The Clouds Beneath the Sun (44 page)

“I’m sorry,” said Christopher. “I didn’t think to ask. I never imagined—”

“You
should
have imagined. It was your
job
to imagine, to anticipate any likely difficulty.” Eleanor slapped the table. “What are we going to do?”

No one answered.

Seeing Natalie and Jonas’s bewilderment, Jack leaned forward and said, gently, knowing he could set his mother off again at any moment, “The Coryndon museum, where the press conference was to have been, has separate lavatories for blacks and whites.”

He let this sink in.

Outside, rain began to fall. Natalie stared at it. Rain in Africa—this was a new experience for her.

“How did you manage to overlook something so basic?” cried Eleanor, again addressing her remarks to Christopher. “I told you to steer clear of the main hotels, for the very reason that they are whites only.” She thrust forward her chin in the manner she had. “The whole
message
of the research we do here is that mankind had its origins in this part of Africa, that the whole globe was peopled by migrants from here, that we are all
one people!”
She took a deep breath, her chest heaving. “That is what we stand for, Christopher, and it’s an important something that can’t be exaggerated.”

She wiped her neck with a handkerchief. “Think of the wars that have been fought, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, over nationalism, because one set of people thought that they, or their way of life, was better than others.
We are all one people
—that is conceivably the most important message there has ever been. We can’t announce our results in a place, even a museum, where that message is contradicted in the most … basic, humiliating way.” She shook her head. “What are we going to do? I just hope this news doesn’t get out—think what the press would do with it.”

“Have we lost any money?” said Jack. “Did we have to put a deposit down?”

Christopher nodded gloomily. “Yes, but not much.”

“Well, I don’t see a problem with the press, if they find out. We just tell the truth, that we discovered, late in the day, that the museum has a racial policy we can’t agree with, so we did what we did. Nairobi’s got lots of buildings—cinemas, school halls, churches … it can’t be difficult to find a replacement.”

He turned to his mother. “Do you want me to—?”

“No, it’s Christopher’s job. He’s made the mess, let him clear it up.” She turned in her seat so that she was facing Christopher. “Do you hear? It’s
your
mess, so it’s
your
Christmas that is going to be spoiled. You can drive to Nairobi tomorrow morning and, whatever it takes, you will find another place for the press conference, somewhere that is available to blacks and whites equally, somewhere that’s easy to find, somewhere that holds enough people, somewhere with proper electricity, so we can show slides, and where the rental isn’t an arm and a leg. Talk to Jack, he’s on this KANU education committee, he must know about the schools and colleges, at least.”

She put her spectacles back on and picked up the papers in front of her. “Now, let’s go through our argument, make sure it’s watertight, try to think of all the potential criticisms.”

Natalie looked at Christopher. He looked wretched. His mother had all but humiliated him in front of the rest of them. Yes, he had made a mistake, but was it anything more than that? Had Natalie herself been organizing the venue for the press conference, would she have thought to ask if the lavatories were segregated? She supposed not. On the other hand, she told herself, she was new to Africa, whereas Christopher had grown up here, so maybe Eleanor had a point.

Did Eleanor pick on Christopher more than she picked on Jack? Was Jack his mother’s favorite? Natalie couldn’t honestly say that Eleanor was anything other than scrupulously fair—scrupulously
hard
—on both of them.

But she couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for Christopher.

Eleanor was speaking again, as she pushed her eyeglasses back up her nose. “The press release itself, I think, is more or less on the right lines. The right information in more or less the right order. The one change I’d like to make is to adapt a suggestion of Natalie’s.”

The two women exchanged glances.

“It would be inappropriate to name our new hominid after either Richard Sutton or Kees van Schelde, and we all know there are unbeatable reasons for calling him, or her,
Homo kiharensis.”
She paused, briefly. “But Kees did identify a new form of hand ax—smaller, finer, sharper than what came before. With everyone’s agreement, therefore, I intend to name this new culture ‘Scheldian.’ It’s easy on the ear and ensures that Kees will be remembered, at least by his colleagues.”

