Free The Complete Short Stories by Muriel Spark

north. Towns, life. Civilization, shops. Much cooler — you see, it’s
high up there in the north. The races.’
    ‘You would like it in
the east — those orange-planters. Everything is greener, there’s a huge valley.
Shooting.’
    ‘Why did they send you
nurses to this unhealthy spot? You should go to a healthy spot.’
    Some of the nurses left
Fort Beit. But those of us who were doing tropical diseases had to stay on,
because our clinic, the largest in the Colony, was also a research centre for
tropical diseases. Those of us who had to stay on used sometimes to say to each
other, ‘Isn’t it wonderful here? Heaps of servants. Cheap drinks. Birds,
beasts, flowers.
    The place was not
without its strange marvels. I never got used to its travel-film colours except
in the dry season when the dust made everything real. The dust was thick in
the great yard behind the clinic where the natives squatted and stood about,
shouting or laughing — it came to the same thing — cooking and eating, while
they awaited treatment, or the results of X-rays, or the results of an X-ray of
a distant relative. They gave off a fierce smell and kicked up the dust. The
sore eyes of the babies were always beset by flies, but the babies slept on
regardless, slung on their mothers’ backs, and when they woke and cried the
women suckled them.
    The poor whites of Fort
Beit and its area had a reception room of their own inside the building, and
here they ate the food they had brought, and lolled about in long silences, sometimes
working up to a fight in a corner. The remainder of the society of Fort Beit
did not visit the clinic.
    The remainder comprised
the chemist, the clergyman, the veterinary surgeon, the police and their
families. These enjoyed a social life of a small and remote quality, only
coming into contact with the poor white small-farmers for business purposes.
They were anxious to entertain the clinic staff who mostly spent its free time
elsewhere — miles and miles away, driving at weekends to the Capital, the north,
or to one of the big dams on which it was possible to set up for a sailor. But
sometimes the nurses and medical officers would, for a change, spend an evening
in the village at the house of the chemist, the clergyman, the vet, or at the
police quarters.
    Into this society came
Sonia Van der Merwe when her husband had been three years in prison. There was
a certain slur attached to his sentence since it was generally felt he had gone
too far in the heat of the moment, this sort of thing undermining the prestige
of the Colony at Whitehall. But nobody held the incident against Sonia. The
main difficulty she had to face in her efforts towards the company of the vet,
the chemist and the clergyman was the fact that she had never yet been in their
company.
    The Van der Merwes’ farm
lay a few miles outside Fort Beit. It was one of the few farms in the district,
for this was an area which had only been developed for the mines, and these had
lately closed down. The Van der Merwes had lived the makeshift, toiling lives
of Afrikaner settlers who had trekked up from the Union. I do not think it had
ever before occurred to Sonia that her days could be spent otherwise than in
rising and washing her face at the tub outside, baking bread, scrappily feeding
her children, yelling at the natives, and retiring at night to her feather bed
with Jannie. Her only outings had been to the Dutch Reformed gathering at
Easter when the Afrikaners came in along the main street in their covered
wagons and settled there for a week.
    It was not till the
lawyer came to arrange some affair between the farm and the Land Bank that she
learned she could actually handle the fortune her father had left her, for she
had imagined that only the pound notes she kept stuffed in the stocking were of
real spending worth; her father in his time had never spent his money on
visible things, but had invested it, and Soma thought that money pad into the
bank was a sort