The Clouds Beneath the Sun (43 page)

“Most of the British delegation will be staying at the Rhodes,” Christopher was saying. “That’s not far from the Coryndon Natural History Museum, where the director has said we can use their premises. It’s central, and the room will be filled with natural history specimens—that will produce the right atmosphere, don’t you think?”

“Yes, it will. Excellent. Well done, Christopher.” Eleanor looked up and smiled as Natalie sat down. She let Natalie sip some coffee and slice into her fruit before asking, “And the documentation, Natalie, how is that coming along?”

“Well, no one has worked on it for a few days, for obvious Kees-related reasons. But we’re almost there, I think. Once Jack gets back from Nairobi, we can polish what we have, and you can see it soon after. Forty-eight hours at the most, I should think.”

Eleanor nodded. “Good. Things are falling into place. I still can’t say I’m happy with the route we are taking but … since we are going that way, we must give it our best shot, as the Americans say.” She looked across to Natalie. “There’s been no further word from the odious Richard Sutton Senior, or from Russell, I suppose?”

“One short note from Russell. He’s still not happy.”

“And did you try to soften him up?”

“Yes, of course. I haven’t heard back. My letter crossed with his.”

She swallowed some fruit.

“I don’t think Russell
will
soften, Eleanor.”

Eleanor nodded, removing her spectacles at the same time.

Just then Naiva brought in a large plate.

“Ah, eggs!” cried Eleanor. “Christopher—” and she looked across. “I’m famished. Be an angel, go and radio Jack. Find out how Kees is this morning.”

Christopher got to his feet and, taking his coffee mug with him, crossed to his mother’s tent, where the radio-telephone was.

Eleanor waited, as usual, while everyone else was served, before spooning two eggs on to her own plate.

“Arnold, how close are you to finishing your part in the press conference?”

“It’s just a matter of tinkering, don’t worry. This creature—I take it we are still calling him, or her,
Homo kiharensis
, yes—?”

Eleanor nodded.

“Well, we now know more or less what his or her diet was and—”

“Before you go into that, may I say something?”

Everyone looked at Natalie.

“Sorry, Arnold,” she said. “But I’m sure your news about diet will be accepted by the rest of us. I wanted to raise a point where I don’t expect universal agreement.”

“Go ahead,” said Arnold. “These eggs are too good to let them get cold, anyway.” He attacked his food.

“I can understand why you want to call these remains
Homo kiharensis.”
Natalie swallowed some coffee, and looked over her mug at Eleanor. “I see how that fits into what we are trying to achieve. But I wonder if we are not … if we are not missing a trick here.”

Eleanor wiped the remains of egg yolk from her plate with some bread. “I don’t follow.”

“Consider an alternative name,” replied Natalie gently. “Consider
Homo suttoniensis.”

Eleanor gave a stunted gasp. “What—! I don’t believe—!” She tailed off.

No one else spoke.

“As a mark of respect, as an acknowledgment that he, and Russell, and Daniel here found the first bones.”

Eleanor was shaking her head. She was just about to speak when Christopher stood over her. She looked up. “Yes?”

Natalie noticed a stain on Christopher’s shirt. He had spilled his coffee over himself.

“I spoke to Jack,” he said quietly, very quietly. “Kees died in the night.”

“What! No.
No!
” Eleanor wrapped her fingers around her mouth, but said nothing more.

Behind her spectacles, her eyes glinted.

Natalie, shocked herself, couldn’t make out whether or not there were tears in Eleanor’s eyes.

“Jack and Jonas will stay in Nairobi today, alert the family, and make the arrangements to fly the body back to Holland. They’ve already started. He died in hospital so there are no legal problems.” Christopher looked around the table and put his hand on his mother’s shoulder. “Apparently, his internal organs had suffered and withered too much for him to survive. He died at 4:15.”

Eleanor scraped back her chair and hurried to her tent.

She disappeared inside.

Christopher sat back down at the breakfast table. “I know I shouldn’t say this, but I’m starving.”

•   •   •

“Eleanor? Eleanor? It’s Natalie. Are you there? May I come in?” Natalie stood by the radio-telephone at the entrance to Eleanor’s tent. In more matter-of-fact tones, she repeated, “Eleanor.”

Following Christopher’s devastating news, the high spirits in the camp, the high spirits that had carried over from the night before, had vanished entirely. No one now felt like exposing himself or herself to the airless heat of the gorge, and people found chores to do in camp. Grief shared is grief lessened.

Eleanor hadn’t been seen all morning. There had been no more activity on the radio-telephone. Jack and Jonas were obviously shouldering the burden of telling the next of kin and making the other arrangements—finding a coffin, making the airline booking, liaising with the Dutch embassy over customs/immigration clearance, and whatever else was needed.

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.”

•   •   •

As Natalie walked across the camp ground towards the refectory area, a great gray shadow swept across the row of tents and the trees where the Land Rovers were parked. Clouds. Huge white and slate-colored balloons billowed one upon the other high in the sky, like giant sailing ships. The short rains were arriving.

Most of the others were already there when she reached the main tent and the meeting had started.

Eleanor, dressed today in navy chinos and a white shirt, was holding the draft press release in front of her. This was a business meeting to finalize the details of the press conference before they all dispersed for the Christmas break.

She was already speaking. Or rather, shouting. At Christopher.

“I cannot believe it… I repeat:
I cannot believe it!
After all this time, after weeks of delay, you have only just found out … what were you thinking?
Did
you think? Did your father and I not teach you anything?” She threw her spectacles on the table in front of her. “Words fail me.”

Natalie sat down. Puzzled, she transferred her gaze from Arnold Pryce to Jack to Daniel. Jonas had followed her in and sat next to her.