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“You mean, you did?”

“Of course,” she said, standing at the entrance of the tent. “Pay you back. It’s natural. You did a real all-out demolition job on me. It succeeded because I loved you. And then when you quit, I started doing your work for you. I was dead on my feet for years. I didn’t wake up till London.”

She went into the tent, leaving him standing outside and wondering stupidly if her days in London could have been just like his; could she have picked up some people and every night, while he was with the others—was it so crazy? He stepped into the tent.

“How did London wake you up?”

“Well, I’ve been talking my head off about it to anyone who’d listen.
Romeo
and
Juliet.
Covent Garden. Etcetera.”

“Oh, that,” he said.

“It changed my life. I should have seen it years ago.”

He laughed. He knew it was some kind of game. She was so calm. Playing hide-and-seek, of course. At last she’d learned how. She was teaching him a lesson. That was all right. He’d say, “Yes, I know” and “Forgive me” and eventually she would forgive, as long as he’d been through this period of repenting. It had to be that way, because now everything was falling into place and he realized that what he wanted was the chance to find the happiness he could have had many years ago, if he’d recognized it. And it could only come through Millie.

*

Over drinks the next evening, Nicholas joined the Fosters in encouraging Millie to take up the business of painting as
a profession. She smiled and said she’d think it over; it wasn’t such a bad idea.

When they were alone together, Stan said, “We are still married, you know.”

“But not for much longer.”

“Look, Millie, you’ve made your point. I haven’t been trying as much as I could have.”

“Oh, Stan. Now, listen. We’ve both changed a lot. We still know each other pretty well, but in a way we don’t. We don’t have anything to draw on any more. I don’t believe you care about me. It’s as simple as that. I don’t really believe you ever did. I thought so at the time, and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say I think you did, too, but that’s all over.”

“Are you crazy? I love you, Millie. Are you saying you don’t love me any more, not at all?”

“I’m still very fond of you, Stan.”

“Fond of me. Oh, great. Shove that.”

“Very fond of you, despite the fact that you can annoy me more than almost any other person I’ve ever met. It hasn’t helped that everything I tried to do, you took special pains to tear down. Something was wrong with the way we organized our family right from the start. I know you have this thing about: if only we’d had children, but believe me, that would’ve made it twice as bad for me. Everybody thinks Jill is in a mess—at least Nicholas is on her side. What I’m trying to say is that for some reason, it made you feel good every time I failed at something—especially when I failed to please you. That meant you were free to go your own way, right? So, we’ve had too many years of that. And now it’s all different, and I’ve come back to being human again. It’s because other people are there around me and you haven’t had the
chance to keep tearing me down. Now, I don’t care how we work this. I can go back to town tomorrow morning, or I can move into a different tent, or we can go on like this, but at the end of this trip, we say goodbye.”

“All those years, you thought I was trying to make you feel unsure of yourself? Tearing you down?”

“And you succeeded. I wasn’t all that sure of myself, anyway.”

“Your father once told me you—”

“Oh, what does my father know about anything? He doesn’t even like women—he only likes his comfort. As long as he’s all right, everything is all right. He’s the baby in the family: he comes first. And she resents it, and we noticed very early on how much she dislikes her life. I used to think, if only I’d gotten out sooner. But now it’s better, and I’m stronger for it.”

A stream of talk came out of her. He felt frustrated and maddened. He grabbed hold of her and shook her. She hit him and jabbed him with her knee. He was ready to tear her apart. She said, “If you do, I swear I’ll shoot you. Jesus, all the years I’ve been sweet and kind to you through every damn humiliation you put on me, and this is all you think of me, you bastard.”

He let go immediately, as if he’d been burned. He had never heard her use such words. He was shocked, more than he could have imagined, to hear her using them to his face, calling him names. He collapsed on to his camp bed, panting. She too was gasping. He had made her cry, but not with sorrow as she used to; with anger and desperation.

He said, “I’m so lonesome.”

