The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Read online

  ‘I say, Sybil,’ Barry said as he smoothed down his hair, ‘you ought to get married again. You’re missing such a lot.’

  ‘Yes, Sybil,’ said Désirée, ‘you should either marry or enter a convent, one or the other.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ Sybil said, ‘I should fit into a tidy category.’

  ‘Well, you’re neither one thing nor another – is she, honeybunch?’

  True enough, thought Sybil, and that is why I’m laid out on the altar of boredom.

  ‘Or get yourself a boyfriend,’ said Désirée. ‘It would be good for you.’

  ‘You’re wasting your best years,’ said Barry.

  ‘Are you comfy there, Sybil? … We want you to enjoy yourself here. Any time you want to bring a boyfriend, we’re broadminded – aren’t we, Baddy?’

  ‘Kiss me, Dearie,’ he said.

  Désirée took his handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed lipstick from his mouth. He jerked his head away and said to Sybil, ‘Pass your glass.’

  Désirée looked at her reflection in the glass of the french windows and said, ‘Sybil’s too intellectual, that’s her trouble.’ She patted her hair, then looked at Sybil with an old childish enmity.

  After dinner Barry would read his poems. Usually, he said, ‘I’m not going to be an egotist tonight. I’m not going to read my poems.’ And usually Désirée would cry, ‘Oh do, Barry, do.’ Always, eventually, he did. ‘Marvellous,’ Désirée would comment, ‘wonderful.’ By the third night of her visits, the farcical aspect of it all would lose its fascination for Sybil, and boredom would fill her near to bursting point, like gas in a balloon. To relieve the strain, she would sigh deeply from time to time. Barry was too engrossed in his own voice to notice this, but Désirée was watching. At first Sybil worded her comments tactfully. ‘I think you should devote more of your time to your verses,’ she said. And, since he looked puzzled, added, ‘You owe it to poetry if you write it.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Désirée, ‘he often writes a marvellous sonnet before shaving in the morning.’

  ‘Sybil may be right,’ said Barry. ‘I owe poetry all the time I can give.’

  ‘Are you tired, Sybil?’ said Désirée. ‘Why are you sighing like that; are you all right?’

  Later, Sybil gave up the struggle and wearily said, ‘Very good,’ or ‘Nice rhythm’ after each poem. And even the guilt of condoning Désirée’s ‘marvellous … wonderful’ was less than the guilt of her isolated mind. She did not know then that the price of allowing false opinions was the gradual loss of one’s capacity for forming true ones.

  Not every morning, but at least twice during each visit Sybil would wake to hear the row in progress. The nanny, who brought her early tea, made large eyes and tiptoed warily. Sybil would have her bath, splashing a lot to drown the noise of the quarrel. Downstairs, the battle of voices descended, filled every room and corridor. When, on the worst occasions, the sound of shattering glass broke through the storm, Sybil would know that Barry was smashing up Désirée’s dressing-table; and would wonder how Désirée always managed to replace her crystal bowls, since goods of that type were now scarce, and why she bothered to do so. Sybil would always find the two girls of Barry’s former marriage standing side by side on the lawn frankly gazing up at the violent bedroom window. The nanny would cart off Désirée’s baby for a far-away walk. Sybil would likewise disappear for the morning.

  The first time this happened, Désirée told her later, ‘I’m afraid you unsettle Barry.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Sybil.

  Désirée dabbed her watery eyes and blew her nose. ‘Well, of course, it stands to reason, Sybil, you’re out to attract Barry. And he’s only a man. I know you do it unconsciously, but …’

  ‘I can’t stand this sort of thing. I shall leave right away,’ Sybil said.

  ‘No, Sybil, no. Don’t make a thing of it. Barry needs you. You’re the only person in the Colony who can really talk to him about his poetry.’

  ‘Understand,’ said Sybil on that first occasion, ‘I am not at all interested in your husband. I think he’s an all-round third-rater. That is my opinion.’

  Désirée looked savage. ‘Barry,’ she shouted, ‘has made a fortune out of passion-fruit juice in eight years. He has sold four thousand copies of Home Thoughts on his own initiative.’

