A Change in Altitude (26 page)

“Such as?”

She could hardly think. She had little patience for this interview. “I don’t know, Patrick. Things.”

“I called your office.”

Perhaps her face registered a small ping of alarm.

“Solomon said you’d done some work in Ruaraka. But he didn’t know where you’d gone after that.”

“I told you,” she said evenly, “I had errands.”

“Solomon said you’d done the assignment with Rafiq.”

“What are you implying?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

Margaret faced her husband squarely. “I. Did. Errands.”

Patrick flipped a large wooden spoon above his head and let it fall to the floor. “If you want to be like that,” he said.

“I think this is what you want to know,” Margaret said. “There is nothing between Rafiq and me. Absolutely nothing. That couldn’t be a truer statement.”

His face relaxed from anger into puzzlement. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“As a matter of fact, I’m not. I’m sorry you went to all that trouble,” she said, pointing to the dining table. “And I’m sorry I’m late, but I think the best thing for me is to go lie down.”

How ironic, Margaret thought as she left the living room, that she would not have to lie about Rafiq. Margaret felt anger, and she felt an overwhelming ache. She needed a dark room and a bed.

That night, she drifted in and out of sleep. Each time she woke, she knew that something was wrong, and then it hit her. Fresh news. Again and again.

And questions. Would she have had an affair with Rafiq? Yes. She had no doubt. Would she have suffered? Yes, probably. Would it have ended well? Inconceivable. Margaret was angry at Rafiq for his arrogance in thinking he could know or predict anything about her. Would it have been better if he had just slipped away from her without having delivered his devastating pronouncement? No, she didn’t think so. She’d have been confused, and it would have been all she’d thought about. She would have had to ask herself, again and again,
Why is Rafiq avoiding me?

She hoped Patrick would think that she had been insulted or belittled at the newspaper and that she was trying to regroup.

Regrouping, however, was more difficult than Margaret had ever imagined. She was baffled by how enervated she felt. Having a bath seemed an enormous task. Margaret took to spending weekends in her bathrobe: she couldn’t summon the will to get dressed. Mostly, she wanted Patrick out of the flat so that she could think.

She returned to the office the following Monday. She had been reassigned to Jagdish, punishment enough. She thought of quitting, but then what would she do all day? A dilemma more exhausting to think about than getting dressed. Occasionally, Margaret saw Rafiq. They were civil but not especially friendly. She felt that everyone in the office sensed a change. If they hadn’t known before, they certainly knew then.

And then there was a second loss, one that flattened her.

As she stepped out of the bathtub one morning, she slipped and hit her hip on the porcelain rim and then again on the floor. She had tried to brace herself with her hands. She lay on the tiles, gingerly feeling her hip. But she was more concerned by a sudden strong pain in her abdomen. Had she torn a muscle? She held on to the toilet as she stood up. When she was on her feet, she reached for her lime-green terry-cloth robe and went out to sit on the bed. Patrick had already walked to the hospital, and Margaret had been getting ready to go to work. She thought she should call Patrick and have him come home. Or maybe she should just pull herself together and try to go to work. Another strong cramp took hold of her. It was like having a period but not. The pain was too sharp, too defined, not achy. Margaret needed to see someone, probably her gynecologist, a doctor she had once visited for a yeast infection.

Margaret slipped off the bathrobe and let it fall back onto the bed. She walked to her underwear drawer and then began to rifle through her wardrobe for a cotton dress that was clean and hadn’t been worn recently. A cramp bent her at the waist. She whirled around and put her hand out, trying to reach the bed for support. As she did, she saw the bright-red stain on the terry-cloth robe.

Margaret was taken not to Nairobi Hospital but to a Catholic hospital, where her gynecologist had his practice. She had called the doctor, who had in turn called an ambulance. She arrived at the hospital in her bloody bathrobe. Patrick couldn’t be reached until he returned from Dagoretti, where he was holding a bush clinic.

She’d been only six weeks along, her doctor informed her. Margaret tried to grasp what he was saying. She’d been pregnant? Was he sure? Yes, he was sure. He patted her hand.

