A Change in Altitude (2 page)

Arthur, offering Margaret a drink, made the appropriate calls. The car was being towed to a garage, where mechanics would repair it. Margaret became aware of her own bare legs, particularly when Arthur’s wife, Diana, clearly disconcerted to see a visitor she hadn’t been told about, entered the room. The wife took note, she saw, of the drink. Arthur explained, and Margaret was treated to Diana’s first smile: a sudden sharp surprise. Margaret called Patrick at the hospital to tell him that they’d been invited to dinner in Langata. She had to make the call with Arthur in the room and so sounded more enthusiastic than she actually felt, perhaps even a little breathless. Margaret could hear Patrick’s gentle complaint at the other end.

At dinner the first night, another invitation was extended. A guesthouse on the property was vacant. Arthur named a sum less than the one Patrick and Margaret had been prepared to pay for the flat she’d intended to view. Diana suggested that Margaret and Patrick, who’d taken a bus out from Nairobi, stay the night and view the cottage in the morning, when they would be able to see it in the daylight. In bed that night, Patrick was wary—perhaps he had heard, before Margaret had, the faint tumble of a lock. They held each other tightly on the foreign mattress as if reestablishing themselves as a couple, as if an act of resistance were called for.

In the morning, they viewed the guesthouse, a white stucco cottage with a red tiled roof, surrounded by pink and orange bougainvillea. The cottage had a sitting room with a small table swathed in a vermilion-and-yellow khanga. The kitchen had a Dutch door; the bedroom had a bathroom. The floor was polished wood in an intricate parquet pattern. The walls were white; the windows, mullioned glass. Even in America—or especially in America—Patrick and Margaret had never lived in such a beautiful place. Before the car had given out, they had been living over a nightclub at the Ngong Road Hotel. Prior to that, they had endured a grim stay at the Hotel Nairobi, where the sink and toilet had been encrusted with filth, where cockroaches had fled whenever Margaret had opened the bathroom door. She thought that Patrick must have seen, that morning, her desire for the cottage, and so he gave up his mild political objections.

The guesthouse was far enough away from Arthur and Diana’s house to suggest a measure of autonomy. Diana insisted that the two couples would hardly ever see one another: Arthur worked all the hours of the day as head of sales at Colgate-Palmolive; Diana bred Rhodesian ridgebacks and had little time for people. All this seemed fine. Or Margaret made it so.

That afternoon, James had taken a photograph of Margaret and Patrick. The picture was of Margaret in a chair just beyond the Dutch door of their new cottage in Africa. She had on a white sundress. Her skin was a deep red—Indian red, her mother used to call it. Margaret’s hair was dishwater blond, though dishwater didn’t really resemble her hair color, a light brown with hints of brass. Her skin seemed painted on and shiny.

Behind her, Patrick was standing in a short-sleeved white shirt with a tie. He had a healthy-looking tan and hair that might or might not have been washed in several days. In the picture, it looked lank. His face was in shadow, sunglasses shading his eyes.

James was serious when working Margaret’s Nikon, but he grinned as he handed the camera back to her.

At the Big House, James cooked the meals, set the table, served the food, cleared the dishes away, and then washed them. Patrick and Margaret didn’t have servants. Only recently had Diana sent James over to the cottage to wash their clothes. Though Margaret had been advised early on to hire someone to do the chore, the task seemed too intimate to farm out. She had tried to wash the clothes in the bathtub, but she hadn’t been able to get all the soap out. When Patrick developed a rash around his neck, Margaret capitulated. She cooked and served their dinners, however, and Patrick did the dishes. It seemed a straw victory. Not to employ a servant was to deny an African a job.

At dinner on the evening of that first mention of the climb, Arthur, his wet hair still grooved from his comb, spoke of hypoxia.

“The lungs fill up with blood,” he said, setting Patrick and Margaret straight. “Typically four or five people a year die climbing Mount Kenya. Usually it’s the fit German climbers who hop off the plane in Nairobi, head straight for the mountain, and practically run up it. They often get into trouble because they haven’t allowed their bodies to acclimate to the height and the thinner air. The slower you climb and the longer it takes, the better off you are.”

“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 AMS 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.