Acts of Faith, page 66
“Fitz?”
“Yes.”
She came out in her nightgown, the satin clinging to her, and leaned over the back of the chair and clasped him around the chest. “What are you doing out here at four in the morning?”
“Our big friend woke me,” he said, pointing.”Did you hear the lion?”
“That’s what woke me.”
“The lions of Tsavo,” he said. “Man-eaters.”
“That’s right. Women aren’t the menu. He’ll go for you.” She moved to the railing and stood with her hands on it, looking toward the river and the escarpment beyond, its top faintly illuminated by the waning moon. “I’m rather glad we came here. I love Tsavo, the last really wild place left in Kenya. My father hunted here, my grandfather as well. He hunted with Finch-Hatton.”
“Ah yes, the mighty sahibs,” Fitzhugh remarked. He never could understand the white man’s fascination with wildlife, whether he shot it for sport or photographed it. For the African, wild animals were a nuisance or a menace.
Diana turned her head, gazing at him over her bare shoulder. “There’s another thing I’m glad of. That we both broke down.”
He would not have broken if she hadn’t first. She had sent him a letter a little more than a week ago, declaring an end to the “intermission” she’d imposed. She couldn’t bear another day without him, she didn’t care what happened in the future, she needed him now. He answered immediately, writing that the separation was unbearable for him as well and that he had to see her as soon as possible. The exchange coincided with Douglas’s decision to give the Knight Air staff a holiday—a long weekend on the coast, at company expense. He’d arranged a bird-watching safari in Tsavo for himself and invited Fitzhugh to join him to talk over some business matters. Fitzhugh accepted, provided Diana could come along.
“I’m glad, too,” he said.
“You sound a little ambivalent.”
“But I’m not,” he protested, though in fact he was. It seemed to him that the only thing in charge of their relationship was her mood of the moment. If she felt that they should be together, then they would be; if not, then they wouldn’t. He criticized himself for not taking command and holding her to her demand for a breathing spell till he could resolve the question of whether he was capable of committing to her, whatever the cost to himself. They were reunited, but they were adrift again, to wherever the currents of love and need might carry them.
“Don’t tell me you’re glad,” Diana demanded. “Show me.”
In the moonlight, she had the cool beauty of a statue, her pale hair flipped over a pale shoulder, her cream-colored nightgown almost indistinguishable from her skin. He came up behind her and, circling her waist, kissed her throat.
“We’ll just have to have faith that this will sort itself out, since we can’t,” she said, as if guessing his thoughts.
Her tummy bulged softly under his hands. He adored this mature, preserved body of hers, held between ripeness and decay, toughness and vulnerability. Yet the thought that there was something a little unnatural in this attraction, as if it manifested Oedipal longings, brought a modesty to his embrace. He held her loosely and with a discreet space between himself and her.
“I feel shameless,” she said, seized his wrists, and drew him to her, lewdly rubbing her hips against him as she tilted her head back and brushed her lips across the underside of his chin. “Utterly, completely shameless.” She pulled his hands below her waist, and he caressed her there, through the satin, arousing himself as much as he did her. “Oh yes, here, now, like this,” she whispered, turning to slide down his body, tugging his undershorts to his ankles as she fell in a mimic of a dancer’s swoon, drawing him to the veranda’s floor with her.
A river breeze slithered through the trees, carrying the smell of the gallery forest, a jungle smell, rank and sweet at the same time. Branches shook as the elephant foraged. They heard the lion again—the drawn-out, belly-deep moan, followed by a series of grunts. Fitzhugh lay under her, to spare her from the rough planks. Straddling him, she lifted her gown up over her waist and gave a low gasp as he penetrated her; and in the quaking instant that he poured himself into her, all things were resolved—but only for that instant.
She flung herself over his chest and kissed him. “I have lost all my self-respect, and I’m perfectly, perfectly happy.”
The lion groaned.
“He sounds closer,” Fitzhugh said. “Maybe we should go inside.”