  It was like a game for three players. According to the rules, she was to be in love, unconsciously, with Barry, and tortured by the contemplation of Désirée’s married bliss. She felt too old to join in, just at that moment.

  Barry came to her room while she was packing. ‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘We need you. And after all, we are only human. What’s a row? These quarrels only happen in the best marriages. And I can’t for the life of me think how it started.’

  ‘What a beautiful house. What a magnificent estate,’ said Sybil’s hostess.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sybil, ‘it was the grandest in the Colony.’

  ‘Were the owners frightfully grand?’

  ‘Well, they were rich, of course.’

  ‘I can see that. What a beautiful interior. I adore those lovely old oil lamps. I suppose you didn’t have electricity?’

  ‘Yes, there was electric light in all the rooms. But my friends preferred the oil-lamp tradition for the dining-room. You see, it was a copy of an old Dutch house.’

  ‘Absolutely charming.’

  The reel came to an end. The lights went up and everyone shifted in their chairs.

  ‘What were those large red flowers?’ said the elderly lady.

  ‘Flamboyants.’

  ‘Magnificent,’ said her hostess. ‘Don’t you miss the colours, Sybil?’

  ‘No, I don’t, actually. There was too much of it for me.’

  ‘You didn’t care for the bright colours?’ said the young man, leaning forward eagerly.

  Sybil smiled at him.

  ‘I liked the bit where those little lizards were playing among the stones. That was an excellent shot,’ said her host. He was adjusting the last spool.

  ‘I rather liked that handsome blond fellow,’ said her hostess, as if the point had been in debate. ‘Was he the passion-fruiter?’

  ‘He was the manager,’ said Sybil.

  ‘Oh yes, you told me. He was in a shooting affair, did you say?’

  ‘Yes, it was unfortunate.’

  ‘Poor young man. It sounds quite a dangerous place. I suppose the sun and everything …’

  ‘It was dangerous for some people. It depended.’

  ‘The blacks look happy enough. Did you have any trouble with them in those days?’

  ‘No,’ said Sybil, ‘only with the whites.’

  Everyone laughed.

  ‘Right,’ said her host. ‘Lights out, please.’

  Sybil soon perceived the real cause of the Westons’ quarrels. It differed from their explanations: they were both, they said, so much in love, so jealous of each other’s relations with the opposite sex.

  ‘Barry was furious,’ said Désirée one day, ‘– weren’t you, Barry? – because I smiled, merely smiled, at Carter.’

  ‘I’ll have it out with Carter,’ muttered Barry. ‘He’s always hanging round Désirée.’

  David Carter was their manager. Sybil was so foolish as once to say, ‘Oh surely David wouldn’t—’

  ‘Oh wouldn’t he?’ said Désirée.

  ‘Oh wouldn’t he?’ said Barry.

  Possibly they did not themselves know the real cause of their quarrels. These occurred on mornings when Barry had decided to lounge in bed and write poetry. Désirée, anxious that the passion-fruit business should continue to expand, longed for him to be at his office in the factory at eight o’clock each morning, by which time all other enterprising men in the Colony were at work. But Barry spoke more and more of retiring and devoting his time to his poems. When he lay abed, pen in hand, worrying a sonnet, Désirée would sulk and bang doors. The household knew that the row was on. ‘Quiet! Don’t you see I’m try
ing to think,’ he would shout. ‘I suggest,’ she would reply, ‘you go to the library if you want to write.’ It was evident that her greed and his vanity, facing each other in growling antipathy, were too terrible for either to face. Instead, the names of David Carter and Sybil would fly between them, consoling them, pepping-up and propagating the myth of their mutual attraction.

  ‘Rolling your eyes at Carter in the orchard. Don’t think I didn’t notice.’

  ‘Carter? That’s funny. I can easily keep Carter in his place. But while we’re on the subject, what about you with Sybil? You sat up late enough with her last night after I’d gone to bed.’

  Sometimes he not only smashed the crystal bowls, he hurled them through the window.

  In the exhausted afternoon Barry would explain, ‘Désirée was upset – weren’t you, Désirée? – because of you, Sybil. It’s understandable. We shouldn’t stay up late talking after Désirée has gone to bed. You’re a little devil in your way, Sybil.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Sybil obligingly, ‘that’s how it is.’

