Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

‘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 Kierkegaard’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 submarines, 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.