Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

‘Apart from being Henry Castlemaine’s daughter, what is there in me for you?’ she once asked the new young man.

‘You’re fascinating by yourself.’

It was, in a way, all she wanted to hear or know from him. The very next day she had telephoned to Ben. A woman’s voice answered the phone, a silly voice. ‘Who’s speaking?’ — ‘His wife.’ — ‘Oh, wife.’ — ‘Yes, wife.’ (Voice off ‘Ben, it’s for you. She says she’s your wife.’) — A pause and Ben is on the phone. ‘Yes, Dora, what do you want?’ — ‘Lionel and I have to make a decision about Father’s papers. I think you could be helpful.’ — ‘Who’s Lionel?’ — ‘My friend.’ — ‘I thought he was Tim.’ — ‘No, Tim was last year. Anyway…’ — ‘I’ll come round one day.’ — ‘Better make it soon.’ — ‘Some time in the next couple of weeks, I can’t manage sooner.

She is appalled to see him at the Brontës house of doom and dread, at Haworth in Yorkshire.

‘This is where they walked up and down at night, after dinner, here in this dining-room, planning the future —’

Outside, in the graveyard among the tombstones, there by Emily Brontës grave, she turns and says,

‘Stop following me.’

A small group of American visitors are watching them. They see a neurotic-looking woman in her mid-forties apparently trying to shake off a bewildered man in his late twenties or early thirties, both slightly outmoded in their appearance.

‘People are looking at us,’ he says.

‘It is my one hope,’ she says, ‘that we should open the house for Father. I’ve been round so many houses. They are all so bleak. Museums have no heart.’

‘Stop haunting them,’ he says. ‘That’s what I’ve come to tell you.’

‘Then you’ll be free, is that it?’

‘Don’t tell me,’ he says, ‘that you’re free, wandering around in this timelessness, as you do.’

They walk away, he to his car and she to nowhere. The American group are already standing before the solemn Brontë graves, reading the inscriptions.

It is at Lamb House, Rye, in East Sussex that the ghosts of their ambition finally reach a decision.

‘Would you like to sign the book?’ says the curator. ‘This is where James received his visitors; yes, it is rather small, quite poky; yes, indeed with his bulk he must have found it quite cramped. But upstairs —’

Out in the garden beside the graves of Henry James’s dogs Ben says,

‘I don’t know how you could bear to open your old home to the public. It’s so charming as it is.’

‘If it wasn’t for Father I would feel the same,’ Dora says. ‘But Father’s ambition was always for his fame to be perpetuated, for ever and ever, it seems, elongated, on and on into the future.

‘The future has arrived,’ he says, ‘and you’ve done nothing about it but sit around drinking with your young men, thinking of your father.’

‘And what have you been doing?’

‘Sitting around drinking with my girls, thinking of your father.

‘To hell with Father,’ she says.

Dora opened the door.

‘Lionel was desolate,’ she said. ‘I was a bit sad myself, for he was the best of the lot. But he knew he had to go.’

‘You’ve got a new haircut,’ he said.

‘Have you come for Father, his papers?’

‘No, I’ve come for you.

She led the way upstairs in the new freedom of her trousers, and opened the door to the hopeless study, with its piles of archives going back to 1890 or worse.

‘I suppose we should give them to a university,’ she said.

‘We would never be free,’ he said. ‘Those ghosts, those ghosts, would never let us go. Letters from students, letters from scholars. It would be the same old industry.’

They lit a bonfire in the garden that night. It took them many hours to burn all the Castlemaine papers. But they sat around drinking in the back wash-house, watching the flames curl round the papers and going out every now and again to feed the fire with a new armful, until they were all consumed.

The Dragon

I was standing talking at a cocktail party when I was saddened to see that everybody formed a forest. I felt defeated. The Dragon had taken over.

No sooner did I feel this, than I decided it was only a temporary defeat, for that is what I am like. I didn’t see then how I could possibly do it, but certainly, I decided, I was going to stop the Dragon. The party was people again. I picked up the conversation at the point where a man in the group was talking. He was good-looking, about sixty. ‘My address book,’ he was saying, ‘is becoming like a necropolis, so many people dying every month, this friend, that friend. You have to draw a line through their names. It’s very sad.’

‘I always use pencil,’ said a lady, a little younger, ‘then when people pass on I can rub them out.’

We were in a shady part of the garden. It was six o’clock on a hot evening in the north of Italy. It was my garden, my party. The Dragon came oozing through the foliage. She was holding her drink, a Pimm’s No. 1, and was followed by a tall, strikingly handsome truck-driver whom she had brought along to the party on the spur of the moment. To her dismay, discernible only to myself, he was a genial, easy-mannered young man, rather amused to be taking half-an-hour off the job with his truck parked outside the gate. I knew very well that when she had picked him up at the bar across the street she had hoped he would be an embarrassment, a nuisance.

Oh, the Dragon! Dragon was what it was her job to be. She had been highly and pressingly recommended by one of my clients, the widow of a well-known dramatist. It didn’t occur to me, then, that the vertiginous blurb that was written to me about the girl was in fact so excessive as to be suspicious. Perhaps I did feel uneasy about the eulogies that came over the telephone, and the letters which the widow wrote to me from Gstaad about the Dragon and her virtues as such. Perhaps I did. But, as often when I want to believe something enough because I am in need of help, I didn’t listen to the small inner voice which said, Something is wrong, or which said, Be careful. I was optimistic and enthusiastic.

I was first and foremost a needlewoman. I have been called a couturier, a dressmaker, a designer. But it was my fascination with the needle and thread that earned me my reputation. I could have gone into big business, I could have merged with any of the world’s famous houses of haute couture. But I would have none of that. I preferred to keep my own exclusive and small clientele. It wasn’t everybody I would sew for.

When I left school at the beginning of the sixties there were two things I could do well. One was write a good letter in fine calligraphy, and the other was sew, by hand, with every stitch perfect. I worked as a seamstress, in the alterations department of a London store. This taught me a lot, but it didn’t satisfy me. At home, I started making my own clothes. I had learned at my evening classes how to make an individual working dummy for each client. I was very careful about this, and I practised on my grandmother with whom I lived. You cut a length of buckram into a body-shape and sew your lady into it over the minimum of underwear. I did this with my grandmother, basting the buckram on her body with only an exact inch to spare. She thought she would never get out of it again. Then, I sit it up the front with my scissors, sewed it up again the exact one-inch seam. When I had perfected the sewing on the buckram with even, small, back-stitching I filled the shape with fine-teased raw wool. There was my grandmother’s perfect shape to set on my stand. Some dressmakers use synthetic fabrics, if they still employ this process, but I wouldn’t touch them.