The Complete Short Stories

  Sometimes as occasion arises on a Saturday morning, my friend Kathleen, who is a Catholic, has a Mass said for my soul, and then I am in attendance, as it were, at the church. But most Saturdays I take my delight among the solemn crowds with their aimless purposes, their eternal life not far away, who push past the counters and stalls, who handle, buy, steal, touch, desire and ogle the merchandise. I hear the tinkling tills, I hear the jangle of loose change and tongues and children wanting to hold and have.

  That is howl came to be in the Portobello Road that Saturday morning when I saw George and Kathleen. I would not have spoken had I not been inspired to it. Indeed it’s one of the things I can’t do now — to speak out, unless inspired. And most extraordinary, on that morning as I spoke, a degree of visibility set in. I suppose from poor George’s point of view it was like seeing a ghost when he saw me standing by the fruit barrow repeating in so friendly a manner, ‘Halo, George!’

  We were bound for the south. When our education, what we could get of it from the north, was thought to be finished, one by one we were sent or sent for to London. John Skinner, whom we called Skinny, went to study more archaeology, George to join his uncle’s tobacco farm, Kathleen to stay with her rich connections and to potter intermittently in the Mayfair hat shop which one of them owned. A little later I also went to London to see life, for it was my ambition to write about life, which first I had to see.

  ‘We four must stick together,’ George said very often in that yearning way of his. He was always desperately afraid of neglect. We four looked likely to shift off in different directions and George did not trust the other three of us not to forget all about him. More and more as the time came for him to depart for his uncle’s tobacco farm in Africa he said,

  ‘We four must keep in touch.’

  And before he left he told each of us anxiously, ‘I’ll write regularly, once a month. We must keep together for the sake of the old times.’ He had three prints taken from the negative of that photo on the haystack, wrote on the back of them, ‘George took this the day that Needle found the needle’ and gave us a copy each. I think we all wished he could become a bit more callous.

  During my lifetime I was a drifter, nothing organized. It was difficult for my friends to follow the logic of my life. By the normal reckonings I should have come to starvation and ruin, which I never did. Of course, I did not live to write about life as I wanted to do. Possibly that is why I am inspired to do so now in these peculiar circumstances.

  I taught in a private school in Kensington for almost three months, very small children. I didn’t know what to do with them but I was kept fairly busy escorting incontinent little boys to the lavatory and telling the little girls to use their handkerchiefs. After that I lived a winter holiday in London on my small capital, and when that had run out I found a diamond bracelet in the cinema for which I received a reward of fifty pounds. When it was used up I got a job with a publicity man, writing speeches for absorbed industrialists, in which the dictionary of quotations came in very useful. So it went on. I got engaged to Skinny, but shortly after that I was left a small legacy, enough to keep me for six months. This somehow decided me that I didn’t love Skinny so I gave him back the ring.

  But it was through Skinny that I went to Africa. He was engaged with a party of researchers to investigate King Solomon’s mines, that series of ancient workings ranging from the ancient port of Ophir, now called Beira, across Portuguese East Africa and Southern Rhodesia to the mighty jungle-city of Zimbabwe whose temple walls still stand by the approach to an ancient and sacred mountain, where the rubble of that civilization scatters itself over the surrounding Rhodesian waste. I accompanied the party as a sort of secretary. Skinny vouched for me, he paid my fare, he sympathized by his action with my inconsequential life although when he spoke of it he disapproved. A life like mine annoys most people; they go to their jobs every day, attend to things, give orders, pummel typewriters, and get two or three weeks off every year, and it vexes them to see someone else not bothering to do these things and yet getting away with it, not starving, being lucky as they call it. Skinny, when I had broken off our engagement, lectured me about this, but still he took me to Africa knowing I should probably leave his unit within a few months.

  We were there a few weeks before we began inquiring for George, who was farming about four hundred miles away to the north. We had not told him of our plans.

  ‘If we tell George to expect us in his part of the world he’ll come rushing to pester us the first week. After all, we’re going on business,’ Skinny had said.

  Before we left Kathleen told us, ‘Give George my love and tell him not to send frantic cables every time I don’t answer his letters right away. Tell him I’m busy in the hat shop and being presented. You would think he hadn’t another friend in the world the way he carries on.

  We had settled first at Fort Victoria, our nearest place of access to the Zimbabwe ruins. There we made inquiries about George. It was clear he hadn’t many friends. The older settlers were the most tolerant about the half-caste woman he was living with, as we found, but they were furious about his methods of raising tobacco which we learned were most unprofessional and in some mysterious way disloyal to the whites. We could never discover how it was that George’s style of tobacco farming gave the blacks opinions about themselves, but that’s what the older settlers claimed. The newer immigrants thought he was unsociable and, of course, his living with that nig made visiting impossible.

  I must say I was myself a bit off-put by this news about the brown woman. I was brought up in a university town to which came Indian, African and Asiatic students in a variety of tints and hues. I was brought up to avoid them for reasons connected with local reputation and God’s ordinances. You cannot easily go against what you were brought up to do unless you are a rebel by nature.

