A Change in Altitude Read online

  “I should do really well, then,” Margaret said.

  Arthur ignored the joke. “As we climb, we’ll come across park rangers. They’ll be in pairs, and they’ll go right up to your face. They’ll fire a series of questions at you: What’s the date? What time is it? Where do you live? And if you can’t fire answers back at them, they’ll each take an elbow and run you straight down the mountain whether you want to go or not. It’s the only cure.”

  Margaret was thinking that Arthur, by nature, wasn’t an alarmist. Though he could be condescending—she sometimes thought he viewed condescension as a minor sport—he and Patrick had had lively discussions that had lasted late into the night. Patrick would not concede a point if he had facts to back it up.

  “We’ll leave Nairobi midmorning,” Arthur continued. He had on a white shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbows, a striped tie. He had a pallor that seemed unusual in Africa, a perpetual five o’clock shadow emerging from his skin.

  Diana had on a blue cotton sundress. Her skin had the patina of an outdoorswoman. She had recently cut her bright blond hair, a practical gesture that lent her a gamine look.

  “We’ll take the Thika Road and have a comfortable night, I should think, at the lodge in Naro Moru,” Arthur said. “Then we’ll make our way to Park Gate, where we’ll leave the Land Rover. At the gate, we hire the guide and the porters who will carry the food and gear. They’re meant to be very good, by the way. Then it’s straight up to Point Lenana. It’s one of the steepest and fastest ways up, but an amateur can make it. It’ll take four days, three nights, not including our stay at the lodge.”

  The meal was lamb with mint sauce. The table was elaborately set in the English mode. Beneath Margaret’s place was a mat depicting Westminster Abbey. Patrick had St. Paul’s. Each diner had his own silver saltcellar and tiny spoon. Arthur was generous with the wine, which he poured into cut-crystal goblets. The dinner plates might have been Wedgwood or Staffordshire. The ones in the cottage were mismatched and had chips in them.

  Two children appeared from behind a door. Edward and Philippa, nine and seven, were being raised by an ayah named Adhiambo. The children came and went in school uniforms as if they lived in Kent and not just one road removed from a forest with antelope and lions and buffalo. Diana believed in bringing up children the British way, without excessive praise.

  Adhiambo stepped from behind the door as well. She had a red head scarf over her hair and a pink sweater that might once have been part of a twinset. Her hips were wide, but she was young. Twenty-three, twenty-four, Margaret thought, though she was hopeless at decoding African ages. Adhiambo had a deep scar on her chin and a shy smile that revealed a row of gapped teeth. In her eyes, though, there was something Margaret couldn’t identify—something resilient or simply persistent.

  “Say good night to Mummy,” Adhiambo said to the children.

  In their pajamas, they went to their mother for hugs and kisses that looked real and needy, small blots on a stoic ledger. Arthur demanded kisses and hugs as well. Margaret knew this already to be the evening ritual. Philippa looked like her father, with her long brown hair; Edward, a towhead, resembled Diana before the weathering. At first, Margaret had found the gender mismatch disconcerting. Diana mentioned riding; Arthur, tennis. Within minutes, the children and their ayah were gone.

  “Bring gaiters for the vertical bog,” Arthur continued. “Hats and gloves and parkas for the cold.”

  “What bog?” Patrick asked.

  “Bog.” Arthur seemed uncharacteristically at a loss for words. He held his arms wide. “You know… mud.”

  “Sunglasses to avoid snow blindness,” Diana added. She seemed distracted by activity in the kitchen. Earlier, she had gotten up from the table. James and Adhiambo weren’t the only servants. There were several men who worked in the kennels, as well as the askari at the gate. “And be sure to break in your boots.”

  Patrick shot a glance at Margaret.

  “I don’t have boots,” she said. “I’m going to buy some tomorrow.”

  Arthur calculated. “You’ve got ten, eleven days. That should be sufficient if you work at breaking them in. Wear two pairs of socks.”

  “I might have boots that will fit you,” Diana offered, stealing a glance at Margaret’s feet in her sandals. She frowned. “Maybe not.”

  Margaret saw, in the doorway, James patiently waiting to clear the plates.

