The Complete Short Stories. Muriel Spark

sixty. He had been called Young Tuys until his wife was known definitely to have committed adultery, not once, but a number of times. After her death it was at first a matter of some surprise among the farmers that Old Tuys did not leave Chakata’s, for with his sound health and experience of tobacco, he could have been anyone’s manager in or beyond the Colony. But word got round why Tuys remained with Chakata, and the subject was no more mentioned, save as passed on from fathers to sons, mothers to daughters, like the local genealogies, the infallible methods of shooting to kill, and the facts of life.

      Daphne was only half conscious of the go-away bird, even while she heard it, during the first twelve years of her life. In fact she learnt about it at school during Natural History, and immediately recognized the fact that she had been hearing this bird calling all her life. She began to go out specially to hear it, and staring into the dry river-bed, or brushing round the orange trees, she would strain for its call; and sometimes at sundowner time, drinking her lemonade between Chakata and his wife on the stoep, she would say, “Listen to the go-away bird.”

      “No,” said Chakata one evening, “it’s too late. They aren’t about as late as this.”

      “It was the Bird,” she said, for it had assumed for her sufficient importance to be called simply this, like the biblical Dove, or the zodiacal Ram.

      “Look yere, Daphne, ma girl,” said Mrs Chakata, between two loud sucks of whisky and water, “chuck up this conversation about the blerry bird. If that’s all they teach you at the blerry boarding-school –”

      “It’s Natural History,” Chakata put in. “It’s a very good thing that she’s interested in the wild life around us.”

      Mrs Chakata had been born in the Colony. She spoke English with the African Dutch accent, although her extraction was English. Some said, however, that there was a touch of colour, but this was not sufficiently proved by her crinkled brown skin: many women in the Colony were shrivelled in complexion, though they were never hatless, nor for long in the sun. It was partly the dry atmosphere of the long hot season and partly the continual whisky drinking that dried most of them up. Mrs Chakata spent nearly all day in her kimono dressing-gown lying on the bed, smoking to ease the pains in her limbs the nature of which no doctor had yet been able to diagnose over a period of six years.

      Since ever Daphne could remember, when Mrs Chakata lay on her bed in the daytime she had a revolver on a table by her side. And sometimes, when Chakata had to spend days and nights away from the farm, Daphne had slept in Mrs Chakata’s room, while outside the bedroom door, on a makeshift pallet, lay Ticky Talbot, the freckled Englishman who trained Chakata’s racers. He lay with a gun by his side, treating it all as rather a joke.

      From time to time Daphne had inquired the reasons for these precautions. “You can’t trust the munts,” said Mrs Chakata, using the local word for the natives. Daphne never understood this, for Chakata’s men were the finest in the Colony, that was an axiom. She vaguely thought it must be a surviving custom of general practice, dating from the Pioneer days, when white men and women were frequently murdered in their beds. This was within living history, and tales of these past massacres and retributions were part of daily life in the great rural districts of the Colony. But the old warrior chiefs were long since dead, and the warriors disbanded, all differences now being settled by the Native Commissioners. As she grew older Daphne thought Mrs Chakata and her kind very foolish to take such elaborate precautions against something so remote as a native rising on the farm. But it was not until the Coates family moved in to the neighbouring farm thirty-five miles away that Daphne discovered Mrs Chakata’s precautionary habits were not generally shared by the grownup females of the Colony. Daphne was twelve when the Coates family, which included two younger girls and two older boys, came to the district. During the first school holidays after their arrival she was invited over to stay with them. Mr Coates had gone on safari, leaving his wife and children on the farm. The only other European there was a young married student of agriculture who lived on their land two miles from the farmhouse.

      Daphne was put up on a camp bed in Mrs Coates’s bedroom. She noticed that her hostess had no revolver by her side, nor was anyone on sentry duty outside the door.

      “Aren’t you afraid of the munts?” said Daphne.

      “Good gracious, why? Our boys are marvellous.”

      “Auntie Chakata always sleeps with a pistol by her side.”

      “Is she afraid of rape, then?” said Mrs Coates. All the children in the Colony understood the term; rape was a capital offence, and on very remote occasions the Colony would be astir about a case of rape, whether the accused was a white man or a black.

      It was a new thought to Daphne that Mrs Chakata might fear rape, not murder as she had supposed. She looked at Mrs Coates with wonder. “There isn’t anyone, is there, would rape Auntie Chakata?” Mrs Coates was smiling to herself.

      Often, when she was out with the Coates children, Daphne would hear the go-away bird. One day when the children were walking through a field of maize, the older Coates boy, John, said to Daphne,

      “Why do you suddenly stop still like that?”

      “I’m listening to the go-away bird,” she said.

      Her face was shaded under the wide brim of her hat, and the maize rose all round her, taller than herself. John Coates, who was sixteen, folded his arms and looked at her, for it was an odd thing for a little girl to notice the go-away bird.

      “What are you looking at?” she said.

      He didn’t answer. The maize reached to his shoulder. He was put into a dither, and so he continued to look at her, arms folded, as if he felt confident.

      “Don’t stand like that,” Daphne said. “You remind me of Old Tuys.”

      John immediately laughed. He took his opportunity to gain a point, to alleviate his awkwardness and support his pose. “You got a handful there with Old Tuys,” he said.

      “Old Tuys is the best tobacco baas in the country,” she said defiantly. “Uncle Chakata likes Old Tuys.”

      “No, he does not like him,” said John.

      “Yes, he does so, or he wouldn’t keep him on.”

      “My girl,” said John, “I know why Chakata keeps on Old Tuys. You know. Everyone knows. It isn’t because he likes him.”

      They moved on to join the other children. Daphne wondered why Chakata kept on Old Tuys.

      They scrounged a lift to the dorp. The Coates family were uninhibited about speaking Afrikaans, chatting in rapid gutturals to people they met while Daphne stood by, shyly following what she could of the conversation.

      They were to return to the car at five ôclock, and it was now only half-past three. Daphne took her chance and slipped away from the group through the post office and out at the back yard where the natives were squatting round their mealie-pot. They watched her with their childish interest as she made her way past the native huts and the privies and out on the sanitary lane at the foot of the yard.

      Daphne nipped across a field and up the steep track of Donald Cloete’s kopje. It bore this name, because Donald Cloete was the only person who lived on the hill, although there were several empty shacks surrounding his.

      Donald Cloete had been to Cambridge. Indoors, he had two photographs on the wall. One was Donald in the cricket team, not easily recognizable behind his wide, curly moustache and among the other young men who looked so like him and stood in the same stiff, self-assured manner that Daphne had observed in pictures of the Pioneer heroes. The picture was dated 1898. Another group showed Donald in uniform among his comrades of the Royal Flying Corps. It was dated 1918, but Donald behind his moustache did not look much older than he appeared in the Cambridge picture.

      Daphne looked round the open door and saw Donald seated in his dilapidated cane chair. His white shirt was stained with beetroot.

      “Are you drunk, Donald,”