the sea. The Mahindra pushed onward across the great plain. Gaby made Shepard stop on the top of a long ridge that commanded a wide green valley filled with animals. She took her visioncam from the sports bag and stood up in the back of the jeep, panning slowly across the panorama.
‘It won’t catch it,’ Shepard said.
‘I know,’ Gaby said in her football socks and shiny shorts and green and yellow shirt with
‘Changed into another kind of beauty,’ Shepard said.
‘A terrible beauty, as Yeats said,’ Gaby said.
The camp had been made between two acacias near the bank of a seasonal tributary of the Mara river. There were two tents, a canvas shittery, a safari shower made from an oil drum and a nozzle, a fire, a table with two folding chairs and three Kalashnikov-armed game wardens with a battered Nissan Safari.
‘We’re in the tent on the right,’ Shepard said.
‘“We’re”?’ Gaby queried.
‘Well, you’re welcome to the one on the left, if you’d prefer. The guys won’t complain. Evening game drive is at five pm. Dinner after dark. If you need a shower, ask the guys. They’re discreet, which means you won’t actually catch them looking at you.’
One of the wardens came with them in the Mahindra as game spotter. The other two went in the other direction in the Nissan: ‘To shoot dinner,’ Shepard said. He drove the jeep himself, following the spotter’s directions to plunge headlong into seemingly impenetrable bush or down impossibly steep bluffs.
‘You love this, don’t you?’ Gaby shouted.
‘I was born eighty years too late,’ Shepard shouted back. ‘I wish I could have lived in the days of the Union Jack and tiffin at the Norfolk and whiskies at the Mount Kenya Safari Club where women weren’t allowed in. The days of Lord Aberdare and Baron Von Blixen and White Mischief, when there was just the land and the animals moving upon it, and the scattered tribes and their cattle.’
‘But you love the Chaga as well.’
‘That’s the dilemma. I love them both, but one will not let the other survive.’
The sun had set by the time they returned to the camp under the acacia trees. The night was as clear and infinitely deep as only African nights can be. The wardens had killed successfully, and set up a table by the camp fire. There was white linen, good crystal and Mozart on a boombox CD player.
‘You’ve put a lot of planning into this,’ Gaby said, showered and dressed in her office uniform of jodhpurs, boots and silk, which was as formal as she could be. ‘What would you have done if I’d said no?’
‘Kidnapped you,’ Shepard said, in the one creased linen suit she had seen on him that first day in Kajiado, which was as formal as he could be. He poured wine. The wardens brought antelope steaks. Afterwards, there was whisky. Gaby rolled the cut glass tumbler between her hands and asked, ‘Can I do that interview now?’
‘Here? Now? For SkyNet?’
‘No.’ She looked at him over the rim of the tumbler, which was another man-trick she had taught herself. ‘For me. I want to know who you are, Shepard. I want to know teeny-bop things: what star sign you are, what your favourite colour is, what you like to drink.’
‘Taurus. Green: the exact shade of your eyes. Three fingers of Wild Turkey with a little ice and a tablespoon of branch water.’
‘Favourite music.’
‘You’re listening to it.’
‘If you were an element, what would you be?’
He paused, momentarily taken aback by Gaby’s change of tack.
‘You mean hydrogen, helium, lithium?’
‘More primitive than that. Earth, air, fire, water.’
‘Earth.’
Yes, you are, Gaby McAslan thought, lighting a cigarette from a candle.
‘What colour are you?’
‘I’ve already told you that.’
‘You’ve told me your favourite colour. I’m asking you what colour you think you are yourself.’
He pondered a moment beneath the slow-turning stars.
‘A kind of faded terracotta; the exact shade my mother’s herb pots used to turn after two summers on the sunny side of the porch.’
Yes, you are telling me the truth, thought Gaby McAslan.
‘What season are you?’
‘This is a funny way to conduct an interview.’
‘It’s the only way to conduct an interview if you want to find anything valuable.’
He was silent for the space of three sips of whisky.
‘Fall,’ he said. ‘Fall in Nebraska, which is all silver and gold; silver of frost, gold of Hallowe’en pumpkins in back yards and yellow tomatoes on the vine and bare fields of corn stubble and a yellow edge to the horizon under the purple snow clouds that come down from the Dakotas. A fall that is the cold of evenings when you make a fire and your whisky catches the light and the heat of it, that is just like the line in the song about when the wind comes whistlin’ down the plain, and gets into the eaves and you hear the roof shingles rattle but you’re in no hurry to worry about them, not just yet.’
My God, Gaby thought, I am about to have sex with a Frank Capra movie. No, that is unfair. You would speak with as much love of the Watchhouse and the Point in its different seasons and moods.
‘Wood, fabric, pottery or metal?’
‘Pottery.’
‘Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern?’
‘Classical. You’re not taking this down.’
‘I am taking this down, where it matters. Circle, square, triangle?’
‘A sort of slightly rounded square. Or a slightly squared circle.’
‘Plains, mountains, forests or islands?’
‘Plains. With the aforementioned wind whistlin’ down them. And the corn as high as an elephant’s eye.’
‘What kind of car are you?’
‘Something pretty much like I drive already. Maybe one of those old British Landrovers that you could drive forever over any kind of surface in any conditions and it would always forgive you. But with the tail fins, fenders and white-walls off one of those 1950s cars you used to see in old rock’n’roll movies that looked about the size of Rhode Island. If that makes sense.’
Perfect sense. You are getting it now, Shepard. I knew you would. And I am getting you.
‘What kind of animal are you?’
He sighed.
‘Something big and wise, that can see a long way across the plain, like a giraffe, but not silly like a giraffe. Not a herd creature. I’ve never been a team player.’
I know that, speed-skater.
‘But not solitary, like a leopard is solitary. A lion. That’s what I am.’
‘Which sense are you?’
He put down his glass. She had him now. The last question would make it irrevocable. Expectation was a warm whisky glow inside her.
‘Touch,’ he said and got up from his folding chair and took her hand very gently and led her to the tent on the right.
‘Are we safe?’ Gaby asked.
‘The wardens keep watch,’ Shepard said, misunderstanding.
‘I warn you, I make horrible loud cat noises.’
‘Everything makes horrible loud cat noises out here.’
‘All right then,’ she said and pulled him down on top of her on the ground sheet.
