Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

It was not altogether the undesirability of Ida that persuaded me to take on Winnie. At first, I was decidedly dissuaded. The family fortunes had just managed to eke themselves out over my mother’s lifetime. I am comfortably off, I have a job, but I’m by no means wealthy. Like most of my friends I wasn’t in a position to take on a full-time housekeeper. And for another thing, I had no room. There was the damp basement full of rotting boxes which contained a great many other rotting objects that I always intended to do something about. These included some boxes of my mother’s that had somehow landed at my house during one of her moves, and never been forwarded; once I had looked inside one of them; it had held two ostrich feather fans falling apart with moth, some carved wood chessmen the worse for the damp, some soggy books and some wine. On that occasion I threw back the contents into the box, less the wine which was still enjoyable. But I never again opened one of those boxes. The basement contained two rooms, a little dank bathroom and a frightful kitchen. It had plainly been inhabited before I acquired the house.

‘I can’t put you in the basement, Winnie,’ I said, instead of saying outright ‘I can’t afford a cook-housekeeper, Winnie.

‘What’s wrong with the basement?’

‘It’s damp.’

‘I don’t need much money,’ said Winnie. ‘Your mother underpaid me, anyway. Old-fashioned ideas. You need me to cook for you. I can go into the attic and make it over for a room.’

How she knew about the attic I don’t know. I had once thought of making it into a one-room apartment and renting it, but it was just above the two bedrooms of the house, one of which was my study, and I hadn’t liked the thought of people moving about over my head. So the attic was empty. The other rooms in my house apart from my bedroom and my study were on the ground floor, a sitting-room and a dining-room with a divan where I put up occasional friends. The only place for Winnie was the attic, warm and empty. What made me waver in my resolve not to take on Winnie was that remark of hers, ‘You need me to cook for you.’ That was indeed a temptation. I visualized the effortless and good little supper parties I could give after the theatre. The nice lunches I would have, always so well-planned, well-served; and Winnie was a very economical shopper.

‘Save you a fortune in restaurants,’ decided Winnie; for it really was all decided. ‘And with the sale of your mother’s house, you’ll be in clover.

I didn’t go into the fact that death duties were taking care of my late mother’s property, she having stubbornly arranged her affairs so badly. But it was true that restaurant-eating in London was becoming more and more difficult as the food and service were ever more inferior. I just said, ‘Well, Winnie, you’ll have to settle yourself in the attic as best you can. I’ll help you up with your things but beyond that, I’m a busy man.’

‘I haven’t many things,’ Winnie said.

When she saw my house she said, ‘The Slough of Despond, if you remember your Bunyan.’ Nevertheless she settled into the attic. I paid off Ida and from then on was in Winnie’s hands.

It was true my life was transformed. It was amazing what Winnie could do. Except for the study which I locked up every time I left the house and where Winnie could not penetrate, she penetrated everywhere. A new kitchen stove was her only extravagance. I paid no attention to Winnie’s comings and goings but it was truly remarkable how she managed to clean out the house from the basement to the attic so well that I saw through the sitting-room windows as it seemed for the first time, and my bed was actually made every day. Winnie achieved all this in a very short time. Within a week I began to have friends to meals, delicious, interesting, just right.

‘How lucky you are!’ was what I heard from one friend after another. There were few who would not willingly have taken Winnie away from me if they’d had the chance. My mother’s silver and crystal sparkled on the table. Winnie was quite up to serving at a late hour. And her meals were always marvellous. ‘Oh what elegance! How does she manage it?’

‘Who is she arguing with, there in the kitchen?’

‘Herself.’

For one could hear Winnie, after she had cleared away and served us coffee, muttering to herself meanwhile, in the sitting-room, still fighting her lonely battles in the kitchen.

I am a man of the theatre, and this oddity of Winnie’s certainly appealed to my sense of theatre. Nor were my friends unappreciative of the carry-on. They thought it was delightful. As soon as she had left the room they called her a joy and they called her a treasure. One of my younger friends, an actress who had formerly liked to visit my mother in the country, had the quick eye to notice, what I hadn’t noticed, that a couple of my chairs had been newly upholstered in genuine petit-point.

‘You’ve had your mother’s petit-point finished,’ she said. ‘I remember she was working on it all last summer. The last time I saw her just before she died she was sitting out on the terrace working at this.’

‘How do you know it’s Ma’s work?’ I said.

‘I recognize the pattern, look, that’s the Venetian design, she had it done specially, look at that red.’

‘Well she must have finished it.’

‘Oh, that’s impossible. It’s very slow work. For your mother, impossible.’

‘Well, Winnie must have finished it.’

‘Winnie? How could she have managed it with all the other things she had to do?’

‘One never knows what Winnie’s up to.

I was suspicious. But, looking back on it, I think that the truth is I didn’t want to know how Winnie did it. It was like admitting you didn’t believe in Santa Claus: all those lovely surprises might stop.

Winnie’s success with my friends wasn’t lost on her. She, too, developed a sense of her theatrical side, muttering ever the more as she served the vegetables or the coffee; and one evening when I had a few guests, for no apparent reason she entered the room with one of my mother’s mothy great ostrich feather fans in her hand and gave a performance of a pre-war debutante being presented at court, sweeping the fan before her and curtseying low, with the feathers flying all over the carpet. She solemnly left the room, backwards, treating us to another low genuflection before she left. Nobody spoke till she had gone, but Winnie’s dottiness occupied the conversation merrily for the rest of the evening secretly, I was a little embarrassed. Another time I was having a quiet game of chess with a friend when Winnie came in unnecessarily to tidy the fire. She had cleaned up those old chess pieces from Ma’s trunk, they were positively a work of restoration. As she passed us she cast an eye at the board and said, ‘Undemocratic.’ I suppose she was referring to the kings and castles. But where Winnie was getting beyond a joke was on those days when, after lunch, I sat in my study trying to compose my theatre column.

Winnie at that time of day was usually up in her room in the attic wildly remonstrating with herself. I could get no peace. Finally and reluctantly I had it out with her.

‘Winnie,’ I said, very tactfully, ‘you’re beginning to talk to yourself, you know. There’s nothing to worry about, many people do it, in fact there are great geniuses who go about talking to themselves. It’s only that I can’t get on with my work when I hear these arguments going on over my head.’

‘Well, I’m much provoked,’ Winnie said.

‘I’ve no doubt of that. And I think you really do too much for me. Will you agree to see a doctor?’

‘In an institution?’ Winnie wanted to know.

‘Oh, Winnie, of course not. Only privately. Maybe you need some medicine. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’ll have to part. But I do urge you —I urged her into going to a young psychiatrist I’d heard of, in private practice. I have no idea what account she gave of herself and her condition but I’ve no doubt he got some illogical story out of her. She didn’t appear to think there was anything wrong with her, and neither, apparently, did he. She refused to go into hospital under observation and he sent her away after a few visits with some medicine. I made enquiries of the doctor but he wouldn’t say much. ‘She has a few hallucinations, nothing to worry about. She should get over it. Of course I can’t diagnose in depth without her cooperation in a clinic.’ I settled his exorbitant bill. Winnie carried on in much the same way as before for about a week. She told me she was taking the medicine.