The Complete Short Stories (11 page)

Between Sybil’s ninth
year and her tenth Désirée’s family came to live in her square. The residents’
children were taken to the gardens of the square after school by mothers and nursemaids,
and were bidden to play with each other nicely. Sybil regarded the intrusion of
Désirée sulkily, and said she preferred her book. She cheered up, however, when
a few weeks later the Dobell boys came to live in the square. The two Dobells
had dusky-rose skins and fine dark eyes. It appeared the father was half
Indian.

How Sybil adored the
Dobells! They were a new type of playmate in her experience, so jumping and
agile, and yet so gentle, so unusually courteous. Their dark skins were never
dirty, a fact which Sybil obscurely approved. She did not then mind Désirée
joining in their games; the Dobell boys were a kind of charm against despair,
for they did not understand stupidity and so did not notice Désirée’s.

The girl lacked mental
stamina, could not keep up an imaginative game for long, was shrill and apt to
kick her playmates unaccountably and on the sly; the Dobells reacted to this
with a simple resignation. Perhaps the lack of opposition was the reason that
Désirée continually shot Sybil dead, contrary to the rules, whenever she felt
like it.

Sybil resented with the
utmost passion the repeated daily massacre of herself before the time was ripe.
It was useless for Jon Dobell to explain, ‘Not yet, Désirée. Wait, wait,
Désirée. She’s not to be shot down yet. She hasn’t crossed the bridge yet, and
you can’t shoot her from there, anyway — there’s a big boulder between you and
her. You have to creep round it, and Hugh has a shot at you first, and he
thinks he’s got you, but only your hat. And …’

It was no use. Each day
before the game started the four sat in conference on the short dry prickly
grass. The proceedings were agreed. The game was on. ‘Got it all clear,
Désirée?’

‘Yes,’ she said, every
day. Désirée shouted and got herself excited, she made foolish sounds even when
supposed to be stalking the bandits through the silent forest. A few high
screams and then, ‘Bang-bang,’ she yelled, aiming at Sybil, ‘you’re dead.’
Sybil obediently rolled over, protesting none the less that the game had only
begun, while the Dobells sighed, ‘Oh,
Désirée!’

Sybil vowed to herself
each night, I will do the same to her. Next time — tomorrow if it isn’t raining
— I will bang-bang her before she has a chance to hang her panama on the bough
as a decoy. I will say bang-bang on her out of turn, and I will do her dead
before her time.

But on no succeeding
tomorrow did Sybil bring herself to do this. Her pride before the Dobells was
more valuable than the success of the game. Instead, with her cleverness, Sybil
set herself to avoid Désirée’s range for as long as possible. She dodged behind
the laurels and threw out a running commentary as if to a mental defective,
such as, ‘I’m in disguise, all in green, and no one can see me among the trees.’
But still Désirée saw her. Désirée’s eyes insisted on penetrating solid
mountains. ‘I’m half a mile away from everyone,’ Sybil cried as Désirée’s gun
swivelled relentlessly upon her.

I shall refuse to be
dead, Sybil promised herself. I’ll break the rule. If it doesn’t count with her
why should it count with me? I won’t roll over any more when she bangs you’re
dead to me. Next time, tomorrow if it isn’t raining …

But Sybil simply did
roll over. When Join and Hugh Dobell called out to her that Désirée’s bang-bang
did not count she started hopefully to resurrect herself; but ‘It does count,
it
does.
That’s the rule,’ Désirée counter-screeched. And Sybil dropped
back flat, knowing utterly that this was final.

And so the girl
continued to deal premature death to Sybil, losing her head, but never so much
that she aimed at one of the boys. For some reason which Sybil did not consider
until she was years and years older, it was always herself who had to die.

One day, when Désirée
was late in arriving for play, Sybil put it to the boys that Désirée should be
left out of the game in future. ‘She only spoils it.’

‘But,’ said Jon, ‘you
need four people for the game.’

‘You need four,’ said
Hugh.

‘No, you can do it with
three.’ As she spoke she was inventing the game with three. She explained to
them what was in her mind’s eye. But neither boy could grasp the idea, having
got used to Bandits and Riders with two on each side. ‘I am the lone Rider, you
see,’ said Sybil. ‘Or,’ she wheedled, ‘the cherry tree can be a Rider.’ She was
talking to stone, inoffensive but uncomprehending. All at once she realized,
without articulating the idea, that her intelligence was superior to theirs,
and she felt lonely.

