by Muriel Spark
It was some hours before the fire was put out. While the corrugated metal walls still glowed, twisted and furled, it was impossible to see what had happened to the Seraph, and after they had ceased to glow it was too dark and hot to see far into the wreck.
‘Are you insured?’ one of Cramer’s friends asked him.
‘Oh yes,’ Cramer replied, ‘my policy covers everything except Acts of God — that means lightning or flood.’
‘He’s fully covered,’ said Cramer’s friend to another friend.
Many people had gone home and the rest were going. The troopers drove off singing ‘Good King Wenceslas’, and the mission boys ran down the road singing ‘Good Christian Men, Rejoice’.
It was about midnight, and still very hot. The tobacco planters suggested a drive to the Falls, where it was cool. Cramer and the Fanfarlo joined us, and we bumped along the rough path from Cramer’s to the main highway. There the road is tarred only in two strips to take car-wheels. The thunder of the Falls reached us about two miles before we reached them.
‘After all my work on the masque and everything!’ Cramer was saying.
‘Oh, shut up,’ said the Fanfarlo.
Just then, by the glare of our headlights I saw the Seraph again, going at about seventy miles an hour and skimming the tarmac strips with two of his six wings in swift motion, two folded over his face, and two covering his feet.’
‘That’s him!’ said Cramer. ‘We’ll get him yet.’
We left the car near the hotel and followed a track through the dense vegetation of the Rain Forest, where the spray from the Falls descends perpetually. It was like a convalescence after fever, that frail rain after the heat. The Seraph was far ahead of us and through the trees I could see where his heat was making steam of the spray.
We came to the cliff’s edge, where opposite us and from the same level the full weight of the river came blasting into the gorge between. There was no sign of the Seraph. Was he far below in the heaving pit, or where?
Then I noticed that along the whole mile of the waterfall’s crest the spray was rising higher than usual. This I took to be steam from the Seraph’s heat. I was right, for presently, by the mute flashes of summer lightning, we watched him ride the Zambezi away from us, among the rocks that look like crocodiles and the crocodiles that look like rocks.
The Pawnbroker’s Wife
At Sea Point, on the coast of the Cape of Good Hope, in 1942, there was everywhere the sight of rejoicing, there was the sound of hilarity, and the sea washed up each day one or two bodies of servicemen in all kinds of uniform. The waters round the Cape were heavily mined. The people flocked to bring in the survivors. The girls of the seashore and harbour waited two by two for the troops on shore-leave from ships which had managed to enter the bay safely.
I was waiting for a ship to take me to England, and lived on the sea-front in the house of Mrs Jan Cloote, a pawnbroker’s wife. From her window where, in the cool evenings, she sat knitting khaki socks till her eyes ached, Mrs Jan Cloote took note of these happenings, and whenever I came in or went out she would open her door a little, and, standing in the narrow aperture, would tell me the latest.
She was a small woman of about forty-three, a native of Somerset. Her husband, Jan Cloote, had long ago disappeared into the Transvaal, where he was living, it was understood, with a native woman. With his wife, he had left three daughters, the house on the sea-front, and, at the back of the house which opened on to a little mean street, a pawnshop.
Mrs Jan Cloote had more or less built up everything that her husband had left half-finished. The house was in better repair than it ever had been, and she let off most of the rooms. The pawnshop had so far flourished that Mrs Jan Cloote was able to take a shop next door where she sold a second-hand miscellany, unredeemed from the pawnshop. The three daughters had likewise flourished. From all accounts, they had gone barefoot to school at the time of their father’s residence at home, because all his profit had gone on his two opulent passions, yellow advocaat and black girls. As I saw the daughters now, I could hardly credit their unfortunate past life. The youngest, Isa, was a schoolgirl with long yellow plaits, and she was quite a voluptuary in her manner. The other two, in their late teens, were more like the mother, small, shy, quiet, lady-like, secretarial and discreet. Greta and Maida, they were called.
