The Clouds Beneath the Sun (11 page)

“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, she 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
un
natural, 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.

“After the … after she died, I stayed at home for a couple of weeks to be with my father, but he was never there. He was either taking choir practice, or practicing the organ, or praying in the cathedral, or at my mother’s grave. When he did come home, he went straight to his room—their room—and had his dinner sent up.”

Natalie turned on her side. Eleanor was just a shape in the gloom.

“I was growing angry with him. He was grief-stricken—we both were—but he was behaving unnaturally. I was about to tackle him when he suddenly said he wanted me to leave. He held in front of me a sheaf of papers.” She paused. “They were life insurance policies. He said that, a few days before she died, my mother had confided something like ‘If anything should happen to me, don’t forget the polices in the drawer’ … she meant the drawer where their marriage certificate was kept, where my birth certificate was kept, and my degree.” Natalie wiped her lips with her tongue. “My father thought that not only did my mother commit suicide—a sin for a Catholic—but she did so in a way that made it look like an accident, so the policies would pay out. That’s what she’d meant when she had reminded him where the policies were kept.”

Natalie lay back down and stared up again at the sloping tent ceiling.

“I haven’t spoken to my father since that day. Then Dominic, my cellist lover, ditched me. Your invitation to Kihara saved my sanity. You don’t need to worry about me, Eleanor. I’m not about to do anything rash or rushed.” Was that true? she asked herself. Her anger had been known to explode into recklessness, if only in small ways. She had resigned from the drama society in Cambridge over a prop that had got lost, and she had regretted that. Once, shopping in London, she had encountered a difficult assistant and sworn at him in French, assuming he wouldn’t understand. But he had.

“I’ve told you far more than I ever intended, Eleanor, so I hope you won’t broadcast this generally. I don’t want to be thought of as the walking wounded. I’m basically fine.”

Neither spoke for a while. Natalie could again hear the wind playing with the rigging of the tent.

“I can understand that being estranged from your father must be hurtful,” said Eleanor eventually, in almost a whisper. “Especially as you have lost your mother and the man you were seeing. But I agree with you … Kihara may help with the scars.” She turned, puffed up her pillow, and lay back again. “If it is any comfort, I have always found the companionship and sociability of family life to be in large measure an illusion. Children are fine when they are young—they’re like toys. It is intellectually interesting to watch them grow, see their personalities develop. Take Jack and Christopher, for instance. They have the same parents, and grew up together, yet they could not be more different. Jack is outgoing, self-confident, what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Christopher is diffident, inward, and—I hate to say this—just a little jealous of Jack, or Jack’s self-confidence. The girls are different again.”

She paused.

“Where does Christopher’s jealousy come from and why isn’t he jealous of his sisters?” She pulled the blankets higher up the bed. “Have you never noticed how a person’s family life is a poor guide to how he or she performs in the rest of life?” She coughed. “T. S. Eliot, that American poet, said one aim in life is to
escape
our families, our childhood, not be conditioned by them, and I agree. Real independence is the name of the game, and intellectual work the real high point of life for people with a scientific curiosity like us. Research—discovery—is the highest calling, the enduring passion. In a world without God, without salvation, the only fulfillment is to be had from the respect of others.”

Natalie wasn’t sure how to respond. Eleanor was not at all like Natalie’s own mother but she was giving her something to aim for amid her distress.

She heard a buffalo baying far off. Maybe he was alone, too, separated from his herd. “This murder must be heartbreaking for you.”

“Yes. But what’s happened has happened. I appreciate it’s a personal tragedy for Sutton, and his parents, and to some extent for Russell, but the main thing now is to move on. Richard’s death doesn’t change the excitement or the passion. We must keep a sense of proportion. A death is a death, a terrible thing. But when I’m ready I’m going to move things forward. The needs of the gorge must come first.”

“Oh? What are you going to do?” To her surprise, Natalie was feeling sleepy. But then it had been a wearing day.

