The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 35

  ‘Don’t make pets of snakes or crocs. Mind out for the lions. Don’t forget to write.’

  It was almost a surprise to them to find that shooting affairs in the Colony were not entirely a music-hall myth. They occurred in waves. For three months at a time the gun-murders and suicides were reported weekly. The old colonists with their very blue eyes sat beside their whisky bottles and remarked that another young rotter had shot himself. Then the rains would break and the shootings would cease for a long season.

  Eighteen months after their marriage Donald was mauled by a lioness and died on the long stretcher journey back to the station. He was one of a party of eight. No one could really say how it happened; it was done in a flash. The natives had lost their wits, and, instead of shooting the beast, had come calling ‘Ah-ah-ah,’ and pointing to the spot. A few strides, shouldering the grass aside, and Donald’s friends got the lioness as she reared from his body.

  His friends in the archaeological team to which he belonged urged Sybil to remain in the Colony for the remaining six months, and return to England with them. Still undecided, she went on a sight-seeing tour. But before their time was up the archaeologists had been recalled. War had been declared. Civilians were not permitted to leave the continent, and Sybil was caught, like Donald under the lioness.

  She wished he had lived to enjoy a life of his own, as she intended to do. It was plain to her that they must have separated had he lived. There had been no disagreement but, thought Sybil, given another two years there would have been disagreements. Donald had shown signs of becoming a bore. By the last, the twenty-seventh, year of his life, his mind had ceased to inquire. Archaeology, that thrilling subject, had become Donald’s job, merely. He began to talk as if all archaeological methods and theories had ceased to evolve on the day he obtained his degree; it was now only a matter of applying his knowledge to field-work for a limited period. Archaeological papers came out from England. The usual crank literature on roneo foolscap followed them from one postal address to another. ‘Donald, aren’t you going to look through them?’ Sybil said, as the journals and papers piled up. ‘No, really, I don’t see it’s necessary.’ It was not necessary because his future was fixed; two years in the field and then a lectureship. If it were my subject, she thought, these papers would be necessary to me. Even the crackpot ones, rightly read, would be, to me, enlarging.

  Sybil lay in bed in the mornings reading the translation of Kierke-gaard’s Journals, newly arrived from England in their first, revelatory month of publication. She felt like a desert which had not realized its own aridity till the rain began to fall upon it. When Donald came home in the late afternoons she had less and less to say to him.

  ‘There has been another shooting affair,’ Donald said, ‘across the valley. The chap came home unexpectedly and found his wife with another man. He shot them both.’

  ‘In this place, one is never far from the jungle,’ Sybil said.

  ‘What are you talking about? We are eight hundred miles from the jungle.’

  When he had gone on his first big shoot, eight hundred miles away in the jungle, she had reflected, there is no sign of a living mind in him, it is like a landed fish which has ceased to palpitate. But, she thought, another woman would never notice it. Other women do not wish to be married to a Mind. Yet I do, she thought, and I am a freak and should not have married. In fact I am not the marrying type. Perhaps that is why he does not explore my personality, any more than he reads the journals. It might make him think, and that would be hurtful.

  After his death she wished he had lived to enjoy a life of his own, whatever that might have been. She took a job in a private school for girls and cultivated a few friends for diversion until the war should be over. Charming friends need not possess minds.

  Their motor launch was rocking up the Zambezi. Sybil was leaning over the rail mouthing something to a startled native in a canoe. Now Sybil was pointing across the river.

  ‘I think I was asking him,’ Sybil commented to her friends in the darkness, ‘about the hippo. There was a school of hippo some distance away, and we wanted to see them better. But the native said we shouldn’t go too near – that’s why he’s looking so frightened – because the hippo often upset a boat, and then the crocs quickly slither into the water. There, look! We got a long shot of the hippo – those bumps in the water, like sub-marines, those are the snouts of hippo.’

  The film rocked with the boat as it proceeded up the river. The screen went white.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ said Sybil’s hostess.

