Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

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.