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“I mean, we'll really talk about it.”

“Fine.” She pushed the flap aside and moved out of the tent. He went after her, holding his shirt in his hand. He said, “You don't really want a divorce, or you wouldn't be here.”

“I'm waiting for something.”

Stan looked around him at the empty plains, the blank, hot sky. “Here?” he asked.

“I'm waiting for the right time. And for you to accept it.”

“Sure,” he said. “That's great. That's just great.” He put on his shirt and started to do up the buttons. He thought of a really good argument against everything she had said, but when he looked up to tell her, saw that she had already walked away from him.

*

Millie and Pippa travelled a long way from camp that day in search of good views. They settled near a majestic slanted tree that rose from a small eminence above a grassfield. The field was of many colours, from pale almost-white, to a deep russet-gold. Pippa set up her easel while Millie stared ahead.

You
'
re
with
me
all
the
time,
she thought.
I
keep
remembering
everything.
I
tingle
all
over.
I
can't
wait.

The moment she came into the room, he stood up from the bed, where he'd been sitting. He said, “I forgot to give you this.” He took something from his pocket and held it out. In the palm of his hand was a gold chain. He lifted it up.

She said, “It's beautiful.”

“And you're beautiful,” he said.

“But I can't. How would I explain it? What could I tell my husband?”

“Tell him you bought it,” he said. “If you really get stuck, tell him you found it in the street. That's what I always used to say. Nobody believed me, either.”

Pippa came and stood beside Millie. She asked, “How is it?”

“I've been dreaming. It's so nice here. But I just wondered: the best view is probably from out there, looking back. Looking at the tree. Don't you think?”

“That's for another day. It's a much more difficult proposition. The light.”

Millie walked over and looked at the beginning Pippa had made. The painting evidently aimed for an impression of the field's different colours, their several ways of holding and shedding light. At the moment, it looked like a picture of a hairy rug.

“A series of washes afterwards,” Pippa said.

“Mm.”

They ate their sandwiches and drank cold tea out of thermos flasks. Robert wandered over to the other side of the field for a while, to join two men he gossiped with and who usually shared his meals outside camp.

They dozed when the sun was at its height. Later, when Pippa went back to her landscape, Millie decided to start another painting. As she progressed, she was filled with the idea and worked very fast, making a picture that showed an African poacher shooting down the
green-and-white
checked London balloon. But she was disappointed at the result. The incident had been a serious business and she had made it seem comic. Her rendition was like a cartoon. She thought she'd tear it up.

“Any luck?” Pippa called. Her sketch, with the added washes, now indicated the softness and bushy growth of the field.

“That's nice,” Millie said.

“Something's wrong, though.”

“Not that I can see. Something to do with the way the shadows are falling? I never notice things like that.”

“Of course, it's the shadows. I should have asked you sooner. Here. And here.”

When Millie turned to walk back to her improvised easel, she saw that Robert and his friends were crowded around it and obviously talking about the scene she had brought to life.

“I just thought of something,” she said. “I painted a picture of the poacher, and you can't see his face, but maybe everyone will think the real man is dressed that way and has that kind of a gun and so on.”

“What's this?”

“Come take a look.”

“May I see, please?” Pippa said to Robert. The group stood back. Pippa's face became contorted.

“That's the trouble,” Millie said. “I think I'd better tear it up right now.”

“No, my dear. Certainly not. It's priceless.”

“Can you explain that I don't know what the man really looks like?”

“I see. Yes, that's a bit tricky. It's understood that you weren't there at the time, but if not, then you must have dreamt it, and dreams reveal the truth.”

“Especially since the balloon is exactly the way it should be. Can you just say I could paint him out and put in a different man? I'm no good at the complicated stuff, long sentences and everything.”

“I'm afraid you've now established the magical vision of this painted man being the one who did the deed.”

“Lucky I didn't give him a special hat or shirt. I still
don't understand it. Everybody here sees photographs and other pictures, even movies and TV. And those self-service snapshot booths in town. Even the Masai were using them. All the time.”

“The Photo-Me kiosks. Of course. But this is the old guard, you know. Not the modern generation. Not like Tom.”

“It's dry already,” Millie said. “I guess it's a classic of its time now. Too late to do anything about it.”

They started back long before Stan and Ian, who had spent their morning tracking a wounded lioness. The only time she broke cover, they could see that there was an arrow or dart, or spearpoint of some kind still lodged down behind her shoulder. She led them across a dry gully and up into a formation of craggy rocks. Ian threw his hat on the ground and stamped.

“There's no way of getting her out of there. No way at all.”

“Smart cookie.”

“Absolutely. I don't know why so often the ones that deserve to survive are just the ones that don't.”

