Binstead's Safari

by Rachel Ingalls

  “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.

&nbs
p; 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.

  “She’ll be glad of it later,” he said. “My God, what an opportunity. The best hospitals in the world couldn’t give one the experience. She’s seeing it all. Shame about her husband.”

  “Oh?” Ian said.

  Stan asked, “The one in the balloon?”

  “Eddie. And the Swede is Bernhard. Bernhard’s all right. A bit of a dreamer.”

  “Geoffrey said he had his head in the air,” Pippa told him.

  “And so he does. Eddie’s more the practical type. I hope he stays up in the balloon till she finishes her contract.”

  “Distracting influence, husbands,” Stan said.

  “Well … that’s not it. It’s really Bernhard’s girlfriend, a little girl, very wild and excitable. I thought she was a child when I first saw her. She drives along behind them with the provisions and replacements, but what she really likes is going up in the balloon.”

  “Hear, hear,” Pippa said. “I adored my trip. Ian is utterly illogical about the matter.”

  “Frightful things. Unsafe.”

  “Quiet and floating. Lovely.”

  “Float to your death in silence, says satisfied customer.”

  “Well?” Millie asked.

  “You’re quick, aren’t you? Well. Well, when the little girl goes up in the balloon, it seems they all, all three of them—I don’t know if it’s some imported Scandinavian custom. Her idea was that she didn’t want to be without Bernhard and wasn’t going to be, so if Eddie wanted to go, or stay, or join in, he could please himself.”

  “Oh, my,” Ian said. “Another scandal. This is a marvellous country for scandals nowadays. We should have told you.”

  “Every country is,” Pippa said.

  “Naturally, he joined in. And now he wants to stay in the balloon all the time. Oh, not quite. He wanted to tell Carrol about it. ‘Make an honest break with her,’ he said. I talked him out of that, but I don’t know. They’re so young. Only children, really. It’s extraordinary.”

  “And you’re such an old man, Alistair,” Pippa laughed.

  “Well, older than that.”

  Stan said that as a matter of fact he thought it sounded great, like cruising around tropical islands in a yacht and making love all the way across the ocean.

  “One wouldn’t feel comfortable,” Ian said. “No. What happens if they’re all going at it like the clappers and a breeze slaps them against the hillside? Or down into the trees. Not my idea of romance.”

  The doctor stayed for lunch. Afterwards he lit a pipe and remembered more news he’d picked up on the grapevine. He also said that he’d had a long meeting with Nicholas at the hospital. And Nicholas certainly had enough on his plate, as the Whiteacres had at last arrived in town, blowing all their trumpets. Everyone had heard about them. Alistair wished the company luck and said they were going to need it.

  “I’ve never seen Nick lose his temper, but how he manages not to with that lot is beyond me.”

  “I once saw Nicky lose his temper,” Pippa said. “His eyes got bluer and bluer, they were like electric lights, and his hair went dark; one minute it was fair, the next minute brown. It was just the perspiration making it wet. No other sign.”

  “No trouble with the boys?” Ian said.

  “I’m sure it’s all in the letter. They’re having rows. Loud, public—you know. They go out looking for people to use as an audience, then they stage a bigger and better row. They’re with an enormous number of other people. And they keep adding more.”

  “Poor Nick,” Pippa said. “Not his sort of crowd at all. As if he hadn’t enough worries already.”

  They walked out into the open to say goodbye. The light around them was like echoes of the sun’s heat throwing itself down to the ground. The sky burned from all its edges. Alistair waved and the driver started up the engine. He was the same man who had given Millie her special note.

  *

  In the evening, Stan leafed through an offprint he’d been sent by a colleague in Philadelphia and Millie read a paperback travel book.

  Ian muttered over Nicholas’s letter until Pippa took it from him. He asked, “Do you think she’ll ever be well?”

  “Yes, of course,” Pippa said.

  “Once people crack—”

  “Yes, my dear, I know. That’s another one of those Victorian truisms, isn’t it?”

  “I just don’t know what poor old Nick is going to do.”

  Millie said, “I guess the hardest part is going to be afterwards. When they start to see the effect it’s had on the kids. But if they really work together—”

  “That’s it. How can he drop his work and go look after her for a few years? He can’t. It won’t be much good wet-nursing her through a breakdown if they have to sell the house and starve.”

  “And Nicholas has no qualifications for another job?”

  “Leave the business? Oh, not Nick. It would kill him. It’s his life.”

  So, Millie thought, it’s the wife, not the job, that’s expendable. Just like home.

  Pippa talked about the children. She said that little Elsie was mad about Alistair.

  “And about Harry,” Ian said. “But a lot of grown women are too, of course.”

  “She’s a prey to infatuations. She falls in love with people. It’s rather embarrassing, somehow. A child.”

  “Maybe she’s lucky it comes to her so easily,” Millie said. “I’ve only been in love twice in my life, but some people never stop. And it’s pretty much the same at any age, except it means more later. She probably needs attention, that’s all.”

  Twice, Stan thought.


  “Well, I’ll write to Nick,” Pippa said. “Nothing much else one can do. We’ll see him soon. Alistair’s the one who can tell him what he needs to know.”

  “The medical part of it,” Millie said. “But if a lot was circumstantial, there’s another side to it. It sounds like she’s an ordinary nice woman except for her condition.”

  “Oh, she is,” said Pippa.

  “Except for her condition,” Ian repeated.

  Millie said to Stan, “You’ve always told me witch doctors treated the whole case: family, thoughts, job, as well as the bodily ailment, so in some ways they’re better doctors.”

  “Me?” Stan felt himself go numb. It was possible he had once said something like that. He couldn’t remember. It seemed to him he had filled years of his life saying useless things to people who looked up to him, or whom he would have liked to convince of his superiority. He hadn’t convinced her, though. He had made her unhappy and she’d thought he was contemptible.

  Ian said, “Witch doctors. That’s a load of old cobblers. They ladle out a bowl of gruel and tell you the guilty man is the only one who’ll die of it, and you find out later that’s the cup he’s put the cyanide in. They’re a fly lot.”

  Pippa held up the top sheet of the letter. “What a time he’s having,” she said. “I can hardly untangle the cast of characters.”

  “I’d soon sort them out.”

  “Yes, that’s why I’m glad you’re here. It’s hard on Nick, but at least he won’t send them packing. It’ll mean a change of routine,” she said to Millie. “He says there might be more people than we’d expected. The Whiteacres are bringing friends.”

  “Extra friends, extra hunters,” said Ian. “If they’re planning to shoot.”

  “Sounds to me as though they won’t be in any condition to shoot, probably be staying in the tents all day, sleeping off the night before. Let me see. Two other couples. One young pair, Martha and Bill; they’re engaged. Then, a friend of Mr Whiteacre’s uncle: Otis Stevenson. They ran into each other on the first day in town. He has a girl with him named Darleen.”