  She became tired of the game. When, in the evenings, Barry’s voice boomed forth with sonorous significance as befits a hallowed subject, she no longer thought of herself as an objective observer. She had tired of the game because she was now more than nominally committed to it. She ceased to be bored by the Westons; she began to hate them.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ said Barry, ‘is why my poems are ignored back in England. I’ve sold over four thousand of the book out here. Feature articles about me have appeared in all the papers out here; remind me to show you them. But I can’t get a single notice in London. When I send a poem to any of the magazines I don’t even get a reply.’

  ‘They are engaged in a war,’ Sybil said.

  ‘But they still publish poetry. Poetry so-called. Utter rubbish, all of it. You can’t understand the stuff.’

  ‘Yours is too good for them,’ said Sybil. To a delicate ear her tone might have resembled the stab of a pin stuck into a waxen image.

  ‘That’s a fact, between ourselves,’ said Barry. ‘I shouldn’t say it, but that’s the answer.’

  Barry was overweight, square and dark. His face had lines, as of anxiety or stomach trouble. David Carter, when he passed, cool and fair through the house, was quite a change.

  ‘England is finished,’ said Barry. ‘It’s degenerate.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Sybil, ‘you have the heart to go on writing so cheerily about the English towns and countryside.’ Now, now, Sybil, she thought; business is business, and the nostalgic English scene is what the colonists want. This visit must be my last. I shall not come again.

  ‘Ah, that,’ Barry was saying, ‘was the England I remember. The good old country. But now, I’m afraid, it’s decadent. After the war it will be no more than …’

  Désirée would have the servants into the drawing-room every morning to give them their orders for the day. ‘I believe in keeping up home standards,’ said Désirée, whose parents were hotel managers. Sybil was not sure where Désirée had got the idea of herding all the domestics into her presence each morning. Perhaps it was some family-prayer assembly in her ancestral memory, or possibly it had been some hotel-staff custom which prompted her to ‘have in the servants’ and instruct them beyond their capacity. These half-domesticated peasants and erstwhile small-farmers stood, bare-footed and woolly-cropped, in clumsy postures on Désirée’s carpet. In pidgin dialect which they largely failed to comprehend, she enunciated the duties of each one. Only Sybil and David Carter knew that the natives’ name for Désirée was, translated, ‘Bad Hen’. Désirée complained much about their stupidity, but she enjoyed this morning palaver as Barry relished his poetry.

  ‘Carter writes poetry too,’ said Barry with a laugh one day.

  Désirée shrieked. ‘Poetry! Oh, Barry, you can’t call that stuff poetry.’

  ‘It is frightful,’ Barry said, ‘but the poor fellow doesn’t know it.’

  ‘I should like to see it,’ Sybil said.

  ‘You aren’t interested in Carter by any chance, Sybil?’ said Désirée.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Personally, I mean.’

  ‘Well, I think he’s all right.’

  ‘Be honest, Sybil,’ said Barry. Sybil felt extremely irritated. He so often appealed for frankness in others, as if by right; was so dishonest with himself. ‘Be honest, Sybil – you’re after David Carter.’

  ‘He’s handsome,’ Sybil said.

  ‘You haven’t a chance,’ said Barry. ‘He’s mad keen on Désirée. And anyway, Sybil, you don’t want a beginner.’

  ‘You want a mature man in a good position,’ said Désirée. ‘The life you’re living isn’t natural for a girl. I’ve been noticing,’ she said, ‘you and Carter being matey together out on the farm.’

  Towards the end of her stay David Carter produced his verses for Sybil to read. She thought them interesting but unpractised. She told him so, and was disappointed that he did not take this as a reasonable criticism. He was very angry. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘your poetry is far better than Barry’s.’ This failed to appease David. After a while, when she was meeting him in the town where she lived, she began to praise his poems, persuading herself that he was fairly talented.

  She met him whenever he could get away. She sent excuses in answer to Désirée’s pressing invitations. For different reasons, both Sybil and David were anxious to keep their meetings secret from the Westons. Sybil did not want the affair mythologized and gossiped about. For David’s part, he valued his job in the flourishing passion-fruit concern. He had confided to Sybil his hope, one day, to have the whole business under his control. He might even buy Barry out. ‘I know far more about it than he does. He’s getting more and more bound up with his poetry, and paying next to no attention to the business. I’m just waiting.’ He is, Sybil remarked to herself on hearing this, a true poet all right.

