Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

‘You can have this omelette,’ said Dora. ‘I’ll make another for myself.’

‘I couldn’t eat it, thanks, at this hour. What happened to your friend?’

‘I suppose he was embarrassed when he saw you,’ said Dora.

‘About what?’

‘About his coming to live here and opening the house to the public. I owe it to Father. First I’ll have a trip abroad and then, believe me, I’ll arrange for a companion, an assistant, somebody, to help me turn the house into a museum. Father’s rooms, his manuscripts.’

‘Well, that was my idea,’ Ben said. ‘That’s what we were always planning to do when Henry was dead.’

‘You aren’t the only Castlemaine enthusiast,’ Dora said. ‘I’m not too old to marry again and I could open the house to the public, only certain rooms, the important ones. I’ve had the house repainted and the floors mended. I could do it with a new partner.

‘Why on earth should you want to marry again?’

‘The usual reasons,’ Dora said. ‘Love, sex, companionship. The Castlemaine idea wasn’t enough, after all. You can’t go to bed with an idea.’

‘You used to,’ he said, ‘when Henry was alive.’

‘Well, I don’t now.

‘Do you mind if I look over the house before I go?’ Ben said.

Dora studied her watch. She sighed. She put the dishes in the sink.

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘What exactly do you want?’

‘To see for myself what it’s like now.

They went from room to room. The chairs were newly upholstered, the walls and woodwork freshly painted. In Henry Castlemaine’s study his papers were piled on the floor on a plastic sheet, his desk had been replaced by a trestle-table on which more papers and manuscripts were piled. ‘I’m working on the papers,’ said Dora. ‘It’ll take time. A lot of his books have been re-bound and some are still at the binders.’

Ben looked at the shelves. The books that Henry had used most, his shabby poetry, his worn reference books, were now done up in glittering gold and half-calf bindings.

‘You’ll never get through those papers yourself,’ Ben said. ‘It’s an enormous job. The letters alone —’

‘I’ll have them in showcases,’ Dora said, her voice monotonous and weary. ‘I can get help, lots of help.’

‘Look,’ said Ben. ‘I know you can get help. But it’s a professional job. You need scholars, people with taste.

‘All right, I’ll get scholars, people with taste.

‘Do you intend to marry that young man, what was his name?’

‘I could marry him. I haven’t decided,’ she said.

‘Do you mean he’s a manuscript expert?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t let a fellow like that touch Father’s papers. But he’d be very good at the entrance-hall, giving out tickets, when I open the house to the public. Can’t you see him in that role?’

‘Yes, I can,’ said Ben.

‘The divorce should go through —’

‘Look, Dora, I must tell you that I’m going to make a claim. I’m entitled to a share of what I’ve built up for you over the last seven years.

‘I expected you would. The lawyer expected it. We’ll make a settlement.’

‘Castlemaine was nowhere when I married you.’

‘I said we’ll make a settlement.’

‘It’s a sad end to our ambitions,’ Ben said. ‘We were always going to open the house to the public, Henry knew that. Now you’ll make a mess of it, are making a mess of it. You’ll never get through those archives.’

‘Are you proposing to come back here and work on the papers?’ she said.

‘I might consider it. For Henry’s sake.’

‘But for my sake?’

‘For Henry’s sake. You didn’t marry me for my sake. It was always Father, Father.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and now Father’s dead. We have no more in common. ‘We still have our ambition for the Castlemaine museum in common, our dreams.’

‘It’s time for you to go. I want some sleep,’ Dora said, her eyes fixed on her watch.

As she closed the study door there was the sound behind them in the study of a bundle of papers slithering to the floor, blown by the draught.

Then, another thump of paper urged on by the displacement of the first lot. Dora took no notice.

The visitors, it seems to the young girl-student who is taking her turn at the entrance-desk, appear to be nervously aware of each other, although they have arrived separately. There is something old-fashioned about them both. It is not exactly the cut and style of their clothes that gives them this impression; it is not exactly anything; it is something inexact. They are both English or perhaps American: the girl’s ear is not attuned to the difference, especially as they have each said so few words when buying their ticket. ‘How long has the museum been open?’ and ‘Is that really Freud’s hat?’ Freud’s hat, a bourgeois light-brown felt hat, is hanging on the coat-stand with Freud’s walking stick. The girl follows the visitors. The man is tall, good-looking, around thirty. The woman, prim with her hair combed back into a bun is older. They look studious, as do most people who come to visit the house of Sigmund Freud at 19 Berggasse, Vienna. But the fact that they look at each other from time to time anxiously, then anxiously look away, makes the young guardian of the shrine feel increasingly nervous. There are precious objects lying about: a collection of primitive artefacts on the studio table, manuscripts and letters in the glass-topped show-tables. Could the visitors be accomplices in a projected robbery?

‘That is the Couch,’ says the girl-student. ‘Yes, the original Couch.’ The couch is large, floppy and soft. One could go to sleep forever in it, sinking deeper and deeper.

‘And this is the waiting-room.’

‘Ah, the waiting-room,’ says the young man.

‘Is it haunted?’ says the woman, touching one of the red plush chairs lined up against the wall, themselves waiting for something.

‘Hunted?’ says the puzzled girl.

‘No, haunted. Ghosts.’

‘No,’ says the young woman, looking behind her in sharp surprise, for the man has left abruptly, and is already outside the door of the flat. When she turns back to the woman she is amazed to find nobody there.

At the family home of Louis Pasteur the bacteriologist at Arbois, in the rainy Jura, she is there and so is he. ‘This was the dining table. This is the board where he carved. What rain! — will it never stop? You would like to see the laboratory, Madame, Monsieur, this way.’ It is taken for granted they are a couple. The laboratory is scrubbed but somehow dusty, and a few old books are lying about realistically: ‘… his researches into organisms and fermentations.

‘Few people,’ says the young man, in lucid but foreign French, ‘realize that pasteurized milk comes from Pasteur.’

‘True,’ says the guide.

The couple leave together. Outside in the rain she says, ‘It’s time for you to stop following me.

‘I’m not following you,’ he says, ‘I’m following our ambition. It’s for you to go back where you came from. It was you who broke away.

‘There is no contract,’ she says. ‘No pledge. It was you who provoked the rift. We never had a marriage that you could call a marriage. As I’ve told you, I have always intended to open Father’s house to the public after Father’s death.’

‘You’ll never do it,’ he says. ‘Not without me. I’m part of the ambition. I have to go on.

‘You’re the ghost of an ambition,’ she says.

‘So are you, the ghost of a dream and a plan.’

He gets into his car and drives off leaving her in the wet, old street.

Dora opened the door of her father’s study and closed it again. It was two years since he died. Her new young man was the third in the series and, like his two predecessors, his enthusiasm for helping to put the papers in order and setting up the house as a museum, had waned or perhaps was never there. But unlike the others he has had a good effect on Dora. This young man was in the wholesale fashion business; his attempts to smarten up Dora’s appearance had been successful. In her fifties Dora looked healthy for the first time in her life. His devotion to her, or rather, his quite eccentric passion, always did wonders for her morale, as she herself put it.