Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

“Would you like me to come with you?”

“Would you mind?”

“No, not all.”

But when they reached the main door of the hotel, the doorman approached Jack and addressed him urgently in what Natalie took to be Swahili. There was a prolonged exchange and Jack began to frown and look serious. At length he turned to her.

“There’s a demonstration in the main square, which is just off the main street where I was intending to take you. About land reform after independence. I don’t think it’s wise for us to go walking tonight. It’s late, some of them will have been drinking. There could be … Sorry. Shall we have another drink?”

“You have one. I’ll just watch. I’ve had enough.”

They retreated to the bar. The barman was black, she noticed. Everyone else was white.

While Jack was getting his drink, she re-ran in her mind the conversation they had had about the judge—Tudor?—and his racist views.

When Jack joined her, she said, “Can London really interfere in a trial here? In England we are always being told our judiciary is independent.”

He offered her a cigarette. She shook her head. She preferred smoking out of doors.

“They wouldn’t normally interfere, no. You appoint people to run a colony and let them get on with it. They are the people on the ground; they know best. But these are not normal times. Independence is coming, tempers are running high, old rivalries and grievances are resurfacing, race is the biggest issue of our day. Black people are convinced their time is coming, and for most of them it can’t come soon enough.” He pulled on his cigarette and blew smoke into the room. “I’ve seen you looking around, in this very hotel. It’s a white world, with black staff. That has to change. It will change.”

He blew more smoke into the room.

“But London’s priority is a smooth transition. That’s not a small thing. Look at some of the horrors and mistakes that have happened—in Algeria, Egypt, the Belgian Congo. Seen from the Colonial Secretary’s desk in Whitehall, one murder in Kenya is small beer, small beer that puts at risk a wider picture that might—might—precipitate hundreds of deaths.”

Natalie shook her head. “I can see that, of course I can. But I can’t go along with it. If we took that view, we could excuse any crime.”

Jack crushed out his cigarette in an ashtray on the table between them. “No. All crimes have a wider context, I agree. But some trials spark sensitivities. This one threatens to snowball in a way London doesn’t like. The demonstration tonight, a demonstration that stops you and me doing something as innocuous as taking a walk, simply proves the point. In the current climate, ordinary life is suspended from time to time.”

Natalie didn’t like what she was hearing. “May I have one of your cigarettes now, please?”

“Of course.”

She reached for his pack, on the table between them, and as she did so, he did too.

His hand closed over hers and held it for a moment, squeezing just slightly.

Then he smiled and let go.

There was mild excitement as Jack’s twin-engined Comanche bumped down on the red-earth landing strip at Kihara the next morning. Their first approach had been hampered by the presence of the family of cheetahs that seemed to regard the strip as their home, the mother and cubs sleeping slap in the middle of the runway. As the plane raced along, about twenty feet from the ground, the cheetahs lifted their heads, got to their feet languidly, and scampered into the long grass.

Natalie loved every moment of it. It was something that, under different circumstances, she could put in a letter to her father.

Two of the ancillary staff had brought out a brace of Land Rovers to meet the plane, and all the supplies Jack had bought in Nairobi were transferred from the Comanche. They parked the plane where it got what shade was going, covered the cockpit with sheets, to break the worst effects of the sun, locked the doors, and ran ropes from hooks on the undersides of the wings to metal spikes hammered into the ground. Then they heaped thorn bushes around the aircraft to keep inquisitive animals away.

As they drove into the camp, Eleanor came out of her tent to meet them. Jack and Natalie got down from the Land Rover and he kissed his mother. As the ancillary staff began unloading the supplies that had been bought, Eleanor, Natalie, and Jack stood to one side.

“Well?” said Eleanor, addressing herself to Natalie. She was wearing a white shirt and sand-colored chinos today. “Did Jack look after you?”

Natalie smiled and nodded. “I ran into trouble with some drunken blacks on our first night away. Jack turned up on cue.”

Eleanor looked concerned. “He let you go walking by yourself, at night?”

She turned to her son but before he could say anything Natalie got in first. “No harm done, Eleanor. I’m still in one piece, as you can see.”

There had been no more bodily contact between Natalie and Jack, nothing other than the brief squeeze of his hand over hers the evening before, in the bar of the hotel. But, by mistake, she had this morning left undone one more button of her shirt than was normal, and Jack had noticed, his eye straying more than once to where the swelling of her upper breasts was just visible. As soon as they were in the plane, and he was occupying himself with his preflight routine, she had surreptitiously fixed her shirt. She had been embarrassed when he had first looked at her so frankly, but she found she enjoyed it too. Nothing had been said.

Jack glanced at Natalie now, taking in that her shirt had been buttoned. Then he relayed to his mother what he’d been told by Frank Villiers and Maxwell Sandys in Nairobi.

Eleanor heard him out in silence, at least to begin with. But, as he went on, she drew herself up, made herself taller, held herself more erect, her body trembling with tension. As Jack finished his account, she transferred her gaze to Natalie. “So, the situation gets worse and worse. We’ll discuss it at dinner. You must both be dusty and sticky, and I want to fix that new battery for the radio. Have a shower and I’ll see you later.”

At dinner Eleanor had put her hair up in a chignon. She wore a pale green shirt and her wraparound khaki skirt. Her stylish dressing, Natalie had decided, was a form of self-discipline. Eleanor, she understood, dressed with men in mind, even here in the gorge. It was an aspect of her self-respect which Natalie admired.

Naiva had prepared a simple roast chicken, roast potatoes, and carrots. Plain water was a relief: Natalie had drunk too much whiskey in Nairobi.

“Tell me again what Nshone told you,” said Eleanor once they were settled. She was seated between Arnold Pryce and Jonas. Natalie and Jack sat together, opposite her. Daniel was nowhere to be seen. Kees was there, Christopher too. He smiled.

Natalie still hadn’t made up her mind what she thought about Jack’s fishing/hippopotamus adventure.

Jack repeated his story for Eleanor’s benefit, and the others’, adding in details about Natalie’s deposition, the choice of John Tudor as judge in the case, and Maxwell Sandys’s curious behavior.

Eleanor listened in silence, chewing her chicken, sipping her water.

“What was Nshone’s tone?”

“How do you mean?”

“Was he confident, cocky, was he opening a negotiation?”

“I’m not experienced enough to know. They are planning to call more than one Maasai chief, as witnesses, to explain their laws—”

“Will that be allowed—?” Natalie interjected.

“It doesn’t matter,” snapped Eleanor. “If the court refuses to hear the chiefs, that merely rubs in the Maasai argument.”