Mackenzie Ford

by The Clouds Beneath the Sun (v5)

  “But not to the point of being killed, surely?”

  Kees shrugged. “It seems harsh, yes. And a machete is a messy, bloody way of going about it. On the other hand, the machete is a traditional weapon here and only emphasizes that we are guests, outsiders, who should show some respect for Maasai ways.”

  Natalie was sweating. Was it Kees’s argument which got under her skin, or was it the still, hot air of the gorge?

  He wouldn’t give up. “Maybe you could say that you will only give evidence if the prosecution doesn’t ask for the death penalty. That would bring justice, but save a life.”

  “I’m not sure that’s allowed.”

  “And that’s my point. We accept the rules too easily.”

  “The rules have evolved, Kees, changed gradually over a long time, and for a reason, just as there’s a reason for human evolution beginning here in this place. I’m sorry you feel the way you do,” she said, sighing. “But I can’t change my view. It’s my background, how I was brought up.” She placed her water bottle in her bag. “You don’t seem to find that a mitigating factor where I am concerned.”

  • • •

  “You choose.” Jack Deacon held out a stack of records. “My mother says you come from a musical family. You can decide what we listen to tonight.”

  Dinner was over and Natalie had just settled into her chair near the fire. She loved watching the flames dance among the logs and listening to the cracking and occasional hissing sounds they gave off.

  So Eleanor had told Jack about her background. What else had she told him? On the one evening the two women had shared a tent, Natalie had revealed quite a few intimate details about herself. About Dominic. About her mother’s death, about her estrangement from her father. She had asked Eleanor not to broadcast these … not failings, exactly, but… blemishes, aspects of her life that she wasn’t eager to have known more generally. She didn’t want people feeling sorry for her, feeling pity, condescension, making allowances. She had already found a Pelorovis skull and an ancient wall, if she was right about those stones, and she was beginning to make her mark. That’s what counted now. Her anger flared for a moment.

  Jack was sitting in the canvas chair next to Natalie with a pile of brown wrappers on his knee, each with a record inside. Every wrapper had a hole in the center, so the record label could be read.

  “Go on,” said Jack. “Other people can choose other nights. Here.”

  He passed the stack of records across.

  She began to sort through them: Bruch’s violin concerto, Brahms’s Third Symphony, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, Prokofiev’s Symphony no. 4, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Satie’s Gnossienne no. 1, Liszt’s Sospiro.

  She handed him the Barber.

  “You like sad music, then?”

  “They’re your records, Dr. Deacon.” She met his direct gaze. “I usually find beautiful music sad.”

  “Oh, really? Even Mozart or Haydn at their most jolly?”

  She nodded. “Yes, I agree, Mozart can be jolly. But music is so mysterious, and so many composers had unhappy lives—Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mahler, Schönberg. Don’t you think that’s the underlying attraction of music for most people—that it is consoling? That implies sadness, wouldn’t you say?”

  He took back the records. “Do you have a Ph.D. in music as well, Dr. Nelson? You chose something I find very sad-sounding … Does that say something about you, I wonder?” Without waiting for an answer, he cranked the machine, put the record on the turntable, and lowered the needle to the outer edge.

  The slow string sounds of the Adagio slipped into the night, the deeper register of the cellos and basses gradually winning out, slowing down and keeping in check the more sinewy, lighter strains of the violins and violas, which threatened to break out and soar high above the campfire. For a moment equilibrium was attained, a sound that reminded Natalie of the sea swelling and rolling, swelling and rolling, as calm as the deep ocean ever gets. Then the tones turned darker, slower still, the initial motif repeated in a lower register, as if to mark a burial at sea. So it seemed to Natalie.

  As the final sounds died away, a rumpus could be heard across the gorge. A fight had broken out among some animals and it took a while to resolve itself.

  Natalie smiled at Jack, who smiled back. “Doesn’t sound as though the baboons care for Samuel Barber. Shall I play it again?”

  She grinned and nodded.

