The Complete Short Stories. Muriel Spark
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There was just enough of the European touch – old sedate Dutch houses, cottage gardens, green meadows, a symphony orchestra, a modern art gallery – to whet her appetite for the real thing. The fact that the servants were paler than those of the Colony, and more European in feature, suggested to her a proximity to England where servants were white. “We have no one left,” wrote the English Pattersons, “but Clara, and half the time we have to wait on her. She has lost her memory and she keeps thinking you are your mother. She thinks Toad is Uncle Pooh-bah. Aunt Sarah is a trial. She thinks we pinch her sweet coupons.”
Daphne longed to be waiting on Clara, to be accused by Aunt Sarah of stealing the coupons, to be washing up the dishes and climbing over stiles with the cousins whom she had never seen. Some of her relations were nicknamed after characters in The Wind in the Willows, Rat, Mole, Toad, others named from as yet unaccountable sources – her uncles Poohbah and The Dong, for instance. The du Toits could not quite follow the drift of Daphne’s letters from England when she read them aloud, herself carried away by the poetry of the thing. “Rat,’ she would explain, “is Henry Middleton, Molly’s husband. He’s in the navy …”
“Doesn’t he treat her right, then?”
“He adores her actually,” said Daphne, using the infectious phraseology of the letters from England.
“Why does she call him a rat, then?”
Chakata was right, thought Daphne, you simply can’t explain the English sense of humour.
She went to night-clubs in Cape Town, keeping steadily in her thoughts the fact, of which she was convinced, that these were but tawdry versions of the London variety.
The du Toits were members of an Afrikaner élite. They tolerated but did not cultivate the English. One of their cousins, an Oxford graduate now fighting in North Africa, came home on leave and made a bid for Daphne. Just at that moment she became attached to a naval officer who had arrived a fortnight ago in a corvette which had been badly hit. Ronald was the most typical, Daphne thought, Englishman she had ever met, and the most unaffected. The ship, he whispered confidentially, for no one was supposed to know it, would be in port for six weeks. Meanwhile, might they consider themselves engaged? Daphne said, oh really, all right. And regardless of anything the du Toits might speculate, she spent a night with him at a sea-front hotel. With the utmost indifference Ronald mentioned that, before the war, he had captained the village cricket team – “The squire usually does.” Daphne saw, in a vision, numerous long white-flannelled legs, the shadowy elms, pretty sisters in pastel dresses, the mothers in old-fashioned florals and the fathers in boaters, all cool and mellow as the lemonade being served, under the marquee by the lake, on trays borne by pale-faced, black-frocked, white-frilled maids. Daphne thought of the heat and glare of Chakata’s farm, the smell of the natives, and immediately felt bloated and gross.
A few days later, while she was dancing cheek-to-cheek with Ronald, at the tea-dance provided by the hotel on the sea-front, to the strains of
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by
– at the same moment young Jan du Toit was informing the assembled family that Daphne’s fiancé was a married man.
Her Aunt Sonji spoke to Daphne next morning.
Daphne said, “He’s the captain of his local cricket team.”
“He could still be a married man,” said Sonji.
By lunch-time the information was confirmed, and by sundown the corvette had sailed.
Daphne felt irrationally that it was just the sort of thing one would expect to happen while living with the du Toits. She removed to Durban, treating the English ships with rather more caution than hitherto. She eschewed altogether the American navy which had begun to put in frequent appearances.
Among her colleagues at the school where she taught in Durban was a middle-aged art master who had emigrated from Bristol some years before the war. He saw England as the Barbarian State which had condemned him to be an art master instead of an artist. He spoke often to Daphne on these sad lines, but she was not listening. Or rather, what she was listening to were the accidentals of this discourse. “Take a fashionable portrait painter,” he would say. “He is prepared to flatter his wealthy patrons – or more often patronesses. He’s willing to turn ’em out pretty on the canvas. He can then afford to take a Queen Anne house in Kensington, Chelsea, or Hampstead, somewhere like that. He turns the attic into a studio, a great window frontage. A man I know was at college with me, he’s a fashionable portrait painter now, has a studio overlooking the Regent’s Canal, gives parties, goes everywhere, Henley, Ascot, titled people, dress designers, film people. That’s the sort of successful artist England produces today.”
Daphne’s mind played like the sun over the words “Queen Anne house”, “Kensington”, “Chelsea”, “Studio”, “Regent’s Canal”, “Henley”. She had ears for nothing else.
“Now take another fellow,” continued the art master, “I knew at college. He hadn’t much talent, rather ultra-modern, but he wanted to be an artist and he wouldn’t be anything else. What has he got for it? The last time I saw him he hadn’t the price of a tube of paint. He was sharing a Soho attic with another artist – who’s since become famous as a theatrical designer incidentally – name G.T. Marvell. Heard of him?”
“No,” Daphne said.
“Well, he’s famous now.”
“Oh, I see.”
“But the artist he was living with in Soho never got anywhere. They used to partition the room with blankets and clothes hung on a piece of rope. That’s the sort of thing you get in Soho. The native in the bush is better off than the artist in England.”
Daphne took home all such speeches of discouragement, and pondered them with delight: “Soho”, “poet”, “attic”, “artist”.
In 1946, at last, she got a place on a boat. She went to say goodbye to Chakata. She sat with the ageing man on the stoep.
“Why did you never go back to England for a visit?” she said.
“There has always been too much to do on the farm,” he said. “I could never leave it.” But his head inclined towards the room at the back of the stoep, where Mrs Chakata lay on her bed, the whisky and the revolver by her side. Daphne understood how Chakata, having made a mistake in marriage, could never have taken Mrs Chakata home to the English Pattersons, nor could he ever have left her in the Colony, even with friends, for he was a man of honour.
“I suppose,” said Daphne, “the Pattersons will be thrilled to hear about our life out here.”
He looked worried. “Remember,” he said, “that Auntie Chakata is an invalid. At home they don’t understand tropical conditions, and—”
“Oh, I shall explain about Auntie Chakata,” she said, meaning she would hush it up.
“I know you will,” he said admiringly.
She walked over to Makata’s kraal to say goodbye. There was a new Makata; the old chief was dead. The new chief had been educated at the Mission, he wore navy blue shorts and a white shirt. Whereas old Makata used to speak of his tribe as “the men”, this one called them “my people”. She had used to squat with old Makata on the ground outside his large rondavel. Now a grey army blanket was spread, on which two kitchen chairs were placed for the chief and his visitor. Daphne sat on her kitchen chair and remembered how strongly old Makata used to smell; it was the unwashed native smell. Young Makata smelt of carbolic soap. “My people will pray for you,” he said. He did not offer to send a man to escort her to the farm, as old Makata had always done.
She knew Old Tuys had followed her to the kraal, and she was aware that he was awaiting her return. Her arms were swinging freely, but she had a small revolver in the pocket of her shorts.
A mile from the farm