Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

“London doesn’t want this trial because the racial element may divert attention from the independence conference, may overshadow it. My mother doesn’t want the trial for the effect it will have on the gorge. And you … you are determined. It’s quite a scenario.”

Natalie eyed Jack. He looked a bit flustered tonight. His hair was awry, his face was flushed, as he had angered himself in telling his story, his shirt looked as though it had been worn before, which was true enough. But it suited him, she thought. Jack wasn’t the city type, he wasn’t—what did the Americans call it?—clean-cut, that was it. He was more rough-and-ready. The shadow on his chin looked as though he hadn’t shaved today. She didn’t mind.

In angering himself, he had angered her. All she had done was sit in her chair in camp and watch the night. And now the British government, in London, wanted the trial scrapped because it might spoil a conference. Just thinking about it made the skin on her throat damp with sweat.

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then he added, “Here are the main courses, let’s change the subject.”

They both sat back to allow the food to be served. He rubbed the scar above his eyebrow.

“How did you get that mark you are scratching? What happened?”

He shook his head. “Nothing romantic or heroic, I’m afraid. We had some orphaned lion cubs when we were children—orphaned cubs are more common than you might think. They were great fun to begin with, very cuddly, but they grew up quicker than we did, quicker than we thought, in fact. I was playing with one of them one day, one of the cubs we called Kili, when she suddenly went for me and her claws were out when she cuffed me round the head. There was a lot of blood, though I was lucky, really. She could have caught my eye. But we had to release them into the wild after that.”

His beer was finished and he signaled to the waiter to bring more drinks. While they waited for the drinks to be brought, Jack talked and Natalie sat back and listened to him. She found she enjoyed just listening, where he was concerned. He talked about his sisters, his airplane, about KANU, in an unself-conscious way, with lots of gestures he seemed unaware of. He pushed back his hair when it flopped forward with the movement that she liked, his voice was easy on the ear—on her ear at any rate—and, all in all, he didn’t seem in any way impressed with himself. He made her forget the trial.

But the evening had not started at all well. Whereas the previous night she had heard nothing from the international operator about the phone call to her father, this evening it had come through straight away. She had been nervous all over again as the housekeeper had answered.

“Mrs. Bailey? It’s Natalie here, calling from Africa, from Nairobi in Kenya. How are you?”

“Oh, you know, fine. Same old aches and pains.”

“Sorry to hear that. Is my father there?”

“Hold on, I’ll see. Where did you say you are?”

“Nairobi, in Kenya.”

Mrs. Bailey put the phone down and Natalie had heard her walk along the hall. She was gone an age. When Natalie next heard footsteps approaching the phone, she tried to assess whether they were Mrs. Bailey’s or her father’s.

“Are you there?” It was Mrs. Bailey’s voice. “He can’t come to the phone.”

“Did he say why?”

“He said to say he had someone with him.”

“And does he?”

“That’s what he told me to say, Miss Natalie. And I’ve told you. Now you look after yourself.” And she had put the phone down.

Natalie had gulped her first whiskey in the bar. She needed it. What would have happened, she had often wondered, if she had told her father about his wife’s wartime betrayal? How well she remembered, even now, the afternoon she had heard noises from the upstairs bedroom, when she was supposed to have been at a picnic with friends but had felt unwell, coming down with what would turn out to be chicken pox. Although she hadn’t really understood what her mother and the pilot were doing with each other in the bed, when she had seen them through the open door from across the upstairs landing, the very fact that her mother had been too preoccupied to notice she was there told her a lot. And the noises her mother made … had puzzled her for years, but not anymore.

Thank God for Jack. He had been on hand last night when she had needed him and he was definitely helping tonight. A couple of whiskies and an hour or so with Jack and the unpleasantness with her father was undoubtedly eased.

She leaned forward. “I might be prying again but … you talk much more, and much more fondly, about your sisters than about Christopher. Do you and he not get on? I noticed a certain— fire —between you two at the publications meeting.”

He looked at her, holding his glass to his lips but not drinking.

“We get by,” he said at length. “We didn’t get on as children—I’m surprised it still shows, but if you’ve noticed it, others will have too.”

She said nothing.

“I am the oldest, the most wizened of the Deacon gang.” He grinned. “So, as we grew up I was the first to have a bike, for example, the first to be able to fire a gun, ride a pony, I was the first to cross all those growing-up benchmarks. My sisters took it in their stride—they laughed when I fell off my bike and grazed my knee, or when my pony threw me and I broke a collarbone.” He wiped his lips with his napkin. “But not Christopher. Christopher was always an angry child, certainly where I was concerned. He hated being number four, the smallest, the slowest, the weakest.” Jack hunched forward in his seat. “When the rest of us climbed trees, for instance, and he was simply too small to do it, he would scream and yell and cry his eyes out. That only made the rest of us tease him, of course, and that in turn made him even more miserable. As he grew up, he grew out of it, but he always contained a competitive streak—and, I have to say, a jealous streak.”

He drank more water. “There was a time when we used to fight a lot, and he would play not-very-funny practical jokes on me, like loosening the wheel of my bicycle, or cutting partway through the strap of a stirrup.” Jack folded his napkin and set it to one side. “The worst was when I was about fifteen, and he was twelve, and we’d had a fight. I can’t remember what it was about but I can remember we were on holiday at Lake Naivasha—that’s a stretch of fresh water about forty or fifty miles north of Nairobi. I think we may have argued about whether the Kikuyu were better long-distance runners than the Luo—it doesn’t matter, but it was one of those things that boys take seriously. Anyway, we were both sent to our rooms.

“Next day we were going fishing, with Matoga, well into his sixties, who had been with the family for years. Christopher had been up early but said he wasn’t feeling well and decided not to come.

“Matoga and I set off, but only after lunch, and took the skiff to Kangoni Point. It’s a trip of about an hour but that’s where the best fishing is. Once you are there, however, you have to be careful because it’s quite near to a place where the hippos like to bathe.” Now he did sip some beer. “The prevailing winds take the boat towards the hippos and every so often you need to start the engine and putter back to the Point and start fishing again from there.”

He put his glass down.

“Everything went well for about an hour. We fished and regrouped twice or three times, and we caught some decent perch. But then, the next time we came to start the engine it wouldn’t fire, it was completely dead. Worse, only then did we notice that the fall-back oars weren’t in the bottom of the boat as they were supposed to be, in just such a case of engine failure. Someone had removed them and, in our eagerness to get out on the water, we hadn’t noticed.”