Free The Complete Short Stories by Muriel Spark Page B

medical student, to Africa, and specialize, with him, in tropical
diseases.
     
    It was about a year after my arrival at
Fort Beit that I came across Sonji Van der Merwe and, together with the other
nurses, read the letter which was about to be sent to her husband four hundred
miles away in the Colony’s prison. She posted the letter ritualistically the
next afternoon, putting on her church-going gloves to do so. She did not
expect, nor did she receive, a reply. Three weeks later she started calling
herself Sonia.
    Our visits to the farm
began to take the place of evenings spent at the vet’s, the chemist’s and the
clergyman’s, to whose society Sonia now had good hopes of access. And every
time we turned up something new had taken place. Sonia knew, or discovered as
if by bush-telegraph, where to begin. She did not yet know how to travel by
train and would have been afraid to make any excursion by herself far from the
area, but through one nurse or another she obtained furnishings from the Union,
catalogues, books about interior decoration and fashion magazines.
Travel-stained furniture vans began to arrive at her bidding and our
instigation. Her first move, however, was to join the Church of England,
abandoning the Dutch Reformed persuasion of her forefathers; we had to hand it
to her that she had thought this up for herself.
    We egged her on from
week to week. We taught her how not to be mean with her drinks, for she had
ordered an exotic supply. At first she had locked the bottles in the pantry and
poured them into glasses in the kitchen and watered them before getting the
house-boy to serve them to her guests. We stopped all that. A contractor
already had the extensions to the house in hand, and the rooms were being decorated
and furnished one by one. It was I who had told her to have two bathrooms, not
merely one, installed. She took time getting used to the indoor lavatories and
we had to keep reminding her to pull the chain. One of us brought back from the
Capital a book of etiquette which was twenty-eight years old but which she read
assiduously, following the words with her forefinger. I think it was I who had
suggested the black-and-white bedroom, being a bit drunk at the time, and now
it was a wonder to see it taking shape; it was done within a month — she had
managed to obtain black wallpaper, and to put it up, although wallpaper was a
thing unheard of in the Colony and she was warned by everyone that it would
never stick to the walls. There was in this bedroom a white carpet and a
chaise-longue covered with black-and-white candy-striped satin. It was less
than a year before she got round to adding the Beardsley reproductions, but by
that time she was entertaining, and had the benefit of the vet’s counsel, he
having once been a young man in London.
    She told us one day —
lying on the chase-longue and looking very dramatic with her lanky hair newly
piled up and her black chiffon dressing-gown — the story of the piccanin, which
we already knew:
    ‘It was through that
window he was looking. Yere I was sitting yere on the bed feeding the baby and
I look up at the window and so help me God it was a blerry nig standing outside
with his face at the window. You should of heard me scream. So Jannie got the
gun and caught the pic and I hear the bang. So he went too far in his blerry
temper so what can you expect? Now I won’t have no more trouble from them boys.
That’s the very window, I was careless to leave the curtain aside. So we show
them what’s what and we get a new set of boys. We didn’t have no boys on the
farm, they all run away.
    There was a slight warm
breeze floating in little gusts through the window. ‘We’d better be getting
back,’ said one of the girls. ‘There’s going to be a storm.
     
    A storm in the Colony was such that before
it broke the whole place was spasmodic like an exposed nerve, and after it was
over the body of the world from horizon to horizon moved in a slow daze