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by Rachel Ingalls


  “Ivory wasn’t ever his interest,” she said. “He was a known specialist for lion, not elephant.”

  “He gave Rupert Hatchard nearly all the stories in that book of his about elephants, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, that’s true. But—well, he just wouldn’t do such a thing.”

  “Why not? Beautiful scheme.”

  “He wasn’t like that.”

  “Okay, tell me. What was he like?”

  “I told you already. Direct, simple. If he thought something, he did it. He didn’t sit on his thoughts. Very daring. He didn’t save anything. He lived a hundred per cent. And—he was very ordinary, in a way. I mean, you felt right from the beginning that you’d known him all your life, you relaxed with him. But he also—it’s like what Aunt Edna used to say about special people: he gave out, he shone. Really. I’m sure there’s something in it scientifically, some kind of radiation. That’s why people are called stars, or you say they have star quality—you can’t see it, but it sort of pours off them. When you were with him, you felt that way, too. You started to radiate, too. You felt free. Of course, I’m not sure if a man would have been impressed in quite the same way.”

  “Sounds pretty fancy. You seem to have thought an awful lot about him in such a short time.”

  “Mm. That’s what he was like.”

  “Go on. This is the kind of thing I want.”

  “Is it? Oh, for your research. Well, that’s all. I don’t know what else you want.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Very romantic, but no pretty-boy. Medium height, strong, sort of chunky. His hair—going like this, back away from his face, like the busts of Beethoven. Eyes like … eyes….” She stopped. “He was at that party, standing right next to me. Didn’t you see him?”

  “I can’t remember. I was plastered. Everybody says what a ladies’ man he was. Is it true?”

  “Yes, like a magnet. So much that he never had to do anything with it or even be aware of using it.”

  “But he did use it. He used all that bunch of talents to make a fortune out here.”

  “Stan, when you write up this thesis, are you going to name names and everything?”

  “That’s a thought. I’d better find out about—no, that’s all right. Just leave it out about the poaching. It’ll be okay. But I’ve got to get in and get some tapes of those songs. I think they were trying to keep us away. Nick thinks so, too.”

  After he had put the light out, Millie turned over in her bed. She listened. He was still awake. She said, “Stan, I’m pregnant.”

  There was a long silence, then he said, “I thought you couldn’t.”

  “I know. You thought I couldn’t do anything.”

  “I thought you couldn’t, because I knew it wasn’t me. I went to the doctor right at the start and got checked out.”

  “So did I. Just a few months after we got married.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “You know, I meant it when I told you I was going to leave you.”

  “But you’ve changed your mind.”

  “I don’t know. If I could wave a magic wand and say we’re divorced, I’d do it. Honest. But to go through the whole thing, with lawyers and settlements and moving house—it needs a good reason. More than just lack of … lack of everything. But there isn’t anybody else. There isn’t—yes, okay. We’ll see how it goes. But I’m not doing all the stuff I used to. If you aren’t satisfied, you can do everything yourself, or you get the divorce, if you like.”

  “Just one thing,” he said. “Does this mean I’m still married to the virgin bride, or not?”

  *

  Millie stepped out of the tent to join Nicholas. This time Stan came with her and he brought his rifle. Nicholas saw them approaching, touched his hat, but didn’t speak. The three of them waited.

  It was nearing the time at which the lion normally came into camp to prowl around, when they heard the boys from the cookhouse tent begin to sing.

  The chant grew louder and more insistent, until Nicholas held his hand up, gestured that he’d return soon, and walked off in the direction of the sound.

  From the distance Millie and Stan heard a slight break in the song, voices talking, and the singing continuing more quietly. Then, it was broken again and disintegrated into speech, calling, and the noise of breakfast preparations.

  Nicholas came back. He said, “They don’t like it. They say it should be forbidden to hunt the lion in any way, that it would bring bad luck. I told them we just wanted to scare him off.”

  “What did they say to that?”

  “They boasted that we couldn’t frighten him. I think they’ve taken him up as a sort of mascot. Let’s wait a while longer.”

  Millie said, “Maybe I should get out there and walk around the places where I was the last times I saw him.”

  “No,” Stan said quickly.

  “I think today is finished anyway, but let’s see.”

  The lion didn’t come. At breakfast they talked about it. Stan advanced theories as to why no lion would hang around a camp unless for some purpose.

  “Are they feeding it?” he asked. “Or leaving food?”

  “Don’t be daft,” Ian said.

  “I don’t think it’s such a dumb idea. You said yourself, and Nicholas, that this lion may be a kind of cookhouse pet.”

  “I said mascot, not pet. You couldn’t possibly describe him as a pet,” Nicholas said. “This is a hell of a large lion. Enormous. The finest I’ve seen, I think.”

  “I wonder why he didn’t show up.”

  Pippa turned to Ian. “Perhaps tomorrow,” she said.

  “All right, we’ll all have a go tomorrow.” Ian rose from the table to join Oliver. “And if you want a crack at the best part of today, speak now. Home again by sundown.”

