The Complete Short Stories (12 page)

She overheard a sibilant
‘Whish-sh-sh?’ from the elderly woman in which she discerned, ‘Who is she?’

‘Sybil Greeves,’ her
hostess breathed back, ‘a distant cousin of Ted’s through marriage.’

‘Oh yes?’ The low tones
were puzzled as if all had not been explained. ‘She’s quite famous, of course.

‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’

‘Very few people know
it,’ said Sybil’s hostess with a little arrogance. ‘OK,’ said Ted, ‘lights out.’

‘I must say,’ said his
wife, ‘the colours are marvellous.’

All the time she was in the Colony Sybil
longed for the inexplicable colourings of her native land. The flamboyants were
too rowdy, the birds, the native women with their heads bound in cloth of
piercing pink, their blinding black skin and white teeth, the baskets full of
bright tough flowers or oranges on their heads, the sight of which everyone
else admired (‘How I wish I could paint all this!’) distressed Sybil, it bored
her.

She rented a house,
sharing it with a girl whose husband was fighting in the north. She was
twenty-two. To safeguard her privacy absolutely, she had a plywood partition
put up in the sitting-room, for it was another ten years before she had learnt
those arts of leading a double life and listening to people ambiguously, which
enabled her to mix without losing identity, and to listen without boredom.

On the other side of the
partition Ariadne Lewis decorously entertained her friends, most of whom were
men on leave. On a few occasions Sybil attended these parties, working herself,
as in a frenzy of self-discipline, into a state of carnal excitement over the
men. She managed to do this only by an effortful sealing-off of all her
critical faculties except those which assessed a good male voice and
appearance. The hangovers were frightful.

The scarcity of white
girls made it easy for any one of them to keep a number of men in perpetual
attendance. Ariadne had many boyfriends but no love affairs. Sybil had three
affairs in the space of two years, to put herself to the test. They started at
private dances, in the magnolia-filled gardens that smelt like a scent factory,
under the Milky Way which looked like an overcrowded jeweller’s window. The
affairs ended when she succumbed to one of her attacks of tropical flu, and lay
in a twilight of the senses on a bed which had been set on the stone stoep and
overhung with a white mosquito net like something bridal. With damp shaky hands
she would write a final letter to the man and give it to her half caste maid to
post. He would telephone next morning, and would be put off by the house-boy,
who was quite intelligent.

For some years she had
been thinking she was not much inclined towards sex. After the third affair,
this dawned and rose within her as a whole realization, as if in the past, when
she had told herself, ‘I am not predominantly a sexual being,’ or ‘I’m rather a
frigid freak, I suppose, these were the sayings of an illiterate, never quite
rational and known until now, but after the third affair the notion was so
intensely conceived as to be almost new. It appalled her. She lay on the shady
stoep, her fever subsiding, and examined her relations with men. She thought,
what if I married again? She shivered under the hot sheet. Can it be, she
thought, that I have a suppressed tendency towards women? She lay still and let
the idea probe round in imagination. She surveyed, with a stony inward eye, all
the women she had known, prim little academicians with cream peter-pan collars
on their dresses, large dominant women, a number of beauties, conventional
nitwits like Ariadne. No, really, she thought; neither men nor women. It is a
not caring for sexual relations. It is not merely a lack of pleasure in sex, it
is dislike of the excitement. And it is not merely dislike, it is worse, it is
boredom.

She felt a lonely
emotion near to guilt. The three love affairs took on heroic aspects in her
mind. They were an attempt, thought Sybil, to do the normal thing. Perhaps I may
try again. Perhaps, if I should meet the right man … But at the idea ‘right
man’ she felt a sense of intolerable desolation and could not stop shivering.
She raised the mosquito net and reached for the lemon juice, splashing it
jerkily into the glass. She sipped. The juice had grown warm and had been made
too sweet, but she let it linger on her sore throat and peered through the net
at the backs of houses and the yellow veldt beyond them.

Ariadne said one morning, ‘I met a girl
last night, it was funny. I thought it was you at first and called over to her.
But she wasn’t really like you close up, it was just an impression. As a matter
of fact, she knows you. I’ve asked her to tea. I forget her name.’

‘I don’t,’ said Sybil.

