The Complete Short Stories. Muriel Spark

      “You need four,” said Hugh.

      “No, you can do it with three.” As she spoke she was inventing the game with three. She explained to them what was in her mind’s eye. But neither boy could grasp the idea, having got used to Bandits and Riders with two on each side. “I am the lone Rider, you see,” said Sybil. “Or,” she wheedled, “the cherry tree can be a Rider.” She was talking to stone, inoffensive but uncomprehending. All at once she realized, without articulating the idea, that her intelligence was superior to theirs, and she felt lonely.

      “Could we play rounders instead?” ventured Jon.

      Sybil brought a book every day after that, and sat reading beside her mother, who was glad, on the whole, that Sybil had grown tired of rowdy games.

      “They were preparing,” said Sybil, “to go on a shoot.”

      Sybil’s host was changing the reel.

      “I get quite a new vision of Sybil,” said her hostess, “seeing her in such a … such a social environment. Were any of these people intellectuals, Sybil?”

      “No, but lots of poets.”

      “Oh, no. Did they all write poetry?”

      “Quite a lot of them,” said Sybil, “did.”

      “Who were they all? Who was that blond fellow who was standing by the van with you?”

      “He was the manager of the estate. They grew passion-fruit and manufactured the juice.”

      “Passion-fruit – how killing. Did he write poetry?”

      “Oh, yes.”

      “And who was the girl, the one I thought was you?”

      “Oh, I had known her as a child and we met again in the Colony. The short man was her husband.”

      “And were you all off on safari that morning? I simply can’t imagine you shooting anything, Sybil, somehow.”

      “On this occasion,” said Sybil, “I didn’t go. I just held the gun for effect.”

      Everyone laughed.

      “Do you still keep up with these people? I’ve heard that colonials are great letter-writers, it keeps them in touch with –”

      “No.” And she added, “Three of them are dead. The girl and her husband, and the fair fellow.”

      “Really? What happened to them? Don’t tell me they were mixed up in shooting affairs.”

      “They were mixed up in shooting affairs,” said Sybil.

      “Oh, these colonials,” said the elderly woman, “and their shooting affairs!”

      “Number three,” said Sybil’s host. “Ready? Lights out, please.”

      “Don’t get eaten by lions. I say, Sybil, don’t get mixed up in a shooting affair.” The party at the railway station were unaware of the noise they were making for they were inside the noise. As the time of departure drew near Donald’s relatives tended to herd themselves apart while Sybil’s clustered round the couple.

      “Two years – it will be an interesting experience for them.”

      “Mind out for the shooting affairs. Don’t let Donald have a gun.”

      There had been an outbreak of popular headlines about the shooting affairs in the Colony. Much had been blared forth about the effect, on the minds of young settlers, of the climate, the hard drinking, the shortage of white women. The Colony was a place where lovers shot husbands, or shot themselves, where husbands shot natives who spied through bedroom windows. Letters to The Times arrived belatedly from respectable colonists, refuting the scandals with sober statistics. The recent incidents, they said, did not represent the habits of the peaceable majority. The Governor told the press that everything had been highly exaggerated. By the time Sybil and Donald left for the Colony the music-hall comics had already exhausted the entertainment value of colonial shooting affairs.

      “Don’t make pets of snakes or crocs. Mind out for the lions. Don’t forget to write.”

      It was almost a surprise to them to find that shooting affairs in the Colony were not entirely a music-hall myth. They occurred in waves. For three months at a time the gun-murders and suicides were reported weekly. The old colonists with their very blue eyes sat beside their whisky bottles and remarked that another young rotter had shot himself. Then the rains would break and the shootings would cease for a long season.

      Eighteen months after their marriage Donald was mauled by a lioness and died on the long stretcher journey back to the station. He was one of a party of eight. No one could really say how it happened; it was done in a flash. The natives had lost their wits, and, instead of shooting the beast, had come calling “Ah-ah-ah,” and pointing to the spot. A few strides, shouldering the grass aside, and Donald’s friends got the lioness as she reared from his body.

      His friends in the archaeological team to which he belonged urged Sybil to remain in the Colony for the remaining six months, and return to England with them. Still undecided, she went on a sight-seeing tour. But before their time was up the archaeologists had been recalled. War had been declared. Civilians were not permitted to leave the continent, and Sybil was caught, like Donald under the lioness.

      She wished he had lived to enjoy a life of his own, as she intended to do. It was plain to her that they must have separated had he lived. There had been no disagreement but, thought Sybil, given another two years there would have been disagreements. Donald had shown signs of becoming a bore. By the last, the twenty-seventh, year of his life, his mind had ceased to inquire. Archaeology, that thrilling subject, had become Donald’s job, merely. He began to talk as if all archaeological methods and theories had ceased to evolve on the day he obtained his degree; it was now only a matter of applying his knowledge to field-work for a limited period. Archaeological papers came out from England. The usual crank literature on roneo foolscap followed them from one postal address to another. “Donald, aren’t you going to look through them?” Sybil said, as the journals and papers piled up. “No, really, I don’t see it’s necessary.” It was not necessary because his future was fixed; two years in the field and then a lectureship. If it were my subject, she thought, these papers would be necessary to me. Even the crackpot ones, rightly read, would be, to me, enlarging.

      Sybil lay in bed in the mornings reading the translation of Kierkegaard’s Journals, newly arrived from England in their first, revelatory month of publication. She felt like a desert which had not realized its own aridity till the rain began to fall upon it. When Donald came home in the late afternoons she had less and less to say to him.

      “There has been another shooting affair,” Donald said, “across the valley. The chap came home unexpectedly and found his wife with another man. He shot them both.”

      “In this place, one is never far from the jungle,” Sybil said.

      “What are you talking about? We are eight hundred miles from the jungle.”

      When he had gone on his first big shoot, eight hundred miles away in the jungle, she had reflected, there is no sign of a living mind in him, it is like a landed fish which has ceased to palpitate. But, she thought, another woman would never notice it. Other women do not wish to be married to a Mind. Yet I do, she thought, and I am a freak and should not have married. In fact I am not the marrying type. Perhaps that is why he does not explore my personality, any more than he reads the journals. It might make him think, and that would be hurtful.

      After his death she wished he had lived to enjoy a life of his own, whatever that might have been. She took a job in a private school for girls and cultivated a few friends for diversion until the war should be over. Charming friends need not possess minds.

      Their motor launch was rocking up the Zambezi. Sybil was leaning over the rail mouthing something to a startled native in a canoe. Now Sybil was pointing across