It was seldom that Mrs Jan Cloote opened the door of her own apartment wide enough for anyone to see inside. This was a habit of the whole family, but they had nothing really to hide, that one could see. And there Mrs Jan Cloote would stand, with one of the girls, perhaps, looking over her shoulder, wedged in the narrow doorway, and the door not twelve inches open. The hall was very dark, and being a frugal woman, she did not keep a bulb in the hall light, which therefore did not function.
One day, as I came in, I saw her little shape, the thin profile and knobbly bun, outlined against the light within her rooms.
‘Sh-sh-sh,’ she said.
‘Can you come in tonight for a little cup of tea with the others?’ she said in a hushed breath. And I understood, as I accepted, that the need for the hush had something to do with the modesty of the proposed party, conveyed in the words, ‘a little cup …’
I knocked on her door after dinner. Maida opened it just wide enough for me to enter, then closed it again quickly. Some of the other lodgers were there: a young man who worked in an office on the docks, and a retired insurance agent and his wife.
Isa, the schoolgirl, arrived presently. I was surprised to see that she was heavily made up on the mouth and eyes.
‘Another troopship gone down,’ stated Isa.
‘Hush, dear,’ said her mother; ‘we are not supposed to talk about the shipping.’
Mrs Jan Cloote winked at me as she said this. It struck me then that she was very proud of Isa.
‘An Argentine boat in,’ said Isa.
‘Really?’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘Any nice chaps?’
The old couple looked at each other. The young man, who was new to many things, looked puzzled but said nothing. Maida and Greta, like their mother, seemed agog for news.
‘A lot of nice ones, eh?’ said Maida. She had the local habit of placing the word ‘eh’ at the end of her remarks, questions and answers alike.
‘I’ll say, man,’ said Isa, for she also used the common currency, adding ‘man’ to most of the statements she addressed to man and woman alike.
‘You’ll be going to the Stardust!’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘Won’t you now, Isa?’
‘The Stardust?’ said Mrs Marais, the insurance agent’s wife. ‘You surely don’t mean the nightclub, man?’
‘Why, yes,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote in her precise voice. She alone of the family did not use the local idiom, and in fact her speech had improved since her Somerset days. ‘Why, yes,’ she said, ‘she enjoys herself, why not?’
‘Only young once, eh?’ said the young man, putting ash in his saucer as Mrs Jan Cloote frowned at him.
Mrs Jan Cloote sent Maida upstairs to fetch some of Isa’s presents, things she had been given by men; evening bags, brooches, silk stockings. It was rather awkward. What could one say?
‘They are very nice,’ I said.
‘This is nothing, nothing,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote, ‘nothing to the things she could get. But she only goes with the nice fellows.’
‘And do you dance too?’ I inquired of Greta.
‘No, man,’ she said. ‘Isa does it for us, eh. Isa dances lovely.’
‘You said it, man,’ said Maida.
‘Ah yes,’ sighed Mrs Jan Cloote, ‘we’re quiet folk. We would have a dull life of it, if it wasn’t for Isa.’
‘She needs taking care of, that child,’ said Mrs Marais.
‘Isa!’ said her mother. ‘Do you hear Mrs Marais, what she says?’
‘I do, man,’ said Isa. ‘I do, eh.’
From my room it was impossible not to overhear all that was going on in the pawnshop, just beneath my window.
; ‘I hope it doesn’t disturb you,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote, with a sideways glance at her two elder daughters.
‘No,’ I thought it best to say, ‘I don’t hear a thing.’
‘I always tell the girls,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote, ‘that there is nothing to be ashamed of, being a PB.’
‘PB?’ asked the young clerk, who had a friend who played the drums in the Police Band.
Mrs Jan Cloote lowered her voice. ‘A pawnbroker,’ she informed him rapidly.
‘That’s right,’ said the young man.
‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of in it,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote. ‘And of Course I’m only down as a PB’s wife, not a PB.’
‘We keep the shop beautiful, man,’ said Maida.
‘Have you seen it?’ Mrs Jan Cloote asked me.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Well, there’s nothing to see inside, really,’ she said; ‘but some PB shops are a sight enough. You should see some of the English ones. The dirt!’
