Mackenzie Ford

by The Clouds Beneath the Sun (v5)

  Eventually, he said, much more quietly, “I’m sorry.” He sighed. “I seem to have spent the last few days being in the wrong.” He looked across at her. “But I’m not wrong in how I feel about you, Natalie. I’ve fallen for women before but not … not … to tell you the truth, when I’m with you I feel even better than I did when we made our discovery. Ten times better. Better than sunshine, whiskey, and discovery all added together.”

  Was his face flushed at saying so much?

  She couldn’t tell.

  She shook her head. How blatant did she need to be?

  But not tonight. They’d all been through too much in the last hours. So she let it go and instead inspected her watch. “I’d better go. Wish me luck.” She lifted what was left of the whiskey and held it out for Russell.

  He shook his head. “You drink it. For Dutch courage.”

  They both smiled and she swigged back what was left of the second nip.

  “See you at breakfast.”

  • • •

  Eleanor Deacon’s tent was bigger than anyone else’s, much bigger. That made sense, because it comprised an office, in the front, with a bedroom beyond a big flap that was always kept closed. Eleanor stored all the files in the office part, paperwork both in connection with the paleontology and the administration. Against one wall of the outer tent was a table with the radio-telephone, which intermittently barked into life. Next to it was the first-aid box, for use if Jonas wasn’t around.

  When Natalie arrived, Eleanor was sitting at her desk and writing her journal by the light of a hurricane lamp. Everyone knew that Eleanor kept a journal, which she compiled at the end of every day, though no one had ever seen what she wrote. Most of them assumed that she was going to publish her diaries sooner or later, possibly posthumously.

  As Natalie ducked into the tent, Eleanor stopped writing, looked up, and smiled. Natalie was surprised to see that Eleanor was already changed for bed—she was wearing a pair of men’s pajamas that were much too big for her. They were yellow, with brown checks.

  Seeing Natalie’s eyes roaming over her frame, Eleanor looked down at herself and said, “These were Jock’s. I’ve never bothered to get a new pair.”

  Natalie nodded. “You’ll be setting a new fashion.”

  Eleanor was about to allow herself a smile at this, but suddenly looked up sharply. “Do I smell whiskey on your breath, Natalie?”

  Natalie colored. She knew she had colored, too, so there was no point in denying the allegation. She nodded.

  Eleanor stood up. She was flustered, irritated more than angry. “I have strict rules about alcohol. And I know those rules were among the papers you were sent in Cambridge, on your appointment. Has Russell North got a secret supply?” Eleanor put down her pen and took off her spectacles.

  “No, no. It’s mine.” Natalie brushed the hair off her face. “I’m not an alcoholic, Eleanor. I have a small flask with me, and every evening, after dinner, I like to sit alone, under the stars, having one last cigarette and a few sips of whiskey. It’s not a crime and it doesn’t affect my work. Like you write your journal, I relax in my own way. That’s what I was doing when I saw … when I saw Mutevu Ndekei.” She knew she was trembling but forced herself to keep looking steadily at Eleanor.

  Eleanor had closed up her journal and was putting it away in one of the filing cabinets, which she kept locked. “Where is this flask now?” she said.

  “In my tent.”

  “You can give it to me tomorrow.” Eleanor picked up her spectacles from the writing table. “I’m sorry, it may seem excessively zealous to you but I have my rules. I don’t for one minute think that a nip of whiskey will affect your work, my dear, but if any of the Africans found out, your flask would be stolen in no time, and one or more of them would be drunk in no time plus ten minutes. Do you understand?”

  Natalie nodded, deflated. “I suppose so.”

  Eleanor turned away, toward the flap that led to the bedroom. “I’ll keep it under lock and key, until you go home. With the champagne, in case we find something really important.” She smiled. “Now, come through and I’ll show you where you are sleeping.”

