Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

Then she did get quieter. Within two weeks she had stopped her racketing and shouting. I was able to get on with my work.

But slowly the house degenerated. It was like old times, only worse, because, although I began to eat out, Winnie burnt the food she prepared for herself. There was a super-chaos, a smell of burning and old rubbish all over the house. She bustled about brightly enough, but simply couldn’t manage.

‘Perhaps you need a holiday, Winnie.’

‘I stopped taking them pills,’ she said. ‘Rose didn’t like them. They had an effect.’

‘Rose?’

‘Rose Spigot.’

I remembered Miss Spigot, the cook who died. I remembered Miss Spigot with her specially careful enunciation, her prim and well-trained ways, and how she was said to have travelled with a duke’s family all over the Orient. ‘Are you talking about some relation of our late cook?’ I said.

‘I’m talking about our late cook herself,’ said Winnie. ‘She’s gone away. When I started to take the pills they put her off her stroke.’

‘By no means,’ I said wildly, ‘take anything whatsoever that doesn’t suit you, Winnie.’

‘It’s not me, it’s Rose. She was a very provoking woman, acting the lady with your mother’s needlework and objecting to me showing off in front of company. But she was a good cook-housekeeper, she’s a good manager, and I can’t cope alone with all the mess. She was another pair of hands.’

‘Definitely, you should stop the pills,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t you like me to have another word with the doctor?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Winnie. ‘There was nothing wrong with the doctor.

I had to go away for a week to a theatre festival in the north. I was glad to go, notwithstanding my crumpled shirts and unwashed socks crammed into my bag. I felt I could face the problem of Winnie better after a break.

When I got back, as I put my key in the door, I knew something had happened by the fact that my old brass name-plate was twinkling and by the sound of Winnie’s voice from the back of the house raised in argument.

Only Winnie was in the kitchen when I put my head round the door. ‘Rose is back,’ said Winnie.

I could see what she meant. The house was clean and shining; my supper that night was excellent.

But it was all too much for my no doubt weak character. I thought it over for a bit and finally persuaded Winnie to retire. She went back to Yorkshire, accompanied by Miss Spigot or not I don’t know. My house is the pigsty of old. My friends are awfully good to me and I dine out a lot. The stuff that used to moulder in the basement is now rotting in the attic. Nobody combs Francis the cat, but he doesn’t mind. When I’m on my own I can always sit down among the dust and the litter, and play the piano.

The Girl I Left Behind Me

It was just gone quarter past six when I left the office.

‘Teedle-um-tum-tum’ — there was the tune again, going round my head. Mr Letter had been whistling it all throughout the day between his noisy telephone calls and his dreamy sessions. Sometimes he whistled ‘Softly, Softly, Turn the Key’, but usually it was ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’ rendered at a brisk hornpipe tempo.

I stood in the bus queue, tired out, and wondering how long I would endure Mark Letter (Screws & Nails) Ltd. Of course, after my long illness, it was experience. But Mr Letter and his tune, and his sudden moods of bounce, and his sudden lapses into lassitude, his sandy hair and little bad teeth, roused my resentment, especially when his tune barrelled round my head long after I had left the office; it was like taking Mr Letter home.

No one at the bus stop took any notice of me. Well, of course, why should they? I was not acquainted with anyone there, but that evening I felt particularly anonymous among the homegoers. Everyone looked right through me and even, it seemed, walked through me. Late autumn always sets my fancy towards sad ideas. The starlings were crowding in to roost on all the high cornices of the great office buildings. And I located, among the misty unease of my feelings, a very strong conviction that I had left something important behind me or some job incompleted at the office. Perhaps I had left the safe unlocked, or perhaps it was something quite trivial which nagged at me. I had half a mind to turn back, tired as I was, and reassure myself. But my bus came along and I piled in with the rest.

As usual, I did not get a seat. I clung to the handrail and allowed myself to be lurched back and forth against the other passengers. I stood on a man’s foot, and said, ‘Oh, sorry.’ But he looked away without response, which depressed me. And more and more, I felt that I had left something of tremendous import at the office. ‘Teedle-um-tum-tum’ — the tune was a background to my worry all the way home. I went over in my mind the day’s business, for I thought, now, perhaps it was a letter which I should have written and posted on my way home.

That morning I had arrived at the office to find Mark Letter vigorously at work. By fits, he would occasionally turn up at eight in the morning, tear at the post and, by the time I arrived, he would have dispatched perhaps half a dozen needless telegrams; and before I could get my coat off, would deliver a whole day’s instructions to me, rapidly fluttering his freckled hands in time with his chattering mouth. This habit used to jar me, and I found only one thing amusing about it; that was when he would say, as he gave instructions for dealing with each item, ‘Mark letter urgent.’ I thought that rather funny coming from Mark Letter, and I often thought of him, as he was in those moods, as Mark Letter Urgent.

As I swayed in the bus I recalled that morning’s excess of energy on the part of Mark Letter Urgent. He had been more urgent than usual, so that I still felt put out by the urgency. I felt terribly old for my twenty-two years as I raked round my mind for some clue as to what I had left unfinished. Something had been left amiss; the further the bus carried me from the office, the more certain I became of it. Not that I took my job to heart very greatly, but Mr Letter’s moods of bustle were infectious, and when they occurred I felt fussy for the rest of the day; and although I consoled myself that I would feel better when I got home, the worry would not leave me.

By noon, Mr Letter had calmed down a little, and for an hour before I went to lunch he strode round the office with his hands in his pockets, whistling between his seedy brown teeth that sailors’ song ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’. I lurched with the bus as it chugged out the rhythm, ‘Teedle-um-tum-tum. Teedle-um…’ Returning from lunch I had found silence, and wondered if Mr Letter was out, until I heard suddenly, from his tiny private office, his tune again, a low swift hum, trailing out towards the end. Then I knew that he had fallen into one of his afternoon daydreams.

I would sometimes come upon him in his little box of an office when these trances afflicted him. I would find him sitting in his swivel chair behind his desk. Usually he had taken off his coat and slung it across the back of his chair. His right elbow would be propped on the desk, supporting his chin, while from his left hand would dangle his tie. He would gaze at this tie; it was his main object of contemplation. That afternoon I had found him tie-gazing when I went into his room for some papers. He was gazing at it with parted lips so that I could see his small, separated discoloured teeth, no larger than a child’s first teeth. Through them he whistled his tune. Yesterday, it had been ‘Softly, Softly, Turn the Key’, but today it was the other.

I got off the bus at my usual stop, with my fare still in my hand. I almost threw the coins away, absentmindedly thinking they were the ticket, and when I noticed them I thought how nearly no one at all I was, since even the conductor had, in his rush, passed me by.