Prague, 1952 wasn’t much of a year for revolution, whaling, or the collapse of civilisation, I was sick of faking TB and epilepsy, and emaciation seemed too high a price to pay for one’s non-beliefs. Pain, to sum up, was in short supply.
It was The Sorrows Of Young Werther which pointed the way out of this slough of painlessness. Egged on by a near-delirious schoolmaster, I had had a shot at Goethe already, since a bit of Sturm und Drang sounded just what the doctor ordered, but I’d quickly rejected it. I wasn’t able to manufacture the brand of jadedness which comes, apparently, after a lifetime’s fruitless pursuit of knowledge, and the paraphernalia of pacts with the devil, Walpurgisnachtsträume, time-travel, and the rest, were not really in my line. While I sympathised deeply with Faust himself, it was quite obvious that we were different types of bloke altogether. But Werther, that meisterwerk of moonstruck self-pity – he was me all over.
The instant I put down the book, I recognised that what up until then had been a rather primitive adolescent lust for the nubile young bride next door had really been 22-carat sublime devotion all along. It was the quintessence of unrequitable love, liberally laced with unquenchable anguish. Sporting a spotted bow, shiny shoes and a natty line in sighs, I slipped easily into the modified personality, hanging about in the communal driveway for the chance to bite my lip as the unattainable polished the doorknocker or cleaned out the drains. I abbreviated the mirthless chuckle to a silent sob, cut out the spitting altogether, and filled the once-tubercular eyes with pitiable longing.
The girl, who must have been about twenty-five, responded perfectly. She called me her little man, underlining her blindness to my infatuation with exquisite poignancy, and let me wipe the bird-lime off her window-sills and fetch the coal. What had once been K’s cell, Raskolnikov’s hovel, the Pequod’s poop-deck, now took on the appearance of a beachcomber’s strongbox. My room was littered with weeds from her garden, a couple of slats from the fence I’d helped her mend, half-a-dozen old lipstick cases, a balding powder-puff, three laddered stockings (all taken, at night, from her dustbin), a matted clot of hair I’d found in her sink, an old shoe, a toothless comb, and a pair of lensless sunglasses that had once rested on the beloved ears. Daily, I grew more inextricably involved. I began to demand more than silent service and unexpressed adulation. I dreamed of discovering that she no longer loved her husband, that she had responded to my meticulous weeding and devoted washing-up to the point of being unable to live without me. I saw us locked in each other’s arms in a compartment on the Brighton Belle, setting out on a New Life Together.
In April I discovered she was pregnant. For one wild moment I toyed with the idea of claiming the child as my own, thus forcing a rift between her and her husband. But the plan had obvious drawbacks. The only real course of action was undoubtedly Werther’s. Naturally, I’d contemplated suicide before, but an alternative had always come up, and, anyway, this was the first time that I had something worth dying elaborately for. I wrote innumerable last notes, debated the advantages of an upstairs window over the Piccadilly Line, and even wrote to B.S.A. to ask whether it was possible to kill a human being with one of their airguns, and, if so, how.
In fact, if the cricket season hadn’t started the same week, I might have done something foolish.
The result of a bed-ridden afternoon, in which a romp through Hemingway concluded with a coda of Elsa the Lioness and the belief that enough was as good as a feast, however moveable.
The windbrake crackled in a gust of hot breeze. She looked up but the leaves were still now. She could see the leaves through the open tentflap, and they were still. There was a lizard on the tentpole near the top. It was the colour of old sand, and it had one yellow eye that did not blink. She whistled at it, twice; but it did not move. A muscle twitched in its shoulder, but it did not move. It is one of the brave ones, she thought. It is one of the few brave ones left.
The boy padded in with the drinks. Not that she drank so much any more, because drink did not do the thing that it used to do. All the drink in the world will not do that thing now, she thought.
‘There are vultures,’ said the boy.
‘Yes,’ she said. She watched the soda bubbles rise in the long glass, and burst, impotently. ‘They have made a kill.’
‘Yes,’ he said. He looked away. ‘Missy not go no more kill?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not any more.’
‘It is good,’ he said. He pulled a tick from his black neck and snapped it with his thumbnail, carefully. ‘It is not for lady, the thing with the guns.’
‘That’s right,’ she said. She took the tall glass, and the ice bumped against her lips, and she thought: they will be cold now, the lips. But she did not laugh. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘it is not for lady.’
Now in her mind she saw the wet platform of the Estacion Norte, and the great black tank engines, and the shuffling lines of khaki puppets and the anaesthetized faces of men who have lain beside the dead, and have got up and walked away. She saw the bars of the Madrid-Floride, and the Metropole, and the others, which were all the same after a while; like the fresh-faced boys who would never quite be fresh anymore. It was a long war, but they had still gone to it, and they had come back, more or less. Mostly less. She remembered the purple Spanish nights when she sat up in the room smelling of ordinario and cartridge-belts, holding their hands and telling them it did not matter the way everyone said it mattered, and that this thing with the woman was not all it was cracked up to be, anyway.
She could hear the bearers singing now, and she wondered about the kill. I hope they got a water-buff, she thought. I hope they got a big black sweating buck, one of those that keep on coming, even with a couple of 220 solid-grain Springfields buried in their guts; one of those big, hard males with the great spread of horn. Those were the best ones, in the old days. George would not let her go for them any more. Not after the time she had gone into the bush after the bull that had tossed him. She had dropped it, finally, with one so clean you had to part the forelock to find the hole. When she got back, George had been lying in the sun for three hours.
‘He was a tough one,’ she said.
‘I know’, he said. ‘I have lost a lot of blood.’
‘Where did he get you?’ she said.
He took his hands away.
‘Oh.’
‘That is the way it is, sometimes.’ He laughed, briefly.
‘Like Manolete,’ she said.
‘Yes.’ He began to cry. ‘Like Manolete.’
Things had been different between them after that, and he would not let her hunt the water-buffs any more. He did not like what it did to her, he said. So she sat around the camp, in the brass African heat, raising mongeese and crossbreeding scorpions. Sometimes she would stick pins in little clay models; but even that did not help.
She saw the first two boys come over the hill with the animal slung on poles between them. George walked alongside, carrying the big Remington by its strap. He waved at her, the way he always did, and she took another finger of scotch, and waved back. She got off the camp-bed and went towards them.
‘It’s a lioness,’ she said, quietly. ‘You son-of-a-bitch.’
‘I didn’t want to do it, but it happened that way. She came out of the bush, and no one had time to ask questions. She was a big one,’ he said, ‘and she was coming fast.’
She