Binstead's Safari (16 page)

“They were singing it. They were telling your story. The story of the lion's bride.”

“I think I'm going out of my mind,” Stan said. “Millie got here after the cult was well established. How could they know all that about her, anyway?”

“In country places, everyone always knows everything about everybody,” Millie said. “Even if they don't, they make it up.”

Stan said, “Look, Nick, I came here to test the validity of a thesis, to find out about a religious cult on the other side of the world, and when I get there and I'm supposed to be right in the centre of it, I find out they're singing ritual songs about my wife. This just can't be.”

“It's curious, certainly,” Nicholas said.

“Curious? It's crazy. It's totally impossible.”

“Why shouldn't people sing songs about each other?” Millie said. “Is it so different from painting a picture of somebody? I did that picture of the man shooting down the balloon, and Robert thought it was like magic. Now you think this is so strange. It seems all right to me.”

Stan said, “To me it seemed like they were ready to hustle you away into some private little ceremony where you might have been chopped up into pieces and fed to the faithful, for all I know.”

“That's pitching it a bit strong,” Nicholas said. “Couldn't it be that the song was there before, and that they decided to put Millie's biography into it?”

“What was it about that thing you've got on? It looks like just a gold chain.”

“It comes from this part of the world, or near here,” Nicholas said.

“I thought you said you bought it in London, Millie.”

“That's right.”

“Well, I guess in London you can buy things from anywhere. But if it does come from around here, what a coincidence. That's like one in a million. Even more.”

*

During the crowding, Pippa had been elbowed in her bad eye. She hadn't told anyone at the time but when they returned to camp she said she'd like to have a sandwich in her tent and a long rest flat on her back.

The others had lunch together and looked through the mail that had arrived while they were out. There was a letter to all of them from Alistair, enclosing a short note from Jill to Nicholas. Nicholas read it and said he was going to go in to see her as soon as they got a glimpse of the lion for Stan. “It's like a child's letter,” he said. “‘Dear Nick, I am very well. I hope you are well.'”

There was a letter to Millie from London, to confirm the sale of her Aunt Edna's hatpin collection. She waved it at Stan.

Nicholas opened the last envelope addressed to him. It was from Darleen, and asked if he—in his capacity as tour operator—could give her Otis's address, because he had disappeared.

“I'll bet he has,” Stan said.

After lunch, he wanted to work on his notes. Millie moved into the tea tent to take a nap and then arrange her paints. Nicholas joined her. He sat on a packing case and looked through one of the flower catalogues. He said, “I thought I recognized the necklace the first time you put it on. They made it for him at his village to thank him for something, I forget what. He always wore it; under his shirt, but it was visible where it went across at the top. I thought he'd hit a run of bad luck in town and sold it to pay off some debt or other. But then you said you'd bought it in London.”

“He gave it to me,” she said.

“He wouldn't have given it to just anyone.”

“No. It was like a wedding ring. I could tell you more, but he's dead.”

Nicholas nodded. He picked up a tube of paint, turned it around, and put it back. He began to go through all the tubes in the box.

She said, “You're upset about your letter. But it's good that she's still able to think about doing something practical like writing. It's a good sign.”

“I suppose so. I sometimes feel I'd like to chuck the whole thing.”

“I know. And then you're ashamed of yourself, and so on. It's going to take a long time. Those are Pippa's special paints. I'm not even supposed to get near them. I hope you didn't squeeze any of them.”

“No, only toothpaste.”

“Can you paint?”

“No more than what they taught us in school.”

“That puts you in my league. I challenge you to a picture race.” She gave him a pad of paper. “And a brush, there. These are the right paints.”

“I can't think of anything.”

“Anything in the world—animal, vegetable, mineral. You're free to choose.”

“All right.”

Millie began a picture of one of the ballets she'd gone to in London. They faced each other, so that she couldn't see what Nicholas had chosen to do. Her painting was ready while he was still at work. She got up and moved behind him and looked; he was making a picture of an African landscape with a house in the centre, and people standing around it. She thought it must be his own house and his family before Jill had the breakdown. He was so taken up with the scene, especially the small figures of the people,
that he didn't look up when she left or even appear to realize she had been there.

*

The sun moved westward, the camp was quiet. Stan gave up tinkering with his tape recorder, which had been broken during the pushing and shoving at the village. He put his notebooks away and said to Millie, “You know, I didn't tell you about it, but all during this trip, as soon as we got to Africa, I've been thinking a lot about my parents. And about Sandy.” He had actually started to think about them before Africa, in London. But it would only confuse things to say so.

“Yes?” she said.

“I kept feeling so angry against them and against everything else. I thought it was their fault that maybe my life wasn't what I wanted it to be. But it's all right now.”

He tried to explain to her how he had gradually been working through all the unseen side of his life until at last some kind of pattern had stood out clearly to him and he could accept everything. The Fosters had taken the place of his parents and because of them he could think of his mother and father without resentment and forgive them for all the things he had held against them and which they had probably never even suspected. In addition to that, the presence of Nicholas was beginning to exert some kind of healing power over the spite and envy he had felt against his brother.

And, he thought, possibly even the time spent with Jack in London—that too had been necessary, and was in its turn being exorcized by the hunt for this man Lewis's true story. He should never have doubted his ability to shape his own present and future. He ought to have changed his
way of living years ago.

He said, “You know, I've been thinking of giving up the academic life.”

“Yes, that might be a good thing. All your working life you've studied these stories. Why?”

“It's a true picture of the world. The poetic world, not what we see around us. There isn't any place for heroes there.”

