Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

The flap to Eleanor’s tent moved, and she appeared.

Yes, she was diminished, Natalie thought. Her hair was less than its immaculate self, her skin had lost its sheen, her fingers were shaking. She was still in shock. For the first time, Natalie thought, Eleanor looked old .

“Yes?” she said, in a flat, cold voice. “I can’t face talking about Richard—”

“No, no . That’s not why I’m here.” She lowered her voice. “Let’s sit down. I have something to tell you, about Kees.”

Eleanor looked at her sharply, as she slumped to a chair.

“But first,” said Natalie, “here.” She held up her whiskey flask and poured a shot into the cap. “I know you don’t have a head for spirits, but now is not the time to quibble. This is medicinal.” She attempted a smile.

Eleanor looked at her, fiercely to begin with, but then her face dissolved into a small smile and she took the cap.

“Knock it all straight back,” whispered Natalie. “It will help. I’ve already had one—just one.”

Eleanor sniffed the liquid, made a face, but swallowed the contents of the cap all at once. She coughed, wiped her lips with the back of her hand, nodded her head. “I see what you mean. I suppose I feel a bit better now. What is it you have to tell me?”

Natalie took back the cap and screwed it on the flask. She slipped it into her pocket.

“A little while ago, Kees told me something in confidence. Normally, I would have respected that confidence but… given what has happened, given how traumatic the past few hours and days have been, and because Kees is now dead, I regard myself as released from that confidence.”

Eleanor looked at her. Her skin was not quite so … dead as it had been. The whiskey was having an effect.

“We were working in the gorge when Kees told me he was homosexual—”

“What!”

“Yes. He confessed to me because, he said, he had watched me being in a minority of one in the camp, over the Ndekei trial, and he said that he wanted me to know that, although he didn’t agree with my stance, he did sympathize with my solitary position.”

“But why are you telling me this now?”

“Hold on. I haven’t finished.” Natalie took a deep breath. She wanted to do this slowly. “That wasn’t the whole picture. Kees also told me because he was feeling miserable and he had to talk to someone. I suppose he thought that, with us both being ‘outsiders,’ or people in a minority, I would be more sympathetic—”

“Sympathetic to what?”

“Hold on . He told me that, a day or so before, he had received a letter from, as he put it, an older friend—an older male friend—in Amsterdam, a friend who meant a great deal to Kees, whom he lived with, yet who had met someone else, he said, and who was emigrating to America, to San Francisco.”

“I still don’t—”

“Eleanor, please! What I’m saying is that I don’t think Kees’s disappearance was accidental.”

Eleanor, in the act of wrapping her spectacles around her ears, stopped what she was doing.

“Yes, that’s what I came to say. I think he was emotionally disturbed and that his disappearance had, at least in part, suicidal elements. He had been thrown over by his lover, he was all alone down here—doing important work, yes—but with nothing to look forward to, back at home. He was devastated.”

Eleanor, having just put on her eyeglasses, snatched them off again. “But … but if you’re right, that was a ghoulish way to go about it.”

“I’m not sure there’s a non-ghoulish way to commit suicide but … as I told you, weeks ago, when my mother was killed there was always a doubt in my mind that she might have been suicidal too. So, in the midst of my grief at her death, I read books on suicide.” Natalie ran her tongue along her lips. “People don’t always mean to kill themselves outright. Often they put themselves in danger, at risk—they will turn on the car engine in their garage, for instance, or slit their wrists and lie in a bath of warm water—but, but , they will do so in such a way, at certain times of the day, when other family members, or neighbors, will interrupt what they are doing and find them. They put themselves in a situation where whether they live or die is a matter of chance, and depends on whether they are found or not.”

She took out her handkerchief and wiped the sweat off her throat. “I think that’s what happened with Kees. He went off in search of his precious chert and allowed himself to stay out too long, too long in the sun, knowing it was dangerous, that he could die of dehydration or be eaten by lions or hyenas, but also knowing that we would come looking for him. With suicidal people, these calculations are always tricky. If people find you in time, they make a fuss of you, you are the center of attention for a while, and you either make a recovery or … or you bide your time until you feel depressed all over again.”

She put away her handkerchief. “I’m not an expert, of course, but it seems to me that on this occasion Kees made a calculation that almost worked, but in the end didn’t.”

Eleanor turned this over in her mind, not speaking for some considerable time. “And you’re telling me all this to reassure me? To lessen my feelings of guilt?”

“That comes into it, yes. I could see this morning how hard you had taken Kees’s death, how you must be thinking that, after however many years it is of trouble-free digging, all of a sudden you have two deaths on your hands. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you can be held responsible for either death. That’s why I’ve told you about Kees.” She wasn’t going to add what Kees had said about Richard Sutton. She didn’t want that argument just now.

Eleanor again turned Natalie’s remarks over in her mind. “And you tell me all this … you offer me this … comfort , I suppose you’d call it, despite our differences over … over Ndekei?”

“I’m not that calculating, Eleanor. At least I don’t think I am. I could see how upset you were—we all could. I happened to know things that were relevant. You couldn’t know what I knew, you blamed yourself more than was reasonable.” She wiped her lips with her tongue. “I could pick on myself if I chose to—I knew what a mess Kees was in and didn’t think it through, didn’t anticipate he wasn’t fit enough to be left on his own.”

“Now don’t you go blaming your self. That’s ridiculous.” Eleanor reached out and put her hand on Natalie’s knee. “But thank you for telling me all of that. It has helped lift a load from my mind. Some of it, anyway.”

Eleanor was perking up, there was no doubt. She rose and moved across to the radio-telephone. “I must talk to Jack, see what’s happening. He tells me he’s invited you to Lamu for Christmas, to look at the Swahili village. Are you going?”

Natalie shook her head.

“Why on earth not? Everything will be all closed up here for a couple of days. Are you afraid of flying?”

“It’s not that. Christopher also invited me, to Kubwa hot springs.”

“Oh dear!” sighed Eleanor. “So you can’t accept one without devastating the other.”

“I think ‘devastating’ is putting it rather strongly. But I’m saying no to both of them.”

Eleanor pulled her chair closer to the radio-telephone. “I should be able to say something to help you, my dear, to give you some inside information about the boys that you don’t know, to help repay you for what you have just told me, and help you decide, one way or the other. But I daren’t, I daren’t , a mother can’t take sides.” She smiled as she played with the dials and knobs. “It’s a good job Jock isn’t alive. He’d have charmed you long before his sons did.”