Binstead's Safari (7 page)

“I hope they’re even worse,” Millie said. “I hope they’re revolting. Think of the stories we’ll have to tell.”

“Not so funny, to be out in the bush with a large crowd of rich boors who’ve got access to firearms and can’t hold their drink. Ian will only stand for so much. He peppered a man with birdshot once. There was no end of a stink about that. I’d rather have a pleasant trip and no story, thank you.”

“Not like Stan,” Millie said. “Stan says he’d put up with anything if there’s a story at the end.”

“Even Stan might change his mind if we have to live with it.”

*

Stan developed a speckling of small, pink heat-bumps over
the backs of his hands and across his shoulders. They quickly spread into a red rash that itched all the time, until Millie said to him, “Stan, you’re scratching yourself to death. Let me see that.” And she brought out a tube of cream, just like a television actress in a commercial, and cured him within twenty-four hours.

His days began to seem like a summer vacation from long ago, or dreams of a kind of life he had never lived except on hiking trips. Ian talked a great deal, describing the country as it used to be, and deploring the way it was headed. He told Stan a lot about the Masai and the lion hunts, initiation ceremonies and general beliefs.

“I’ve read about it,” Stan said, “and heard about it from a friend who was doing a documentary for television. But I thought they weren’t allowed to have the lion hunt any more.”

“No, well that’s why one can’t learn much from watching the telly.”

“They still do? What’s it like?”

“The same as it was. It hasn’t changed. They go out and drive the lion into an open space. They surround him, make a circle with their shields up on the inside. He’s in the middle of the circle. Each man has a spear. They egg him on till he’s in a fine old rage—that’s not hard. And then the man who’s proving himself steps out of the line and into the middle of the circle with the lion. The others close ranks behind him.”

“And you’ve seen it?”

“Oh, yes. Five times in all. The only European I saw who went through it was Simba Lewis. That’s how he got his name.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You’re like my boy Davy: ‘Tell us about the war, Dad.
Tell us again.’ Well, there you are with a sort of javelin and a leather shield. Coming at you is your lion, weighing
four-fifty
to five hundred pounds, has a speed of zero to
sixty-five
miles per hour in four seconds and on a charge is doing about a hundred and ten. Opinions differ as to what he looks like at that stage, stretched out or bunched up. To me, he looks like a flying rocket even when he’s still on the ground coming on. If he’s fifteen yards away, you haven’t a hope of doing much more than try to raise your shield. When a lion charges home, the speed is so much faster than you’d expected. It’s all much more than you expected. You don’t know what killer instinct is till you’ve seen a lion charge. It’s terrible. Glorious. Harry said he knew what to do because he’d been taught how to use a harpoon out in Canada. His one worry was that the spear might not be strong enough to take the strain. Binkie was there, too; said he’d shoot the swine if things got out of hand. I don’t know how he thought he could help—he’d only got his revolver on him in any case, and even if you had enough gun, what can you do when your man is out there practically locked in the bugger’s arms? Well, the idea is that if you can stand up to all that, you must have the qualities of the beast you’ve conquered. I’m not so sure but what they’ve got a point.”

“Of course they do, if you’re being tested for a world where those qualities will be useful.”

“Yes, yes. That’s going, too. It all went in my lifetime, really. Soon it’ll be nothing but dust and poachers, and politicians in the town. The mosquitoes will live through it and the tsetse and the bloody parasites in the water, but precious little else.”

