asked, in an unexpectedly mellow tone, what I had been doing.
I told him, in a rather superior fashion, about friendship in zebras, for I was a field scientist, no mere safari guide. ‘How terribly interesting, I’ve always wondered about doing another study, perhaps of a herbivore, though I’d never thought about zebras, confusing things, after my stuff with, well, those lion, you know.’ For this, of course, was George Sorensen, the George Sorensen, African legend, co-author of Lions of the Plains. I was instantly ashamed, instantly impressed. I noticed that his glasses had been fixed across the bridge with Elastoplast. (In fact, I was to notice that George changed this bridge far more often than any other of his garments, Elastoplast replaced by Sellotape, replaced by masking tape.)
I also had the weird impression that the cigarette he was smoking was made from newspaper. This turned out to be the case. ‘The Guardian Weekly,’ he explained. ‘Airmail edition. Best for cigarettes. May I roll you one?’ I accepted. The tobacco, thick, coarse and crackly, delivered a powerful and pungent smoke. We discussed the usual problems of field work, and he asked with great attention about my zebras. The key to ethology is the recognising of individuals: no, I had not used coloured ear-tags, or anything of the kind. ‘Well, I have read that every zebra has a distinct stripe pattern, of course,’ George said. ‘But then I have also read that every snowflake is unique. It has always seemed an impossible business to me.’
‘It’s just a matter of getting your eye in,’ I said. ‘Same with all animals. A racehorse trainer can recognise every horse in his string. Zebras are easy – easier than lion, I would have thought.’
‘I’ve always found zebras exasperating. I can’t even tell males from females half the time, not without a long hard look.’
‘Well, I will take a bet that I can tell the dominant stallion from any breeding herd of zebra within, say, five seconds of seeing the herd, and I’d be right seven times out of ten. I’d bet better than even money. These cigarettes are good.’
‘Aren’t they? I get the tobacco in the village just down the road from here. How can you pick out the stallion so fast? Without peering at the undercarriage for half an hour?’
‘Body language. And the position he takes up relative to the herd. And especially the way the herd responds to him. Once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s amazingly straightforward.’
‘How terribly terribly interesting,’ George said, without a shred of irony. ‘Do you think you could show me? Perhaps we could take a drive tomorrow? I assume you’re staying here. I could pick you up after breakfast.’
‘Why not?’ I wonder now how many hundred times I have asked this same non-question of George. Why not, indeed.
I suppose it does sound rather melodramatic, but all the same I don’t suppose I ever will forget the sight or vision that greeted us as George, Helen and I turned into Mchindeni Airport. George, eschewing the tarred road, had taken an intriguing and bouncing short cut across open country – ‘I think a spot of bundu-bashing is in order’ – crunching and pitching through the scrub. Negligently wiping out a small bush, he jumped the vehicle heroically back onto the road, pounding up to the front of the airport building, eyes skyward as he remarked, ‘Wire-tailed swallows’ above the engine’s roar, and made, passengers listing crazily forward, his trademark crash-halt.
There, watching every yard of our arrival, was the sight or vision, and it affected my pulse rate as dramatically as the morning’s lion. This was Mrs van der Aardvark, no less, or to be formal, Caroline Sandford, caterer and deputy manager of Impala Lodge, mistress to Leon Schuyler, who, behind his extremely wide back, was nicknamed van der Aardvark. He was the owner and manager of Impala Lodge, the grandiosely named camp that lay across the river from our own.
She was dressed in khaki shorts and a singlet in umbrella-thorn green and gave an impression of arachnoid limbs. Her straggle of leucistic hair was worn in a style that looked self-administered or self-inflicted, perhaps with wire-cutters. Arms, shoulders, neck, face, legs: all copiously freckled: endless constellations, galaxies and nebulae of freckles, freckles that caused me to wonder, but not for the first time, with the curiosity that is at the base of the erotic impulse, exactly how far, and in what form, those freckles extended.
She was laughing as we pulled up, absolutely roaring with laughter. She was also apparently talking, which was not unusual, but inaudibly. George switched off the engine, and it was as if her personal volume had been switched on. ‘It’s like the clown’s car arriving at the circus, I keep expecting it to explode and all four wheels to fall off. Really, George, where did you learn to drive?’ She turned to me as I stood on the back replacing my hat, and she smiled, something that always had on me the approximate effect of swallowing a large Jack Daniels in one go, ice cubes and all. ‘And you with your trilby and George with his broken specs and, really, Leon and I are labouring night and day to drag this park up-market, and here come the pair of you standing for everything we try not to do.’ She was beautiful and I adored her, but I didn’t like anything she said or did.
I jumped neatly to the ground and observed, ‘There is a difference between money and class, but not everyone knows that. Has the bloody plane gone yet?’
She smiled patronisingly: Impala Lodge would never get into such a mess about planes, oh dear me, no. ‘It’s only just landed,’ she said. ‘They’re running about an hour late.’
‘There you are, you see,’ George said smugly, as if he had personally arranged all this.
‘I’ll get Helen checked in.’
‘What a shame,’ Helen said. ‘I was beginning to like the idea of being marooned.’
‘Marooned with this pair of lunatics?’ Caroline asked her. Truly an insufferable woman. But she seemed completely unaware of either of the two effects she had on me: hopeless desire and helpless anger.
‘I wouldn’t wish to stay anywhere else in the world, given a choice,’ said Helen, suddenly and rather magnificently reverting to her tea-party manners. ‘Let alone in Mchindeni Park.’
I pointed a finger at Caroline’s freckled nose. ‘Class,’ I said. ‘You see, there are some clients you can’t poach from us, and that’s the classy ones.’ Then I seized Helen’s baggage from the back, and George and I escorted Helen herself into the airport building, a long, low hall thronged with tourists and safari guides from all over the Valley.
The meeting of planes was also a meeting of the clans. The dozen or so camps in the Valley were widely separated, relative solitude being rather the point of visiting a wilderness. Everyone knew everyone else at the other camps, but we tended only to meet when collecting or despatching clients. An airport run was always an opportunity to talk shop, swap gossip, lust at caterers and so on.
We steered Helen through various groups of already-checked-in tourists clutching boarding passes and phony items of African fetish, and a couple of hunter types looking sneeringly superior. At the head of the queue, actually checking in, we found Leon Schuyler: van der Aardvark himself. ‘Ullo, George, killed any clients this week?’ He accepted his boarding pass, yielding the check-in to Helen, and turned to us: a chunky, much moustached man, extravagantly epauletted and wearing at his belt a knife that reached almost to his knees. As his nickname suggested, or shouted, he was of Afrikaner extraction, but he had been born in Chipembere, the capital city. He had lived in Africa all his life, educated at school and university in South Africa, returning to the land of his birth to set himself up in the safari business. He was, in a distinctly African way, a great problem-solver: a man of practicalities. He was also said to be very good indeed in the bush and was much respected in the Mchindeni Valley. ‘Leon will know how to do that,’ people said, and he generally did.
‘Oh, not many,’ said George. ‘None to speak of, really.’
‘Is it?’ said Leon, one of the great Afrikaner