– oh dear –’ and there and then, this stately and self-possessed lady was overcome by a deluge of tears. She seized George in a bear hug, kissed him soundly and fled, sniffing, while George and I said more nice things, wonderful having you, come back any time, Auntie Joyce will miss you.
‘What have you been doing to that poor woman?’ Leon asked.
‘Oh, nothing really,’ George said. ‘Found lion for her this morning, that’s all.’
‘It wasn’t the showing that affected her,’ I said. ‘It was making her walk up and shake hands with them.’
‘Tell you what, let’s get back to them this afternoon in the vehicle,’ George said. ‘We’ll drive right into them. I think that should be possible in this terrain. Worth a try, don’t you think, Dan?’
‘Why not?’
‘Right into them?’ Caroline asked. ‘You don’t do that, do you, Leon?’
‘Listen, sweetie, what George does with lion and what I do with lion are two different things. I try to keep my clients alive. Don’t want them eaten by lion, or dying of bloody heart attacks.’ Art attacks. ‘You want to have a art attack, sweetie, you go driving with George.’
‘Well, you can if you like,’ George said vaguely. ‘Very welcome, any time, come now, come with us this afternoon, we’ve no clients today either, you know.’
To my considerable surprise, Leon pounced avidly on this invitation. ‘What a bloody brilliant idea. Triffic, brilliant. Look, sweetie, why don’t you do that, go and look at George’s lion, find out where he is hiding them. Look round his camp, give me a full run-down of their operation. Have a good time. Look after her nicely, you guys, right, and don’t get her bloody eaten or I’ll come across that river with a bloody gun.’
At this point the airport manager approached us. ‘Mr Schuyler, the plane is leaving now, all the passengers are on board.’
‘Christ, sorry, James, all right, I’m out of here.’ Out of year. He kissed Caroline on the lips, the bastard, said, ‘Goodbye, sweetie, don’t get bloody eaten,’ and was gone.
‘Are you sure this is all right?’ Caroline asked, suddenly a little taken aback by all these arrangements being made on her behalf. ‘It’s a nice idea, but I don’t want Leon to impose me on you, you know what he’s like. If it’s not really convenient just say – I was planning to spend the day doing the books, anyway, so I’m not being left high and dry or anything.’
‘Well, all we’ve really got planned today is a look at the lion,’ George said, ‘once I’ve made a phone call to the office. We’ve got to call in at Mukango on the way to use their phone. Look at lion, have a few beers, perhaps. No clients till tomorrow.’
‘George, aren’t we expecting a parcel today?’
‘Oh, so we are.’
George and I walked over to the place where the luggage from the planes was unloaded. ‘George, they’re up to something,’ I said. ‘Caroline and bloody Leon. I don’t like it.’
George looked benign and mildly surprised. ‘Sorry, Dan, I thought you rather liked her, I wouldn’t have invited her if …’
‘There’s a difference between fancying and liking, George. Not my type. No bloody parcel, of course. Another of Joyce’s cock-ups. Oh, well. Let’s go and take the bitch to the lions.’
We walked back to Caroline. ‘Let’s go to Mukango, then,’ George said.
‘If we’ve got to go to Mukango, we won’t get back till mid-afternoon,’ I said. ‘So maybe we should take the spot and have a little go for leopard as well.’
‘I’d love to see leopard,’ Caroline said.
‘You haven’t seen leopard?’ I was amazed. Leopard were rather a speciality of the Mchindeni Valley.
‘Well, I don’t normally go out with the clients,’ Caroline said. It’s not the way we do things. I tend to be a fixed point at camp, apart from when I go out to get vegetables and so on. There’s not much time for game viewing when you are running a lodge full of demanding international clients. I’d love the chance to get out into the bush, actually.’
‘Come along, then,’ George said. ‘If you can face it, after Leon’s dire warnings.’
‘Rather because of Leon’s dire warnings.’
I turned to her with sudden pleasure. ‘Is there a latent craziness in this apparently sane woman?’ I asked George. Caroline laughed. I thought then that there was a chance of reclaiming her for the human race.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Here’s the plan.’ This was something I quite often said. This was because it was something George never said. ‘We drive to Mukango, both vehicles. George calls the office, talks to Joyce and hears her latest plan for ruining the company. Then we all have a beer. We drive to Lion Camp in two vehicles. Sunday gives us late lunch. Then we drive off and look for lion. Sundowner. Spotlight on, and cruise back looking for leopard. Get back for supper. How does that sound?’
‘Admirable,’ George said. Caroline smiled at me again, but I coped.
We drove in convoy to Mukango, an hour’s journey south. Philip Pocock’s lodge had one of the two telephones in the Valley – the other was at the airport but they kept it for themselves – and other camps were permitted to use it for a fee. Philip often pretended that the telephone was his principal source of income; he ran Mukango from a planter’s chair beneath a colossal leadwood tree in the Mukango garden. Now in his seventies, he had of late, he boasted, learned the art of delegation. His staff were inclined to dispute this.
I went up to the Mukango Bar, an establishment so grand it had a real barman, and asked for three Lion, Lion being the name of the beer of the country, and it came out a good shade of lion colour, if occasionally a touch cloudy. George was preparing his mind, or perhaps not preparing his mind, for his call. Lion Safaris was a partnership between George and a charming, generous man named Bruce Wallace, and the booking and administration were carried out from Bruce’s office in Chipembere. Most generously, Bruce had delegated the day-to-day running of the company to his poisonous ex-mistress. Her name, as it happened, was Joyce.
George drank half his beer and took the other half to the telephone, which was in reception a few paces away. Joyce, of course, would already have met Helen at the airport, and helped her to make her connection to Palmyra: the standard tourist trip to the country involved a visit to South Mchindeni for the game viewing and then to Palmyra Resort to wind down.
George got through surprisingly quickly, but the line, judging from his bellow, seemed a poor one. And, all too audibly, it was clear that George was in receipt of a royal bollocking. ‘No, she liked it … Joyce, she may well have been frightened, but … Joyce, she said it was the most marvellous day of her life. No, she was not in any danger. She enjoyed it, I promise you. Ah, Heuglin’s. What? Oh, sorry, no, a Heuglin’s robin has just started singing. No, I know. Sorry. It’s just singing. No, of course not, Joyce, it was a great success. Joyce, I’m sure she didn’t tell you that she had a terrible time. She said she wanted to come back. Well, next time, don’t apologise on my behalf. Oh Joyce, remember Wilderness Express? They’re going to stay at Impala Lodge. That was seventy bed-nights you turned down. Oh, all right then, sixty-three. We
