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“You see, I've got this theory—”

“I know, Stan. We all know.”

“No, listen. If it's possible that these cults start with a real person, this guy could be it. I've just realized. And he was about to get married, too. It all fits. Tell me some more about him.”

“Not now,” she said. “I want to sleep.”

*

She woke, crying, and put her hands over her eyes. Her body felt tightened and sore. She tried to swallow her sobbing. Stan's breathing was slow and even.

Never see him again. Never be with him. Never anything any more.

All the camp around her was still. Gradually her weeping subsided. And then, she heard a cough outside. She sat bolt upright. It had sounded exactly like Henry, that night before they left town; when he had stood under her window. The last time she had ever seen him. No animal could make a sound like that. No animal except a human being.

Maybe it was Nicholas. That was possible. Probably it was. She turned to her other side and stared into the blackness. She tried to remember. Tears moved hotly across her face, running into her nose, her mouth, her ears.

If you were here, if you could talk. Speak to me now. If we were lying side by side or with our arms circling each other, outside around inside and inside around outside. If I could die.

*

Rupert began the drive back to town early the next morning when it was still dark. Millie was at the car park to say goodbye to him and Nicholas met her on her way to the dining tent. He said, “Are you still out and about, after your fright yesterday?”

“That's right. It wasn't you coughing last night, was it?”

“No. It must have been the lion again. Short of hunting him out, I don't know what I can do about it. Pity, but we can't have a beast like that roaming about the place for long.”

They strolled through the camp as the morning light grew around them. Nicholas moved his eyes to the left and back, to the right and back.

“You really think that lion could jump out on us?”

“I don't think anything. But there's always the danger. It was curious behaviour.”

“Maybe he's attracted by the smell of the skins.”

“I could sit up tonight, try to fire a warning shot across his bows tomorrow morning.”

“Your tent is so far away from everyone else's, Nicholas. It looks like the house of a hermit.”

“Oh. Come see where I've put the zebra.”

She went with him into the tent, which was as large as the one she and Stan had. For one person, there was plenty of room. She sat on the bed and looked over to where Nicholas pointed, at the painting, which had been ingeniously taped to a wire and the wire attached to the canvas. He stood his rifle in the corner and sat down beside her. They both stared at the picture. She cleared her throat, about to start up a conversation, but changed her mind.

She put her hand on his wrist and said, “It's very hard for you without her, isn't it?” He lowered his head until his face almost rested against her neck. He said, “I used to think. When people said they were lonely….” He swallowed. She waited for him to go on. Her wristwatch started to tick loudly. He raised his head. “I used to think it was their own fault,” he said.

*

Stan was ready to leave and was going to join Joshua in the car park, when the world in front of him slowed down. Everything came to a stop. He could hear, but the sound
reached him from far away. He looked out into a blazon of light and tried to concentrate. He stood completely still, hoping for the confusion to pass, for his mind to remember what he had been about to do.
Come
back,
he thought.
Come
back.

And then he was standing there again, on his way to the car park. And, as always, it was as though the thing had never been.

Millie came up to him as he went by their tent.
“Bon
voyage,”
she said. She moved forward, as if preparing to give him a goodbye kiss. He pulled back, and said, “Don't peck at me like that. It's such an insult.”

“You don't like it? Okay.”

“It isn't that I don't. It just isn't enough. Look, I'm feeling totally deprived, Millie. It's bad enough waiting for you to make up your mind about what the hell you think you're doing. And what was that Pippa said at breakfast—some kind of hint about you and Nicholas?”

“Start worrying about Rupert Hatchard. That's my idea of a man I could spend my life with.”

“Oh, very funny.”

“I'm serious. Not the great romance or twin souls that beat as one, but I could be very happily married with him. Never run out of things to talk about, and put up with each other's habits.”

“And you've come to the end of my conversation? Or is it my irritating habits? Don't you think we could still patch up the cracks and keep going for a little while?”

“I don't know. We may have to, I guess. I just don't know.”

“What enthusiasm. How long is it going to take before you do know?”

She gave him a push with the flat of her hand. “Go on,”
she said. “You'll be late at the office.”

He laughed. He felt for a moment that things were going to be all right. And there was something about her at last that made her seem more accessible. He had an idea that she had decided, and that the decision had been to stay together.

He got into the landrover with Nicholas and Joshua. Nicholas said, “I'll drop you two there after I talk with the man in charge. Want to see if I can find a buff Tom told me about.”

They drove in silence until Joshua began to sing softly. Stan blinked at the grassland and trees, the blue sky, the long horizon. Nothing was wrong with his focus now. He'd always had good eyesight. All the good things he'd always had, never given a thought to them, and now it seemed that they were running out. But if Millie stayed, it would have to be all right.

He knew he wasn't sick. Once or twice he'd thought he might have picked up parasites from the food or the water. But that couldn't be the answer. It had started in town. He remembered how his skin had reacted to the sun at first. Maybe that was all it was—an unusual kind of photosensitivity.

*

As soon as they arrived in the village Nicholas singled out an old man to talk to. They discussed something for several minutes. The man twice made a gesture in the air with his arm: slow and final, like the action of a man using a scythe.

Nicholas returned to the landrover and they began to drive on. “What next?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Stan said. “What was he telling you?”

“A lot of codswallop. Shop's closed today. The gods wouldn't like it, or words to that effect.”

“That's great. What did he say exactly?”

“Stan, they've got some business of their own on, or having friends round, or some such—”

“What did he say?”

“He said that these were the days of preparation and they belonged to the king. We could come back another time. In a month, was what he said. Are you joining me for the shoot?”

