Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

He shrugged again. “I shouldn’t have to explain that, surely. Doesn’t everyone want children? Don’t you?”

She nodded. “I suppose I do want children, yes, but I haven’t thought much about it. I had an affair with a married man. I was very happy … he had two children, there was never any question of … of me having a child with him. Children were never talked about.”

When he didn’t say anything immediately, she went on, “Your mother seems to think that neither Christopher nor your sisters is as likely to have children as you.”

Jack finished chewing some chicken. “I suppose it’s true that Christopher doesn’t have the interest in children that I have. But Virginia is a doctor, doing good works in Palestine. She and her husband think that having children now would hamper their work, and they are right. But they’ll have children at some point. And Beth … she’s impulsive, noisy, she’s just as likely to get pregnant as she is to have an abortion, or get married in Las Vegas.” He grinned, biting into his tomato. “Our mother doesn’t really understand Beth.”

“And she understands the rest of you?”

“She thinks she does.”

“Does she interfere much in your lives?”

“Why do you say that?”

“The night she shooed you away from the campfire, when she came to sit with me, she had a proposal, to intervene with my father. I thought it … I thought it well meaning but very … I didn’t welcome it, it wasn’t her place to do … what she suggested doing.”

“Oh yes, that sounds like our mother all right. She’s always matchmaking for us, when we were at school she was always writing to the headmaster if we showed some gap in our learning that she found alarming. Our mother never sits back and lets life go past. She has definite views about shaping the future. Did she agree to do as you asked?”

“What do you mean?” Natalie, in the process of chewing her tomato, spilled some juice on her hand.

“I mean: if you asked her not to interfere, did she agree not to? If you left it ambiguous, she is quite capable of taking matters into her own hands and proceeding anyway.”

“Oh no. There was nothing ambiguous about my reaction. If she has intervened with my father after that … I shall be … you’ll be able to hear my roar from very far away.”

They both sat in silence for a while, eating.

“See the elephants,” Jack said at length, pointing. “Near those trees.”

Natalie nodded.

Heat shimmered above the lake, making the reeds a green-gray mass of abstract lines. The hubbub of the flamingos was as loud as ever.

“Speaking of ambiguity,” said Natalie after another pause, “your mother told me that she has learned to live with the ambiguity of your grandfather’s death. Do you think that’s true?”

Jack didn’t reply straight away. When he did, it was to say, “I’m not sure I follow what you mean. What was ambiguous about my grandfather’s death?”

“Was it an accident or suicide? Come on, Jack, that’s obvious.”

He thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said then. “Tell me first why you were talking about his death to begin with.”

Natalie wasn’t sure she wanted to get into all that but she had started the conversation and Jack’s question was reasonable.

“The night I spent with her, in her tent, the night after Richard was killed, we got talking and she asked me about myself, and in particular why I received so few letters. I told her about Dominic but I also told her about the death of my own mother.” Natalie repeated to Jack what she had told Eleanor weeks earlier. “And when I told her there was doubt about whether my mother had deliberately set fire to her bedclothes, she told me about the way your grandfather had died.”

Jack let a long silence elapse. The wind was stiffening. Grains of sand were blown against the flesh of their legs.

“There was nothing ambiguous about my grandfather’s death. It was suicide.”

Natalie looked at Jack. “How can you know that? He was cleaning his gun, wasn’t he?”

Jack drank some water. “He left a message.”

“What? What kind of message? What did it say? Your mother never mentioned a note.”

He nodded. “It wasn’t a formal note, so she chose to ignore it.” He swallowed more water. “He was a vicar, Natalie, remember that, and a missionary. Next to the body was a Bible. It had a ribbon attached to it, one of those ribbons that help you keep your place in books. When we opened the Bible at the place where the ribbon was, it was the Book of Ecclesiastes and five lines were underlined.” He turned his head to her. “I have never forgotten them …

“‘He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow … Therefore, I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me … Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof …’

“I’d say that’s pretty clear, wouldn’t you?”

A long silence passed.

Jack looked out across the lake. “I think my grandfather was holding the book when he died, and he was holding it because he had lost faith in it, lost confidence in the story it told, and he was hoping against hope that what he was doing would bring him some peace of mind, redemption. I think that when my mother talks of ambiguity, the only ambiguity was whether Gideon Taylor achieved the equanimity, the solace, the peace he sought, or whether he merely achieved oblivion. And I think she told you the lie that she did to help you, to make you feel less cold, less alone, less abandoned.”

He reached out and put his hand on Natalie’s arm. “And now I have … I have robbed you of whatever comfort you derived from my mother’s version of reality.”

He passed her some water. “I can’t tell whether you are shocked or bewildered or disappointed or angry, but I know I want to be the one to tell you, and that it’s fortunate we are here, in this magical but very cut-off place, where you can digest what I say before attacking my mother with all your guns, for misleading you. Or attack me, for disabusing you. She was trying to help, but I’ve seen how strong you are, how resilient, self-reliant.” He smiled. “And lithe!”

He nodded. “I know you prefer the truth, however unpleasant, and you’d probably have found out sooner or later about my mother’s … manipulation of reality, and maybe in a way that would have done a lot of damage.”

They sat on, the wind slightly rocking the small plane.

Natalie wrestled with her thoughts, with what Jack had said. He was right in his observation, in that her feelings veered from anger to shock to bewilderment. Worst of all, she felt used by Eleanor and, yes, manipulated, cheated .

She drank more water; her shock and bewilderment were giving way to anger. “When you have all these children you say you want, Jack, are you going to intervene in their lives like your mother interferes in yours?”

He put his hand on her arm again. “Parents can’t help but interfere in their children’s lives. That’s what being a parent is , it’s how they show they care. And, much of the time, especially when children are young, parents do know better. I agree that, as they get older, children come to know their own minds—”

“But what gave your mother the right to—”

“Nothing did. It’s not a question of rights, Natalie, it’s a question of negotiating our way through whatever life throws in our path. My mother was trying to help you. I know you don’t see it that way, for the moment anyway, but she was. And maybe she did help. Although there was no ambiguity over her father’s death, it sounds as though there was over your mother’s.”