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?’
He reflected and said, ‘I have very rarely encountered a case in which the circumstances were so extreme as yours: but I do know how often the sorrow and woe that is in marriage arise from want of elementary physical understanding, to say nothing of ineptitude, selfishness, gross ignorance . . .’
‘And a kind of hostility, resentment …”
‘Agreed, agreed. Please wipe my foolish, self-seeking words from your memory as far as ever you can. But do let us go on exchanging notes on Adanson. There are the lanterns coming down through the trees.’
‘Oh dear,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘I am afraid I have wounded you, a man I esteem more than any who have ever addressed me. Stephen, I am so sorry . . .’
The eastern nightjar had begun its song again, its churr, apparently without ever drawing breath; and by way of distracting his mind from the sorrow, Stephen counted the pulse of his heart: he had reached seventy-five before the bird stopped. The lights were on the edge of the wood, and he was aware that Christine had been weeping.
On the way up she took his arm, and in the house they sat down to a curiously delicious supper based on African vegetables that he did not know, and eggs, with a tolerable white wine; then came the almond pudding, followed by a capital madeira.
Pushing the plates aside she showed him the astonishing skin of Caprimulgus longipennis and told him about the power of those particular feathers as ju-ju in local belief. ‘The longer I live in Africa,’ she observed when they were drinking the wretched coffee and some excellent rum, ‘and the more I know about Africans, the nearer I come to a sort of diffused pantheism.’
Reverting to this a little later, when her spirits had revived somewhat, she said, ‘I know my divinity angers missionaries to a quite surprising degree, and upon the whole I do not care for them either, not very much. But sometimes a missionary is also a naturalist, and if he is far away in the bush he may have wonderful opportunities. I am sure you have heard of the Congo peacock?’
‘Indeed, I have often heard tell of him; but I have never known him described by a credible witness.’
‘Well,’ she said, feeling in a drawer, ‘I do not say that this is proof positive,’ – holding out a green feather – ‘but it was given me by a very old – Franciscan, I think, a Catholic in any event – who died here before he could take ship, and who told me without the least pomp or showing away that he had plucked it from the back of a recently dead peacock in the Congo: I forget the name of the district, but the bird lived in open woodland.’
‘Dear me, Christine,’ he said, caressing the feather, ‘you have amazed and delighted me three times today. The elephantine heron; the wildly eccentric, more than improbable nightjar, and now the fabled Congo peacock, on whose existence I shall now pledge my soul. I am sorry that you do not choose to marry me, but I thoroughly understand your . . .
what shall I say? Disinclination.’
A surprising length of time, of emotional time, had passed between their standing in the hide, the space of his declaration, and the present, with its entirely different context. She smiled, drank a little more rum, patted his knee, and said, ‘Tell me, Stephen, if I had accepted your dear, dear proposal, how should you have managed the purely material side of the union? You have spoken of your daughter. How old is she?’
‘I am ashamed to say I cannot tell. Quite young, sure: nowhere near puberty.’
‘Then again you are engaged with your friend on a distant and I presume important voyage?’
‘To be sure,’ said Stephen, looking wretchedly from side to side. ‘Yet I was not entirely thoughtless. Believe me,” he said earnestly, ‘I was not entirely selfish. I had a very pretty solution: my idea was that you should go to England, there to stay with Sophie Aubrey, a charming woman and a very old friend, who has two girls and a son, who looks after Brigid, my daughter, and who lives in a large house in Dorset with quantities of friends all round and a most respectable body of servants. And then, it appeared to what I can only diffidently call my mind – in other words the embodiment of my wishes – that I should return from the sea, and that together we should plot the course of our days: England, Ireland, France or Spain, or any combination according to your choice.’