“It happens to people too, haven't you noticed? It's practically axiomatic.”

“True enough.”

“And in the end, it's only a reprieve, anyway. Nobody survives for very long.”

“Rotten feeling to leave a wounded beast. Put her out of her misery before the hyenas get at her.”

“She might take a few with her.”

“Still, there it is. Let's go.”

They shot eland for the evening meal on the way back to camp and travelled through country that was mellow and glowing from a sun about to set. As he turned his face
against the yellow and rosy blur cast over the land, Stan thought it was a little like the beginning stages of inebriation. And then, as he was looking into the fields, a memory came to him—as suddenly and vividly as a shiver running over his skin—of Jack's flat in London: the four of them intertwined under just such a soft, drunken light in a tangle of limbs, and of himself doing things, having things done to him and not being sure who was doing them, and not caring.

He had two dreams that night. The first was like an echo of his afternoon vision: he was naked, pressed deep within a coiled and slithering knot of other naked bodies. But all at once it wasn't London any more. One of the women was Millie. And the man, when they were at last face to face, was his brother, Sandy.

His second dream began as one of those nightmares where you believe you are awake. He was out hunting with Ian and they picked up the track of the lioness they had been following. This time it led across a pretty landscape filled with trees. Soon they came to scattered buildings and the beginnings of towns, but still the trail led on. It began to look like home. He recognized a neighbour's house from a few streets away. And then they saw a clearing full of Africans in masks and carrying shields and spears; they were chanting and dancing around in a circle. Ian pushed him. “They're waiting for you,” he said. Stan didn't want to enter the circle. He knew that if he did, he would die. “It's a trial of manhood,” Ian said. “It's a fertility rite.” He shoved Stan hard, into the middle of the circle, and the same thing happened that had happened to him the night before: slamming him in the base of the neck, grabbing his head away backwards into nothingness and the white snowfield blinding across his eyes.

He woke again and stayed awake for a long time. He said to himself that things couldn't go on like this.

My
brother,
he thought.
Father named him Alexander. A bronze star name. But Sandy wasn't any braver than I am. He used to cover up his eyes in the movies. He was afraid of the moths divebombing in the bathroom. They were never proud of me that way. And he wasn't worth it, anyhow. I know that. It's because he did the heroic thing and died. But I don't have to prove anything. I am not a coward.

They moved for the last time, to join the group at the big camp. On the night before, they toasted each other as though they would never meet again, since from that time onward, Ian would be occupied with the Whiteacres and their many guests.

Their route carried them at one point through true farming country and they saw a great many people and villages, which they had avoided so far in their moves from place to place. Millie was interested. Stan, on the other hand, was offended by this sudden evidence of domesticated civilization in a country he had become used to thinking of as a hunter’s Garden of Eden. The villages contained bicycles, beer parlours, sewing machines, women wearing tailored dresses and men with suits. Scrawny cattle, tended by children, roamed across the outskirts. There were more young people than in the villages he had seen so far; he had been introduced to very traditional, outmoded places, where the sons grew up wanting to get out fast and go to work for the safari companies or for the government, and the daughters had dreams of living a modern life in the big cities.

The road was used by many groups travelling on foot. An old man, who held a flowered parasol, was one of the few pedestrians to whom Tom gave a lift. There seemed to be an established etiquette about picking passengers up on the road: you didn’t take everyone who asked, otherwise it became like a game. And no very young children, who only wanted rides for fun and then called out to large numbers of their friends to come join in.

Whether near villages or out on the plains, dust rose around them as they moved forward. Some places were worse than others; often a turn in the road would bring them out into a new stretch of country that almost seemed to be part of a different climate.

They arrived early in the afternoon, expecting to find a camp stocked with all the people mentioned in the letters they had received, but met only Nicholas himself and the cookhouse crew and gunbearers.

Nicholas helped with the unpacking. He said, “You wouldn’t believe the explanations. You couldn’t. I shan’t even try.”

“Joshua knows,” Tom said.

“Never mind, then. I’ll tell it.” He said that only two days before, Alistair’s friend Carrol, after a final quarrel with Eddie, had driven into town in search of a lawyer. Eddie had gone back to the balloon just in time to be able to hitch a ride with Bernhard’s girlfriend, Karen, while Bernhard himself drove Otis and Martha to town. They had been followed by Darleen, who wanted to return to her duties as Otis’s secretary, and Bob, who had again decided he needed Martha back.

Stan said, “So now it’s musical cars instead of musical chairs. It must feel like the place is empty.”

“It feels bloody marvellous. And there’s an even chance
it may stay like this for a bit.”

The Whiteacres, together with friends of theirs named Stone, had gone off to the coast for several weeks. They had fired Jonathan Bean before leaving.

