Binstead's Safari

by Rachel Ingalls

  They moved for the last time, to join the group at the big camp. On the night before, they toasted each other as though they would never meet again, since from that time onward, Ian would be occupied with the Whiteacres and their many guests.

  Their route carried them at one point through true farming country and they saw a great many people and villages, which they had avoided so far in their moves from place to place. Millie was interested. Stan, on the other hand, was offended by this sudden evidence of domesticated civilization in a country he had become used to thinking of as a hunter’s Garden of Eden. The villages contained bicycles, beer parlours, sewing machines, women wearing tailored dresses and men with suits. Scrawny cattle, tended by children, roamed across the outskirts. There were more young people than in the villages he had seen so far; he had been introduced to very traditional, outmoded places, where the sons grew up wanting to get out fast and go to work for the safari companies or for the government, and the daughters had dreams of living a modern life in the big cities.

  The road was used by many groups travelling on foot. An old man, who held a flowered parasol, was one of the few pedestrians to whom Tom gave a lift. There seemed to be an established etiquette about picking passengers up on the road: you didn’t take everyone who asked, otherwise it became like a game. And no very young children, who only wanted rides for fun and then called out to large numbers of their friends to come join in.

  Whether near villages or out on the plains, dust rose around them as they moved forward. Some places were worse than others; often a turn in the road would bring them out into a new stretch of country that almost seemed to be part of a different climate.

  They arrived early in the afternoon, expecting to find a camp stocked with all the people mentioned in the letters they had received, but met only Nicholas himself and the cookhouse crew and gunbearers.

  Nicholas helped with the unpacking. He said, “You wouldn’t believe the explanations. You couldn’t. I shan’t even try.”

  “Joshua knows,” Tom said.

  “Never mind, then. I’ll tell it.” He said that only two days before, Alistair’s friend Carrol, after a final quarrel with Eddie, had driven into town in search of a lawyer. Eddie had gone back to the balloon just in time to be able to hitch a ride with Bernhard’s girlfriend, Karen, while Bernhard himself drove Otis and Martha to town. They had been followed by Darleen, who wanted to return to her duties as Otis’s secretary, and Bob, who had again decided he needed Martha back.

  Stan said, “So now it’s musical cars instead of musical chairs. It must feel like the place is empty.”

  “It feels bloody marvellous. And there’s an even chance it may stay like this for a bit.”

  The Whiteacres, together with friends of theirs named Stone, had gone off to the coast for several weeks. They had fired Jonathan Bean before leaving.

  “Saves me the bother,” Ian said.

  “That was the last straw, Bean. I couldn’t even put it in a letter. Talk—you should have heard him talk. Made me want to wash the camp with carbolic from top to bottom. That whinging voice, and he’s delighted. ‘Oh, I hear you’re having troubles at home, isn’t that a pity!’ I thought of shooting him. God’s truth. Making it look like an accident. Had to keep myself on a tight rein every minute of the day. There was a great temptation to follow precedent and just stay pissed. It’s been sheer bloody hell.”

  *

  The country they were in contained all kinds of animals and so many different terrains that it was as if their camp had been the crossroads for a geological revolution. They had desert, forest, plains, hills and one spot full of streams, trees and meadows.

  Stan now spent most of his time hunting with Nicholas, while Ian went out early with Tom. For the first two days they barely spoke. The next morning, Stan said, “Tell me about the game,” and Nicholas talked, with many pauses so long that they became silences. Stan let him take his time and kept himself from interrupting with too many questions. They ate their lunch in the shade of some trees and rested. Stan nearly went to sleep. He asked about rituals, any ceremonies connected with lion.

  “Oh, Harry is the expert on lion,” Nicholas said. “But there are those initiations. It’s all a bit of a nuisance now. You know, the Whiteacres were expecting to have every kind of show put on for them. They wanted to go to villages the way one would go out to the theatre. Drove me mad.”

  “I guess you can let Ian handle that side of it from now on. He’ll take care of all those things when they come back.”

  “Ian is marvellous with clients. But he sometimes has a filthy temper.”

  “Well, like he says: they’ve paid.”

  Stan leaned back and pulled the brim of his hat down. The world around him grew hotter and whiter, until it seemed to approach incandescence. Everything became silent. And nothing moved; there wasn’t even any dust in the air. He slept lightly for a quarter of an hour. When he woke, Nicholas was sitting just as he had been, staring out into the landscape as though into the future. Maybe he wasn’t seeing what he was looking at. Maybe he was wondering whether his wife had considered him incapable of making a success of their lives. The farm wasn’t bringing in any money, nor was the business doing as well as it should be. That was all right for Ian, who had saved something and had three grown children earning their living, and who was the type who didn’t really give a damn anyway. Nicholas was more like a country boy from back home; slow, sincere, meeting his worries like a man twice his age.

  “Do you know the people in the balloon?” Stan asked. “The Scandinavians?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do they ever take passengers?”

  “Yes. I’ve been up with them. It’s a bit cramped, but they’ve got everything. Full of modern comforts, fail-safe devices, unsmashable whatnots. Not like poor old Pembroke. Interesting to see the place from above.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “What do what look like?”

