The Complete Short Stories Part 9

'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 Desiree. And anyway, Sybil, you don't want a beginner.'

'You want a mature man in a good position,' said Desiree. '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 Desiree'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 pa.s.sion-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 Desiree and Barry were becoming more violent, that the possibility of Barry's resigning from business to devote his time to poetry was haunting Desiree. 'Why don't you come, Desiree 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 embarra.s.sing, 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 pa.s.sion-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 s.e.xlessness.

'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 dung 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 Pa.s.sion-fruit Juice. He will soon get over the affair, she thought, he has still got his obsession with the pa.s.sion-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 duty 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 Desiree, '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' s.e.xuality, 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 Desiree. '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 cine camera out. Come and be filmed.'

Desiree 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 Desiree. She snubs him so badly.'

'He's psychological,' said Desiree.

'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.

'He was caught in an off-moment there,' said Sybil's hostess. 'Oh, there goes Sybil. I thought you looked a little sad just then, Sybil. There's that other girl again, and the lovely dog.'

'Was this a typical afternoon in the Colony?' inquired the young man. 'It was and it wasn't,' Sybil said.

Whenever they had the camera out life changed at the Westons'. Everyone, including the children, had to look very happy. The house natives were arranged to appear in the background wearing their best whites. Sometimes Barry would have everyone dancing in a ring with the children, and the natives had to clap time.

Or, as on the last occasion, he would stage an effect of gracious living. The head cook-boy, who had a good knowledge of photography, was placed at his post.

'Ready,' said Barry to the cook, 'shoot.'

Desiree came out, followed by the dog.

'Look frisky, Barker,' said Barry. The Alsatian looked frisky.

Barry put one arm round Desiree and his other arm through Sybil's that late afternoon, walking them slowly across the camera range. He chatted with amiability and with an actor's lift of the head. He would accentuate his laughter, tossing back his head. A sound track would, however, have reproduced the words, 'Smile, Sybil. Walk slowly. Look as if you're enjoying it. You'll be able to see yourself in later years, having the time of your life.'

Sybil giggled.

Just then David was seen to be securing the little lake boat between the trees. 'He must have come across the lake,' said Barry. 'I wonder if he's been drinking again?'

But David's walk was quite steady. He did not realize he was being photographed as he crossed the long lawn. He stood for a moment staring at Sybil. She said, 'Oh halo, David.' He turned and walked aimlessly face-on towards the camera.

'Hold it a minute,' Barry called out to the cook.

The boy obeyed at the moment David realized he had been filmed.

'OK,' shouted Barry, when David was out of range. 'Fire ahead.'

It was then Barry said to Sybil, 'Haven't you found a man yet...?' and Desiree said, 'You ought to try a love affair ...'

'We've made Sybil unhappy,' said Desiree. 'Oh, I'm quite happy.

'Well, cheer up in front of the camera,' said Barry.

The sun was setting fast, the camera was folded away, and everyone had gone to change. Sybil came down and sat on the stoep outside the open french windows of the dining-room. Presently, Desiree was indoors behind her, adjusting the oil lamps which one of the house-boys had set too high. Desiree put her head round the gla.s.s door and remarked to Sybil, 'That Benjamin's a fool, I shall speak to him in the morning. He simply will not take care with these lamps. One day we'll have a real smoke-out.'

Sybil said, 'Oh, I expect they are all so used to electricity these days ...'

'That's the trouble,' said Desiree, and turned back into the room.

Sybil was feeling disturbed by David's presence in the place. She wondered if he would come in to dinner. Thinking of his sullen staring at her on the lawn, she felt he might make a scene. She heard a gasp from the dining-room behind her.

She looked round, but in the same second it was over. A deafening crack from the pistol and Desiree crumpled up. A movement by the inner door and David held the gun to his head. Sybil screamed, and was aware of running footsteps upstairs. The gun exploded again and David's body dropped sideways.

With Barry and the natives she went round to the dining-room. Desiree was dead. David lingered a moment enough to roll his eyes in Sybil's direction as she rose from Desiree's body. He knows, thought Sybil quite lucidly, that he got the wrong woman.

'What I can't understand,' said Barry when he called on Sybil a few weeks later, 'is why he did it.'

'He was mad,' said Sybil.

'Not all that mad,' said Barry. 'And everyone thinks, of course, that there was an affair between them. That's what I can't bear.'

'Quite,' said Sybil. 'But of course he was keen on Desiree. You always said so. Those rows you used to have ... You always made out you were jealous of David.'

'Do you know,' he said, 'I wasn't, really. It was a sort of... a sort of...'

'Play-act,' said Sybil.

'Sort of. You see, there was nothing between them,' he said. 'And honestly, Carter wasn't a bit interested in Desiree. And the question is why he did it. I can't bear people to think ...'

The damage to his pride, Sybil saw, outweighed his grief The sun was setting and she rose to put on the stoep light.

'Stop!' he said. 'Turn round. My G.o.d, you did look like Desiree for a moment.

'You're nervy,' she said, and switched on the light.

'In some ways you do look a little like Desiree,' he said. 'In some lights,' he said reflectively.

I must say something, thought Sybil, to blot this notion from his mind. I must make this occasion unmemorable, distasteful to him.

'At all events,' she said, 'you've still got your poetry.

'That's the great thing,' he said, 'I've still got that. It means everything to me, a great consolation. I'm selling up the estate and joining up. The kids are going into a convent and I'm going up north. What we need is some good war poetry. There hasn't been any war poetry.

