Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

She met him whenever he could get away. She sent excuses in answer to Désirée’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 passion-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 Désirée and Barry were becoming more violent, that the possibility of Barry’s resigning from business to devote his time to poetry was haunting Désirée. ‘Why don’t you come, Désirée 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 embarrassing, 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 passion-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 sexlessness.

‘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 Passion-fruit Juice. He will soon get over the affair, she thought, he has still got his obsession with the passion-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 Désirée, ‘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’ sexuality, 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 Désirée. ‘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 ciné camera out. Come and be filmed.’

Désirée 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 Désirée. She snubs him so badly.’

‘He’s psychological,’ said Désirée.

‘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.’

Désirée came out, followed by the dog.

‘Look frisky, Barker,’ said Barry. The Alsatian looked frisky.

Barry put one arm round Désirée 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 Désirée said, ‘You ought to try a love affair …’

‘We’ve made Sybil unhappy,’ said Désirée. ‘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, Désirée was indoors behind her, adjusting the oil lamps which one of the house-boys had set too high. Désirée put her head round the glass 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.’