Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

“But she pretended— !”

He looked at her and squeezed her arm. “Don’t we pretend all the time?” He smiled. “When we flew back from Nairobi, both you and I pretended not to notice that you had left undone a button in your shirt that is usually done up. And the first chance you had to do it up, while I was distracted, you did. I noticed straight away but pretended not to.” He squeezed her arm again. “I’m not saying all pretenses are as important as others. I’m just asking you not to judge my mother too harshly. Not because she’s my mother but because you are going through a bit of a roller coaster just now, and she was trying to help.”

Natalie unconsciously checked the button on her shirt, the one Jack had referred to. She noticed what she was doing and smiled at him sheepishly.

“All right, all right. I’ll calm down. But can you please tell your mother to lay off, that I don’t need help all the time, that I can be safely left alone to clean a gun, that I’m not going to set fire to my tent with a cigarette, that I can sort out my own problems myself.” She breathed out heavily. “It should be obvious by now, from the discoveries I have been making, that whatever is happening inside me doesn’t affect my concentration on our work.”

“We can all see that, Natalie. Relax. I’ve put the record straight. Let’s go on from there.”

Jack was right, she told herself. He had cleared the air. She found herself feeling cleaner, clearer-headed, less entangled in her past. Was it what had been said, or simply his presence? He had that effect on her; she had noticed that before.

Changing her tone, she said, “I find it faintly indecent that you pay so much attention to one of my shirt buttons.”

“Then you know nothing about men … or about some women,” he replied. “I found it… exciting is the wrong word. Erotic, that’s it. For a while, I thought you’d done it deliberately—”

“What—?”

“Watch out!” cried Jack, scrambling to his feet. “Lions. Leave the plates. Get in the plane.”

She quickly did as she was told. Without looking to see where the lions were, or how many there were, she climbed into the plane, Jack after her, with the picnic basket. He closed the door and they both watched as a pride of five lions, three females and two males, walked by. They sniffed at the plane, the table and chairs, licked the plates, and then walked on to some dunes about thirty yards away.

“Let’s get some air in here,” Jack said, and opened one of the side windows, which had a metal clip on its rear edge.

“The males’ manes are black,” said Natalie after a pause.

“Yes, it’s a local adaptation. The reeds by the lake here are very dark and the black manes help camouflage the lions when they are hunting.”

Three of the lions now appeared to be resting, but one, a male, was sniffing around a female.

“This looks interesting,” said Jack. “I think they are going to copulate.”

She stared at him. “Do you like watching animals have sex? Sounds sick to me.”

“That’s just your Christian upbringing getting in the way. My interest is purely scientific. Ah—here we go.”

They watched as the male lion mounted the female, gave a few thrusts, bared its teeth in what could have been a grimace, or a grin, and then withdrew.

Jack looked at his watch. “Eight seconds.”

“How romantic.”

“But the purpose has been achieved—impregnation. It makes sense, in the wild, with a lot of predators around, to get it over with quickly.”

“Do you think the lioness is happy with the arrangement?”

“She doesn’t know any different, so I don’t see why not. It’s as risky for her as for him, so the quicker it’s all over, the safer they both are.”

The lions were moving on.

She used the binoculars Jack kept in the plane to focus on the lions as they drifted off.

“I nearly married an only child.” He said this as he put his water bottle on the backseat.

“What happened?”

“She died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Leukemia.”

He peeled an orange and offered it to her. She took it.

“Are you over it? Over her?”

“It was nearly a decade ago, so yes.” He looked across to where the lions had all but disappeared. “I’ve not been in a hurry.”

She handed him back some slices of orange. “Does that mean you are now?”

“No, but… you can’t always let life slip by. You have to act. I agree with my mother there. The next five years in Kenya are going to be taken up with the transition to independence. There’ll be a lot of politics. By the end of that time I’ll be nearly forty, on the late side to have children—”

“Do you think so?”

“I do, yes. I don’t want to be sixty when my children are at university. Children matter to me.”

With his fingers he gripped the door handle.

She leaned forward. “So you are in a hurry. That could be dangerous. Are you feeling broody?”

He rubbed his fingers over his chin. “Horrible word. Let’s just say that time is at the back of my mind, and that I can foresee a turbulent era coming up.” He opened the door, got down, and helped her out of the plane. He began folding up the chairs and she did the same.

Holding the table, he said, “Do you get broody?”

She made a face and shook her head. “It hasn’t happened yet, no. The idea of children, the possibility, is always there, of course, but I don’t feel any pressure of time.”

“Where do you want to be when you are fifty? A professor? A professor and a wife? A professor and a wife and a mother?”

She shook her head vehemently. “I haven’t thought about it! Honestly. I find your questions faintly … faintly …”

The hubbub from the flamingos was, if anything, louder than ever. Although it wasn’t late, shadows were beginning to encroach on the crater, its mountainous walls being so high.

“Faintly what?”

She shrugged. “You seem so … you have your plane, your record player, your political committee in Nairobi, you are confident about the future here in Kenya, you seem to know such a lot of people wherever you go. Until now, you seemed—quite frankly—like a round peg in a round hole. Yet here you are—” She smiled. “This will sound crazy, fou as the French say, but it’s as if you are interviewing me for a job as your wife!”

He whistled as he clanged shut the rear airplane emergency door and fixed it with its lever. It was his turn to make a face. “I put my lips together and whistle but you’re not entirely wrong.” He added quickly, “No, I’m not interviewing you for a vacancy, though such a vacancy does, unquestionably, exist.” He smiled. “But there is something in what you say—”

He held the door open as she got back in the plane. Then he climbed in after her.

“What I mean is, and this interests me about myself … at some stage in your life, you do begin to think about time, about the fact that you are mortal. You begin to weigh up what you might achieve—in all sorts of directions. It never occurs to you in your twenties, that’s too early, and maybe it’s hit me sooner than it hits other people. If it has, I put it down to what’s happening here in Kenya—independence, I mean. We are all going to be caught up in big events, great events, historic political changes, shaping a whole world. But, during that time, what happens to your private life?”

He leaned over and closed the window he had opened earlier. Everything needed to be battened down for takeoff.

“I grew up with parents who had four children, but were never really interested in us as children. We had toys when we were very young, but the wildlife in the bush was much more interesting than conventional toys and we moved on as soon as we could walk and talk. I’m not sure I ever had a childhood in the normal sense of that term. Living the life we did, the life you are living now, we never really had a private life either. You must see that—it’s why you like your late nights to yourself. Otherwise, you would spend all your days as part of a team, in a big family of sorts, where everyone knows what you are up to at all times.”