“Look,” Joshua said. He pointed. Up in the sky the lilac and blue balloon drifted ahead on a course parallel to theirs. “We can drive to where they come down.”

Nicholas shook his head. “Not me. You want to?” Stan said yes; he'd like a trip in the balloon. Nicholas got out into the road and waited for the skinners, who were travelling behind them. Stan and Joshua started out on their own.

They chased the balloon for miles, choking in dust whenever they came to a sharp bend or had to reverse. Joshua waved ecstatically and shouted. He beat his hand against the door.

“They must see us signalling,” Stan said.

“They see us. Sometimes they can't stop. They ride on the lines in the air. They have to follow.”

“They can't turn around?”

“If they come to another line.”

“What is it, like a spiderweb up there?”

“It's like the wind. Lines. We can't see them, but they're there.”

The balloon floated slowly ahead of them until they thought they would be able to cut over to the right and drive across its path. And just then it picked up speed and
flew high into the sky, diminishing so rapidly that it might have been a plane or a rocket.

“Look at her go,” Stan said. “That's amazing.”

Joshua gazed upward. He didn't seem sad or defeated, but for a long time he wouldn't look away from the place where the balloon had been. He told Stan later that he only wanted to see his friends, Bernhard and Karen. The balloon itself made him seasick; he had been up in it once and his stomach had died and died.

They took an easy route home, after trying to detach a prize gazelle from its herd. They were unsuccessful at that too, but Stan didn't mind. Joshua told him a long story about a scorpion, large parts of which, he recognized with pleasure, were almost identical to folktales from Egypt and Mexico.

*

Long before Alistair's landrover pulled up, Millie could see there was someone travelling with him.

“At last,” Pippa said. “Carrol.”

Alistair became shy and flushed as he introduced his fiancée. She was a nice-looking, forthright girl, slightly plump, who had easy manners and evidently liked meeting people. Pippa was delighted with her. Millie, too, wondered why Eddie had become tired of such a wife.

They showed Carrol everything as though she were a visitor from another planet, then they sat down to lunch. Ian said it was a pity that Rupert hadn't stayed.

“He's very broken up about Henry,” Millie said. “I think he just needs to be alone for a while. He only came because he wanted us to get the true story instead of a lot of those rumours going around town.”

“What's this?” Alistair asked.

They went through the story once more. Alistair wanted to know all the details. “There seems to be a terrible amount of homicidal activity in the country at the moment,” he said. “More than usual, I mean.”

“No worse than New York,” Carrol told him.

They changed the subject and talked about making films, and about art. They went to look at the paintings. Millie presented Carrol with a picture of a bird. To Alistair she gave a picture he asked for specially: of a python about to eat a goat, which he referred to as a poodle.

“I shall treasure it,” he said. “The snake looks more apprehensive than the dog. I don't know that one can blame him.”

As they all said goodbye, Millie saw that Alistair had a different driver. She didn't ask why. Now there was no need to know.

*

She sat in front of her paints for a long while, looking at nothing. She thought about walking under the shadows of the trees in town, first dark, then light. She went back to the moment when he put his hand on her arm. She stared down at the ground and tried not to cry. Suddenly she remembered the talk she had had over breakfast in the hotel dining room with Mrs Miller, and how the old woman had said that she believed all life was a single cell. He and she, the animals, the birds and flowers she had painted—she was related to everything now, and to the future. But without him.

“I love colour,” he had said. “I love it. Sometimes out here when it's really hot, it disappears. All the colour just goes, whole bands drop out of the spectrum, like in the
desert. A couple of times recently I've caught myself thinking I miss the snow, but not often, not much. I like being here. Especially now.”

She lifted her paintbrush and thought she would make a picture of a flower she had seen years ago.

He'd said, “It wasn't completely accidental, you know. I had you followed everywhere. There were about twelve of them trying to find out where you were staying, and reporting back to me.”

After a little while, Pippa came and stood by her.

“How's the eye?” Millie asked. “Still okay?”

“All well still, thank goodness. I like that. You have a marvellous memory.”

“I don't think so. I make it up. I can't really remember what the thing looked like, just what impression it made on me. There. Like that. It's too bad Alistair couldn't stay to talk with Nicholas. A letter isn't the same.”

“No. And it would be a great pity if that marriage broke up.”

She's
talking
about
me
being
in
his
tent,
Millie thought. “I think so too,” she said. “I think Nicholas needs all the help he can get. He needs to talk, he needs company. He needs people who like him and don't believe he's failed at anything. He's lonely. He needs not to be isolated. Don't you agree?”

“Well, yes,” Pippa said. “If you put it like that.”

Millie almost told her about Henry, about how she had planned to leave Stan and go away with him.

“Were you married out here?” she asked.

“Indeed we were. The reception lasted for three days. I still have the newspaper cutting. It said we had a ‘tired' wedding cake.”

They found Stan back in camp and telling Ian about
driving after the balloon. Ian kept waving away Stan's fervour. He had had enough of balloons to last any man a lifetime, he said.

It was late, but still there was no sign of Nicholas. They had tea, talked about Alistair and Carrol, and moved to the dining tent, where the evening's drinks had been set out as usual. Stan almost said he hoped everything was all right, but realized in time that it would be another of those things that wasn't done. He asked Millie if she'd like to go up in the balloon.

“Very much. You think the love-nest story is true?”

“Sure.”

Pippa said, “But it doesn't really sound the sort of thing a man would allow his fiancée—well, any decent man, right there in front of him.”

“Well, maybe not. Who knows?”

Who knew anything? Only when it was nearly too late, you looked up and your future went flying away from you, invisible, like Joshua's lines in the air.