The Clouds Beneath the Sun (13 page)

“You know Eleanor much better than I do.” Natalie bent down and fiddled with the hurricane lamp, to make the flame bigger. “But I know one thing: she won’t change her mind.”

He leaned forward and nodded. “I’m going to miss you.”

She shook her head. “I told you—the whiskey parties are over.”

She handed him the cup and he took it, smiling. “I’ll never be able to drink whiskey again without thinking of you. Have you got a photo I can take with me?”

Oh dear. It wasn’t in her nature to be cold but she couldn’t let Russell leave thinking … thinking there was more between them than there was.

“One good thing comes out of this.”

“Oh yes? What might that be?”

“You’re free now to find some modern bones, that either match or don’t match the ones you found in the gorge. Your paper will be published more quickly than it otherwise would have done.”

He nodded. “I guess. But what if you, or Jonas, or Eleanor, God forbid, discovers a skull? Our findings will be overshadowed—”

“But that’s a big ‘if.’ You know that. Don’t be so … so
confrontational
all the time. You’ve made a great discovery—enjoy it. Well, maybe it’s hard to enjoy it, given what’s happened to Richard, but savor it, if you can.” After a moment, she added, “I’ll savor everyone in Cambridge knowing I’m a colleague of yours.” That put a distance between them, the use of such a neutral word as “colleague.”

“I had hoped we’d be more than colleagues, Natalie.”

She sipped some whiskey and handed the cup back to him. She let the silence lengthen.

She let the silence speak.

It was kinder that way.

Smoke from the campfire wafted over them.

“Have you had a chance to think what you are going to do—immediately, I mean?”

He shrugged. His fists were still clenched. His breath still came in short bursts, his chest rising and falling, rising and falling. “Get to New York as soon as possible. See Richard’s parents. Then back to Berkeley, find those modern bones you’ve been banging on about—” He didn’t smile. “Then, all being well, send a paper in to
Nature
. The paper is already half written, as I showed you a few nights ago.” He chewed a knuckle. “Then we’ll have to see. I’m the wronged party here, Natalie—I know you don’t see it quite like I do, but that’s how it seems from where I sit. So I’ll take advice from colleagues, discuss it with Richard’s father, talk to my lawyer—”

“Lawyer!”

“Sure. Why not? I may be leaving in the morning, Natalie, but that doesn’t mean I’m rolling over.” He ran a finger down the crease on his cheek. “I have some claim here. There are a lot more discoveries to be made in Kihara and I’ll be back, someday—you can bet on it.” He leaned forward. The stubble on his chin was beginning to show itself again. “I don’t want this business to come between us, Natalie. I can’t help the way I feel about you, and I won’t hide it—it’s not in my nature. If you don’t—or can’t—reciprocate … it’s a pity but maybe you’ll change. Anyway, so far as you are concerned, I’ll be as civil as I can while I’m here, but I won’t hide from you the fact that I intend to raise the most almighty stink when I get back to the States. Everyone’s going to hear about this and Eleanor Deacon’s name will be trawled through the mud.” He gave a curt nod. “You can count on it.”

Natalie rubbed her eyes. The wood smoke from the fire was beginning to make them sore. “And will we all be dragged through the mud with her? Is that dignified, Russell?”

He handed back the whiskey. “Of course I won’t drag you through it. You’re not part of it, so you can trust me on that score. As for dignity—well, fuck dignity. I’m being kicked out tomorrow, my goddamn tail between my legs. Retired, hurt.” He brandished a clenched fist. “Well, I can hurt back.”

Natalie took the cup but shook her head. “My first dig as a fully qualified scientist, and it will become famous for all the wrong reasons—murder, bad blood, recriminations, a slanging match. The discoveries, the achievements, will be overshadowed. Whatever you say or don’t say, Russell, I’ll be tainted. Always.”

He lowered his voice. “You’re asking me to do
nothing?”
He shook his head. “This has gone too far.” Now he nodded. “But I’ll keep you out of this, you’ll see. My quarrel is with Eleanor, not you—”

“And I’m telling you that you’re being naive!” Natalie was nearly shouting. “You’re so upset, your pride has been burst, you haven’t thought it through. The world isn’t interested in niceties, in details like that.” She left her chair and tied up her tent, to stop insects getting in. “If you go ahead and do what you say you’re going to do, we can all wave goodbye to any academic ambitions we ever had. You’ll turn this into a soap opera!”

“So what are you saying? That I should just ignore this? Give up the chance of a follow-through, kiss off the opportunity to rewrite history?” His voice had been rising but he lowered it again. “No way, Natalie. No fucking way.”

For a long while there was just the sound of them breathing. Neither looked at the other.