‘Could we play rounders
instead?’ ventured Jon.

Sybil brought a book
every day after that, and sat reading beside her mother, who was glad, on the
whole, that Sybil had grown tired of rowdy games.

‘They were preparing,’ said Sybil, ‘to go
on a shoot.’ Sybil’s host was changing the reel.

‘I get quite a new
vision of Sybil,’ said her hostess, ‘seeing her in such a … such a
social
environment.
Were any of these people intellectuals, Sybil?’

‘No, but lots of poets.’

‘Oh,
no.
Did they
all write poetry?’

‘Quite a lot of them,’
said Sybil, ‘did.’

‘Who
were
they
all? Who was that blond fellow who was standing by the van with you?’

‘He was the manager of
the estate. They grew passion-fruit and manufactured the juice.’

‘Passion-fruit — how
killing. Did
he
write poetry?’

‘Oh, yes.

‘And who was the girl,
the one I thought was you?’

‘Oh, I had known her as
a child and we met again in the Colony. The short man was her husband.’

‘And were you all off on
safari that morning? I simply can’t imagine you shooting anything, Sybil,
somehow.’

‘On this occasion,’ said
Sybil, ‘I didn’t go. I just held the gun for effect.’

Everyone laughed.

‘Do you still keep up
with these people? I’ve heard that colonials are great letter-writers, it keeps
them in touch with —’

‘No.’ And she added, ‘Three
of them are dead. The girl and her husband, and the fair fellow.’

‘Really? What happened
to them? Don’t tell me
they
were mixed up in shooting affairs.’

‘They were mixed up in
shooting affairs,’ said Sybil.

‘Oh, these colonials,’
said the elderly woman, ‘and their shooting affairs!’

‘Number three,’ said
Sybil’s host. ‘Ready? Lights out, please.’

‘Don’t get eaten by lions. I say, Sybil,
don’t get mixed up in a shooting affair.’ The party at the railway station were
unaware of the noise they were making for they were inside the noise. As the
time of departure drew near Donald’s relatives tended to herd themselves apart
while Sybil’s clustered round the couple.

‘Two years — it will be
an interesting experience for them.’

‘Mind out for the
shooting affairs. Don’t let Donald have a gun.’

There had been an
outbreak of popular headlines about the shooting affairs in the Colony. Much
had been blared forth about the effect, on the minds of young settlers, of the
climate, the hard drinking, the shortage of white women. The Colony was a place
where lovers shot husbands, or shot themselves, where husbands shot natives who
spied through bedroom windows. Letters to
The Times
arrived belatedly
from respectable colonists, refuting the scandals with sober statistics. The
recent incidents, they said, did not represent the habits of the peaceable
majority. The Governor told the press that everything had been highly
exaggerated. By the time Sybil and Donald left for the Colony the music-hall
comics had already exhausted the entertainment value of colonial shooting
affairs.

‘Don’t make pets of
snakes or crocs. Mind out for the lions. Don’t forget to write.’

It was almost a surprise
to them to find that shooting affairs in the Colony were not entirely a
music-hall myth. They occurred in waves. For three months at a time the
gun-murders and suicides were reported weekly. The old colonists with their
very blue eyes sat beside their whisky bottles and remarked that another young
rotter had shot himself. Then the rains would break and the shootings would
cease for a long season.

Eighteen months after
their marriage Donald was mauled by a lioness and died on the long stretcher
journey back to the station. He was one of a party of eight. No one could
really say how it happened; it was done in a flash. The natives had lost their
wits, and, instead of shooting the beast, had come calling ‘Ah-ah-ah,’ and
pointing to the spot. A few strides, shouldering the grass aside, and Donald’s
friends got the lioness as she reared from his body.

His friends in the
archaeological team to which he belonged urged Sybil to remain in the Colony
for the remaining six months, and return to England with them. Still undecided,
she went on a sight-seeing tour. But before their time was up the
archaeologists had been recalled. War had been declared. Civilians were not
permitted to leave the continent, and Sybil was caught, like Donald under the
lioness.

