The Complete Short Stories. Muriel Spark
now a general meeting-place for the district and she conducted quite a salon every late afternoon. About this time I became engaged to marry a research worker at the clinic.
I do not know if Richard slept with Sonia. He was very enamoured of her and would not let anyone make fun of her in his hearing.
She said one day: “Why d’you want to marry that Frank? Man, he looks like your brother, you want to catch a fellow that doesn’t look like one of the family. I could get you a fellow more your type.”
I was irritated by this. I kept Frank from seeing her as much as possible; but it was not possible; all our lives outside the clinic seemed to revolve round Sonia. When Frank began to ridicule Sonia I knew he was in some way, which he was afraid to admit, attracted by her.
She chattered incessantly, her voice accented in the Afrikaans way. I had to admire her quick grasp of every situation, for now she was acquainted with the inner politics of the clinic, and managed to put in effective words here and there with visiting Government officials who took it for granted she had ruled the district for years and, being above the common run, pleased herself how she dressed and what she did.
I heard her discussing our disagreeable chief radiologist with an important member of the Medical Board: “Man, he got high spirits I tell you, man. I see him dig the spurs into the horse when he pass my house every morning, he goes riding to work off those high spirits. But I tell one thing, he’s good at his job. Man, he’s first rate at the job.” Soon after this our ill-tempered radiologist, who did not ride very frequently, was transferred to another district. It was only when I heard that the important man from the Medical Board was a fanatical horse-lover that I realized the full force of Sonia’s abilities.
“God, what have we done?” I said to my best friend.
She said, “Leave well alone. She’s getting us a new wing.”
Sonia made plans to obtain for Richard the job of Chief Medical Officer in the north. I suspected that Sonia meant to follow him to the north if he should be established there, for she had remarked one day that she would have to get used to travel; it must be easy: “Man, everyone does it. Drink up. Cheerio.”
Frank had also applied for the job. He said – looking at the distance with his short-sighted eyes, which gave to his utterances a suggestion of disinterestedness – “I’ve got better qualifications for it than Richard.” So he had. “Richard is the better research worker,” Frank said. This was true. “Richard should stay here and I should go up north,” Frank said. “You would like it up there,” he said. All this was undeniable.
It became apparent very soon that Frank was competing with Richard for Sonia’s attention. He did this without appearing to notice it himself, as if it were some routine performance in the clinic, not the method but the results of which interested him. I could hardly believe the ridiculous carry-on of these two men.
“Do they think she will really have any influence in the question of that job?”
“Yes,” my best friend said, “and so she will.”
That important member of the Medical Board – he who was passionate about horses – was in the district again. He had come for a long weekend’s fishing. It was all mad. There was no big fishing at Fort Beit.
I began to want Richard to get the job. I cooled off where Frank was concerned; he did not notice, but I cooled off. Richard had become highly nervous. As soon as he had free time he raced off in his car to Sonia’s. Frank, who was less scrupulous about taking free time, was usually there first.
I was at the tea-party when the ageing, loose-mouthed, keen-eyed chief of the Medical Board turned up. Richard and Frank sat at opposite ends of a sofa. Richard looked embarrassed; I knew he was thinking of the job, and trying not to seem to be exploiting his attachment to Sonia. I sat near them. Sonia, reciting a long formula from her book of etiquette, introduced us to the important man. As she did so it struck me that this recitation might to some ears sound like a charming gesture against the encroaching slackness of the times. She sat the man between Richard and Frank, and clearly she meant business.
She stood by. She had a beautiful shape; we nurses had not provided that, we had only called it forth from the peasant slouch. She said to the old man, “Richard yere wants to talk to you, Basil, man,” and touched Richard’s shoulder. Frank was peering into the abstract distance. It occurred to me that Frank was the administrative type; none of the research workers I had known were dispassionate, they were vulnerable and nervous.
Richard was nervous. He did not look at the man, he was looking up at Sonia’s face with its West End make-up.
“Applied for the job up north?” said this Basil to Richard.
“Yes,” Richard said, and smiled with relief.
“Want it?” said the man, casually, in his great importance.
“Oh, rather,” Richard said.
“Well, have it,” said the man, flicking away the invisible job with his forefinger as lightly as if it were a ping-pong ball.
“Well,” Richard said, “no thank you.”
“What did you say?” said the man.
“What that you say?” said Sonia.
My brother and I are very unlike in most ways, but there are a few radical points of similarity between us. It must be something in the blood.
“No thank you,” Richard was saying. “After all, I feel I ought to go on with research in tropical diseases.”
Sonia’s fury only made a passing pattern on her face. Her first thought was for the old man, fussed and suddenly groundless as he was. “Basil, man,” she said, bending over him with her breasts about his ears, “you got the wrong chap. This yere Frank is the boy I was talking of to you. Frank, may I have the honour to introduce to you this yere distinguished –”
“Yes, we’ve met,” said the man, turning to Frank.
Frank returned from the middle distance. “I’ve applied for the job,” he said, “and my qualifications are, I think –”
“Married?”
“No, but hoping to be.” He turned duly to me and I smiled back most nastily.
“Want the job?”
“Oh, rather.”
“Sure?”
“Oh yes, quite sure.”
The old man was not going to be caught again. “I hope you really want the job. There are a good many excellent applicants and we want a keen –”
“Yes, I want the job.”
Sonia said, “Well, have it,” and I thought, then, she had really done for the whole thing and outrun her influence.
But the old man beamed up at her, took both her prettily restored hands in his, and I nearly saw his slack mouth water.
Other people were pressing round for a word with this Medical Board man. Sonia was treating Richard with ostentatious neglect. Frank was leaning against the wall, now, talking to her. Suddenly I did not want to lose Frank. I looked round the company and wondered what I was doing there, and said to Richard, “Let’s go.”
Richard was looking at Sonia’s back. “Why do you want to go?” Richard said. “It’s early yet. Why?”
Because the curtain was fluttering at the open window, letting in wafts of the savage territory beyond the absurd drawing-room. The people were getting excited; I thought soon they might scream, once or twice like the birds, and then be silent. I thought, even, that Richard might change his mind again about the job, and tell Sonia so, and leave it to her to sort it out for him. It was the pull of Sonia that made him reluctant to leave. She was adjusting Frank’s tie and telling him he needed looking after, for all the world as if she had been brought up to that old line; we must tell her, I thought, not to