Natural History Read Online Free Page B

the cause of it.
    But now he knew what she’d really been thinking. Before they even reached the foot of the hill, Jane had known that he’d go with her, to Africa.
    Charlie and Jo were born in Kenya.
    They were fine years. Patrick used the Underwood to type Jane’s research notes, and his unpublished adventure novels. And when the kids were old enough, he home-schooled them.
    At first, he spent time chasing down books which followed the English curriculum—buying them from the English schools in Kenya, ordering them in from London. Then he gave up and made up their education as he went along. It was a good way to teach, and a good way to learn: Jo and Charlie spent time with each other, with their parents, and with all the people around them; and everyone they met contributed in some way to their schooling—the PhDs from Europe and America, the Kenyan men and women who worked with them.
    Patrick was proud of his kids, and proud of the life they were leading. He liked to watch his barefoot son kick round a soccer ball with barefoot black boys and ginger-bearded zoologists—and he liked to sit with his daughter, outside, and watch the vast and uninterrupted night sky.
    In 1984, Jane secured funding to study the Tsavo lions. Patrick suspected she did it to please her father, but he said nothing, and went with her.
    But the post didn’t last long, because Jane, Patrick and the kids had to move to Lion Manor.
    Jane’s father had been leading tourists on horseback bush tour when he suffered a God-almighty stroke and died at the edge of a dried-out water-hole, propped by a panicking tourist against a fever tree.
    Lion Manor was Jane’s inheritance; they stayed for three years, preparing it for sale. They leased one of the Manor’s several islands to a chimpanzee rescue charity, then sold the Safari Park as a going concern and, eager to be free, spent the money part-funding a palaeo-anthropological dig on the coast of Kenya. But all the dig proved was their inability to handle finance. And so, eleven years after leaving, they returned to Britain.
    By now, Jane had acquired a small reputation for unusual field projects, which was how she secured a position studying a colony of Tuatara living in freakish isolation off the North Welsh coast. Tuatara were a lizard species unique to New Zealand. Nobody had the first idea how they’d come to be on the wrong side of the world.
    The family lived in a coastal, whitewashed cottage. Patrick loved to be near the sea, and at least Wales wasn’t England. The kids went to the local school. In spring and summer, they walked or cycled. In winter, he drove them in the old VW estate—leprous with Greenpeace and WWF and surfing decals, rusted round the wheel-rims, orange as a lollipop.
    Jo wanted to be an astronaut, and because astronauts had to be fit, she and Patrick went on after-school rambles and beachfront sprints.
    Patrick kept house, wrote books, sent them to publishers, kept the rejections. He grew vegetables. He compiled and typed-up Jane’s notes, first with the old Underwood, then with a computer bought second-hand from the local Classifieds. He kept on top of Jane’s correspondence. He travelled to local libraries, historical societies, document collections, searching out mention of some local traveller’s return from New Zealand with a basket of exotic lizards. But he found nothing.
    While they were living at this very cottage, in something not far from poverty, Jane took a call from a man called Bob Todd.
    Todd worked for a West Country safari park that had just been taken over—and he knew what Jane had achieved, turning round Lion Manor. So he drove his shiny Rover all the way to the little whitewashed cottage on the Welsh coast, just to meet her. Bob Todd was just about as keen as mustard.
    He and Jane sat in the little kitchen and talked. Bob Todd showed her a folder, full of glossy photographs and bullet points. And