The Clouds Beneath the Sun (42 page)

“Understood,” said Jack.

“We’ll keep at it,” said Christopher.

“If you find him, radio in, whatever the time. Clear?”

“Clear.”

Jack turned the Land Rover and headed for home. “Keep looking,” he said to Natalie. “You never know.”

As they drove, he said, “If we have to go looking for Kees tomorrow—by plane, I mean—if Christopher and Daniel don’t find him tonight, are you okay about that?”

“What do you mean? Why shouldn’t I be?”

“The hairy landing the other day. It didn’t put you off?”

She thought. “I can’t say it’s up there with Brahms’s
German Requiem
as one of life’s must-have experiences, but… well, I don’t have much flying experience but you seem … you seem … I’m not put off.”

He nodded and changed gear, to negotiate ruts in the track. “And when I dared to kiss you the other night, during our other nocturnal adventure, did that put you off?”

She didn’t say anything.

“If you don’t answer, I’m going to stop the Land Rover and let you walk the rest of the way home.”

“That puts me off.”

She grinned and let another silence elapse, and so did he.

“How long can someone survive in the bush?”

He swung the wheel over, to avoid a rock. “Well, obviously it depends on whether he meets any predators, whether he has the sense to keep in the shade, whether he knows which plants are edible, so he can take on water.” Jack took some chocolate from the breast pocket of his shirt and handed it to Natalie. “Four days, I’d say.”

Natalie stripped the silver foil from the chocolate, broke off two squares, and handed them back across to Jack.

He held her hand in his, moved her fingers to his mouth, took the chocolate, and brushed his lips across the back of her hand. Then he let go.

It took them almost another hour to reach the camp, so that it was two o’clock before Jack reversed the Land Rover under the acacia trees where it was normally parked. Someone had kept the campfire going, the hurricane lamps were still burning in the refectory tent, and they could see three or four thermos flasks on the table, alongside a tea towel draped over something. Naiva was in bed but she had left them coffee and chicken sandwiches. They had gone without dinner.

There was no sign of Jonas either. He must have gone to bed.

“Do you have an alarm?” said Jack, as they stood, munching sandwiches and washing them down with hot coffee.

“Of course.”

He nodded. “Let’s meet at the Land Rovers at five. It gets light around five-thirty but Naiva will be up, with breakfast, and we need to get the plane ready. We take off at six, once we can see clearly.”

When Natalie reached her tent, she realized she was exhausted, and she felt as though she was covered in dust. Part of her would have loved a shower but there was no Mgina at this hour, and certainly no water. The other half of her was longing to collapse on the bed, but she forced herself to clean her teeth and, after she had got undressed, she brushed her hair for a few minutes.

She set the alarm; five o’clock was now just two and a half hours away.

She lay back and thought of Kees. How terrified he must be, right now, if he was still alive. She had listened to the theater of the night so often from the safety of her tent in the camp, but to be out there, amid the screams and skirmishes, the sudden rush of hooves, the roar of lions, the sudden, menacing silences … if the sun hadn’t driven Kees mad, nighttime surely would.

She turned on her side. She realized she was still hungry. The sandwiches had simply stimulated her appetite. The camp kitchen was closed but there were the remains of Jack’s bar of chocolate which she had left in the Land Rover. Should she get them?

Jack. Once again he had gently touched her but made no attempt to press himself further. He was letting her get used to him, showing her how he felt but leaving her breathing space.

She liked that. He was willing to wait.

Like Dominic had been.

•   •   •

Jack slumped into a chair next to Natalie and they both stared at the flames of the campfire.

“What can you see in the embers, Dr. Nelson?”

It was three nights later. Despite daylong searches, by plane and Land Rover, Kees had not been found. This evening, at dusk, the search had been called off.

She shook her head. “I’m not looking and I’m not thinking. My mind is numb. Say we never find Kees’s body … how are we going to deal with that? I mean, there’ll be no end, always a doubt—not just as to whether he is, actually, dead but as to how, exactly, he died, if he did die. It’s all so … so
cold
. If my father were here, he would pray for Kees. I can’t do that but not being able to do anything … it’s
worse.”