“We’re in a beautiful country, on a luxury safari, surrounded by hot-and-cold running servants and gross
plenty, and you’re on the track of your religious theory. There isn’t any reason to be lonesome. Write a letter to your friend Myra. Or Sally Murchison. Or that Belgian girl who worked in the library, and all the others, even in London. I’m not lonesome. I’ll talk to Ian in the morning about getting a separate tent.”

“Don’t do that. It’ll be all right.”

“I don’t see why I should have to put up with this.”

“Leave it. Better me than somebody else. You move out, and I bet Nicholas would be under the netting before you knew what hit you.”

“Incredible,” she said. “God, this is incredible. Good night, Stan.”

She seemed to go to sleep straight away, confident that he wouldn’t try to disturb her a second time.

*

He couldn’t sleep for a long while. He kept going over what she had said, and remembering the tone of her voice: it had been level and controlled—dispassionate, as though she were beyond him, standing far away from him and feeling contempt. And now he couldn’t even get through to her in the simplest way. He couldn’t touch her. If they had had children—but maybe she was right about that, too. All he knew for certain was that she must not leave. They had to stay together, no matter what. She had really been prepared to shoot him. Well, he was prepared too, if she tried to leave. He wouldn’t be able to stand it. He couldn’t imagine himself left alone while she went on leading a different existence somewhere else. They belonged together.

He couldn’t sleep for so long that he finally got up and put his head through the tent flap and then stood just
outside the entrance, his jacket over his shoulders. It was cold. He looked up at the stars, not precisely the stars of his childhood, but pretty good. Always good; one of the things in life that was never a disappointment. It was always good to look at the stars.

He listened to the sounds of the night. The voices of the animals called to each other for food, love, battle. It was as noisy as standing near a highway. He didn’t know how to interpret everything he heard, but he was sure that it included the false threat of the meek as well as the real warning of the killer.

All of them were out there, acting. And pulling tricks on each other, attacking and eating, the weak going down to the strong and the few to the multitude. It was the way they stayed alive. All the many disguises they had: they made themselves sound different, and they could make themselves look different, too—change colour and size, where a man would need the aid of clothing, make-up, added or removed hair. Even the cat his parents had had at home had been able to transform itself in an instant. They’d found her at the edge of the yard one day, holding her ground against an intruding gang of bigger, rougher-looking cats; she’d been a small, slim and vivacious animal with an affectionate disposition, but when Stan reached her she had swollen up until she was almost round as a ball, and the baleful howls that continued to break from her altered body had made him want to put her down again fast.

When an animal changed, there was reason for the change. But what was the reason in people deceiving each other? One of the midwestern universities had done research on the subject recently and proven that man had an inborn capacity for deception. The doctors there had
studied children and found that from the very earliest years it was characteristic of humankind to justify itself: if you asked children something, they would hand you an explanation—anything, no matter how nonsensical it was.

That was people being false to each other. And why, as if that weren’t strange enough, did they mislead themselves? They pretended to be different from what they were. They didn’t actually change, because the only real change came from within, but they told themselves that they had. They lied.

He too had been pretending. All his life he had been pretending not to feel fear. And he’d always been afraid. That was what made people cruel—fear. Only now was it beginning to release him, but he thought perhaps he was losing something else with it as it let go.

He went back inside and lay down. At some point just before the turn of the night and gradual lightening of the sky towards the pre-dawn, he began to fall asleep. And as he did, he heard someone out in the camp clear his throat and cough. He listened, expecting it to happen again. The sound had left him with an impression of suspense. Someone was out there, keeping watch. But whoever it was didn’t give a second sign and Stan fell asleep waiting for it.

*

Millie was up before the rest of the camp. She washed, dressed and slipped away from the tent, out into the morning. She smelled food. The calling and answering of voices in the cookhouse came to her as a vague murmur from the far side of the camp. Then, closer, she heard someone cough.

She walked a couple of steps forward. In front of her, a few yards away, a shape moved against the background
and stopped.