“Oh, a lion won’t come in with a bull elephant in camp,” she said. “Do you think he heard us?”
“That depends on how well lions hear.”
“I meant next door. Doug.”
“He’s a sound sleeper,” Fitzhugh said. “He’s probably dreaming of birds.”
“Perhaps we could talk now? On the plane, you said you’d had some thoughts.”
He went inside for his cigarettes and sat down in the deck chair, she next to him. “I wonder if you’ve had the same thought. We could adopt.”
“It was the first thing I thought of, but I can’t imagine who would want to give a child to someone my age.”
“With all the orphans in this country, they can’t be particular. And there’s . . .” He hesitated, drawing on the cigarette. “This is awkward. There is your—your situation.”
“I’m rich,” she said.
“I would think they would be delighted to place a child in such comfortable circumstances.”
“And how would you feel?”
“I must face facts. You would be the one putting bread on the table.”
“I meant, how would you feel about raising a child who isn’t yours?”
“I believe I could do it.” He put an arm around her and stared toward the river, almost invisible, now the moon had set. “It could be a solution. We could be happy together, you, me, and a brood of adopted children.”
He wished he could have sounded more certain, had used know instead of believe, will instead of the more hypothetical could.
“A lovely picture,” she said. “It terrifies me.”
“That’s a strange reaction to a lovely picture.”
“I’m terrified of happiness.”
He sat up straighter, disturbed by the comment. “Just minutes ago you said you are perfectly happy. Does that mean you are also perfectly terrified?”
“Happiness terrifies me because it’s so easily lost.”
He knew she was inviting him to declare that her terror was unfounded, that he would make her happy the rest of her life, but his own terror of uttering a vow he might not be able to keep restrained him.
“You’ll know when you’re sure,” she said, again reading his thoughts. “And not a word from you till you are.”
After breakfast, with nothing more concluded between them, he and Diana (smashing in a straw hat, tan bush jacket, and leopard-print scarf) set off with Douglas, a camp driver, and two armed park rangers on a quest for the carmine bee-eater. Douglas’s aim was to photograph the bird and add it to something called a “life-list.”
“What is that?” Fitzhugh asked as they left camp, bumping down a dirt-track road alongside a watercourse.
A life-list, Douglas explained, was the record of every bird a bird-watcher observed in its natural habitat.
“But I thought you had already seen a carmine bee-eater.”
“Nope,” said Douglas, riding in the front seat, binoculars around his neck, and in his lap a camera with a lens almost as long as an arm. “Where’d you get the idea I did?”
“From you. The first conversation we had with Tara. You told her that you’d been to Tsavo with your mother and that you’d photographed a carmine bee-eater.”
“I couldn’t have said that,” Douglas insisted, turning around to face him with a disarming grin. “I’ve never been to Tsavo, and neither has my mother. You must be remembering wrong.”
“I have a memory like a computer, and I distinctly recall your saying that you’d gotten pictures of this bird. Here in Tsavo, with your mother. I remember that because I thought at the time your family must have money to burn if your mother could come all the way to Africa to look at birds.”
“Your computer has a glitch,” Douglas replied casually, then boosted himself through the overhead hatch to ride on the roof.
“There is no glitch, my friend,” Fitzhugh called up in an unpleasant voice. “That is exactly what you said. Own up to it.”
Douglas said nothing.
“Is there some reason you won’t own up to it?”
Diana laid a hand on his arm and said, “Darling, why are you making an issue out of nothing?”
Of course it was nothing. He was feeling irritable, frustrated by his inability to give her what she wanted, and in this state of mind, Douglas’s lie and flip dismissal of the accuracy of his memory had struck him as an insult. He knew Douglas had a tendency to fib when it suited some larger purpose of his, but Fitzhugh couldn’t fathom what purpose there could have been in denying he’d said what he’d said to Tara, as if it were an incriminating statement.
They drove on, passing near a big herd of Cape buffalo that Diana wanted to photograph. Douglas vetoed her request to stop. There would be no stopping until he’d seen his bird.