“Saves me the bother,” Ian said.

“That was the last straw, Bean. I couldn’t even put it in a letter. Talk—you should have heard him talk. Made me want to wash the camp with carbolic from top to bottom. That whinging voice, and he’s delighted. ‘Oh, I hear you’re having troubles at home, isn’t that a pity!’ I thought of shooting him. God’s truth. Making it look like an accident. Had to keep myself on a tight rein every minute of the day. There was a great temptation to follow
precedent
and just stay pissed. It’s been sheer bloody hell.”

*

The country they were in contained all kinds of animals and so many different terrains that it was as if their camp had been the crossroads for a geological revolution. They had desert, forest, plains, hills and one spot full of streams, trees and meadows.

Stan now spent most of his time hunting with Nicholas, while Ian went out early with Tom. For the first two days they barely spoke. The next morning, Stan said, “Tell me about the game,” and Nicholas talked, with many pauses so long that they became silences. Stan let him take his time and kept himself from interrupting with too many questions. They ate their lunch in the shade of some trees and rested. Stan nearly went to sleep. He asked about rituals, any ceremonies connected with lion.

“Oh, Harry is the expert on lion,” Nicholas said. “But there are those initiations. It’s all a bit of a nuisance now. You know, the Whiteacres were expecting to have every
kind of show put on for them. They wanted to go to villages the way one would go out to the theatre. Drove me mad.”

“I guess you can let Ian handle that side of it from now on. He’ll take care of all those things when they come back.”

“Ian is marvellous with clients. But he sometimes has a filthy temper.”

“Well, like he says: they’ve paid.”

Stan leaned back and pulled the brim of his hat down. The world around him grew hotter and whiter, until it seemed to approach incandescence. Everything became silent. And nothing moved; there wasn’t even any dust in the air. He slept lightly for a quarter of an hour. When he woke, Nicholas was sitting just as he had been, staring out into the landscape as though into the future. Maybe he wasn’t seeing what he was looking at. Maybe he was wondering whether his wife had considered him incapable of making a success of their lives. The farm wasn’t bringing in any money, nor was the business doing as well as it should be. That was all right for Ian, who had saved something and had three grown children earning their living, and who was the type who didn’t really give a damn anyway. Nicholas was more like a country boy from back home; slow, sincere, meeting his worries like a man twice his age.

“Do you know the people in the balloon?” Stan asked. “The Scandinavians?”

“Of course.”

“Do they ever take passengers?”

“Yes. I’ve been up with them. It’s a bit cramped, but they’ve got everything. Full of modern comforts, fail-safe devices, unsmashable whatnots. Not like poor old Pembroke. Interesting to see the place from above.”

“What do they look like?”

“What do what look like?”

“Bernhard and the girlfriend. I actually dreamt about going up in the balloon with them.”

“He’s my size, more or less. Brown hair, grey eyes. Short beard like the Kon Tiki mask. She’s small, fair, slanted eyes, blue. Looks rather like a blonde eskimo, very wild.”

“Weird?”

“No, wild.”

“I was thinking about the rumour going around, about all of them up there together. Maybe you haven’t heard it.”

“Oh yes, I’ve heard.”

“Think it’s true?”

“If it’s not, it should be.”

“Oh?”

“Why not? Makes a good story.”

“I meant really.”

“Who knows?”

“They aren’t the same. In my dream, they looked different.”

“Makes sense. Dreams are always different. That’s what the word means: something real in another form, everything falsified.”

Stan started to say it had been the one good dream he had had in the past few weeks, but he stopped. “Do you ever have bad dreams?” he asked.

“Not any more. I did for a while. Frightful. About the children being killed. About Jill. Then I stopped having any at all.”

On their way back to camp they took a different route. The road ran along a stand of trees and the slanting sun threw slats of light and dark across their path. It reminded Stan of something. He thought about London again, about
Jack, about Nicholas. And about his brother. People forgive you so much if you’re killed in a war. It’s the brave ones who die, everyone knows that. Your photograph goes up on the piano or on the mantelpiece, your medals in the drawer. They especially forgive you for not fulfilling the promise they saw in you. It’s their promise in any case, not yours. And you are spared the failure they put upon you for not becoming their second self.

For years he had felt angry with himself, and he’d taken it out on Millie. Not till London did he begin to put the blame on his parents and his brother; there was nothing wrong with him—there never had been. It was them, and the way they had treated him. And he had to be free of them, if only it wasn’t too late.

