Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

He ran his fingers around the rim of his glass. “We returned in 1946, when I was eighteen, so I never went to university, not then anyway. I came back to the gorge, started digging again, learned to fly, traveled a bit—America, with my father, who was fundraising, met a Canadian woman, a doctor, but she didn’t fancy the idea of coming to live in Africa. I finally went to university in 1950, when I was twenty-two, Columbia in New York. Then my father died, just before I finished my Ph.D., and I zoomed back to support my mother. I stayed a couple of years and only finished my doctorate, as I told you, about the time you did.” Absently, he touched a scar above his eye.

Natalie hadn’t noticed it before. “And you never played in a rock band?”

He grinned. “No, but … as it happens … I can sing. That’s how I met my Canadian medic—we both sang in the same church choir in Manhattan. I had sung in one of the college choirs at Cambridge as a boy, and when I asked they gave me an introduction to the American Choral Society in New York, who directed me to Riverside Church, which is the church attached to Columbia.”

Natalie had given up on her fish. Truth to tell, she rather fancied some of Jack’s beef but it didn’t look as though there was going to be any left. “Bit odd, isn’t it—a paleontologist spending so much time in a church?”

The restaurant was filling up. All the diners were white.

“I’m not religious, not in the slightest. You’re right there. But the music … it’s not just beautiful, but stirring , don’t you think?” He rubbed his chin where his beard was beginning to show. “I remember once being in South Africa, swimming on the east coast, the Indian Ocean. Late one afternoon, a shoal—or whatever you call about three hundred dolphins—came by. They saw us, came over and played with us, breaking the surface of the water, arcing through the air, surfing on the waves, brushing against us underwater but never in a threatening way. Everybody loved it, children and adults.” He took his hand away from his chin. “A dose of dolphin makes you feel so good , in an uncomplicated way. Church music is a bit the same.”

She tipped the ice from her dead whiskey glass into the one that had just been brought. “You’re right about the effect it has. It’s like a mental shower—it wakes you up and cleans you inside all at the same time.”

Jack finished his dinner. All the beef had gone. He finished chewing. “Do you know Luitfrid Marfurt’s Music in Africa?”

“No, no I don’t.”

“He compares African choral music with the European tradition. African songs are much more about farming, bravery, and the land than straightforward religion. And technically, they are more about singing and response. His argument is that African music is much more sophisticated than white people think.”

Jack was a baritone, she guessed. He had a mellifluous voice that she enjoyed listening to. And his conversation didn’t travel in straight lines either, it didn’t follow obvious routes. He had a self-confidence but wasn’t knowing or pushy. He talked like he flew, with authority, without fuss, like he knew what he was doing. Dare she say it, he was a bit like Dominic.

Jack was doing his best to make Natalie warm to him. But the truth was, tonight, for this dinner, nothing—not even the sudden arrival in the restaurant of Dom, or her father, or three hundred dolphins—could have taken her mind off the trial and what Jack had just told her. He took the lead in the conversation, talking about music, concerts he’d been to, operas he had seen, choirs he had heard, and when it came to her turn she uttered a few sentences and then faltered into silence, like an engine running out of diesel.

She refused dessert and cheese. And coffee. Jack paid the bill and then, on the way out of the restaurant, asked her if she’d like a nightcap at the bar. She nodded, but as soon as he had ordered she made him cancel it.

“I’ve had enough whiskey,” she sighed. “What I really need is a walk.”

He was perched on a bar stool and got down off it.

“A walk? Under the stars, like your late-night session in the gorge? Would you like to be alone?”

Briefly, she nodded. She had the fist of foreboding in her stomach—that was more than enough company.

At least Jack was sensitive to that.

She went out through the main door.

Jack made no attempt to follow her.

Natalie turned left out of the hotel. It was still warm despite the lateness of the hour. The road itself was dusty but she crossed to the far side because there was more light. The shop windows were lit, showing women’s fashions, rather outmoded fashions as far as she could tell—long skirts, wedge heels, hairstyles piled up in a way that Eleanor Deacon would not have looked twice at, and suggested the war was still on.

The pavement on this side of the street was raised high and made of wood. The wood magnified the sounds her footsteps made. The shop windows now showed furniture—sofas, wardrobes, beds made of what looked like laminated plastic.

She turned and looked back the way she had come. No sign of Jack Deacon.

She was interested that he was so involved in politics. Politics had never interested her, but she could concede that it was a dimension of life that put the rest into context, forced someone to sort out his or her priorities. Jack Deacon had set her thinking.

She thought back to the conversation she had had with Sandys earlier in the day. She had put on a good show, she thought. She hadn’t thought twice about giving evidence. It was the tradition she had been brought up in. But was she being fair to herself? After all, she hadn’t seen Mutevu’s face, just his strapping frame and his characteristic shuffle. She was as certain as could be that it was him—it was him—but would a court see it her way and was it worth putting herself in the limelight?

There was a red neon sign a few yards ahead, and what looked like a bar. There was the sound of music.

Eleanor had made plain her views and so had Jack. He said that neither he nor his mother wanted—or expected—Natalie to change her testimony but she wasn’t sure she bought that argument entirely.

Jack. She had enjoyed their dinner. She was pleased they had flown up together from the gorge in his small plane. Funny how something like that could affect the impression one got. The Comanche seemed Jack’s natural habitat, an extension of him. It was only the second time she had flown in a small plane, or any kind of plane, come to that, but it had felt natural, she had felt—yes—at home almost. It was as if her life had suddenly acquired another dimension. Jack and his plane had enlarged her life.

She was just approaching the bar. The heavy sounds of the music sent reverberations along the wooden boards of the pavement.

The call to her father still hadn’t gone through. So she was still on edge about that, whether he would agree to talk or not—

Two men—two black men—almost fell out of the bar as she came abreast of the door. Two heavily made up women followed them, dressed in long, African-style, multicolored skirts and headbands.

Natalie stepped off the pavement out of their way, but one of the men shouted something in her direction, in a language she didn’t understand.

The other man joined in. They were grinning, obviously drunk, and sweating. The two women were watching this exchange but talking to a third man, who seemed to be guarding the door to the bar.

Natalie tried to move beyond the two drunken men and resume her walk on the pavement, but they had followed her, still shouting words she didn’t understand, and forced her to remain in the road.