Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

‘Don’t talk like that. Are you going back to England or staying?’

‘Staying, for a while.’

‘Well, don’t wander too far off.’

I was able to live on the fee I got for writing a gossip column in a local weekly, which wasn’t my idea of writing about life, of course. I made friends, more than I could cope with, after I left Skinny’s exclusive little band of archaeologists. I had the attractions of being newly out from England and of wanting to see life. Of the countless young men and go-ahead families who purred me along the Rhodesian roads, hundred after hundred miles, I only kept up with one family when I returned to my native land. I think that was because they were the most representative, they stood for all the rest: people in those parts are very typical of each other, as one group of standing stones in that wilderness is like the next.

I met George once more in a hotel in Bulawayo. We drank highballs and spoke of war. Skinny’s party were just then deciding whether to remain in the country or return home. They had reached an exciting part of their research, and whenever I got a chance to visit Zimbabwe he would take me for a moonlight walk in the ruined temple and try to make me see phantom Phoenicians flitting ahead of us, or along the walls. I had half a mind to marry Skinny; perhaps, I thought, when his studies were finished. The impending war was in our bones: so I remarked to George as we sat drinking highballs on the hotel stoep in the hard bright sunny July winter of that year.

George was inquisitive about my relations with Skinny. He tried to pump me for about half an hour and when at last I said, ‘You are becoming aggressive, George,’ he stopped. He became quite pathetic. He said, ‘War or no war I’m clearing out of this.’

‘It’s the heat does it,’ I said.

‘I’m clearing out in any case. I’ve lost a fortune in tobacco. My uncle is making a fuss. It’s the other bloody planters; once you get the wrong side of them you’re finished in this wide land.’

‘What about Matilda?’ I asked.

He said, ‘She’ll be all right. She’s got hundreds of relatives.’

I had already heard about the baby girl. Coal black, by repute, with George’s features. And another on the way, they said.

‘What about the child?’

He didn’t say anything to that. He ordered more highballs and when they arrived he swizzled his for a long time with a stick. ‘Why didn’t you ask me to your twenty-first?’ he said then.

‘I didn’t have anything special, no party, George. We had a quiet drink among ourselves, George, just Skinny and the old professors and two of the wives and me, George.

‘You didn’t ask me to your twenty-first,’ he said. ‘Kathleen writes to me regularly.’

This wasn’t true. Kathleen sent me letters fairly often in which she said, ‘Don’t tell George I wrote to you as he will be expecting word from me and I can’t be bothered actually.’

‘But you,’ said George, ‘don’t seem to have any sense of old friendships, you and Skinny.’

‘Oh, George!’ I said.

‘Remember the times we had,’ George said. ‘We used to have times.’ His large brown eyes began to water.

‘I’ll have to be getting along,’ I said.

‘Please don’t go. Don’t leave me just yet. I’ve something to tell you.

‘Something nice?’ I laid on an eager smile. All responses to George had to be overdone.

‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ George said.

‘How?’ I said. Sometimes I got tired of being called lucky by everybody. There were times when, privately practising my writings about life, I knew the bitter side of my fortune. When I failed again and again to reproduce life in some satisfactory and perfect form, I was the more imprisoned, for all my carefree living, within my craving for this satisfaction. Sometimes, in my impotence and need I secreted a venom which infected all my life for days on end and which spurted out indiscriminately on Skinny or on anyone who crossed my path.

‘You aren’t bound by anyone,’ George said. ‘You come and go as you please. Something always turns up for you. You’re free, and you don’t know your luck.’

‘You’re a damn sight more free than I am,’ I said sharply. ‘You’ve got your rich uncle.’

‘He’s losing interest in me,’ George said. ‘He’s had enough.’

‘Oh well, you’re young yet. What was it you wanted to tell me?’

‘A secret,’ George said. ‘Remember we used to have those secrets.’

‘Oh, yes we did.’

‘Did you ever tell any of mine?’

‘Oh no, George.’ In reality, I couldn’t remember any particular secret out of the dozens we must have exchanged from our schooldays onwards.

‘Well, this is a secret, mind. Promise not to tell.’

‘Promise.’

‘I’m married.’

‘Married, George! Oh, who to?’

‘Matilda.’

‘How dreadful!’ I spoke before I could think, but he agreed with me.

‘Yes, it’s awful, but what could I do?’

‘You might have asked my advice,’ I said pompously.

‘I’m two years older than you are. I don’t ask advice from you, Needle, little beast.’

‘Don’t ask for sympathy then.’

‘A nice friend you are,’ he said, ‘I must say after all these years.’

‘Poor George!’ I said.

‘There are three white men to one white woman in this country,’ said George. ‘An isolated planter doesn’t see a white woman and if he sees one she doesn’t see him. What could I do? I needed the woman.

I was nearly sick. One, because of my Scottish upbringing. Two, because of my horror of corny phrases like ‘I needed the woman’, which George repeated twice again.

‘And Matilda got tough,’ said George, ‘after you and Skinny came to visit us. She had some friends at the Mission, and she packed up and went to them.’

‘You should have let her go,’ I said.

‘I went after her,’ George said. ‘She insisted on being married, so I married her.’

‘That’s not a proper secret, then,’ I said. ‘The news of a mixed marriage soon gets about.’

‘I took care of that,’ George said. ‘Crazy as I was, I took her to the Congo and married her there. She promised to keep quiet about it.’

‘Well, you can’t clear off and leave her now, surely,’ I said.

‘I’m going to get out of this place. I can’t stand the woman and I can’t stand the country. I didn’t realize what it would be like. Two years of the country and three months of my wife has been enough.’

‘Will you get a divorce?’

‘No, Matilda’s Catholic. She won’t divorce.’

George was fairly getting through the highballs, and I wasn’t far behind him. His brown eyes floated shiny and liquid as he told me how he had written to tell his uncle of his plight, ‘Except, of course, I didn’t say we were married, that would have been too much for him. He’s a prejudiced hardened old colonial. I only said I’d had a child by a coloured woman and was expecting another, and he perfectly understood. He came at once by plane a few weeks ago. He’s made a settlement on her, providing she keeps her mouth shut about her association with me.

‘Will she do that?’

‘Oh, yes, or she won’t get the money.

‘But as your wife she has a claim on you, in any case.’

‘If she claimed as my wife she’d get far less. Matilda knows what she’s doing, greedy bitch she is. She’ll keep her mouth shut.’

‘Only, you won’t be able to marry again, will you, George?’

‘Not unless she dies,’ he said. ‘And she’s as strong as a trek ox.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, George,’ I said.

‘Good of you to say so,’ he said. ‘But I can see by your chin that you disapprove of me. Even my old uncle understood.’