Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

The Dragon erupted in her spare time with Daniele the cutter, and they made love after lunch in the room off the cool back kitchen where the Dragon slept. Her red hair was growing longer and she kept it flying loose. She said it was Pre-Raphaelite, to go with the house.

In August came extraordinary rains, leaving the air between downfalls soporific and bewildered. The Dragon said to me, ‘Why do you work so hard? What is it all for?’ Nobody had ever before asked me a question like that. It seemed sacrilegious. I began to notice that my clients arrived late for their fittings. When you live out of town, you must expect certain delays. But, in fact they didn’t come so very late to the house; rather, they were kept gossiping with the Dragon in her office, no matter that I was kept waiting in my workroom. Later, she wouldn’t tell me what my clients had to say to her or she to them. I noticed that, with me, curiously enough, people started to speak in a low careful voice after they had first talked to the Dragon. When the Dragon took a boat out on the lake with Daniele, her red hair blew over her face; mostly, she came back drenched from the rain. Now, one day, I observed that she was breathing fire.

‘Emily,’ I said, ‘I think you’re not very well.’

‘Can you wonder?’ she said; and the smoke rose from her nostrils, flaming like her hair. ‘Can you wonder? Always no, no, no on the telephone. Always, keep away, nobody come here, Madam is busy, have you an appointment? It wears you down,’ she said, ‘always playing the negative role.’ Her nose was perfectly cool by now as if there had been no smoke, no flame flaring.

I agreed to let her invite the local people for an evening party. She brought a group from the smart hotel across the lake whom she had somehow got friendly with. She brought a number of Spaniards who were touring the lake, to make Daniele happy, and Daniele’s sister from Milan also arrived. I noticed that three of my most exclusive clients were among the women who came to that party. And there was the handsome truck-driver. The Dragon had called in a caterer of the first importance and ordered refreshments of the last rarity. She was efficient.

The Dragon had taken over, and I knew it when the forest formed around me. She came through the people, the trees, towards me, blowing fire. Then I saw that the statues, the Four Seasons, the Four Artists, were wearing materials from my workroom. They were pinned and draped as if the statues were my working manikins, and my guests marvelled at them. One of the statues, the Winter one, was actually wearing an evening dress that I was in the process of sewing. I looked round for Daniele. He was entertaining the boat-officer from the little lake port by blowing smoke through two cigarettes stuck one in each of his nostrils. The Dragon was drinking her Pimm’s, green-eyed, watching me. I went up to the good-looking truck-driver who was standing around not knowing what to do with himself, and I said, ‘Where are you going with your truck?’ He was going to Düsseldorf with a load, and back again across Europe. His name was Simon K. Clegg, the ‘K’ standing for Kurt. For a few moments we discussed the adventures of heavy transport in the Common Market. Finally, I said, ‘Let’s go.’

I left the party and climbed into the truck beside him and off we went. Suddenly I remembered my raincoat and my passport, the two indispensable vade-mecums of travel, but Simon Kurt said, for a raincoat and a passport leave it to him. The Dragon ran up the road after us a little way, snorting and breathing green fire from her mouth — perhaps it had a copper sulphate or copper chloride basis; I have heard that you can get a green flame from skilfully blowing green Chartreuse on to a lighted candle. She was followed by Daniele. However, off we went, waving, leaving the Dragon and Daniele and the party and all my household to sort out the mess and the anxiety, and the stitching and matching, forever.

Forever? Before we reached the city of Como, nearly twenty-five miles from my house, my conversation with Simon K. Clegg had turned on the meaning of forever. We parked the truck and went for a walk into town to a bar where we ordered coffee and ice-creams. Simon said he definitely felt that he didn’t understand ‘forever’, and doubted if there was any such thing as always and always, if that’s what it meant. I told him that so far as I knew to date, forever was slip-stitch, split-stitch, cross-stitch, back-stitch; and also buttonhole and running-stitches.

‘You’ve got me guessing,’ said Simon. ‘It’s above my head, all that. Don’t you want a lift, then? Get away from the party and all?’

I explained that the Dragon was in my home, questioning the value of all the materials and the sewing, the buckram, the soft, soft silk; and the run-and-fell seams, the fine lace edging. Buttonholes. Satin-stitch. I told him about her liaison with Daniele the cutter.

‘Her what?’

‘Her love affair.’

‘They should go away on holiday,’ was Simon’s point of view.

‘There’s too much work to do.’

‘Well, if she’s the lady in charge, it’s up to her what she does in business hours. The garment industry’s flourishing.’

‘I am the lady in charge,’ I said.

He was taken aback, as if he had been deceived.

‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that you were some sort of employee.’

Really, he was a nice-looking truck-driver. He pushed away his glass of ice-cream as if he had something newly on his mind.

He said, ‘My sister works in a textile and garment factory in Lyons. Good pay, short hours. She’s a seamer.’

‘A seamstress,’ I said.

‘She calls it seamer.’

‘I sew my seams by hand,’ I said.

‘By hand? How do you do that?’

‘With a needle and thread.’

‘What does that involve?’ he said, in a way that forced me to realize he had never seen a needle and thread.

I explained the technique of how you use the fingers of your right hand to replace the needle and shuttle of the sewing machine, while holding the material with your left hand. He listened carefully. He was almost deferential. ‘It must save you a lot of electricity,’ he observed.

‘But surely,’ I said, ‘you’ve seen someone sewing on a button?’

‘I don’t have any clothes with buttons. Not in my line.’

But he was thinking of something else.

‘Would you mind lying low in the cabin of the truck while I pass the customs and immigration?’ he said. ‘It’s quite comfortable and they won’t look in there. They just look at my papers. I’ve delivered half my load and I’ve got to take the rest across the St Gotthard to a hotel at Brunnen in Switzerland. Then on to Düsseldorf. Health crackers from Lyons.’

But I, too, was thinking of something else, and I didn’t answer immediately.

‘I thought you were an employee,’ he said. ‘If I’d known you were the employer I’d have thought up something better.

It saddened me to hear the anxiety in his voice. I said, ‘I’m afraid I’m in charge of my business.’ I was thinking of the orders mounting up for next winter. I had a lady from Boston who was coming specially next Tuesday across the Atlantic, across the Alps, to order her dresses from my range of winter fabrics which included a length of wool so soft you would think it was muslin, coloured pale shrimp, and I had that deep blue silk-velvet, not quite midnight blue, but something like midnight with a glisten of royal blue which I would line with identical coloured silk, for an evening occasion, with the quarter-centimetre wide lace hand-sewn on all the seams. I had another client from Milan for my grey wool-chiffon with the almost indiscernible orange stripe, to be made up as a three-piece garment flowing like a wintry cloud; I had the design ready for the cutter and I had matched all the threads.