But when Désirée arrived
they greeted each other with exaggerated warmth, wholly felt at the time, as
acquaintances do when they meet in another hemisphere. Sybil had last seen
Désirée at a dance in Hampstead, and there had merely said, ‘Oh, hallo.’

‘We were at our first
school together,’ Désirée explained to Ariadne, still holding Sybil’s hand.

Already Sybil wished to
withdraw. ‘It’s strange,’ she remarked, ‘how, sooner or later, everyone in the
Colony meets someone they have known, or their parents knew, at home.’

Désirée and her husband,
Barry Weston, were settled in a remote part of the Colony. Sybil had heard of
Weston, unaware that Désirée was his wife. He was much talked of as an
enterprising planter. Some years ago he had got the idea of manufacturing
passion-fruit juice, had planted orchards and set up a factory. The business
was now expanding wonderfully. Barry Weston also wrote poetry, a volume of
which, entitled
Home Thoughts,
he had published and sold with great
success within the confines of the Colony. His first wife had died of
blackwater fever. On one of his visits to England he had met and married
Désirée, who was twelve years his junior.

‘You
must
come
and see us,’ said Désirée to Sybil; and to Ariadne she explained again, ‘We
were at our first little private school together.’ And she said, ‘Oh, Sybil, do
you remember Trotsky? Do you remember Minnie Mouse, what a hell of a life we
gave her? I shall never forget that day when …’

The school where Sybil
taught was shortly to break up for holidays; Ariadne was to visit her husband
in Cairo at that time. Sybil promised a visit to the Westons. When Désirée,
beautifully dressed in linen suiting, had departed, Ariadne said, ‘I’m so glad
you’re going to stay with them. I hated the thought of your being all alone for
the next few weeks.’

‘Do you know,’ Sybil
said, ‘I don’t think I shall go to stay with them after all. I’ll make an
excuse.

‘Oh, why not? Oh, Sybil,
it’s such a lovely place, and it will be fun for you. He’s a poet, too.’ Sybil
could sense exasperation, could hear Ariadne telling her friends, ‘There’s
something wrong with Sybil. You never know a person till you live with them.
Now Sybil will say one thing one minute, and the next … Something wrong with
her sex-life, perhaps … odd …’

At home, thought Sybil,
it would not be such a slur. Her final appeal for a permit to travel to England
had just been dismissed. The environment mauled her weakness. ‘I think I’m
going to have a cold,’ she said, shivering.

‘Go straight to bed,
dear.’ Ariadne called for black Elijah and bade him prepare some lemon juice.
But the cold did not materialize.

She returned with flu,
however, from her first visit to the Westons. Her 1936 Ford V8 had broken down
on the road and she had waited three chilly hours before another car had
appeared.

‘You must get a decent
car,’ said the chemist’s wife, who came to console her. ‘These old crocks
simply won’t stand up to the roads out here.’

Sybil shivered and held
her peace. Nevertheless, she returned to the Westons at mid-term.

Désirée’s invitations were pressing, almost
desperate. Again and again Sybil went in obedience to them. The Westons were a
magnetic field.

There was a routine
attached to her arrival. The elegant wicker chair was always set for her in the
same position on the stoep. The same cushions, it seemed, were always piled in
exactly the same way.

‘What will you drink,
Sybil? Are you comfy there, Sybil? We’re going to give you a wonderful time,
Sybil.’ She was their little orphan, she supposed. She sat, with very dark
glasses, contemplating the couple. ‘We’ve planned — haven’t we, Barry? — a
surprise for you, Sybil.’

‘We’ve planned — haven’t
we, Désirée? — a marvellous trip … a croc hunt … hippo …’

Sybil sips her gin and
lime. Facing her on the wicker sofa, Désirée and her husband sit side by side.
They gaze at Sybil affectionately, ‘Take off your smoked glasses, Sybil, the
sun’s nearly gone.’ Sybil takes them off. The couple hold hands. They peck
kisses at each other, and presently, outrageously, they are entwined in a long
erotic embrace in the course of which Barry once or twice regards Sybil from
the corner of his eye. Barry disengages himself and sits with his arm about his
wife; she snuggles up to him. Why, thinks Sybil, is this performance being
staged? ‘Sybil is shocked,’ Barry remarks. She sips her drink, and reflects
that a public display between man and wife somehow is more shocking than are
courting couples in parks and doorways. ‘We’re very much in love with each
other,’ Barry explains, squeezing his wife. And Sybil wonders what is wrong
with their marriage since obviously something is wrong. The couple kiss again.
Am I dreaming this? Sybil asks herself.