“How well did you know Kees?”

She shook her head again. “Not well, not well at all. He talked to me about his beloved hand axes and the stone they were made of, that’s about it. You?”

“Some. He was interested in flying, mainly because it helped him see rock formations from above. He was one of the most interesting passengers I ever gave a lift to, explaining what we were overflying all the time.” Jack shifted in his seat. He let a few moments go by. “I can see you are upset, Natalie. Why don’t you let me take you to Lamu for Christmas—just a couple of days. It will take our minds off things. It’s only about three hours by plane.”

Natalie didn’t seem to hear him. Then, “What’s at Lamu?”

“It’s on the coast, an old Swahili village that used to be a center of the slave trade. Totally different from here. There’s also a very nice reef, we could go snorkeling, work on our tans.”

She looked across and gave him a sad smile. “I don’t know, Jack. I don’t think … I’m not ready to have a good time, while we don’t know what’s happened to Kees. It doesn’t seem right.”

•   •   •

Eleanor stopped buttering her toast and tapped her enamel breakfast mug with her knife. “Now, it’s going to be a difficult day today, and there’s no point in hiding it. We have got to try and get back to a normal routine, doing what we came here to do. We’ll go through where we are on the press conference before dinner tonight, but as for the gorge we need to keep sieving and digging; we have a few days yet and we may still come across more bones of our man, or woman, which may enlarge on what we already know.”

She drank some tea. “But … and I know this is bolting the stable door after the horse has escaped,
but
, from now on, we only dig in pairs; outside the camp, we only do
everything
in pairs. I don’t want anyone else straying like Kees did. I shouldn’t need to say this but … do I make myself absolutely clear?”

“Don’t worry, Mother,” breathed Christopher. “There’s no need to rub it in.”

She nodded. “Good, good. So, how shall we pair off—?”

Suddenly a Land Rover drove into the camp at high speed and sounded its horn. The horn sounded again and again. A black driver got down. “We’ve found him! We’ve found him! Doctor Jonas, come quickly, he’s very weak! By the Nimanu Road.”

Jonas was running to his tent, to fetch his bag.

Jack was on his feet, pulling Christopher with him. He stopped for a moment and shouted, “Remove the back seats from the plane and put in a mattress. I may have to fly him to a hospital. Hurry!”

Christopher had started the Land Rover’s engine and Jack jumped in alongside him. Jonas got in the back and the two vehicles accelerated away through the camp gate.

They returned in just over an hour. “He was six miles away,” said Christopher, getting down. “He’s conscious, but delirious—and he’s lost a lot of weight,
a lot
. Dehydration.”

Natalie looked in the back of the Land Rover. She shuddered in shock. She couldn’t help it. She had seen Kees barely five days before, but he was now just skin and bone; he must have lost thirty pounds, more. His facial skin was stretched tight over his jawbone, the stubble of his beard dark against the rust red of his cheeks. His eyes, deep in their sockets, like tiny craters, raked this way and that, unfocused, fearful, and bewildered at the same time. But Kees was alive.

“Where are we going to put him?” said Arnold.

“We’re not,” said Christopher. “We’re going straight to Jack’s plane. We only came back here so Jack could pick up his keys and Jonas could get some medicines from the refrigerator. Did you take out the seats as we asked?”

“Yes,” said Natalie. “The plane is ready. I also filled it with Avgas.”

Jack, who had arrived back from his own tent, heard this. He stretched his arm around her and squeezed. “Thank God for Dr. Nelson. You’ve saved us fifteen precious minutes. If Kees makes it, you may have saved his life.” He turned to Jonas. “Ready?”

Jonas nodded.

As they got into the Land Rover, Jack shouted to his mother, “I’ll radio in from Nairobi.”

Christopher and Natalie followed them in another Land Rover as they sped out to the strip. Christopher helped Jonas lift Kees into the back of the plane to save time as Jack did his preflight checks. Then they watched as first one engine, then the other, cranked into life. Jack taxied to the far end of the strip and took off, waving briefly as he banked eastward.