*

At times he felt that he was serving an apprenticeship as a professional hunter. He was collecting hints about wind direction and cloud formation, how to read the landscape, how to forecast weather conditions and the presence of game, how to listen. He learned that when you threw out stones to determine where a big cat was hiding in the long grass, a lion would grunt or growl if you hit him, but a leopard wouldn’t. All day long, each minute, you had to keep your attention at its peak. Everything was a sign to be interpreted; a different kind of reading from what he was used to. On the day when he shot his first buffalo, he found out for himself that a lot of noise usually meant danger, but so did complete silence: as they went in to get it, all sound ceased. He knew that when the animal broke out upon him, the noise would be tremendous and it would be right on top of him. They made their way forward very slowly, stopping every so often, waiting and listening. He held his breath until he thought he’d burst. And when the moment came, the animal wasn’t quite so near as he had imagined, nor coming at him quite so fast, but it did seem to be moving with a massive, undeflectable solidity, like the engine of an oncoming train. He stood up straight and emptied everything he had at it until it knelt down exactly two yards away from his feet and Ian let out a whoop of joy. Stan laughed.

He had begun to understand what had tormented him about the war. The reasons weren’t what he had believed. His fear and self-disgust had come from other sources: his brother, the rest of the family. The question of death itself had not caused any trouble. He now knew it was possible and often natural to enjoy killing. A great many men felt the same way; and quite a lot of women too, no doubt. That didn’t mean you were a sadist or even that you were
cruel, just that if you were out on the hunt, killing made you feel slightly better afterwards rather than slightly worse. You only had to know what you were doing, and why.

Perhaps his attitude to the animals would change if he stayed in the country for a long time. Maybe he’d begin to feel he could leave them alone. And then he might become like Ian and Nicholas, and—even later—think it was a shame to kill. But not yet. He was still intoxicated by the life of the chase and the moment when he sighted along the line, like looking down a road he was going to travel on, seeing a living creature standing there and crossed at the place where it would die.

When you squeezed the trigger, you captured that life. On the instant of being no more, it became yours forever. It really was true, he told himself: when you killed a thing, you became its owner in a way nothing else was ever owned. You equated yourself with the priest making a blood-sacrifice and with the drama released by his act. What was death otherwise, more than the enfeeblement of old age or sickness? Otherwise it had no meaning.

He didn’t consider that there was a point of view belonging to the one marked out to die. To kill for food, to kill for fun or an idealistic cause—all were different to the killer. For the victim there was no variety. Dead was dead, just as dirt was dirt, without qualification.

Every once in a while he found himself thinking about his job—the college, lectures, people he worked with. One day the notion came to him that he might not go back. He could even do what that other maverick professor had done, and end up with money instead of scholarly accuracy. When the air was like this, the sky, the health of his body—anything was possible.

He began to become very attached to Pippa and Ian. He felt more at ease with them than with his parents, who were about the same age. And being with them put the idea of his mother and father into his mind. He thought over old parts of his life as though coming to them in a new way. One late afternoon he returned to camp and saw Millie too as if he’d never met her before. For a moment she looked so beautiful that she took his breath away, like some ordinary object that had turned and caught the sun, to become suddenly dazzling, blinding. And yet, she was the same. He had just never seen her like this, not even when they were first married.

He thought:
Well, we’ll start all over. We wondered how to get together again and it looks as though it will just happen, like the estrangement itself.

As he reached out towards her later that night, she drew her arm away from under his hand and told him, “I can’t any more,” the first time in their marriage that she had ever refused. Sometimes in the past he had suspected or known she hadn’t wanted to, but she’d never said so.

He would have to take it easy, fix some time to think about the long talk they had been putting off for years. He was the one who had avoided that, finally. He hadn’t been able to face it. They’d never even settled their thoughts on the subject of having children.

When they married he had assumed that she’d want to start a family straight away. She had no other interests and no other plans. That was the natural thing: he’d go on with his work, she’d take care of the children. Then, they didn’t have any. He thought they should go to a doctor. The moment he suggested it, she exploded. She wouldn’t go. “You do it,” she had told him. He had gone. He was sure he wasn’t the one, but as soon as he got to the doctor’s
office, he felt terrible.

As it turned out, there had been no need. Everything was normal. He was fine. “Shall I make an appointment for your wife?” the doctor had asked. “I think I’d better have a talk with her first,” Stan had said. The doctor told him that it could be any one of a number of things, or a combination: a slight infection, a blocked tube, even an allergic reaction to the husband’s sperm, or, of course, some psychosomatic change in the metabolism.

