Binstead's Safari by Rachel Ingalls

Author:Rachel Ingalls [Rachel Ingalls]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571299850
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

They moved for the last time, to join the group at the big camp. On the night before, they toasted each other as though they would never meet again, since from that time onward, Ian would be occupied with the Whiteacres and their many guests.

Their route carried them at one point through true farming country and they saw a great many people and villages, which they had avoided so far in their moves from place to place. Millie was interested. Stan, on the other hand, was offended by this sudden evidence of domesticated civilization in a country he had become used to thinking of as a hunter’s Garden of Eden. The villages contained bicycles, beer parlours, sewing machines, women wearing tailored dresses and men with suits. Scrawny cattle, tended by children, roamed across the outskirts. There were more young people than in the villages he had seen so far; he had been introduced to very traditional, outmoded places, where the sons grew up wanting to get out fast and go to work for the safari companies or for the government, and the daughters had dreams of living a modern life in the big cities.

The road was used by many groups travelling on foot. An old man, who held a flowered parasol, was one of the few pedestrians to whom Tom gave a lift. There seemed to be an established etiquette about picking passengers up on the road: you didn’t take everyone who asked, otherwise it became like a game. And no very young children, who only wanted rides for fun and then called out to large numbers of their friends to come join in.

Whether near villages or out on the plains, dust rose around them as they moved forward. Some places were worse than others; often a turn in the road would bring them out into a new stretch of country that almost seemed to be part of a different climate.

They arrived early in the afternoon, expecting to find a camp stocked with all the people mentioned in the letters they had received, but met only Nicholas himself and the cookhouse crew and gunbearers.

Nicholas helped with the unpacking. He said, “You wouldn’t believe the explanations. You couldn’t. I shan’t even try.”

“Joshua knows,” Tom said.

“Never mind, then. I’ll tell it.” He said that only two days before, Alistair’s friend Carrol, after a final quarrel with Eddie, had driven into town in search of a lawyer. Eddie had gone back to the balloon just in time to be able to hitch a ride with Bernhard’s girlfriend, Karen, while Bernhard himself drove Otis and Martha to town. They had been followed by Darleen, who wanted to return to her duties as Otis’s secretary, and Bob, who had again decided he needed Martha back.

Stan said, “So now it’s musical cars instead of musical chairs. It must feel like the place is empty.”

“It feels bloody marvellous. And there’s an even chance it may stay like this for a bit.”

The Whiteacres, together with friends of theirs named Stone, had gone off to the coast for several weeks.

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