He went inside for his cigarettes and sat down in the deck chair, she next to him. “I wonder if you’ve had the same thought. We could adopt.”
“It was the first thing I thought of, but I can’t imagine who would want to give a child to someone my age.”
“With all the orphans in this country, they can’t be particular. And there’s . . .” He hesitated, drawing on the cigarette. “This is awkward. There is your—your situation.”
“I’m rich,” she said.
“I would think they would be delighted to place a child in such comfortable circumstances.”
“And how would you feel?”
“I must face facts. You would be the one putting bread on the table.”
“I meant, how would you feel about raising a child who isn’t yours?”
“I believe I could do it.” He put an arm around her and stared toward the river, almost invisible, now the moon had set. “It could be a solution. We could be happy together, you, me, and a brood of adopted children.”
He wished he could have sounded more certain, had used know instead of believe, will instead of the more hypothetical could.
“A lovely picture,” she said. “It terrifies me.”
“That’s a strange reaction to a lovely picture.”
“I’m terrified of happiness.”
He sat up straighter, disturbed by the comment. “Just minutes ago you said you are perfectly happy. Does that mean you are also perfectly terrified?”
“Happiness terrifies me because it’s so easily lost.”
He knew she was inviting him to declare that her terror was unfounded, that he would make her happy the rest of her life, but his own terror of uttering a vow he might not be able to keep restrained him.
“You’ll know when you’re sure,” she said, again reading his thoughts. “And not a word from you till you are.”
After breakfast, with nothing more concluded between them, he and Diana (smashing in a straw hat, tan bush jacket, and leopard-print scarf) set off with Douglas, a camp driver, and two armed park rangers on a quest for the carmine bee-eater. Douglas’s aim was to photograph the bird and add it to something called a “life-list.”
“What is that?” Fitzhugh asked as they left camp, bumping down a dirt-track road alongside a watercourse.
A life-list, Douglas explained, was the record of every bird a bird-watcher observed in its natural habitat.
“But I thought you had already seen a carmine bee-eater.”
“Nope,” said Douglas, riding in the front seat, binoculars around his neck, and in his lap a camera with a lens almost as long as an arm. “Where’d you get the idea I did?”
“From you. The first conversation we had with Tara. You told her that you’d been to Tsavo with your mother and that you’d photographed a carmine bee-eater.”
“I couldn’t have said that,” Douglas insisted, turning around to face him with a disarming grin. “I’ve never been to Tsavo, and neither has my mother. You must be remembering wrong.”
“I have a memory like a computer, and I distinctly recall your saying that you’d gotten pictures of this bird. Here in Tsavo, with your mother. I remember that because I thought at the time your family must have money to burn if your mother could come all the way to Africa to look at birds.”
“Your computer has a glitch,” Douglas replied casually, then boosted himself through the overhead hatch to ride on the roof.
“There is no glitch, my friend,” Fitzhugh called up in an unpleasant voice. “That is exactly what you said. Own up to it.”
Douglas said nothing.
“Is there some reason you won’t own up to it?”
Diana laid a hand on his arm and said, “Darling, why are you making an issue out of nothing?”
Of course it was nothing. He was feeling irritable, frustrated by his inability to give her what she wanted, and in this state of mind, Douglas’s lie and flip dismissal of the accuracy of his memory had struck him as an insult. He knew Douglas had a tendency to fib when it suited some larger purpose of his, but Fitzhugh couldn’t fathom what purpose there could have been in denying he’d said what he’d said to Tara, as if it were an incriminating statement.
They drove on, passing near a big herd of Cape buffalo that Diana wanted to photograph. Douglas vetoed her request to stop. There would be no stopping until he’d seen his bird.
“Single-minded, isn’t he?” Diana said in an undertone.
“Yes,” Fitzhugh said. “It’s a flaw of the virtue.”
His single-mindedness was much on display as they continued down the road. The watercourse