“I couldn’t do it. In the end I just felt too guilty, too on the spot. It was damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I mean. He’s married and has two grown-up kids. I’m not going to ever be more important than that. He’s been married almost thirty years. They’ve been together since he was about 23 –“

“Which would make him…?”

“52, give or take. I know, I know. But you should have seen him. Really well preserved. Really. And so into me. And filthy on the phone. I just couldn’t convert that to actual, you know, physical, you know, getting amongst it. I wanted to, believe me, but I wanted him to make that move and he always seemed to hang back, waiting for me.”

“So he could blame you when it all went tits up and his wife found out. ‘She caught me unawares, I didn’t see it coming’. Yeah right.”

“Exactly. And I wasn’t going to fall for that. I knew I’d get in too deep before I even looked up for air.”

This, whilst crawling through Addo National Elephant Park at 12 miles an hour, me in the passenger seat, leaning out the window with the binoculars we’d bought yesterday, Elaine in the driver’s seat, leaning out her window to scan the undergrowth. The closest we’d been to wildlife this morning was a red triangle road sign saying ‘Drive Carefully - Dung Beetles Have Right of Way!’, with a graphic of a beetle up on its hind legs, rolling what stood for a large round ball of shit. Neither of us was looking at the road, hence the car crawl; plus we didn’t want to scare or to miss anything, should there be anything to miss other than the occasional crunch of dung beetle under wheel.

“So, yeah”, said Elaine. “That was basically that. I challenged him the last night I saw him. We’d gone out for dinner, to Baltic in Waterloo - you know the place, beetroot with everything – and by the way things were going, I thought ‘game on!’, he’s working up to making a move on me. I was totally up for it.”

“And?”

“But he buckled. Or changed his mind. Or whatever”, she continued. “I asked him what all the phone calls and the emails and the constant sms’s were all about and he –“

“Warthog! Cute! And baby hogs! Four, five, six of them. On the left. Left, see them? Comedy. Finally, something to put against the entrance fee. Okay, yeah, so the sms’s?”

“He kind of acted innocent”, she said, taking the binoculars and giving the family Hog a once-over. “Innocent or stupid. He did this ‘what, me?’ look and acted like you carry on like this with all your mates. I was gobsmacked. It just shows how boys are such boys no matter how old they are. He really wanted me to jump his bones so he could do a ‘she made me do it!’ routine. That just really pissed me off.”

“Hats off to your self-restraint” I said, although I wasn’t really listening any more. Not that I didn’t care, but we’d been through this already. It was day 17 of a 20 day vacation in South Africa and we’d spent the flight from London to Cape Town talking about little else. To be honest, I was just going through the motions to make Elaine feel better. It was a great story and there were plenty of pretty outrageous details she was more than happy to share with me. We had squealed together in row 16, finally waking up the farty old gran across the aisle, when she first mentioned the phone sex and had outlined some of this guy’s less standard peccadillos. But now this tale wasn’t going anywhere. She should have fucked him, then there would be more to tell. More for me to enjoy and share with Magnus when I got back to Amsterdam. He’d enjoy the curlier moments already, but would certainly hanker for more.

I ticked ‘warthog’ off the list of wildlife the front kiosk had given us on entry and wrote a number six next to the picture. The rest of the page was blank of markings, apart from Elaine’s ‘before’ and ‘after’ drawings of a dung beetle encountering our car as it rolled its shit ball across the track. Apparently, according to the leaflet, we could potentially see more than forty-seven varieties of wildlife in this nature reserve, including elephant, zebra, a round dozen species of deer, hippo, snake, giant tortoise, crocodile and giraffe. But it seemed that somewhere in the shrub there was one ostrich telling another about its recent sort-of-affair with an older married ostrich, whilst all 46 other varieties of wildlife listened in, under the cover of vegetation. Were they getting as sick of this story as I was?