Eric McCormack - Cloud

FOR THE NEXT forty-eight hours I lay in bed, sleeping off and on, nibbling on snacks of fruit and bread. Occasionally I’d awake to a soothing noise, like a machine running quietly. It turned out to be a little black and brown cat that had found a way under the mosquito net and would lie near me, purring happily. I was comforted by its presence when I drifted in and out of sleep.

Early on the third morning, Dupont came into the room a few minutes after I awoke. He lifted the net and felt my forehead.

“Your temperature’s very high,” he said. “The fever should break any time now.”

The little cat was at the bottom of the bed, watching and purring. Dupont stroked its fur.

“I see you have little Sadie looking after you,” he said. “The hospital’s cats were Clara’s idea. We got them at first just to keep down rodents and insects, but then we discovered that some of patients recovered faster with them around.”

I assured him that Sadie was the best of company.

“Speaking of which, I’m here with a dinner invitation for you,” said Dupont. “If, and only if, you feel a bit better tonight, Clara would like you to dine with her at six. Normally I’d be there too, but I’m afraid I’ll be gone till at least tomorrow. A village a hundred miles east is reporting an outbreak of yellow fever. I’ll go over and see what I can do. Clara will keep an eye on you till I get back.”

I dozed most of that day and got up around five. I wasn’t at all hungry, but I was feeling much stronger, so I shaved and put on my freshly laundered clothes.

At just before six o’clock, darkness, as usual, fell like a stone, and not long after that a nurse appeared at the door of my room to lead me to wherever I was to dine. She took me along dimly lit corridors, past rooms with open doors in which I could vaguely see patients settling down for the evening.

One door we passed bore the sign Delivery Room . The door was ajar and we could hear a bustle of activity and the sound of moaning from inside.

“One of our patients is having some difficulties,” said the nurse.

SHE BROUGHT ME to another well-lit room with a dining table set for two. A ceiling fan whirled silently as the nurse set off back down the hall. I had barely seated myself when Clara came in.

“I’m so glad you felt well enough to join me,” she said. “I’m hungry. Let’s eat.”

The meal consisted of a spicy stew made from some kind of desert deer, followed by figs and various fruits. Clara encouraged me to try a little of each, so I did.

While we were at the table, aside from brief comments on the food, the state of my health, and the expected progress of my recovery, we didn’t talk much. Afterwards, we moved to a side room that had more comfortable chairs and drank some hot tea.

As she sipped her tea, Clara relaxed and became much more talkative. I discovered, amongst other things, the reason Dupont had been on the Otago in the first place. He’d been returning from a short visit to London where he’d been called to advise the ministry on the political situation here in the desert. Apparently it was worsening, daily.

“We can sometimes hear artillery in the distance at night,” said Clara. “It’s frightening for us all. The patients and the staff have to be prepared for instant evacuation if the hospital comes under threat.”

Now I understood what Dupont had been hinting at as we were approaching the hospital.

“We hope we won’t actually have to leave,” said Clara. “But we have to be realistic and acknowledge that an attack on the hospital isn’t out of the question.” She then gave me a brief history lesson.

Vicious intertribal wars had been going on in these regions for centuries. When the various colonial powers took over, they enforced an artificial peace amongst the tribes and put them together in equally artificial countries. The borders of the new countries were strictly for the foreigners’ administrative convenience and often lumped together peoples of the jungle, the savannah, and the desert — traditional enemies who didn’t share the same languages or world views. Naturally, when the colonial powers left, or were thrown out, the benefits of the peace and order they’d imposed were quickly replaced by instinctive, traditional animosities. Violence flared up over and over, usually aimed at not-quite-legitimate governments.

“Hence the artillery fire at night,” said Clara. “We try to carry on as best we can, but who knows how it will all end?”

NOW, AS THOUGH to signal a change of subject, she took off her glasses. Her huge owl eyes were restored to normal size, green and lively.

“I hope you don’t mind that Charles has told me all about you and your unhappy love affair,” she said. “I must say — and he agrees with me — that it’s to your credit how deeply you were affected. But you’re young and have the whole world before you. Rest assured, in time, you’ll find happiness.”

Here we go again, I thought: Dupont’s told her to give me some advice.

“The main thing is not to retreat, not to fear getting involved again in future,” she said. “Some of us swear off any entanglements after we’ve been hurt. But that isn’t a virtue. It’s just a form of cowardice — a fear of being wounded again.”

That comment hurt a little.

“Of course, in your case I don’t mean right now,” she said, to make me feel better. “You’re still in your period of mourning. But you must never become a cynic about love. If you do, the very women who are worth loving will sense an emptiness in you and will stay away. They’ll understand you can’t take root in their hearts, nor they in yours.”

She was enjoying very much having someone new to tell her theories to, I suspected. I wondered if advice to a novice like myself would culminate in some revelations about her own life and experiences in the matter of love.

I couldn’t have been more right.

“As a matter of fact, I myself know exactly what you’ve been through,” she said. “Yes, I married a man two decades ago, now. Just one week after our wedding in England, my new husband and I came to Africa. We were both twenty-one and quite a pair of innocents. I’d barely finished my nursing training and he was an adventurous, idealistic schoolteacher — that’s why he wanted to work in a part of the world that was most in need.”

I did my addition: twenty-one, twenty years ago would make her now forty-one. Her skin was so wrinkled by the sun I’d thought she was much older. Yet in other ways she might still have been twenty-one: her green eyes were so youthful and lively and there was an energy about her that seemed somehow out of place in that worn face.

“My husband died unexpectedly just four years ago,” she said. “Physically he wasn’t a strong man, so the climate and various tropical diseases killed him though he was quite young. He was the first District Education Officer in the region of the Basio people, five hundred miles south of here. I was in charge of nursing at the local hospital. I was very much in love with him when we came here — I wouldn’t have left England otherwise. But the man I loved turned out not to be the same as the man I married. I don’t suppose that’s too uncommon.”

Clara sipped her tea and I waited to hear more.

“You see,” she said, putting down her cup, “during that period of almost twenty years when he was on his various official education tours — they lasted for weeks, sometimes months — he’d been intimate with a variety of Basio women. I’d never have known if he hadn’t confessed it to me just six months before he died. I’d have been in blissful ignorance and broken-hearted at his death.”