Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

She stood up to look out of the window, to see where the noise was coming from all of a sudden. She saw several people with placards; it was a small demonstration.

“What do the posters say?” asked Natalie. “Why are they screaming? What are they screaming?”

“They’re nationalists, and Marxists,” replied Sandys. “Mainly from tribes who feel they were dispossessed of their land by the white man, usually long ago, in the nineteenth century. They feel that, after independence, they’ll get their land back. But they’re only part of the problem. There is another group made up of Muslims. They loathe the Marxists and want a more … a tighter Islamic law. You know, no drink, your hand cut off if you are convicted of theft, three wives for everyone.”

Natalie looked out at the demonstrators. Many of them were children, no more than twelve or thirteen. “Is there going to be trouble at independence?”

“There’s bound to be some. There already is some. But things are moving fast enough towards independence to head off the worst excesses, I think. It shouldn’t be too bad, if the governor keeps his head.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he looked over his shoulder, to make sure no one had come back into the room.

“Natalie … given the statements you have made, to the police and today, in your deposition … well, under the law, we can compel you to give evidence. But of course we would rather you gave evidence willingly, of your own free will.” He fingered the tabs at his throat. “What I mean is … knowing the risks, the glare of publicity that you may well attract, the hostility, the pressure of the attention in the press … we need to know, as soon as possible, whether you are likely to change your mind. If you are going to have second thoughts about your testimony, better to have them now than on the eve of the trial. Am I being clear enough for you?”

Natalie looked out of the window again at the placards. “Sir Maxwell, I can’t pretend that I like being caught up in this … this mess. Yes, part of me thinks that Richard and Russell brought this trouble on themselves. Yes, I understand that Mutevu Ndekei was only obeying local traditions. But did Richard Sutton deserve to die? No, I don’t think so. I am British, brought up in a Christian household. I saw what I saw. I can’t go back on that and will tell it to the court. In the same way—”

He tried to interrupt but she waved him down.

“—in the same way, if I say I will give evidence, that is what I mean. I—will—give—evidence. I don’t want to be the object of any demonstration, or smear campaigns in the newspapers, or anywhere else for that matter, but I owe it to Richard, and to Russell, to give evidence, quite apart from my own conscience.” She smiled. “Am I being clear enough for you?”

Sandys nodded and stood up himself. “Yes, yes you are. Thank you. I wish all witnesses were like you, my dear. No wonder Jack is so taken with you. All being well, Ndekei will hang before Easter. Lunch?”

Natalie stared at her face in the mirror. She had a good skin, she knew that. People were always telling her. But the shadows under her eyes, so prominent in the wake of Dominic’s defection, hadn’t quite gone. What color were they? They weren’t brown—that was too strong a word. They weren’t gray either—that was too weak. They were nothing like bruises, so purple and yellow were out. Whatever color they were, they gave her face a washed-out, vulnerable look. As though she spent her nights crying. True enough in its way. She wished they would disappear and added a little powder, as camouflage. It worked, up to a point.

She tried some brown lipstick. That suited her coloring. A smidgeon of brownish rouge on her cheeks, just under her cheekbones, and she was more or less done. She stepped into her dress—the only one she had brought, which had been hanging over a hot bath for the past three hours, in the hope that the steam would help at least some of the creases fall out. It was white, with green and yellow flowers printed on it. Short sleeves. She clipped on a gold bracelet her mother had given her. Shoes with wedge heels. The only heels she had with her in Africa.

She was ten minutes away from dinner with Jack and sat now in a wicker chair on the balcony of her room in the hotel, overlooking the pool where she’d eaten lunch. Beyond the lobby area was an arcade of shops—selling newspapers and magazines, traditional clothes, European jewelry—and then a covered walkway alongside the pool, where one area was set aside as a restaurant. She looked around. All the people seated at the tables in the restaurant were white, all the staff black. There were at most half a dozen bodies in the pool, but they were all white, too, as were those lounging on the long chairs covered with towels. But the man cleaning the pool was black, and the man handing out towels. It was no more than what she had expected, but after her experience of the demonstration, and what Sandys had to say about Mutevu’s defense, she couldn’t help but notice.

She had spent the afternoon touring Nairobi in Maxwell Sandys’s car, with Mbante, the driver, pointing out the sights in his not-very-good English: the governor’s house, the National Assembly, the market, the train station, the main mosque—an ugly affair, she thought, in blue concrete with hardly any windows. They had driven past the racecourse, with its thin grass and rotting railings, which had once been white. And along embassy row, with its flagpoles, security gates, barking dogs, and hidden tennis courts. Mbante hadn’t specifically meant to show her but she had seen anyway the shantytown on the edge of the capital, the chaotic bus station—for blacks only, it seemed—and a local hospital, with bin upon bin of surgical waste overflowing into the car park. The National Museum had been closed, as had the National Library. Temporarily, or permanently, she couldn’t tell. She had seen two other, much smaller demonstrations, but on each occasion Mbante had turned the car quickly away.

When she had got back to her room, she still had a couple of hours to kill before dinner, and so there was more than enough time for a debate with herself over whether to call her father. It was a risk and she alternated between anger at him and a longing to hear his voice. When she had received the invitation to Kihara from Eleanor Deacon, she had written to her father to tell him she would be going abroad, and for some months. She had allowed time for the letter to reach him, then phoned. His housekeeper, Mrs. Bailey, had answered. She had gone in search of Natalie’s father but had returned to say he was practicing at the piano and was not to be disturbed. Owen Nelson practiced at all hours and was simply being distant, deliberately so. Natalie had left for Africa without saying goodbye.

If she phoned now, would it be any different? Her mother had always wanted to come to Africa, to see the great animal migrations she had read about. Would that make her father more amenable to a phone call from Nairobi, or less?

Natalie didn’t know, but it was his birthday in a few days and so, crossing her fingers, she placed a call with the hotel operator. She didn’t know when she would get another chance. But the operator hadn’t rung back yet.

Having tried on her shoes, she quickly slipped them off again as she affixed first one, then the other earring. Single pearls—her mother’s, naturally. They were lovely—plain, simple, and they matched Natalie’s skin color perfectly. But every time she put them on, she experienced a twinge of guilt. She only had them because her mother was dead.

She realized with a start that she had nothing with her that Dominic had given her.