Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

Yet again, Natalie was hating what she was hearing. At the same time, Eleanor had said one important thing. She had not learned to live with ambiguity, not just the ambiguity over her mother’s death, but the ambiguity over the situation in the gorge, where her view was so different from Eleanor’s own, and all the others.

She didn’t want Eleanor to proceed with her plan, she knew that. She must change the subject.

“Is there …? Jack and Christopher … I see something between them … a fire, a friction … does it bother you, does it get in the way, here in the gorge?”

Eleanor looked annoyed for a moment or two.

“Are you sure?” she said at length. “They were always fighting as boys. Christopher especially was unruly. But he quietened down a long time ago. I think I told you the night you slept in my tent that he used to be very jealous of Jack, but I’m not sure that’s true anymore. There was the whole business of Gisella, of course, that was rather unfortunate but—”

“I don’t know what you mean. Who was Gisella?”

Eleanor was still smarting from Natalie’s quick-fire change of subject, still adjusting to the fact that Natalie was determined not to accept her offer of help, and she was obviously wary of saying too much about her sons, of being disloyal to one or the other. She looked about her, to make sure both men were beyond earshot, and then she spoke carefully, deliberately.

“Two years ago, Christopher fell in love with a woman called Gisella. She was a wildlife artist and he met her when he was taken to the opening of one of her shows in Nairobi. They had a whirlwind romance and I think, I’m sure, he had considered marrying her. Anyway, he brought her to the gorge, where the whole thing fell flat, or at least it did on her part. She went back to the city after only a few days, leaving Christopher bemused and deflated and very upset.”

Eleanor kicked the fire again. “But she was a decent girl—woman—she knew she had hurt Christopher and she wrote him a long letter.” She gently touched her hair where the strand had fallen down earlier. “He never told me what was in the letter but I could see he was hurting and so, one day when he had gone to Nairobi, I found the letter among his things and read it.” She made a face. “I shouldn’t have done it, but he was my son and I could see he was in turmoil, just as I can see that you are now in turmoil.”

She let a pause go by.

“Gisella had left, she said, because although she had arrived in the gorge as Christopher’s girlfriend, she had very quickly fallen in love with Jack.”

Natalie turned involuntarily towards Eleanor and Eleanor nodded.

“Gisella made it clear in her letter that Jack wasn’t aware of her feelings for him, that she had fallen for him ‘at a distance,’ as she put it, and nothing had gone on. But that was why she had left in such a hurry. She had no idea, she said, if Jack felt about her the way she felt about him but it was safer for her to leave, before … before, as I remember she put it, she hurt Christopher more than she was hurting him already.”

Eleanor stared into the fire before going on. “Imagine all that. Imagine the currents and crosscurrents swirling around in that whirlpool of emotion. Was Jack really not aware of Gisella’s feelings for him? These things have a way of revealing themselves after all. Was he therefore aware of the full extent of Christopher’s obvious distress? Did Jack know he had—however inadvertently—been part of the cause of his brother’s unhappiness? Deeper still, if Jack didn’t know about Gisella’s feelings, did she underneath it all want Christopher to tell Jack that she had fallen for him? Would Christopher have done that? And what did he feel about his brother? Gisella had said in her letter that Jack wasn’t aware of the situation, and had done nothing to bring it about, but was that true? Who tells the complete truth in situations like that?”

Natalie felt the warmth of the fire play on her cheeks. “Having read the letter, what did you do?”

Eleanor looked at her. “What would you have done, my dear?”

“I’m not sure I would have read Gisella’s letter in the first place.”

Eleanor nodded. “You are not a mother yet, Natalie. I had one son hurting. I didn’t know how deep the whole business went. Was Jack involved or not? If he really wasn’t aware of Gisella’s feelings, what would happen if and when he did become aware of them?”

She removed her spectacles and cleaned them with her handkerchief. “I sent Christopher to a conference in Paris. While he was away, I told Jack, on one of the occasions he was in Nairobi, that I had been asked to write a book on the gorge and that the publishers wanted the illustrations to be paintings and drawings, not photographs. So I asked him to see Gisella and ask her if she was interested.”

“And—?”

“And nothing. Whatever Gisella felt for Jack, and whether she felt the same after a few weeks had elapsed, Jack certainly didn’t reciprocate the feeling—nothing happened. So I concluded that Gisella had been truthful in her letter. Jack didn’t know about her feelings for him. Once or twice after Christopher came back from Paris, I introduced into the conversation the fact that Jack had seen Gisella, that nothing had come of the book project, and there had been no subsequent contact between the two of them.”

“And you think … you think that settled everything?”

“No, of course not. I’m not naive. Of course it didn’t settle everything. But, at the least, what I did showed Christopher that he had not been betrayed by his brother, rather by Gisella.”

“But … but Jack had been the catalyst. Isn’t that enough to stoke Christopher’s jealousy?”

“Yes, maybe, but that had already happened. I could do nothing about that. You can’t protect your children from everything, so you protect them where you can.”

Natalie stared into the dying fire. “And what if there had been something between Jack and Gisella?”

“Again, I’m realistic. If there had been something, better to have it out in the open. Jack is my son just as much as Christopher is. And being so obsessed by the gorge doesn’t stop me wanting to be a grandmother some day, see the Deacon name perpetuated. That’s more likely to happen with Jack than Christopher. Jack adores children.”

Natalie could still feel the glow of the campfire on her cheeks, but the heat was fading. “So it all settled down, did it, after the Gisella episode? I mean the rivalry between Christopher and Jack.”

“As much as these things ever do. There will always be some rivalry between brothers.”

Was Eleanor quite as sensitive to her sons’ rivalry as she thought? Natalie asked herself. Mothers couldn’t always second-guess their own children. Look at what had happened in her own case.

Eleanor stood up, to indicate the conversation was over.

Natalie stood up too.

“I’ve said more than I ever intended.” Eleanor smiled but sternly. “I take it you don’t wish me to intervene with your father?”

Natalie shook her head.

“You’re sure?”

Natalie stared into the remains of the fire. “My father is my problem.”

Between her fingers, Natalie gripped a cigarette. Even its smell was comforting. Before her, on the small table, the flask of whiskey was laid out where it usually was.

The moon was not up yet and so the night, beyond the reach of the camp lights, was dark, inky dark, impenetrable.

It was the following evening and, after dinner tonight, they had listened to Massenet’s Manon , about lovers and letters and misunderstandings. She had adored it but Arnold Pryce had complained again that Jack didn’t have enough jazz.