By the sound of it, other quarrels were taking place nearby, among the baboons.

Natalie wished they could just enjoy the night, listening to the sounds of the bush, as she and Dom had lain together, listening to music, not feeling the urge to talk all the time, their skin touching.

As she sat down again, Russell leaned forward. “I’m sorry, Natalie, real sorry. The last thing I want is to screw up your career, or for us to part… well, like this. I haven’t hidden my feelings for you, and they haven’t changed—if anything, they’re stronger now than ever—”

“No! Russell, stop! I don’t want any special treatment from you. We’re colleagues, that’s all. Friends, yes, I suppose, though I hardly know you and you hardly know me. But that’s all.” She wiped her lips with her tongue. “I have been trying to tell you, but you haven’t been listening. Don’t go back to America, to Berkeley, thinking there is more between us than there is.” She softened her tone: she found it hard to do what she was doing but her instincts told her she must clear the air with Russell before he left.

“You’re a clever man, and I like you, but…” She faltered, and then regained her momentum. “But when I finally come out of the shadows I’m living under, when I’m ready to move on …” She looked him hard in the eye and let out a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’m happy to be your coworker, colleague, friend. But don’t leave with any other idea.”

He stood up. “I’m sorry, too, Natalie, very sorry.” He looked down at her and nodded. “And I wonder which of us, at the end of the day, is going to be sorrier.”

He turned and walked off towards his tent.

4
SPECIAL DELIVERY

N
atalie, crouched on all fours, brushed the soil-sand from a thin splinter of fossil bone poking out from between two large stones in the wall of the gorge. There were no clouds today to offer respite from the shimmering heat and she could feel her wet shirt sticking to her back. Sweat dropped down inside her collar in great globules. The French word for sweat,
sueur
, was much less unpleasant, she thought. Strands of her hair were plastered to her temples. This afternoon’s shower couldn’t come soon enough.

Natalie reexamined the position of the bone splinter. Sweat dripped into her eye and she removed it with her knuckle. It was time for a rest. She stood up.

Ten days had gone by since Russell’s ill-tempered departure and, during that time, the tension in the camp had risen and fallen more than once. With Russell gone, there was no longer any sense of confrontation, but then Daniel had reported that Mutevu Ndekei—now in custody in Nairobi—had refused to see him in Kiambu prison: a bad sign. Eleanor had arranged for the bones which Richard and Russell had stolen to be returned to the Maasai. These had been accepted but her request for a meeting with the elders of the tribe had been turned down, for the time being. These were not propitious days, she had been told.

Like everyone else on the dig, Natalie kept a small towel hanging half in and half out of the back pocket of her trousers. She pulled it free and wiped her neck. On the lip of the gorge right opposite where she was working, the lines of the albizia and croton trees formed a dark lacework against the sky.

She tried not to think of Russell. How he must miss just not being here.

She focused her attention again on the splinter of fossil bone that she had found. Either side of it, she now noticed, there was a large stone, about the size of a head or a melon, almost big enough to be called a boulder. Next to them were two others and she stepped back to get a better look.

A bead of sweat ran from the skin on her throat down her chest and between her breasts. That sometimes happened when she was surprised or excited.

A childhood spent making and doing jigsaws had given Natalie … not an obsession exactly, but a taste for, a
fascination
with patterns, with regularity and randomness. She was forever counting things—railings, paving stones, window panes, the seats and rows in theaters—to check out their regularity, their design.

Now, as she stared at the boulders in the gorge wall in front of her, she asked herself if they amounted to a pattern, if they were regular or random.

“Water?”

She turned. She hadn’t heard Christopher approaching. He was almost unrecognizable in his floppy hat and sunglasses. She took the bottle he offered. “Thanks.”

As she drank, he stood next to her, his gaze following hers as once again it swept the gorge. “You know all this used to be a huge lake, don’t you?”

“I read the basic stuff, yes, of course, but how huge?”

“About fifty square miles. Roughly the size of London.”

She handed back the bottle. “This is a better land use.”

He took off his glasses, grinning. “I agree. But it’s also why this area is so flat, and so rich in fossils. The early hominids—and all the other animals—liked to live near the lake for obvious reasons, for the fresh water. Then, about two and a half million years ago, one of those mountains over there, which is a volcano, erupted. Millions of tons of ash were deposited on the lake. People, animals, and plants were buried under about four hundred feet of hot molten lava. Imagine. Makes our problems seem trivial. Then, in the intervening years, flash floods have caused fissures and gorges. Kihara is the biggest and the most productive—from a fossil point of view, I mean.”

