Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

But who was Lavishes Ghast? Could it be that Papa…

At that moment someone entered the shop. The girl at the table looked up. Pamela!’ she called out. ‘Halo, Pamela,’ said the young man, we were just talking about you.’ Well, it had all been about Pamela and, for all I knew, her angular charms. As it happened I knew this Pamela. She came and spoke to me, then introduced me to her friends, and we stuck together for the evening.

We went to a pub and then to another. Then we went to a pub that served those watery meals comprising something with two vegetables, and decided we were hungry enough to take it. Two men sat at the table nearest ours. As the larger man ordered a rum with his supper, I noticed his voice above the hubbub from the bar, oiled and purring, like a cat of Rolls Royce make. He wore a broad ring studded with onyx, and although his clothes were dark, he looked profuse, his face, fruitlike above the white leaves of his collar, glowing with higher and richer thoughts. He said nothing to his companion who, poor thing, seemed distressed; this man, nervous and haggard, made repeated movements with his throat, as though swallowing down some dreadful sorrow.

The landlord approached the pair. ‘How’s business?’ he said with a more-than-hearty laugh. The large man seemed delighted by the question. ‘Lavishes ghast!’ he proclaimed with a deep ripple of wheel-borne laughter. His friend closed his eyelids and softly ordered a beer.

The waitress came along with our plates splashing over each other. She set them down and said, jerking her head to indicate the two men, ‘Did you hear that? I don’t call that a joke. Very bad taste.’ She explained that the men worked in the funeral parlour around the corner, and that it was the landlord’s indelicate habit to inquire how business was, and the big fellow’s habit to reply, ‘Absolutely marvellous.’

Suddenly I saw the whole thing quite clearly and the weight lifted for ever: this was Mr Lavishes and that was the unfortunate Mr Ghast. My friends were smiling at the landlord’s joke, and I, secure in my private enlightenment, smiled too, and continued to work out the simple details. The partners had begun as Lavishes, Ghast & Co., now known generally as Lavishes Ghast, Undertakers. Mr Lavishes preferred to deal with the bereaved relatives, leaving Mr Ghast to see to the actual body.

Lavishes Ghast. I like to think of Mr Lavishes and Mr Ghast performing, each in his own way, their selfless functions, so necessary to all. I feel it is rather touching, and only right, that when we gather together at parties we should pass those hours, as we do, in fervent acclamation of the Lavishes Ghast combine. In their way they are as much the backbone of the country as is the Housewife or the Coldstream Guard. And it is a memory to be cherished, that evening at the pub, when they settled to their late-snatched supper, in a silence of mutual understanding, interrupted only when shrunken Mr Ghast looked up from his plate, and having brokenly uttered the national phrase to which he had contributed his name, swallowed a mouthful of cabbage, alas.

The Young Man Who Discovered the Secret of Life

The main fact was, he was haunted by a ghost about five feet high when unfurled and standing upright. For the ghost unfurled itself from the top drawer of a piece of furniture that stood in the young man’s bed-sitting room every night, or failing that, every morning. The young man was a plasterer’s apprentice, or so he claimed.

But I have been told on good authority that this is absolutely absurd. There is no such thing: plasterers do not have apprentices. Ben, as the young man was called, was very concerned when I wrote to point this out. He decidedly preferred to change his status to that of ‘bricklayer’s’ or, better still, ‘kerblayer’s apprentice’, even though this meant putting himself in an unemployed category while doing a bit of plastering on the side to make a weekly wage of sorts.

I myself had only heard of Ben through correspondence, for he had written to me a most unusual letter, care of my publisher. In it, the then ‘plasterer’s apprentice’ told about the visitations of the ghost. Normally, I would have torn up the letter; I only replied to him because one of his statements contained the challenging one that through his ghost Ben had discovered, or was by way of discovering ‘the secret of life’. In my reply I was cautious about the ‘apparition’, as I called his ghost, but I more definitely pointed out that ‘the secret of life’ was most likely to mean the secret of his own personal life, not life in general. The lives of people hold many secrets, I emphasized. There was possibly no one ‘secret’ applying to us all. So, anyway, I wished him luck, and mailed off the letter. Goodbye.

But no, it wasn’t goodbye, as I might have foreseen. It was true that I didn’t write to him for some time, but he continued to write letters to me in some inexplicable need that he felt to express his odd experiences, real or imagined as the case might be.

According to Ben’s letters to me, his greatest problem with the ghost was now blackmail and jealousy, for the ghost was truly jealous of Ben’s girlfriend.

‘I can haunt whoever and wherever I wish,’ the ghost told Ben. ‘It is easy for me to inform the whole of your acquaintance that you are only a plasterer looking for a steady job, and as for being a kerblayer or even a bricklayer, that is far from the truth.’

‘Please yourself who you haunt,’ said Ben. ‘I am totally indifferent. The fact remains that I am a kerblayer at heart, whatever the nature of the temporary job as plasterer, etc., etc., that I am economically forced to accept from time to time.

‘And what is “etc., etc.”?’ said the ghost nastily. ‘Do you mind explaining?’

‘Curl up and return to your drawer,’ Ben bade him. ‘And mind you don’t crush my pyjamas.’

‘Your pyjamas,’ said the ghost, ‘have no place in the top drawer where I come from. They are not pure silk, they are Marks & Spencer’s.’

Ben was secretly very anxious lest it should be known he was not a kerblayer after all. But he was a brave fellow. ‘Get back to your place or else,’ he said.

The ghost curled up again, murmuring, ‘At least you admit that I have a right to be here. As it happens I know what is going to win the three-thirty tomorrow. It is Bartender’s Best.’

True enough that horse won the race and Ben was furious with himself for failing to take the tip, for he liked to play the horses when he had some money.

‘Any more tips?’ he asked the ghost that night.

‘I thought you would ask that question,’ said the ghost. ‘But as you know, your girlfriend doesn’t like betting. If you give her up I’ll tell no one your secret and I’ll give you good racing tips.

‘Do you know what?’ said Ben. ‘You are getting on my nerves. You are the result of stale air, neither more nor less. Stale air becomes radioactive. It becomes luminous. If I open the window you will gradually disappear.

‘Not me,’ said the ghost. ‘Not me, I won’t.’

‘I can’t think of any more mindless occupation than to be a ghost in that post-mortem way you have in coming and going. So very unnecessary. I could have you psychoanalysed away.’

Enter the story Genevieve, young and fair, a designer of scarecrows, Ben’s girlfriend: Ben was convinced that her occupational status, the only type of status that apparently he knew, was beneath his, particularly now that he had become ‘Profession: kerblayer’s apprentice’. The passion with which the ghost despised Genevieve could only be matched by Ben’s genuine and desperate love for her. In the meantime the ghost continued to unfurl its five feet and to give Ben advice like ‘psychoanalyse your crazy pavements.