Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

Richard Sutton Junior was, outwardly at least, the best looking of the younger men in the camp. But he was also the most cocky, and Natalie hated his overconfidence.

Russell North wasn’t bad looking, not as striking as Richard, maybe, but judging by his performance at dinner, he was a damn sight more fun to be around.

Kees van Schelde was different again. A Dutchman, as she had gathered from passing remarks, he was small—too small for her—with pointed features, a small nose, and a remarkably smooth skin, with hardly any beard showing. He was very tidy, bien rangeé , economical in his manner and movements. Natalie was sure his tent would be immaculate.

Christopher Deacon was harder to read. He wasn’t bad looking either, but there was something … unformed about him, she felt. More than the others, he watched life from the sidelines; or he hadn’t yet grown in confidence enough to be wholly his own man. Of course, it couldn’t be easy, with Eleanor around all the time, but then he had chosen to stay close to her apron strings. He had an elder brother, she had heard, called Jack, who was away in Nairobi or London—she wasn’t sure which. Maybe Jack was more formed.

She took another sip of whiskey. She was still smarting from the way Richard had snapped at her over dinner. She had been making a simple point, one that was obvious to any scientist who thought about the situation they found themselves in. And she had been grateful for Eleanor’s support. Eleanor, she knew, regarded her—not with suspicion, exactly, because Natalie was more than qualified for the job. No, it was a more personal reaction, having to do with the fact that she was a young woman surrounded by four young men. Well, that couldn’t be helped.

In the light of the dying fire, she watched as Richard and Russell got to their feet and moved away from what was left of the logs. There would be an early start tomorrow, following up today’s momentous discovery, and she would for the very first time be able to explore the fabled gorge for herself. The two men dispersed and walked slowly back to their respective tents. The camp was dead for the night and it was not yet nine-thirty.

Natalie looked up. The stars were so bright down here in Africa, they seemed so close. Amazing that there was a man-made satellite up there with them now and talk of sending men to the moon. She doubted it would ever happen.

Another burst of barking shattered the peace out to her right, and she wondered if a fight had broken out among the baboons, or if a young animal had been snatched away by a predator. The skies looked so peaceful compared with life on earth.

She was tired but she didn’t think about bed. However tired she was, these days sleep wouldn’t come. It wasn’t just that Dominic refused to go away, that he clogged her mind the way she had heard an anesthetic could hide in the small vessels of the brain for months after an operation. She had left Cambridge without saying goodbye to her father and that had been hard. Natalie’s parents had been—her father still was—unsophisticated, unworldly, and in its way that’s where the problem lay.

It had something to do with being an only child. It wasn’t just that she was overprotected as a young girl—though that was true enough—but her parents too had been very naive, inexperienced, unworldly. Her father had met her mother when he was a student at the Guildhall School of Music in London and she was a member of a French choir that had come to London for a competition. Owen Nelson spoke some French, Violette Royère spoke rather more English, so they had been able to explore London together. He knew where the best church choirs sang, where the best music shops were to be found. Violette came from a small town called Moirans-en-Montagne, Moirans in the mountains, west of Geneva. It could not have been more different from the pancake-flat fens of Lincolnshire, and when Owen had visited Violette a few weeks later he had loved the landscape almost as much as he had fallen for her. They had been married soon after and Violette had moved to Gainsborough early in 1932, Natalie being born just over a year later.

In Gainsborough, music had been Owen and Violette’s life—a beautiful life, Natalie thought, a pure, straightforward, innocent, clear, clean life but closed . Music, she now knew, could be so fulfilling that it drowned out everything else. It hadn’t with Dominic but it had with her parents. They had remained married, and happily so—Owen Nelson the organist and choirmaster, Violette teaching music and her native French in a local school—until Natalie’s mother had died just months before when, on a camping holiday, she had fallen asleep in her tent with a lighted cigarette in her hand. The tent had caught fire—and Violette had been first asphyxiated and then burned.

With Natalie’s father being so much a part of the church, and her mother a teacher, in provincial England, serving others, they had led relatively simple lives. Yes, her mother had stood out in Gainsborough, thanks to the fact that she smoked those strong-smelling French Gitanes cigarettes, which she had to order specially, and because she knew more about wine and makeup than the average Lincolnshire mother. Her haircuts, too, could be … well, daring. But, Natalie guessed, the most flamboyant thing Violette had ever done was marry a Protestant. It had caused a major rupture in the very Catholic Royère family, so Natalie had learned, but Owen and Violette had found that their passion for music was more than doubled when they were together and they had never looked back.

Then had come the war. Natalie’s father had spent most of the Second World War playing the piano, as accompanist to a well-known opera singer who had toured the troops. Owen had suffered a slight shrapnel wound when one concert had been shelled, but he had carried on playing and received a medal in 1946.

But all that meant he was away for months at a time. During the war years, when Natalie was reaching her early teens, she saw her father on barely three occasions and mother and daughter became very close. Moirans-en-Montagne was famous for its traditional toy-making industry. Violette had worked there as a toy maker before she had met Owen and, when she arrived in Gainsborough, she had brought with her a number of beautiful, hand-carved wooden jigsaws and a wooden toy theater, with equally wonderful carved puppets. Just before France was invaded in 1940, Violette’s sister sent her two daughters to England for safety and so, during the war years, the Nelson household in Gainsborough was mostly French and entirely female. By the time peace came, Natalie was virtually bilingual and had acquired a passion for jigsaws and the theater.

Violette’s accident had ended her life but started something else. Owen Nelson had been propelled into his shell. He had thrown himself into his work, embraced the church and his faith ever more closely, and turned his back on Natalie. She reminded him too much of Violette, he said.

Then had come the blow with Dominic and Natalie had been doubly plunged into despair, bereaved twice over, within the space of a few months. The worst of it was that she suspected Dominic had found her naïveté attractive to begin with but that it had eventually palled. In the middle of her wretchedness, the letter from Eleanor Deacon had arrived, inviting her to Kihara—on other digs, during her work for her Ph.D., Natalie had impressed her seniors, who had spread the word. So the roller coaster of Natalie’s emotions was still on the rails, just.

“Mind if I join you?”

She flinched. She recognized Russell North’s voice but hadn’t heard him approach. She had thought everyone was in bed. She turned and looked up at him—he towered over her. “You’ve found me out,” she whispered, raising the cap of her whiskey flask. “Drinking in secret.”