Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

Felicity looked round and saw that patient of hers. The name?

‘How did you get in here?’ she said.

‘Through the door.’

The front door was locked, but she supposed he meant that he always proceeded like a ghost through walls and doors.

‘If you want to consult me professionally,’ Felicity said, ‘you’ll have to see me at my office in the clinic. This is my home, Mr — ?’

‘P. Shadow,’ he said. ‘First name, Pearly. I prefer not to attend that clinic. I frighten the nurses.’

Felicity was used to strange patients, but she was thoroughly annoyed that her privacy had been violated. Quite sensibly, she didn’t see the point of arguing with Shadow. Instead, she decided to ring a colleague to see if he would come round and help her to chuck out the unwanted patient. She phoned a number while P. Shadow made himself comfortable in an armchair with the newspaper.

There was no reply to the number Felicity rang. She paused a moment and started looking up another number in her address book.

She came to the name she was looking for: Margaret Arkans, a gynaecologist married to James Arkans, another gynaecologist. When she thought of them, sun-bronzed, young, with white teeth flashing as they laughed, she felt a fool.

The shadow sat on. He had put aside her paper and from what she could make out of his features, he looked more anxious than before.

‘Mr Shadow, what’s troubling you?’ she said.

‘I gather you’re looking for medical friends,’ said the pearly shadow. ‘They might advise you to take a sleeping pill or something.’

‘Undoubtedly,’ said Felicity, beginning to see some way out of the situation. ‘I’ll take a sleeping pill anyway.

‘It might kill me if you did that.’

‘Relax. Just relax. I’ll only take a light one. But I do feel the need of something to make me sleep, quite honestly.’

In the bathroom Felicity took a white tablet from her medicine cupboard. She cleaned her teeth. Then she looked round the door of the sitting-room. Already, the pearly shadow had gone. To be quite sure, she searched the rest of the house before going to bed. Yes, the pill had worked. She slept well.

‘Nurse, relax. Just relax.’

‘He’s in the waiting-room,’ said the nurse. It was nine-thirty the next morning, the time when the psychiatrist’s office opened.

‘Any other patients?’ said Felicity.

‘Three more. But they don’t seem to notice him.’

Felicity could quite believe this. Most psychiatric patients look weird, especially while waiting for consultation.

‘He might walk through me again,’ wailed the nurse loudly. ‘It makes me feel awful.’

‘Hush,’ said the doctor. ‘Someone might hear you.’

The office door was open. Someone had heard her. Dr Margaret Arkans put her head round the door. ‘Anything wrong?’

‘Nurse Simmons isn’t very well,’ said Felicity in a voice which suggested she had decided everything — on a course of action, everything, from now on.

‘I’ve had a terrible experience,’ Nurse Simmons said. ‘Last night; and now it’s going to happen again this morning.’

Margaret and Felicity were extremely solicitous. Felicity herself gave the nurse an injection to make her relax, and took her to the staff rest-room to lie down.

‘Overwork.’ The two doctors looked at each other and shook their heads knowingly. They were both long since convinced that everyone in their department was overworked, including themselves.

On her way back to her office Felicity looked in on the waiting-room. The pearly shadow was not there.

Felicity recommended that Nurse Simmons should have a month’s rest, with a course of sedatives. Nurse Simmons lived with a large family who were extremely alarmed when she felt a ‘presence’ in the room every time she forgot to take her pills. She screamed a great deal. ‘She still has her delusions,’ said her sister on the phone.

One night Pearly Shadow visited Felicity again.

‘Are you hoping to kill me with all these sedatives you’re giving her?’

‘Yes,’ said Felicity.

‘She might take an overdose.’

‘Almost certainly she will,’ Felicity said.

‘But that would kill me.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘If you don’t leave us alone you’ll be finished soon.’

‘But I’m your patient.’

‘You won’t feel a thing,’ said the doctor. ‘Not a thing.’

The pearly shadow looked terribly frightened.

‘Your only hope,’ said Felicity, as she switched the television from station to station, ‘is to leave us alone and go elsewhere for treatment.’

Nurse Simmons improved. Neither she nor Dr Felicity Grayland saw Pearly Shadow again, but a few years later they heard of a psychiatrist in the north who had died of an overdose of barbiturates which had curiously made his skin translucent and pearly.

Going Up and Coming Down

How many couples have met in an elevator (lift, ascenseur, ascensore or whatever you call it throughout the world)? How many marriages have resulted?

In their elevator there is usually an attendant, sometimes not.

She goes up and down every weekday. At the 1.05 crush and the 2.35 return she generally finds him in the crowded box; looking up at the floor number display, looking down at the floor. Sometimes they are alone. He, she discovers, comes down from the twenty-first.

His office? On the board downstairs six offices are listed on the twenty-first floor: a law firm, a real estate office, an ophthalmologist, a Swiss chemicals association, a Palestine Potassium (believe it or not) agency, a rheumatologist. Which of these offices could he belong to? She doesn’t look at him direct, but always, at a glance, tests the ramifying possibilities inherent in all six concerns.

He is polite. He stands well back when the crowd presses. They are like coins in a purse.

One day she catches his eye and looks away.

He notices her briefcase while she has her eyes on the floor numbers. Going down. Out she pours with the chattering human throng, turns left (the lobby has two entrances) and is gone. On the board down there are listed four offices on Floor 16, her floor. Two law firms, a literary agency and an office named W. H. Gilbert without further designation. Does she work for Mr Gilbert, he wonders. Is Gilbert a private detective? W. H. Gilbert may well be something furtive.

Day by day she keeps her eyes on his briefcase of pale brown leather and wonders what he does. The lift stops at Floor 9, and in sidles the grey-haired stoutish man with the extremely cheerful smile. On we go; down, down. She wonders about the young man’s daily life, where does he live, where and what does he eat, has he ever read the Bible? She knows nothing, absolutely nothing except one thing, which is this: he tries to catch a glimpse of her when she is looking elsewhere or leaving the elevator.

On the ground floor — seconds, and he’s gone. It is like looking out of the window of a train, he flashes by so quickly. She thinks he might be poorly paid up there on the twenty-first, possibly in the real estate office or with the expert on rheumatism. He must be barely twenty-five. He might be working towards a better job, but at the moment with very little left in his pocket after paying out for his rent, food, clothes and insect spray.

Her long fair hair falls over her shoulders, outside her dark green coat. Perhaps she spends her days sending out membership renewal forms for Mr Gilbert’s arcane activity: ‘Yes, I want to confirm my steadfast support for the Cosmic Paranormal Apostolic Movement by renewing my subscription’, followed by different rates to be filled in for the categories:

Individual Member, Couple, and Senior Citizen/Unwaged/Student. Suppose there is a power failure?