  Anyhow, we visited George eventually, taking advantage of the offer of transport from some people bound north in search of game. He had heard of our arrival in Rhodesia and though he was glad, almost relieved, to see us he pursued a policy of sullenness for the first hour.

  ‘We wanted to give you a surprise, George.’

  ‘How were we to know that you’d get to hear of our arrival, George? News here must travel faster than light, George.’

  ‘We did hope to give you a surprise, George.’

  At last he said, ‘Well, I must say it’s good to see you. All we need now is Kathleen. We four simply must stick together. You find when you’re in a place like this, there’s nothing like old friends.’

  He showed us his drying sheds. He showed us a paddock where he was experimenting with a horse and a zebra mare, attempting to mate them. They were frolicking happily, but not together. They passed each other in their private play time and again, but without acknowledgement and without resentment.

  ‘It’s been done before,’ George said. ‘It makes a fine strong beast, more intelligent than a mule and sturdier than a horse. But I’m not having any success with this pair, they won’t look at each other.’

  After a while, he said, ‘Come in for a drink and meet Matilda.’

  She was dark brown, with a subservient hollow chest and round shoulders, a gawky woman, very snappy with the house-boys. We said pleasant things as we drank on the stoep before dinner, but we found George difficult. For some reason he began to rail at me for breaking off my engagement to Skinny, saying what a dirty trick it was after all those good times in the old days. I diverted attention to Matilda. I supposed, I said, she knew this part of the country well?

  ‘No,’ said she, ‘I been a-shellitered my life. I not put out to working. Me nothing to go from place to place is allowed like dirty girls does.’ In her speech she gave every syllable equal stress.

  George explained, ‘Her father was a white magistrate in Natal. She had a sheltered upbringing, different from the other coloureds, you realize.’

  ‘Man, me no black-eyed Susan,’ said Matilda, ‘no, no.’

&n
bsp; On the whole, George treated her as a servant. She was about four months advanced in pregnancy, but he made her get up and fetch for him, many times. Soap: that was one of the things Matilda had to fetch. George made his own bath soap, showed it proudly, gave us the recipe which I did not trouble to remember; I was fond of nice soaps during my lifetime and George’s smelt of brilliantine and looked likely to soil one’s skin.

  ‘D’yo brahn?’ Matilda asked me.

  George said, ‘She is asking if you go brown in the sun.

  ‘No, I go freckled.’

  ‘I got sister-in-law go freckles.’

  She never spoke another word to Skinny nor to me, and we never saw her again.

  Some months later I said to Skinny,

  ‘I’m fed up with being a camp follower.’

  He was not surprised that I was leaving his unit, but he hated my way of expressing it. He gave me a Presbyterian look.

  ‘Don’t talk like that. Are you going back to England or staying?’

  ‘Staying, for a while.’

  ‘Well, don’t wander too far off.’

  I was able to live on the fee I got for writing a gossip column in a local weekly, which wasn’t my idea of writing about life, of course. I made friends, more than I could cope with, after I left Skinny’s exclusive little band of archaeologists. I had the attractions of being newly out from England and of wanting to see life. Of the countless young men and go-ahead families who purred me along the Rhodesian roads, hundred after hundred miles, I only kept up with one family when I returned to my native land. I think that was because they were the most representative, they stood for all the rest: people in those parts are very typical of each other, as one group of standing stones in that wilderness is like the next.

  I met George once more in a hotel in Bulawayo. We drank highballs and spoke of war. Skinny’s party were just then deciding whether to remain in the country or return home. They had reached an exciting part of their research, and whenever I got a chance to visit Zimbabwe he would take me for a moonlight walk in the ruined temple and try to make me see phantom Phoenicians flitting ahead of us, or along the walls. I had half a mind to marry Skinny; perhaps, I thought, when his studies were finished. The impending war was in our bones: so I remarked to George as we sat drinking highballs on the hotel stoep in the hard bright sunny July winter of that year.

  George was inquisitive about my relations with Skinny. He tried to pump me for about half an hour and when at last I said, ‘You are becoming aggressive, George,’ he stopped. He became quite pathetic. He said, ‘War or no war I’m clearing out of this.’

  ‘It’s the heat does it,’ I said.

  ‘I’m clearing out in any case. I’ve lost a fortune in tobacco. My uncle is making a fuss. It’s the other bloody planters; once you get the wrong side of them you’re finished in this wide land.’

  ‘What about Matilda?’ I asked.

  He said, ‘She’ll be all right. She’s got hundreds of relatives.’

  I had already heard about the baby girl. Coal black, by repute, with George’s features. And another on the way, they said.

  ‘What about the child?’

  He didn’t say anything to that. He ordered more highballs and when they arrived he swizzled his for a long time with a stick. ‘Why didn’t you ask me to your twenty-first?’ he said then.

  ‘I didn’t have anything special, no party, George. We had a quiet drink among ourselves, George, just Skinny and the old professors and two of the wives and me, George.

