Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

Donald’s ragged native brought in tea in two big cups, holding one in each hand. One he gave to Daphne and the other to Donald.

How small, Donald said, were the English streams which never dried up. How small the fields, little bits of acreage, and none of the cottage women bitchy for they did their own housework and had no time to bitch. And then, of course, the better classes taking tea in their long galleries throughout the land, in springtime, with the pale sunlight dripping through the mullioned windows on to the mellow Old Windsor chairs, and the smell of hyacinths…

‘Oh, I see. Now tell me about London, Donald. Tell me about the theatres and bioscopes.

‘They don’t say “bioscope” there, they say “cinema” or “the pictures”.

‘I say, Donald,’ she said, for she noticed it was twenty-past four, ‘I want you to tell me something straight.’

‘Fire ahead,’ said Donald.

‘Why does Uncle Chakata keep on Old Tuys?’

‘I don’t want to lose my job,’ he said.

‘Upon my honour,’ she said, ‘if you tell me about Old Tuys I shan’t betray you.’

‘The whole Colony knows the story,’ said Donald, ‘but the first one to tell it to you is bound to come up against Chakata.’

‘May I drop dead on this floor,’ she said, ‘if I tell my Uncle Chakata on you.

‘How old are you, now?’ Donald said.

‘Nearly thirteen.’

‘It was two years before you were born — that would make it fifteen years ago, when Old Tuys…’

Old Tuys had already been married for some time to a Dutch girl from Pretoria. Long before he took the job at Chakata’s he knew of her infidelities. They had one peculiarity: her taste was exclusively for Englishmen. The young English settlers whom she met in the various establishments where Tuys was employed were, guilty or not, invariably accosted by Tuys: ‘You committed adultery with my wife, you swine.’ There might be a fight, or Tuys would threaten his gun. However it might be, and whether or not these young men were his wife’s lovers, Tuys was usually turned off the job.

It was said he was going to shoot his wife and arrange it to look like an accident. Simply because this intention was widely reported, he could not have carried out the plan successfully, even if he did, in fact, contemplate the deed. Certainly he beat her up from time to time.

Tuys hoped eventually to get a farm of his own. Chakata, who knew of his troubles, took Tuys on to learn the tobacco sheds. Tuys and his wife moved into a small house on Chakata’s land. ‘Any trouble with the lady, Tuys,’ said Chakata, ‘come to me, for in a young country like this, with four white men to every one white woman, there is bound to be trouble.’

There was trouble the first week with a trooper.

‘Look here, Tuys,’ said Chakata, ‘I’ll talk to her.’ He had frequently in his life had the painful duty of giving his servants a talking-to on sex. At the Pattersons’ home in England it had been a routine affair.

Hatty Tuys was not beautiful: in fact she was dark and scraggy. However, Chakata not only failed to reform her, he succumbed to her. She wept. She said she hated Tuys.

Donald paused in his story to remark to Daphne, ‘Mind you, this sort of thing doesn’t happen in England.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ said Daphne.

‘Oh well, there are love affairs but they take time. You have to sort of build them up with a woman. In England, a man of Chakata’s importance might feel sorry for a slut if she started to cry, but he wouldn’t just make love to her on the spot. The climate’s cooler there, you see, and there are a lot more girls.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Daphne. ‘What did Uncle Chakata do next?’

‘Well, as soon as he had played the fool with Mrs Tuys he felt sorry. He told her it was a moment of weakness and it would never occur again. But it did.’

‘Did Tuys find out?’

‘Tuys found out. He went to Mrs Chakata and tried to rape her.’

‘Didn’t it come off?’

‘No, it didn’t come off.’

‘It must have been the whisky in her breath. It must have put him off,’ said Daphne.

‘In England,’ said Donald, ‘girls your age don’t know very much about these things.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Daphne.

‘It’s all different there. Well, Mrs Chakata complained to Chakata, and wanted him to shoot Tuys. He refused, of course, and he gave Tuys a rise and made him manager. And from that day he wouldn’t look at Mrs Tuys, wouldn’t even look at her. Whenever he caught sight of her about the farm, he looked the other way. In the end she wrote to Chakata to say she was mad in love with him and if she couldn’t have him she would shoot herself. The note was written in block letters, in Afrikaans.’

‘Chakata would never answer it, then,’ Daphne said.

‘You are right,’ said Donald. ‘And Mrs Tuys shot herself. Old Tuys has sworn to be revenged on Chakata some day. That’s why Mrs Chakata has a gun at her bedside. She has implored Chakata to get rid of Old Tuys. So he should, of course.’

‘He can’t, very well, when you think of it,’ said Daphne.

‘It’s only his remorse,’ said Donald, ‘and his English honour. If Old Tuys was an Englishman, Daphne, he would have cleared off the farm long ago. But no, he remains, he has sworn on the Bible to be revenged.’

‘It must be our climate,’ said Daphne. ‘I have never liked the way Old Tuys looks at me.’

‘The Colony is a savage place,’ he said. He rose and poured himself a whisky. ‘I grant you,’ he said, ‘we have the natives under control. I grant you we have the leopards under control —’

‘Oh, remember Moses,’ said Daphne. Her former playmate, Moses, had been got by a leopard two years ago.

‘That was exceptional. We are getting control over malaria. But we haven’t got the savage in ourselves under control. This place brings out the savage in ourselves.’ He finished his drink and poured another. ‘If you go to England,’ he said, ‘don’t come back.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Daphne.

She was ten minutes late when she arrived at the car. The party had been anxious about her.

‘Where did you get to? You slipped away … we asked everywhere … John Coates said in a mock-girlish tone, ‘Oh, she’s been listening to the go-away bird out on the lone wide veldt.’

‘Five more years and then I go to England. Four years … three … Meanwhile, life in the Colony seemed to become more exciting every year. In fact, it went on as usual, but Daphne’s capacity for excitement developed as she grew into her teens.

She had a trip to Kenya to stay with a married cousin, another trip to Johannesburg with Mrs Coates to buy clothes.

‘Typical English beauty Daphne’s turning out to be,’ said Chakata. In reality she was too blonde to be typically English; she took after her father’s family, the Cape du Toits, who were a mixture of Dutch and Huguenot stock.

At sixteen she passed her matric and her name was entered for a teachers’ training college in the Capital. During the holidays she flirted with John Coates, who would drive her round the countryside in the little German Volkswagen which his father had obtained for him. They would go on Sunday afternoons to the Williams Hotel on the great main road for tea and a swim in the bathing-pool with all the district who converged there weekly from farms and towns.

‘In England,’ Daphne would tell him, ‘you can bathe in the rivers. No bilharzia there, no crocs.

‘There’s going to be a war in Europe,’ said John.

Daphne would sit on the hotel stoep in her smart new linen slacks, sipping her gin and lime, delighted and amazed to be grown-up, to be greeted by her farming neighbours.