She looked around. “Are we agreed?”

“Well done, Eleanor, good idea,” said Jonas. “It’s the right thing to do.”

“What about Richard?” said Arnold.

In reply, Eleanor looked at Daniel. “With your agreement, I’d like to name the gully in the gorge, where you and Russell and Richard found the knee joint, RSK, for ‘Richard Sutton’s Korongo.’ That too ensures he will be remembered.” She looked around the table. “Are we agreed?”

Natalie had a question. “In theory I approve, wholeheartedly. But isn’t that… aren’t you being a little bit—what’s the word?—
forward
, aggressive, attaching English-language names to parts of what is, after all, a Maasai gorge? Aren’t you being deliberately confrontationist?”

Eleanor nodded. “A good point and the answer is—yes, I am. We’ve pussyfooted around this for too long. Kenya is going to be independent soon. Black people will regain what they say is theirs. But this gorge, and what it stands for, is just as much the work of white people as black people. It is, in itself, and as I said earlier, a monument to the fact that we are all one people. So that’s what I am going to add to your press release, that’s the gloss I shall tack on at the end.” She took off her spectacles, and let her gaze take in the whole table. “Since we are in this fight, we may as well punch as hard as we can. I’m not just aiming at Marongo. If we get the kind of press I’m hoping for, it will be very hard for the foundation to pull out now.”

•   •   •

“Okay everybody, just sit quietly while I fill her up with Avgas—we don’t want to run out in midair, do we?—and then I’ll be ready for the first group.”

Jack, Natalie, Eleanor, and Arnold were standing around Jack’s plane while he poured fuel into the tanks in the wings from the fortified spare cans he and Natalie had filled in Karatu. A group of about a dozen children sat on the ground next to the airstrip, their parents standing a little way off.

“Natalie,” said Jack. “If you don’t mind, I’d like you to sit in the back of the plane. If last year is anything to go by, some of the children get excited when we are in the air, and they fidget like mad, and don’t always keep their seat belts fastened. Make sure they do, will you? Now the short rains have started, there’s more cloud around and the air is less stable. If the children don’t have their seat belts on and we hit some holes in the air, they could get hurt.” He smiled at her. “Also, one or two get frightened once we have taken off, and they may need their hands held.”

“Okay,” he said, laying the petrol can back on the ground and screwing the lid back on the wing where the fuel pipe was. He clapped his hands. “Who wants to go first?”

All the children raised their arms.

Jack laughed. “Let’s do it village by village. Who comes from Tukana?” Four children raised their hands and he lifted one boy off his feet and carried him to the plane. Natalie did the same with a young girl. She got in behind the girl and sat next to her. Jack filled the plane with two more children and then climbed into the cockpit himself. He started his preflight checks.

Arnold was busy sketching the scene, and handing round his drawings to the parents.

Jack started the Comanche’s engines and taxied to the end of the airstrip.

“Is everyone strapped in?” he shouted.

“Yes,” Natalie answered for the children.

“Tukana, here we come!”

The plane lurched forward and gathered speed as it raced down the strip.

“Wave!” shouted Jack and the children in the plane waved to their parents as the Comanche lifted from the ground.

Jack and Natalie made three circuits in all, each lasting about thirty minutes, as they climbed in the sky, banked, and headed for one or another village, which they overflew at a low level. Each time they took in a stretch of the Sand River, where Jack knew they would see hippos, and where elephants were lurking in the vegetation. He kept up a running commentary all the time, pointing out aspects of the landscape that the children might otherwise miss.

One girl, Teza, was frightened by the noise of the plane and climbed on to Natalie’s lap, closing her eyes. But everyone else seemed to love their time in the air, and when Jack landed for the last time, two of the children went up to him, held him by the hand, and led him to a log they had found while he had been flying. They made him sit on the log and then they all stood in front of him, and began to sing.

