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“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.”

“No,” Stan said. “Impossible. In Africa?”

“She’s American. He says she’s his secretary. Nicholas says—”

“They’re roaring up and down the streets,” Ian said, “getting drunk in every decent bar and restaurant in town. It’s extraordinary the way people will behave in a country that isn’t their own. Extraordinary. Do they think no one sees, no one hears? The whole town is talking about them.”

“I suppose they’re like people who quarrel in front of the servants and never think every word is going to be repeated to the neighbours.”

“Simpler that that,” Stan said. “I bet they just don’t care.”

Ian sighed. “We’ll get through it somehow.”

Pippa folded up the letter. She said, “Still, I must say, I’m looking forward like mad to the fridges and showers and everything. It’s going to be like the Olympic Villages.”

“We’ll have to call it Fun City,” Millie said.

“We may be calling it all sorts of names before long,” Ian told her. “Pity things can’t stay as they are.”

“We can keep on like this, can’t we?” Stan asked.

“If they let us. We’ll have to see. It depends on the daily shoot.”

Millie said, “I liked your friend, Alistair.”

“Yes, Alistair’s lovely,” Pippa said. “We thought he was going to marry a nice girl named Dorcas who was out here two or three years ago. But nothing ever came of it. Just one of those things that didn’t happen.”

“I got the feeling he was in love with this other doctor, Carrol.”

“You thought that, too?”

“And if—Eddie, if Eddie really wants to break with her, maybe the wheels will start to turn.”

“That’s an idea.”

“What’s this? Scheming and plotting?” Ian said. “My God, the women in this country are worse than the politicians. The complications they can cook up.”

Pippa waved her hand at him. “Back to your paper,” she said. “This doesn’t concern you. Don’t you worry your pretty head.”

Millie burst out laughing. Stan raised his eyes and looked at her, but she wouldn’t catch his glance.

*

In the middle of the night he woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep.

He lay with his eyes open, his arm across his forehead. And he wondered what good his research was doing, if it could be called that. He’d almost forgotten why he had come to Africa in the first place. He had been looking for a story that was being made into a fixed pattern, a standard and order against which to set the chaos of life. But life was for living, not to be studied.

Love,
he thought.
We are taught to expect it. When it isn’t there, we fall apart. But in nature there is no love, only need. There is play, pleasure, even dreams. But love, as most people understand it: a cherishing of the mind and soul of another being—that’s an artificial emotion. Friendship is almost unknown in nature. Family ties prevail over such trivialities. Family ties depend on blood.

*

They moved camp the next week, staying for a few days at a site which was so much less comfortable than the one they’d left that for a while all of them felt dispirited. The ground was dry and stony, the whole land looked parched and ready for the rainy season. At the other camp, clear blue heavens and juicy foliage had housed them. They had gone north and now it was hotter, the sky seemed almost white most of the time. They breathed in dust when they moved.

Ian took Stan to a village where one of the head elders was an old friend. They talked while Stan stood, then sat, silent. He had learned that, for some reason he couldn’t
guess, he was not liked by many of the Africans he’d met outside the town. At first he had thought it crude and simple: because he was white, rich (compared to them) and foreign. But then he began to believe it was only because of the way he behaved. He was trying to learn all the rules now, being taught slowly and carefully how to act with people, just as he’d been led to an appreciation of how to adapt himself to the hunting conditions. There was no need to hurry or force the rate of his progress; everything would come at its own pace. Not like his real father:
Speak
up
there,
boy,
what
do
you
have
to
say
for
yourself?
He wished there had been the time for Ian to teach him the languages, too. It both annoyed and amused him to see Millie so often deep in conversation with Robert and appearing to be communicating fairly easily, whereas all the courses in Swahili that he himself had gone through back home had proved pretty useless—everyone was speaking his own language and dialect.

The old man chatted with Ian, first seriously and then with jokes and laughter. Later, Ian said that it was their usual catching-up talk and they covered all sorts of topics, private and public. Stan understood nothing of the words but felt moved by the sight of the two men and the sound and rhythm of their voices speaking so harmoniously. What good friends they were, he thought. He hadn’t had friends like that since high school. Real friends, not like Jack.

At a point about halfway through the conversation, the old man turned to him and asked politely about the important things in his life: his country, his family. Stan liked the diplomatic way in which shock and pity were repressed as he admitted to having no children. He spoke about the hunting and declared that it was good to be able
to learn with a teacher like Ian. That was the right thing to say. It pleased the old man. The talk went back out of English again.

On their way home, Ian said that as far as his friend knew, there was no new political or religious movement in the vicinity, nor among other villages he visited or heard news from. “But….”

“Yes?”

“He said something about songs and dances. I expect it’s simply the same ones they’ve always had. He seemed to believe they were new. I don’t think it means much, to tell the truth. It may be someone’s distortion of—you see, nowadays it might even be that someone’s cousin in town saw a film on the box and described it with local additions. Adapted it. He told me a kind of ghost story that might be nothing more than that. How can you tell whether these things are really intended to be anything or to mean anything?”

“That’s what we’re trained for. And that’s the kind of thing I’m looking for. What was this ghost story?”

“A lion that lives among people and then goes back to the pride. But, surely you recognize that—it’s the story of Elsa the lioness, isn’t it?”

“Did he say the lion was male or female?”

“Male. But that might just have been a twist, to make it more interesting.”

“Anything else? Only that one thing, or were there any stories surrounding this figure?”

“He heard it from someone else. That was what he did say: the story doesn’t come from this part of the country. Well, we’ll go to the someone else and try to track it down. All right? Like working for the police.”