“If there’s an aversion—”

“On the contrary,” Stan had said.

And Millie had asked later, “What for? So we can find out whose fault it is? Never mind. I’m sure it’s my fault. Everything always is.”

He hadn’t wanted to force her to find out, especially since he was seeing someone else at the time; that wouldn’t have been right, even though it would have taken her mind off whatever suspicions she might develop. She had been so savage, unreasoning and ugly when he raised the matter again that he didn’t know her any more. So, he had left the subject alone. It became a question that got lost with time. But he hung on to his disappointment. And he turned it into an excuse for continuing to be unfaithful: because something was lacking in his marriage, and he had to make up for it. He knew even then that that was the kind of reasoning he was using, but he didn’t feel guilty.

Years like that. He hadn’t been able to talk to her and she didn’t seem capable of picking herself up out of the dark place into which she’d fallen. Yet he never got to the point where he threw it in her face. He never told her that he had been to the doctor.

Now they would have to straighten everything out. That, too. They could keep going the way they were, or
they could adopt children. No divorce—he knew now that he had been wrong about that. A divorce was out. At last he was touched. He had fallen in love with her again. And she was right: unless they talked to each other, nothing would ever be any good.

*

The Fosters’ friend, Dr James, who was medical officer of the district, passed through on his way from town, dropped off some mail for them and stayed to gossip. In the middle of cocktails, Millie got up and went back to her tent to bring Pippa a stamp. She picked up her own letters for America and was heading towards the big tent again, when a young man—a stranger in the camp—stepped up to her.

“For you, masaba,” he said. He handed her an envelope that had been folded in half and was blank except for her name. She took it, thanked him, and wondered if she should give him something.

“I will take a reply,” he said, holding up his hand against payment.

She opened the envelope, saw who it was from, and went back to her tent to read it. She wrote a quick answer.

“Tell him his letter made me very happy,” she said to the man. “Are you sure you were given enough for mine, too?”

“Yes, it’s my great pleasure I am chosen, an honour to carry your words to him. He’s waiting.” He rolled up the letter, pinched it down the sides and inserted it into his breast pocket. She thanked him once more and crossed to the dining tent, where she returned to her usual place.

Alistair James sat in one of the extra canvas-backed chairs and held a dry martini in his hand. Pippa said to
him, “But how extraordinary, Alistair.”

“Not a bit of it. Everyday occurrence. Poor child, she’s only just out of medical school. Priceless training, of course, if her nerves can take it. Back there in the so-called civilized countries they don’t let one approach anything more complicated than an appendectomy till one’s forty. Send them out to the colonies when they’re twenty-three and no one gives a damn what you do.”

“The colonies,” Pippa said. “Really.”

“It’s still the way they think of us.”

“What happened?” Ian asked.

“Oh, she coped. Scalpel in one hand, textbook in the other. No choice.”

Millie asked, “What was it?”

“Teenage mother with rickets, been in labour nearly three days. Clearly a Caesarean, but Carrol had never done one. Lovely job, mother and child doing well, Carrol’s the star of the show out there. They spat all over her for good luck—revolting custom. I saw her the next day. She was in a dreadful state. Nerves shot to pieces. Everything was all right during the operation, you see, but afterwards she began to realize what it would have been like if things hadn’t gone according to plan.”

Stan asked some questions about the incidence and distribution of certain illnesses among the population and how they had changed over the past fifty years or so. Alistair spoke of the epidemic of venereal disease and gave it as his opinion that time spent in worrying about the atom bomb was time wasted, when jet travel presented such an unbeatable method of spreading any infection nurtured in overcrowded slums. He then inquired after the Foster grandchildren and the leopard cubs, expressed interest in Stan’s theory (towards which he could supply
no evidence), and came back to Carrol, who turned out to be the wife of the American amateur balloonist.