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 question tags.
After a brief pause, George remembered his manners. ‘Business all right with you and so on?’
‘Terrific,’ said Leon, or rather, ‘Triffic. Got permission from the National Parks Commission to expand. I am seriously bloody pleased, I tell you. Going to build six more huts.’ Leon’s voice was not Pretoria-pure, but he separated his vowels and suppressed his aspirates in a wonderfully imitable – I imitated it all the time – Afrikaner fashion. Six maw uts.
‘Are you full right now?’
‘Wouldn’t be catching a plane if we were full, man. No, we have two days without clients, quite a relief, I tell you, it’s been non-stop. Going to Chip to talk a bit of business, couple of big meetings and so forth. Plenty clients coming Thursday, plenty-plenty clients. Party of bloody ten, bunch of people in England you’ve probably never heard of. Called Wilderness Express.’
After a slightly stunned silence, I managed to say amiably enough, ‘Bit of a squeeze on game drives.’
‘Nott!’ said Leon, another great Afrikanerism. ‘Bought a new Land Cruiser. Came in from Jo’burg three weeks back, just cleared customs this week, slow bastards. My partner had to move in and kick plenty arse, get the damn thing free. But tell me, George, what is happening with the Tondo Pride?’
Leon, I knew, had little time for George as a businessman; I suspect that even my poor father could have given him a few tips in that area. But Leon knew that when it came to wildlife, and especially when it came to lion, George was the man to ask. ‘George will know,’ people in the Valley said when a conversation about lion reached impasse, and George generally did. And lion were also business: if you showed your clients lion, they tended to go home happy.
‘They knocked down an old buff this morning,’ George said. He gave the location precisely. ‘I fancy that they will stay on the riverine strip now until it rains. I know it’s early, but the drought conditions have altered things. Game concentrations are higher round the river than I have ever seen this early in the season, and practically all the standing water has gone. I think the pride will stay where they are till the end of the season. The plain after the ebony grove due north of ours is currently their core area. Not that that helps you on the opposite bank.’
‘Well, you’d be surprised at what I have in mind, George. But tell me, have you heard any talk about the bloody road? I need information.’
‘That old story again?’
‘Shit, George, you never hear anything unless it’s a bloody bird. ‘It’s all started again, man: second strike of natural gas out in Western Province, want to build a road straight through the middle of the park to make the journey time to Chip down to six hours, open the area up. People from the Ministry of National Resources spent a day with the old man, Chief Mchindeni, talking about a four-lane highway.’
‘Are you sure?’ I asked, not a good question.
‘Jesus, of course I’m bloody sure, and I’m going in to Chip to get even more sure.’
‘That would be the end of the park,’ I said, naïvely stating the obvious. But I was suddenly dismayed: the end of the park, the end of my life in the bush.
Leon shot me a brief look of contempt. ‘It would be the end of my bloody business, man,’ he said, Afrikaner-tough. ‘Bastards don’t bloody care. I’m going to shake a few trees down in Chip, I tell you. These bastards are going to get a fight.’ Git a faart.
At this point, Helen joined us, boarding pass in hand, and Caroline also arrived, having shepherded her clients into the departure ‘lounge’. She placed her elbow on Leon’s shoulder, which immensely solid item was located at a convenient height for her. Leon was built on the principle of the cube, with a khaki baseball cap (marked ‘Impala Lodge’ and bearing a leaping impala logo, nicely made – ‘got ’em done in Jo’burg, man, none of the local rubbish’) perched on the top.
‘I have to go through now, they tell me,’ Helen said. ‘Perfectly dreadful. I feel like running away, coming back to stay with you for ever at Lion Camp. I don’t suppose you’d consider smuggling me back?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Any time.’ I kissed her cheek, not without affection, and said, not without truth, that it had been lovely having her. ‘Oh Helen, do you think you could be awfully kind and not actually mention to
