Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

The nurses dispersed in a flurry as Raymond approached. He looked hard at the baby. It looked back with its black button eyes. He saw the name-tab round its neck, ‘Dawn Mary Parker.’

He got hold of a nurse in the corridor. ‘Look here, you just take that name Parker off that child’s neck. The name’s not Parker, it isn’t my child.’

The nurse said, ‘Get away, we’re busy.’

‘There’s just a chance,’ said the doctor to Raymond, ‘that if there’s ever been black blood in your family or your wife’s, it’s coming out now. It’s a very long chance. I’ve never known it happen in my experience, but I’ve heard of cases, I could read them up.’

‘There’s nothing like that in my family,’ said Raymond. He thought of Lou, the obscure Liverpool antecedents. The parents had died before he had met Lou.

‘It could be several generations back,’ said the doctor.

Raymond went home, avoiding the neighbours who would stop him to inquire after Lou. He rather regretted smashing up the cot in his first fury. That was something low coming out in him. But again, when he thought of the tiny black hands of the baby with their pink fingernails he did not regret smashing the cot.

He was successful in tracing the whereabouts of Oxford St John. Even before he heard the result of Oxford’s blood test he said to Lou, ‘Write and ask your relations if there’s been any black blood in the family.’

‘Write and ask yours,’ she said.

She refused to look at the black baby. The nurses fussed round it all day, and came to report its progress to Lou.

‘Pull yourself together, Mrs Parker, she’s a lovely child.’

‘You must care for your infant,’ said the priest.

‘You don’t know what I’m suffering,’ Lou said.

‘In the name of God,’ said the priest, ‘if you’re a Catholic Christian you’ve got to expect to suffer.’

‘I can’t go against my nature,’ said Lou. ‘I can’t be expected to —Raymond said to her one day in the following week, ‘The blood tests are all right, the doctor says.

‘What do you mean, all right?’

‘Oxford’s blood and the baby’s don’t tally, and —’

‘Oh, shut up,’ she said. ‘The baby’s black and your blood tests can’t make it white.’

‘No,’ he said. He had fallen out with his mother, through his inquiries whether there had been coloured blood in his family. ‘The doctor says, he said, ‘that these black mixtures sometimes occur in seaport towns. It might have been generations back.’

‘One thing,’ said Lou. ‘I’m not going to take that child back to the flat.’

‘You’ll have to,’ he said.

Elizabeth wrote her a letter which Raymond intercepted:

‘Dear Lou Raymond is asking if we have any blacks in the family well thats funny you have a coloured God is not asleep. There was that Flinn cousin Tommy at Liverpool he was very dark they put it down to the past a nigro off a ship that would be before our late Mothers Time God rest her soul she would turn in her grave you shoud have kept up your bit to me whats a pound a Week to you. It was on our fathers side the colour and Mary Flinn you remember at the dairy was dark remember her hare was like nigro hare it must be back in the olden days the nigro some ansester but it is only nature. I thank the almighty it has missed my kids and your hubby must think it was that nigro you was showing off when you came to my place. I wish you all the best as a widow with kids you shoud send my money as per usual your affec sister Elizabeth.’

‘I gather from Elizabeth,’ said Raymond to Lou, ‘that there was some element of colour in your family. Of course, you couldn’t be expected to know about it. I do think, though, that some kind of record should be kept.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Lou. ‘The baby’s black and nothing can make it white.’

Two days before Lou left the hospital she had a visitor, although she had given instructions that no one except Raymond should be let in to see her. This lapse she attributed to the nasty curiosity of the nurses, for it was Henry Pierce come to say goodbye before embarkation. He stayed less than five minutes.

‘Why, Mrs Parker, your visitor didn’t stay long,’ said the nurse.

‘No, I soon got rid of him. I thought I made it clear to you that I didn’t want to see anyone. You shouldn’t have let him in.’

‘Oh, sorry, Mrs Parker, but the young gentleman looked so upset when we told him so. He said he was going abroad and it was his last chance, he might never see you again. He said, “How’s the baby?”, and we said, “Tip-top.”‘

‘I know what’s in your mind,’ said Lou. ‘But it isn’t true. I’ve got the blood tests.’

‘Oh, Mrs Parker, I wouldn’t suggest for a minute …’

‘She must have went with one of they niggers that used to come.’

Lou could never be sure if that was what she heard from the doorways and landings as she climbed the stairs of Cripps House, the neighbours hushing their conversation as she approached.

‘I can’t take to the child. Try as I do, I simply can’t even like it.’

‘Nor me,’ said Raymond. ‘Mind you, if it was anyone else’s child I would think it was all right. It’s just the thought of it being mine, and people thinking it isn’t.’

‘That’s just it,’ she said.

One of Raymond’s colleagues had asked him that day how his friends Oxford and Henry were getting on. Raymond had to look twice before he decided that the question was innocent. But one never knew … Already Lou and Raymond had approached the adoption society. It was now only a matter of waiting for word.

‘If that child was mine,’ said Tina Farrell, ‘I’d never part with her. I wish we could afford to adopt another. She’s the loveliest little darkie in the world.’

‘You wouldn’t think so,’ said Lou, ‘if she really was yours. Imagine it for yourself, waking up to find you’ve had a black baby that everyone thinks has a nigger for its father.’

‘It would be a shock,’ Tina said, and tittered.

‘We’ve got the blood tests,’ said Lou quickly.

Raymond got a transfer to London. They got word about the adoption very soon.

‘We’ve done the right thing,’ said Lou. ‘Even the priest had to agree with that, considering how strongly we felt against keeping the child.’

‘Oh, he said it was a good thing?’

‘No, not a good thing. In fact he said it would have been a good thing if we could have kept the baby. But failing that, we did the right thing. Apparently, there’s a difference.

The Thing about Police Stations

In the first place the boy did not wish to go to the police station to inquire for his aunt’s little spotted dog. He was sorry she had lost the dog, but he didn’t like police stations.

‘I’ve got a thing about police stations,’ he explained.

‘Your generation has things about everything,’ she said, ‘and the only way to conquer your thing about police stations is to go into one.’

He felt sure this was a fallacy. He was eighteen. He had already met a girl who had failed to get over her thing about post offices. But his aunt was upset about the dog, and so he went.

It was a dark afternoon in the dead of January. He took a long long time to come to the end of the icy zig-zag lanes which led across the countryside to the police station. The lanes crossed land which had been quarried and abandoned about twenty years ago. Nature had never quite reclaimed itself here. In summer, it was true, when they were covered with tall tough grass and off-white patches of ladies’ lace, those gaping pits had an appearance of normality. But in winter they were black thorny wounds in the earth. He feared them greatly and secretly, and always walked stealthily there, so that he would not be noticed by these terrible quarries.