Natalie stood under the wing of the plane, in the shade, watching and listening. Eleanor and Arnold had gone back to camp by now, but the children’s parents were still there.

The song didn’t last long and when it was over the children and their parents began to drift away.

Jack came over to Natalie.

“What was the song about?” she asked.

“Oh, it was a well-known ballad in this part of the Serengeti, about a mythical land where the only inhabitants are children, and all the wild animals are infants too, so there are no fights, no wars, no predators, everyone gets on. It was a nice way to say thank you, don’t you think?”

She nodded. “Have you ever had an accident in your plane?”

“Apart from the other day, do you mean, when Christopher tangled with those birds? No, I haven’t. I blew a tire on takeoff once and had to land very carefully, as slowly as possible, so the tireless wheel didn’t generate any sparks, to set the fuel vapor alight. Nothing worse than that. Why?”

She shrugged. “I think I’m getting the flying bug, so I should explore the risks.”

“Birds can be a problem, if you fly into a flock of them, or tiredness, and incomplete maintenance—you need to know your mechanics and have faith in them. Here in Kihara we have special risks too.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

He nodded towards the airstrip.

She followed his gaze.

The cheetahs were back.

•   •   •

“Good news and not-so-good news, everyone.” Eleanor sat back, her dinner half finished. Outside, the rain sluiced down, hammering on the roof of the refectory tent, rattling on the bonnets of the Land Rovers, hissing on the blackened logs of the campfire, precipitating smoke and steam and an acrid smell of burnt, wet whistling thorn. Eleanor had to raise her voice to make herself heard.

“Christopher has found us a venue for the press conference, a lecture theater at the Royal College, which he says is earmarked to become a university after independence. So it’s a suitably forward-looking institution which is
not
segregated in any way, shape, or form. And it has all the facilities we need to get over our message—film screens, slide projectors, a proper microphone system. It’s conveniently located and we can afford it.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“Poor Christopher.” Eleanor smiled, but sadly. “With all this rain, there was a flash flood near Ngiro. The road from Nairobi has been cut—washed away. It will be
days
before it is repaired and so he can’t get back. I’ve told him to sit it out in Nairobi, to hold tight there over Christmas. He can wait in town till the press conference and spend the time making sure everything runs like clockwork. And he can make early contact with the visiting journalists.”

“I could fly up and fetch him,” said Jack. “And take him back afterwards, so he can drive back the Land Rover.”

Eleanor shook her head. “Don’t worry, Jack. I’ve given him three flying lessons as a Christmas present. At Nairobi International Airport, in the private part. He’ll be fine, he’s got plenty to do.”

She looked round the table. “Now, originally we were going to break for the holidays after lunch tomorrow, it being Christmas Eve. In view of the weather, however, we may as well call it a day now, and start digging again after the break, and after the press conference. Maxwell Sandys is coming in a plane for me tomorrow morning, and we are flying up to Lake Victoria for forty-eight hours. I know Daniel’s going home to see his wife and family, in Nyanza. I’ve told the cooking staff they don’t need to come in after breakfast tomorrow. Has anyone else made any plans?”

Arnold leaned forward. “Jonas and I are going to the hot springs at Kubwa for a couple of days. Make ourselves even more beautiful.” He grinned.

“Natalie? Jack?”

Natalie was suddenly at a loss. With all the concentration necessary to prepare for the press conference, she hadn’t taken on board that the camp would be quite so deserted over Christmas. She didn’t know what to say.

“Don’t worry about me or Natalie, Mother. I’m going snorkeling on the reef off Lamu. Natalie’s coming with me.”

9
SHADOWS

“Y
ou sit there. You can look right out to sea. India is just over the horizon.” Jack held the chair for Natalie.

“Thank you. Have you ever been to India?”

He shook his head as he sat down. “I’m an Africa man. Doesn’t it show?”

“Whenever I’ve been around, you’ve kept your tail well hidden.”

