Binstead's Safari Page 4

  “Come to our house tomorrow night,” the colonel suddenly announced.

  Millie looked at the Fosters, who both gave tiny, almost imperceptible warning movements against the invitation. Stan said that they would only have that one day left and were planning to set out the day after tomorrow, in the morning. Armstrong told him that in that case, they must certainly come, meet all the neighbours.

  “Don’t tell me Ian isn’t having a shauri for you. No? That’s no more than I’d expect. Well, well, you’ll have to come to ours. Can’t have you going off on safari without meeting anyone first.”

  Stan accepted the invitation and also the offer of a drive back to the hotel.

  The men moved towards the porch. Armstrong talked with Ian, while Stan accompanied Hatchard to look at the leopards. Millie stayed behind in the hallway with Pippa.

  “Is he always so definite?”

  “We call him Colonel Headstrong,” Pippa whispered. “His wife’s the only one who can keep him under control. It’s partly the climate, I think. He’s not so bad, really. It’s just his way.” She gave a shrug and made a little gesture that Millie decided must mean drink. “But his friends—”

  “You mean the party?”

  “Not our sort of thing. Very loud, very crowded. Hundreds of strangers shrieking at each other, spilling their drinks, wandering off into the shrubbery.”

  “I don’t think I’ve been to a party like that since I was in my twenties. All I can remember is that they’re wonderful for the first hour and a half. The trick is to force yourself to leave early.”

  “Or not go at all.”

  The men had stationed themselves at the front. The driver held a door open for the colonel. Millie said, “You are coming on the trip, aren’t you? Bring the paints and come. Please.”

  “I haven’t even begun to think how I can leave the house for so long.”

  “But you’re going to?”

  Pippa shook her head, laughed a little, and said yes, of course she was coming; life was too short to waste time trying to find excuses for not doing the things you really wanted to do.

  They walked out to the car, where Ian stood talking to Stan. The colonel and the doctor were already sitting inside, the colonel in front with his driver, the doctor in the back. Millie and Stan got in with the doctor.

  As they moved off, Armstrong said, “Good man, Ian. Known him forever. Knew him when he was a boy, working for Odell.”

  “Who’s Odell?” Stan asked.

  “He started the firm. He was one of the grand old men.”

  A silence followed, into which Millie suddenly said, “Dr Hatchard, are you related to the author, Rupert Hatchard, who wrote a book called In My Sights?”

  Armstrong slewed around in his seat, saying, “The lady’s read your book, Binkie. Jolly good.”

  “Then you are?” Millie said.

  “Yes. A poor thing, but mine own. Nothing much to it.”

  “Oh, but I thought it was very good. And lots of wonderful stories, too. I was really scared by the one about the ants.”

  “Oh, that.”

  Armstrong laughed. “That’s one of Simba Lewis’s. Considerably cleaned up, I might add.”

  “And the one about the flamingoes,” Millie continued.

  “That one as well, wasn’t it?” asked Armstrong.

  Hatchard laughed too and said, “Yes. I wouldn’t dare put in the originals.”

  “But won’t this man mind if you use his stories?”

  “No, everyone here knows. And I asked him. ‘Right you are,’ he told me, ‘clean it up and bung it in, two per cent of the advance—cash, no tax—and we’ll call it a bargain.’”

  “Does he write any books himself?”

  “Harry Lewis?”

  “They wouldn’t print it if he did,” Armstrong said. “Remember that letter he sent to the papers?”

  “And I liked the title,” Millie said.

  Stan thought: Somebody else probably wrote the title, too.

  “Are you working on another book?”

  “Well, yes. I had thought of it. The first one went so well, the publishers asked for another. This one’s mainly about elephant.”

  “That sounds good. Do you have a title yet?”

  “No, I’ve thought of several, but can’t settle on one. Any suggestions?”

  Millie said, “Well, I can only think of one, but I’m sure it’s been used before, because it’s so obvious. You could just call it They Never Forget, or something like that.”

  Armstrong said, “That’s not bad.”

  “I won’t ask for two per cent,” she added. The two men laughed loudly. During the rest of the ride, she talked about her trip through the game park. Armstrong planned a similar excursion for Stan the next day; he was peremptory. Stan had to acquiesce.

  They said goodbye at the hotel entrance. Millie waved, Stan gave a kind of casual salute and turned around. He said, “What do you want to do? I’m still flaked out from the plane.” He yawned.

  “We haven’t seen all the town yet. It would be a shame to miss it if we’re going to be leaving, day after tomorrow. Let’s explore.”

  He would rather have taken a short nap, but this wasn’t like London; here she really would feel lost wandering around alone.

  “All right.”

  “And we could try some fancy place for supper. How’s the money holding out?”

  “Oh, it’s all right.”

  “Eat things we aren’t going to be able to get when we’re out in the wilds.”

