Mackenzie Ford

by The Clouds Beneath the Sun (v5)

  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 l
ost 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.

  For the second time in her life, she had been bereaved twice, and there was now no chance of making good what had been lost. The tears rolled down her cheeks and she made no attempt to stem them. The shaking of her body rocked the Land Rover as much as the wind outside.

  After a long silence, during which various waterbuck and eland crossed their line of sight in the distance, Jack leaned forward and rested his forehead on the steering wheel.

  “I feel as if all the air has been let out of me, all the blood drained away.” He sat up again and wiped his eyes with his hands. “Nothing is going on inside me. I’m a wasteland.”

  She reached out again and laid her hand on his arm. “If we got married, how long would it be before … you regretted it?”

  He leaned back again but said nothing.

  “You were there, in the clinic, when I really needed you. We helped each other, I think. I felt warmer when you were around.” She smiled sadly. “In Lamu I loved being ogled as much as you liked ogling. Then … what happened happened.” She looked directly at him and her voice broke again. “We must face it, Jack. Children matter to you—you have said it often. I saw it for myself, the day we took those boys and girls flying over their villages.”

  Another long silence.

  “And you’ve known about this for only a day?”

  She nodded. “I lied about us in court. Not over this.”

  She looked at him and he looked at her. He would make a good father; she had told herself that before.

  He passed his hand over his face, but didn’t look at her as he said, “No one finds it odd that the urge to have children is so strong in women—why not men? The urge must exist in all men at some level. It’s just that no one ever talks about it.” His fingers touched the rim of the steering wheel.

  The wind still rocked the Land Rover.

  “Is it some failing in me, or is it my genes doing their job, telling me they want to survive, be passed on?”

  They watched in silence as some zebra ran into view, and then on out of sight.

  Jack went to speak again more than once, but each time subsided into silence. Finally, he said, in a whisper, “I … how many ways can you be bereaved? … My mother, Christopher … the baby, you … all leaving by different doors.”

  An open door, she told herself silently, could be as final, as cold, as a closed one.

  “Dr. Stone was wrong about you, wrong to be worried about you not having any inner strength, I mean. Daniel always said you fought your corner like a lion. Where does that … where does it come from?”

  She wiped her chin with the palm of her hand. “I must have been born with some, and my mother filled my head with résistance, as the French say. But your mother had a lot to do with it.”

  She nodded as he looked up. “That night I shared with her in her tent, I saw her mental toughness. Whatever your father did and didn’t do with all those younger women, she kept her dignity and stuck with what she was good at. It helped me … it helped me in court, and she saw that, I think, when I managed to keep some … dignity.”

  To keep her dignity, Natalie had lied in court. How often had Eleanor Deacon lied—to others and herself—to keep her dignity, to keep her work in the gorge on the rails?

  Natalie reached into her pocket for her handkerchief, wiped her eyes and cheeks, her mouth, blew her nose, and looked out at the plain, the immense sky, the thorn bushes rocking and waving in the wind.

  Night was not far away. Not the comforting, rainy, cozy nights of Lincolnshire but night that, here in the bush, was far more dangerous than the day.

  She let another long silence go by, as more zebra moved through the acacia trees. The giraffes and the guinea fowl had disappeared.

  She put her arm on Jack’s. “My bag’s in the back, with my painkillers. Could you get it for me, please? My pelvis is complaining. Then we should think about putting in an appearance at the reception.”

  “Of course.” He got down and went to the back of the vehicle.

  Natalie looked out of the window again. The sun was now completely covered by clouds. In the distance she saw some Maasai figures in their red cloaks crossing the plain, going home.

  Home. Where was that now, for her?

  Natalie leant her head against the glass of the side window and closed her wet eyes. The thorn trees were moaning—almost screaming—all around, but that wasn’t the sound she heard. The scream she heard came from deep within her.

  Postscript

  The timing given for the origins of bipedalism is correct for the years in which this book is set. Since 1962, however, the age at which early man first walked upright has been pushed further and further back (possibly to 4.5 million years ago, with the form of early man known as Ardipithecus). For an excellent, accessible introductory account, see Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind’s Beginnings, by Virginia Morell (Simon and Schuster, 1995), one of the sources I have relied on for period and scientific detail.

  Kenya was declared independent in December 1963.

  Jack Deacon married Elisabeth Kilibwani in Nairobi in 1964. They had four children. He died in 1972 of testicular cancer.

  Natalie Nelson married Peter Jeavons, in the House of Commons Chapel, in 1966
. In 1967 she fought a parliamentary by-election for the Chapel St. Leonard’s constituency in Lincolnshire, winning by a comfortable margin. Three years later she was appointed a junior minister at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with special responsibility for sub-Saharan Africa.

  Christopher Deacon’s body was never found.

  a cognizant original v5 release october 04 2010

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mackenzie Ford is the nom de plume of Peter Watson, a well-known and respected historian whose books are published in twenty languages. He was educated at the Universities of Durham, London, and Rome, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and numerous publications in the United Kingdom. From 1997 to 2007 he was a research associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Mackenzie Ford

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto

  www.nanatalese.com

  Originally published in Great Britain in paperback by Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, London, in 2009.

  DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Title page photograph copyright © Masterfile

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ford, Mackenzie.

  The clouds beneath the sun : a novel / Mackenzie Ford. — 1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published in Great Britain in paperback by Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, London, in 2009”—T.p. verso.