The restaurant was very small, a veranda of about eight tables, of which only two others were occupied. It was lit by hurricane lamps and candles. The sea itself was the width of the beach away, inky black, collapsing on to the sand in soft slurps.

Natalie fingered the menu, a short card.

“Drink?” He ignored her last remark.

“I’d love one, but do they serve alcohol here? I thought you said that Lamu was mainly Muslim.”

“Mainly, yes, but not only. That’s why I chose this hotel, if you can call it that. How many rooms did they say they had—nine?”

She nodded. “Plus a pool, a restaurant and a shop. But the rooms are very comfortable, soft spongy beds. I’m sure I shall sleep well here.”

“What about the smell?”

“After the gorge? Oh no, it doesn’t matter, doesn’t even register. How many donkeys
are
there here?”

Lamu had been a surprise to Natalie in more ways than one when they had arrived.

The journey up from Kihara had been enjoyable and only mildly adventurous.

“How do we avoid the storms?” she had asked that morning, as they were loading their luggage onto Jack’s plane, with the aid of Mgina, who had turned up on her own initiative. In truth, Natalie had been rather thrown, the evening before, when he had announced, baldly, that she would be going with him to Lamu. But she hadn’t relished being virtually alone in the camp over Christmas, especially as that was the time of year her parents had always been happiest, when their choir was busiest. And, since Christopher was marooned in Nairobi, and not there to be upset, she had acquiesced.

“Simple,” Jack had replied. “We leave in the morning, before the storms build up in the afternoon. If we do meet any big clouds, we go round them, or above them, not through them. In any case, I’m going to fly east to the ocean, then up the coast. The clouds tend to gather over land, especially high land. The coast, as the saying goes, should be clear.”

So it had proved, though the journey had taken closer to three and a half hours, rather than the two hours had they flown direct. During the journey she had had her first proper flying lesson. Jack had let her handle the controls, explained some of the instruments, the mysteries of air-traffic-control jargon, and shown her what the lines and numbers meant on the maps he kept in the plane. She had practiced turning the Comanche, climbing, descending, slowing down, speeding up. She had been content to watch when they had reached the coast and turned north. They flew low, saw shoals of shark, wrecks of ships half hidden in the sand, clouds of white geese cruising in unison over the coral reefs.

Forms of beauty, she thought, that could be seen in no other way. She
had
to learn to fly, once the trial was over. Jack had sparked something in her.

Flying at two thousand feet, a thousand feet, showed how small the world was, how everything was connected to everything else. Villages, towns, rivers, farms, factories, churches, mosques, roads. You got the bigger picture from the air, Natalie realized. In a funny way she understood that being a pilot of your own small machine, a few hundred feet up, helped you to see things politically.

They had landed on an airstrip that seemed to have an island to itself and been ferried to Lamu proper—another island—in a small skiff.

Lamu had been a revelation, too. An old town dating back to the fourteenth century, its streets were too narrow for cars—none, in fact, were allowed on the island and all transport, human or freight, was carried out by donkeys.

“I think there are about two thousand donkeys in Lamu,” said Jack. “And all together they send out quite a smell. Ah, here’s someone.” He gestured to the waitress who had just appeared. “Two beers, please.”

She nodded and disappeared again.

He turned back to Natalie. “Now, we haven’t talked about it, I wanted to get you here in one piece first, and so I’m sorry if you feel I dragooned you here, but you would have been miserable all by yourself in the camp, having to prepare your own food, make your own bed, fix your own shower. Lots of rain and mud and you’d have missed me.”

“I’m not a complete wastrel, you know. Only children learn to look after themselves in all sorts of ways.” She paused. “But yes, I’d rather be here than there.” She passed her fingers through her hair. “Sorry if that sounds grudging. I didn’t mean it like that.”

The beers arrived.

“I’ll let that go,” said Jack, swallowing some beer. “Now, ahead of tomorrow, how good a swimmer are you? The reef is not at all deep but there’s one channel where the current comes in at about five knots—that’s quite strong.”

