Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

‘Go’way, go’way.’

That was the bird, just behind Daphne’s grave. She had often mentioned the bird.

‘It says go’way, go’way.

‘Well, what about it?’ he had said to her irritably, for sometimes she had appeared to him, as in a revelation, a personified Stupidity.

She would tell him, ‘There’s a bird that says “Go’way, go’way”,’ without connecting the information with any particular event; she would expect him to be interested, as if he were an ornithologist, not an author.

‘Go’way, go’way,’ said the bird behind Daphne’s grave.

He heard the bird at some time during each day for the next six weeks while he was completing his tour of the rural spaces. He was glad to return to the Capital, and to be free of its voice. Relaxing in the Club, it was as though the bird had never existed.

However, he went with the Governor for a round of golf:

‘Go’way. Go’way …’

He booked a seat on the plane to England for the following week. He met Michael once more by chance at Williams Hotel.

‘That farm,’ said Michael ‘— someone else has made an offer. You’d better settle right away.’

‘I don’t want it,’ said Ralph. ‘I don’t want to stay here.’ They sat on the stoep drinking highballs. Beyond the mosquito netting was the bird.

‘Can you hear that go-away bird?’ said Ralph. Michael listened obediently.

‘No, I can’t say I can.’ He giggled, and Ralph wanted to hit him.

‘I hear it everywhere,’ said Ralph. ‘I don’t like it. That’s why I’m going.’

‘Good Lord. Keen on bird life, are you?’

‘No, not particularly.’

‘Ralph Mercer isn’t going to buy the farm,’ Michael told his wife that evening.

‘I thought it was settled.’

‘No, he’s going home. He isn’t coming back. He says he doesn’t like the birds here.’

‘I wish you could cure that giggle, Michael. What did you say he doesn’t like?’

‘The birds.’

‘Birds. Is he an ornithologist then?’

‘No, I think he’s RC.’

‘A man, darling, who studies birds.’

‘Oh! Well, no, he said no, he’s not particularly interested in birds.’

‘How extraordinary,’ she said.

The Curtain Blown by the Breeze

It is always when a curtain at an open window flutters in the breeze that I think of that frail white curtain, a piece of fine gauze, which was drawn across the bedroom windows of Mrs Van der Merwe. I never saw the original curtains, which were so carelessly arranged as to leave a gap through which that piccanin of twelve had peeped, one night three years before, and had watched Mrs Van der Merwe suckle her child, and been caught and shot dead by Jannie, her husband. The original curtains had now been replaced by this more delicate stuff, and the husband’s sentence still had five years to run, and meanwhile Mrs Van der Merwe was changing her character.

She stopped slouching; she lost the lanky, sullen look of a smallholder’s wife; she cleared the old petrol cans out of the yard, and that was only a start; she became a tall lighthouse sending out kindly beams which some took for welcome instead of warnings against the rocks. She bought the best china, stopped keeping pound notes stuffed in a stocking, called herself Sonia instead of Sonji, and entertained.

This was a territory where you could not bathe in the gentlest stream but a germ from the water entered your kidneys and blighted your body for life; where you could not go for a walk before six in the evening without returning crazed by the sun; and in this remote part of the territory, largely occupied by poor whites amidst the overwhelming natural growth of natives, a young spinster could not keep a cat for a pet but it would be one day captured and pitifully shaved by the local white bachelors for fun; it was a place where the tall grass was dangerous from snakes and the floors dangerous from scorpions. The white people seized on the slightest word, Nature took the lightest footfall, with fanatical seriousness. The English nurses discovered that they could not sit next a man at dinner and be agreeable — perhaps asking him, so as to slice up the boredom, to tell them all the story of his life — without his taking it for a great flirtation and turning up next day after breakfast for the love affair; it was a place where there was never a breath of breeze except in the season of storms and where the curtains in the windows never moved in the breeze unless a storm was to follow.

The English nurses were often advised to put in for transfers to another district.

‘It’s so much brighter in the north. Towns, life. Civilization, shops. Much cooler — you see, it’s high up there in the north. The races.’

‘You would like it in the east — those orange-planters. Everything is greener, there’s a huge valley. Shooting.’

‘Why did they send you nurses to this unhealthy spot? You should go to a healthy spot.’

Some of the nurses left Fort Beit. But those of us who were doing tropical diseases had to stay on, because our clinic, the largest in the Colony, was also a research centre for tropical diseases. Those of us who had to stay on used sometimes to say to each other, ‘Isn’t it wonderful here? Heaps of servants. Cheap drinks. Birds, beasts, flowers.

The place was not without its strange marvels. I never got used to its travel-film colours except in the dry season when the dust made everything real. The dust was thick in the great yard behind the clinic where the natives squatted and stood about, shouting or laughing — it came to the same thing — cooking and eating, while they awaited treatment, or the results of X-rays, or the results of an X-ray of a distant relative. They gave off a fierce smell and kicked up the dust. The sore eyes of the babies were always beset by flies, but the babies slept on regardless, slung on their mothers’ backs, and when they woke and cried the women suckled them.

The poor whites of Fort Beit and its area had a reception room of their own inside the building, and here they ate the food they had brought, and lolled about in long silences, sometimes working up to a fight in a corner. The remainder of the society of Fort Beit did not visit the clinic.

The remainder comprised the chemist, the clergyman, the veterinary surgeon, the police and their families. These enjoyed a social life of a small and remote quality, only coming into contact with the poor white small-farmers for business purposes. They were anxious to entertain the clinic staff who mostly spent its free time elsewhere — miles and miles away, driving at weekends to the Capital, the north, or to one of the big dams on which it was possible to set up for a sailor. But sometimes the nurses and medical officers would, for a change, spend an evening in the village at the house of the chemist, the clergyman, the vet, or at the police quarters.

Into this society came Sonia Van der Merwe when her husband had been three years in prison. There was a certain slur attached to his sentence since it was generally felt he had gone too far in the heat of the moment, this sort of thing undermining the prestige of the Colony at Whitehall. But nobody held the incident against Sonia. The main difficulty she had to face in her efforts towards the company of the vet, the chemist and the clergyman was the fact that she had never yet been in their company.

The Van der Merwes’ farm lay a few miles outside Fort Beit. It was one of the few farms in the district, for this was an area which had only been developed for the mines, and these had lately closed down. The Van der Merwes had lived the makeshift, toiling lives of Afrikaner settlers who had trekked up from the Union. I do not think it had ever before occurred to Sonia that her days could be spent otherwise than in rising and washing her face at the tub outside, baking bread, scrappily feeding her children, yelling at the natives, and retiring at night to her feather bed with Jannie. Her only outings had been to the Dutch Reformed gathering at Easter when the Afrikaners came in along the main street in their covered wagons and settled there for a week.