Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

‘We four must stick together,’ George said very often in that yearning way of his. He was always desperately afraid of neglect. We four looked likely to shift off in different directions and George did not trust the other three of us not to forget all about him. More and more as the time came for him to depart for his uncle’s tobacco farm in Africa he said,

‘We four must keep in touch.’

And before he left he told each of us anxiously, ‘I’ll write regularly, once a month. We must keep together for the sake of the old times.’ He had three prints taken from the negative of that photo on the haystack, wrote on the back of them, ‘George took this the day that Needle found the needle’ and gave us a copy each. I think we all wished he could become a bit more callous.

During my lifetime I was a drifter, nothing organized. It was difficult for my friends to follow the logic of my life. By the normal reckonings I should have come to starvation and ruin, which I never did. Of course, I did not live to write about life as I wanted to do. Possibly that is why I am inspired to do so now in these peculiar circumstances.

I taught in a private school in Kensington for almost three months, very small children. I didn’t know what to do with them but I was kept fairly busy escorting incontinent little boys to the lavatory and telling the little girls to use their handkerchiefs. After that I lived a winter holiday in London on my small capital, and when that had run out I found a diamond bracelet in the cinema for which I received a reward of fifty pounds. When it was used up I got a job with a publicity man, writing speeches for absorbed industrialists, in which the dictionary of quotations came in very useful. So it went on. I got engaged to Skinny, but shortly after that I was left a small legacy, enough to keep me for six months. This somehow decided me that I didn’t love Skinny so I gave him back the ring.

But it was through Skinny that I went to Africa. He was engaged with a party of researchers to investigate King Solomon’s mines, that series of ancient workings ranging from the ancient port of Ophir, now called Beira, across Portuguese East Africa and Southern Rhodesia to the mighty jungle-city of Zimbabwe whose temple walls still stand by the approach to an ancient and sacred mountain, where the rubble of that civilization scatters itself over the surrounding Rhodesian waste. I accompanied the party as a sort of secretary. Skinny vouched for me, he paid my fare, he sympathized by his action with my inconsequential life although when he spoke of it he disapproved. A life like mine annoys most people; they go to their jobs every day, attend to things, give orders, pummel typewriters, and get two or three weeks off every year, and it vexes them to see someone else not bothering to do these things and yet getting away with it, not starving, being lucky as they call it. Skinny, when I had broken off our engagement, lectured me about this, but still he took me to Africa knowing I should probably leave his unit within a few months.

We were there a few weeks before we began inquiring for George, who was farming about four hundred miles away to the north. We had not told him of our plans.

‘If we tell George to expect us in his part of the world he’ll come rushing to pester us the first week. After all, we’re going on business,’ Skinny had said.

Before we left Kathleen told us, ‘Give George my love and tell him not to send frantic cables every time I don’t answer his letters right away. Tell him I’m busy in the hat shop and being presented. You would think he hadn’t another friend in the world the way he carries on.

We had settled first at Fort Victoria, our nearest place of access to the Zimbabwe ruins. There we made inquiries about George. It was clear he hadn’t many friends. The older settlers were the most tolerant about the half-caste woman he was living with, as we found, but they were furious about his methods of raising tobacco which we learned were most unprofessional and in some mysterious way disloyal to the whites. We could never discover how it was that George’s style of tobacco farming gave the blacks opinions about themselves, but that’s what the older settlers claimed. The newer immigrants thought he was unsociable and, of course, his living with that nig made visiting impossible.

I must say I was myself a bit off-put by this news about the brown woman. I was brought up in a university town to which came Indian, African and Asiatic students in a variety of tints and hues. I was brought up to avoid them for reasons connected with local reputation and God’s ordinances. You cannot easily go against what you were brought up to do unless you are a rebel by nature.

Anyhow, we visited George eventually, taking advantage of the offer of transport from some people bound north in search of game. He had heard of our arrival in Rhodesia and though he was glad, almost relieved, to see us he pursued a policy of sullenness for the first hour.

‘We wanted to give you a surprise, George.’

‘How were we to know that you’d get to hear of our arrival, George? News here must travel faster than light, George.’

‘We did hope to give you a surprise, George.’

At last he said, ‘Well, I must say it’s good to see you. All we need now is Kathleen. We four simply must stick together. You find when you’re in a place like this, there’s nothing like old friends.’

He showed us his drying sheds. He showed us a paddock where he was experimenting with a horse and a zebra mare, attempting to mate them. They were frolicking happily, but not together. They passed each other in their private play time and again, but without acknowledgement and without resentment.

‘It’s been done before,’ George said. ‘It makes a fine strong beast, more intelligent than a mule and sturdier than a horse. But I’m not having any success with this pair, they won’t look at each other.’

After a while, he said, ‘Come in for a drink and meet Matilda.’

She was dark brown, with a subservient hollow chest and round shoulders, a gawky woman, very snappy with the house-boys. We said pleasant things as we drank on the stoep before dinner, but we found George difficult. For some reason he began to rail at me for breaking off my engagement to Skinny, saying what a dirty trick it was after all those good times in the old days. I diverted attention to Matilda. I supposed, I said, she knew this part of the country well?

‘No,’ said she, ‘I been a-shellitered my life. I not put out to working. Me nothing to go from place to place is allowed like dirty girls does.’ In her speech she gave every syllable equal stress.

George explained, ‘Her father was a white magistrate in Natal. She had a sheltered upbringing, different from the other coloureds, you realize.’

‘Man, me no black-eyed Susan,’ said Matilda, ‘no, no.’

On the whole, George treated her as a servant. She was about four months advanced in pregnancy, but he made her get up and fetch for him, many times. Soap: that was one of the things Matilda had to fetch. George made his own bath soap, showed it proudly, gave us the recipe which I did not trouble to remember; I was fond of nice soaps during my lifetime and George’s smelt of brilliantine and looked likely to soil one’s skin.

‘D’yo brahn?’ Matilda asked me.

George said, ‘She is asking if you go brown in the sun.

‘No, I go freckled.’

‘I got sister-in-law go freckles.’

She never spoke another word to Skinny nor to me, and we never saw her again.

Some months later I said to Skinny,

‘I’m fed up with being a camp follower.’

He was not surprised that I was leaving his unit, but he hated my way of expressing it. He gave me a Presbyterian look.