, you seemed—quite frankly—like a round peg in a round hole. Yet here you are—” She smiled. “This will sound crazy, fou as the French say, but it’s as if you are interviewing me for a job as your wife!”

  He whistled as he clanged shut the rear airplane emergency door and fixed it with its lever. It was his turn to make a face. “I put my lips together and whistle but you’re not entirely wrong.” He added quickly, “No, I’m not interviewing you for a vacancy, though such a vacancy does, unquestionably, exist.” He smiled. “But there is something in what you say—”

  He held the door open as she got back in the plane. Then he climbed in after her.

  “What I mean is, and this interests me about myself … at some stage in your life, you do begin to think about time, about the fact that you are mortal. You begin to weigh up what you might achieve—in all sorts of directions. It never occurs to you in your twenties, that’s too early, and maybe it’s hit me sooner than it hits other people. If it has, I put it down to what’s happening here in Kenya—independence, I mean. We are all going to be caught up in big events, great events, historic political changes, shaping a whole world. But, during that time, what happens to your private life?”

  He leaned over and closed the window he had opened earlier. Everything needed to be battened down for takeoff.

  “I grew up with parents who had four children, but were never really interested in us as children. We had toys when we were very young, but the wildlife in the bush was much more interesting tha
n conventional toys and we moved on as soon as we could walk and talk. I’m not sure I ever had a childhood in the normal sense of that term. Living the life we did, the life you are living now, we never really had a private life either. You must see that—it’s why you like your late nights to yourself. Otherwise, you would spend all your days as part of a team, in a big family of sorts, where everyone knows what you are up to at all times.”

  He started his check of the instruments.

  “So yes, I do think about how my life might be different. I don’t necessarily want it to be different but, not having had a proper childhood, children interest me. It’s more abstract than being broody.”

  Natalie fixed her seat belt. “When I spent the night with your mother, in her tent, the night before Russell left, before Ndekei had been caught, she talked about her passion for the gorge, about your father’s womanizing, and about how he had infused her with a love for paleontology. She mentioned her children, but almost in passing. Were your parents not good parents?”

  He checked the altimeter. “How do children ever know how to answer that question? You only get one shot at it, don’t you? Our parents expected us children to be adults as soon as possible. Is that being a good parent, or not?”

  She smiled. “You don’t seem to have turned out too badly.”

  When Jack said nothing, she added, “Have you ever failed at something?”

  He frowned. “Like what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. An exam? A relationship that you wanted to succeed? A job or a task?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Answer the question first, then I’ll tell you.”

  He seemed satisfied with the instruments and sat back in his seat. “Just now, I mentioned a woman who died. She was called Roxanna and I said I nearly married her, but that’s a lot less than the whole truth. We had been going out with each other for several months and she, I know, was very much in love with me. I was just as much in love with her, at least to begin with, but then one big thing came between us. She didn’t want children. She loved her career—she was an agent for actors and actresses and traveled a lot—and children would have slowed her down.” He fixed his seat belt. “Well, I did want children. They were, they still are, the whole point of marriage for me. So I was preparing to tell Roxy that we should go our separate ways.” He took down his headphones from where they were hooked up on the dashboard. “And it was at that point that she was diagnosed as suffering from leukemia. She had been feeling tired for ages and once the diagnosis had been made she was given about a year to live.”