Blue at the Mizzen (15 page)

Stephen understood that 'he' was some particular creature

- bird, reptile, possibly mammal, of a rarity that would delight him. He asked no questions and soon he had no time to ask any that might arise as he concentrated on following her practised steps through this slimy shade.

Yet most unhappily, as both sun and tide mounted, Christine moved faster, just too fast for her mud-clogged boots. The aerial roots, pale wands hanging plumb-straight down from the upper tree, betrayed her, and she did indeed fall plump into that vile black stinking mud, angering the small fishes that skipped on its surface, the many kinds of crab, and the little mud-tortoises that preyed on both. Stephen lurched forward to heave her out - met with the same fate - and they wallowed painfully, slowly, on all fours to the extreme edge of the mangrove trees, where clean water and a fairly clean bottom allowed them to crawl ashore in a very distressing state of filth.

She gasped, begged his pardon, said, 'How I hope we did not disturb him - probably not - there is two hundred yards to go. Does nakedness worry you?'

'Not in the least. After all, we are both anatomists.'

'Very well,' said she. 'There is nothing for it. We must both strip and rid our clothes of mud, our bodies of leeches. We have clean water here, thanks be: and in my pocket there is salt for the leeches, in a corked bottle. May I give you a hand with your boots?' She did so; he did the same for her; and they stripped off their clothes without the least ceremony, floating the mud out of them, weighing them down with stones; and then they attended to the astonishingly numerous and avid leeches, each dealing with the other's back in a wholly impersonal manner.

Apart from some artists' models and nations that possessed no clothes at all, Stephen had never seen anyone so unconcerned with nudity: and on reflection he remembered her brother Edward, his intimate friend, telling him that he and she had bathed, naturalised and fished, wearing nothing at all, from small childhood to maturity, in the isolated lake that formed part of their family's park. Well before this, during his first visit, she and her black companion had wandered into his field of vision as he searched the farther shore of a mere for birds and he had admired not only their freedom but also the combination of green, black, white, and the whiter than white of an egret, yet as objectively as he watched duck and cormorants. But now her tall, graceful, willowy shape was emphasised by the thin vermilion streams that flowed from the leech-bites (it did not coagulate, the creatures injecting a substance that thinned the blood, turned it a fine vermilion and allowed them a much longer period of feeding) and these outlined the curve of her long, long legs with an extraordinarily pleasing effect; and now something of the scientist, something of the pure anatomist, began to leave him.

'Presently the flies will grow intolerable,' she said. 'It would be better to put on damp clothes than to have them crawling about all over one.' Still, she did spread some of the wettest on sun-warmed rocks: they dried quite soon, but even sooner the mounting sun made her uneasy. They put the garments on, as well as they could, and she led the way, murmuring, 'Oh that he may not have gone.'

She reached a last screen of rushes before a small, secluded inlet, and as she did so there leapt into the air a perfectly enormous bird of the heron kind, blueish on top, chestnut below, with immense green legs and a deep, furious baying cry - he filled the narrow space of sky before vanishing seawards, leaving Stephen perfectly amazed. He kissed Christine quite ardently, thanking her with the most profound gratitude. She blushed, and said, 'Oh how glad I am we had not flushed him. He is as touchy as a Roman emperor.'

'Lord,' said Stephen, 'that such a bird can fly! Can take to the air!'

When he had recovered from his amazement, which was not soon, and when their clothes were moderately dry, he observed with pleasure that in spite of the fact that they had stalked about together stark naked she had a certain coquetry in arranging the fall of her principal garment. 'Now, should you like to go to the house and have tea and then come down to the hides out there' - nodding to some reed shelters on or just off the true shore - 'so that when the sun is gone I hope to be able to show you a most prodigious wonder. You do not have to go back to the ship directly, I trust?'

'Oh no. If there is any urgency aboard they will send for me; but with my colleague already there, it is scarcely possible.'

'To tea, then; and at least we have a Christian path to the house. Coming down it again, we should be wise to carry a gun. The poor leopard is growing desperate, I fear - so many insatiable cubs.'

'Have you ever seen them?'

'Yes: she keeps them in a tumble of rocks on the hillside, and if you climb an oil-palm about two hundred yards along, you can see them peeping out just after dawn, waiting for her. I drove tenpenny nails into the trunk, and many a good skirt have they cost me, when I slip.'

