Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

Sybil said, ‘Oh, I expect they are all so used to electricity these days …’

‘That’s the trouble,’ said Désirée, and turned back into the room.

Sybil was feeling disturbed by David’s presence in the place. She wondered if he would come in to dinner. Thinking of his sullen staring at her on the lawn, she felt he might make a scene. She heard a gasp from the dining-room behind her.

She looked round, but in the same second it was over. A deafening crack from the pistol and Désirée crumpled up. A movement by the inner door and David held the gun to his head. Sybil screamed, and was aware of running footsteps upstairs. The gun exploded again and David’s body dropped sideways.

With Barry and the natives she went round to the dining-room. Désirée was dead. David lingered a moment enough to roll his eyes in Sybil’s direction as she rose from Désirée’s body. He knows, thought Sybil quite lucidly, that he got the wrong woman.

‘What I can’t understand,’ said Barry when he called on Sybil a few weeks later, ‘is why he did it.’

‘He was mad,’ said Sybil.

‘Not all that mad,’ said Barry. ‘And everyone thinks, of course, that there was an affair between them. That’s what I can’t bear.’

‘Quite,’ said Sybil. ‘But of course he was keen on Désirée. You always said so. Those rows you used to have … You always made out you were jealous of David.’

‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t, really. It was a sort of… a sort of…’

‘Play-act,’ said Sybil.

‘Sort of. You see, there was nothing between them,’ he said. ‘And honestly, Carter wasn’t a bit interested in Désirée. And the question is why he did it. I can’t bear people to think …’

The damage to his pride, Sybil saw, outweighed his grief The sun was setting and she rose to put on the stoep light.

‘Stop!’ he said. ‘Turn round. My God, you did look like Désirée for a moment.

‘You’re nervy,’ she said, and switched on the light.

‘In some ways you do look a little like Désirée,’ he said. ‘In some lights,’ he said reflectively.

I must say something, thought Sybil, to blot this notion from his mind. I must make this occasion unmemorable, distasteful to him.

‘At all events,’ she said, ‘you’ve still got your poetry.

‘That’s the great thing,’ he said, ‘I’ve still got that. It means everything to me, a great consolation. I’m selling up the estate and joining up. The kids are going into a convent and I’m going up north. What we need is some good war poetry. There hasn’t been any war poetry.

‘You’ll make a better soldier,’ she said, ‘than a poet.’

‘What do you say?’

She repeated her words fairly slowly, and with a sense of relief, almost of absolution. The season of falsity had formed a scab, soon to fall away altogether. There is no health, she thought, for me, outside of honesty.

‘You’ve always,’ he said, ‘thought my poetry was wonderful.’

‘I have said so,’ she said, ‘but it was a sort of play-act. Of course, it’s only my opinion, but I think you’re a third-rater poet.’

‘You’re upset, my dear,’ he said.

He sent her the four reels of film from Cairo a month before he was killed in action. ‘It will be nice in later years,’ he wrote, ‘for you to recall those good times we used to have.’

‘It has been delightful,’ said her hostess. ‘You haven’t changed a bit. Do you feel any different?’

‘Well yes, I feel rather differently about everything, of course.’ One learns to accept oneself.

‘A hundred feet of one’s past life!’ said the young man. ‘If they were mine, I’m sure I should be shattered. I should be calling “Lights! Lights!” like Hamlet’s uncle.’

Sybil smiled at him. He looked back, suddenly solemn and shrewd. ‘How tragic, those people being killed in shooting affairs,’ said the elderly woman.

‘The last reel was the best,’ said her hostess. ‘The garden was entrancing. I should like to see that one again; what about you, Ted?’

‘Yes, I liked those nature-study shots. I feel I missed a lot of it,’ said her husband.

‘Hark at him — nature-study shots!’

‘Well, those close-ups of tropical plants.

Everyone wanted the last one again.

‘How about you, Sybil?’

Am I a woman, she thought calmly, or an intellectual monster? She was so accustomed to this question within herself that it needed no answer. She said, ‘Yes, I should like to see it again. It’s an interesting experience.’

The Seraph and the Zambezi

You may have heard of Samuel Cramer, half poet, half journalist, who had to do with a dancer called the Fanfarlo. But, as you will see, it doesn’t matter if you have not. He was said to be going strong in Paris early in the nineteenth century, and when I met him in 1946 he was still going strong, but this time in a different way. He was the same man, but modified. For instance, in those days, more than a hundred years ago, Cramer had persisted for several decades, and without affectation, in being about twenty-five years old. But when I knew him he was clearly undergoing his forty-two-year-old phase.

At this time he was keeping a petrol pump some four miles south of the Zambezi River where it crashes over a precipice at the Victoria Falls. Cramer had some spare rooms where he put up visitors to the Falls when the hotel was full. I was sent to him because it was Christmas week and there was no room in the hotel.

I found him trying the starter of a large, lumpy Mercedes outside his corrugated-iron garage, and at first sight I judged him to be a Belgian from the Congo. He had the look of north and south, light hair with canvas-coloured skin. Later, however, he told me that his father was German and his mother Chilean. It was this information rather than the ‘S. Cramer’ above the garage door which made me think I had heard of him.

The rains had been very poor and that December was fiercely hot. On the third night before Christmas I sat on the stoep outside my room, looking through the broken mosquito-wire network at the lightning in the distance. When an atmosphere maintains an excessive temperature for a long spell something seems to happen to the natural noises of life. Sound fails to carry in its usual quantity, but comes as if bound and gagged. That night the Christmas beetles, which fall on their backs on every stoep with a high tic-tac, seemed to be shock-absorbed. I saw one fall and the little bump reached my ears a fraction behind time. The noises of minor wild beasts from the bush were all hushed-up, too. In fact it wasn’t until the bush noises all stopped simultaneously, as they frequently do when a leopard is about, that I knew there had been any sound at all.

Overlying this general muted hum, Cramer’s sundowner party progressed farther up the stoep. The heat distorted every word. The glasses made a tinkle that was not of the substance of glass, but of bottles wrapped in tissue paper. Sometimes, for a moment, a shriek or a cackle would hang torpidly in space, but these were unreal sounds, as if projected from a distant country, as if they were pocket-torches seen through a London fog.

Cramer came over to my end of the stoep and asked me to join his party. I said I would be glad to, and meant it, even though I had been glad to sit alone. Heat so persistent and so intense sucks up the will.

Five people sat in wicker armchairs drinking highballs and chewing salted peanuts. I recognized a red-haired trooper from Livingstone, just out from England, and two of Cramer’s lodgers, a tobacco planter and his wife from Bulawayo. In the custom of those parts, the other two were introduced by their first names. Mannie, a short dark man of square face and build, I thought might be a Portuguese from the east coast. The woman, Fanny, was picking bits out of the frayed wicker chair and as she lifted her glass her hand shook a little, making her bracelets chime. She would be about fifty, a well-tended woman, very neat. Her grey hair, tinted with blue, was done in a fringe above a face puckered with malaria.