  She led the way, carrying the hurricane lamp with her. Natalie followed. She had never been in here before and was amazed by what she saw. Apart from two single beds—laid out as in a hotel, side by side, with a small table between them—the room was dominated by photographs. Photographs on tables, photographs hanging on tent poles, on a small bookshelf. Photographs of Eleanor, of Jock, and of one celebrity or another: Jomo Kenyatta, leader of the Kikuyu tribe; Solly Zuckerman, who she knew was Britain’s chief scientist; Sir Evelyn Baring, the governor of Kenya; Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia. There were also photographs of hand axes, fossil bones, skulls of early man and other primates, photographs taken at conferences, the whole world of paleontology in one form or another. And there were a number of blowups of Kenyan stamps showing ancient skulls Eleanor and Jock had found.

  As Natalie worked her way around the photographs, Eleanor sat on her bed, kicked off her shoes, let her hair down, and began to brush it. She let Natalie finish her tour of inspection before saying, “You get into bed first, then we’ll talk.”

  Natalie unbuttoned her shirt, unlaced her boots, stepped out of her trousers, folded them and laid them on a chair next to the bed. She slipped off her bra and put on her own pajamas, blue cotton. She slid between the sheets. The bed was firmer than the one in her own tent.

  Once she could see Natalie was settled, Eleanor took the hurricane lamp and left it in the office outside. Coming back in, she said, “There’s enough fuel for the lamp to last through till morning. The light might deter any late-night prowlers.”

  Some light from the office leaked into the bedroom, enough for Natalie to see Eleanor get into bed. There was obviously going to be no chance to read, or smoke. Both women lay on their backs.

  Natalie stared up at the sloping canvas roof and let her eyes adjust to the gloom. She listened to the night. A wind had got up and was playing in the webbing of the tent supports. The thorn was moaning softly. She heard the low grunt-cough of a warthog. She had gone the whole day without a shower, something she hoped wouldn’t happen too often in the future.

  “I really do think it’s safer for you to sleep here until Mutevu is caught.” Eleanor broke in on her thoughts unceremoniously. “But I wanted a chat anyway, my dear. I know so little about you, in a personal sense, of course. I’ve read your research, and I know you were with Tom Little in Blombos Cave in South Africa.” Eleanor turned on her side to look at Natalie. “You’re very beautiful—I’ve seen the way both Russell and Christopher look at you—but you don’t get much post from Britain. Is there no man in your life?”

  So Russell wasn’t the only blunderbuss, thought Natalie. Not for the first time tonight, she blushed. Thankfully, once again, in the gloom, no one could see. But she was trapped. “No, not anymore. I was … there was a man back home, for nearly three years. He was a musician, a cellist, always traveling and always married. I spent weeks, months, waiting. Waiting for him to come back from a tour, waiting for him to get a few days free from his wife, waiting for him to come down to Cambridge, waiting on platforms for the train to London.”

  “What happened?”

  Natalie told Eleanor about that last afternoon, with the bicycles by the river, and the faint singing of the choir. She couldn’t look at Eleanor as she said all this. “I was so surprised, so … winded that I didn’t put up any resistance. I mean, you can’t fight for someone, can you? I’ve never believed that. When you read it in books, I mean. Part of the experience of loving is … is of being loved in return, and that has to be freely given …”

  She tailed off. This was too much intimacy, too quickly. That was one effect of life in the bush.

  Eleanor lay back on the bed again, staring up at the slope of the canvas. She let a period of silence elapse, before saying, “Great literature can be very misleading, my dear.” She
had a jar of skin moisturizer and had begun applying it to her cheeks. “Great literature is always about grand passion—meaning great love affairs. Have you ever noticed how almost no one in the real world lives like that? Not anymore and maybe not ever. Oh, I grant you it’s what a lot of people say they want, or think they want. But is it really?” She slipped off her watch and placed it on the table between the beds. “Jock taught me a lot—I’m sure you’ve heard he was a great womanizer, always chasing after younger women. All true, but less than the truth, a good deal less. Jock knew one thing and he taught it to me, and he taught it well. It is that in modern life—and by modern life he meant life with all the risk taken out, the risk of illness, the risk of starvation, the risk of war—that enduring passion, fulfillment, is to be found most of all in intellectual pursuit. Sexual passion, being in love, fades. Everyone over a certain age knows that but few admit it or accept it as Jock accepted it.”