  ‘Put on the light,’ said Sybil’s host. He fiddled with the projector and a young man, their lodger from upstairs, went to help him.

  ‘I loved those tiny monkeys on the island,’ said her hostess. ‘Do hurry, Ted. What’s gone wrong?’

  ‘Shut up a minute,’ he said.

  ‘Sybil, you know you haven’t changed much since you were a girl.’

  ‘Thank you, Ella. I haven’t changed at all so far as I still think charming friends need not possess minds.’

  ‘I expect this will revive your memories, Sybil. The details, I mean. One is bound to forget so much.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Sybil said, and she added, ‘but I recall quite a lot of details, you know.’

  ‘Do you really, Sybil?’

  I wish, she thought, they wouldn’t cling to my least word.

  The young man turned from the projector with several feet of the film-strip looped between his widespread hands. ‘Is the fair chap your husband, Mrs Greeves?’ he said to Sybil.

  ‘Sybil lost her husband very early on,’ her hostess informed him in a low and sacred voice.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry.’

  Sybil’s hostess replenished the drinks of her three guests. Her host turned from the projector, finished his drink, and passed his glass to be refilled, all in one movement. Everything they do seems large and important, thought Sybil, but I must not let it be so. We are only looking at old films.

  She overheard a sibilant ‘Whish-sh-sh?’ from the elderly woman in which she discerned, ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Sybil Greeves,’ her hostess breathed back, ‘a distant cousin of Ted’s through marriage.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ The low tones were puzzled as if all had not been explained.

  ‘She’s quite famous, of course.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Very few people know it,’ said Sybil’s hostess with a little arrogance.

  ‘OK,’ said Ted, ‘lights out.’

  ‘I must say,’ said his wife, ‘the colours are marvellous.’

  All the time she was in the Colony Sybil longed for the inexplicable colourings of her native land. The flamboyants were too rowdy, the birds, the native women with their heads bound in cloth of piercing pink, their blinding black skin and white teeth, the baskets full of bright tough flowers or oranges on their heads, the sight of which everyone else admired (‘How I wish I could paint all this!’) distressed Sybil, it bored her.

  She rented a house, sharing it with a girl whose husband was fighting in the north. She was twenty-two. To safeguard her privacy absolutely, she had a plywood partition put up in the sitting-room, for it was another ten years before she had learnt those arts of leading a double life and listening to people ambiguously, which enabled her to mix without losing identity, and to listen without boredom.

  On the other side of the partition Ariadne Lewis decorously entertained her friends, most of whom were men on leave. On a few occasions Sybil attended these parties, working herself, as in a frenzy of self-discipline, into a state of carnal excitement over the men. She managed to do this only by an effortful sealing-off of all her critical faculties except those which assessed a good male voice and appearance. The hangovers were frightful.

  The scarcity of white girls made it easy for any one of them to keep a number of men in perpetual attendance. Ariadne had many boyfriends but no love affairs. Sybil had three affairs in the space of two years, t
o put herself to the test. They started at private dances, in the magnolia-filled gardens that smelt like a scent factory, under the Milky Way which looked like an overcrowded jeweller’s window. The affairs ended when she succumbed to one of her attacks of tropical flu, and lay in a twilight of the senses on a bed which had been set on the stone stoep and overhung with a white mosquito net like something bridal. With damp shaky hands she would write a final letter to the man and give it to her half-caste maid to post. He would telephone next morning, and would be put off by the house-boy, who was quite intelligent.