He put the empty bottle away in his pocket. “Look, there’s a lake about three hours’ drive from here, where you see all sorts of animals and rock art. I’m learning to fly, so one day I can take you by plane. But for now, what do you say? We could drive up one weekend, overnight in a convenient cave I know, wake up at dawn and watch the show, drive back later that Sunday.”

She looked at him.

“When I say ‘overnight,’ I simply mean … what I mean is …”

He fell silent. He had already said quite a lot for him.

Natalie decided to help him out. “I did a rock art course at Cambridge. I’d love to see some in situ.”

He smiled, in relief. “Good. Where were we?”

“See that there?” She pointed at the bone in the gorge wall. “I think it’s a femur from an extinct buffalo—” She reached out and held his shoulder. “But before you bend down for a closer look, take in those stones. Does anything suggest itself to you?”

Christopher looked sharply at her, then at the stones, then back at her. He shook his head.

“Don’t they seem regular to you? Regularly spaced, I mean. Arranged.”

He inspected the stones again, then took a step back for a better look. “What are you getting at?”

Natalie slipped the towel back into the pocket of her pants. “I’m not sure yet. They just seem too regular to be natural. It set me wondering.” She bent down again. “Anyway, look at this.”

Christopher crouched alongside her as she placed the tip of her finger at the end of the fossil bone splinter. “If this little creature is what I think it is, it’s a first—not a world-shattering first, but important.”

“Go on,” Christopher said, immediately attentive. He peered closer to the splinter. She could smell his aftershave.

“Actually, it’s not so little, is it? It’s a buffalo-type creature called
Pelorovis
. It went extinct about eight hundred thousand years ago, and its claim to fame is that it had turned-down tusks.”

Christopher looked doubtful. His skin was shiny with sweat.

“Oh yes. Every other animal with horns near its mouth—elephants, mammoth, rhinos, pigs, boars—has horns or tusks that turn up. Why did those on
Pelorovis
turn down? What was their function and was it associated with why they became extinct?” Natalie felt more sweat drip inside her shirt. “It’s one of the great mysteries in my speciality and the beast has never been found as early as this, two million years ago, not in sub-Saharan Africa anyway. So the discovery will be well worth a paper for
Nature.”

He put his hand on her shoulder. “Well done. Your first discovery. We should celebrate.”

“It’s hardly earth shattering.”

“No, but it’s important. That will go down well with my mother. She might not get out the champagne but you’ve made your bones, as they say in the Mafia. How are you getting on with my mother, by the way?”

Natalie nodded. “We had an interesting talk the night I shared her tent with her, but … but …”

Christopher raised his hands. “Hold on! She’s done something to irritate you. Or you have, to irritate her. It can’t have been important or she would have told me. What is it? What’s eating you?” A smile was beginning to appear around the edges of his mouth.

Natalie massaged her temple with her fingers. “It’s nothing in itself. Nothing. But … well, every night after dinner, after we’ve discussed whatever we’ve been discussing, I like to sit outside my tent and wind down. I love the skies down here, the night sounds of the bush—the animals bantering, like it’s market day. Or killing each other in a shower of screams. And I have one cigarette—I’m not a big smoker, just one. And a tiny nip of whiskey. Tiny, but it relaxes me.”

Natalie faltered. Christopher was Eleanor’s son, after all. She wasn’t sure she should have started this. But she had, and he had asked. “The night after the … accident, as I arrived to sleep in your mother’s tent, she smelled whiskey on my breath. It was … she made me feel like a lush. And she made me hand over my flask. She said alcohol wasn’t allowed on the digs here, except when she chose to celebrate some discovery or other, and that if the locals found the flask they would get drunk.”

“She has a point, Natalie.” He wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt.

“Has she?
Has she?
I’ve been thinking about what she said, and watching. Half the black Africans who work here are Muslims and would never touch a drop of drink. The others, if they were drink crazy, could easily steal the sugar we have and brew their own concoction. They don’t, but that’s not the point. I’m an adult, Christopher. Totally responsible, totally sane, someone who loves her job.”

She was getting worked up. It was much too hot for that. She forced herself to breathe more slowly. “I am perfectly capable of having one cigarette and one nip of whiskey a night without letting it interfere with my work, without sinking into a haze of alcohol fumes and dancing naked through the camp. Your mother ought to acknowledge that.” Natalie looked down at the ground and inspected the dust on her boots. “I’ve said more than I intended.”

“No, no,” he replied, putting his hand on her arm. “It’s not the first time people have used me as a kind of … Trojan horse to get to my mother.” He grinned. “And I know what you mean. She can be fierce. For her, there’s only the dig, and I have to remind her that there are other things in life.”