  He lifted the arm, cranked the machine again, and carefully laid the needle on the edge of the record. For a big man he was surprisingly gentle with the needle, she thought. The ring on his little finger caught the light from the flames of the fire.

  As the strains of the Adagio spread through the night for a second time, Natalie looked around her. Arnold Pryce had his eyes closed and his head was thrown back. Jonas stared into the fire, its shadows moving across his face. Kees also stared into the fire and for some reason looked cross. Christopher was talking to his mother, but she had her hand on his arm, as if to quieten him. Once or twice he glanced across to Natalie.

  Their trip to the cave at Ndutu, the previous Sunday, had been as engrossing as Christopher had promised. The lake had been much as she had imagined Eden to be when she was a girl, with hundreds of different species of animals, all drinking side by side, as if the struggle for existence had been put on hold for a couple of hours. The rock art had been very vivid—with large, mysterious figures fighting smaller ones. Christopher had explained that no one, not the archaeologists, not the locals, knew whether they were Zulus, not normally found in this part of Africa, or gods. There had been mild excitement when, as it seemed to Natalie, a lion had roared its head off right near the cave, but Christopher had reassured her it was a lioness separated from her pride and only trying to locate them. Once or twice he had stood very close to Natalie but each time she had moved smoothly away.

  The Adagio was over for the second time. Jack lifted the needle, gripped the record, and slid it back into its sleeve. Again, she noticed how gentle his movements were.

  “Got any jazz?” shouted Arnold Pryce, breaking the mood entirely.

  “Basie and Beiderbecke, will they do?” Jack shouted back.

  “They’re my choice, when it’s my turn,” said Pryce, getting up from his chair and heading for his tent. He waved good night.

  Jonas was still staring at the fire, his thoughts far, far away by the looks of it.

  Kees got up and waved good night.

  “I hear you went to the rock shelter with Christopher.”

  “Yes, it was wonderful. You’ve been?”

  “Of course. I showed it to him in the first place. The Maasai showed me, when I was a boy. You spent the night there?”

  “Isn’t that the point? So you can see the animals early the next morning, when they visit the water?”

  He nodded. “See any lions?”

  “No, but we heard some, just as we were going to sleep.”

  “Did that frighten you?”

  She nodded. “To begin with, but Christopher explained what was happening—a lioness had got separated from her pride. She called out, they answered, she went off to join them.”

  “It all sounds very cozy.”

  “It was. We built a fire, Christopher cooked. He says you used to call him ‘Christine’ when you were boys, because of his cooking. Brothers can be a bit cruel, yes?”

  He looked at her, a slight smile along his lips. “Did he tell you what he called me?”

  She shook her head. “What was it?”

  He didn’t reply directly but said, “Do you have brothers or sisters?”

  “No.” Obviously, Eleanor hadn’t told him much. She had kept the confidence Natalie had asked her to.

  Jack stifled a yawn. “Christopher and I have rarely seen eye to eye. We rub along for our mother’s sake, for the sake of the gorge, but we flare up from time to time. We’re like a couple of water buffalo who square up to each other now and then but don’t
do too much damage, not these days. But it’s not nice to be near, when it does happen.”

  She shrugged. “I’m tough enough. Don’t worry about me. Being an only child doesn’t mean I’m soft.”

  “Did I say you were soft? No—and I wasn’t thinking it. I think there’s something sad about you, and you are certainly not as tough as my mother, not by a long way, not yet anyway. But you’re not soft, no. In fact, so far, Dr. Nelson, I’m impressed.”

  “Sad? Why do you say that? Because I chose the Adagio?”

  He looked at her. “I’m not going to argue with you but, for what it’s worth, your eyes, your face—your very beautiful face, I have to say—is like a shield. You smile, you don’t smile, but whatever you do your eyes don’t change. I’ve watched them, around the dinner table. They’re like an eland’s eyes, or a kudu’s, when they lift their heads to look for predators. Have you been preyed on?”

  He leaned forward and kicked the fire, so that the logs burned better.

