The Complete Short Stories (14 page)

But in response to her
letter David forced his way into the house. Sybil was alarmed. None of her
previous lovers had persisted in this way.

‘It’s your duty to marry
me.

‘Really, what next?’

‘It’s your duty to me as
a man and a poet.’ She did not like his eyes.

‘As a poet,’ she said, ‘I
think you’re a third-rater.’ She felt relieved to hear her own voice uttering
the words.

He stiffened up in a
comical melodramatic style, looking such a clean-cut settler with his golden
hair and tropical suiting.

‘David Carter,’ wrote Désirée,
‘has gone on the bottle. I think he’s bats, myself It’s because I keep giving
him the brush-off. Isn’t it all silly? The estate will go to ruin if Barry
doesn’t get rid of him. Barry has sent him away on leave for a month, but if he
hasn’t improved on his return we shall have to make a change. When are you
coming? Barry needs to talk to you.’

Sybil went the following
week, urged on by her old self-despising; driving her Ford V8 against the
current of pleasure, yet compelled to expiate her abnormal nature by contact
with the Westons’ sexuality, which she knew, none the less, would bore her.

They twisted the knife
within, an hour of her arrival.

‘Haven’t you found a man
yet?’ said Barry.

You ought to try a love
affair,’ said Désirée. ‘We’ve been saying —haven’t we, Barry? — you ought to,
Sybil. It would be good for you. It isn’t healthy, the life you lead. That’s
why you get flu so often. It’s psychological.’

‘Come out on the lawn,’
Barry had said when she first arrived. ‘We’ve got the ciné camera out. Come and
be filmed.’

Désirée said, ‘Carter
came back this morning.’

‘Oh, is he here? I
thought he was away for a month.’

‘So did we. But he
turned up this morning.’

‘He’s moping,’ Barry
said, ‘about Désirée. She snubs him so badly.’

‘He’s psychological,’ said
Désirée.

‘I love that striped awning,’ said Sybil’s
hostess. ‘It puts the finishing touch on the whole scene. How carefree you all
look — don’t they, Ted?’

‘That
chap looks
miserable,’ Ted observed. He referred to a shot of David Carter who had just ambled
within range of the camera.

Everyone laughed, for
David looked exceedingly grim.

‘He was caught in an
off-moment there,’ said Sybil’s hostess. ‘Oh, there goes Sybil. I thought you
looked a little sad just then, Sybil. There’s that other girl again, and the
lovely dog.’

‘Was this a
typical
afternoon
in the Colony?’ inquired the young man. ‘It was and it wasn’t,’ Sybil said.

Whenever they had the camera out life
changed at the Westons’. Everyone, including the children, had to look very
happy. The house natives were arranged to appear in the background wearing
their best whites. Sometimes Barry would have everyone dancing in a ring with
the children, and the natives had to clap time.

Or, as on the last
occasion, he would stage an effect of gracious living. The head cook-boy, who
had a good knowledge of photography, was placed at his post.

‘Ready,’ said Barry to
the cook, ‘shoot.’

Désirée came out,
followed by the dog.

‘Look frisky, Barker,’
said Barry. The Alsatian looked frisky.

Barry put one arm round Désirée
and his other arm through Sybil’s that late afternoon, walking them slowly
across the camera range. He chatted with amiability and with an actor’s lift of
the head. He would accentuate his laughter, tossing back his head. A sound
track would, however, have reproduced the words, ‘Smile, Sybil. Walk slowly.
Look as if you’re enjoying it. You’ll be able to see yourself in later years,
having the time of your life.’

Sybil giggled.

Just then David was seen
to be securing the little lake boat between the trees. ‘He must have come
across the lake,’ said Barry. ‘I wonder if he’s been drinking again?’

But David’s walk was
quite steady. He did not realize he was being photographed as he crossed the
long lawn. He stood for a moment staring at Sybil. She said, ‘Oh halo, David.’
He turned and walked aimlessly face-on towards the camera.

‘Hold it a minute,’
Barry called out to the cook.

The boy obeyed at the
moment David realized he had been filmed.

‘OK,’ shouted Barry,
when David was out of range. ‘Fire ahead.’

It was then Barry said
to Sybil, ‘Haven’t you found a man yet…?’ and Désirée said, ‘You ought to try
a love affair …’

‘We’ve made Sybil
unhappy,’ said Désirée. ‘Oh, I’m quite happy.