  For some years she had been thinking she was not much inclined towards sex. After the third affair, this dawned and rose within her as a whole realization, as if in the past, when she had told herself, ‘I am not predominantly a sexual being,’ or ‘I’m rather a frigid freak, I suppose,’ these were the sayings of an illiterate, never quite rational and known until now, but after the third affair the notion was so intensely conceived as to be almost new. It appalled her. She lay on the shady stoep, her fever subsiding, and examined her relations with men. She thought, what if I married again? She shivered under the hot sheet. Can it be, she thought, that I have a suppressed tendency towards women? She lay still and let the idea probe round in imagination. She surveyed, with a stony inward eye, all the women she had known, prim little academicians with cream peter-pan collars on their dresses, large dominant women, a number of beauties, conventional nitwits like Ariadne. No, really, she thought; neither men nor women. It is a not caring for sexual relations. It is not merely a lack of pleasure in sex, it is dislike of the excitement. And it is not merely dislike, it is worse, it is boredom.

  She felt a lonely emotion near to guilt. The three love affairs took on heroic aspects in her mind. They were an attempt, thought Sybil, to do the normal thing. Perhaps I may try again. Perhaps, if I should meet the right man … But at the idea ‘right man’ she felt a sense of intolerable desolation and could not stop shivering. She raised the mosquito net and reached for the lemon juice, splashing it jerkily into the glass. She sipped. The juice had grown warm and had been made too sweet, but she let it linger on her sore throat and peered through the net at the backs of houses and the yellow veldt beyond them.

  Ariadne said one morning, ‘I met a girl last night, it was funny. I thought it was you at first and called over to her. But she wasn’t really like you close up, it was just an impression. As a matter of fact, she knows you. I’ve asked her to tea. I forget her name.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Sybil.

  But when Désirée arrived they greeted each other with exaggerated warmth, wholly felt at the time, as acquaintances do when they meet in another hemisphere. Sybil had last seen Désirée at a dance in Hampstead, and there had merely said, ‘Oh, hallo.’

  ‘We were at our first school together,’ Désirée explained to Ariadne, still holding Sybil’s hand.

  Already Sybil wished to withdraw. ‘It’s strange,’ she remarked, ‘how, sooner or later, everyone in the Colony meets someone they have known, or their parents knew, at home.’

  Désirée and her husband, Barry Weston, were settled in a remote part of the Colony. Sybil had heard of Weston, unaware that Désirée was his wife. He was much talked of as an enterprising planter. Some years ago he had got the idea of manufacturing passion-fruit juice, had planted orchards and set up a factory. The business was now expanding wonderfully. Barry Weston also wrote poetry, a volume of which, entitled Home Thoughts, he had published and sold with great success within the confines of the Colony. His first wife had died of blackwater fever. On one of his visits to England he had met and married Désirée, who was twelve years his junior.

  ‘You must come and see us,’ said Désirée to Sybil; and to Ariadne she explained again, ‘We were at our first little private school together.’ And she said, ‘Oh, Sybil, do you remember Trotsky? Do you remember Minnie Mouse, what a hell of a life we gave her? I shall never forget that day when …’

  The school where Sybil taught was shortly to break up for holidays; Ariadne was to visit her husband in Cairo at that time. Sybil promised a visit to the Westons. When Désirée, beautifully dressed in linen suiting, had departed, Ariadne said, ‘I’m so glad you’re going to stay with them. I hated the thought of your being all alone for the next few weeks.’

  ‘Do you know,’ Sybil said, ‘I don’t think I shall go to stay with them after all. I’ll make an excuse.’

  ‘Oh, why not? Oh, Sybil, it’s such a lovely place, and it will be fun for you. He’s a poet, too.’ Sybil could sense exasperation, could hear Ariadne telling her friends, ‘There’s something wrong with Sybil. You never know a person till you live with them. Now Sybil will say one thing one minute, and the next … Something wrong with her sex-life, perhaps … odd …’

  At home, thought Sybil, it would not be such a slur. Her final appeal for a permit to travel to England had just been dismissed. The environment mauled her weakness. ‘I think I’m going to have a cold,’ she said, shivering.

  ‘Go straight to bed, dear.’ Ariadne called for black Elijah and bade him prepare some lemon juice. But the cold did not materialize.

  She returned with flu, however, from her first visit to the Westons. Her 1936 Ford V8 had broken down on the road and she had waited three chilly hours before another car had appeared.