  They walked without heading anywhere in particular and looked at all the extraordinary things that they’d have taken for granted if they hadn’t been tourists. Millie’s eye was caught by a row of blue-flowered bushes that grew on the traffic islands in the middle of the street. Everywhere there was something worth noticing; a man in the distance walked by with a monkey sitting on his shoulder, and she turned her head as two boys passed, one covered with red dye and wearing a black cloak. His friend carried a spear.

  Stan said, “What got into you there? That repulsive man—gushing over his book. ‘What a wonderful title.’ It sounds like just a lot of rewritten anecdotes other people told him.”

  “No, it begins with a long chapter on the nature of sight and vision. He’s an eye doctor. And it isn’t that he’s repulsive at all. He’s just very lonely, almost suicidal. I bet the colonel is practically the only friend he has.”

  “What did you do, pick all this up on some kind of ESP broadcast?”

  “Why did you accept the invitation if you felt like that? Couldn’t you see the Fosters warning us away?”

  “Was that what it was? I thought there was something. Well, the colonel seemed all right. He was the one who was offering.”

  “The colonel’s a windbag, but kind of a sentimental old thing, I expect, underneath all that haw-haw-haw act.”

  “Wow, you’re really coming out with them today, aren’t you? I thought Pippa Foster was nice, anyway.”

  “Very nice. One of the nicest people I’ve met.”

  Stan was moved and vaguely upset. She had never expressed herself like this before. She had never expressed anything. Suddenly she was giving out judgements. It amused him a little, but at the same time almost made him feel nervous.

  They stopped by a camera shop. He looked in at the ranks of photographic equipment. “That’s a thought,” he said. “You didn’t even bother to bring your camera, did you? All we’ve got is my old one.”

  “I told you. I want to look. I don’t really want to shoot.”

  “This is cameras, Millie, not elephant guns.”

  “Same thing. Once you shoot it, it’s dead.”

  “Right, that gets rid of quite a lot of twentieth-century culture.”

  “I don’t mean movies. They’re meant to be fake. They’re like the theatre’. I mean—when you look at something, that’s real. When you take a picture of it, that’s an interpretation. Like keeping a diary. It’s a distortion
of reality one stage beyond the natural one.”

  “What about documentaries?”

  “No such thing. Impossible.”

  “Oh, really. Well, that’s interesting.” He almost said he wondered what Jack would have to say to that. She would wonder, top. And why he hadn’t introduced them straight away. Of course it was understandable why he hadn’t wanted to do it after his first meeting with Jack, but perhaps right from the beginning he’d had some idea what might happen. Maybe he’d wanted it to. That kind of thing probably went on a lot. You never thought about some corners of your own world until you had experience of them or knew people who lived that way. And, after all, it hadn’t been so different from what used to occur in many countries during fertility rituals. In some places it was still part of the culture.

  She said, “Don’t you remember that documentary about the insane asylum?” He had taken her to see it at a time when she was beginning to think she might be ready to go out of her mind herself. “What do you think that showed? A true assessment? I thought it was about what was in that man’s head. The one who made the picture.”

  They walked on. She said, “Anyway, I never remember things I’ve photographed. Once I’ve got it, I only remember the photograph. It’s like losing the real thing.”

  He sighed. He glanced sideways at her, but she was looking straight ahead, relaxed and alert to the sights in front of her. She had already picked up a touch of the sun and it looked good on her.

  Everything should have been fine in this beautiful place and on this splendid day, especially when for the first time in years his wife was returning to a state approaching normal life, but as they moved forward, all at once he was gripped by a sense of dread that took the strength out of his legs and made him feel sick all over.

  He had never known anything like it. It went almost as quickly as the time it took to notice it. He was seized, made faint, and emptied as though he’d just thrown up. Then, the instant was gone. And he was the same again.

  He was sure it had nothing to do with his heart or his lungs or anything. The attack had just seemed to rush at him from outside, like the sky dropping on top of him. It was one of the weirdest things he had ever been through; like an hallucination—utterly convincing, and the next moment not a trace there. All that remained was the knowledge that something terrible had come close to him, pushed him to the edge of endurance, and then gone away. It had been so bad for just those few seconds that it had seemed to take from him the capacity to fight back, even to react against it in any way. He had almost doubted his ability to keep breathing.

  “Have you forgotten something?” Millie asked.

  He had gradually slowed down and come to a standstill.

  “No…” he said, and then wondered whether it might be because of the stuff they had all taken in London—whether this was some kind of after-effect. But now that it had passed, he felt all right, only troubled by the question of what the cause could be. It couldn’t really be the altitude either, or changes in the air pressure.

  Millie waited beside him. He stared ahead down the street full of movement and light. She gazed absent-mindedly into the windows next to her. Suddenly she raised her eyes. A man inside the shop, who had been facing out in her direction, lifted his head evidently at the same time, and she found herself looking straight at him, intently. He had a strong face: dark, grey-brown eyes set under straight eyebrows, cheekbones that stood out, a short, irregular nose, over the bridge of which there was a small scar, and there was another tiny mark near his upper lip. He had a two-day stubble on his cheeks and thick, ragged brown hair that grew back away from his forehead. He was wearing an open-necked khaki shirt that had a tear in it near the breast pocket.

