Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

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.

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.

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.

Also by Mackenzie Ford

Gifts of War