  ‘You must get a decent car,’ said the chemist’s wife, who came to console her. ‘These old crocks simply won’t stand up to the roads out here.’

  Sybil shivered and held her peace. Nevertheless, she returned to the Westons at mid-term.

  Désirée’s invitations were pressing, almost desperate. Again and again Sybil went in obedience to them. The Westons were a magnetic field.

  There was a routine attached to her arrival. The elegant wicker chair was always set for her in the same position on the stoep. The same cushions, it seemed, were always piled in exactly the same way.

  ‘What will you drink, Sybil? Are you comfy there, Sybil? We’re going to give you a wonderful time, Sybil.’ She was their little orphan, she supposed. She sat, with very dark glasses, contemplating the couple. ‘We’ve planned – haven’t we, Barry? – a surprise for you, Sybil.’ ‘We’ve planned – haven’t we, Désirée? – a marvellous trip … a croc hunt … hippo …’

  Sybil sips her gin and lime. Facing her on the wicker sofa, Désirée and her husband sit side by side. They gaze at Sybil affectionately, ‘Take off your smoked glasses, Sybil, the sun’s nearly gone.’ Sybil takes them off. The couple hold hands. They peck kisses at each other, and presently, outrageously, they are entwined in a long erotic embrace in the course of which Barry once or twice regards Sybil from the corner of his eye. Barry disengages himself and sits with his arm about his wife; she snuggles up to him. Why, thinks Sybil, is this performance being staged? ‘Sybil is shocked,’ Barry remarks. She sips her drink, and reflects that a public display between man and wife somehow is more shocking than are courting couples in parks and doorways. ‘We’re very much in love with each other,’ Barry explains, squeezing his wife. And Sybil wonders what is wrong with their marriage since obviously something is wrong. The couple kiss again. Am I dreaming this? Sybil asks herself.

  Even on her first visit Sybil knew definitely there was something wrong with the marriage. She thought of herself, at first, as an objective observer, and was even amused when she understood they had chosen her to be their sort of Victim of Expiation. On occasions when other guests were present she noted that the love scenes did not take place. Instead, the couple tended to snub Sybil before their friends. ‘Poor little Sybil, she lives all alone and is a teacher, and hasn’t many friends. We have her here to stay as often as possible.’ The people would look uneasily at Sybil, and would smile. ‘But you must have heaps of friends,’ they would say politely. Sybil came to realize she was an object of the Westons’ resentment, and that, nevertheless, they found her indispensable.

  Ariadne returned from Cairo. ‘You always look washed out when you’v
e been staying at the Westons’,’ she told Sybil eventually. ‘I suppose it’s due to the late parties and lots of drinks.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Désirée wrote continually. ‘Do come, Barry needs you. He needs your advice about some sonnets.’ Sybil tore up these letters quickly, but usually went. Not because her discomfort was necessary to their wellbeing, but because it was somehow necessary to her own. The act of visiting the Westons alleviated her sense of guilt.

  I believe, she thought, they must discern my abnormality. How could they have guessed? She was always cautious when they dropped questions about her private life. But one’s closest secrets have a subtle way of communicating themselves to the resentful vigilance of opposite types. I do believe, she thought, that heart speaks unto heart, and deep calleth unto deep. But rarely in clear language. There is a misunderstanding here. They imagine their demonstrations of erotic bliss will torment my frigid soul, and so far they are right. But the reason for my pain is not envy. Really, it is boredom.

  Her Ford V8 rattled across country. How bored, she thought, I am going to be by their married tableau! How pleased, exultant, they will be! These thoughts consoled her, they were an offering to the gods.

  ‘Are you comfy, Sybil?’

  She sipped her gin and lime. ‘Yes, thanks.’

  His pet name for Désirée was Dearie. ‘Kiss me, Dearie,’ he said.

  ‘There, Baddy,’ his wife said to Barry, snuggling close to him and squinting at Sybil.