•   •   •

The waves of human voices built on each other, like giant rollers thudding on to a beach, each one more powerful than the others. The third movement of Brahms’s
German Requiem
. How different male voices were from female ones, Natalie thought. Not just a different sound but different moods. Female choirs soared, male voices consoled.

Dinner this evening had been close to a riot. In view of the fact that Kees had been found alive, and after Jack had radioed in to say they had reached the hospital in Nairobi safely, Eleanor had allowed a bottle of champagne to be brought from the fridge. As usual, there hadn’t been enough for more than one glass per person, but even so tongues had been loosened, now that the cloud hanging over them had been lifted.

There had been much laughter at dinner, as if, not being allowed expression for days, it was now pouring out of everyone. And, with Jack away, they were playing as many of his records as they could, one after the other, jazz alternating with classical in random order.

Natalie sat next to Christopher. “Tell me, where exactly was Kees found?
How
was he found?”

Christopher edged his chair closer to hers. “He was between two large boulders, in the shade. But he was near a track and he had pulled a log across it, forcing anyone who came by to stop, to move it out of the way. As far as we could make out, he had wandered in the sun for the first day, because the kind of rock formation he was looking for didn’t support much vegetation. He didn’t realize he had been in the sun for so long until it was too late, when he felt sick and had to rest. He fell asleep and woke in the middle of the night. His sunstroke was bad the next day and as the sun moved round, during the afternoon, his shade disappeared. He tried to move, fell, hit his head, and passed out, in full sunlight. Again, when he woke it was dark.

“It was amazing no predators found him, but since he wasn’t near any trees, that helped. By the third day, he was severely dehydrated, and though he heard the planes looking for him, he was too weak to stand or wave. The only thing he could do, had done, was use a log to block the track he was near. But that track is hardly used at all these days, and Iku Liguru only drove that way this morning because he had fought with his daughter and wanted to make it up to her by picking some rare wildflowers which grow in that area.”

Christopher stopped speaking as the music fell silent. Then he said, “I’m sorry if I frightened you—the other day, I mean, in the plane. I suppose I panicked.”

Arnold Pryce, in charge of the gramophone tonight, put on some jazz—loud, fast, and, to Natalie’s ears, crude.

“I’m not sure I have the temperament to be a pilot.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. It was a momentary slip.”

“If Jack hadn’t been there—”

“But he
was!”

“Were you
very
frightened?”

She paused. “It all happened so quickly … there wasn’t time … Jack reacted before I did.”

Christopher nodded. “He was quick to see what was happening. Those bloody birds.” He let some time go by. The jazz got faster still.

A water buffalo moaned in the gorge.

“I need more lessons.” He breathed out. “But not from Jack. Jack makes me nervous. I suppose it’s him being my brother.”

Natalie said nothing. Where was this going?

The jazz ended in what sounded to Natalie like an apocalypse of drums.

“Look,” said Christopher, leaning forward, “it’s Christmas in just over a week. The ancillary staff get a few days off, and the guards, and with this new ruling of my mother’s—that we must only be in the gorge in pairs—we are all going to stand down for seventy-two hours. I wondered … I wondered if you wanted to drive over to Kubwa. It’s on the slopes of the mountain before you get to Ngorongoro and there are some hot springs. The water is very restorative and, well, since we have had such a wearing few days, I thought it might help us unwind, get the cobwebs out of our hair, prepare us for the ordeals to come … the press conference and the trial …”

Natalie was relieved to hear Chopin’s “Farewell to Poland” waltz. For her, the piano beat the drums any day.

But how did she respond to Christopher, who had just handed her a nice little dilemma?

“Jack has already asked me to spend Christmas with him, at a Swahili village called … Limu, Lomu? On the coast, anyway.”

“Lamu. It’s not far from the Somalia border. Did you say yes?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t given him an answer yet, no.”

“Then you are going to have to choose between brothers.”

“Oh no,” replied Natalie, shaking her head again. “Oh no. You’ve both put me in an impossible position and there’s only one way out.” She stood up. This had gone far enough. “I’m going to say no to both of you. Good night.”

•   •   •

When Natalie reached the breakfast table the next morning, Eleanor and Christopher were discussing the press conference.