Even on her first visit
Sybil knew definitely there was something wrong with the marriage. She thought
of herself, at first, as an objective observer, and was even amused when she
understood they had chosen her to be their sort of Victim of Expiation. On
occasions when other guests were present she noted that the love scenes did not
take place. Instead, the couple tended to snub Sybil before their friends. ‘Poor
little Sybil, she lives all alone and is a teacher, and hasn’t many friends. We
have her here to stay as often as possible.’ The people would look uneasily at
Sybil, and would smile. ‘But you must have
heaps
of friends,’ they would
say politely. Sybil came to realize she was an object of the Westons’
resentment, and that, nevertheless, they found her indispensable.

Ariadne returned from
Cairo. ‘You always look washed out when you’ve been staying at the Westons’,’
she told Sybil eventually. ‘I suppose it’s due to the late parties and lots of
drinks.’

‘I suppose so.

Désirée wrote
continually. ‘Do come, Barry needs you. He needs your advice about some
sonnets.’ Sybil tore up these letters quickly, but usually went. Not because
her discomfort was necessary to their wellbeing, but because it was somehow
necessary to her own. The act of visiting the Westons alleviated her sense of
guilt.

I believe, she thought,
they must discern my abnormality. How could they have guessed? She was always
cautious when they dropped questions about her private life. But one’s closest
secrets have a subtle way of communicating themselves to the resentful
vigilance of opposite types. I do believe, she thought, that heart speaks unto
heart, and deep calleth unto deep. But rarely in clear language. There is a
misunderstanding here. They imagine their demonstrations of erotic bliss will
torment my frigid soul, and so far they are right. But the reason for my pain
is not envy. Really, it is boredom.

Her Ford V8 rattled
across country. How bored, she thought, I am going to be by their married
tableau! How pleased, exultant, they will be! These thoughts consoled her, they
were an offering to the gods.

‘Are you comfy, Sybil?’

She sipped her gin and
lime. ‘Yes, thanks.’

His pet name for Désirée
was Dearie. ‘Kiss me, Dearie,’ he said.

‘There, Baddy,’ his wife
said to Barry, snuggling close to him and squinting at Sybil.

‘I say, Sybil,’ Barry
said as he smoothed down his hair, ‘you ought to get married again. You’re
missing such a lot.’

‘Yes, Sybil,’ said
Désirée, ‘you should either marry or enter a convent, one or the other.’

‘I don’t see why,’ Sybil
said, ‘I should fit into a tidy category.

‘Well, you’re neither
one thing nor another — is she, honeybunch?’

True enough, thought
Sybil, and that is why I’m laid out on the altar of boredom.

‘Or get yourself a
boyfriend,’ said Désirée. ‘It would be good for you.’

‘You’re wasting your
best years,’ said Barry.

‘Are you comfy there,
Sybil? … We want you to enjoy yourself here. Any time you want to bring a
boyfriend, we’re broadminded — aren’t we, Baddy?’

‘Kiss me, Dearie,’ he
said.

Désirée took his
handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed lipstick from his mouth. He jerked his
head away and said to Sybil, ‘Pass your glass.’

Désirée looked at her
reflection in the glass of the french windows and said, ‘Sybil’s too
intellectual, that’s her trouble.’ She patted her hair, then looked at Sybil
with an old childish enmity.

After dinner Barry would
read his poems. Usually, he said, ‘I’m not going to be an egotist tonight. I’m
not going to read my poems.’ And usually Désirée would cry, ‘Oh do, Barry, do.’
Always, eventually, he did. ‘Marvellous,’ Désirée would comment, ‘wonderful.’
By the third night of her visits, the farcical aspect of it all would lose its
fascination for Sybil, and boredom would fill her near to bursting point, like
gas in a balloon. To relieve the strain, she would sigh deeply from time to
time. Barry was too engrossed in his own voice to notice this, but Désirée was
watching. At first Sybil worded her comments tactfully. ‘I think you should
devote more of your time to your verses,’ she said. And, since he looked
puzzled, added, ‘You owe it to poetry if you write it.’