‘Well, cheer up in front
of the camera,’ said Barry.

The sun was setting fast, the camera was
folded away, and everyone had gone to change. Sybil came down and sat on the
stoep outside the open french windows of the dining-room. Presently, Désirée
was indoors behind her, adjusting the oil lamps which one of the house-boys had
set too high. Désirée put her head round the glass door and remarked to Sybil, ‘That
Benjamin’s a fool, I shall speak to him in the morning. He simply will not take
care with these lamps. One day we’ll have a real smoke-out.’

Sybil said, ‘Oh, I
expect they are all so used to electricity these days …’

‘That’s the trouble,’
said Désirée, and turned back into the room.

Sybil was feeling
disturbed by David’s presence in the place. She wondered if he would come in to
dinner. Thinking of his sullen staring at her on the lawn, she felt he might
make a scene. She heard a gasp from the dining-room behind her.

She looked round, but in
the same second it was over. A deafening crack from the pistol and Désirée
crumpled up. A movement by the inner door and David held the gun to his head.
Sybil screamed, and was aware of running footsteps upstairs. The gun exploded
again and David’s body dropped sideways.

With Barry and the
natives she went round to the dining-room. Désirée was dead. David lingered a
moment enough to roll his eyes in Sybil’s direction as she rose from Désirée’s
body. He knows, thought Sybil quite lucidly, that he got the wrong woman.

‘What I can’t understand,’ said Barry when
he called on Sybil a few weeks later, ‘is why he did it.’

‘He was mad,’ said Sybil.

‘Not all that mad,’ said
Barry. ‘And everyone thinks, of course, that there was an affair between them.
That’s what I can’t bear.’

‘Quite,’ said Sybil. ‘But
of course he was keen on Désirée. You always said so. Those rows you used to
have … You always made out you were jealous of David.’

‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I
wasn’t, really. It was a sort of… a sort of…’

‘Play-act,’ said Sybil.

‘Sort of. You see, there
was nothing between them,’ he said. ‘And honestly, Carter wasn’t a bit
interested in Désirée. And the question is
why
he did it. I can’t bear
people to think …’

The damage to his pride,
Sybil saw, outweighed his grief The sun was setting and she rose to put on the
stoep light.

‘Stop!’ he said. ‘Turn
round. My God, you did look like Désirée for a moment.

‘You’re nervy,’ she
said, and switched on the light.

‘In some ways you
do
look
a little like Désirée,’ he said. ‘In some lights,’ he said reflectively.

I must say something,
thought Sybil, to blot this notion from his mind. I must make this occasion
unmemorable, distasteful to him.

‘At all events,’ she
said, ‘you’ve still got your poetry.

‘That’s the great thing,’
he said, ‘I’ve still got that. It means everything to me, a great consolation.
I’m selling up the estate and joining up. The kids are going into a convent and
I’m going up north. What we need is some good war poetry. There hasn’t been any
war poetry.

‘You’ll make a better
soldier,’ she said, ‘than a poet.’

‘What do you say?’

She repeated her words
fairly slowly, and with a sense of relief, almost of absolution. The season of
falsity had formed a scab, soon to fall away altogether. There is no health,
she thought, for me, outside of honesty.

‘You’ve always,’ he
said, ‘thought my poetry was wonderful.’

‘I have said so,’ she
said, ‘but it was a sort of play-act. Of course, it’s only my opinion, but I
think you’re a third-rater poet.’

‘You’re upset, my dear,’
he said.

He sent her the four
reels of film from Cairo a month before he was killed in action. ‘It will be
nice in later years,’ he wrote, ‘for you to recall those good times we used to
have.’

‘It has been delightful,’ said her hostess.
‘You haven’t changed a bit. Do you
feel
any different?’

‘Well yes, I feel rather
differently about everything, of course.’ One learns to accept oneself.

‘A hundred feet of one’s
past life!’ said the young man. ‘If they were mine, I’m sure I should be
shattered. I should be calling “Lights! Lights!” like Hamlet’s uncle.’

Sybil smiled at him. He
looked back, suddenly solemn and shrewd. ‘How tragic, those people being killed
in shooting affairs,’ said the elderly woman.

‘The last reel was the
best,’ said her hostess. ‘The garden was entrancing. I should like to see that
one again; what about you, Ted?’