  She continued rubbing moisturizer into her cheeks.

  “Jock and I had a very passionate marriage for a few years, and we had two lovely girls and two boys. But he always insisted that the passion would pass, and that I was not to be surprised or regretful when it did. And he was right: it did pass. On both sides.” She lifted her watch, to look at the time. “What Jock did before it faded, however, was see to it that I was properly launched on my career. I don’t mean he found me jobs but that he enthused me with a love—yes, a passion—for all that you see around you, here in Kihara. It was the same with his affairs—they weren’t casual, the way some affairs are. Yes, he went to bed with a succession of young women, but all of them—each and every one—went on to have a passion for some aspect of archaeology, anthropology, zoology, or paleontology. All of them, just like me, were infused with a passion by Jock. He had quite a gift; maybe the greatest gift one person can give another, outside of children. You could say he impregnated a succession of women with a particular intellectual imagination.”

  She changed her tone, so it was intimate, almost a whisper, the first time Natalie had heard her sound this way. “And these are passions that last a lifetime, Natalie. Unlike people, intellectual passions are constant.”

  Natalie didn’t run with the conversation straight away. When she did, she softened her own tone, because her point was fairly sharp. “Weren’t you hurt by Jock’s affairs, Eleanor? And don’t you get lonely now, not having someone to share all this with anymore?”

  It was Eleanor’s turn to pause. She lay, breathing steadily, a faint wheeze emanating from her throat. “Yes, I suppose I was hurt, the first time. But Jock didn’t change towards me in any other way, he went on sharing the gorge with me, sharing discoveries, his thinking. He was such a generous man, so open, so un-jealous. He had realized early on the importance of the gorge, that he had to devote his life to it and what it had to offer, and he helped show me that I should follow his example, and share that grand passion. He helped show me that we were both incredibly lucky to have such an opportunity.”

  The wind pulled at the flaps on the tent. The thorn had quietened down.

  “Do I get lonely? No man has ever asked me that question. The answer is no. Three of the children are involved in the gorge—I can share the life with them.”

  Natalie wasn’t sure she believed Eleanor. This conversation had turned intimate pretty quickly, as if she were waiting for the opportunity.

  But Eleanor hadn’t finished. “Do you have any brothers or sisters? Are your parents alive?”

  “I’m an only child; my mother was killed in an accident a few months ago.”

  “So you are close to your father?”

  Natalie didn’t reply immediately, weighing her answer. “No.” What was she going to add? She wasn’t sure she was as ready to be as intimate as Eleanor wanted. “After my mother was killed, my father … he retreated into himself. He’s the organist and choirmaster at Gainsborough Cathedral and music is his life, just as it was my mother’s. He surrounds himself with music. They both did.”

  “And you are locked out?”

  “Yes.”

  A pause. “And why, do you think, does your father take it out on you?”

  “I’m not sure that he does.”

  “You are an only child and he spurns you? Come, come, my dear … there’s something you are not telling me.”

  “But Eleanor, even if that’s true—and I’m not saying it is—what business is it of yours? I hardly know you, you hardly know me. My family life is my own affair. Why do you want to know?”

  “In case it affects your work—isn’t that obvious?”

  “Like the whiskey, do you mean?” Natalie didn’t want an argument, which this showed signs of becoming, but she sensed it was important, right now, to make a stand, not to give way. “People must come into the gorge with all sorts of family backgrounds—and, yes, problems. Who knows what goes on inside Arnold Pryce, or Kees van Schelde, but that doesn’t stop them being good at what they do. Why should I be any different?”

  “Oh, I know what makes Arnold tick. Oh yes.” Eleanor put more moisturizer on her cheeks. “And I also know that if your father has turned against you after your mother’s accident, there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “And I’m saying it’s a private matter, Eleanor. I don’t want to fight with you, of course I don’t. I’ve only been here a few days, a few days in which a wonderful discovery has been made, and now an appalling murder has occurred. But I don’t see why my estrangement from my father—”

  “Was your mother’s death an accident—or something else?”

