THE GREAT MISTAKE

Edmund had stayed still for too long, watching the red ants, whose courageous convoy seemed to have no end. When he’d woken from his ‘absence’ with the ants to remember where he was, the rain was already drenching him and he looked around urgently for shelter. The thick canopy itself could afford some protection from the deluge, so he made his way to a patch of forest where no light seemed to fall and stood under the broad leaves of a tall banana tree. It always astonished him, the silence that descended upon the forest when the rains came. It sometimes felt to Edmund as though everything had died in the storm, except himself, kept sentient only by the workings of his stubborn English soul. But surviving such acute loneliness had always tested his inner strength to its limits. When he’d first arrived in Borneo, he’d felt so confused and alone that he had adopted an orphaned orang-utan and was consoled by its presence, and man and beast had clung together, like parent and terrified infant, when the rains fell and the voices of the jungle faded to silence. When the creature died – of some disease which Edmund had no power to cure – he buried it in a deep grave and laid on it a worn pair of gloves, as a symbol of human friendship.

After a while, as the deluge gathered force, and the sky darkened to a night-time blackness, he felt stupid standing under the tree, like a child punished by being told to stand in a cold corner of the room. He remembered a day when, as a boy of seven or eight, walking home from school to his parents’ Wiltshire farm, he’d been caught in a thunderstorm and had crossed half a field of plough to stand under a broad-leaved oak. It was autumn and the leaves of the oak were yellowing and falling all around him.

He’d thought the storm might quickly pass, but it didn’t pass. And it began to feel to the boy as though it would never pass, but slowly turn the field to flood and his skin to slimy pink liquid – and yet he didn’t dare move. He remembered wishing that Valentine had been with him, to tell him what to do, but Valentine was away at his boarding school.

He’d thought of his mother, waiting at the door, casting terrified eyes on the sky and on the empty road beneath, and knew that he should run home along the narrow lanes turning to gullies, and that if he didn’t move, he might die. But he was afraid to leave the shelter of the protecting oak. And then the darkness of evening had come on and he could see nothing except the faint glimmer of the rain, and he had begun to cry.

After a long time, he’d seen the light of a torch flickering in the lane and heard his father calling his name and he knew that he was saved. Yet still he clung to the rough bark of the tree, and his father, in his heavy farm boots, had had to make his way across the ploughed field and pick him up and carry him home in his arms.