It is the third glass, tonight, and the two of them have arrived without an invitation, as they generally do at this hour. The warden first, then my father, close behind him the way he was in life, arriving separately but never far apart. I did not summon either. That is the whole trick of the third glass. You stop choosing what shows up.
Reflection, I have decided, somewhere between the second glass and this one, is the intellect trying to portion a life into pieces small enough to chew, and, if the portioning goes well, to eventually notice that most of it was funny and nobody told you at the time. The wildebeest did not arrive pre-portioned. Neither did watching my father argue with a haematologist and, later, an oncologist, the way he had once argued with a Kenyan customs officer over the correct tariff code for six kilometres of aluminium cable. Some experiences you get in bite sizes. Others arrive as an entire animal, and you eat what you are given, and laugh about it later, on a schedule the animal does not consult you about.
There was a time, and it lasted years, when I did not smoke, did not drink, and ate no meat. Not from religion. Not from any moral position I could have defended under cross-examination. I was an active sportsman, and I had convinced myself that vegetarianism was the more sustainable way to live on a crowded planet. I held this belief the way young men hold beliefs they have not yet been made to pay for.
The bill came in 1984, on a two-day drive through the Masai Mara and the Serengeti, presented by a German game warden whose name I no longer remember, though I remember many details down to the smell. I do not recall the exact shape of the argument I made to him about ecology and sustainable protein. I imagine it was a good one, the kind that survives seminar rooms indefinitely. It did not survive him. He heard me out with the patience of a man who has heard every possible objection to shooting a wildebeest and finds none of them improve the taste. He shot one anyway, apparently for entirely separate professional reasons that had nothing to do with winning an argument with a twenty-something Indian student. He had it grilled that same evening, served me a portion, and stood there while I ate it. It is a debating technique I have not encountered since in any faculty of philosophy. I do not know what he said to dismantle my position. I am fairly sure he said very little. Some arguments are won with better arguments. Mine was won with a fire, a knife, and roughly four hundred kilograms of rebuttal.
The pipe came around the same time, and so did a genuine taste for alcohol, not the dutiful sipping of a young man performing sophistication, but an actual palate, developing in real time and alarmingly fast. A dam does not leak so much as decide, one day, that it is now a waterfall. And so, within what felt like a single season, three prongs took hold of a life that had until then run on abstinence and good intentions, neither of which, I should say in their defence, had ever once made a dinner party better.
I have thought about this often since, usually with a glass in hand, which is the correct condition under which to think about it, sobriety being a poor vantage point from which to evaluate the merits of its own absence. There was a richness in the years that followed, an expansiveness in ordinary evenings, that the earlier, cleaner version of me had no access to and, worse, had no idea he was missing, the way a man cannot miss a joke he has not yet been told.
I do not offer this as an argument for wildebeest, pipes, or drink. I offer it as evidence for something narrower and more useful, which is that certainty, however well reasoned, is a young man’s disease, and the cure is usually administered by someone who does not care how well reasoned you are. The warden did not defeat my ecology. He defeated my seriousness about my ecology, which is a different organ entirely and a much more stubborn one.
This is also, I have come to think, the actual argument every good comic character has been making for centuries without anyone quite crediting them for it. Falstaff is not making the case for cowardice at the battle when he feigns death rather than die well. He is making the case that a man who has correctly priced his own mortality does not owe the battlefield a performance.
My twenty-something self, reciting sustainable protein ratios to a man with a rifle and a fire going, was, without knowing it, auditioning for a Wodehouse novel, and not even for a good part in it. Every Wodehouse novel needs a young man of firm, unexamined conviction, so that the plot has something to gently, thoroughly demolish, and I was, that evening, giving a first-rate performance as the character nobody is rooting for.
What nobody tells you, in the years when you are still assembling your convictions, is that the demolition is not a tragedy. It felt like one for perhaps a week, that trip. It was, in the accounting that only becomes visible decades later, closer to a gift, badly wrapped and delivered by a man with a gun, but a gift. The three prongs that replaced the certainty gave me forty years of dinner tables, of arguments won and lost on the third glass rather than the first, of an aroma from a pipe bowl that meant, for a while, that the evening had properly begun. None of that was available to the version of me who was still correct about everything.
My father would have understood the warden’s argument better than I did, though he would never have put it that way. He was an engineer, electrical cables, and he spent his working life stringing them across Europe, India, and Africa. Three continents’ worth of contractors, tenders, and governments, all wanting the same wire laid faster and cheaper than the specifications allowed. He negotiated for a living, and he negotiated the way engineers negotiate: by being immovably, expensively correct. He did it in three continents’ worth of official languages, and an even larger number of unofficial ones. In his line of work, the alternative to being correct was a cable that failed somewhere a man could not easily reach to fix it. Unlike my ecology, nobody was going to grill him something and call it even. I grew up watching a kind of seriousness that had earned its keep many times over, the real thing, not the performance of it I was still practising in 1984 with a rifle pointed generally in my direction.
It was only much later, when his own body became the thing under negotiation, that I saw the seriousness change shape. He fought his doctors the way he had once fought a contractor over a specification, on principle, at length, with documentation. And it did not go well for him, not because he was wrong about the medicine but because a body does not respond to being out-argued the way a tender committee does. Watching that, I understood something about my own wildebeest that I had not fully understood before. He had spent a life correctly refusing to compromise where compromising would have cost someone else a working cable in a village he would never visit. I had spent one meal on the Serengeti discovering that not every hill is worth dying on, and that the trick, the whole trick, is knowing early enough which kind of correctness you are holding. His was the kind worth keeping. Mine, about the wildebeest, was not, and I am glad a man with a rifle told me so before I could pass it on to anyone else.
I still think about sustainable protein, occasionally, usually while eating something that would have appalled the man I was in 1984. The pipe is gone now, doctors having delivered their own milder version of the German warden’s argument, with rather less ceremony and considerably less grilled meat. But the glass remains, and so does the third-glass truth it eventually gets around to telling, which is that a life organised entirely around being right is a life that has not yet been properly interrupted. Mine was interrupted on the Serengeti, by a man with a rifle, over a fire, in 1984. I have been grateful to him for forty years, in the specific, complicated way you are grateful to anyone who was right about you before you were ready to be.
The glass is nearly empty now, and the two of them show themselves out, the way they showed themselves in. Tomorrow, sober, I will not think of either. That absence is not forgetting. It is simply what the first glass is for.