As they came across the fields, already growing dark, he was again aware of the sense of dread—the suffocating, deathly feeling he couldn’t explain, and which had first fallen across him as he’d stood on the sidewalk with Millie back in town. He was afraid that he might really lose her. He had never seriously thought it before. It was inconceivable. That she should want a divorce—that he could understand. But naturally it would never happen, because it would only be a wish. And yet, nothing was the same now. She herself was like a self-assured and charming woman he’d just been introduced to and whose thoughts he could not guess at. He would have to be as careful about winning back her attention, and approach her with as much guile and tenderness, as if she were a deer in the forest.

And he would have to go slow. He wanted to say something that night but when they entered the tent, he didn’t know how to begin. He decided to wait.

He lay in the dark with his eyes open. He thought about
Myra. The red jacket she had, the afternoon when his watch stopped, and that day in the early spring when he saw her after squash and she hooked her fingers into the collar of his sweater and asked, “Did little wifie knit you this? Is she sitting at home making doilies?” “Don’t talk like that,” he’d told her, but the truth was that Millie was so dejected and woebegone at the time, such a sad sack that he stayed away from the apartment as much as possible. He was conscious of her ridiculousness even when he could see that she should be pitied. And he had long ago talked himself into condoning his infidelities, even before the question of having children—or not having them—had become such a large, concealed part of their lives. It often seemed to him that by being with another woman he was getting even with Millie for her dreariness. He deserved something better, after all. So, he had not once thought he should feel guilty, not even later about her friend, Sally Murchison—and that really would have been a mess if it had come out. The Murchisons, both of them—Jerry, too—were friends who had known them from the beginning, when Stan had first started at the college. Jerry had been his colleague. He felt badly about it all at once. But at the time, and for a long while, nothing. Only now. Now it was unbelievable to him that he should have acted in such a way. And he was ashamed.

Biologists
talk
about
the
aggressive
instincts
of
animals,
he thought,
but people themselves take the cake every time. They won’t let a thing alone even after the victims are dead. They stand out among the earth’s population as members of the one species whose hatreds and fears are mostly directed against itself. You’d think they would have died out a long time ag
o.

*

Nicholas sat over morning tea with Millie and Pippa. The women praised the opulent comforts of the Whiteacres’ camp, especially the showers. They had both washed their hair earlier in the morning.

“It’s sad to have to admit that it should make such a difference,” Pippa said, “but it does.”

“And for me, it’s shaving,” Nicholas said. “I’m quite content to go about unwashed for weeks, but if I can’t shave, I begin to feel scruffy.”

“You’ve never wanted to grow a beard like Ian?” Millie asked.

“Never. Only if I developed one of those skin complaints, or a case of sunblisters.”

He said there was nothing like tea, then he asked to see some of the works of art. He expressed particular interest in the picture of the balloon and its assassin. Millie said again that she wished she had never had the idea, but he was delighted with the painting.

“They’re like children’s drawings, I know,” she said.

“No, they’re not. They’re more like what-do-
you-call-it
.”

“Primitive art,” Pippa said. “Folk art. They’re childlike, but never crude or inept. Naïve, that’s the one.”

“Oh boy. Just like the magazines. And here we have an example of an early attempt.” Millie held out a picture of a zebra. It had an expression on its face like a mule, or perhaps a camel. Nicholas laughed. He kept looking back at the picture and smiling. Millie presented it to him. She said, “That’s what they’re for. When you stop enjoying it, take it off the wall and put something else there.”

*

In the afternoon she and Pippa painted, as usual. Pippa quickly became dedicated to a configuration of branches in the near distance and hardly looked up from her work except to check with the landscape.

Millie doodled for a while, then got up to stretch. As she raised her arms above her head, she suddenly thought that something was about to happen. She pulled her hands back. She felt so dizzy that she almost fell. Everything was silent and she was frightened.

She turned around once. Nothing had changed. She turned around twice. Robert and Odinga were standing where they had been before, and Odinga’s cousin, Ajuma, was playing a game with two sticks and some stones on the ground. It was all the same as when she had risen to her feet, but something wasn’t right.

On the way to their tent that evening, Stan shook his shoulders and stood still. Millie asked, “Something wrong?”

“I don’t know. I just got the creeps all of a sudden.”

“Me, too. Something someone said today or something I saw, I don’t know—gave me the most horrible feeling. I guess it sort of built up. One minute it wasn’t there, and then it was.”

“I felt pretty bad yesterday, too,” he said. “I suddenly got really scared that you might leave me. I couldn’t stand it, Millie.”

“I think you could. When you get used to the idea. It’s just the shock, that’s all. At the moment, you’re used to me being around.”

“That’s a lousy thing to say.”

“Oh, Stan. All the lousy things to say I’ve saved up for so many years, and now it’s too late. I’m not even trying. If I say anything, it’s just what I think, that’s all. I’m not
trying to hurt you. I don’t even want to any more.”