She laid her head back upon the pillow and stared at the ceiling. She had been put into a private room with a window near the bed. It resembled a room one might have encountered in London in 1918: a pristine white-iron bed, capable of being shut off from the rest of the room by a long white linen screen; a porcelain water pitcher on a bedside table; no sign of any technology whatsoever, though there were holes in the wall, which she assumed powered various portable machines. The sisters wore their white nursing habits, and on the wall across from the bed was a large, gruesome crucifix.

The sisters cleaned her up, and her doctor examined her. Margaret was prepped for a D and C. When she woke from the twilight sleep, she had no control over the tears. Another new beginning lost before she’d even known it was there.

She first became aware that Patrick was in the room when he bent down and kissed her. He immediately told her she was young and there was plenty of time later to start a family. Besides, Patrick added, it was for the best.

“How can it possibly be for the best?” Margaret wanted to know.

“It’s better that we wait until we get home,” he explained. “Nairobi is no place for a baby.”

“You don’t believe that,” she said, staring into his pale-blue eyes.

“I do, and I don’t.”

“You’re just saying that to help me through it.”

“Maybe. Is helping you through it such a bad idea?”

“Crying would be a better way to help me through it,” she said.

He took her hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I feel.”

A baby would have cemented them, Margaret thought.

Patrick let go of her hand and bent to the floor. “Brought you your favorite thing. A vanilla milk shake.”

“Where on earth did you get a vanilla milk shake?”

“I found the kitchen and talked the cook—a nun, by the way—into it. I had to walk her through the steps.”

Margaret took a sip. “Thank you, Patrick,” she said, managing a smile.

“They’ll keep you here a couple of days,” he said.

“A couple of days. Why?”

“It’s not abnormal. They have to watch out for infection.”

In truth, Margaret was glad for the respite. Though she wasn’t fond of the nuns—they were rough and no-nonsense; not a compassionate bone among the lot—the idea of lying on a bed with nothing expected of her seemed a kind of safe haven. A place where she could finally think.

She noticed that Patrick’s knee was knocking up and down. He was anxious, she thought. Why? Anxious to leave?

“By the way, a lot of people want to visit you,” he said.

“Not today.”

“No, but okay if I tell them tomorrow?”

Margaret turned toward her husband. He smoothed her hair. She closed her eyes. After a time, she heard Patrick push the chair back and stand. He touched her cheek with his finger, and then he was gone.

Margaret rolled in the bed and stared through the window. Outside, it was dark and dry. The rains were late this year and hadn’t yet come. Nearly everything was parched. The mud had turned to dust; vegetation had wrinkled to brown. Bodies were harder to keep clean. Dirt wreaked havoc with engines.

She had been pregnant for six weeks. She tried to figure out the moment of conception, but much of those early weeks had been a blur. She tried to imagine what it would have been like to be told she was pregnant. She imagined joy. Would Patrick have made them leave the country at once?

Margaret thought of Rafiq and his pronouncement. He had been proved right yet again. To be with Rafiq but to be pregnant with Patrick’s child would have been unthinkable. And what if Margaret hadn’t known who the father was? The anxiety of having to wait for the birth to find out would have been all but unendurable. She would have had to tell Patrick in order to prepare him.

And yet she would have undergone all of that. Margaret had never ached to hold a baby, but she did then. She couldn’t sort out whether it was her mind or her body that wanted this. Did the desire come from the body, which didn’t need to be told anything?

Margaret allowed herself to imagine a baby, a boy. She felt what it would have been like to pick him up from a cradle and hold him, his head bobbing at her shoulder. Hadn’t shoulders been designed for that precious purpose?

Margaret thought of Rafiq and his face, of his wonderful brown eyes, his Welsh jaw. Of the body she had barely had a chance to touch. Of the sound of his voice, the British accent strangely comforting. She wondered if he knew, if Solomon had told him. Or if he’d overheard the news from a nearby desk. She wondered if, when he’d heard, he’d turned his face away. Or whether he had thought of her and wished the child his.

Margaret thought of Patrick, who’d laid a thin blanket over his feelings. Who saw his role as her protector, her medical manager. In the face of helplessness, he wanted control.

