Read Online The Complete Short Stories by Muriel Spark - Free Book Online Page B

next six weeks while he was completing his
tour of the rural spaces. He was glad to return to the Capital, and to be free
of its voice. Relaxing in the Club, it was as though the bird had never existed.
    However, he went with
the Governor for a round of golf:
    ‘Go’way. Go’way …’
    He booked a seat on the
plane to England for the following week. He met Michael once more by chance at
Williams Hotel.
    ‘That farm,’ said
Michael ‘— someone else has made an offer. You’d better settle right away.’
    ‘I don’t want it,’ said
Ralph. ‘I don’t want to stay here.’ They sat on the stoep drinking highballs.
Beyond the mosquito netting was the bird.
    ‘Can you hear that
go-away bird?’ said Ralph. Michael listened obediently.
    ‘No, I can’t say I can.’
He giggled, and Ralph wanted to hit him.
    ‘I hear it everywhere,’
said Ralph. ‘I don’t like it. That’s why I’m going.’
    ‘Good Lord. Keen on bird
life, are you?’
    ‘No, not particularly.’
    ‘Ralph Mercer isn’t
going to buy the farm,’ Michael told his wife that evening.
    ‘I thought it was
settled.’
    ‘No, he’s going home. He
isn’t coming back. He says he doesn’t like the birds here.’
    ‘I wish you could cure
that giggle, Michael. What did you say he doesn’t like?’
    ‘The birds.’
    ‘Birds. Is he an
ornithologist then?’
    ‘No, I think he’s RC.’
    ‘A man, darling,
who studies birds.’
    ‘Oh! Well, no, he said
no, he’s not particularly interested in birds.’
    ‘How extraordinary,’ she
said.

 
     
    The Curtain Blown
by the Breeze
     
     
    It is always when a curtain at an open window
flutters in the breeze that I think of that frail white curtain, a piece of
fine gauze, which was drawn across the bedroom windows of Mrs Van der Merwe. I
never saw the original curtains, which were so carelessly arranged as to leave
a gap through which that piccanin of twelve had peeped, one night three years
before, and had watched Mrs Van der Merwe suckle her child, and been caught and
shot dead by Jannie, her husband. The original curtains had now been replaced
by this more delicate stuff, and the husband’s sentence still had five years to
run, and meanwhile Mrs Van der Merwe was changing her character.
    She stopped slouching;
she lost the lanky, sullen look of a smallholder’s wife; she cleared the old
petrol cans out of the yard, and that was only a start; she became a tall
lighthouse sending out kindly beams which some took for welcome instead of
warnings against the rocks. She bought the best china, stopped keeping pound
notes stuffed in a stocking, called herself Sonia instead of Sonji, and entertained.
     
    This was a territory where you could not
bathe in the gentlest stream but a germ from the water entered your kidneys and
blighted your body for life; where you could not go for a walk before six in
the evening without returning crazed by the sun; and in this remote part of the
territory, largely occupied by poor whites amidst the overwhelming natural
growth of natives, a young spinster could not keep a cat for a pet but it would
be one day captured and pitifully shaved by the local white bachelors for fun;
it was a place where the tall grass was dangerous from snakes and the floors
dangerous from scorpions. The white people seized on the slightest word, Nature
took the lightest footfall, with fanatical seriousness. The English nurses
discovered that they could not sit next a man at dinner and be agreeable —
perhaps asking him, so as to slice up the boredom, to tell them all the story
of his life — without his taking it for a great flirtation and turning up next
day after breakfast for the love affair; it was a place where there was never a
breath of breeze except in the season of storms and where the curtains in the
windows never moved in the breeze unless a storm was to follow.
    The English nurses were
often advised to put in for transfers to another district.
    ‘It’s so much brighter
in the