'Jenny,' she called, walking into the house with a little cloud of dogs, 'tell N'Gombe that we should like tea, and pray run and fetch a really cool cucumber for sandwiches.

Stephen,' she went on, 'should you like a dressing-gown?'

'No, thank you, my dear: I have walked myself dry.'

'Then forgive me for a moment while I put something decent on my back.'

There were some bird-skins on her work-table, with the heaps of notes required for an intelligent commentary on Adanson, and he looked at them with an interest quite devoid of prying, at the same time revolving one of those curious problems of limit: you may kill a leopard if she assumes a threatening attitude, thus condemning her beautiful cubs to a hideous and lingering death. You may shoot and skin a number of slightly differing green pigeons and wood-doves with no more of a tremor than Sir Joseph Blaine impaling a butterfly. Yet to the question 'You would not destroy the whole litter and be shot of them?' you may reply 'If you had seen a little leopard, I do not think you would ask.'

The door opened. 'Why, my dear,' he said, 'how very fine you look, now you are cleaned and brushed. Pray what is this skin? Clearly a pigeon, but I cannot make out which.'

'He is Gmelin's Treron thomae, from the island down in the Gulf. Here comes the tea: what joy. There is nothing like tea for getting rid of the taste of mangrove mud.'

It was brought with proper ceremony by an immense, grave, very black man, and almost immediately after it was followed by the cucumber sandwiches and some little round affairs, not unlike marzipan.

They made a good, serious tea, passing bird-skins from hand to hand and speaking of their infant greed - muffins, crumpets, buttered toast with anchovy relish, deeply iced fruit cake - in the most companionable way. But towards the end Stephen noticed that she was looking out of the window with something of the anxiety of one who does not wish to miss the evening rise: he refused 'another cup' and rose briskly at her suggestion that they should go down to the hides - lanterns would bring them up again, so they could stay as long as they chose.

'I shall entrust the gun to you, if I may,' she said, rather as though it were an umbrella, and led the way out with a fine elastic step, putting her boots on again in the hall.

Down, with plenty of light and a three-quarter moon rising over Africa: Stephen said, 'Sometimes, you know, I am shockingly careless of the common decencies of life.'

'You mean taking all our clothes off in that abandoned way?'

'Dear me, no: our forbears did that long before us - long before they had any notion of that apron of fig-leaves. No: what grieves me is my never uttering a single word - not the least enquiry after your chanting-goshawks, begging you to tell me how they do?'

'Alas, Stephen, alas: a bateleur killed their mother, and I did not succeed in bringing them up. You have seen a bateleur, I make no doubt?'

'I have, too. The most remarkable of the eagles - if he is an eagle at all, which some naturalists deny.'

'She was out in the yard, on her perch, and he came down with a noise like a stooping peregrine but twice as loud, chased her into the stable and instantly killed her. Hassan took her body away, netted the eagle, and so left him in the dark. He was - and is - a young bird, and terribly fierce at the slightest threat. But quite soon we were on reasonably good terms. He is surprisingly intelligent, and even kind; indeed very good terms. I turned him free, and even now -for this is his territory - he will come racing down on to my shoulder to ask how I do.'

'How I hope I may see him: he at least is a bird one can never mistake - no tail, no tail at all. You would say a scythe, flying at enormous speed; wonderful gyrations. Tell me, what about bats?'

'I must confess that I have not paid as much attention to bats as I should have done. There are such myriads of birds - one of them, by the way, lives on bats, together with the odd evening pipit. He is a buzzard really, of moderate size but extraordinary agility, as you may imagine: they eat their bats straight out of their talons, in the air. I only know two couples. Here we are: and here is really quite a good path and then a little sort of causeway to the main - well, you can hardly call it a building - but the place or hide from which my husband and his guests used to shoot the flighting duck and the smaller geese. You can stand there, seeing and not being seen: a capital place if you like to watch the waders and many, many of the little things in the reeds. Take care on the causeway - here is the rope.'

Inside it was surprisingly light. Their eyes were already accustomed to the afterglow - it was no more - and they could make out geese and duck by the hundred. 'But my dear Stephen,' she said, gently turning him round to the shore and the trees, 'this is the way you must look, and oh how I hope my nine-days' wonder remembers the appointment. We are rich in nightjars, as you know - do you hear the one over to the east?'