“Single-minded, isn’t he?” Diana said in an undertone.
“Yes,” Fitzhugh said. “It’s a flaw of the virtue.”
His single-mindedness was much on display as they continued down the road. The watercourse was a virtual aviary of herons, ibis, eagles, rollers, shrikes, and storks, but those species were already on Douglas’s life-list, and he bypassed them all. When the road turned to skirt a saltbush forest, he thumped the roof and called out, “Simama!”
The driver braked just as Fitzhugh spotted a blaze of scarlet, flitting into the dark green saltbush. Douglas leaped to the ground, flung the rear door open, and with eagerness written all over his face, pulled out his tripod. The driver cautioned that he ought not to be out of the vehicle—a man on foot might be seen as prey or a threat by a lion, buffalo, or elephant.
“That’s why we hired these boys,” he said, motioning at the rangers. “C’mon, let’s go. There’s two of them, both males.”
The rangers piled out. One, a giant Turkana with a semiautomatic rifle, took the lead, Douglas behind him. Fitzhugh and Diana followed, with the second ranger bringing up the rear. The saltbush, growing in dense thickets twenty feet high, was mazed with trails trodden by elephant, whose spoor was everywhere—piles of dung, circular prints as big around as wastebaskets. Glancing over his shoulder, Fitzhugh could no longer see the Land Rover; nor could he tell which way to get back to it. A hornbill lofted from a branch, making a mournful cry. Otherwise there wasn’t a sound. The Turkana advanced cautiously, looking right to left. The ranger’s switched-on watchfulness did not reassure Fitzhugh; a whole pride of lions could be hiding in the thick undergrowth, and no one would know it till they sprang. Douglas raised his binoculars.
“There one is,” he whispered, and passed the binoculars to Fitzhugh while pointing at a shrub ahead. The bird was perched atop it, its body feathered flame red, its head a luminescent blue. It flew off, bobbing against the cloudless sky.
“Damn it!” Douglas shouldered tripod and camera and charged forward, the Turkana running after him, calling to him to be careful. Fitzhugh, Diana, and the other ranger caught up with them at the edge of a broad clearing, across which both bee-eaters clung to a low tree in perfect profile. Douglas spread the tripod’s legs and, signaling for everyone to remain still, crouched and adjusted the focus. The shutter made several rapid clicks that sounded as loud as pencils falling to a tile floor.
“Outstanding, got ’em both,” he said softly. “I’m going to try for a few more, closer up.”
Lifting his rig, he stalked into the clearing, halted, and took another series of shots. As he was moving to one side for a different angle, a shrill scream sent the two birds into sudden flight. The bushes across the clearing trembled and produced two elephants, a cow and a calf, their hides reddened by Tsavo dust to make the pair resemble pieces of rusty sculpture. The cow stood facing the intruders and scuffed the ground with a forefoot, her ears flared, her great head swaying to and fro—body language that required no translation. The Turkana told Douglas to back away slowly, but he could not resist the chance to take a picture of the angry elephant. He was oblivious to the danger, the kind of man, Fitzhugh thought, who believed that no harm could befall him because none ever had. His refusal to give ground provoked the cow beyond tolerance. She trumpeted and charged at a stiff-legged run. Abandoning his tripod and camera, Douglas fled, the beast rapidly closing on him as he sprinted straight toward Fitzhugh and Diana, drawing them into the elephant’s path. She came on, ears pinned back, head lowered, tusks gleaming in the sunlight—three tons of living battering ram, a four-legged bulldozer.
Fitzhugh swooped Diana into his arms and dove into a clump of saltbush, falling face-down atop her, prepared to shield her from the elephant’s tusks with his body if it came to that. He heard what sounded like three door knocks in quick succession. Rifle shots. Cautiously, he got to his feet and saw the Turkana, rifle crooked in his arm, and the elephant trotting away, the calf behind her. He had fired over her head, stopping her charge and scaring her off. He wheeled and announced that it was safe to come out of hiding.
