The Complete Short Stories. Muriel Spark

under control. This place brings out the savage in ourselves.” He finished his drink and poured another. “If you go to England,” he said, “don’t come back.”

      “Oh, I see,” said Daphne.

      She was ten minutes late when she arrived at the car. The party had been anxious about her.

      “Where did you get to? You slipped away … we asked everywhere …”

      John Coates said in a mock-girlish tone, “Oh, she’s been listening to the go-away bird out on the lone wide veldt.”

      “Five more years and then I go to England. Four years … three …”

      Meanwhile, life in the Colony seemed to become more exciting every year. In fact, it went on as usual, but Daphne’s capacity for excitement developed as she grew into her teens.

      She had a trip to Kenya to stay with a married cousin, another trip to Johannesburg with Mrs Coates to buy clothes.

      “Typical English beauty Daphne’s turning out to be,” said Chakata. In reality she was too blonde to be typically English; she took after her father’s family, the Cape du Toits, who were a mixture of Dutch and Huguenot stock.

      At sixteen she passed her matric and her name was entered for a teachers’ training college in the Capital. During the holidays she flirted with John Coates, who would drive her round the countryside in the little German Volkswagen which his father had obtained for him. They would go on Sunday afternoons to the Williams Hotel on the great main road for tea and a swim in the bathing-pool with all the district who converged there weekly from farms and towns.

      “In England,” Daphne would tell him, “you can bathe in the rivers. No bilharzia there, no crocs.”

      “There’s going to be a war in Europe,” said John.

      Daphne would sit on the hotel stoep in her smart new linen slacks, sipping her gin and lime, delighted and amazed to be grown-up, to be greeted by her farming neighbours.

      “’Lo, Daphne, how are your mealies?”

      “Not too bad, how are yours?”

      “Hallo, Daphne, how’s the tobacco?”

      “Rotten, Old Tuys says.”

      “I hear Chakata’s sold La Flèche.”

      “Well, he’s had an offer, actually.”

      She had been twice to a dance at Williams Hotel. Young Billy Williams, who was studying medicine at Cape Town, proposed marriage to her, but as everyone knew, she was to go to college in the Capital and then to England to stay with the English Pattersons for a couple of years before she could decide about marriage.

      War broke out at the beginning of her first term at the training college. All her old young men, as well as her new, became important and interesting in their uniforms and brief appearances on leave.

      She took up golf. Sometimes, after a hole, when she was following her companions to the next tee, she would lag behind or even stop in her tracks.

      “Feeling all right, Daphne?”

      “Oh, I was only listening to the go-away bird.”

      “Interested in ornithology?”

      “Oh yes, fairly, you know.”

      When she returned to the farm after her first term at the college Chakata gave her a revolver.

      “Keep it beside your bed,” he said.

      She took it without comment.

      Next day, he said, “Where did you go yesterday afternoon?”

      “Oh, for a trek across the veldt, you know.”

      “Anywhere special?”

      “Only to Makata’s kraal. He’s quite determined to hang on to that land the Beresfords are after. He’s got a wife for his son, he paid five head.” Makata was the local chief. Daphne enjoyed squatting in the shade of his great mud hut drinking the tea specially prepared for her, and though the rest of the Colony looked with disfavour on such visits, it was something which Chakata and his children had always done, and no one felt inclined to take up the question with Chakata. Chakata wasn’t just anyone.

      “I suppose,” said Chakata to Daphne, “you always carry a gun?”

      “Well, yesterday,” said Daphne, “I didn’t actually.”

      “Always,” said Chakata, “take a gun when you go out on the veldt. It’s a golden rule. There’s nothing more exasperating than to see a buck dancing about in the bush and to find yourself standing like a fool without a gun.”

      Since she was eight and had first learnt to shoot, this had been a golden rule of Chakata’s. Many a time she had been out on her own, weighed down with the gun, and had seen dozens of buck and simply had not bothered to shoot. She hated venison, in any case. Tinned salmon was her favourite dish.

      He seemed to know her thoughts. “We’re always short of buck for the dogs. Remember there’s a war on. Remember always,” said Chakata, “to take a gun. I hear on the wireless,” he added, “that there’s a leopard over in the Temwe valley. The mate has young. It’s got two men, so far.”

      “Uncle Chakata, that’s a long way off,” Daphne said explosively.

      “Leopards can travel,” said Chakata. He looked horribly put out.

      “Oh, I see,” said Daphne.

      “And you ought to ride more,” he said, “it’s far better exercise than walking.”

      She saw that he was not really afraid of her meeting the leopard, nor did he need meat for the dogs; and she thought of how, yesterday afternoon, she had been followed all the way to the kraal by Old Tuys. He had kept to the bush, and seemed not to know he had been observed. She had been glad that several parties of natives had passed her on the way. Afterwards, when she was taking leave of Makata, he had offered to send his nephew to accompany her home. This was a customary offer: she usually declined it. This time, however, she had accepted the escort, who plodded along behind her until she dismissed him at the edge of the farm. Daphne did not mention this incident to Chakata.

      That afternoon when she set off for tea at the Mission, she was armed.

      Next day Chakata gave her the old Mercedes for herself. “You walk too much,” he said.

      It was no use now, checking off the years before she should go to England. She climbed Donald Cloete’s kopje: “Are you sober, Donald, or –?”

      “I’m drunk, go away.”

      Towards the end of her course at the training college, when she was home for the Christmas holidays, she rode her horse along the main wide road to the dorp. She did some shopping; she stopped to talk to the Cypriot tailor who supplied the district with drill shorts, and to the Sephardic Jew who kept the largest Kaffir store.

      “Live and let live,” said Chakata. But these people were never at the farm, and this was Daphne’s only chance of telling them of her college life.

      She called in at the Indian laundry to leave a bottle of hair oil which, for some unfathomable reason, Chakata had promised to give to the Indian.

      She had tea with the chemist’s wife, then returned to the police station where she had left the horse. Here she stopped for about an hour chatting with two troopers whom she had known since her childhood. It was late when she set off up the steep main road, keeping well to the side of the tarmac strips on which an occasional car would pass, or a native on a bicycle. She knew all the occupants of the cars and as they slowed down to pass her they would call a greeting. She had gone about five miles when she came to a winding section of the road with dense bush on either side. This part was notorious for accidents. The light was failing rapidly,