  “Bernhard and the girlfriend. I actually dreamt about going up in the balloon with them.”

  “He’s my size, more or less. Brown hair, grey eyes. Short beard like the Kon Tiki mask. She’s small, fair, slanted eyes, blue. Looks rather like a blonde eskimo, very wild.”

  “Weird?”

  “No, wild.”

  “I was thinking about the rumour going around, about all of them up there together. Maybe you haven’t heard it.”

  “Oh yes, I’ve heard.”

  “Think it’s true?”

  “If it’s not, it should be.”

  “Oh?”

  “Why not? Makes a good story.”

  “I meant really.”

  “Who knows?”

  “They aren’t the same. In my dream, they looked different.”

  “Makes sense. Dreams are always different. That’s what the word means: something real in another form, everything falsified.”

  Stan started to say it had been the one good dream he had had in the past few weeks, but he stopped. “Do you ever have bad dreams?” he asked.

  “Not any more. I did for a while. Frightful. About the children being killed. About Jill. Then I stopped having any at all.”

  On their way back to camp they took a different route. The road ran along a stand of trees and the slanting sun threw slats of light and dark across their path. It reminded Stan of something. He thought about London again, about Jack, about Nicholas. And about his brother. People forgive you so much if you’re killed in a war. It’s the brave ones who die, everyone knows that. Your photograph goes up on the piano or on the mantelpiece, your medals in the drawer. They especially forgive you for not fulfilling the promise they saw in you. It’s their promise in any case, not yours. And you are spared the failure they put upon you for not becoming their second self.

  For years he had felt angry with himself, and he’d taken it out on Millie. Not till London did he begin to put the blame on his parents and his brother; there was nothing wrong with him—ther
e never had been. It was them, and the way they had treated him. And he had to be free of them, if only it wasn’t too late.

  As they came across the fields, already growing dark, he was again aware of the sense of dread—the suffocating, deathly feeling he couldn’t explain, and which had first fallen across him as he’d stood on the sidewalk with Millie back in town. He was afraid that he might really lose her. He had never seriously thought it before. It was inconceivable. That she should want a divorce—that he could understand. But naturally it would never happen, because it would only be a wish. And yet, nothing was the same now. She herself was like a self-assured and charming woman he’d just been introduced to and whose thoughts he could not guess at. He would have to be as careful about winning back her attention, and approach her with as much guile and tenderness, as if she were a deer in the forest.

  And he would have to go slow. He wanted to say something that night but when they entered the tent, he didn’t know how to begin. He decided to wait.

  He lay in the dark with his eyes open. He thought about Myra. The red jacket she had, the afternoon when his watch stopped, and that day in the early spring when he saw her after squash and she hooked her fingers into the collar of his sweater and asked, “Did little wifie knit you this? Is she sitting at home making doilies?” “Don’t talk like that,” he’d told her, but the truth was that Millie was so dejected and woebegone at the time, such a sad sack that he stayed away from the apartment as much as possible. He was conscious of her ridiculousness even when he could see that she should be pitied. And he had long ago talked himself into condoning his infidelities, even before the question of having children—or not having them—had become such a large, concealed part of their lives. It often seemed to him that by being with another woman he was getting even with Millie for her dreariness. He deserved something better, after all. So, he had not once thought he should feel guilty, not even later about her friend, Sally Murchison—and that really would have been a mess if it had come out. The Murchisons, both of them—Jerry, too—were friends who had known them from the beginning, when Stan had first started at the college. Jerry had been his colleague. He felt badly about it all at once. But at the time, and for a long while, nothing. Only now. Now it was unbelievable to him that he should have acted in such a way. And he was ashamed.

  Biologists talk about the aggressive instincts of animals, he thought, but people themselves take the cake every time. They won’t let a thing alone even after the victims are dead. They stand out among the earth’s population as members of the one species whose hatreds and fears are mostly directed against itself. You’d think they would have died out a long time ago.

  *

  Nicholas sat over morning tea with Millie and Pippa. The women praised the opulent comforts of the Whiteacres’ camp, especially the showers. They had both washed their hair earlier in the morning.

  “It’s sad to have to admit that it should make such a difference,” Pippa said, “but it does.”

  “And for me, it’s shaving,” Nicholas said. “I’m quite content to go about unwashed for weeks, but if I can’t shave, I begin to feel scruffy.”

  “You’ve never wanted to grow a beard like Ian?” Millie asked.

  “Never. Only if I developed one of those skin complaints, or a case of sunblisters.”

  He said there was nothing like tea, then he asked to see some of the works of art. He expressed particular interest in the picture of the balloon and its assassin. Millie said again that she wished she had never had the idea, but he was delighted with the painting.

  “They’re like children’s drawings, I know,” she said.

  “No, they’re not. They’re more like what-do-you-call-it.”

  “Primitive art,” Pippa said. “Folk art. They’re childlike, but never crude or inept. Naïve, that’s the one.”