  After-dinner drinks were offered in a room Diana called the drawing room. Margaret had a brandy while trying to describe to Arthur a “rusty nail,” Scotch laced with Drambuie. Diana sat across from Margaret on an oversize chintz sofa and appeared to be impatient to get going, though going where Margaret wasn’t certain. It seemed Diana’s natural state. She lived not for the moment but for the one anticipated. Diana wasn’t beautiful, but she was pretty. Margaret had guessed Arthur and Diana to be in their early to midthirties.

  “How did you two meet?” Margaret asked.

  Arthur, at the drinks table, answered without hesitation, as if repeating a marital legend. “We met at a party in London. Within five minutes, we’d worked out that each of us secretly yearned to go to Africa. In Diana’s case, to return to Kenya, where she’d been raised. In my case, to get as far away from bloody London as possible.”

  Margaret noted that neither Arthur nor Diana looked at the other while Arthur told his brief story. Perhaps Diana wasn’t listening. Perhaps she rued confessing that yearning.

  Arthur raised his glass. All present raised theirs as well, though a toast had hardly been offered. Arthur, also, seemed a man on the move, having to harness an energy too great for the occasion.

  On the marital balance sheet, Margaret guessed that Diana thought herself from better stock than Arthur. Margaret wondered if this counted for a lot. In her own marriage, Patrick was third-generation Irish, his distinctive gene pool noted for its fondness for medicine, the pointed chin, the black hair that didn’t gray until well into the sixties, and the surprise of the pale-blue eyes. Beauty depended upon how these features had been arranged, and Patrick seemed to have gotten a goodly share. Patrick’s father, a gynecologist, still had a brogue, a lovely accent that put all of his patients at ease.

  As for Margaret, she came from a middle-class, suburb-north-of-Boston, Unitarian background with some history. A distant relative of hers had been commissioned as an officer during the American Revolution. Her mother had a plaque attesting to this fact hanging behind her bedroom door, though she was a rabid Democrat and had been since FDR.

  Arthur turned his attention to Patrick. “So what’s going to happen to all of us when Kenyatta dies?”

  “I’m very surprised we haven’t had this conversation already,” Patrick answered.

  The British seemed to have an unquestioning sense of legitimacy in Kenya. Americans did not. Margaret guessed the difference to be Vietnam.

  Idly, while Kenyatta was being dispensed with, Margaret counted seventeen different patterns on the various fabrics and dishware. She looked around her at the room: the windows were casements, like those in Margaret’s cottage, but there the resemblance between the two buildings ended. The furniture in the drawing room had carved legs and ornate surfaces, mass as well as decoration.

  “Who’s the other couple?” Margaret asked.

  “On the climb? Saartje and Willem van Buskirk. I didn’t tell you?” Diana seemed puzzled at this omission.

  “He’s part of the Hilton Group,” Arthur said. No mention was made of what Saartje did. “We’ll have them over this week for a planning session. You’ll like them. No-nonsense. Very down-to-earth. I should think Willem has done Mount Kenya before.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Diana said.

  “He used to climb in Switzerland before they went out to Bombay.”

  Diana nodded, and Margaret worried about the pace of the climb if one of their party was experienced.

  “In addition to the hypoxia,” Arthur continued, “almost everyone gets AM
S of some form or another. Acute mountain sickness. Headache. Fatigue. Vomiting. Dizziness.”

  “This is supposed to be fun?” Margaret asked.

  “I’m telling you all this because we’re going to have to diagnose each other,” Arthur said, a touch sternly. “Watch for signs.”

  Margaret nodded, suitably chastened.

  “The huts fit between ten and thirty,” Arthur went on. “One usually sleeps on cots. There are latrines, if you want to call them that. Not a trip for the squeamish.”

  “The Kikuyu think the mountain is sacred,” Patrick offered, and Margaret was glad for the respite from the images of misery. “Their god Ngai is said to reside there. They call the mountain Kirinyaga.”