She wished he had lived
to enjoy a life of his own, as she intended to do. It was plain to her that
they must have separated had he lived. There had been no disagreement but,
thought Sybil, given another two years there would have been disagreements.
Donald had shown signs of becoming a bore. By the last, the twenty-seventh,
year of his life, his mind had ceased to inquire. Archaeology, that thrilling
subject, had become Donald’s job, merely. He began to talk as if all
archaeological methods and theories had ceased to evolve on the day he obtained
his degree; it was now only a matter of applying his knowledge to field-work
for a limited period. Archaeological papers came out from England. The usual
crank literature on roneo foolscap followed them from one postal address to
another. ‘Donald, aren’t you going to look through them?’ Sybil said, as the
journals and papers piled up. ‘No, really, I don’t see it’s necessary.’ It was
not necessary because his future was fixed; two years in the field and then a
lectureship. If it were my subject, she thought, these papers would be
necessary to me. Even the crackpot ones, rightly read, would be, to me,
enlarging.

Sybil lay in bed in the
mornings reading the translation of Kierkegaard’s
Journals,
newly
arrived from England in their first, revelatory month of publication. She felt
like a desert which had not realized its own aridity till the rain began to
fall upon it. When Donald came home in the late afternoons she had less and less
to say to him.

‘There has been another
shooting affair,’ Donald said, ‘across the valley. The chap came home
unexpectedly and found his wife with another man. He shot them both.’

‘In this place, one is
never far from the jungle,’ Sybil said.

‘What are you talking
about? We are eight hundred miles from the jungle.’

When he had gone on his
first big shoot, eight hundred miles away in the jungle, she had reflected,
there is no sign of a living mind in him, it is like a landed fish which has
ceased to palpitate. But, she thought, another woman would never notice it.
Other women do not wish to be married to a Mind. Yet I do, she thought, and I
am a freak and should not have married. In fact I am not the marrying type.
Perhaps that is why he does not explore my personality, any more than he reads
the journals. It might make him think, and that would be hurtful.

After his death she
wished he had lived to enjoy a life of his own, whatever that might have been.
She took a job in a private school for girls and cultivated a few friends for
diversion until the war should be over. Charming friends need not possess
minds.

Their motor launch was rocking up the
Zambezi. Sybil was leaning over the rail mouthing something to a startled
native in a canoe. Now Sybil was pointing across the river.

‘I think I was asking
him,’ Sybil commented to her friends in the darkness, ‘about the hippo. There
was a school of hippo some distance away, and we wanted to see them better. But
the native said we shouldn’t go too near — that’s why he’s looking so
frightened — because the hippo often upset a boat, and then the crocs quickly
slither into the water. There, look! We got a long shot of the hippo — those
bumps in the water, like submarines, those are the snouts of hippo.’

The film rocked with the
boat as it proceeded up the river. The screen went white.

‘Something’s happened,’
said Sybil’s hostess.

‘Put on the light,’ said
Sybil’s host. He fiddled with the projector and a young man, their lodger from
upstairs, went to help him.

‘I loved those tiny
monkeys on the island,’ said her hostess. ‘Do hurry, Ted. What’s gone wrong?’

‘Shut up a minute,’ he
said.

‘Sybil, you know you
haven’t changed much since you were a girl.’

‘Thank you, Ella.’ I
haven’t changed at all so far as I still think charming friends need not
possess minds.

‘I expect this will
revive your memories, Sybil. The details, I mean. One is bound to forget so
much.’

‘Oh yes,’ Sybil said,
and she added, ‘but I recall quite a lot of details, you know.

‘Do you
really,
Sybil?’

I wish, she thought,
they wouldn’t cling to my least word.

The young man turned
from the projector with several feet of the film-strip looped between his
widespread hands. ‘Is the fair chap your husband, Mrs Greeves?’ he said to
Sybil.

‘Sybil lost her husband
very early on,’ her hostess informed him in a low and sacred voice.

‘Oh, I
am
sorry.’

Sybil’s hostess
replenished the drinks of her three guests. Her host turned from the projector,
finished his drink, and passed his glass to be refilled, all in one movement. Everything
they do seems large and important, thought Sybil, but I must not let it be so.
We are only looking at old films.