The Complete Short Stories (56 page)

‘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.

‘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.’

‘Oh, George, I quite
understand. You were lonely, I suppose.

‘You didn’t even ask me
to your twenty-first. If you and Skinny had been nicer to me, I would never
have lost my head and married the woman, never.

‘You didn’t ask me to
your wedding,’ I said.

‘You’re a catty bissom,
Needle, not like what you were in the old times when you used to tell us your
wee stones.

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

‘Mind you keep the
secret,’ George said.

‘Can’t I tell Skinny? He
would be very sorry for you, George.’

‘You mustn’t tell
anyone. Keep it a secret. Promise.’

‘Promise,’ I said. I
understood that he wished to enforce some sort of bond between us with this
secret, and I thought, ‘Oh well, I suppose he’s lonely. Keeping his secret won’t
do any harm.’

I returned to England
with Skinny’s party just before the war.

I did not see George
again till just before my death, five years ago.

After the war Skinny returned to his
studies. He had two more exams, over a period of eighteen months, and I thought
I might marry him when the exams were over.

‘You might do worse than
Skinny,’ Kathleen used to say to me on our Saturday morning excursions to the
antique shops and the junk stalls.

She too was getting on
in years. The remainder of our families in Scotland were hinting that it was
time we settled down with husbands. Kathleen was a little younger than me, but
looked much older. She knew her chances were diminishing but at that time I did
not think she cared very much. As for myself, the main attraction of marrying
Skinny was his prospective expeditions to Mesopotamia. My desire to marry him
had to be stimulated by the continual reading of books about Babylon and
Assyria; perhaps Skinny felt this, because he supplied the books and even
started instructing me in the art of deciphering cuneiform tablets.

Kathleen was more
interested in marriage than I thought. Like me, she had racketed around a good
deal during the war; she had actually been engaged to an officer in the US
navy, who was killed. Now she kept an antique shop near Lambeth, was doing very
nicely, lived in a Chelsea square, but for all that she must have wanted to be
married and have children. She would stop and look into all the prams which the
mothers had left outside shops or area gates.

‘The poet Swinburne used
to do that,’ I told her once.

‘Really? Did he want
children of his own?’

I shouldn’t think so. He
simply liked babies.’

Before Skinny’s final
exam he fell ill and was sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland.

‘You’re fortunate after
all not to be married to him,’ Kathleen said. ‘You might have caught TB.’

I was fortunate, I was
lucky … so everyone kept telling me on different occasions. Although it
annoyed me to hear, I knew they were right, but in a way that was different
from what they meant. It took me very small effort to make a living; book
reviews, odd jobs for Kathleen, a few months with the publicity man again,
still getting up speeches about literature, art and life for industrial
tycoons. I was waiting to write about life and it seemed to me that the good
fortune lay in this, whenever it should be. And until then I was assured of my
charmed life, the necessities of existence always coming my way and I with far
more leisure than anyone else. I thought of my type of luck after I became a
Catholic and was being confirmed. The Bishop touches the candidate on the
cheek, a symbolic reminder of the sufferings a Christian is supposed to
undertake. I thought, how lucky, what a feathery symbol to stand for the
hellish violence of its true meaning.

I visited Skinny twice
in the two years that he was in the sanatorium. He was almost cured, and
expected to be home within a few months. I told Kathleen after my last visit.

‘Maybe I’ll marry Skinny
when he’s well again.’

‘Make it definite,
Needle, and not so much of the maybe. You don’t know when you’re well off,’ she
said.