Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

She rubbed her eyes with her fingers. “What gave you—? Who thought of—? No, I don’t want to know.” She shook her head. “I cannot believe that grown men, educated men, professors , could be so foolish, so wrong-headed, so insensitive.” She shifted her gaze from Richard to Russell, then back to Richard. “You are … you are …” A strand of hair had fallen from her chignon. She pushed it back up. “Words fail me.”

“Now we know what we know,” said Russell, “and after we have taken some photographs, we can put the bones back—”

“Don’t you dare!” hissed Eleanor. She leaned forward and pointed at him with her glasses. “Don’t even think about setting foot in that burial ground again. Desecrate the site a second time? Now I know you’re beyond the pale.” She put her spectacles back on. As she did so, they could all see that her hands were shaking. “Look, this is a potential disaster.” She pointed at the tibia and femur. “Hide those bones. Wrap them up and give them to me. Go on, hurry up.”

As Russell moved to do as she said, Eleanor shook her head again and groaned. “I am beside myself with fury. Nothing like this has ever happened on one of my digs before. It’s disgraceful, barbaric. I feel sick.”

“Eleanor, come on. You’re overreacting,” said Richard. He was lounging in his chair. One leg was crossed over the other and he gripped one ankle with his hand.

“No, no. No! I am not overreacting.” Eleanor still didn’t raise her voice but her tone was vehement. She slapped the table with the flat of her hand. “What you have done is unforgivable. Sacrilegious, arrogant, and crass. If the Maasai find out about this, I hate to think what will happen. The dig might even be canceled. It was a condition of the government permit that we obtain the agreement of local tribes. How are the chiefs going to feel when they find out that their sacred burial ground has been interfered with?” She took the bundle of bones from Russell and pushed him away. “My God, I have never been so angry.”

She stood up, held her head high, so that the full length of her long neck was exposed. “You are both very foolish men,” she said. “Monumentally foolish.” She took a deep breath. “I would make sure your careers were ruined but for the fact that our only hope now is to hush this up.” She picked up a spoon and pointed it at all the others, one by one. “This information, this … crime , goes no further than this table. It is not to be mentioned again. Ever. You will not talk about it even among yourselves. You will carry on as if nothing has happened. Is that clear?” She looked from one to the other. “I said … is that clear?”

One by one they nodded, signaling their agreement.

Eleanor lowered her voice to a whisper. “The paper will not now be published until we have all left here, until we have found another modern tibia and femur with which to make the comparison, and can say so. We must put this behind us, and we must cover up.” She glared at Richard Sutton. “This is the worst example of vandalism I have ever encountered. You had better make as many discoveries as you can on this dig, Professor Sutton, because I will not have you or Professor North back again. If, that is, we are allowed to work here in the future.”

She took the towel with the bones in it and scraped back her chair. She addressed herself to Richard and to Russell. “You have both made a serious error of judgment. Wholly unacceptable. In my eyes, you can never recover from this act of gross stupidity and insensitivity. The only way you can even begin to make amends is never to mention your foolishness, your insensitivity, your sacrilege, your sheer racial arrogance again, to stay as far away from the burial ground as possible, and to make another important discovery that will take everyone’s mind off this one.”

Eleanor stood absolutely still, erect, her eyes on fire. Even her fingernails seemed to shine in the gloom.

She turned and stalked off, back to her own tent.

In the deep distance a lion roared. Natalie, seated within the glow of her hurricane lamp, turned towards the sound. This, she decided, would be her abiding memory of Africa. Sitting by herself, in the dark, late at night, gazing up at the velvet sky and the stars and hearing a lion roar—oh, miles away.

Other sounds of the night, less distinctive, formed a backdrop to the lion. The stutter of a nightjar, breaking wood as elephants sucked bark from nearby trees, the cackle of a hyena.

The warmth and the dryness were part of the experience for her too. Lincolnshire, in contrast, was wet, very wet. Not that that bothered her too much either. She treasured the memory of an afternoon with her father on the beach near Chapel St. Leonard’s, on the Lincolnshire coast, when she had been eight or nine. It was during the war, one of the few times he had been home, and they were bathing when it had come on to rain. Everyone else had cleared the beach, but not Owen, her father, who had carried on swimming. He enjoyed rain, he said, just as much as he enjoyed sunshine. If you lived in Lincolnshire, he said, it helped. If you didn’t enjoy rain, life on England’s east coast could get pretty miserable. Natalie knew what he meant, even if she didn’t agree totally. Ever since, she had associated rain with her father.

Both were a long way away now.

Would her father ever come back from the locked-away place he now inhabited? She knew he still went through the motions as organist and choirmaster at Gainsborough. In fact, she had heard from the bishop that Owen Nelson “poured himself” into his playing, his grief at his wife’s death colored every note, modulated every key his fingers touched. But when he stepped away from the organ, when choir practices or performances were concluded, as Natalie knew all too well, the shutters came down, her father grew smaller. Did he imagine Violette still in the choir, did he still hear her mezzo soprano above all the others?

He had rebuffed all attempts by Natalie to approach him, and she was secretly fearful that she knew exactly why. Natalie could barely put her fears into words, but when the sweat broke out on her throat, what went through her mind was the dreadful possibility that her mother’s death was no accident, that she had deliberately set fire to her camp bed because her daughter was having an affair with a married man, and that Owen Nelson knew it . Her father blamed Natalie, his daughter, for the death of his wife. How terrible was that? That was why he inhabited his locked-away world, locked away from his daughter in particular, and that was one reason why she had had to get away, far away.

She had hoped that, being so distant, and in such different surroundings, she would have thought about her father—and her dead mother—less, but the sweats on her throat kept coming.

“Natalie?”

It was Russell.

She was expecting him. He slipped into the other chair as he had done before.

The flask of whiskey and its cup were where they always were at this time of night, on the small table, next to the ashtray Natalie used. She pushed the whiskey across and he took it.

She smoked as he swallowed.

They sat in silence for a while.

“Not a good day,” he said at length.

She didn’t look at him. “No.”

Another pause. Insects buzzed at the glass of the hurricane lamp.

“Are you as mad at us as Eleanor is?”

She rubbed her tongue along her lips. “I’m upset, yes. How could you be so … so crude? Blundering into a burial ground, robbing graves. I don’t know whether it’s juvenile or like something out of a nineteenth-century horror story.”