  “I hope your brand-new doctorate wasn’t in psychology—because if it was, you didn’t deserve it. You are way off.”

  “Am I?” He pulled his chair closer. “Am I? Is it the trial? Is it getting to you? Or is it something else?” He leaned forward; their knees were nearly touching.

  Oh dear, thought Natalie. First Russell, then Eleanor, now Jack. Did she give off some subliminal chemical—what was the word? pheromone—that encouraged people, newcomers, people who didn’t know her, to charge in where her private life was concerned?

  “Whatever you think you see, whatever fanciful theory you are developing, based on what I think of one eight-minute adagio, forget it. Just because we are stuck out here in the bush, with no one but each other for company, just because I made some off-the-cuff remark about music that you have made more of than I ever intended, that doesn’t mean … that doesn’t mean … you remind me of Montgomery Clift, that film star, but you’re behaving like Anthony Perkins in Psycho.”

  “Didn’t see it,” said Jack. “Was it bad?”

  “Scary.”

  He leaned back and grinned. “Have it your way. But I’m telling you, Natalie Nelson, Doctor Natalie Nelson, you’re getting over someone or something. You’re holding yourself in. There’s anger there, as well as sadness. If you had brothers or sisters you’d have to share it, you couldn’t help it. And the burden would be eased. That makes me think that it’s not the trial, that it’s something you arrived here with.”

  She stared into the fire. She didn’t like what she was hearing. He was right, of course, damn him, but she wasn’t for the life of her going to say so.

  She hadn’t realized she was so obvious. Was she? No one else had said what he had said, not Christopher in the cave, when he had all night to talk, not anyone. Was Jack so much more observant than anyone else, or just less discreet? Had all the others observed what he had, but failed to say anything? How embarrassing, if true.

  “Your silence tells me quite a lot,” he said softly when she didn’t reply, but she gave him such a glare that he quickly added, “Okay, okay, let’s drop it. I’m told you like a late-night smoke, so I won’t go on. Just one housekeeping point. My mother’s had word from the court in Nairobi. They want you there sometime in the next week, to make a deposition—”

  “A what?”

  “A deposition, a statement about what you—”

  “I’ve already done that!” Natalie hated what she was hearing now, too. The effect of the music had quite worn off.

  “I know, I know, but you have to do it again, in front of the prosecution and the defense counsel, in the presence of the court stenographer. They may want to ask you questions, decide how exactly the trial will proceed.”

  She just looked at him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, leaning forward again. “It’s me who’s telling you all this, instead of my mother, because I’m flying up to Nairobi myself, the day after tomorrow. I have things to do, political things, and supplies to buy. You can come with me if you wish. It will save you a very long drive in a Land Rover—hours.”

  Natalie stared again into the fire. She didn’t know what to say. Her experience of Nairobi was confined to changing planes at the airport there.

  “Look,” said Jack quietly. “Don’t be so … don’t think of Nairobi as a problem. It’s very different from the gorge but it’s just as much a part of Kenya as this place is. You’ll see things in Nairobi that you’ll hate, you’ll meet the barrister who will cross-examine you at the trial, you might see some political demonstrations. Better to find out now how you respond to all that than at the trial, and have everything thrown at you all at once.”

  She still didn’t respond.

  “All right, then … what else? Oh yes. I’ll show you around, be your guide. We’ll stay at a good hotel, you can have a proper bath for once, we’ll have dinner in a real restaurant, you can get out of your jungle gear and into a frock. You can wash your hair properly. Maybe we can buy some more records. You will get to see me in a blazer—think how exciting that could be.”

  He kicked the fire again. The flames flared up.

  “Come on,” he said, in barely above a whisper. “What do you say? Get it over with.”

  She was still staring at the few remaining flames of the dying fire.

  “You’ll be able to phone your father.”

  She transferred her gaze from the fire to Jack. He obviously didn’t know what he’d said.

  It was her father’s birthday in a few days. Under normal circumstances, a phone call would be a real treat. But now … what reception would she get?

