“So you don’t wear a black tie, then?” he said. A look of mild disappointment settled on his face.
“Of course I do,” I said quickly. I cannot fully explain the fabrication that followed. I can only say that I wanted desperately for the smile to return to Johnny’s face, for him to be thrilled and mystified once more. And so I continued: “I am famous for my sartorial sensibilities. I have even been known to dress for dinner when I am at home on my own! Did you know, a great ballet dancer once said that he wished his shirts were as elegant as mine. He saw me in a restaurant and crossed the room to pay me that compliment. The next day I selected a few of my less-favoured shirts — made by Charvet in Paris — and had them sent round to his dressing room. I daresay he was mightily pleased with them.”
He smiled broadly and turned to look at me with his all-absorbing eyes. “Really?” he breathed. “What was this person’s name?”
“Nijinsky,” I said without hesitation, knowing he would not know any better.
He continued picking his way through the trees, negotiating tree roots and fallen logs as easily as I might have strolled through St. James’s Park on a summer’s day.
“In fact,” I continued, “I have not one but two dinner jackets with me back at the guest house. It’s one of my rules of travel: never be underdressed. I was thinking, though, that perhaps you should have one of them. A man should always be appropriately attired, after all.”
He looked shocked at first, uncomprehending. I made my offer again, and he accepted it with a silent smile. Thereafter he began to fire questions rapidly, speaking with a looseness I had never before seen in an adult. This had a curious effect on me. My answers became more and more elaborate, happily gilded with stories from a glittering past I never knew I had. He seemed to draw energy from these tales, laughing loudly whilst striding powerfully ahead of me. I tried hard to keep up, but the effort of explaining, inter alia, Jacob’s Ladder and the devotion of Mary Magdalene was too much for me, and my breath became truncated and painful. We stopped in a glade by a shallow valley filled with rhododendrons. My vision swam with multicoloured shapes.
“Rest awhile,” Johnny said. He poured some water onto a small piece of cloth and offered it to me. I placed it on my neck and caught my breath. The landscape around us seemed bizarre in its variety. Part tropical, part temperate, wholly perplexing. All manner of epiphytes clung to the trees: bird’s-nest ferns, many-headed orchids, twisting vines with flowers the colour of hot coals. We were in the heart of the forest now, tiny creatures dwarfed by the towering columns around us.
“What’s that tree called?” I asked, pointing.
He shrugged.
“That one?” I asked again.
“I don’t know.”
“That one’s teak,” I said.
“We call it jati,” he said.
I walked to the edge of the clearing, listening to the cries of hawks.
“Jati is what we use to build houses,” he said.
“Isn’t your house made from teak?”
He laughed. “That is my father-in-law’s house — but yes, it is teak. Someday I too will own a house made from teak.”
“Was your shop made from teak?” I said, continuing to gaze at the thick canopy of leaves above me.
He laughed suddenly, a different laugh this time. It sounded cold and sad. “My shop was destroyed. By fire. And now I live in the house of my wife’s father.”
I had just begun to turn to look at Johnny when I felt something on my shoulder. Just for an instant: a blunt thud accompanied by a sharp, pricking pain in my neck. Johnny’s eyes widened and he ran towards some bushes, picking up a long stick as he did so. In a single fluid movement he brought the stick down hard into the earth; he lifted his arm again and repeated this several times until finally I saw that he had killed a snake. A small one, dull green in colour. Its bloodied body hung limply over the stick. My neck began to throb gently. Johnny came to me and said, “I thought it was a viper, but it’s not. This snake is only slightly poisonous.”
“Slightly poisonous?” I said, my voice constricting into a whisper. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll be fine. It didn’t bite you properly.” He came very close to me and held my neck. I could not see what he was doing. I could barely feel the flick of his knife on my skin as he made a tiny incision. He squeezed the cut so gently I could not feel anything apart from a spreading warmth on my neck; and then he wet a thin towel with some water from the flask and pressed it to my numbed skin.
“We should go,” he said.