Fitzhugh turned and gave Diana his hand. She pulled herself up. Everything had happened too quickly for them to be conscious of fear, though Fitzhugh assumed he’d felt it—his heart was beating at twice its normal rate.
“That was awfully brave of you,” she said, picking up her hat and scarf. “But it wouldn’t have done the least bit of good.”
He gave her a questioning look.
“An elephant doesn’t kill with its tusks. It leans its forehead on you and squashes you like you would squash a bug under your thumb.” She spoke with scientific detachment. “So you see, she would have crushed us both to death.”
He reflected on this information and said he would have done the same thing regardless.
“I know,” she said, squeezing his arm. “And I love you for it.”
Douglas had gone into the clearing to retrieve his gear. The elephant had knocked the tripod over, splintering it into several pieces. He tossed them aside and picked up his camera, still attached to the mount, from which a foot of a tripod leg protruded like fractured bone. They watched him raise the camera to his eye, turning to point it at them.
“It’s good to go, not a dent!” he shouted triumphantly.
“You might want to thank him,” said Diana, jerking her thumb sideways at the Turkana.
“Hey, yeah.” He took the ranger’s photo. “Asante sana, rafiki! I sure would’ve hated to lose those pictures!”
There is something wrong with him, Fitzhugh thought as he regarded Douglas, standing out there alone and exposed to the unforgiving African light. Something is missing in him, I don’t know what.
After lunch, during which Douglas had nattered on about his narrow escape, as if no one else had been in danger, he reminded Fitzhugh that this was a working holiday and asked him to take an hour to discuss business. They met in his banda where, shirtless and barefoot in the afternoon heat, he lounged in a camp chair, a file folder in his lap. He led off by stating that his reservations about Knight Air’s new marketing director had proved unfounded. He removed copies of the past month’s invoices from the folder. The names of several agencies belonging to the UN consortium had been highlighted—World Vision, CARE, the Catholic Relief Agency, among others.
“Timmerman wooed every one of them from Pathways to us, and the best part is, he did it without paying a dime in commissions.”
“Kickbacks, you mean,” Fitzhugh said.
“Hey, whatever. Timmerman just used his friendship with the agency logisticians. The man is a rainmaker.” Douglas sat back with an indolent stretch of his long legs, their dark blond hair sparkling in the light. “We’re doing great, better than I expected, but the flying nun is starting to make noise.”
“Noise? What sort of noise?” asked Fitzhugh, preoccupied by his perception that Douglas possessed some fatal deficiency.
“She’s told some people that she thinks we’re engaging in unfair business practices, hiring Timmerman away from the UN and then using his connections to take clients from her. Corrupt is the word I’ve heard she’s been using. Not surprised. Tara isn’t used to real competition, and now that she’s getting a taste of it, she doesn’t know how to handle it.”
Fitzhugh opined that this wasn’t a fair characterization.
“Don’t let yourself be taken in by that woman. The word I’ve got is that she intends to do more than call us names.”
“Intends what?”
“There’s the problem. I don’t know. All I’ve heard is that she’s said, in so many words, that since we’ve made things tough for her, she’s going to make them tough for us. Nothing more solid than that. Could be the usual Loki gossip.”
“I imagine it is.”
“Well, I—we—we can’t count on that. We’re vulnerable. Got to ask you something. Yellowbird—you never mentioned any of that to Diana, right? She and Tara being friends and all.”
“Not even to her,” Fitzhugh replied, stiffening. “I’ve kept my word.”
Withdrawing his outstretched legs, Douglas leaned forward and rested his palms on Fitzhugh’s knees, his direct and intimate gaze on Fitzhugh’s face. “There’s another thing I’ve got to ask, and it isn’t easy.” He winced to show how deeply the question distressed him. “Do you think Diana, considering her feelings for you . . . if you asked her to, would she be willing to find out if Tara is planning to cause us problems and how she means to go about it?”