“I don’t know how good I am. I have only ever swum in pools, when I was at school, in the North Sea, off the Lincolnshire coast, where it was so cold we never stayed in the water for very long, and in the Mediterranean, off Palestine, when I was on a dig, and where it was very warm and there were no tides or currents so far as I remember. I’ve never even seen a reef. Is there any danger?”

“You’ll be amazed by the colors of the fish, but we’ll steer clear of the inlet where the current is stronger. There’s no danger as such but you should avoid sea urchins. They are not scary but if you tread on one, or knock against one, their spikes are very
very
painful and can break off and get under your skin. It’s not life threatening but the pain is excruciating.”

The waitress brought some salad and took their main order.

“It has to be fish,” Jack said, looking up at her. “We’ll have whatever was caught this morning. And two more beers, when we’ve finished these.”

He leaned forward, so that his hand was nearly touching Natalie’s. “Years and years and
years
ago, Lamu used to be a center of the slave trade. We all know that slaves went from
West
Africa to America, but here they were brought down the Duldul and Tana rivers, sold at the market in Lamu, a site now occupied by a mosque, and sent north to the Middle East. That’s what the prosperity of this town is—or was—based on, slaves and fishing and furniture making. The mahogany around here is second to none.”

Jack ate some lettuce. “Zanzibar was the main center of slavery, and Malindi. But Lamu was quite bad enough—archaeologists have discovered dungeons here, with iron shackles, and cemeteries with bodies piled up. They had obviously died on the way downriver, or were so malnourished by the time they got here that they couldn’t survive.”

He wiped his lips with his napkin. “America gets a bad press over its history of slavery, but the sultans of the Middle East were almost as awful. They used male slaves as soldiers or sailors in their armed forces—dangerous but possibly more interesting than being stuck on a plantation. Women were used as domestics or as sex slaves. Later, a lot were taken to Brazil. The British, who in the early nineteenth century had outlawed slavery, were intercepting the North Atlantic trade, so the Brazilians came round the Cape of Good Hope and put ashore here.”

She sipped some beer. “Have you … have you ever been out with a black girl, a black woman?”

“Good question.” Jack nodded. “And the answer is no. You do see it, of course, though it’s mainly older white men with younger black wives or, more likely, mistresses. In some quarters, with some people, a black mistress is all right, whereas a black wife isn’t. Mistresses don’t go to cocktail parties, wives do.”

He thought for a moment. “In theory, mixed-race couples are the ideal, in practice it would be difficult. There’s prejudice on both sides, and there are still big cultural differences. When you see it, and as I say you
do
see it, there’s obviously a very strong bond, very often a strong sexual bond, I suspect, but the couples lead solitary lives, relatively solitary anyway.”

The fish was brought. “How about you?”

“Don’t be silly, there are very few black people in Britain and those I met at Cambridge all turned out to be princes or kings from Nigeria or Ghana. The last thing they wanted was a white wife when they went back home.”

“Dominic was a good bit older than you, wasn’t he? Isn’t age as big a divide as race?”

She weighed this in her mind. “No, not really. I don’t think age is as fundamental a difference between people as race, though I don’t want to minimize the importance of age either.”

“How was Dominic different? What was it that attracted you to him?” He grinned. “How can I be more like him?”

She smiled. “You could dye your hair, make it a bit grayer, that would help.” She tasted her fish. “Well, he was good-looking of course—and you don’t need much help there either. I don’t want to suggest that looks are everything, because they aren’t, but good-looking people do have a head start on the rest, don’t you think? They have to follow through, of course, but that’s where it starts, mostly.”

The waitress brought some slices of lemon.

