Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

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, 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.