Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

His aunt always made light of that walk along the quarry lanes: ‘Only a five minutes’ walk.’

He didn’t know what she meant by five minutes. Anyhow, the sky was dark by the time he reached the police station, the afternoon was gone.

He entered, and saw two uniformed men sitting behind a high counter. One of them was writing in a book. For a long long time neither of them took any notice of his presence, and he wondered if he ought to cough, or say something. Should he say, ‘Excuse me, it’s about a little white dog with black spots?’ Or should he say, ‘May I speak to the officer in charge?’ He remembered that when he was a schoolboy one of his teachers used often to say, ‘Discretion is the better part of valour.’ He kept his peace and waited.

The policeman who was not writing in the book was resting his elbows on the counter, he was resting his chin in his hands and his eyes on mystical space. He was big-featured and broody, like a displaced Viking.

Behind the men was a door, the top half of which was frosted glass. Someone was behind it. The young man could see the shadow moving.

At length, a loud voice came from behind this door, ‘No. 292 this way! No. 292 this way!’

Immediately the Viking straightened up. The other policeman threw down his pen. They lifted the end-flap of the counter and together approached the boy.

‘No. 292 this way,’ said the Viking to the youth. ‘No. 292 this way, the other repeated.

He was surprised. Clearly they expected him to follow them and he was about to open his mouth to protest when the adage ‘Discretion is the better part of valour’ seized his brain together with ‘Speech is silver but silence is golden.’ So he said nothing. But as he was offended by the tone of their address, he did not move. The Viking took him by the wrist and pulled him into the inner room, the other policeman following.

There were now three policemen. They sat on plain hard chairs on three sides of a table, while the young man stood on the fourth side, being watched by them.

After a long long time the third policeman, the one who had first called ‘No. 292 this way,’ made a note on some papers. Then he looked up and addressed the youth in his loud voice:

‘There has been an unspeakable crime. Guilty or Not Guilty?’

He remembered ‘Nothing venture, nothing win’ and spoke up.

‘What crime?’ he said.

‘Use your logic, please,’ the policeman said. ‘We cannot speak about a crime which is unspeakable. Guilty or Not Guilty?’

‘I demand a proper trial,’ said the boy. This was foolish, for what he should have said was, ‘I think there has been some misunderstanding’ . But he did not think of this in the stress of the moment, and in fact he felt a little proud of himself for thinking to demand a proper trial.

The Viking jumped to his feet immediately. ‘No. 292 for trial!’ he shouted. A door at the far end of the room opened and three more policemen entered. They put handcuffs on the prisoner and led him away along a lot of corridors. After walking for at least half an hour they came to a cell. The boy was locked in.

All that night he thought to himself that his aunt would surely come in the morning and clear up the misunderstanding. He fancied she must already have applied for him at the police station, but evidently had found it closed.

In the morning a policeman unlocked his cell.

‘Crust and water for 292, he said, thrusting a crust of bread and a mug of water into the prisoner’s hands. The policeman disappeared before the boy could speak to him.

Some hours later the head policeman arrived, carrying some papers. He was very suave in his manner. Quickly, before he could speak, the young man put in, ‘I wish to see my aunt. Has she been inquiring for me?’

He bowed. ‘There was a lady,’ he said, ‘about a spotted dog.’

‘That’s my aunt. Did she inquire for me?’

The chief of police bowed. ‘I believe so. But we explained that you preferred to stand your trial.’

‘There’s been a misunderstanding.

‘It will be cleared up at the trial. I have come to tell you that the trial will take place in three months’ rime. We detain you till then.’

‘That’s irregular,’ the youth said smartly. ‘There’s a Habeas Corpus Act —’

The policeman bowed. ‘It is obsolete,’ he said.

And so, for three months the young man of eighteen watched the sky above the roof behind the high window, dreadfully barred. The walls of his cell were pinky-grey, and there were hundreds of rats. The aunt said later, when he told her of the rats, that this couldn’t be. The police are nothing if not hygienic in their habitat,’ she said. Maybe so, but still there were hundreds of rats.

Needless to say the boy was found guilty at the trial. His aunt, who had in the meantime found her little dog, gave evidence to the effect that he was incapable of an unspeakable crime, being incapable of almost everything. But the Prosecution pointed out that a) her evidence was suspect as she was a blood relation and b) it was impossible to admit evidence in connection with a crime too unspeakable to speak about. The judge had a square face with double-lens glasses. All the jury were policemen with double lenses. The youth wondered afterwards if he should have shouted out in Court, ‘I am innocent of the unspeakable crime,’ but perhaps they wouldn’t have believed him.

He was sent away to the salt mines of somewhere for three months. Since his return the aunt kept on saying, ‘It could all have been avoided if you had only handled the situation with aplomb.’ Anyway, that is what happened, and her nephew still has a thing about police stations.

A Hundred and Eleven Years Without a Chauffeur

Grandmothers, great-grandfathers and all antecedents. Don’t forget they lived ordinary lives, had pains, went to work, talked, busied themselves, had sex — full days and full nights as long as all that lasted. I see no reason to drool over them. They did not drool over us. They thought, if they wanted and could, of the future, the generations to come, but only in the most general terms, obviously, in the nature of things.

When they wrote memoirs and letters, we know that is not the whole story. When they left only their photographs and a few imputed sayings and habits, still less have we got the whole story. We have their birth and marriage records and their tombstones in some country churchyard, as in the case of my forebears.

When it came to producing photographs for my biographer, Joe, there was little to go on. I hadn’t looked them over for at least twenty years. They had been tucked into a drawer in a spare bedroom together with a tiny musical box that still played a tinkly tune when wound up, a few old reels of black cotton, a tin box of Venus pencils (unused, a very useful find). There was also a piece of stone from an excavation of antiquity, but which? Other items.

I took out the photographs and spread them out on a table. Is that all? I could have sworn there had been more. In fact, I knew there had been more. Where were they all? Who on earth could have gone off with my old fusty photos, what use would anyone have had for them?

I looked at the photographs one by one, to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. People, even one’s friends, do go off with things. But their main objects of acquisition are books. Guests go off with books out of the guestroom, but not photos, not old photos of dull people of modest means.

Gladys was there, an aunt on my maternal side married to my mother’s brother Jim. Jim was sitting with a hand on his knee, a watch-chain across his belly, while Gladys stood beside him, one hand on his shoulder. Beside Gladys was a photographer’s prop in the form of a pillar surmounted by a bunch of flowers. Date, circa 1880.