“I can’t say yet. There are ways to do these things. Just remember our chat, my dear. I’ve enjoyed it. You’ll find me hard at times … well, not hard, I hope, but strong-minded, tough. And I’m tough on myself too. All I ask is that you remember what’s underneath.” She pulled up the covers and turned her back on Natalie. “Now, I bid you good night.”

“Good night.” Natalie closed her eyes. She could smell the kerosene from the hurricane lamp outside. The buffalo moaned again in the distance.

•   •   •

Natalie poured her second cup of coffee from the enamel breakfast jug and helped herself to another slice of toast. In her first few days on the dig, she had lost her appetite. The coffee seemed too strong, Mutevu’s bread too doughy, she couldn’t get used to powdered milk. But she had adjusted now and looked forward to breakfast as soon as she awoke. The more so today as breakfast had been skipped in yesterday’s high drama.

It was just before seven, so the sun was not too hot. Natalie had been up nearly an hour but even so Eleanor had beaten her to it. In fact, it had been Eleanor’s voice on the radio-telephone that had wakened Natalie. Hot water had been provided in the wash basin at the side of the tent, as usual, so Natalie had at least cleaned her face and neck. Did that mean Mgina was back? Natalie wouldn’t feel really fresh until she’d showered, but a wash was better than nothing.

Kees, Christopher, and Arnold were already at breakfast.

Pryce was a finicky eater who invariably cut what he was eating into neat little squares. “Who is that rather pretty girl who helps you in the darkroom, Christopher?”

“Why? Are you thinking of getting married again?” Christopher grinned. “And don’t let her hear you calling her a girl,” he added. “She’s twenty-one, and a mother twice over. She’s a
woman.”

“Is she a Maasai?” growled Pryce. “Is she one of her husband’s
many
wives?”

“You should have been a Maasai,” said Kees. “Then you wouldn’t have to keep getting divorced.”

“It’s a civilized civilization, in some ways, I agree.” Pryce spooned cereal into his mouth. “But not all Maasai habits are equally agreeable, eh?”

No one said anything for a moment.

Natalie buttered her toast.

“No,” Christopher said at length, almost in a whisper. “And there’s something you don’t know.”

Everyone looked at him.

“Some of you may have been there a few days ago when my mother asked Daniel to send the Maasai a bolt of cloth, as a softener because we have fenced off that
korongo.”
He paused. “It was left outside the gate to the camp during the night.”

“They
returned
it!” Pryce was astonished. He put his fingers to his lips. “Oh, my.”

Christopher nodded.

Natalie put down her cup. “And that means what, exactly?” But the way her heart was rocking about in her chest told her that she already had some idea.

“Well, it’s hardly good news, is it?” Christopher cupped his hands around his coffee mug. “They’re not happy—but then we knew that.”

“What else do you read into their behavior?” Kees put down his knife.

“We-e-ll,” said Christopher, adopting a deliberate tone. “I’d say it’s a measured response, a warning.” He looked at Natalie. “When we are here, digging, we pay the Maasai to keep away … we pay in cows—it’s their main form of wealth.”

“Cows? How many cows?” This was all news to Natalie.

“Oh, half a dozen. They’re not very expensive for us, but they mean a lot to the Maasai.” He swallowed some coffee. “Anyway, the gift of cattle is always popular—and they get another six at the end of the digging season. So-o-o … they don’t want to drive us away.” He helped himself to an apple. “So-o-o … the fact that they returned the bolt of cloth means two things.”

No one else said anything. All eyes were on him. He was his mother’s son.

“It means we are not out of the wood yet. That the Maasai are still grieving about the invasion of their burial ground. And it means they reserve the right to take back the
korongo
, destroy our sites, and stop what we are doing here—”

“No—!” said Kees and Natalie at the same time.

“Unless … unless, well, you can probably work it out for yourselves.” Christopher looked down, avoiding eye contact.

Natalie turned over what Christopher had said in her mind. No, she couldn’t work out what he was getting at.

Naiva, the young woman who had met them on their return from the airstrip the day before, who had for the time being taken Mutevu Ndekei’s place, was busy putting out some fried eggs on the side table. She refreshed the coffee jug and brought more butter.