Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

‘Harper,’ said Wilton, ‘I’m arresting him. He had an appointment with you. It’s shameful. You are exposed at last.’

The landlady was suddenly in the doorway. ‘Constable!’ she called. A policeman at the top of the street turned and ambled towards them.

Harper was, in spite of her stays, the more emancipated of the two; she looked at Wilton. ‘This is my man,’ she said. ‘You get the hell out of it.’

‘What’s going on?’ said the policeman.

‘Language!’ said the landlady. ‘These suffragettes!’

‘Suffragettes, eh?’ said the policeman.

‘Constable,’ said Wilton, a-flutter, ‘this man was attempting to climb up this lady. This drainpipe was encouraging him.’

‘It’s her fault,’ the young man gasped, glaring at Wilton. Owing to the squint, the policeman was unable to decide which girl was meant. Not that it mattered.

‘Oh, suffragettes!’ said the policeman.

‘Yes, I was attacked,’ sighed the youth.

The constable took all the particulars. He took Harper and Wilton by the sleeves. ‘This way,’ he said, ‘and come quiet. Disturbing the Peace. Suffragettes.

‘I hope they get a month,’ said the landlady.

‘Three months more likely,’ said the policeman. ‘You all right now, sir!’

‘More or less,’ replied the young man cheerfully. ‘Good night, Constable. Good night, sweet ladies.’

They only got a month. But you see, sweet ladies, what they all had to suffer to get us the vote.

I raced back to the country with this manuscript in my handbag. It had been one of many and many that I had always intended to revise when I had a spare day or two. Those spare days had never come. But looking at the story I didn’t see what was missing. Harper and Wilton had adequately fulfilled their destiny for that little space of history at the turn of the twentieth century that their story occupied.

Harper and Wilton were waiting for me on the doorstep of my country retreat.

‘How about it?’ This was Wilton.

I noticed that Joe the gardener was observing us from the mysterious wooded part of the garden which I had greatly taken to. I love mysterious gardens. I felt that Joe should come and join us. I was dangling the door keys in my hand. On no account would I let any of them cross the threshold. I was carried away by the fact of Joe’s intensely squinting eyes as he approached. Again I wondered why he wore no corrective glasses. How could I have envisaged and foreseen this boy with the great squint all those years ago when I had written this episodic little story of Harper and Wilton?

Joe was obviously fascinated by the two girls in their unconventional clothes. But here again it was difficult to see which one he was observing at any one time.

‘He has given us no peace,’ said Wilton. ‘He follows us everywhere. Don’t you know that is a crime? In the world of today, more than ever.

‘Sexual molestation,’ said Harper.

‘Oh, what has he done?’ I said.

‘Followed us everywhere. He is molesting us. It was he who should have gone to prison, not us.

I saw my chance. I sat down on the doorstep and re-wrote the ending of the story in the light of current correctness. The girls, Harper and Wilton, were vindicated and it was the squint-eyed student who was taken off by the police. I showed it to Harper and Wilton.

Not only that, since they were tepid in their satisfaction, I let myself into the house while the group remained uneasily in the garden. I called the police and said that our garden boy was troubling two young women by his unwanted attention. Rather languidly, they agreed to come along and see what it was all about.

They took Joe away. Harper and Wilton disappeared, evidently satisfied. Joe came back shortly, having been merely cautioned, and got on with his weeding of the garden.

The Executor

When my uncle died all the literary manuscripts went to a university foundation, except one. The correspondence went too, and the whole of his library. They came (a white-haired man and a young girl) and surveyed his study. Everything, they said, would be desirable and it would make a good price if I let the whole room go — his chair, his desk, the carpet, even his ashtrays. I agreed to this. I left everything in the drawers of the desk just as it was when my uncle died, including the bottle of Librium and a rusty razor blade.

My uncle died this way: he was sitting on the bank of the river, playing a fish. As the afternoon faded a man passed by, and then a young couple who made pottery passed him. As they said later, he was sitting peacefully awaiting the catch and of course they didn’t disturb him. As night fell the colonel and his wife passed by; they were on their way home from their daily walk. They knew it was too late for my uncle to be simply sitting there, so they went to look. He had been dead, the doctor pronounced, from two to two and a half hours. The fish was still struggling with the bait. It was a mild heart attack. Everything my uncle did was mild, so different from everything he wrote. Yet perhaps not so different. He was supposed to be ‘far out’, so one didn’t know what went on out there. Besides, he had not long returned from a trip to London. They say, still waters run deep.

But far out was how he saw himself. He once said that if you could imagine modern literature as a painting, perhaps by Brueghel the Elder, the people and the action were in the foreground, full of colour, eating, stealing, copulating, laughing, courting each other, excreting, and stabbing each other, selling things, climbing trees. Then in the distance, at the far end of a vast plain, there he would be, a speck on the horizon, always receding and always there, and always a necessary and mysterious component of the picture; always there and never to be taken away, essential to the picture — a speck in the distance, which if you were to blow up the detail would simply be a vague figure, plodding on the other way.

I am no fool, and he knew it. He didn’t know it at first, but he had seven months in which to learn that fact. I gave up my job in Edinburgh in the government office, a job with a pension, to come here to the lonely house among the Pentland Hills to live with him and take care of things. I think he imagined I was going to be another Elaine when he suggested the arrangement. He had no idea how much better I was for him than Elaine. Elaine was his mistress, that is the stark truth. ‘My common-law wife,’ he called her, explaining that in Scotland, by tradition, the woman you are living with is your wife. As if I didn’t know all that nineteenth-century folklore; and it’s long died out. Nowadays you have to do more than say ‘I marry you, I marry you, I marry you,’ to make a woman your wife. Of course, my uncle was a genius and a character. I allowed for that. Anyway, Elaine died and I came here a month later. Within a month I had cleared up the best part of the disorder. He called me a Scottish puritan girl, and at forty-one it was nice to be a girl and I wasn’t against the Scottish puritanical attribution either since I am proud to be a Scot; I feel nationalistic about it. He always had that smile of his when he said it, so I don’t know how he meant it. They say he had that smile of his when he was found dead, fishing.

‘I appoint my niece Susan Kyle to be my sole literary executor.’ I don’t wonder he decided on this course after I had been with him for three months. Probably for the first time in his life all his papers were in order. I went into Edinburgh and bought box-files and cover-files and I filed away all that mountain of papers, each under its separate heading. And I knew what was what. You didn’t catch me filing away a letter from Angus Wilson or Saul Bellow in the same place as an ordinary ‘W’ or ‘B’, a Miss Mary Whitelaw or a Mrs Jonathan Brown. I knew the value of these letters, they went into a famous-persons file, bulging and of value. So that in a short time my uncle said, ‘There’s little for me to do now, Susan, but die.’ Which I thought was melodramatic, and said so. But I could see he was forced to admire my good sense. He said, ‘You remind me of my mother, who prepared her shroud all ready for her funeral.’ His mother was my grandmother Janet Kyle. Why shouldn’t she have sat and sewn her shroud? People in those days had very little to do, and here I was running the house and looking after my uncle’s papers with only the help of Mrs Donaldson three mornings a week, where my grandmother had four pairs of hands for indoor help and three out. The rest of the family never went near the house after my grandmother died, for Elaine was always there with my uncle.