Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

The scarcity of white girls made it easy for any one of them to keep a number of men in perpetual attendance. Ariadne had many boyfriends but no love affairs. Sybil had three affairs in the space of two years, to put herself to the test. They started at private dances, in the magnolia-filled gardens that smelt like a scent factory, under the Milky Way which looked like an overcrowded jeweller’s window. The affairs ended when she succumbed to one of her attacks of tropical flu, and lay in a twilight of the senses on a bed which had been set on the stone stoep and overhung with a white mosquito net like something bridal. With damp shaky hands she would write a final letter to the man and give it to her half caste maid to post. He would telephone next morning, and would be put off by the house-boy, who was quite intelligent.

For some years she had been thinking she was not much inclined towards sex. After the third affair, this dawned and rose within her as a whole realization, as if in the past, when she had told herself, ‘I am not predominantly a sexual being,’ or ‘I’m rather a frigid freak, I suppose, these were the sayings of an illiterate, never quite rational and known until now, but after the third affair the notion was so intensely conceived as to be almost new. It appalled her. She lay on the shady stoep, her fever subsiding, and examined her relations with men. She thought, what if I married again? She shivered under the hot sheet. Can it be, she thought, that I have a suppressed tendency towards women? She lay still and let the idea probe round in imagination. She surveyed, with a stony inward eye, all the women she had known, prim little academicians with cream peter-pan collars on their dresses, large dominant women, a number of beauties, conventional nitwits like Ariadne. No, really, she thought; neither men nor women. It is a not caring for sexual relations. It is not merely a lack of pleasure in sex, it is dislike of the excitement. And it is not merely dislike, it is worse, it is boredom.

She felt a lonely emotion near to guilt. The three love affairs took on heroic aspects in her mind. They were an attempt, thought Sybil, to do the normal thing. Perhaps I may try again. Perhaps, if I should meet the right man … But at the idea ‘right man’ she felt a sense of intolerable desolation and could not stop shivering. She raised the mosquito net and reached for the lemon juice, splashing it jerkily into the glass. She sipped. The juice had grown warm and had been made too sweet, but she let it linger on her sore throat and peered through the net at the backs of houses and the yellow veldt beyond them.

Ariadne said one morning, ‘I met a girl last night, it was funny. I thought it was you at first and called over to her. But she wasn’t really like you close up, it was just an impression. As a matter of fact, she knows you. I’ve asked her to tea. I forget her name.’

‘I don’t,’ said Sybil.

But when Désirée arrived they greeted each other with exaggerated warmth, wholly felt at the time, as acquaintances do when they meet in another hemisphere. Sybil had last seen Désirée at a dance in Hampstead, and there had merely said, ‘Oh, hallo.’

‘We were at our first school together,’ Désirée explained to Ariadne, still holding Sybil’s hand.

Already Sybil wished to withdraw. ‘It’s strange,’ she remarked, ‘how, sooner or later, everyone in the Colony meets someone they have known, or their parents knew, at home.’

Désirée and her husband, Barry Weston, were settled in a remote part of the Colony. Sybil had heard of Weston, unaware that Désirée was his wife. He was much talked of as an enterprising planter. Some years ago he had got the idea of manufacturing passion-fruit juice, had planted orchards and set up a factory. The business was now expanding wonderfully. Barry Weston also wrote poetry, a volume of which, entitled Home Thoughts, he had published and sold with great success within the confines of the Colony. His first wife had died of blackwater fever. On one of his visits to England he had met and married Désirée, who was twelve years his junior.

‘You must come and see us,’ said Désirée to Sybil; and to Ariadne she explained again, ‘We were at our first little private school together.’ And she said, ‘Oh, Sybil, do you remember Trotsky? Do you remember Minnie Mouse, what a hell of a life we gave her? I shall never forget that day when …’

The school where Sybil taught was shortly to break up for holidays; Ariadne was to visit her husband in Cairo at that time. Sybil promised a visit to the Westons. When Désirée, beautifully dressed in linen suiting, had departed, Ariadne said, ‘I’m so glad you’re going to stay with them. I hated the thought of your being all alone for the next few weeks.’

‘Do you know,’ Sybil said, ‘I don’t think I shall go to stay with them after all. I’ll make an excuse.

‘Oh, why not? Oh, Sybil, it’s such a lovely place, and it will be fun for you. He’s a poet, too.’ Sybil could sense exasperation, could hear Ariadne telling her friends, ‘There’s something wrong with Sybil. You never know a person till you live with them. Now Sybil will say one thing one minute, and the next … Something wrong with her sex-life, perhaps … odd …’

At home, thought Sybil, it would not be such a slur. Her final appeal for a permit to travel to England had just been dismissed. The environment mauled her weakness. ‘I think I’m going to have a cold,’ she said, shivering.

‘Go straight to bed, dear.’ Ariadne called for black Elijah and bade him prepare some lemon juice. But the cold did not materialize.

She returned with flu, however, from her first visit to the Westons. Her 1936 Ford V8 had broken down on the road and she had waited three chilly hours before another car had appeared.

‘You must get a decent car,’ said the chemist’s wife, who came to console her. ‘These old crocks simply won’t stand up to the roads out here.’

Sybil shivered and held her peace. Nevertheless, she returned to the Westons at mid-term.

Désirée’s invitations were pressing, almost desperate. Again and again Sybil went in obedience to them. The Westons were a magnetic field.

There was a routine attached to her arrival. The elegant wicker chair was always set for her in the same position on the stoep. The same cushions, it seemed, were always piled in exactly the same way.

‘What will you drink, Sybil? Are you comfy there, Sybil? We’re going to give you a wonderful time, Sybil.’ She was their little orphan, she supposed. She sat, with very dark glasses, contemplating the couple. ‘We’ve planned — haven’t we, Barry? — a surprise for you, Sybil.’

‘We’ve planned — haven’t we, Désirée? — a marvellous trip … a croc hunt … hippo …’

Sybil sips her gin and lime. Facing her on the wicker sofa, Désirée and her husband sit side by side. They gaze at Sybil affectionately, ‘Take off your smoked glasses, Sybil, the sun’s nearly gone.’ Sybil takes them off. The couple hold hands. They peck kisses at each other, and presently, outrageously, they are entwined in a long erotic embrace in the course of which Barry once or twice regards Sybil from the corner of his eye. Barry disengages himself and sits with his arm about his wife; she snuggles up to him. Why, thinks Sybil, is this performance being staged? ‘Sybil is shocked,’ Barry remarks. She sips her drink, and reflects that a public display between man and wife somehow is more shocking than are courting couples in parks and doorways. ‘We’re very much in love with each other,’ Barry explains, squeezing his wife. And Sybil wonders what is wrong with their marriage since obviously something is wrong. The couple kiss again. Am I dreaming this? Sybil asks herself.