He wiped his forehead. “Take Virginia, my sister, who’s a doctor in Palestine. As a girl she was very close to our grandfather—we all were in our own way, but she particularly adored him. However, they turned out to be ships in the night, in one way at least. As he lost his faith, so she grew more and more interested in the Bible. That’s why she’s in Palestine, not only to help the Palestinians but because she’s fascinated by the Holy Land. I think my mother’s ferocity so far as the gorge is concerned, although it fired Jack, Beth, and me, put Virginia off. She’s quasi-religious and part of it is because she’s anxious to show there are other things than the gorge.”

Natalie nodded. “I understand, but that’s not what I’m getting at. I don’t mind a bit if, while we are all here, the dig comes first, dominates everything else. It’s such a privilege to be in Kihara that I wouldn’t query that. My only point is simple: we are not all the same, but that doesn’t mean that those of us who aren’t Eleanor Deacon are drunks and liars and cheats who are intent on putting the whole excavation at risk.” She felt the wet shirt on her back. She had made herself hot all over again. “I’d better stop. I’m making it sound more of a problem than it is.”

He looked at her for a moment without speaking, then examined his watch. “We’ve only another hour before we stop. I promised Daniel and Arnold I’d help them out today. Finish the area they’re in.”

He made to move when they both heard the metallic drone of an airplane engine. There was no mistaking that sound, throaty and high pitched at the same time. They each turned 180 degrees, to watch as it came out of the sun towards them.

“He’s low,” said Natalie as the airplane approached. She might still be the newest person in camp but, by now, she had seen more than a dozen planes buzz the gorge prior to landing and none of them had flown so low—this one was barely two hundred feet above them.

Natalie and Christopher both shielded their eyes from the sun as the noise from the aircraft grew in intensity and it swept up the gorge directly overhead. The noise from its engines swelled till it was deafening.

Suddenly, not fifty feet from where they were standing, something hit the ground with a thump and a cloud of soil-sand billowed towards them.

“What on earth—?” Natalie was mystified. “Have we just been bombed?”

But Christopher was running towards the cloud.

She watched his silhouette as, half hidden by dust, he looked around him, then he stooped and picked up a bundle.

“Newspapers,” he said, coming out of the cloud and smiling. “It’s Jack.”

“Newspapers?” said Natalie.

Christopher nodded. “When we were boys, living in Cambridge, during the war, Jack did a newspaper round. He hated it—it was the tamest thing he ever did, so he’s always said. It’s his way of letting us know he’s arriving, spicing up newspaper delivery. These are the Nairobi papers. Come on, let’s get back. He’ll have all the latest political gossip.”

•   •   •

Natalie stared at the scarlet embers of the campfire. The smoke stung her eyes slightly and scratched at her nostrils. She barely noticed. Above the crackle of the flames, which curled fondly around the logs, there rose the warm chords of Elgar’s cello concerto.

How different the camp was tonight. Eleanor, unless Natalie was mistaken, had embellished her mouth with lipstick. Daniel had on a crisp shirt she hadn’t seen before. Even Naiva wore a fresh uniform. Clearly, Jack Deacon wasn’t just anybody.

When they had returned to camp, earlier that day, after their morning’s digging in the gorge, Jack was already in the camp, unloading the two Land Rovers that had met him at the airstrip. He had his own plane and flew it himself, as Christopher had said. It had crossed Natalie’s mind that his arrival was a bit like that of Father Christmas—he had brought with him all manner of gifts: film for Christopher, penicillin for Jonas, wooden fencing for Aldwai, a case of champagne, batteries for this and that.

But his most precious possession was all his own: a wind-up record player and a couple of dozen records. “All I could fit into the Comanche,” he said.

Everyone was sitting around the logs now, listening to the Elgar as the flames of the fire began to subside. It had been weeks since any of them had the chance to hear music and everyone sat very still, just listening, locked in their own thoughts and memories. Wherever Jack went, apparently his music went with him.

“Who’s the film star?” he had said to Christopher when Natalie had got down from the vehicle they had driven back from the gorge.

He was surrounded by equipment—buckets, shovels, bolts of cloth, even a few books.

“Careful,” said Christopher. “This is Natalie Nelson,
Doctor
Natalie Nelson. She’s had her Ph.D. for all of six months. Today she made her first discovery.”

“Six months?” said Jack Deacon, holding out his hand. “That’s two months longer than me. I’m Doctor Jack Deacon, Doctor Nelson. Have you got used to the title yet? I haven’t. Doctor Deacon sounds like a fairground quack to me, someone who cures—” He grinned. “You fill in the rest.” He nodded. “Doctor Nelson isn’t bad. It sounds efficient, clinical, it sounds as though you know what you are doing.” He grinned again.