Mackenzie Ford

by The Clouds Beneath the Sun (v5)

  “Are there any remains at all?”

  Jack looked away before looking back. “Cinders. Charred fragments. The remains of burned bones. I am having them collected.”

  “Oh, Jack. This trial …”

  “Shhh.”

  “My father … Eleanor, they were getting on so well.”

  He said nothing. Then, “You’re alive. You will recover—you are already recovering. If you had been …” He shook his head and swallowed hard.

  Through more tears, Natalie managed to say, “And Daniel?”

  “Is down the corridor. He had concussion like you—he hit his head badly; a few bruises and burns, but he’s already up and walking, giving interviews.”

  Drinking some water, she almost spilled it. “Giving interviews! What do you mean? Interviews about what, and to whom?”

  Jack wiped his eyes with his hand and nodded his head. “I haven’t told you the good news. You saved Daniel’s life. You’re a heroine. It’s all over the papers here. In the photos you remind me of Grace Kelly. Well, you would do if you had fair hair. Since you are too ill, too weak to be interviewed, they are interviewing him.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t understand because you don’t remember.” Jack laid some newspapers at the foot of the bed. “It’s all in here, when you’re ready. You were knocked unconscious by the plane. You crashed about three miles from a Maasai village. They saw what had happened and came to help straight away. But, since they had to travel on foot—to run, in the heat—it took them some forty minutes to reach the crash site, and there was a river in the way. But they could see what was happening all the time. Others ran to the nearest telephone, though of course we knew what had happened since Max had sent out an emergency Mayday call.”

  He drank some water himself, and handed her more paper towels, to soak up the tears. He sat on the edge of the bed so he could wrap his arm around her shoulders.

  “Anyway, the Maasai saw what happened. They saw you open the emergency door at the back of the plane—you must have been the first person to regain consciousness—and they saw you go back for Daniel and pull him, and shove him, and squeeze his frame out of that small aircraft. He’s not a Maasai himself, of course, but he’s black and that’s what counted with them—that you saved a black’s life. Apparently, you were trying to give him some water when a wing of the plane fell on both of you. You were knocked on the head and both of you were unconscious when the Maasai reached you. The rest of the plane was on fire by then, and the wing covering you and Daniel—there was airplane fuel everywhere. But the Maasai used boulders to get the wing off you and neither of you is badly burned. The flames kept the wild dogs away.”

  “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 t
rying 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

  For 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?”