  Thank God for the gloom, Natalie thought. Though she said nothing, her body language provided a clear enough answer. She blushed and began to sweat. She swallowed and swallowed again.

  Still she said nothing. And that, she realized, was an answer of sorts.

  Eleanor was still rubbing moisturizer into her forehead. “I’m not sure you know this, but my own father was a missionary. He was sent out here to convert the ‘natives,’ as they were called in those days, and he had some success. But his daughter grew up to marry Jock Deacon and together they explored this gorge and helped devise a new explanation for man’s origins, very different from what it says in the Bible.” She paused. “My father took what we found out here very seriously; he was convinced by the discoveries in the gorge and it shook his faith in the scriptures.” She finished rubbing cream into her cheeks and screwed the lid back on the jar. “One day, nearly ten years ago now, he was cleaning a gun and it went off. We never knew—and don’t know to this day—whether it was an accident or suicide.”

  She pulled her bedclothes higher up the bed.

  “Is that what you’re going through? Is that, perhaps, why your father has done what he has done? Was your mother’s death really an accident?”

  Natalie was still … not angry exactly, but irked.

  Dammit, yes, she was angry. “I still don’t see why—”

  “If you ran away from England, from Cambridge, if you came down here nursing a wound—imaginary or otherwise—I want to know. The camp is a small, closed world, feelings can run high, high and hot. If you are running away, you might … you might do something with Russell or Christopher, or the other men here that you—and I—could soon regret.”

  Eleanor picked up her watch again and inspected it.

  “I’m sorry if you think I’m prying, interfering, poking my nose where it doesn’t belong. All that. But heading off trouble before it arrives is one of my jobs.” She lay back down again. “So tell me, are you hiding, are you running away?”

  Natalie tried to relax herself. Yes, maybe digs like Kihara could be emotional swamps but did so much attention need to be given to prevention? Why not just tackle these problems when they arose, if they arose?

  “I don’t know if my mother’s death was an accident, Eleanor, or if it was something else. She was a moderately heavy smoker, she and my father were on a climbing holiday in the Lake District but, unusually for them, sh
e had had a drink with lunch. She had gone for an afternoon nap—not something she normally did—while my father went hiking. Did she fall asleep smoking, was she temporarily depressed by the alcohol? How can we ever know?”

  Natalie gazed up at the roof of the tent, rippling in the breeze. An image of her mother’s charred remains was replaced in her mind by one of the cloud of flies over the open chasm where Richard Sutton’s throat should have been.

  “There was nothing to suggest anything other than an accident except that it happened a few weeks after I had told my parents about my affair with a man who was married. They had both been upset, my father more angry than anything, but my mother was shocked, devastated and, yes, disappointed.” Natalie took a deep breath. “I never thought disappointment could so ravage someone until I saw how my mother reacted. I realized then what aspirations she had for me and how important those aspirations were for her.” She closed her eyes and opened them again. She wasn’t going to talk about her mother’s affair, the reason for her anger. “People say that it is wrong for parents to live through their children, and I agree with that. But I also half think it’s natural—not unnatural, anyway—and in any case for the parent concerned, and whether it’s wrong or right, living through your child can feel real enough. When I told my mother about the affair, it was like she had been punctured, as if all the air had been let out of her. All her aspirations for me disappeared in an instant.”

  Her mother had had no right to feel that, Natalie felt, after her own betrayal of Owen.

  Natalie shook her head in the gloom. “It was terrible. She wouldn’t look me in the eye, she wouldn’t phone back when I rang her up. I know she prayed for me in church. She had always sent me little notes to Cambridge, about pieces of music she had heard, or French fashion tips, or enclosing reviews of new plays in the newspapers, and she stopped doing that. She used to take the train down to Cambridge every two weeks to have lunch with me, or see one of the theatrical productions I was involved in—I used to find or make props for the dramatic society. But those visits stopped too. I hated it but there was nothing I could do.