  * * *

  Margaret had been taking a photograph of a physician, a man who had recently set up a series of free clinics for babies and toddlers to receive vaccinations and medical care in Roxbury, Boston’s poorest neighborhood, not least because it was almost entirely black. Her paper, a Boston alternative weekly, had given Margaret the assignment that morning. She was having trouble presenting the doctor in a flattering pose: his glasses were magnifying lenses, and the overhead hospital light was too bright. Finally getting enough shots to ensure at least one her editor could use, Margaret realized that there was another doctor standing in the doorway, watching the shoot. When Margaret asked her subject where she might get a Tab and a sandwich, the man in the doorway answered first. “Come with me,” he said. “I’ll take you to the cafeteria. I’m headed that way myself.”

  Margaret packed up her equipment while the two physicians conferred about a matter she wasn’t privy to. Then she followed the second doctor out the door and along a hospital corridor. “Patrick,” the man said, turning and putting out his hand.

  “Margaret,” she said.

  Patrick told Margaret over tuna on rye that he was completing a fellowship in equatorial medicine. He’d become interested in tropical diseases in medical school and had visited Africa twice. She thought he was a beautiful man, and she was fascinated by the unusual planes of his long face. Perhaps, she thought, she had fallen in love with those planes before she’d fallen in love with the man. Before coming to Africa, Margaret had photographed his face at least a hundred times. At first, Patrick was intrigued, then merely patient, and then mildly annoyed, as one might be with a child who wants to play the same game again and again.

  When Patrick asked Margaret if she wanted to go to Kenya with him, she said yes with enthusiasm. Her job at the alternative paper wasn’t progressing, and she was tired of photographing congressional meetings and folksingers in Cambridge coffeehouses. Patrick had attached himself to Nairobi Hospital, which he could use as a resource for as long as he wanted in exchange for conducting free clinics around the country when asked to do so.

  Margaret and Patrick were hastily wed in a backyard in Cambridge. Margaret wore a long white cotton dress and wound her hair into a French twist. After the ceremony, they and their guests drank champagne on plastic deck chairs and an ornate sofa brought outside for the occasion. Patrick and Margaret sat in the sofa’s plush center, fending off witty barbs and occasionally gazing at the stars.

  At a good-bye dinner at her parents’ house the night before Patrick and she were to fly out of Logan to Nairobi, Margaret couldn’t imagine how she could go a year without seeing either them or her twelve-year-old brother, Timmy, born sixteen years after Margaret—a happy accident, her mother had explained. She pleaded with them to come visit her in Africa. No one in the family had ever used the word love before, though the connection among them was fierce.

  On the plane, Margaret was mildly homesick. During the flight across the alien continent, the sun rising, her face pressed to the window, her breath fogging her vision, Patrick held her hand. If he was apprehensive, he didn’t say so.

  From the plane, she saw all the places she had read about in preparation for the trip: the Nile River, long and brown; Lake Turkana, once Lake Rudolf; the Rift Valley, vast and barren and unearthly; and then suddenly the Ngong Hills and the plateau on which Nairobi had been settled. In the distance, Margaret could see, rising above the clouds, Mount Kenya, and even, to the south, Mount Kilimanjaro. Before the plane set down, Patrick presented her with a silver ring, a small diamond at its center, something he hadn’t been able to manage before the wedding. They landed on Margaret’s birthday.

  On the morning after the Mount Kenya climb had been proposed, an iridescent peacock greeted Margaret at Diana’s front door. The bird, seen so close, seemed otherworldly, fraudulent. The peacock eyed her with indifference. What must it think, she wondered, of her own dull plumage?

  Overhead, a jacaranda tree had again laid down its royal carpet. The air felt cool and rinsed. Margaret had on a belted white cotton jacket over a yellow cotton dress. She would have to take the jacket off at ten a.m. At noon, she would want to be indoors. By three, she’d be fantasizing about a cold swim at the InterContinental. The jacket would go back on at six thirty, and by eleven, Patrick and she would be sleeping beneath a pair of down comforters. It was all a matter of altitude, Patrick had once explained.

