The Clouds Beneath the Sun by Mackenzie Ford Page B

possible, and to make another important discovery that will take everyone’s mind off this one.”
    Eleanor stood absolutely still, erect, her eyes on fire. Even her fingernails seemed to shine in the gloom.
    She turned and stalked off, back to her own tent.
    •   •   •
    In the deep distance a lion roared. Natalie, seated within the glow of her hurricane lamp, turned towards the sound. This, she decided, would be her abiding memory of Africa. Sitting by herself, in the dark, late at night, gazing up at the velvet sky and the stars and hearing a lion roar—oh, miles away.
    Other sounds of the night, less distinctive, formed a backdrop to the lion. The stutter of a nightjar, breaking wood as elephants sucked bark from nearby trees, the cackle of a hyena.
    The warmth and the dryness were part of the experience for her too. Lincolnshire, in contrast, was wet, very wet. Not that that bothered her too much either. She treasured the memory of an afternoon with her father on the beach near Chapel St. Leonard’s, on the Lincolnshire coast, when she had been eight or nine. It was during the war, one of the few times he had been home, and they were bathing when it had come on to rain. Everyone else had cleared the beach, but not Owen, her father, who had carried on swimming. He enjoyed rain, he said, just as much as he enjoyed sunshine. If you lived in Lincolnshire, he said, it helped. If you didn’t enjoy rain, life on England’s east coast could get pretty miserable. Natalie knew what he meant, even if she didn’t agree totally. Ever since, she had associated rain with her father.
    Both were a long way away now.
    Would her father ever come back from the locked-away place he now inhabited? She knew he still went through the motions as organist and choirmaster at Gainsborough. In fact, she had heard from the bishop that Owen Nelson “poured himself” into his playing, his grief at his wife’s death colored every note, modulated every key his fingers touched. But when he stepped away from the organ, when choir practices or performances were concluded, as Natalie knew all too well, the shutters came down, her father grew smaller. Did he imagine Violette still in the choir, did he still hear her mezzo soprano above all the others?
    He had rebuffed all attempts by Natalie to approach him, and she was secretly fearful that she knew exactly why. Natalie could barely put her fears into words, but when the sweat broke out on her throat, what went through her mind was the dreadful possibility that her mother’s death was no accident, that she had deliberately set fire to her camp bed because her daughter was having an affair with a married man, and that Owen Nelson knew it . Her father blamed Natalie, his daughter, for the death of his wife. How terrible was that? That was why he inhabited his locked-away world, locked away from his daughter in particular, and that was one reason why she had had to get away, far away.
    She had hoped that, being so distant, and in such different surroundings, she would have thought about her father—and her dead mother—less, but the sweats on her throat kept coming.
    “Natalie?”
    It was Russell.
    She was expecting him. He slipped into the other chair as he had done before.
    The flask of whiskey and its cup were where they always were at this time of night, on the small table, next to the ashtray Natalie used. She pushed the whiskey across and he took it.
    She smoked as he swallowed.
    They sat in silence for a while.
    “Not a good day,” he said at length.
    She didn’t look at him. “No.”
    Another pause. Insects buzzed at the glass of the hurricane lamp.
    “Are you as mad at us as Eleanor is?”
    She rubbed her tongue along her lips. “I’m upset, yes. How could you be so … so crude? Blundering into a burial ground, robbing graves. I don’t know whether it’s juvenile or like something out of a nineteenth-century horror story.”
    He slid the whiskey cup back across the table