The Clouds Beneath the Sun by Mackenzie Ford Page B

Richard’s throat, in his nostrils, the pungent, acrid smell of urine … she shuddered all over again.
    Russell poured a second cup of whiskey. The cup seemed so tiny in his hands, Natalie thought. He handed it across to her. She shook her head. “You first.”
    He gulped the liquid and his Adam’s apple rocked in his throat. “What a mess.”
    “Not what I imagined for my first real dig.” She took the cup. She hadn’t changed all day. No one had bothered with showers. She felt dirty and wretched.
    “Is that the first dead person you’ve seen, Russell?”
    He shook his head. “No. But don’t ask any more. I grew up in the outback, remember. I don’t want to talk about it, not tonight. Okay?”
    “I’ll change the subject, then. Since I’m going to be spending the night with her, tell me what you know about Eleanor.”
    He took back the whiskey cup and drank from it, smacking his lips as he did so. He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. He hadn’t shaved and the stubble on his chin was longer than ever. He looked a bit wretched too.
    “A difficult woman, but then she’s had a difficult time. She was old Jock Deacon’s second wife. Jock, born in South Africa, was a dedicated paleontologist—also very good—but he had one flaw, and it was a big one.” Russell stroked the crease on his cheek. “Women, younger women, a succession of them. He divorced his first wife—a bad career move in those days, which denied him a full professorship in your very own university, Cambridge, which was very straitlaced in the years before the war. Denied that avenue, he allowed himself to expand in other directions.” Russell rubbed the stubble on his jaw, passing his fingers back and forth, seeming to notice it for the first time. “Jock ran the first and the finest digs in Kihara Gorge, and although he married Eleanor two years after his divorce from his first wife, he was soon philandering. One young researcher after another turned up here; he gave them projects, and took them to bed.”
    “Didn’t she mind? And how do you know all this?”
    Monkey screams came from the gorge. Natalie and Russell grinned at each other.
    “I’ll answer the second question first.” He wet his lips with more whiskey. “I know all this because everyone in paleontology knows it, but also because one of the women—Lizbet Kondal, a Swede—worked in my department at Berkeley, and she told me firsthand.” Russell played with what was left of the chocolate packet that Natalie had placed on the table. “Did Eleanor mind? If she did, she never showed it. Jock was a bit of a showman on the side. He knew he had to be, had to make paleontology sexy to the foundations, in order to get them to part with their money. Therefore it didn’t hurt if he was a little larger than life—and the press lapped it up. But Eleanor was always more interested in the science—and she was the better scientist in any case. She let Jock go round the world lecturing, raising funds, charming foundations and young women in more or less equal measure. Meanwhile, she got on with the hard slog of recording all the finds, putting them in order, writing them up.”
    Natalie lit a cigarette.
    “They must have loved each other in the early days; after that the arrangement suited both of them; then, finally, it got very competitive and that was not so nice to watch. Towards the end of Jock’s life, he realized that Eleanor had overtaken him. She knew more, had published far more—and far better—papers.”
    He sighed, passing his fingers through his hair. “Finally, she was offered the Cambridge professorship he had always been denied, that and a fellowship of the Royal Society, the first and only paleontologist to be honored in such a way. Some say his envy at her success killed him, but in fact Eleanor is always generous about Jock. She could never have done what she did without the funds he raised, that’s what she always says.”
    “Did she never …