  “Oh boy. Just like the magazines. And here we have an example of an early attempt.” Millie held out a picture of a zebra. It had an expression on its face like a mule, or perhaps a camel. Nicholas laughed. He kept looking back at the picture and smiling. Millie presented it to him. She said, “That’s what they’re for. When you stop enjoying it, take it off the wall and put something else there.”

  *

  In the afternoon she and Pippa painted, as usual. Pippa quickly became dedicated to a configuration of branches in the near distance and hardly looked up from her work except to check with the landscape.

  Millie doodled for a while, then got up to stretch. As she raised her arms above her head, she suddenly thought that something was about to happen. She pulled her hands back. She felt so dizzy that she almost fell. Everything was silent and she was frightened.

  She turned around once. Nothing had changed. She turned around twice. Robert and Odinga were standing where they had been before, and Odinga’s cousin, Ajuma, was playing a game with two sticks and some stones on the ground. It was all the same as when she had risen to her feet, but something wasn’t right.

  On the way to their tent that evening, Stan shook his shoulders and stood still. Millie asked, “Something wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I just got the creeps all of a sudden.”

  “Me, too. Something someone said today or something I saw, I don’t know—gave me the most horrible feeling. I guess it sort of built up. One minute it wasn’t there, and then it was.”

  “I felt pretty bad yesterday, too,” he said. “I suddenly got really scared that you might leave me. I couldn’t stand it, Millie.”

  “I think you could. When you get used to the idea. It’s just the shock, that’s all. At the moment, you’re used to me being around.”

  “That’s a lousy thing to say.”

  “Oh, Stan. All the lousy things to say I’ve saved up for so many years, and now it’s too late. I’m not even trying. If I say anything, it’s just what I think, that’s all. I’m not trying to hurt you. I don’t even want to any more.”

  “You mean, you did?”

  “Of course,” she said, standing at the entrance of the tent. “Pay you back. It’s natural. You did a real all-out demolition job on me. It succeeded because I loved you. And then when you quit, I started doing your work for you. I was dead on my feet for years. I didn’t wake up till London.”

  She went into the tent, leaving him standing outside and wondering stupidly if her days in London could have been just like his; could she have picked up some people and every night, while he was with the others—was it so crazy? He stepped into the tent.

  “How did London wake you up?”

  “Well, I’ve been talking my head off about it to anyone who’d listen. Romeo and Juliet. Covent Garden. Etcetera.”

  “Oh, that,” he said.

  “It changed my life. I should have seen it years ago.”

  He laughed. He knew it was some kind of game. She was so calm. Playing hide-and-seek, of course. At last she’d learned how. She was teaching him a lesson. That was all right. He’d say, “Yes, I know” and “Forgive me” and eventually she would forgive, as long as he’d been through this period of repenting. It had to be that way, because now everything was falling into place and he realized that what he wanted was the chance to find the happiness he could have had many years ago, if he’d recognized it. And it could only come through Millie.

  *

  Over drinks the next evening, Nicholas joined the Fosters in encouraging Millie to take up the business of painting as a profession. She smiled and said she’d think it over; it wasn’t such a bad idea.

  When they were alone together, Stan said, “We are still married, you know.”

  “But not for much longer.”

  “Look, Millie, you’ve made your point. I haven’t been trying as much as I could have.”

  “Oh, Stan. Now, listen. We’ve both changed a lot. We still know each other pretty well, but in a way we don’t. We don’t have anything to draw on any more. I don’t believe you care about me. It’s as simple as that. I don’t really believe
you ever did. I thought so at the time, and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say I think you did, too, but that’s all over.”

  “Are you crazy? I love you, Millie. Are you saying you don’t love me any more, not at all?”

  “I’m still very fond of you, Stan.”

  “Fond of me. Oh, great. Shove that.”

  “Very fond of you, despite the fact that you can annoy me more than almost any other person I’ve ever met. It hasn’t helped that everything I tried to do, you took special pains to tear down. Something was wrong with the way we organized our family right from the start. I know you have this thing about: if only we’d had children, but believe me, that would’ve made it twice as bad for me. Everybody thinks Jill is in a mess—at least Nicholas is on her side. What I’m trying to say is that for some reason, it made you feel good every time I failed at something—especially when I failed to please you. That meant you were free to go your own way, right? So, we’ve had too many years of that. And now it’s all different, and I’ve come back to being human again. It’s because other people are there around me and you haven’t had the chance to keep tearing me down. Now, I don’t care how we work this. I can go back to town tomorrow morning, or I can move into a different tent, or we can go on like this, but at the end of this trip, we say goodbye.”

  “All those years, you thought I was trying to make you feel unsure of yourself? Tearing you down?”

  “And you succeeded. I wasn’t all that sure of myself, anyway.”

  “Your father once told me you—”

  “Oh, what does my father know about anything? He doesn’t even like women—he only likes his comfort. As long as he’s all right, everything is all right. He’s the baby in the family: he comes first. And she resents it, and we noticed very early on how much she dislikes her life. I used to think, if only I’d gotten out sooner. But now it’s better, and I’m stronger for it.”