  Margaret inhaled the scent of burning leaves as she made her way to the car Patrick had left for her. He had taken the bus into town more than an hour earlier. The Peugeot was parked beside the cottage with the still-defunct plumbing. Margaret slid into the front seat, the floor tinged here and there with red marum. She set her straw bag on the passenger seat to her left. When she’d first arrived in the country, it had taken her nearly a week of trial runs to feel even mildly confident about driving on the left side of the road.

  The scent of the smoke she’d brought with her into the Peugeot made her lean back and close her eyes. She wondered if Matthew, the gardener, burned marijuana leaves with the debris, as if the ganja were no more valuable than twigs. Absurd, Margaret thought, though she was fairly sure that something soporific was in the smoke. She inhaled deeply. The scent was both nostalgic and exotic.

  A knock at her window startled her. Arthur, in suit and tie, motioned for her to roll down the window.

  “The Mercedes won’t start. I’ve called for a mechanic. I need a ride to the office. I have to leave the Rover for Diana to get the kids and so forth.”

  There could be no thought of refusing him.

  “Get in. One good deed deserves another.”

  Margaret moved her straw bag. Arthur slid in, putting his arm across the back of his seat, a proprietary gesture that caused him to have to face Margaret. Arthur reestablishing the alpha male. She knew with certainty that if Patrick entered a car with a woman not his wife behind the wheel, there would be no proprietary arm. Patrick, unlike Arthur, would face pleasantly straight ahead.

  They passed the duka and its gathering of African men in pressed shirts and pants, most smoking, many laughing. The men, Margaret knew, worked as servants and were meeting for a morning break after having done the shopping for the day. Most would have been up since four thirty, preparing meals for dogs and families. Were the Africans in the area mostly Luo, like James? She would have to ask. Already Margaret understood that though the country was deeply misogynistic and acutely aware of class as defined by money, the true animosity that kept man from man or woman from woman was tribal. Turkana, Nandi, Kalenjin, Kisii, Kipsikis, Kikuyu, Luo, Masai, and others. In Africa, a native man with dark skin was identified by tribe.

  “I think it’s fair to say you haven’t mastered the roundabout yet,” Arthur commented, eyebrow raised, as Margaret stopped for a matatu, listing and overloaded, moving into their lane.

  “They’re counterintuitive.”

  “To Americans. You call them something else.”

  “Rotaries.”

  “I think you need more practice.”

  “Thank you for noticing.”

  He made a pshaw sound that was distinctly British and couldn’t be spelled. It meant Don’t be silly. Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t be so touchy.

  “Whe
re can I drop you?” Margaret asked.

  “At Mather House. I hope Diana told you that Saartje and Willem are coming to dinner tonight? We’re meant to discuss the climb.”

  Arthur gestured toward the road Margaret should take.

  “She did, and I’m on my way to buy boots.”

  “You’ll conquer Mount Kenya.”

  Margaret was taken aback. “I don’t think I’m capable of conquering anything, least of all a mountain. In any event, I didn’t come here to conquer.”

  “Where are you from?”

  She glanced briefly in his direction. He was studying her, as she had suspected.

  “I grew up in a small town north of Boston. Went to college near Boston. Been living in Boston ever since.”

  “Why Boston?”

  “It’s close to my family, and it’s a city.”

  “You’re not for the rural areas, then.”

  Margaret laughed. “I guess not.”

  “Never been to Boston,” he said in that accent of his that suggested a manufacturing town in the north of England. “Spent a lot of time in Arizona, though.”

  “Arizona?”

  “Diana’s parents moved there about ten years ago. They have a kind of mini-estate—I suppose you’d call it a ranch—just outside Phoenix. Diana’s father plays golf. They went for his health. The climate. He’s developing emphysema. Still smokes a pack a day. Prides himself on having cut down from three.”

  Once again, Margaret glanced in Arthur’s direction. He was staring out his window. There was about him a quality of smugness that might attract a European woman but might put off an American.

  She had conquered her third roundabout in twenty minutes when Arthur gestured. “It’s just there.”

  She entered a circular driveway on the outskirts of the city that led to an office complex. It resembled a school built in the 1960s—concrete and utilitarian, without any attempt at charm. “Well.” Arthur seemed reluctant to leave the car. “You’re off to buy boots.”

  “Yes.”