'You'll make a better soldier,' she said, 'than a poet.'

'What do you say?'

She repeated her words fairly slowly, and with a sense of relief, almost of absolution. The season of falsity had formed a scab, soon to fall away altogether. There is no health, she thought, for me, outside of honesty.

'You've always,' he said, 'thought my poetry was wonderful.'

'I have said so,' she said, 'but it was a sort of play-act. Of course, it's only my opinion, but I think you're a third-rater poet.'

'You're upset, my dear,' he said.

He sent her the four reels of film from Cairo a month before he was killed in action. 'It will be nice in later years,' he wrote, 'for you to recall those good times we used to have.'

'It has been delightful,' said her hostess. 'You haven't changed a bit. Do you feel any different?'

'Well yes, I feel rather differently about everything, of course.' One learns to accept oneself.

'A hundred feet of one's past life!' said the young man. 'If they were mine, I'm sure I should be shattered. I should be calling "Lights! Lights!" like Hamlet's uncle.'

Sybil smiled at him. He looked back, suddenly solemn and shrewd. 'How tragic, those people being killed in shooting affairs,' said the elderly woman.

'The last reel was the best,' said her hostess. 'The garden was entrancing. I should like to see that one again; what about you, Ted?'

'Yes, I liked those nature-study shots. I feel I missed a lot of it,' said her husband.

'Hark at him - nature-study shots!'

'Well, those close-ups of tropical plants.

Everyone wanted the last one again.

'How about you, Sybil?'

Am I a woman, she thought calmly, or an intellectual monster? She was so accustomed to this question within herself that it needed no answer. She said, 'Yes, I should like to see it again. It's an interesting experience.'

The Seraph and the Zambezi.

You may have heard of Samuel Cramer, half poet, half journalist, who had to do with a dancer called the Fanfarlo. But, as you will see, it doesn't matter if you have not. He was said to be going strong in Paris early in the nineteenth century, and when I met him in 1946 he was still going strong, but this time in a different way. He was the same man, but modified. For instance, in those days, more than a hundred years ago, Cramer had persisted for several decades, and without affectation, in being about twenty-five years old. But when I knew him he was clearly undergoing his forty-two-year-old phase.

At this time he was keeping a petrol pump some four miles south of the Zambezi River where it crashes over a precipice at the Victoria Falls. Cramer had some spare rooms where he put up visitors to the Falls when the hotel was full. I was sent to him because it was Christmas week and there was no room in the hotel.

I found him trying the starter of a large, lumpy Mercedes outside his corrugated-iron garage, and at first sight I judged him to be a Belgian from the Congo. He had the look of north and south, light hair with canvas-coloured skin. Later, however, he told me that his father was German and his mother Chilean. It was this information rather than the 'S. Cramer' above the garage door which made me think I had heard of him.

The rains had been very poor and that December was fiercely hot. On the third night before Christmas I sat on the stoep outside my room, looking through the broken mosquito-wire network at the lightning in the distance. When an atmosphere maintains an excessive temperature for a long spell something seems to happen to the natural noises of life. Sound fails to carry in its usual quant.i.ty, but comes as if bound and gagged. That night the Christmas beetles, which fall on their backs on every stoep with a high tic-tac, seemed to be shock-absorbed. I saw one fall and the little b.u.mp reached my ears a fraction behind time. The noises of minor wild beasts from the bush were all hushed-up, too. In fact it wasn't until the bush noises all stopped simultaneously, as they frequently do when a leopard is about, that I knew there had been any sound at all.

Overlying this general muted hum, Cramer's sundowner party progressed farther up the stoep. The heat distorted every word. The gla.s.ses made a tinkle that was not of the substance of gla.s.s, but of bottles wrapped in tissue paper. Sometimes, for a moment, a shriek or a cackle would hang torpidly in s.p.a.ce, but these were unreal sounds, as if projected from a distant country, as if they were pocket-torches seen through a London fog.

Cramer came over to my end of the stoep and asked me to join his party. I said I would be glad to, and meant it, even though I had been glad to sit alone. Heat so persistent and so intense sucks up the will.

Five people sat in wicker armchairs drinking highb.a.l.l.s and chewing salted peanuts. I recognized a red-haired trooper from Livingstone, just out from England, and two of Cramer's lodgers, a tobacco planter and his wife from Bulawayo. In the custom of those parts, the other two were introduced by their first names. Mannie, a short dark man of square face and build, I thought might be a Portuguese from the east coast. The woman, f.a.n.n.y, was picking bits out of the frayed wicker chair and as she lifted her gla.s.s her hand shook a little, making her bracelets chime. She would be about fifty, a well-tended woman, very neat. Her grey hair, tinted with blue, was done in a fringe above a face puckered with malaria.

In the general way of pa.s.sing the time with strangers in that countryside, I exchanged with the tobacco people the names of acquaintances who lived within a six-hundred-mile radius of where we sat, reducing this list to names mutually known to us. The trooper contributed his news from the region between Lusaka and Livingstone. Meanwhile an argument was in process between Cramer, f.a.n.n.y and Mannie, of which f.a.n.n.y seemed to be getting the better. It appeared there was to be a play or concert on Christmas Eve in which the three were taking part. I several times heard the words 'troupe of angels', 'shepherds', 'ridiculous price' and 'my girls' which seemed to be key words in the argument. Suddenly, on hearing the trooper mention a name, f.a.n.n.y broke off her talk and turned to us.