The Complete Short Stories. Muriel Spark
Читать онлайн книгу.
the shooting-brake. As he approached he gave no sign of slowing down. Not only did Old Tuys keep up his speed, he brought the car off the strips and passed within a few inches of the animal.
Daphne had once heard a trooper say that for a human being to fall in the bush at sundown or after was like a naked man appearing in class at a girl’s school. As she landed in the dark thicket every living thing screeched, rustled, fled, and flapped in a feminine sort of panic. The horse was away along the road, its hooves beating frantic diminishing signals in the dusk. Daphne’s right shin was giving her intense pain. She was fairly sure Old Tuys had stopped the car. She rose and limped a few steps, pushing her way through the vegetation and branches, to the verge of the road. Here she stopped, for she heard footsteps on the road a few feet away. Old Tuys was waiting for her. She looked round her and quickly saw there was no chance of penetrating further into the bush with safety. The sky was nearly dark now, and the pain in her leg was threatening to overcome her. Daphne had never fainted, even when, once, she had wanted to, during an emergency operation for a snake-bite, the sharp blade cutting into her unanaesthetized flesh. Now, it seemed that she would faint, and this alarmed her, for she could hear Old Tuys among the crackling branches at the side of the road, and presently could discern his outline. The sound of a native shouting farther up the road intruded upon her desire to faint, and, to resist closing her eyes in oblivion she opened them wide, wider, staring into the darkness.
Old Tuys got hold of her. He did not speak, but he gripped her arm and dragged her out of the bush and threw her on the ground at the side of the road out of the glare of the head-lamps. Daphne screamed and kicked out with her good leg. Old Tuys stood up, listening. A horse was approaching. Suddenly round the bend came a native leading Daphne’s horse. It shied at the sight of the van’s headlights, but the native held it firmly while Old Tuys went to take it.
“Clear off,” said Tuys to the boy in kitchen Kaffir.
“Don’t go,” shouted Daphne. The native stood where he was.
“I’ll get you home in the van,” said Old Tuys. He bent to lift Daphne. She screamed. The native came and stood a little closer.
Daphne lifted herself to her feet. She was hysterical. “Knock him down,” she ordered the native. He did not move. She realized he would not touch Old Tuys. The Europeans had a name of sticking together, and, whatever the circumstances, to hit a white man would probably lead to prison. However, the native was evidently prepared to wait, and when Old Tuys swore at him and ordered him off, he merely moved a few feet away.
“Get into the van,” shouted Tuys to Daphne. “You been hurt in an accident. I got to take you home.”
A car came round the bend, and seeing the group by the standing car, stopped. It was Mr Parker the headmaster.
Old Tuys started the tale about the accident, but Mr Parker was listening to Daphne who limped across to him.
“Take me back to the farm, Mr Parker, for God’s sake.”
He helped her in and drove off. The native followed with the horse. Old Tuys got into the van and made off in the opposite direction.
“I won’t go into details,” said Chakata to Daphne next day, “but I can’t dismiss Tuys. It goes back to an incident which occurred before you were born. I owe him a debt of honour. Something between men.”
“Oh, I see,” said Daphne.
Old Tuys had returned to the farm in the early hours of the morning. Daphne knew that Chakata had waited up for him. She had heard the indeterminate barking of a row between them.
She sat up in bed with her leg in splints.
“We could be raped and murdered,” said Mrs Chakata, “but Chakata still won’t get rid of the bastard. Chakata would kick his backside out of it if he was a proper man.”
“He says it’s because of a debt of honour,” said Daphne.
“That’s all you get from Chakata. Whatever you do,” said Mrs Chakata, “don’t marry a blerry Englishman. They got no thought for their wives and kids, they only got thought for their blerry honour.”
It had always been understood that she was to go to England in 1940, when she was eighteen. But now there was no question of going overseas till the war should end. Daphne had been to see a Colonel, a Judge and a Bishop: she wanted to go to England to join one of the women’s services. They told her there was no hope of an exit permit for England being granted to a civilian. Besides, she was under age: would Chakata give his permission?
At twenty she took a teaching job in the Capital rather than join any of the women’s services in the Colony, for these seemed to her feeble organizations compared with the real thing.
She was attracted by the vast new RAF training camps which were being set up. One of them lay just outside the Capital, and most of her free time was spent at sundowners and dances in the mess, or week-end tennis parties at outlying farms where she met dozens of young fighter pilots with their Battle of Britain DFCs. She was in love with them collectively. They were England. Her childhood neighbour, John Coates, was a pilot. He was drafted to England, but his ship and convoy were mined outside the Cape. News of his death reached Daphne just after her twenty-first birthday.
She drove out to the camp with one of her new English friends to attend a memorial service for John at the RAF chapel. On the way the tyre burst. The car came to a dangerous screeching stop five yards off the road. The young man set about changing the tyre. Daphne stood by.
He said to her for the third time, “OK. All set, Daphne.” She was craning her head absently.
“Oh,” she said, bringing her attention back to him. “I was listening to the go-away bird.”
“What bird?”
“The grey-crested lourie. You can hear it all over the Colony. You hardly ever see it. It says ‘Go’way’.”
He stood listening. “I can’t hear a thing.”
“It’s stopped now,” she said.
“Are there any yellow-hammers here?” he said.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“They say ‘a little bit of bread and no cheese’,” he said.
“D’you find them all over England?”
“I think so. Anyway, there are millions in Hertfordshire.”
She engaged herself to marry a flight-lieutenant instructor. He was killed the following week in a flying accident. He had said, describing his home near Henley, “Ghastly place really. The river simply walks over the garden. Father’s been doubled with rheumatism, but won’t move.” These words had somehow enchanted her. “The river simply walks over the garden,” and she knew that the river was the Thames and that the garden was full of English bushes and all the year round was green. At his funeral she felt that the garden had gone under the sea. His family lived not far away from the English Pattersons. “No,” he had said, “I don’t think we know them.” It seemed incredible that he did not know his neighbours of only fifteen miles distant. “No,” wrote the English Pattersons, “we don’t know the people. Are they Londoners come down since the war? There are a lot of Londoners …”
In the Christmas holidays after her twenty-first birthday she said to Chakata, “I’m giving a term’s notice. I’m going to Cape Town.”
“Have you had more trouble with Tuys?” he said.
“No. It’s just that I want a change. I should like to see the sea.”
“Because, if you have had trouble with Tuys, I shall speak to him.”
“Are you at all thinking of getting rid of Old Tuys?” said Daphne.
“No,” he said.
He tried to persuade her to go to Durban instead of