Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

Since ever Daphne could remember, when Mrs Chakata lay on her bed in the daytime she had a revolver on a table by her side. And sometimes, when Chakata had to spend days and nights away from the farm, Daphne had slept in Mrs Chakata’s room, while outside the bedroom door, on a makeshift pallet, lay Ticky Talbot, the freckled Englishman who trained Chakata’s racers. He lay with a gun by his side, treating it all as rather a joke.

From time to time Daphne had inquired the reasons for these precautions. ‘You can’t trust the munts,’ said Mrs Chakata, using the local word for the natives. Daphne never understood this, for Chakata’s men were the finest in the Colony, that was an axiom. She vaguely thought it must be a surviving custom of general practice, dating from the Pioneer days, when white men and women were frequently murdered in their beds. This was within living history, and tales of these past massacres and retributions were part of daily life in the great rural districts of the Colony. But the old warrior chiefs were long since dead, and the warriors disbanded, all differences now being settled by the Native Commissioners. As she grew older Daphne thought Mrs Chakata and her kind very foolish to take such elaborate precautions against something so remote as a native rising on the farm. But it was not until the Coates family moved in to the neighbouring farm thirty-five miles away that Daphne discovered Mrs Chakata’s precautionary habits were not generally shared by the grown-up females of the Colony. Daphne was twelve when the Coates family, which included two younger girls and two older boys, came to the district. During the first school holidays after their arrival she was invited over to stay with them. Mr Coates had gone on safari, leaving his wife and children on the farm. The only other European there was a young married student of agriculture who lived on their land two miles from the farmhouse.

Daphne was put up on a camp bed in Mrs Coates’s bedroom. She noticed that her hostess had no revolver by her side, nor was anyone on sentry duty outside the door.

‘Aren’t you afraid of the munts?’ said Daphne.

‘Good gracious, why? Our boys are marvellous.’

‘Auntie Chakata always sleeps with a pistol by her side.’

‘Is she afraid of rape, then?’ said Mrs Coates. All the children in the Colony understood the term; rape was a capital offence, and on very remote occasions the Colony would be astir about a case of rape, whether the accused was a white man or a black.

It was a new thought to Daphne that Mrs Chakata might fear rape, not murder as she had supposed. She looked at Mrs Coates with wonder. ‘There isn’t anyone, is there, would rape Auntie Chakata?’ Mrs Coates was smiling to herself.

Often, when she was out with the Coates children, Daphne would hear the go-away bird. One day when the children were walking through a field of maize, the older Coates boy, John, said to Daphne,

‘Why do you suddenly stop still like that?’

‘I’m listening to the go-away bird,’ she said.

Her face was shaded under the wide brim of her hat, and the maize rose all round her, taller than herself. John Coates, who was sixteen, folded his arms and looked at her, for it was an odd thing for a little girl to notice the go-away bird.

‘What are you looking at?’ she said.

He didn’t answer. The maize reached to his shoulder. He was put into a dither, and so he continued to look at her, arms folded, as if he felt confident.

‘Don’t stand like that,’ Daphne said. ‘You remind me of Old Tuys.

John immediately laughed. He took his opportunity to gain a point, to alleviate his awkwardness and support his pose. ‘You got a handful there with Old Tuys,’ he said.

‘Old Tuys is the best tobacco baas in the country,’ she said defiantly. ‘Uncle Chakata likes Old Tuys.’

‘No, he does not like him,’ said John.

‘Yes, he does so, or he wouldn’t keep him on.’

‘My girl,’ said John, ‘I know why Chakata keeps on Old Tuys. You know. Everyone knows. It isn’t because he likes him.’

They moved on to join the other children. Daphne wondered why Chakata kept on Old Tuys.

They scrounged a lift to the dorp. The Coates family were uninhibited about speaking Afrikaans, chatting in rapid gutturals to people they met while Daphne stood by, shyly following what she could of the conversation.

They were to return to the car at five o’clock, and it was now only half past three. Daphne took her chance and slipped away from the group through the post office and out at the back yard where the natives were squatting round their mealie-pot. They watched her with their childish interest as she made her way past the native huts and the privies and out on the sanitary lane at the foot of the yard.

Daphne nipped across a field and up the steep track of Donald Cloete’s kopje. It bore this name, because Donald Cloete was the only person who lived on the hill, although there were several empty shacks surrounding his.

Donald Cloete had been to Cambridge. Indoors, he had two photographs on the wall. One was Donald in the cricket team, not easily recognizable behind his wide, curly moustache and among the other young men who looked so like him and stood in the same stiff, self-assured manner that Daphne had observed in pictures of the Pioneer heroes. The picture was dated 1898. Another group showed Donald in uniform among his comrades of the Royal Flying Corps. It was dated 1918, but Donald behind his moustache did not look much older than he appeared in the Cambridge picture.

Daphne looked round the open door and saw Donald seated in his dilapidated cane chair. His white shirt was stained with beetroot.

‘Are you drunk, Donald,’ she inquired politely, ‘or are you sober?’

Donald always told the truth. ‘I’m sober,’ he said. ‘Come in.’

At fifty-six his appearance now had very little in common with the young Cambridge cricketer or the RFC pilot. He had been in hundreds of jobs, had married and lost his wife to a younger and more energetic man. The past eight years had been the most settled in his life, for he was Town Clerk of the dorp, a job which made few demands on punctuality, industry, smartness of appearance, and concentration, which qualities Donald lacked. Sometimes when the Council held its monthly meeting, and Donald happened to stagger in late and drunk, the Chairman would ask Donald to leave the meeting, and in his absence propose his dismissal. Sometimes they unanimously dismissed him and after the meeting he was informed of the decision. However, next day Donald would dress himself cleanly and call in to see the butcher with a yarn about the RFC; he would call on the headmaster who had been to Cambridge some years later than Donald; and after doing a round of the Council members he would busy himself in the district, would ride for miles on his bicycle seeing that fences were up where they should be, and signposts which had fallen in the rains set upright and prominent. Within a week, Donald’s dismissal would be ignored by everyone. He would relax then, and if he entered up a birth or a death during the week, it was a good week’s work.

‘Who brought you from the farm?’ said Donald.

‘Ticky Talbot,’ said Daphne.

‘Nice to see you,’ said Donald. And he called to his servant for tea.

‘Five more years and then I go to England,’ said Daphne, for this was the usual subject between them, and she did not feel it right to come to the real purpose of her visit so soon.

‘That will be the time,’ said Donald. ‘When you go to England, that will be the time.’ And he told her all over again about the water meadows at Cambridge, the country pubs, the hedging and ditching, the pink-coated riders.