Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

‘Jest,’ he said carefully. ‘And laughter holding both his sides,’ he continued. ‘Laughter — hear that, Lou? — laughter. That’s what the human race was made for. Those folks that go round gloomy, Lou, they …’

Lou loved this talk. Raymond puffed his pipe benignly. After Henry had gone Raymond would say what a pity it was such an intelligent young fellow had lapsed. For Henry had been brought up in a Roman Catholic mission. He had, however, abandoned religion. He was fond of saying, ‘The superstition of today is the science of yesterday.’

‘I can’t allow,’ Raymond would say, ‘that the Catholic Faith is superstition. I can’t allow that.’

‘He’ll return to the Church one day’ — this was Lou’s contribution, whether Henry was present or not. If she said it in front of Henry he would give her an angry look. These were the only occasions when Henry lost his cheerfulness and grew quiet again.

Raymond and Lou prayed for Henry, that he might regain his faith. Lou said her rosary three times a week before the Black Madonna.

‘He’ll miss us when we go on our holidays.’

Raymond telephoned to the hotel in London. ‘Have you a single room for a young gentleman accompanying Mr and Mrs Parker?’ He added, ‘A coloured gentleman.’ To his pleasure a room was available, and to his relief there was no objection to Henry’s colour.

They enjoyed their London holiday, but it was somewhat marred by a visit to that widowed sister of Lou’s to whom she allowed a pound a week towards the rearing of her eight children. Lou had not seen her sister Elizabeth for nine years.

They went to her one day towards the end of their holiday. Henry sat at the back of the car beside a large suitcase stuffed with old clothes for Elizabeth. Raymond at the wheel kept saying, ‘Poor Elizabeth — eight kids,’ which irritated Lou, though she kept her peace.

Outside the underground station at Victoria Park, where they stopped to ask the way, Lou felt a strange sense of panic. Elizabeth lived in a very downward quarter of Bethnal Green, and in the past nine years since she had seen her Lou’s memory of the shabby ground-floor rooms with their peeling walls and bare boards, had made a kinder nest for itself. Sending off the postal order to her sister each week she had gradually come to picture the habitation at Bethnal Green in an almost monastic light; it would be bare but well-scrubbed, spotless, and shining with Brasso and holy poverty. The floor-boards gleamed. Elizabeth was grey-haired, lined, but neat. The children were well behaved, sitting down betimes to their broth in two rows along an almost refectory table. It was not till they had reached Victoria Park that Lou felt the full force of the fact that everything would be different from what she had imagined. ‘It may have gone down since I was last there,’ she said to Raymond who had never visited Elizabeth before.

‘What’s gone down?’

‘Poor Elizabeth’s place.’

Lou had not taken much notice of Elizabeth’s dull little monthly letters, almost illiterate, for Elizabeth, as she herself always said, was not much of a scholar.

James is at another job I hope that’s the finish of the bother I had my blood pressure there was a Health visitor very nice. Also the assistance they sent my Dinner all the time and for the kids at home they call it meals on Wheels. I pray to the Almighty that James is well out of his bother he never lets on at sixteen their all the same never open his mouth but Gods eyes are not shut. Thanks for P.O. you will be rewarded your affect sister Elizabeth.

Lou tried to piece together in her mind the gist of nine years’ such letters. James was the eldest; she supposed he had been in trouble.

‘I ought to have asked Elizabeth about young James,’ said Lou. ‘She wrote to me last year that he was in a bother, there was talk of him being sent away, but I didn’t take it in at the time, I was busy.’

‘You can’t take everything on your shoulders,’ said Raymond. ‘You do very well by Elizabeth.’ They had pulled up outside the house where Elizabeth lived on the ground floor. Lou looked at the chipped paint, the dirty windows and torn grey-white curtains and was reminded with startling clarity of her hopeless childhood in Liverpool from which, miraculously, hope had lifted her, and had come true, for the nuns had got her that job; and she had trained as a nurse among white-painted beds, and white shining walls, and tiles, hot water everywhere and Dettol without stint. When she had first married she had wanted all white-painted furniture that you could wash and liberate from germs; but Raymond had been for oak, he did not understand the pleasure of hygiene and new enamel paint, for his upbringing had been orderly, he had been accustomed to a lounge suite and autumn tints in the front room all his life. And now Lou stood and looked at the outside of Elizabeth’s place and felt she had gone right back.

On the way back to the hotel Lou chattered with relief that it was over. ‘Poor Elizabeth, she hasn’t had much of a chance. I liked little Francis, what did you think of little Francis, Ray?’

Raymond did not like being called Ray, but he made no objection for he knew that Lou had been under a strain. Elizabeth had not been very pleasant. She had expressed admiration for Lou’s hat, bag, gloves and shoes which were all navy blue, but she had used an accusing tone. The house had been smelly and dirty. ‘I’ll show you round,’ Elizabeth had said in a tone of mock refinement, and they were forced to push through a dark narrow passage behind her skinny form till they came to the big room where the children slept. A row of old iron beds each with a tumble of dark blanket rugs, no sheets. Raymond was indignant at the sight and hoped that Lou was not feeling upset. He knew very well Elizabeth had a decent living income from a number of public sources, and was simply a slut, one of those who would not help themselves.

‘Ever thought of taking a job, Elizabeth?’ he had said, and immediately realized his stupidity. But Elizabeth took her advantage. ‘What d’you mean? I’m not going to leave my kids in no nursery. I’m not going to send them to no home. What kids need these days is a good home life and that’s what they get.’ And she added, ‘God’s eyes are not shut,’ in a tone which was meant for him, Raymond, to get at him for doing well in life.

Raymond distributed half-crowns to the younger children and deposited on the table half-crowns for those who were out playing in the street.

‘Goin’ already?’ said Elizabeth in her tone of reproach. But she kept eyeing Henry with interest, and the reproachful tone was more or less a routine affair.

‘You from the States?’ Elizabeth said to Henry.

Henry sat on the edge of his sticky chair and answered, no, from Jamaica, while Raymond winked at him to cheer him.

‘During the war there was a lot of boys like you from the States,’ Elizabeth said, giving him a sideways look.

Henry held out his hand to the second youngest child, a girl of seven, and said, ‘Come talk to me.

The child said nothing, only dipped into the box of sweets which Lou had brought.

‘Come talk,’ said Henry.

Elizabeth laughed. ‘If she does talk you’ll be sorry you ever asked. She’s got a tongue in her head, that one. You should hear her cheeking up to the teachers.’ Elizabeth’s bones jerked with laughter among her loose clothes. There was a lopsided double bed in the corner, and beside it a table cluttered with mugs, tins, a comb and brush, a number of hair curlers, a framed photograph of the Sacred Heart, and also Raymond noticed what he thought erroneously to be a box of contraceptives. He decided to say nothing to Lou about this; he was quite sure she must have observed other things which he had not; possibly things of a more distressing nature.