  Pippa shook her head. Stan asked Millie, “Are you staying here, or coming wth us? I’ve still got to do my research. Nick has to translate for me.”

  “I think I might come with you.”

  “Have you room for one more?” Pippa said. “I’ve seen so many good views now, it might be rather nice to see some people.”

  *

  They drove to a village where Nicholas had expected to meet a friend, but no one was there to greet them. When they looked closer, they realized that the whole place was deserted.

  They went back and sat in the landrover. Stan said, “What’s the next village? We could try that instead.”

  “But the next village—the point about this one was that there was someone we could talk to.”

  Maybe somebody had died, Stan thought, but it looked worse than that.

  “Where do you think they all went? It’s kind of spooky.” It was like the story he had read as a boy, about the village on Greenland, which had been found completely empty of people; the food had been on the tables—everything, but no people.

  “Have they taken all their belongings?”

  “Not all,” Nicholas said. “They’re coming back.”

  Millie suggested, “Maybe they went off to visit the neighbours.”

  “A whole village?” Stan said.

  “Maybe it’s a big party.”

  “It could be,” Nicholas said. “If they’re preparing for their celebrations. But I don’t think it’s really a very brilliant idea for us to sit in on that, Stan.”

  “We could try. What can they do to us? Would they do anything to us if Pippa’s with us?”

  “If they were going to do anything,” Pippa said, “I don’t think I’d make a difference.”

  They drove on. Nicholas said that they should probably have taken someone with them who knew the local rumours: Julius or Amos.

  “If you’d taken anyone, it should have been Robert,” Millie told him. “He comes from someplace fairly near here.”

  “How do you know that?” Stan asked.

  “He told me.”

  The next village, which was small, was also empty. But at the third, they
found such a throng of people that it looked as though several villages were jammed together. There was a great deal of talking, laughing, and occasional bursts of singing. The crowd parted for them as they stepped forward, and then a line of young men tried to block their way.

  “What’s happening?” Millie asked.

  At the sound of her voice, attention was drawn to her. A sigh went up around them. The men stood back. One of them pointed.

  Stan whispered, “I think they want your necklace.” He said to Nicholas, “Should she hand it over as a gesture of good will?”

  Millie said, “I’m certainly not handing over my necklace to anyone.”

  “No,” Nicholas said. “Wait.”

  A mass of people, at first noisy and cheerful, then rapidly becoming wildly loud and excited, bunched closely around them, screeching and yelping. Stan couldn’t even get to his tape recorder to start it. He had to shout at Nicholas, “Hell of a big mob. I’ve got a feeling they could start pushing us. What’s going on?”

  “We arrived just as they were about to have a bit of singing and dancing, I expect.”

  “They’re trying to shove Millie in another direction. Grab her other hand, Nick.”

  The villagers began a song. It sounded to Stan like the chant the cookhouse staff and skinners had been singing, but his ear was not attuned to the melodies or syllabification of African music. He thought the rhythms were the same. A group of children had been thrust towards Millie through the swinging crush of packed bodies. They jumped up and down, singing at her. It was touching in a way, but it was also eerie. Stan was beginning to feel rushed and scared. He was sure that at any minute, soon and suddenly, the movement and power around them was going to come to a head, everything would go out of control. And being squashed together like that couldn’t be good for her health, either.

  The children began to push harder. They were smiling. The young men were smiling too, but they didn’t try to get too near. All of them seemed riveted by the sight of Millie, and they kept staring at her necklace.

  “Nick,” Stan said sharply, “let’s get out of here, for God’s sake. I’ve got the creeps.”

  Nicholas threw back his head and let out a high, sustained scream like a battle-cry. Afterwards there was a lull in the noise around them. He began to speak quickly. Some of the young men answered.

  “What’s happening?” Stan asked. His own voice was shaky.

  “They say they want Millie to join the party. They want her to play the bride. That thing she’s wearing is like something associated with the god, something he always wears. This is all beyond me, you know. I’ve never heard any of this before.”

  “All right,” Millie said, “I’ll join the dance.”

  “No,” Stan told her. “Take off the necklace and let them have it.”

  “Not for anything. I don’t know why you’re being so free with my things. I’m the one it’s supposed to belong to.”

  “It’s getting them all excited.”

  “Wait till they see my Chinese ear-rings. I think I left them in my pocket.”

  “Let’s get out,” Stan said.

  All at once, the ranks of swaying children parted. They sang the four visitors on their way. As they retreated, Nicholas said, “I told them Millie needed to be alone in order to prepare herself.”

  “Prepare herself for what?” Pippa asked.

  “Lord knows. But it’s worked.”

  When they reached the landrover and started off back to camp, Nicholas asked Millie about her life: had she grown up in such-and-such a place, had this number of sisters, that number of aunts, and so on.

  “Yes. How did you know? I never told you all that, did I?”

  “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 sch
ool.”

  “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.

 

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