The Poison Oracle by Peter Dickinson Page B

the whole hog. Those Jarawa I was talking about aren’t the only tribe in the Andamans, but all the others have made vague contact with the rest of the world and either been assimilated or died out—dying out’s more usual in fact. The Indian government won’t let anyone go near the Jarawa, not even anthropologists—that isn’t because they’re enlightened, it’s because the Andamans are an important naval base. But the result is that they’re still totally isolated—different—themselves, and it is just possible that the future of mankind might lie with them. Or with the marshmen here.”
    She was about to retort, but was distracted. During the last sentences of Morris’s harangue Dinah’s face had emerged above the tatty chintz of the arm of Anne’s chair, the ludicrous arch of her brows expressing wonder and surprise as her brown clear eyes gazed first at the glossy black hair, then at the soft-skinned cheek, and last at the lacy promontory of the bosom. Suddenly her dark arm snaked forward and two fingers probed at the white curve. Anne barely recoiled. She looked down and laughed kindly.
    “Hello, future,” she said.
    It is uncomfortable to find oneself liking, however momentarily, somebody of whom one disapproves with all the poor passion at one’s command. Morris distracted himself by watching Dinah, and immediately wished he’d had a camera going—it was a perfect example of her quickness that she should at once recognise in her own nature an element that she shared with this stranger but did not share with him, for she was peering sideways and down at her chest and feeling with her fingers the area round her own nipples. It would have been anthropomorphism to say she was dissatisfied, but to a comical extent she looked it.
    Anne, still laughing, reached out a careful hand and started to tease at the fur on Dinah’s nape. Dinah was entranced. For a few seconds she stayed where she was, hunched like a man in a shower to relish the process; then she skipped on to the arm of the chair, took Anne by the wrist and moved her hand to a place on her ribs which she seemed to think needed attention. Anne, Morris could see, did instinctively what he himself had only learnt to do by watching Hugo van Lawick’s films.
    “You ought to have trained as a vet,” he said.
    “Oh, Mummy always has a dozen dogs in the house. And my father behaved as though our education was complete when we’d learnt how to groom a horse. But they’d have thought vets a bit beneath us. Will you do something for me?”
    She had chosen her moment beautifully, establishing a deliciously cosy relationship with Dinah, slipping in a quick reference to her real social superiority to anything Morris knew, then asking. She mightn’t be brainy, but she was cunning.
    “Ung?” he said.
    “Are you still Foreign Minister?”
    “I think so. I’ll know to-morrow, when I see where I’m sitting at the feast.”
    “Can you fix me a passport?”
    Morris said nothing, but stared at her gloomily, pulling his lip. She and Dinah made a charmingly posed contrast, both beautiful examples of their species, absorbed in their simple task: it was difficult to imagine refusing either of them anything. Really, this girl was a hundred years out of date. The roles she wanted weren’t being written any more—barging about the middle east, meddling in native politics, upsetting everybody, landing in some fracas far beyond her and then expecting to be rescued by a British Naval Party under the command of a snappily saluting little snotty. Now she was expecting Morris to come to the rescue.
    “Haven’t you got one?” he said.
    “I’ve had my British one withdrawn, the sods. I’ve been getting about on a Syrian travel document, but I think Bruce has impounded it. A Q’Kuti passport would be just the job.”
    “Ung.”
    She stopped grooming Dinah to look at him with the same speculative glance he had seen earlier. She was calculating his price. Not