Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

She glanced at her watch again. Seven forty-one.

She looked about her. There was another couple in the bar, and two women sitting together at the bar itself. They were all in dresses, one wore a hat, all were talking in low voices, so she couldn’t hear what was being said. Did these other women feel about sex the way she felt about it? Were they as demanding? Did they think about it as much as she did, did they make as much noise when …? She was making herself blush inwardly again.

She looked at her watch. Seven forty-three. Maxwell Sandys was really late now, verging on rude—

“Tally?”

The skin on her throat was clammy. Had she heard right? That was the name … that was the nickname her father used—

She turned and looked up at the man who was standing over her.

“Father!” she whispered. “Oh, thank God!”

She stood up. She couldn’t believe it.

Her father, in a lightweight suit she hadn’t seen before. Her father, stooping over her as he had done all her life. Her father, with his beautiful hands, made for playing the organ. Her father, with the small piece of stubble in the cleft of his chin that he always missed when he was shaving.

He held out his hand.

She took it.

He pulled her towards him and threw his arms around her.

She buried her face in his chest, smelled his smell, the smell of the house in Gainsborough, floor polish, Noah the cat, woodsmoke from the fire in his study.

They remained like that for a moment. With her head pressed sideways against his chest, she managed to murmur, “Why are you …? When did you …?”

He took her by the shoulders, then put his hand over her mouth. “All in good time,” he said softly. “You wait here while I get a drink. I need a single malt.”

She sat, smiling, as he went to the bar. She couldn’t believe it.

But there he was, her lovely father, in a lightweight suit, looking thoroughly at home in these surroundings.

She found it impossible to keep a smile off her face.

Then he came and sat next to her so that their legs were touching, so they could maintain body contact.

“I’m here partly because of your director, Eleanor Deacon—”

“No! I don’t believe it! I told her not to interfere. This is—”

“Hold on!” said Owen Nelson. “Hold on. Let me tell my story. It’s not easy.”

He sipped his single malt.

“That’s better, a lot better.” He took Natalie’s hand. “Yes, I was a very bitter man, Tally, as you may have realized. I don’t know whether you knew this—maybe you did—but I blamed you for Violette’s death. Not completely, of course, but your … your affair with that cellist … it devastated your mother, a light went out inside her when you told her. You couldn’t know this but she cried herself to sleep and sometimes she woke me up in the middle of the night with her sobbing. She was so … disappointed , she felt so empty …”

He sipped more whiskey.

“Anyway, when she died, I too was devastated—anyone would be—but I couldn’t see straight. I blamed you, which is why I couldn’t face you, why I avoided you, snubbed you, spurned you, all those horrible nonfatherly things that I did.”

She squeezed his hand. “I understand that, I lived through it and hated it, but what I don’t understand is what made you change your mind.”

“I’m coming to that.” He took out a cigarette case and offered Natalie one. She refused. She wanted to keep her hands free to hold her father. “Three things. Three things changed my mind.” He lit his cigarette. “You remember when you called me from Nairobi, all those weeks ago, and Mrs. Bailey answered.”

Natalie nodded. She still couldn’t stop smiling.

“After the exchange was over, she came back into my study, where I was working, and told me I was being inhuman. That was bad enough but she added that unless I started building bridges … towards you, she meant… she would quit her job. She said she wouldn’t leave me in the lurch, she would wait until I found a replacement, but that she wanted to go, unless I made it up with you.”

Two couples came into the bar and he looked up before going on.

“By Christmastime, I had done nothing about anything. I have to admit that I didn’t like the idea of Mrs. Bailey giving me an ultimatum but then neither did I like the idea of her leaving. She and I are used to each other.” He chuckled. “And then came all the news reports about your press conference, the one where you announced your discoveries, but also where it was revealed that you, you personally, had become a witness in a murder trial and that the case was dividing all the people on your dig.”

He smoked his cigarette for a moment. “That’s when I decided to write to you, to suggest that I come for the trial, to support you—”

“I never got any letter!”

“Because none was ever sent. While I was looking into the whole business, buying tickets, fixing a leave of absence with the bishop, making sure Mrs. Bailey would look after Noah, deciding how to say what I wanted to say in a letter, I had this phone call—from Eleanor Deacon.”

“This is the part I don’t—”

“No, Tally, no. Don’t go off the deep end. I know you think she interfered, meddled, in your private affairs. That’s what she said you’d say—”

“Dad! That’s exactly what she did!”

“But I’m here. It worked! She convinced me not to send you a letter, that what would have the most impact on you was if I behaved , acted, did something, and came here myself.” He crushed his cigarette out into the ashtray. “We must have had the most expensive phone call in history—thank God she was paying—because we talked for almost half an hour. The operator kept asking if she wanted three more minutes and she kept saying ‘Yes, yes, get off the line.’ She’s very … forceful , isn’t she?”

Natalie nodded. She was angry with Eleanor for interfering but couldn’t stop smiling because her father was here.

He lit another cigarette. “Anyway, we spent a lot of time just talking about what you are all doing in the gorge. She told me about her own father, who was a missionary and who had his faith crushed, she told me about the discoveries you have made personally, what their significance is, she told me that she has written to the head of your college about how good you are—”

“She hasn’t told me—!”

“No. I shouldn’t be telling you this, really. She says it’s better if these things are confidential, it’s the way things work in Britain, but she thinks you are professor material and she wants to prepare the ground.”

Natalie was half flattered by this news, but still astounded by Eleanor’s interference.

“Then we talked about the trial, what you saw, the threats to the gorge—which I knew about, briefly, from the reports of the press conference—and the fact that you are under a lot of pressure, from both sides, and that the trial may become a circus. She convinced me I should come for the trial, as I had been meaning to do anyway, and that to alert you in a letter would only add to the pressure. That to surprise you like this would be the best kind of support.”

He sipped more whiskey. “So I took her advice—and here I am.”

She was still holding his hand, so she raised it to her lips and kissed his fingers. “It’s lovely, lovely. Thank you for coming.”

He disengaged his hands from Natalie’s, twisted in his seat, and picked up a package he had with him. “When I talked with Eleanor Deacon, she happened to say that one of her sons has a gramophone in that gorge, so I’ve bought you these.” He handed her three slim brown-paper packages and kissed her cheek. “Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto, ‘In fernem Land’ from Wagner’s Lohengrin , and Glinka’s overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla.”