Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

“My God,” Natalie had said. “This is a surprise.”

Russell hadn’t replied immediately. He towered over them like a bear. “I’m here for the press conference,” he had said at length. “Was anyone going to tell me? Or has my contribution been forgotten already?” His face was flushed.

“California is twelve thousand miles from Kenya, Professor North,” said Jack. “No one imagined you would want to make such a long journey for a two-hour press conference. But you don’t need to worry, your part will get its proper due. I wrote the words myself.”

“Hmm,” grunted Russell. He addressed himself to Natalie. “You look more lovely than ever. Are we going to get a chance to talk?” He pointedly ignored Jack.

“Yes, of course,” said Natalie.

“When?”

There it was, the same directness, the same edge, the same stampede. Russell hadn’t changed.

“Sometime tomorrow? After the conference?”

“Dinner?”

She glanced at Jack.

“Do you need his permission now?”

“Steady—” Jack put his hand on Russell’s arm.

“I’m talking to her!” Russell shook it off.

He stared at her, unflinching. “Well?”

Natalie slowly looked from Russell to Jack. “When do we fly back to the gorge?”

“Not for a day or two, not till we have seen the press reaction to the conference.”

She had nodded, and said to Russell, “Then I’d love to.”

“Good, let’s meet here in the bar, at seven. We can have another whiskey session.” He had smiled but disappeared without saying anything more.

Natalie and Jack had stood awkwardly in the lobby for a moment.

“Nightcap?” Jack had said eventually.

“No,” she replied softly. “We all have to be at our best tomorrow, the future of the gorge may depend on it, on how we perform. Your mother said she wants me up there on the stage with her, so I’m going to bed now. I’m going to brush my hair for a couple of minutes, as I always do, and then I’m going to sleep. I want the full eight hours tonight, so I’m spick and span in the morning.”

“I get the message,” Jack had said. “I’ll have a nightcap and try to relive last night.” He kissed her on the cheek and went in to the bar as she took the stairs to her room.

When she let herself in, the overhead fan had been turned on and it was cool. She kicked off her shoes, flopped onto the bed, and stared up at the whirring blades. Natalie had surprised herself on their last night in Lamu and she was still adjusting to … to what she had done. She couldn’t explain it exactly because there had been no one reason why she had behaved as she had. Perhaps the oddest thing about the whole business is that although she had surprised herself, she hadn’t really shocked herself.

Jack was the third man she had slept with. Dominic had been the first and she always counted herself lucky that she’d had that experience. The second man had been a disaster, though it wasn’t really his fault. She had agreed to go out with him on the rebound and had agreed to go to bed with him, half convincing herself that the best way to forget Dominic would be in the oblivion of sex. Of course, the exact opposite had happened and afterwards she had felt cold and lonely and unclean.

Sex with Jack had been different again. When he had rescued her during the wildebeest stampede, and folded his hands around her breasts, it had—involuntarily—brought back the erotic times she had shared with Dominic, the afternoons in her rooms at Cambridge, hotel rooms in London, once or twice in other cities, when they had veered between tenderness and near savagery, when her sheer greed for sensuality had exhausted her and, yes, surprised her. It was a side to Natalie that she had never expected to satisfy in the gorge and which, now that it had begun to reassert itself, she hadn’t really welcomed.

But then had come the physicality and sensuality of Lamu—the swimming, the colors of the fish, the rhythmical swaying of the underwater vegetation, Jack touching the skin on her legs when he was extracting the sea-urchin spines from her knee, his frank appraisal of her body when she had worn her bikini, their rubbing sun lotion over each other, the warm blackness of the hotel balcony, the warm wood, its comforting smell. Jack had not pressed himself on her before, he had not crowded her in any way, but she was twenty-eight, dammit, and she had needed a man, she had needed his hands, his mouth, everything, on her, over her, around her, in her, and she had needed the release, she had needed to be released, to experience that release with someone , so she could also experience afterwards—afterwards was as important as all that went before.

He had not disappointed her. If he was not Dominic, his body was firmer, his muscles harder, his skin smoother, the stubble on his chin less brittle, the sounds he made were wilder. His appetite, his performance—there was no other word—had matched hers.

“Can you close the doors at the back, please? That will tell latecomers we’ve started.” Eleanor waited while the doors were closed. Then she said, “Good morning again, everyone. My name is Eleanor Deacon and I am the director of excavations at Kihara Gorge, here in Kenya. You see with me here several of my colleagues who will be introduced to you in a few moments, as we go through the story we have to tell you.”

She took off her spectacles. “Many of you are journalists out from Britain, here on a fact-finding mission ahead of the independence conference that is to be held in London in the middle of February. My colleagues and I apologize for breaking into your busy schedule, but we think our story is almost as interesting as independence and shows an important side to Kenya which, once it is a sovereign state, will set the country apart.”

She paused, to let a few latecomers find seats.

“First, a little orientation. Can we have the lights out, please, and the first slide, Christopher.”

The lights went down and a map became visible on the screen behind the stage. It was a map of Kenya with the location of the gorge highlighted. Eleanor briefly explained the history of the gorge, its geology, its wildlife, the Maasai. Then the lights went up again.

“My late husband, Jock Deacon, and I have been excavating in Kihara for decades. Some seasons have been better than others, but the reason we have asked you here today is to announce that this season, the 1961–62 season in Kihara, is the best ever. We have made half a dozen very important discoveries which, when taken together, enable us to make a major announcement today about how early man, two million years ago, first emerged here in Kenya, in the Kihara Gorge.”

Natalie, sitting on Eleanor’s left, noticed how the journalists had begun to write in their notebooks. Eleanor now had their full attention.

“I will now talk you through the discoveries and what they mean. The actual objects will be available at the end, for you to inspect for yourselves, and we have prepared photographs of the discoveries, which are free for you to take away. I will describe the objects in the order in which they were discovered, so that you can get some idea of how our understanding of early man arose, which will also help convey some of the excitement of excavation.”

The lights were lowered and a slide of the knee joint was shown.

“This was the first discovery, made by Daniel Mutevu, seated here on my right, and by the late Professor Richard Sutton, of New York University, and Professor Russell North of the University of California at Berkeley, who I see is sitting in the second row this morning. The significance of this configuration of bones is that they indicate that this creature, whoever he or she was, walked upright. As you may know, the rest of the great apes walk on all fours, or else walk with their knuckles on the ground. Charles Darwin, in the nineteenth century, was the first to suggest that walking upright freed early man’s hands to use and manufacture tools and it was this which became the basis of culture and eventually separated man from the other apes and set humans apart from all the other animals. We now know that this all-important process first occurred two million years ago, right here in Kenya, in Kihara Gorge. As I say, we can discuss these bones in more detail afterwards if any of you are interested.”