It was a lion. Right in the middle of the camp and looking straight at her. It wasn’t a young or immature one—it was what everyone had in mind by the phrase “The King of the Jungle”: a magnificent animal in its prime, large and with an enormous shaggy head framed by a superb mane.

Behind her she heard a tiny click and Nicholas saying softly, “Don’t make a sudden movement. Back off very, very slowly and to your right. That’s good. A bit more.”

She moved to her right again in a slow-motion stretching walk.

“Just a bit more,” Nicholas whispered, but at that moment the lion turned quickly and rushed away. Millie too turned and ran, bumping into Nicholas, who put his arm around her. He kissed her on the cheek.

“Extraordinary,” he said. “I thought he was coming on, and then he just pushed off like that, had a change of heart.” He kept his arm around her waist.

She said, “It was like something out of a dream. I didn’t know lions ever grew that big.”

“Not often, no. That was a splendid specimen.
First-rate
. Perhaps the best I’ve seen.” He took his hand from her waist, placed it on her shoulder and walked towards the cookhouse tent with her.

“I thought it was a person,” she said. “I heard somebody cough.”

“That was the lion. It’s one of the sounds they make. It’s not always the growling one hears at the beginning of the pictures, or the roaring.”

They drank tea in the small tent. She asked him about growing up in Africa, about school, friends, family.

“I’ve never been one to brood over past history,” he
said, “but now there are memories that keep coming back to me. I don’t know why they should. They seem to have no connection with anything. I can’t understand it.”

“It’s because you’re worried. You’re worried about your family.”

“I suppose that’s it. It’s good of you to listen.”

“It’s good of you to talk to me.” She put her hand on top of his.

Pippa called from outside. She lifted the entry flap and joined them. The others didn’t wake for nearly an hour.

Stan was the last up. He had woken feeling light-headed and taking in everything at a distance. When he saw Millie walking past the painting tent, he said, “Did you hear? Somebody shot a lion here in the camp.”

“No, it was Nicholas, and the lion suddenly just turned around and ran away. He was coming straight at me.”

“You? Tell me from the beginning.”

He kept looking at her as she talked. She looked all right. It was hard to believe she might have been hurt. All at once it was hard for him to believe anything. He felt drugged.

Breakfast helped a little. And afterwards he went to talk to Ian. He found him checking the rifles.

“I thought we were going to that village.”

Ian turned, said, “Oh,” and looked exasperated. Something had gone wrong with the plans. Or maybe he’d just forgotten. “I told Amos I’d help him with something, go shooting later. Nick can take you.”

“Millie might want to come too, just for once.”

“Oh?”

“We almost never see each other in the daytime any more.”

“Your work may not get any forrader if the people you
interview decide to keep mum. You know what it’s going to be like. They expect one guest, male, and one
interpreter
, ditto, who has the right references. No tourists, no women.”

“Sure. The real authentic stuff.”

“Not in English, perhaps uncomfortable, and both of you will undoubtedly be forced to sit through hours of speeches, not to mention what you’ll have to eat and drink for the sake of courtesy.”

“Fermented milk and stuff like that?”

“And the odd eyeball floating in muck. I’ve known it happen.”

“I’ll see you later,” Stan said. As soon as he saw Nicholas, he asked about the eating and drinking.

“No, no. I’ll see to that. He’s in a foul mood today. We’ll be all right. The usual drill. But it’s a fair distance. It’s going to be a long day. We should have started earlier.”

“Was that you out walking around so early, when it was still dark?”

“Yes. I couldn’t sleep.”

“I heard you coughing.”

“That wasn’t me,” he said. “That was the lion.”

*

The two women stayed in camp. Pippa had a headache—or perhaps, she said, just possibly a hangover—and thought she might rest till the afternoon. She had also had for the past two days a persistent feeling that there was something in her eye; an eyelash might have worked its way down under the lower lid, to keep touching the eyeball as she blinked. Ian had tried to find it, but hadn’t been much help and was then hurt at her abrupt dismissal of him. She was lying down in her tent when a landrover
drove up and came to a halt in the clearing they had named “the car park”.