The Complete Short Stories. Muriel Spark

square and dark. His face had lines, as of anxiety or stomach trouble. David Carter, when he passed, cool and fair through the house, was quite a change.

      “England is finished,” said Barry. “It’s degenerate.”

      “I wonder,” said Sybil, “you have the heart to go on writing so cheerily about the English towns and countryside.” Now, now, Sybil, she thought; business is business, and the nostalgic English scene is what the colonists want. This visit must be my last. I shall not come again.

      “Ah, that,” Barry was saying, “was the England I remember. The good old country. But now, I’m afraid, it’s decadent. After the war it will be no more than …”

      Désirée would have the servants into the drawing-room every morning to give them their orders for the day. “I believe in keeping up home standards,” said Désirée, whose parents were hotel managers. Sybil was not sure where Désirée had got the idea of herding all the domestics into her presence each morning. Perhaps it was some family-prayer assembly in her ancestral memory, or possibly it had been some hotel-staff custom which prompted her to “have in the servants” and instruct them beyond their capacity. These half-domesticated peasants and erstwhile small-farmers stood, bare-footed and woolly-cropped, in clumsy postures on Désirée’s carpet. In pidgin dialect which they largely failed to comprehend, she enunciated the duties of each one. Only Sybil and David Carter knew that the natives’ name for Désirée was, translated, “Bad Hen”. Désirée complained much about their stupidity, but she enjoyed this morning palaver as Barry relished his poetry.

      “Carter writes poetry too,” said Barry with a laugh one day.

      Désirée shrieked. “Poetry! Oh, Barry, you can’t call that stuff poetry.”

      “It is frightful,” Barry said, “but the poor fellow doesn’t know it.”

      “I should like to see it,” Sybil said.

      “You aren’t interested in Carter by any chance, Sybil?” said Désirée.

      “How do you mean?”

      “Personally, I mean.”

      “Well, I think he’s all right.”

      “Be honest, Sybil,” said Barry. Sybil felt extremely irritated. He so often appealed for frankness in others, as if by right; was so dishonest with himself. “Be honest, Sybil – you’re after David Carter.”

      “He’s handsome,” Sybil said.

      “You haven’t a chance,” said Barry. “He’s mad keen on Désirée. And anyway, Sybil, you don’t want a beginner.”

      “You want a mature man in a good position,” said Désirée. “The life you’re living isn’t natural for a girl. I’ve been noticing,” she said, “you and Carter being matey together out on the farm.”

      Towards the end of her stay David Carter produced his verses for Sybil to read. She thought them interesting but unpractised. She told him so, and was disappointed that he did not take this as a reasonable criticism. He was very angry. “Of course,” she said, “your poetry is far better than Barry’s.” This failed to appease David. After a while, when she was meeting him in the town where she lived, she began to praise his poems, persuading herself that he was fairly talented.

      She met him whenever he could get away. She sent excuses in answer to Désirée’s pressing invitations. For different reasons, both Sybil and David were anxious to keep their meetings secret from the Westons. Sybil did not want the affair mythologized and gossiped about. For David’s part, he valued his job in the flourishing passion-fruit concern. He had confided to Sybil his hope, one day, to have the whole business under his control. He might even buy Barry out. “I know far more about it than he does. He’s getting more and more bound up with his poetry, and paying next to no attention to the business. I’m just waiting.” He is, Sybil remarked to herself on hearing this, a true poet all right.

      David reported that the quarrels between Désirée and Barry were becoming more violent, that the possibility of Barry’s resigning from business to devote his time to poetry was haunting Désirée. “Why don’t you come,” Désirée wrote, “and talk to Barry about his poetry? Why don’t you come and see us now? What have we done? Poor Sybil, all alone in the world, you ought to be married. David Carter follows me all over the place, it’s most embarrassing, you know how furious Barry gets. Well, I suppose that’s the cost of having a devoted husband.” Perhaps, thought Sybil, she senses that David is my lover.

      One day she went down with flu. David turned up unexpectedly and proposed marriage. He clung to her with violent, large hands. She alone, he said, understood his ambitions, his art, himself. Within a year or two they could, together, take over the passion-fruit plantation.

      “Sh-sh, Ariadne will hear you.” Ariadne was out, in fact. David looked at her somewhat wildly. “We must be married,” he said.

      Sybil’s affair with David Carter was over, from her point of view, almost before it had started. She had engaged in it as an act of virtue done against the grain, and for a brief time it had absolved her from the reproach of her sexlessness.

      “I’m waiting for an answer.” By his tone, he seemed to suspect what the answer would be.

      “Oh, David, I was just about to write to you. We really must put an end to this. As for marriage, well, I’m not cut out for it at all.”

      He stooped over her bed and clung to her. “You’ll catch my flu,” she said. “I’ll think about it,” she said, to get rid of him.

      When he had gone she wrote him her letter, sipping lemon juice to ease her throat. She noticed he had brought for her, and left on the floor of the stoep, six bottles of Weston’s Passion-fruit Juice. He will soon get over the affair, she thought, he has still got his obsession with the passion-fruit business.

      But in response to her letter David forced his way into the house. Sybil was alarmed. None of her previous lovers had persisted in this way.

      “It’s your duty to marry me.”

      “Really, what next?”

      “It’s your duty to me as a man and a poet.” She did not like his eyes.

      “As a poet,” she said, “I think you’re a third-rater.” She felt relieved to hear her own voice uttering the words.

      He stiffened up in a comical melodramatic style, looking such a clean-cut settler with his golden hair and tropical suiting.

      “David Carter,” wrote Désirée, “has gone on the bottle. I think he’s bats, myself. It’s because I keep giving him the brush-off. Isn’t it all silly? The estate will go to ruin if Barry doesn’t get rid of him. Barry has sent him away on leave for a month, but if he hasn’t improved on his return we shall have to make a change. When are you coming? Barry needs to talk to you.”

      Sybil went the following week, urged on by her old self-despising; driving her Ford V8 against the current of pleasure, yet compelled to expiate her abnormal nature by contact with the Westons’ sexuality, which she knew, none the less, would bore her.

      They twisted the knife within an hour of her arrival.

      “Haven’t you found a man yet?” said Barry.

      “You ought to try a love affair,” said Désirée. “We’ve been saying – haven’t we, Barry? – you ought to, Sybil. It would be good for you. It isn’t healthy, the life you lead. That’s why you get flu so often. It’s psychological.”

      “Come out on the lawn,” Barry had said when she first arrived. “We’ve got the ciné camera out. Come and be filmed.”

      Désirée said, “Carter came back this morning.”

      “Oh, is he here? I thought he was away for a month.”

      “So did we. But he turned up this morning.”