“I'm sure there is, if you look. There are always going to be heroes. As long as there are challenges or dangers or injustices. But that wasn't why you went into that particular field, was it—to study heroes?”

“Are you being sarcastic?”

“Of course not. I'm just asking. You know me: I never think of the really good remark till about a week afterwards. Anyway, if I wanted to be sarcastic, it's much too late.”

“Don't say that. Please. Nothing's too late.”

“We'll see,” she said. “I think I'm going to try to sell my paintings as a business. You know: for a living.”

“You can't. That's all changed now. The baby changes everything.”

“It'll be freelance, part-time.”

“Even if it's part-time, you won't have time for it.”

“You know, Stan, I'm still not sure if we're getting a divorce or not.”

“Are you crazy? Of course not. Not now.”

“Oh. The baby?”

“Of course, the baby. What do you think?”

“What I think is that the continuation of our marriage depends on whether or not we can get along together. And if we can't, it's going to be much worse with a baby than it ever was without one. Like I said.”

If she ever did try to do something about a divorce, he'd find some way of getting custody of the child. He wouldn't threaten unless she became completely unreasonable. He'd wait. And she'd come to her senses. After all, she didn't really mean it; this was a whim, like any other whim of a pregnant woman. She felt powerless to resist the force of nature within herself, so she was wielding as much power as she could over him. Better not say that, either. A few years ago, he would have. He could have explained anything to her and she would just have said, “Yes, Stan.”

It would be all right. She had become so different already. That was why she had been refusing him and been distant, as though she were constantly listening for something. It was just the child, that was all. Perhaps that was the cause of everything else, too—her new beauty, her ease and charm with strangers, her radiance towards the rest of the world and her ability to draw everyone to her. It was the pregnancy. Even her clumsy paintings had about them a delightfulness that spoke directly to other people; they were part of some living design.

It was important that he too should find such a design for himself. It seemed to him now that he had been searching for it, without realizing, for many years.

And now, so he believed, he had found the key at last in the history of this character Lewis, a man about whom people had fantasies. The story of Lewis would be the basis of his best work—a popular study of the mysticism of leadership,
The
Life
of
a
Hero
:
how that life became set into phrases and rituals and scenes to be acted out, how people talked about it. He would outline its development up to the stage where the discussion of events in the life became religion—a chain of symbols with their own rhythm and pattern, a large and potent drama to which the smaller
lives of ordinary people made constant reference.

But the truth, the real story, was that the man had been just an opportunistic exploiter of black labour and credulity, and perhaps tribal prejudices too. A con man. He hadn't been any more of a hero than Sandy.

*

They all met by the tea tent. Ian said something felt strange about the morning; he could tell that none of his men wanted to see the thing through. They were convinced that the lion was an emblematic figure and that it would never harm them if they left it alone. It was good luck. To hunt it would be a bad thing.

“Not religious, exactly,” he said. “Let's say the idea they have is one of superstitious reverence. They consider it a magical being.”

Nicholas said, “Well, I don't know that one can blame them so much. He rather has that look about him.”

The sky turned from black to grey, from grey to an ebbing back of the darkness and then to a true balance between light and shade. Nicholas said, “Millie, the lion always walks towards you. He may be looking for your scent, or a sight of the clothes and colours you wear, or your face, your hair, some such thing. Would you mind walking to and fro? Only just here—it won't be far away. We'll be able to protect you at every moment. You might draw him out, if he's there. It's all right, Stan. Look, you can see.”

“Okay,” she said. She stepped forward, although she hoped in spite of her nervousness that the lion would never be hurt and especially would never be caught. It would be better off dead than captured. This lion was entirely different from any others she had seen in zoos, and even
from all the other wild ones around them on the safari. She was pretty sure that Nicholas felt the same: he'd shoot to kill if he had to, not to capture.

She began to walk out from the circle of tents, away from cover, backwards and forwards. The air was cool and sharp, the stars fading, grey-bluish light all around turning paler. It was on a morning like this, many years ago—back in her childhood—that she had been running for a train with her parents and sisters, all of them carrying luggage. They had missed the train. And after the disappointment of the moment when they knew it was gone, her father, she remembered (who had laughed), told them that there would be another train and they'd catch that one instead. There was always another train, until one day the last one came and that was your only chance. Her father hadn't told them that part.

Stan,
she thought,
this is the story you want. It's always been the same story, all along. And I forgive you, what you did to me, and to us. Everybody does those things, me too—how can people help it? It's all a mess. I'm not sorry. In spite of everything, I wouldn't take back the beginning years.

To her left, from out of the twilight, behind the shape of Nicholas's tent, she heard a cough.

She stopped. The others had heard too, but waited to see what would happen next. She took a step forward and to the left. Nicholas, with Ian close behind him, began to glide ahead in a silent, stooping walk. Stan approached from his side, but more diffidently, breaking his stride every few seconds to peer around him.

They saw Millie, like a shadow, move as though floating or swimming, and then halt. The lion gave a deep, echoing cough, for which Stan had been stretching his hearing so hard that he didn't immediately realize the sound was
there.

She stayed where she was. And then, just as the sky started to brighten, they saw the lion pace heavily from around the back of the tent and pad slowly forward towards her.

Ian drew in his breath. Ajuma whispered something to himself. Pippa sat silent and worried. Stan could hardly believe what he was seeing: it was a tremendous animal, enormous and wonderfully embodying all the majesty anyone would expect a lion to have, but which the real ones seldom possessed. A lion of lions.