‘Or so I’m told,’ she added.
‘They are very rough-and-tumble in England,’ I admitted.
‘Why,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote, ‘have you been inside one?’
‘Oh, yes, quite a few,’ I said, pausing to recollect; ‘… in London, of course, and then there was one in Manchester, and —’
‘But what for, man?’ said Greta.
‘To pawn things,’ I said, glad to impress them with my knowledge of their trade. ‘There was my compass,’ I said, ‘but I never saw that again. Not that I ever used the thing.’
Mrs Jan Cloote put down her cup and looked round the room to see if everyone had unfortunately heard me. She was afraid they had.
‘Thank God,’ she said; ‘touch wood I have never had to do it.’
‘I can’t say that I’ve ever popped anything, myself,’ said Mrs Marais.
‘My poor mother used to take things now and again,’ said Mr Marais.
‘I dare say,’ said Mrs Marais.
‘We get some terrible scum coming in,’ said the pawnbroker’s wife.
‘I’m going to the PB’s dinner-dance,’ said Isa. ‘What’ll I way?’ she added, meaning what would she wear. The girls did not pronounce the final ‘r’ in certain words.
‘You can way your midnight blue,’ said Greta.
‘No,’ said her mother, ‘no, no, no. She’ll have to get a new dress.’
‘I’m going to get my hay cut short,’ announced Isa, indicating her yellow pigtails.
Her mother squirmed with excitement at the prospect. Greta and Maida blushed, with a strange and greedy look.
At last the door was opened a few inches and we were allowed to file out, one by one.
Next morning as usual I heard Mrs Jan Cloote opening up the pawnshop. She dealt expertly with the customers who, as usual, waited on the doorstep. Once the first rush was over, business generally became easier as the day progressed. But for the first half-hour the bell tinkled incessantly as sailors and other troops arrived, anxious to deposit cameras, cigarette cases, watches, suits of clothes, and other things which, like my compass, would never be redeemed. Though I could not see her, it was easy to visualize what actions accompanied the words I could hear so well; Mrs Jan Cloote would, I supposed, examine the proffered article for about three minutes (this would account for a silence which followed her opening ‘Well?’). The examination would be conducted with utter intensity, seeming to have its sensitive point, its assessing faculty, in her long nose. (I had already seen her perform this feat with Isa’s treasures.) She would not smell the thing, actually; but it would appear to be her nose which calculated and finally judged. Then she would sharply name her figure. If this evoked a protest, she would become really eloquent; though never unreasonable, at this stage. A list of the object’s defects would proceed like ticker tape from the mouth of Mrs Jan Cloote; its depreciating market value was known to her; this suit of clothes would never fit another man; that ring was not worth the melting. Usually, the pawners accepted her offer, after she ceased. If not, the pawnbroker’s wife turned to the next customer without further comment. ‘Well?’ she would say to the next one. Should the first-comer still linger, hesitant, perplexed, it was then that Mrs Jan Cloote became unreasonable in tone. ‘Haven’t you made up your mind yet?’ she would demand. ‘What are you waiting for, what are you waiting for?’ The effect of this shock treatment was either the swift disappearance of the customer, or his swift clinching of the bargain.
Like most establishments in those parts, Mrs Jan Cloote’s pawnshop was partitioned off into sections, rather like a public house with its saloon, public and private bars. These compartments separated white customers from black, and black from those known as coloured — the Indians, Malays and half-castes.
Whenever someone with a tanned face came in at the white entrance, Mrs Jan Cloote always gave the customer the benefit of the doubt. But she would complain wearily of this to Maida and Greta as she rushed back and forth.
‘Did you see that coloured girl that went out?’ she would say. ‘Came in the white way. Oh, coloured, of course she was coloured but you daren’t say anything. We’d be up for slander.’
This particular morning, trade was pressing. A troopship had come in. ‘Now that was a coloured,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote in a lull between shop bells. ‘He came in the white way.’
‘I’d have kicked his behind,’ said Isa.
‘Listen to Isa, eh!’ giggled Maida.