'A dear bird. Our homely European kind, is he not?' 'Certainly; but I meant the deeper croak to the left.' He listened, caught the sound, and said, 'It is a nightjar of a sort, to be sure: the family voice.' The bird stopped: they stood poised, listening: then suddenly she touched his arm. 'There is my bird,' she whispered. 'Oh, how I hope he comes.'

Stephen caught the shrill, lasting churr: and as a waft of air brought the sound closer it soon dropped in pitch, growing much more present. 'Don't move,' she murmured.

They stood taut, their senses at the stretch, the utmost stretch; and clear against the pale sky, not twenty yards before them, flew a bird with a nightjar's action but extraordinarily modified by two immensely elongated flight-feathers on either side, trailing far behind, more than doubling its length. With an instant change of direction it swooped on a pale moth, captured it and flew off, lost against the darkness of the trees.

She had been gripping his arm: now she released it, saying, 'He did come: oh I am so glad. You saw him clear, Stephen?'

'Clear, perfectly clear: and I am amazed, amazed. Thank you very much indeed for showing him to me, dear Christine. Lord, such wealth! Such an acquisition! Will you tell me about him?'

'What very little I know. He is Shaw's Caprimulgus longi-pennis, and he is uncommon in these parts, above all in his full mating plumage - I have seen only two all the time I have been here. That perfectly astonishing train, by the way, is just the ninth primary on either side; and how the poor bird manages to get into the air I cannot imagine, above all if he happens to be on the ground: we have another nightjar with enormously exaggerated flight feathers, Macrodypteryx vexillarius, but his are only pointed, not bushy at the tips, like ours... But in any case I have never been able to make really valuable observations of either, nor of their plain long-tailed cousin.'

'I should not have missed that for anything. On the face of it those primaries destroy the bird's efficiency, just as the peacock's ludicrous train or the lavish display of the birds of paradise may be presumed to cost them a very great deal. Yet they live and even thrive: could it be that our notions, or at least my notions, are fundamentally mistaken?'

'There he is again. And another: the ordinary long-tailed bird.'

They stood in silence, slowly relaxing. 'There is our scops owl,' said she. Some duck passed over, wigeon by the sound of their wings, and broke the surface a hundred yards away with a surprising noise in this dead-still night.

'Stephen,' she said after a while. 'I am afraid you are uneasy. Shall I go away for a few minutes? You can whistle when you want me back.'

'No, soul,' he said, 'this is really not the usual physical matter but rather a question of throwing my petition into a reasonably acceptable form. In short, it would give me infinite joy if you would marry me: yet before you instantly put me to silence, let me at least say what I can in my own favour. Admittedly, I am very far from being even tolerably good-looking; but from the physician's point of view I am pretty sound, with no grossly evident vices; materially I believe I may say that I am what is ordinarily called well-to-do, with an ancient house and a reasonable estate in Spain - I could without difficulty buy a decent place or set of chambers in London or Dublin: or Paris, for that matter. I stand reasonably well in my profession and in the service. My worst enemies could not truthfully say that I was a loose-liver, addicted to gaming or the bottle. And although in candour I cannot deny that my birth was illegitimate and my church that of Rome, I do not think - I do not like to think - that to a person of your distinguished intelligence, these are total bars to a union, above all since I should make no claims of any kind. Finally I should like to add that as you are aware, I am a widower - your letter touched me to the heart - and that I have a daughter.'

After a while, during which at least three separate nightjars churred and one owl called, she said, 'Stephen, you do me infinite honour, and it grieves me more than I can say to desire you to dismiss the subject from your mind. I have been married, as of course you know, and very unhappily married. I too am pretty sound from the physician's point of view: I too am reasonably wealthy. But - I am speaking of course to an honourable man - my husband was incapable of the physical aspects of marriage and his vain attempts to overcome this defect gave me what I have believed to be an ineradicable disgust for everything to do with that aspect - the whole seemed to me a violent and of course inept desire for possession and physical dominance. And this impression was no doubt reinforced by own fear and reluctance.' And speaking in an entirely different tone after a period of silence she said, 'In your experience as a physician, would you say that this was a usual state of mind in a young married woman?'