“How’s your aeroplane?” I finally asked.
“Perfect. I’d no idea I’d love it so much. And it could help business, too. The last time I was up I spotted three different herds of elephants, four massive bulls. For numbers like that, I could be out for weeks, drive hundreds of miles.”
“What? Scout for them from the air then, and wire ahead to camp?”
He nodded. “Not bad, right?”
“Not bad.” I smiled.
We fell quiet again, listening to the sounds of the insects in the grass and the jacaranda. “I heard Karen may have to sell her farm,” I told him.
“She’s looking at the very darkest side of things. I’m worried about her, but she’s asked me not to visit. If we don’t keep our distance now, we might just lose everything. Even our lovely memories.”
I set down my drink and went to him, resting my knees in front of his chair and taking his hands. “I have so much respect for her, you know. She’s the most remarkable woman.”
“Yes.” He looked at me carefully, almost solemnly, as if he were trying to read my features like an ancient text. The lamp threw a dark wand over part of his face, but his eyes gleamed, soft and amber coloured. They reminded me of Berkeley’s Falernian wine. Of lions in the grass.
“Will you teach me to fly?”
“I couldn’t take your life in my hands. Not when I’ve just got the hang of this myself.” He said nothing of his own life, or of Maia Carberry’s, how her plane had smoked and steamed on the Ngong Road for hours, keeping the authorities from even trying to recover her and Dudley’s remains. I wouldn’t have expected him to.
“I’m going to do it anyway.”
“Good. I’ll be back in three months,” he said. “We’ll go up and you can show me everything you’ve learned. We’ll head over to the coast, or out on safari together. We never did get those six days, did we?”
I thought of Pegasus and the elephants and the dissolving bridge, of Denys’s boy running twenty miles in bare feet to break my heart. “No, we didn’t.”
A great deal had happened to Tom Campbell Black since the day we met by the side of the road in Molo. He’d got the aeroplane he’d dreamed of and learned to master it, becoming the managing director and chief pilot at Wilson Airways in Nairobi, a spanking-new flying operation that ferried paying passengers and did courier work. He had also recently made the headlines by rescuing a world-famous German war pilot, Ernst Udet, whose plane had gone down in the desert. When I searched him out to ask about lessons, he didn’t seem at all surprised to see me again, saying, “I always knew you were going to fly. I could see it in the stars.”
“I see. So that’s why you made a long, grand speech about aeroplanes and freedom and the clouds and nothing holding you back? That was all for me?”
“What? Don’t I look like a mystic?”
“As long as you agree to teach me,” I said, laughing, “you can be as mysterious as you like.”
—
We began in the early morning over a peacefully sleeping Nairobi. The aerodrome was as ramshackle then as the town of Nairobi had been only thirty years before, tin and glass and hope standing tiptoe at the edge of emptiness.
Tom had never had a student before, but in a way, that didn’t matter. Most of flying was instinct and intuition, with a few do-or-die rules thrown in on top. “Trust your compass” was one of these. “Your own judgement will go haywire sometimes. The horizon will lie to you, too, when you can see it. It’s bound to. But this needle”—he pointed with no small drama—“this will tell you where you should be going. Not where you are. Put your faith there, and you’ll catch up eventually.”
The plane we used was set up for dual instruction. I could learn the instruments and the feel of the rudder bar with him on hand to catch my mistakes. There were earphones we could use to talk to each other, but soon Tom stopped wanting to use them. “You’re going to have to find out where you’re misstepping on your own,” he told me. “I can keep correcting you, but what would be the point?”