‘Isa’s the one!’ said the mother, as she rushed away again, summoned by the bell.
This time the voices came from another part of the shop set aside from the rest. I had noticed, from the outside, that it was marked OFFICE-PRIVATE.
‘Oh, it’s you?’ said Mrs Jan Cloote.
‘That picture,’ said the voice. ‘Here’s the ticket.’
‘A month late,’ she said. ‘You’ve lost it.’
‘Here’s the fifteen bob,’ said the man.
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘It’s too late. You haven’t paid up the interest; it’s gone.
‘I’ll pay up the interest now,’ he said. ‘Come now,’ he said, ‘we’re old friends and you promised to keep it for me.
‘My grandfather painted that picture,’ he said.
‘You promised to keep it for me,’ he said.
‘Not for a month,’ she said at last. ‘Not for a whole month. It was only worth the price of the frame.’
‘It’s a good picture,’ he said.
‘A terrible picture,’ she said. ‘Who would want a picture like that? It might bring us bad luck. I’ve thrown it away.
‘Listen, old dear —’ he began.
‘Out!’ she said. ‘Outside!’
‘I’m staying here,’ he said, ‘till I get my picture.’
‘Maida! Greta!’ she called.
‘All right,’ he said, hopeless and lost. ‘I’m going.’
A week later Mrs Jan Cloote caught me in the hall again. ‘A little cup of tea,’ she whispered. ‘Come in for a chat, just with ourselves and young Mr Fleming, tonight.’
It was imperative to attend these periodic tea sittings. Those of Mrs Jan Cloote’s lodgers who did not attend suffered many discomforts; rooms were not cleaned nor beds made; morning tea was brought up cold and newspapers not at all. It was difficult to find rooms at that time. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
I joined the family that night. The Marais couple had left, but I found the young clerk there. Isa came in, painted up as before.
There was one addition to the room; a picture on the wall. It was dreadful as a piece of work, at the same time as it was fascinating on account of the period it stood for. The date of this period would be about the mid-1890s. It represented a girl bound to a railway line. Her blue sash fluttered across her body, and her hands were raised in anguish to her head, where the hair, yellow and abundant, was spreading over the rails around her. Twenty yards away was a bend on the rail-track. A train approached this bend, full-steam. The driver could not see the girl.
As you know, the case was hopeless. A moment, and she would be pulp. But wait! A motor car, one of the first of its kind, was approaching a level crossing nearby. A group of young men, out for a joy-ride, were loaded into this high, bright vehicle. One of them had seen the girl’s plight. This Johnnie was standing on the seat, waving his motoring cap high above his head and pointing to her. His companions were just on the point of realizing what had happened. Would they be in time to rescue her? — to stop the onrushing train? Of course not. The perspective of the picture told me this clearly enough. There was not a chance for the girl. And anyhow, I reflected, she lies there for as long as the picture lasts; the train approaches; the young mashers in their brand-new automobile — they are always on the point of seeing before them the girl tied to the rails, her hair spread around her, the ridiculous sash waving about, and her hands uplifted to her head.
On the whole, I liked the picture. It was the prototype of so many other paintings of its kind; and the prototype, the really typical object, is something I rarely have a chance of seeing.
‘You’re looking at Isa’s picture,’ said Mrs Jan Cloote.
‘It’s a very wonderful picture,’ she declared. ‘A very famous English artist flew out on a Sunderland on purpose to paint Isa. The RAF let him have the plane and all the crew so that he could come. As soon as they saw Isa’s photo at the RAF Headquarters in London, they told the artist to take the Sunderland.
‘He put Isa in that pose, doing her hair,’ Mrs Jan Cloote continued, gazing fondly at the picture.
I said nothing. Nor did the young clerk. I tried looking at the picture with my head on one side, and, indeed, the girl bore a slight resemblance to Isa; the distracted hands around her head did look rather as if she were doing her hair. Of course, to get this effect, one had to ignore the train, and the motor car, and the other details. I decided that the picture would be about fifty years old. Undoubtedly, it was not recent.
‘What do you think of it?’ said Mrs Jan Cloote.