Mackenzie Ford

by The Clouds Beneath the Sun (v5)

  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 hi
m 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.”

  “Could you ever do that?”

  “I don’t think so, but I don’t know, not really. It’s one of those decisions you can’t take in the abstract.”

  “What’s your decision on my voice? When the gorge is destroyed, do I have a job in your father’s choir?”

  He slipped his arm in hers.

  “Yes, Dr. Deacon. The vetting committee has convened and your voice passes muster.” She looked up at him. “I’m impressed. I hope I can snorkel as well as you sing.”

  • • •

  “There’s the reef, look, where the water is breaking over it. Think you can swim that far?”

  She nodded. “We cleared our lungs last night. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

  The sun this morning was as fierce as ever. They had breakfasted in a leisurely way and strolled down to the beach wearing their swimming costumes under their jeans and shirts and they now got ready together. Jack had brought goggles and breathing tubes and the hotel had rented them some flippers.

  “Here,” said Jack, handing over a tube of cream. “Put this on your legs and face and I’ll do your shoulders. You can do the same for me. You don’t feel the sun in the water but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

  They walked down to the water’s edge and for a moment Natalie stood with just her feet in the sea.

  “You’re thinking about your father, aren’t you?”

  “How did you know?”

  “You were thinking how clear and warm and calm this water is, how different from the North Sea in Lincolnshire, how unlike a traditional Christmas Day this is, and that made you think of your father, how he’s getting on, what he’s doing, if he’s thinking about your mother.”

  “Yes, you’re right, exactly that. How did you know?”

  “Come on, it’s not hard. You were miles away. Maybe we can put a call through to him tonight, from the hotel. You never know your luck.”

  “What a good idea, Jack. Yes, please. But don’t get too sensitive all of a sudden. I’ve not done this snorkeling before, or swum on a reef. I need you in pilot mode, Olympic swimmer mode, tough-guy-in-control mode.”

  “I know my place.” He grinned. “Now, let me fix your flippers.”

  In no time they were out at sea. Natalie had never known water so warm—not so surprising, she told herself, since they were at two degrees south, as near the equator as she had ever been.

  The water was clear, visibility was good but there was not much to see, to begin with, just the sandy bottom of the ocean. She swam a few yards behind Jack, who seemed to know where he was going and stopped every two hundred yards or so to rest, take a breather, and ask her how she was doing. While she was quite comfortable breathing through the tube, looking down into the depths of the water, the air didn’t feel quite so fresh as when they broke the surface and she breathed normally.

  “Okay,” said Jack at their third break, “we’re nearly at the reef. When we reach it We’ll turn left, north, and you’ll begin to see the bigger, brighter-colored fish.” He reaffixed his mask and was off.

  As they reached the coral, the underwater vegetation started to grow in abundance, huge flat fans of yellow, long thin strips of blue-green, underwater bushes of brown, fields of grasslike sea green. And then the fish began—coral fish, kingfish, wahoo, sailfish. Little scarlet fish, in shoals, thin iris-colored fish in twos and threes, great lurking marlin, violet black and shy in the distance, schools of near-transparent fish that moved as one, jerking this way and that.

  Natalie had never seen anything like it and was immediately entranced. Slowly, they worked their way up the reef, following the fish as they eased into places where the coral overhung what was below, creating caves and shadows, where they disturbed more marlin.

  Every so often, Natalie broke the surface for a breather, to chew in some fresh air, as she thought of it. But she was soon back underwater, looking for species she hadn’t seen before, marveling at the sheer number of different colors. She supposed that each and every one was adapted to some niche in the marine environment but it didn’t seem like that. It seemed as if it was all designed for the
pleasure of human snorkelers, a vast kaleidoscopic jumble of colors and shapes, a never-ending, always-changing fashion parade. Natalie lost all sense of time.

  After however long it was, Jack signaled to her to take another breather. He lifted his mask and said, “How are you doing? Not too tired?”

  “No, not all,” she replied. “I’m loving it, all of it.”

  “So the answer is: yes, you’re as good at snorkeling as I am at singing. In the water you’re up there with Esther Williams.”

  “It’s not exactly difficult.”

  “You’d be surprised, some people never acquire the rhythm, or don’t like the underwater landscape.”

  “A carol concert, and now this. They certainly take your mind off—”

  She was interrupted by a number of large waves, wake from a ship.

  “We’ve been out nearly three hours.”

  “We have?”

  He nodded. “It’s just on two o’clock. From here, we’ll ease back via the cliffs. When we get there, we may see some turtles. Normally they don’t bother us if we don’t bother them—but try not to get too close. They can snap at you if you do.”

  He set off again.

  The cliffs, when they came to them, were skirted with bushes of brown, rubbery-looking fronds that Natalie found rather forbidding, not at all the sort of thing you would want to get tangled up in.

  Jack headed left, south, back towards the beach where they had left their clothes and his bag. After a moment, he turned, swam towards Natalie, and pointed back the way he had come.

  She looked over to where he was pointing.

  Turtles.

  There were about six of them, diving and playing, one or two feeding. They were a little out to sea, and Jack motioned for Natalie to follow him, nearer in, by the underwater face of the cliff. The turtles had seen them and looked in their direction, but other than that they hadn’t moved. They were really quite large, thought Natalie, and their shells reflected the underwater light in ever-changing ways. The turtles had a beauty all their own.

  Now that they were swimming for home, Natalie had got slightly ahead of Jack and she looked with interest as she approached what appeared to be a cave in the cliffs. It was a dark patch, set back, with two fingers of rock stretching outwards, on either side.