“Then there was his talent. Lots of people play musical instruments but most don’t play well enough to give public concerts. I loved that about him, that and the fact that he practiced for several hours a day. People who read music, who play well, who spend their life in music … it’s as if … as if they know some great big secret that other people don’t know. Then, and maybe this was the thing that I really fell for, when he played … when he played, he seemed to make love to his cello, he caressed it, he coaxed sounds out of it, he
persuaded
it to give up its secrets. When he played, when you watched him play, you could see he was absorbed by it. If you play something like Elgar’s cello concerto, at times you attack the instrument, you
manhandle
it, while at other times you embrace it, you stroke it. You make love to it.”

She blushed. “I’ve said more than I should. You handle your plane a bit like that, too.”

“But he was years older than you. You haven’t said anything about that.”

The waitress exchanged the empty fish plates for a bowl of fruit. “Oranges! What a treat.” Natalie took one.

“Of course, I don’t know that all older men are like Dominic was but what I liked about him was that he knew his mind. Again, it was as if he had some big secret inside him. He knew where he stood on almost everything, he had an inner
coherence
, that was it. He knew which books he liked and didn’t like and why, he knew which music was good and which wasn’t and why, he knew about food and diet, he took an interest in politics, and though he didn’t have the time to be involved, as you are, he had clear views about it.

“The point about coherence, if you can achieve it in your life, is that it helps you in your approach to the world, it helps you to understand the world, and to slow the world down as it goes by. That’s the most important gift of all, I think, because the slower life goes by, the more you can enjoy it, the more you can squeeze out of it, the more you can
relish
it, that was his word.” She sliced into her orange. “It was his coherence that I fell for. Men my own age never have that.” She peeled the skin of the fruit away from the flesh.

“I feel out of breath, just listening to you.” He grinned. “I hate this Dominic already, how can anyone live up to such perfection?”

“Who says you have to?”

“What else impresses you? Give me some hope.”

“We could start with another beer.”

“My God, yes. Sorry about that.” He waved at the waitress. “That’s done, now what?”

“Maybe I don’t want to be impressed anymore. You’re not Dominic, and I’m no longer the undergraduate who fell for him. I’ve put him behind me.”

“Have you? Are you sure?”

She nodded but said nothing.

“Are you tired?”

She shrugged. “I’ll sleep well tonight, after a long day, being by the sea—but that’s not what you meant, is it?”

He shook his head. “Lamu is mainly Muslim, as I said, but there’s a Christian church here, with nuns attached—a legacy of the missionary years. There’s a midnight carol service tonight, a chance to sing. Are you up for it?”

“What sort of voice do you have?”

“Not bad.”

“I didn’t mean that. Are you a tenor, a baritone, or a bass?”

“Baritone.”

“Then the answer is yes. My father’s choir in Gainsborough is always short of baritones. We’ll treat the carol service as an audition. After the gorge is closed down, it will be something you can do.”

•   •   •

The organ could have been stronger, and more in tune, and it certainly didn’t shake the ground, as the one in Gainsborough did, but the small church was cute, Natalie thought, plain but with clean, pleasing lines, no waste, the kind of simple décor that threw worshippers back on themselves.

And it was full. Nuns filled the choir—maybe twenty of them. There was a smattering of white faces in the congregation but most were black and most were old.

To begin with it seemed odd to Natalie to be singing the familiar carols on the warm edges of the Indian Ocean and she held back her voice.

Not Jack. He did indeed have a very passable baritone voice and an obviously good pair of lungs. He launched into each carol at full throttle and seemed to know instinctively all modulations of the choir.

Encouraged, emboldened, Natalie gradually moved her own singing up a gear till she was matching him note for note, sound for sound. It had been ages since she had had a good clear-out of her lungs, as she thought of it, and she realized she had forgotten how much she enjoyed—relished—being surrounded by singing voices, just as her parents had, especially now, at Christmastime. When the service ended she was more than a little disappointed.

As they walked back to the hotel, she said, “Isn’t it extraordinary how the church has dropped out of our lives so much, and so quickly? Far fewer people go to services, far more are getting married in registry offices, several of the girls I was at Cambridge with aren’t even getting married, just living together with their boyfriends.”