And Margaret thought, as she stared out the window, of Africa, of the country just beyond the screen. It had been her constant companion for nearly a year, teaching her, scolding her, enveloping her. It was in her lungs and blood now. She’d thought she wanted to absorb Africa, but the continent had absorbed Margaret. She could not imagine ever wanting to leave.

Margaret lay parched like everything else in Kenya. She drank a lot of water, on nurses’ orders and on her own. Nothing could slake the thirst. She thought of how everyone would be searching the sky each day, waiting for a telling breeze or a drop. There would be celebrations during the first good soaking rain—muddy festivities marked by dancing, the roasting of goats, drinking, and giving thanks to whomever they felt grateful to.

Flowers came, and cards. The next day, Solomon Obok arrived bearing books: three novels by Kenyans about Kenya, one of them by Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o, the author Margaret had once photographed. During Solomon’s visit, the sisters brought tea, a remarkably kind gesture Margaret hadn’t anticipated, one that encouraged Solomon to sit and talk. But though they spoke of many things—his wife and children; a recent article about Thomas Oulu, who was still being held without benefit of trial, that was causing a stir; and even of people in the office—he never mentioned Rafiq, a sign that Solomon knew, that perhaps he’d known all along. He told her a Kenyan proverb about seeds that didn’t sprout and of seeds sowed later, and about how this second set would always be the stronger of the two.

Margaret laughed. She told Solomon he’d made it up, and he sheepishly confessed. They spoke of weather conditions in which the first seeds wouldn’t take, but the second set would.

“You must come back to work,” Solomon said as he was leaving. “Jagdish is lonely without you.” This produced another good laugh. It physically hurt Margaret to laugh, but it was worth it.

Moses surprised Margaret that afternoon with a basket of avocados from the garden of the Karen house. Margaret marveled at the speed of the bush network. She was moved by his visit and said so, and he was pleased. She worked out that it would take him, to and fro, at least two hours’ traveling time, and she thanked him for making the journey. She asked him how life in the burgled house had been after she and Patrick had gone, and he said that much of the furniture had been recovered from a shop in Eastleigh. In its “visit” away from home, the furniture had been polished and even repaired. The relationship between the Australian mistress and Moses had improved markedly once the pieces had been returned.

Patrick came with necessities: a nightgown and new bathrobe; a mirror and a tube of lipstick; that morning’s edition of the
Tribune
. The miscarriage had followed so close upon that period of Margaret’s lassitude that she believed Patrick had begun to blur the two events. He was confident that when she was up and about, she would regain her strength rapidly. To that end, he had signed them up at the tennis club. He had a hankering to take up the old sport again.

At dinner, she tried to locate her feelings for her husband, but they eluded her. Though she knew Patrick to be a good person, she couldn’t help but wonder if damage hadn’t been done by both of them.

The next morning, Margaret was surprised by a visit from James and Adhiambo. She thought about their journey to the hospital and back, one that would have been even more difficult than Moses’s. As they came closer to the bed, Margaret saw that they were holding hands. Her eyes must have widened, because they both began to laugh. James looked as though he had a canary fluttering inside his chest, and Adhiambo couldn’t stop smiling. They pulled up chairs beside the bed and handed Margaret a package wrapped in butcher’s paper and tied with twine. They wanted her to open it before they’d even settled in for a visit. As she unfolded the cloth, she searched for the line drawing beneath the beads and seeds. It took a few seconds to register, but when it did, Margaret gave a little yelp. It was of a woman with a camera to her eye. In the distance was the outline of a city.

“This is wonderful,” Margaret said with genuine awe. “It’s a treasure. Thank you.”

“We have news,” James said.

“I guess so,” Margaret said, glancing at their hands.

“We are living in my house in Lavington, and Adhiambo is making the cloths all the hours of the day and selling them on Kimathi Street.”

“On Kimathi Street,” Margaret said with surprise.

“In a shop with crafts,” Adhiambo explained. “A woman is seeing your picture of the cloth in the newspaper and is finding me. She is with…”

She turned to James.