  David reported that the quarrels between Désirée and Barry were becoming more violent, that the possibility of Barry’s resigning from business to devote his time to poetry was haunting Désirée. ‘Why don’t you come,’ Désirée wrote, ‘and talk to Barry about his poetry? Why don’t you come and see us now? What have we done? Poor Sybil, all alone in the world, you ought to be married. David Carter follows me all over the place, it’s most embarrassing, you know how furious Barry gets. Well, I suppose that’s the cost of having a devoted husband.’ Perhaps, thought Sybil, she senses that David is my lover.

  One day she went down with flu. David turned up unexpectedly and proposed marriage. He clung to her with violent, large hands. She alone, he said, understood his ambitions, his art, himself. Within a year or two they could, together, take over the passion-fruit plantation.

  ‘Sh-sh, Ariadne will hear you.’ Ariadne was out, in fact. David looked at her somewhat wildly. ‘We must be married,’ he said.

  Sybil’s affair with David Carter was over, from her point of view, almost before it had started. She had engaged in it as an act of virtue done against the grain, and for a brief time it had absolved her from the reproach of her sexlessness.

  ‘I’m waiting for an answer.’ By his tone, he seemed to suspect what the answer would be.

  ‘Oh, David, I was just about to write to you. We really must put an end to this. As for marriage, well, I’m not cut out for it at all.’

  He stooped over her bed and clung to her. ‘You’ll catch my flu,’ she said. ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said, to get rid of him.

  When he had gone she wrote him her letter, sipping lemon juice to ease her throat. She noticed he had brought for her, and left on the floor of the stoep, six bottles of Weston’s Passion-fruit Juice. He will soon get over the affair, she thought, he has still got his obsession with the passion-fruit business.

  But in response to her letter David forced his way into the house. Sybil was alarmed. None of her previous lovers had persisted in this way.

  ‘It’s your d
uty to marry me.’

  ‘Really, what next?’

  ‘It’s your duty to me as a man and a poet.’ She did not like his eyes.

  ‘As a poet,’ she said, ‘I think you’re a third-rater.’ She felt relieved to hear her own voice uttering the words.

  He stiffened up in a comical melodramatic style, looking such a clean-cut settler with his golden hair and tropical suiting.

  ‘David Carter,’ wrote Désirée, ‘has gone on the bottle. I think he’s bats, myself. It’s because I keep giving him the brush-off. Isn’t it all silly? The estate will go to ruin if Barry doesn’t get rid of him. Barry has sent him away on leave for a month, but if he hasn’t improved on his return we shall have to make a change. When are you coming? Barry needs to talk to you.’

  Sybil went the following week, urged on by her old self-despising; driving her Ford V8 against the current of pleasure, yet compelled to expiate her abnormal nature by contact with the Westons’ sexuality, which she knew, none the less, would bore her.

  They twisted the knife within an hour of her arrival.

  ‘Haven’t you found a man yet?’ said Barry.

  ‘You ought to try a love affair,’ said Désirée. ‘We’ve been saying – haven’t we, Barry? – you ought to, Sybil. It would be good for you. It isn’t healthy, the life you lead. That’s why you get flu so often. It’s psychological.’

  ‘Come out on the lawn,’ Barry had said when she first arrived. ‘We’ve got the ciné camera out. Come and be filmed.’

  Désirée said, ‘Carter came back this morning.’

  ‘Oh, is he here? I thought he was away for a month.’

  ‘So did we. But he turned up this morning.’

  ‘He’s moping,’ Barry said, ‘about Désirée. She snubs him so badly.’

  ‘He’s psychological,’ said Désirée.

  ‘I love that striped awning,’ said Sybil’s hostess. ‘It puts the finishing touch on the whole scene. How carefree you all look – don’t they, Ted?’

  ‘That chap looks miserable,’ Ted observed. He referred to a shot of David Carter who had just ambled within range of the camera.

  Everyone laughed, for David looked exceedingly grim.