‘Yes, I liked those
nature-study shots. I feel I missed a lot of it,’ said her husband.

‘Hark at him —
nature-study shots!’

‘Well, those close-ups
of tropical plants.

Everyone wanted the last
one again.

‘How about you, Sybil?’

Am I a woman, she
thought calmly, or an intellectual monster? She was so accustomed to this
question within herself that it needed no answer. She said, ‘Yes, I should like
to see it again. It’s an interesting experience.’

The Seraph and the
Zambezi

You may have heard of Samuel Cramer, half
poet, half journalist, who had to do with a dancer called the Fanfarlo. But, as
you will see, it doesn’t matter if you have not. He was said to be going strong
in Paris early in the nineteenth century, and when I met him in 1946 he was
still going strong, but this time in a different way. He was the same man, but
modified. For instance, in those days, more than a hundred years ago, Cramer
had persisted for several decades, and without affectation, in being about
twenty-five years old. But when I knew him he was clearly undergoing his
forty-two-year-old phase.

At this time he was
keeping a petrol pump some four miles south of the Zambezi River where it
crashes over a precipice at the Victoria Falls. Cramer had some spare rooms
where he put up visitors to the Falls when the hotel was full. I was sent to him
because it was Christmas week and there was no room in the hotel.

I found him trying the
starter of a large, lumpy Mercedes outside his corrugated-iron garage, and at
first sight I judged him to be a Belgian from the Congo. He had the look of
north and south, light hair with canvas-coloured skin. Later, however, he told
me that his father was German and his mother Chilean. It was this information
rather than the ‘S. Cramer’ above the garage door which made me think I had
heard of him.

The rains had been very
poor and that December was fiercely hot. On the third night before Christmas I
sat on the stoep outside my room, looking through the broken mosquito-wire
network at the lightning in the distance. When an atmosphere maintains an
excessive temperature for a long spell something seems to happen to the natural
noises of life. Sound fails to carry in its usual quantity, but comes as if
bound and gagged. That night the Christmas beetles, which fall on their backs
on every stoep with a high tic-tac, seemed to be shock-absorbed. I saw one fall
and the little bump reached my ears a fraction behind time. The noises of minor
wild beasts from the bush were all hushed-up, too. In fact it wasn’t until the
bush noises all stopped simultaneously, as they frequently do when a leopard is
about, that I knew there had been any sound at all.

Overlying this general
muted hum, Cramer’s sundowner party progressed farther up the stoep. The heat
distorted every word. The glasses made a tinkle that was not of the substance
of glass, but of bottles wrapped in tissue paper. Sometimes, for a moment, a
shriek or a cackle would hang torpidly in space, but these were unreal sounds,
as if projected from a distant country, as if they were pocket-torches seen
through a London fog.

Cramer came over to my
end of the stoep and asked me to join his party. I said I would be glad to, and
meant it, even though I had been glad to sit alone. Heat so persistent and so
intense sucks up the will.

Five people sat in
wicker armchairs drinking highballs and chewing salted peanuts. I recognized a
red-haired trooper from Livingstone, just out from England, and two of Cramer’s
lodgers, a tobacco planter and his wife from Bulawayo. In the custom of those
parts, the other two were introduced by their first names. Mannie, a short dark
man of square face and build, I thought might be a Portuguese from the east
coast. The woman, Fanny, was picking bits out of the frayed wicker chair and as
she lifted her glass her hand shook a little, making her bracelets chime. She
would be about fifty, a well-tended woman, very neat. Her grey hair, tinted
with blue, was done in a fringe above a face puckered with malaria.

In the general way of
passing the time with strangers in that countryside, I exchanged with the
tobacco people the names of acquaintances who lived within a six-hundred-mile
radius of where we sat, reducing this list to names mutually known to us. The
trooper contributed his news from the region between Lusaka and Livingstone.
Meanwhile an argument was in process between Cramer, Fanny and Mannie, of which
Fanny seemed to be getting the better. It appeared there was to be a play or
concert on Christmas Eve in which the three were taking part. I several times
heard the words ‘troupe of angels’, ‘shepherds’, ‘ridiculous price’ and ‘my
girls’ which seemed to be key words in the argument. Suddenly, on hearing the
trooper mention a name, Fanny broke off her talk and turned to us.