  ‘You didn’t ask me to your twenty-first,’ he said. ‘Kathleen writes to me regularly.’

  This wasn’t true. Kathleen sent me letters fairly often in which she said, ‘Don’t tell George I wrote to you as he will be expecting word from me and I can’t be bothered actually.’

  ‘But you,’ said George, ‘don’t seem to have any sense of old friendships, you and Skinny.’

  ‘Oh, George!’ I said.

  ‘Remember the times we had,’ George said. ‘We used to have times.’ His large brown eyes began to water.

  ‘I’ll have to be getting along,’ I said.

  ‘Please don’t go. Don’t leave me just yet. I’ve something to tell you.

  ‘Something nice?’ I laid on an eager smile. All responses to George had to be overdone.

  ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ George said.

  ‘How?’ I said. Sometimes I got tired of being called lucky by everybody. There were times when, privately practising my writings about life, I knew the bitter side of my fortune. When I failed again and again to reproduce life in some satisfactory and perfect form, I was the more imprisoned, for all my carefree living, within my craving for this satisfaction. Sometimes, in my impotence and need I secreted a venom which infected all my life for days on end and which spurted out indiscriminately on Skinny or on anyone who crossed my path.

  ‘You aren’t bound by anyone,’ George said. ‘You come and go as you please. Something always turns up for you. You’re free, and you don’t know your luck.’

  ‘You’re a damn sight more free than I am,’ I said sharply. ‘You’ve got your rich uncle.’

  ‘He’s losing interest in me,’ George said. ‘He’s had enough.’

  ‘Oh well, you’re young yet. What was it you wanted to tell me?’

  ‘A secret,’ George said. ‘Remember we used to have those secrets.’

  ‘Oh, yes we did.’

  ‘Did you ever tell any of mine?’

  ‘Oh no, George.’ In reality, I couldn’t remember any particular secret out of the dozens we must have exchanged from our schooldays onwards.

  ‘Well, this is a secret, mind. Promise not to tell.’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘I’m married.’

  ‘Married, George! Oh, who to?’

  ‘Matilda.’

  ‘How dreadful!’ I spoke before I could think, but he agreed with me.

  ‘Yes, it’s awful, but what could I do?’

  ‘You might have asked my advice,’ I said pompously.

  ‘I’m two years older than you are. I don’t ask advice from you, Needle, little beast.’

  ‘Don’t ask for sympathy then.’

  ‘A nice friend you are,’ he said, ‘I must say after all these years.’

  ‘Poor George!’ I said.

  ‘There are three white men to one white woman in this country,’ said George. ‘An isolated planter doesn’t see a white woman and if he sees one she doesn’t see him. What could I do? I needed the woman.

  I was nearly sick. One, because of my Scottish upbringing. Two, because of my horror of corny phrases like ‘I needed the woman’, which George repeated twice again.

  ‘And Matilda got tough,’ said George, ‘after you and Skinny came to visit us. She had some friends at the Mission, and she packed up and went to them.’

  ‘You should have let her go,’ I said.

  ‘I went after her,’ George said. ‘She insisted on being married, so I married her.’

  ‘That’s not a proper secret, then,’ I said. ‘The news of a mixed marriage soon gets about.’

  ‘I took care of that,’ George said. ‘Crazy as I was, I took her to the Congo and married her there. She promised to keep quiet about it.’

  ‘Well, you can’t clear off and leave her now, surely,’ I said.

  ‘I’m going to get out of this place. I can’t stand the woman and I can’t stand the country. I didn’t realize what it would be like. Two years of the country and three months of my wife has been enough.’

  ‘Will you get a divorce?’

  ‘No, Matilda’s Catholic. She won’t divorce.’

  George was fairly getting through the highballs, and I wasn’t far behind him. His brown eyes floated shiny and liquid as he told me how he had written to tell his uncle of his plight, ‘Except, of course, I didn’t say we were married, that would have been too much for him. He’s a prejudiced hardened old colonial. I only said I’d had a child by a
coloured woman and was expecting another, and he perfectly understood. He came at once by plane a few weeks ago. He’s made a settlement on her, providing she keeps her mouth shut about her association with me.

  ‘Will she do that?’

  ‘Oh, yes, or she won’t get the money.

  ‘But as your wife she has a claim on you, in any case.’

  ‘If she claimed as my wife she’d get far less. Matilda knows what she’s doing, greedy bitch she is. She’ll keep her mouth shut.’

  ‘Only, you won’t be able to marry again, will you, George?’

  ‘Not unless she dies,’ he said. ‘And she’s as strong as a trek ox.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, George,’ I said.

  ‘Good of you to say so,’ he said. ‘But I can see by your chin that you disapprove of me. Even my old uncle understood.’

  ‘Oh, George, I quite understand. You were lonely, I suppose.

  ‘You didn’t even ask me to your twenty-first. If you and Skinny had been nicer to me, I would never have lost my head and married the woman, never.

  ‘You didn’t ask me to your wedding,’ I said.

  ‘You’re a catty bissom, Needle, not like what you were in the old times when you used to tell us your wee stones.