“He’ll have to feed, Davey,” his father said. “Your feet are in good shape. They’re as sound as Juma’s. Eat this slowly and drink some tea and go to sleep again. We haven’t any problem.”
“I’m sorry I was so sleepy.”
“You and Kibo hunted and travelled all last night. Why shouldn’t you be sleepy? You can have a little more meat if you want it.”
“I’m not hungry.”
164 165
“Good. We’re good for three days. We’ll hit water again tomorrow. Plenty of creeks come off the mountain.”
“Where’s he going?”
“Juma thinks he knows.”
“Isn’t it bad?”
“Not too bad, Davey.”
“I’m going back to sleep,” David had said. “I don’t need your coat.”
“Juma and I are all right,” his father said. “I always sleep warm you know.”
David was asleep even before his father said good night. Then he woke once with the moonlight on his face and he thought of the elephant with his great ears moving as he stood in the forest, his head hung down with the weight of the tusks. David thought then in the night that the hollow way he felt as he remembered him was from waking hungry. But it was not and he found that out in the next three days.
In the story he had tried to make the elephant come alive again as he and Kibo had seen him in the night when the moon had risen. Maybe I can, David thought, maybe I can. But as he locked up the day’s work and went out of the room and shut the door he told himself, No, you can’t do it. The elephant was old and if it had not been your father it would have been someone else. There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.
He went behind the bar and found the bottle of Haig and a cold half bottle of Perrier and made himself a drink and took it out in the big kitchen to find Madame. He told her he was going into Cannes and would not be back for lunch. She scolded
him about drinking whiskey on an empty stomach and he asked her what she had cold that he could put in the empty stomach with the whiskey. She brought out some cold chicken and sliced it and put it on a plate and made an endive salad and he went into the bar and made another drink and came back to sit down at the kitchen table.
“Don’t drink that now before you eat, Monsieur,” Madame said.
“It’s good for me,” he told her. “We drank it at the mess like wine in the war.”
“It’s a wonder you weren’t all drunkards.”
“Like the French,” he said and they argued French working class drinking habits, on which they both agreed, and she teased him that his women had left him. He said that he was tired of them both and wasn’t she ready to take their place now? No, she said, he would have to show more evidence he was a man before he roused a woman of the Midi. He said he was going into Cannes where he could get a proper meal and would come back like a lion and let the women of the south take care. They kissed affectionately with the kiss of the favoured client and the brave femme and then David went in to take a shower, to shave and to change.
The shower made him feel good and he was cheered up from talking to Madame. I wonder what she would say if she knew what it was all about, he thought. Things had changed since the war and both Monsieur and Madame had a sense of style and they wished to move with the change. We three clients are all de gens tres bien. So long as it pays and isn’t violent there is nothing wrong with it. The Russians are gone, the British are beginning to be poor, the Germans are ruined, and now there is this disregard of the established rules which can very well be the salvation of the whole coast. We are pioneers in opening up the summer season which is still regarded as madness. He looked at his face in the mirror with one side shaved. Still, he said to