Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

But I saw that one could not do anything with him. He would not change his shirt very often, or get clothes, but he went round like a tramp, lending people money, as I have seen with my own eyes. His place was in a terrible mess, with the empty bottles, and laundry in the corner. He gave me several gifts over the period, which I took as he would have only given them away, but he never tried to go to the full extent. He never painted my portrait, as he was painting fruit on a table all that time, and they said his pictures were marvellous, and thought Willy and I were getting married.

One night, when I went home, I was upset as usual, after Willy’s place. Mum and Dad had gone to bed, and I looked round our kitchen which is done in primrose and white. Then I went into the living-room, where Dad has done one wall in a patterned paper, deep rose and white, and the other walls pale rose, with white woodwork. The suite is new, and Mum keeps everything beautiful. So it came to me, all of a sudden, what a fool I was, going with Willy. I agree to equality, but as to me marrying Willy, as I said to Mavis, when I recall his place, and the good carpet gone greasy, not to mention the paint oozing out of the tubes, I think it would break my heart to sink so low.

Quest for Lavishes Ghast

Lavishes ghast! — this phrase haunted me for years. When I first came to London I worked for a man who was always losing his papers. Hours I would spend, looking for those bits of paper, until suddenly he would say, ‘Lavishes ghast.’ After a while I got used to this man. Northerner though I was, and with only the short ‘a’ of lavishes and the long ‘a’ of ghast to work on, I came to understand that lavishes ghast stood for ‘I have it at last.’ And in spite of his habit of talking hand-over-fist and disdaining consonants, it became possible for me to decode an irrelevant statement like ‘Clot on the brain’ into the relevant ‘Lost it again!’

I have kept coming across people like him. As a rule I have managed to fill in the missing letters and guess the whole. As a rule; but lavishes ghast remains an exception. In the same way that the yellowhammer chirps continually, ‘A little piece of bread and no cheese,’ and the cuckoo croaks nothing but ‘cuckoo,’ so, I swear, does everyone at the usual crowded party say ‘lavishes ghast’ all the time.

At the beginning of my quest I was quite unnerved by it. The phrase meant something different each time, but plainly it stemmed from a general, perhaps mystical meaning. Lavishes was so substantial and ghast so evanescent; all the anxious ingredients of Pavlov’s nasty practical jokes were there in essence. Were people talking of radishes vast? Did they hang from the mast? Once I met a soldier in the train who was trying to dodge the military police. ‘They’ll ask me to lavishes ghast and I lavishes ghast, can’t be done,’ he explained through his teeth. With due cunning I inquired, ‘Why not?’ The question goaded him to articulate speech. ‘How,’ he demanded, ‘can I hand ‘em me pass if I haven’t a pass?’ And a girl I knew told me, ‘I lavishes ghast to marry him.’ Ungenerously, I took this to mean she hadn’t been asked, but it turned out she hadn’t the heart. I recall, too, a visit to the country… a rabbit in the grass… ‘Yes, he does look happy at his task,’ I said to my host, who had seemed to point at a ploughman as he spoke.

There was also the earlier and more deranging occasion when I stayed overnight with a friend’s mother. At breakfast she was reading a letter from her son. She put down the letter, and, gazing wistfully at a bowl of flowers, murmured, ‘Lavishes ghast, don’t you think?’ Well, of course I thought Anthony was fast. I could have told her a lot about Anthony, but after all, she was the mother, so I said, ‘Oh, not really!’ She paused, and, keeping her eye still on the flowers, repeated firmly, ‘Well, my dear, I think they are ravishing flaahers.’

I entered the obsessional phase. L. G. became meaningful, threatening. I began to suspect that it was a person. I didn’t want to meet Mrs Ghast, for at the time I decided it must be a woman, a widow, formerly married to a Mr Ghast who was seen only once with his wife, on a desolate cliff top in the Orkneys or Land’s End, before he disappeared. Mrs Ghast would be very lavish at first. She would be ever so hospitable, to start with. At times I speculated whether Ghast might be a thing, a powerful magnetic mineral to which I alone was allergic. But pondering the question at the dead of night, I felt sure again it was a person.

The situation had reached Gothic proportions. I decided to pursue the monster, hunt it down before it hunted me, and thus I came to do so. I took to frequenting the sort of place which is not my sort of place at all: cosy tea shops in Hampstead, Kensington, and even Ealing, with names like Araminta’s Kettle or The Ginger Jug. Here, in these Jugs and Kettles, lavishes ghast flourishes most. And it rages most between the afternoon hours of four and five-thirty. My plan was simple: all I had to do was sit and listen, take notes of everything I heard by way of lavishes, do it into English and, when my collection reached a decent size, extract the common factors of sense. In this way I would locate lavishes ghast, its origin, nature, nationality of parents and present address.

The first afternoon, this seemed easy. I fixed on a mother and daughter having tea. ‘They’re very lavish here,’ said the mother, beaming on the cakes as the daughter replied, ‘But the tea’s ghastly.’ I took this to be a good omen. But within a few days sinister complications like ‘lavishes ghast lavishes’ began to set in. A creature comprising Alex’s car, aspects of art, anarchist bard, amorous chars, hand on my heart, Battersea Park, masses of stars, passion aha! remained beyond my comprehension.

My last tea shop was ominously called The African Palm by virtue of a large tough fern in the window. I chose a table next to a young couple who were conversing audibly.

‘What was the lavishes ghast on lavishes ghast like?’ rattled the girl.

‘No, thanks,’ said the youth, ‘I’ll have a bun.’

The girl looked cross. He had obviously misunderstood her, had this likable young man. She repeated her question. Practice had given me a flair for rapid decoding: ‘What was the Charity Dance on Saturday last like?’

‘Ghast!’ he replied. ‘Lavishes!’

‘I only went to please my mother,’ he added obligingly, from which I deduced that the dance had been ghastly and shattering. I now craned eagerly. The girl gave utterance again … She meant, surely, ‘Harriet’s mannerly ma’s having a bath at last.’ No doubt Harriet’s ma lived in a boarding-house where there was so little hot water, and she so mannerly, that she had always sacrificed her bath to the other residents.

But the young man was apparently a little deaf. The girl had to repeat her piece of information over and over. The arrogant heart of the guard carried him far too far … Tragic that happy young Mark fancies his chance at art … If the tea shop had been an opium den the nightmare quality of the afternoon could not have been improved upon. ‘Lavishes lavishes ghast lavishes ghast ghast,’ the girl insisted. I really believed I had it then: ‘Sad that a man like Papa had to depart fast.’ This was obviously connected with the charity dance. An emerald bracelet had been missed. Papa, who was present, was also, later, missed. I could see Papa, small and round, skipping on to the plane — no, the Golden Arrow at Victoria Station. Papa, feeling for the bulge in his breast pocket, dressed so businesslike, but emanating such a sublime… Ma was prostrate. His firm were already going into the accounts. Sad that a man like Papa…