Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (8 page)

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 cross-breeding 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 looked at the animal, with its guts torn open and its swollen teats hanging down, heavy with uselessness. She saw the belly full of old fertility, with the fat black flies buzzing around it.

‘Cojones,' she said.

‘I didn't want to do it,' said George again.

‘I hate it when you kill females.' She looked at the bronze horizon. ‘I hate it when you take it out on them.'

‘Don't pity me,' he said, ‘for Christ's sake.'

‘She just calved. Is that why?'

‘I didn't know she had cubs, I swear. When she came at us, I thought she was just one of the mean ones.'

‘I hope it was a clean shot.'

He pumped a used shell out of the Remington.

‘Some things you just don't lose.'

‘You're so damned clever,' she said.

Two boys came up, grinning, with a basket between them.

‘I brought you a present,' said George. He flipped open the lid. Inside there were three lion cubs; their eyes were still closed. There was something terrifying about their innocence.

‘You and your goddamned metaphors,' she said.

He turned and walked into the tent. He pulled his bed a little further away from hers and sat down. He looked at the typewriter. Someday he would write about it, he thought. You can get rid of it when you write about it. He would write with symbols, so that when he was dead they would know he had been one of the big ones all the time. Turgenev was one of the big ones. And Flaubert. And Jack Dempsey. He was one of the big ones, too. And Ludwig von Beethoven. Turgenev and Flaubert and Dempsey and Beethoven and Peter Abelard and that old man in Key West who caught the biggest goddamned sailfish he'd ever seen in his life with a two-dollar rod. They were the great ones.

The next day he went up-country on a Government weevil survey. He did not get back for five months, and when he walked out of the bush, waving and calling the way he always did, it took six houseboys to get the lion off him.

‘You didn't have to do that,' he said. He lay on his back in the tent, his one good eye bright among the bandages. ‘You didn't have to alienate her.'

‘I'm sorry,' she said. She smiled. She was looking better than she had for a long time. ‘Elsa's funny with strangers. I had to send the other two away. I hope you don't mind?'

The eye glittered.

‘As it turns out,' he said, ‘you did the right thing.' He paused. ‘How come you kept the third one?'

She did not answer. In the stillness, a baboon vomited. Elsa came in silently, lapped from a basin of pink gin, and padded out again.

‘You got her pretty damned well trained.'

‘We understand one another,' she said. ‘That's all it takes. Understanding. And a little love.'

‘That's fine,' he said. He tried to laugh, but the stitches dragged, and he fell back writhing. After a time, he said: ‘You girls have to stick together. That's the way it is.'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘That's the way it is.'

That evening, they were closer than they had been since the time she worked the epidiascope at the Royal Geographic. They hand-wrestled, and laughed about the time he had smashed in the French ambassador's face with a bottle of Pernod on the train to Pamplona, and they went through the Book of Job together, looking for a title for that short story he planned to write some day; he felt good, with the old, half-familiar thing. At ten o'clock, he put his arm round her, and as he did, Elsa came in out of the dark and looked at him in a way that made him put his arm down again.

‘What the hell,' he said. ‘The stitches still hurt, anyway. I guess I'll just take a walk before we turn in.'

When he got back, the tent was dark. He sat down on his bed to take off his boots. There was a sudden roar of thunder in his ears, and a stench of stale caviare, and something heavy struck him in the back. He fell across his wife's bunk.

‘What happened?' she said.

‘There's something damned funny about my bed,' he said.

‘
Whose
bed?'

He paused. ‘You're not serious?'

‘I took your mattress out into the open,' she said. ‘It's a fine night. There are shooting stars. You'll be happier there.'

At three a.m., the monsoon broke. It was a good monsoon, as monsoons go, but the thunder was loud, and nobody heard the shouting. The boys found George three days later, after the flood went down. He was stuck in a gau-gau tree eight miles away. After four months, the hospital in Dar-es-Salaam sent him home.

‘How was it?' she said.

‘Fine,' he said. ‘They said plenty of people go around with one lung.'

‘It's good for a man to know suffering,' she said. A locust flew past, and she drew the Luger he always kept under his bed for medicinal purposes, and hit it three times. ‘Animals suffer,' she said. ‘The strong survive. That is the law. That is the only law that counts.'

He looked at her.

‘I did a lot of thinking while I was in there,' he said. ‘It isn't good for Elsa to be brought up with human beings. She is a lioness. She is being deprived of her natural inheritance.'

‘I thought of that,' she said.

They had raw okapi meat for lunch, but he let Elsa have his share, because she was a year old now, and had a way of crunching bones that put him off his food. After the meal, Elsa and his wife sat around roaring at one another.

‘I wish you'd teach me that,' he said.

‘It'd only make Elsa more jealous,' she said.

He did not see much of them after that. They went out hunting at dawn, and did not return until sunset. Once, he wanted to go with them, but they would not let him take his rifle or his trousers, so he stayed behind and thought about the good time before the war and the time Dominguin got both ears and a tail and the time before that when he was a zoology student in Camden Town and he knocked a policeman's helmet off in Regent's Park Road. That was one story he had saved to write. He looked across the dung-coloured scrub to the dead tree where the vultures waited, cleaning their beaks. Somewhere it had gone wrong, he thought. Something had come and it had waited a while, and then it had gone and it would not ever come back any more. And he was no nearer to knowing what it was than he had been on those pale mornings in Edgware in the days when his father had done that thing they did not talk about.

One evening, his wife came back alone. He saw her loping across the twilit scrub, growling. She stopped in front of him, and he saw the blood on her, and the bad marks, and the bald patch.

