The Complete Short Stories. Muriel Spark
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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.
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 in-explicable 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,” Désirés 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