  At least, if she went to Nairobi, she’d have the option of calling him or not.

  • • •

  “We need to finalize this now.” Eleanor sat very upright in the refectory tent. “Jack and Natalie are flying to Nairobi tomorrow and they can post these papers from there. It will save days.”

  Dinner was a good two hours away but everyone was ranged around the dining table. Eleanor had called a publication meeting.

  “First, have you all read the paper Russell sent in via Natalie? Highly improper etiquette, but there we are. Any comments?” She looked around.

  Jonas leaned forward. “He found some modern bones through a doctor friend in New York, I see. Are we happy to trust him on that?”

  “Oh, I think so,” said Eleanor. “He may be a difficult man, but he’s a good scientist.”

  “I thought there were going to be two papers,” said Arnold Pryce. “One on the discovery, another on what it all means.”

  Eleanor nodded. “Yes, that was the original idea. But given what’s happened, and that Russell still thinks he’ll be ‘scooped,’ I’m inclined to let him announce the discovery and write up the implications later.”

  Silence around the table.

  “So we tell Russell to go ahead?” Eleanor looked from one to the other.

  No one said anything.

  “Then we are agreed.” She took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes. “Now, Natalie’s shelter. Has everyone read her paper? Any comments?”

  “I think the tone is a little too bullish,” said Kees. “Take the title, for instance. ‘An Ancient Shelter in the Kihara Gorge’ is too—well, it assumes too much, it begs all sorts of questions. And it will antagonize potential critics.”

  “What would you prefer instead?” said Eleanor.

  “Something with a question mark in the title, or something bland, like … oh, I don’t know, ‘A Provocative Arrangement of Stones in the Kihara Gorge.’ Or, instead of ‘provocative,’ maybe ‘intriguing.’ Something like that.”

  “Natalie?” Eleanor looked across the table and smiled.

  Natalie shrugged. “I don’t mind. If Kees is happier with his title, I’ll go along with it.”

  Christopher nodded. “I agree with Kees.”

  “Well, I don’t!” interjected Jack.

  Christopher reddened and looked briefly at Natalie.

  “I’
d fall asleep before I read to the end of Kees’s title.” Jack hunched forward. “Look, by all means have a question mark to get yourselves off the hook, but Natalie has pushed our investigation into a totally new area and titles are there to catch people’s attention, to show them we are breaking new ground.” He doodled with a pen on the paper in front of him. “How about… something like … ‘The Origins of Architecture?’—with a question mark, of course.”

  “No! No!” chorused several people at the same time.

  “Too sensationalist,” cried Kees.

  “Too glib,” said Christopher.

  Now it was Jack’s turn to fix his brother with a glare. “There you are—it got you all going. That’s my point, that’s what a title should do.”

  “In journalism, maybe,” said Eleanor, shaking her head. “I’m with Christopher and Kees on this one, Jack.” She turned to the others. “But surely we can think of something that will keep Jack awake and not be sensationalist.”

  Silence around the table. Several of them were scribbling draft titles on sheets of paper, then crossing them out.

  “Try this,” said Arnold Pryce at length. “‘Ancient Man’s First Building?’, with a question mark.”

  “Strictly speaking, you don’t need the word ‘ancient,’ and whatever it is, it’s not a building,” said Natalie.

  “‘Man’s first structure?’ then. How about that?” Pryce looked around the table.

  Eleanor glanced at Jack. “Would that keep you awake?”

  “If it’s a structure, it’s a building. It’s better than ‘A Provocative Arrangement of …’ whatever.”

  “Christopher?” Eleanor leaned towards him.

  “I still think we risk being accused of reading too much into the evidence.”

  “Kees?”

  “Well, it’s either a structure or it isn’t. I think Arnold’s title is justified so long as it has a question mark.”

  “And so do I,” said Eleanor. “Let’s agree on that.” She looked around the table again, from person to person. No one spoke.

  Christopher looked angry, Natalie thought.