‘It is over,' she said.

‘Over?'

‘She has found a mate.'

‘That's how it is with kids,' he said. ‘You bring them up, teach them everything you know, and they turn round and go off with the first creep who whistles at them.'

She laughed once, very high, and the vultures flew off in a rattle of black wings. She looked at him with eyes tinted yellow by the dying sun.

‘Is that the way it is?' she said.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘That's the way it is.'

‘I'm glad you told me,' she said.

8
Bohemia

E
nglish Bohemianism is a curiously unluscious fruit. It does not belong in the great, mad, steamy glasshouse in which so much of the art of the rest of the world seems to have flourished – or, at least, so much of the pseudo-art. Inside this hothouse, huge lascivious orchids slide sensually up the sweating windows, passion-flowers cross-pollinate in wild heliotrope abandon, lotuses writhe with poppies in the rich warm beds, kumquats ripen, tremble, and plop fatly to the floor – and outside, in a neat, trimly-hoed kitchen garden, English Bohemians sit in cold orderly rows, like carrots.

In our Bohemia, there are no beautifully crazy one-eared artists, no
sans culottes
, no castrated epistolarians, no genuine revolutionaries, no hopheads, no lunatics, not even any alcoholics of note; our seed-beds have never teemed with Rimbauds and Gauguins and Kafkas and d'Annunzios and Dostoievskys; we don't even have a Mailer or a Ginsberg to call our own. Our Bohemia is populated by Civil Servants like Chaucer and Spenser and Milton; by tough-nut professional penmongers like Shakespeare and Dryden and Johnson, who worried as much about underwear and rent as about oxymorons; by corpulent suburban family men like Thackeray and Dickens and Trollope. And whenever an English oddball raises, tentatively, his head, he's a pitifully pale imitation of the real thing – Thom. Gray, sad, thin Cambridge queer, Cowper, mad among his rabbits, Swinburne, a tiny fetishistic gnome as far from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch as water is from blood. The private lives of our great powerhouses of passion, Pope and Swift, were dreary and colourless in the extreme, and Emily Brontë divided her time between
Wuthering Heights
and the Haworth laundry-list. And history, though it may offer our only revolutionary poet the passing tribute of a literary footnote, will probably think of William Morris mainly as the Father of Modern Wallpaper.

There was, however, one brief moment in this socially unostentatious culture of ours when we were touched, albeit gingerly, by the spirit of Bohemia. I am not (how could you
think
a thing like that?) referring, of course, to the Wildean shenannigans at the
fin
of the last
siècle
, which were the product not of an authentic Bohemianism but of the need to dig up a literature and a
modus vivendi
you could wear with spats and a green carnation: that Café Royal crowd was the first Switched-On, With-It Generation England ever had, and the whole megillah should be taken with a pinch of pastis. No, the gang I have in mind are the Lake Poets, who had, for once, all the genuine constituents of real adjustment problems, social malaise, illegitimate offspring, numerous tracts, a hang-out, a vast literature, and, most important of all, a date: 1798. And since at first sight, and for several thereafter, the Lake District, a sopping place of sedge and goat, seems as unlikely a Bohemian ambience as you could shake a quill at, much can be gained by examining the area itself; one can do no better than take the career of its most eminent son, a William Wordsworth, and relate it (as all the local tourist offices do) to every cranny, sheep and sod between Windermere and the Scottish border.

I realise, naturally, that the aforementioned bard left a meticulous record of all that made him what he was, but since all writers are extraordinary liars, poseurs, distorters, and self-deceivers, I have chosen to ignore most of his farragos and interpretations; and for the background to this chapter, I am not indebted to
The Poetical Works Of William Wordsworth
(5 vols, Oxford 1940–49),
Wordsworth: A Re-interpretation
by F. W. Bateson (London 1954),
The Egotistical Sublime
by J. Jones (London 1954), or
Wordsworth and Coleridge
by H. G. Margoliouth (London 1953). In particular, I am not indebted to
Strange Seas of Thought: Studies in Wordsworth's Philosophy of
Man and Nature
by N. P. Stallknecht (North Carolina 1945). However, I gather from friends in the trade that no work of serious scholarship is complete without a list of references and sources three times the size of the thing itself, so for devotees of this sort of
narrischkeit
, a fuller bibliography will be found sewn inside the lining of my old green hacking-jacket.

Cockermouth, Cumberland, was the spot where, on April 7, 1770, William Wordsworth first drew breath, and the location goes a long way towards explaining his characteristic lugubriousness. In the Old Hall, now derelict and seeping, Mary Queen of Scots was received after her defeat at Langside in 1568; her gloom was plumbless, and her host, Henry Fletcher, gave her thirteen ells of crimson velvet for a new dress. This could hardly have compensated for having her army trodden into the mud, but it ranks as one of history's nicer gestures to Mary. Nearby stands Harry Hotspur's house, contracts for which had just been exchanged when the new proprietor was butchered at Shrewsbury, in 1403, and within spitting distance can be found a few lumps of twelfth-century castle: this was captured in 1313 by Robert the Bruce, and spent the rest of the century under constant attack and bombardment by any Scots infantrymen who happened to be in the neighbourhood. During the Wars of the Roses, it was first Yorkist, then Lancastrian, and the catalogue of woe was finally brought to an end during the Civil War, when it was demolished by the Roundheads. A mile or so away, at Moorland Close, is the 1764 birthplace of Fletcher Christian, leader of the
Bounty
mutineers, and the 1766 birthplace of John Dalton, the physicist whose nefarious theories led ultimately to the destruction of Hiroshima.