  She felt the top of her head go light and seemed to forget where she was. It was peculiar to be looking directly into someone else’s face, with nothing but a pane of glass in between. They were actually near enough—if it hadn’t been for the intervening window—to kiss each other by just leaning forward. The man smiled. And she smiled back, without any strain or embarrassment. She felt that they knew each other now. And she thought that she’d fallen in love with him a little.

  “Let’s go that way,” Stan said. He took her elbow and wheeled her away, started walking, and pointed down the street.

  She half-turned her head as though to look back, but then didn’t. They were too near the windows for her to be able to see anything unless she twisted all the way around. Stan was stepping forward with a jerky quickness unlike his usual easy lope. Strips of sunlight alternated with squares of shade from the awnings. They walked across an open space and she took out a pair of sunglasses from her handbag and put them on. He said he was feeling the lack of exercise; he wondered if he could ask the hotel where he could play a game of squash.

  “I’m sure they could find you a tennis court,” she told him. “And they’ve already got a swimming pool.”

  “That’s right. I forgot about that.”

  What would you do without me? she thought. She’d never say it. Once at a party back home, they had heard their friend Sally Murchison ask her husband, Jerry, what he’d do without her and he had answered, “Rejoice.”

  They passed under an overgrown archway into a small botanical garden, went through to the other side and after a while found several streets full of Indian shops, where Millie looked at miniature painted animals for her nieces and nephews. The toys were all just like the ones she could have bought in London. The type of animal, as well as the workmanship, was Indian, not African. Stan thought it would confuse the kids.

  They found the museum he had been searching for. He set off straight for the palaeontology department he was interested in and left her standing in a corridor. A group of schoolchildren cut her off and after that she spent some time examining insects in glass cases. There was another section on birds, but she hurried through them in order to make sure of meeting Stan. And then she couldn’t find him.

  In the end, she waited outside and he took twenty minutes to come out.

  “I thought you were right behind me,” he said.

  “Interesting?”

  “Yes, fascinating.” He began to talk. They walked back to the hotel slowly, her arm linked in his. She realized that he was more comfortable now.

  He talked on. He thought that maybe things weren’t going to be so bad after all, especially if Pippa Foster was going to be along on the trip to give Millie some way of spending her time.

  At the hotel, they asked about a restaurant, changed, and went out for their evening meal. Millie said later that the people at the other tables had almost distracted her from the delicious food. They heard French, German, Italian and Chinese from their immediate neighbourhood, and there were obviously more languages from other nationalities in the two rooms they walked through to get to their table. In one of the German-speaking parties near them a woman was dressed in some kind of couturier creation: a low-backed, shoulder-strapped gown that curved out into a full-length skirt of lilac watered silk.

  As soon as they were seated, Millie whispered, “I wish I’d had the nerve to go for something like that in London. Something really bright, instead of restrained good taste.”

  “It would look silly.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. It looks great. It looks terrific.”

  “No, it doesn’t. It’s inappropriate.”

  “It’s only inappropriate in a way that makes you wish everybody in the room had dressed up like that. A dress like that makes its own occasion.”

  “You sound like fifty wise sayings from Coco Chanel. A dress like that is an anachronism.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. The study of palaeontology is an anachronism.”

  Stan said, “Look, Millie, a study of the past is not the same as a fashion that’s out of date.”

  “This fashion may be just coming back. You may not have read the right magazines. This woman may be the ace trend-setter of a jet-set you’ve never e
ven heard of. She may at this very moment have a bluebird tattooed on her instep.”

  He started to say something else, when he realized that she was joking, and enjoying herself.

  They skipped the dancing, which was still going on at the hotel when they returned, and made it an early night. That was what Stan called it; early to sleep, rather than early to bed. In the morning he showered and dressed quickly, before Millie was up.

  They passed each other at the reception desk as she was on her way to the dining room for breakfast and he was waiting for Colonel Armstrong’s driver.

  “Have a nice time,” she said.

  *

  Over breakfast she made friends with an old woman named Miller, whose son was doing research on sleeping sickness. Mrs Miller walked with a cane and had dropped a large handbag on entering the room. Millie, right behind her, had retrieved it and suggested that they sit together, since her husband had had to leave early.

  “Unless your family—”

  “Oh no, that’s quite all right. My son is going to visit me for tea later today. By all means let’s sit together. How kind of you to suggest it.”

  The rescued bag contained a great deal of knitting—for the most part children’s sweaters in fine yarn and criss-crossed by complicated designs. Mrs Miller mentioned grandchildren.

  Millie wondered why the son wasn’t offering his mother a place to stay. She even asked if there was a daughter-in-law and was told yes, but always very busy, poor thing. So, either the younger woman didn’t want Mama horning in on their life, or perhaps the son himself didn’t. The old woman was so placid when she spoke of her relatives that it was hard to tell what she was thinking, nor did she act like someone on vacation. Millie suddenly imagined that she might have come out to the country without warning, because she had found out she was ill or dying and didn’t want to be alone.