Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

The town was laid out like geometry in squares, arcs (to allow for the by-pass) and isosceles triangles, breaking off, at one point, to skirt the old village which, from the aerial view, looked like a merry doodle on the page.

Manders Road was one side of a parallelogram of green-bordered streets. It was named after one of the founders of the canning concern, Manders’ Figs in Syrup, and it comprised a row of shops and a long high block of flats named Cripps House after the late Sir Stafford Cripps who had laid the foundation stone. In flat twenty-two on the fifth floor of Cripps House lived Raymond and Lou Parker. Raymond Parker was a foreman at the motor works, and was on the management committee. He had been married for fifteen years to Lou, who was thirty-seven at the time that the miraculous powers of the Black Madonna came to be talked of.

Of the twenty-five couples who lived in Cripps House five were Catholics. All, except Raymond and Lou Parker, had children. A sixth family had recently been moved by the Council into one of the six-roomed houses because of the seven children besides the grandfather.

Raymond and Lou were counted lucky to have obtained their three-roomed flat although they had no children. People with children had priority; but their name had been on the waiting list for years, and some said Raymond had a pull with one of the Councillors who was a director of the motor works.

The Parkers were among the few tenants of Cripps House who owned a motorcar. They did not, like most of their neighbours, have a television receiver, for being childless they had been able to afford to expand themselves in the way of taste, so that their habits differed slightly and their amusements considerably, from those of their neighbours. The Parkers went to the pictures only when the Observer had praised the film; they considered television not their sort of thing; they adhered to their religion; they voted Labour; they believed that the twentieth century was the best so far; they assented to the doctrine of original sin; they frequently applied the word ‘Victorian’ to ideas and people they did not like — for instance, when a local Town Councillor resigned his office Raymond said, ‘He had to go. He’s Victorian. And far too young for the job’; and Lou said Jane Austen’s books were too Victorian; and anyone who opposed the abolition of capital punishment was Victorian. Raymond took the Reader’s Digest, a magazine called Motoring and the Catholic Herald. Lou took the Queen, Woman’s Own and Life. Their daily paper was the News Chronicle. They read two books apiece each week. Raymond preferred travel books; Lou liked novels.

For the first five years of their married life they had been worried about not having children. Both had submitted themselves to medical tests as a result of which Lou had a course of injections. These were unsuccessful. It had been a disappointment since both came from large sprawling Catholic families. None of their married brothers and sisters had less than three children. One of Lou’s sisters, now widowed, had eight; they sent her a pound a week.

Their flat in Cripps House had three rooms and a kitchen. All round them their neighbours were saving up to buy houses. A council flat, once obtained, was a mere platform in space to further the progress of the rocket. This ambition was not shared by Raymond and Lou; they were not only content, they were delighted, with these civic chambers, and indeed took something of an aristocratic view of them, not without a self-conscious feeling of being free, in this particular, from the prejudices of that middle class to which they as good as belonged. ‘One day,’ said Lou, ‘it will be the thing to live in a council flat.’

They were eclectic as to their friends. Here, it is true, they differed slightly from each other. Raymond was for inviting the Ackleys to meet the Farrells. Mr Ackley was an accountant at the Electricity Board. Mr and Mrs Farrell were respectively a sorter at Manders’ Figs in Syrup and an usherette at the Odeon.

‘After all,’ argued Raymond, ‘they’re all Catholics.’

‘Ah well,’ said Lou, ‘but now, their interests are different. The Farrells wouldn’t know what the Ackleys were talking about. The Ackleys like politics. The Farrells like to tell jokes. I’m not a snob, only sensible.’

‘Oh, please yourself.’ For no one could call Lou a snob, and everyone knew she was sensible.

Their choice of acquaintance was wide by reason of their active church membership: that is to say, they were members of various guilds and confraternities. Raymond was a sidesman, and he also organized the weekly football lottery in aid of the Church Decoration Fund. Lou felt rather out of things when the Mothers’ Union met and had special Masses, for the Mothers’ Union was the only group she did not qualify for. Having been a nurse before her marriage she was, however, a member of the Nurses’ Guild.

Thus, most of their Catholic friends came from different departments of life. Others, connected with the motor works where Raymond was a foreman, were of different social grades to which Lou was more alive than Raymond. He let her have her way, as a rule, when it came to a question of which would mix with which.

A dozen Jamaicans were taken on at the motor works. Two came into Raymond’s department. He invited them to the flat one evening to have coffee. They were unmarried, very polite and black. The quiet one was called Henry Pierce and the talkative one, Oxford St John. Lou, to Raymond’s surprise and pleasure, decided that all their acquaintance, from top to bottom, must meet Henry and Oxford. All along he had known she was not a snob, only sensible, but he had rather feared she would consider the mixing of their new black and their old white friends not sensible.

‘I’m glad you like Henry and Oxford,’ he said. ‘I’m glad we’re able to introduce them to so many people.’ For the dark pair had, within a month, spent nine evenings at Cripps House; they had met accountants, teachers, packers and sorters. Only Tina Farrell, the usherette, had not seemed to understand the quality of these occasions: ‘Quite nice chaps, them darkies, when you get to know them.’

‘You mean Jamaicans,’ said Lou. ‘Why shouldn’t they be nice? They’re no different from anyone else.’

‘Yes, yes, that’s what I mean,’ said Tina.

‘We’re all equal,’ stated Lou. ‘Don’t forget there are black Bishops.’

‘Jesus, I never said we were the equal of a Bishop,’ Tina said, very bewildered.

‘Well, don’t call them darkies.’

Sometimes, on summer Sunday afternoons Raymond and Lou took their friends for a run in their car, ending up at a riverside roadhouse. The first time they turned up with Oxford and Henry they felt defiant; but there were no objections, there was no trouble at all. Soon the dark pair ceased to be a novelty. Oxford St John took up with a pretty red-haired bookkeeper, and Henry Pierce, missing his companion, spent more of his time at the Parkers’ flat. Lou and Raymond had planned to spend their two weeks’ summer holiday in London. ‘Poor Henry,’ said Lou. ‘He’ll miss us.

Once you brought him out he was nor so quiet as you thought at first. Henry was twenty-four, desirous of knowledge in all fields, shining very much in eyes, skin, teeth, which made him seem all the more eager. He called out the maternal in Lou, and to some extent the avuncular in Raymond. Lou used to love him when he read outlines from his favourite poems which he had copied into an exercise book.

Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee

Jest and youthful jollity,

Sport that …

Lou would interrupt: ‘You should say jest, jollity — not yest, yollity.’