Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

‘The ghost is a terrible snob,’ Ben wrote. ‘He makes me feel great and terrible —’

In fact, Ben changed his patronizing attitude towards the girl only after Genevieve borrowed his sun-hat, his jeans and one of his shirts to make up one of her scarecrows. She painted a turnip in the likeness of Ben’s face. When she had set up this scarecrow in a field everyone knew that it was modelled on Ben. Everyone smiled. The terrible snob ghost came to report this to Ben, adding that a cow’s milk had already been turned by the scarecrow.

On the previous day Ben had won twenty-four pounds on a horse, quite on his own hunch. So he skipped his usual visit to the job centre and took a bus out of town to the field where Genevieve’s handiwork was flapping. Two cars had drawn up by the side of the road, and the occupants were admiring the work of art, as one of them called it. ‘It’s the image of a young builder’s mate who once worked on my property,’ she said.

So instead of taking the effigy amiss Ben was full of admiration for Genevieve. He rang her up and made her fix a date for their marriage, never mind that he was at present out of work.

The ghost unfurled himself again that night, but when he heard of Ben’s proposal to Genevieve, he returned to the top drawer from whence he came, curled up and disappeared. ‘This quenching of the ghost,’ Ben wrote, ‘is to me the secret of life.’ He said ‘quenching’ for he felt the ghost had been thirsty for his soul, and had in fact drunk his fill.

Ben never again won on the horses, although he became a master-bricklayer, a prosperous man, specializing in crazy-paving.

Daisy Overend

It is hardly ever that I think of her, but sometimes, if I happen to pass Clarges Street or Albemarle Street on a sunny afternoon, she comes to mind. Or if, in a little crowd waiting to cross the road, I hear behind me two women meet, and the one exclaim:

‘Darling!’ (or ‘Bobbie!’ or ‘Goo!’) and the other answer: ‘Goo!’ (or ‘Billie!’ or ‘Bobbie!’ or ‘Darling!’) — if I hear these words, spoken in a certain trill which betokens the period 1920—29, I know that I have by chance entered the world of Daisy Overend, Bruton Street, W1.

Ideally, these Bobbies and Darlings are sheathed in short frocks, the hems of which dangle about their knees like seaweed, the waistlines of which encircle their hips, loose and effortless, following the droop of shoulder and mouth. Ideally, the whole is upheld by a pair of shiny silk stockings of a bright hue known as, but not resembling, a peach.

But in reality it is only by the voice you can tell them. The voice harks back to days bright and young and unredeemable whence the involuntary echoes arise — Billie!… Goo!… heavenly!… divine! like the motto and crest which adorn the letter paper of a family whose silver is pawned and forgotten.

Daisy Overend, small, imperious, smart, was to my mind the flower and consummation of her kind, and this is not to discount the male of the species Daisy Overend, with his wee face, blue eyes, bad teeth and nerves. But if you have met Mrs Overend, you have as good as met him too, he is so unlike her, and yet so much her kind.

I met her, myself, in the prodigious and lovely summer of 1947. Very charming she was. A tubular skirt clung to her hips, a tiny cap to her hair, and her hair clung, bronzed and shingled, to her head, like the cup of a toy egg of which her face was the other half. Her face was a mere lobe. Her eyes were considered to be expressive and they expressed avarice in various forms; the pupils were round and watchful. Mrs Overend engaged me for three weeks to help her with some committee work. As you will see, we parted in three days.

I found that literature and politics took up most of Daisy’s days and many of her nights. She wrote a regular column in a small political paper and she belonged to all the literary societies. Thus, it was the literature of politics and the politics of literature which occupied Daisy, and thus she bamboozled many politicians who thought she was a writer, and writers who believed her to be a political theorist. But these activities failed to satisfy, that is to say, intoxicate her.

Now, she did not drink. I saw her sipping barley water while her guests drank her gin. But Daisy had danced the Charleston in her youth with a royal prince, and of this she assured me several times, speaking with swift greed while an alcoholic look came over her.

‘Those times were divine,’ she boozily concluded, ‘they were ripping.’ And I realized she was quite drunk with the idea. Normally as precise as a bird, she reached out blunderingly for the cigarettes, knocking the whole lot over. Literature and politics failed to affect her in this way, though she sat on many committees. Therefore she had taken — it is her expression — two lovers: one an expert, as she put it, on politics, and the other a poet.

The political expert, Lotti, was a fair Central European, an exiled man. The skin of his upper lip was drawn taut across his top jaw; this gave Lotti the appearance, together with his high cheekbones, of having had his face lifted. But it was not so; it was a natural defect which made his smile look like a baring of the teeth. He was perhaps the best of the lot that I met at Daisy Overend’s.

Lotti could name each member of every Western Cabinet which had sat since the Treaty of Versailles. Daisy found this invaluable for her monthly column. Never did Lotti speak of these men but with contempt. He was a member of three shadow cabinets.

On the Sunday which, as it turned out, was my last day with Daisy, she laid aside her library book and said to Lotti:

‘I’m bored with Cronin.

Lotti, to whom all statesmen were as the ash he was just then flicking to the floor, looked at her all amazed.

‘Daisy, mei gurl, you crazy?’ he said.

‘A Cronin!’ he said, handing me an armful of air to convey the full extent of his derision. ‘She is bored with a Cronin.’

At that moment, Daisy’s vexed misunderstood expression reminded me that her other lover, the poet Tom Pfeffer, had brought the same look to her face two days before. When, rushing into the flat as was her wont, she said, gasping, to Tom, ‘Things have been happening in the House.’ — Tom, who was reading the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, looked up. ‘Nothing’s been happening in the house,’ he assured her.

Tom Pfeffer is dead now. Mrs Overend told me the story of how she rescued him from lunacy, and I think Tom believed this. It is true she had prevented his being taken to a mental home for treatment.

The time came when Tom wanted, on an autumn morning, a ticket to Burton-on-Trent to visit a friend, and he wanted this more than he wanted a room in Mrs Overend’s flat and regular meals. In his own interests she refused, obliterating the last traces of insurrection by giving Lotti six pound notes, clean from the bank, in front of Tom.

How jealous Tom Pfeffer was of Lotti, how indifferent was Lotti to him! But on this last day that I spent with Mrs Overend, the poet was fairly calm, although there were signs of the awful neurotic dance of his facial muscles which were later to distort him utterly before he died insane.

Daisy was preparing for a party, the reason for my presence on a Sunday, and for the arrival at five o’clock of her secretary Miss Rilke, a displaced European, got cheap. When anyone said to Daisy ‘Is she related to the poet Rilke?’ Daisy replied, ‘Oh, I should think so,’ indignant almost, that it should be doubted.

‘Be an angel,’ said Daisy to Miss Rilke when she arrived, ‘run down to the cafe and get me two packets of twenty. Is it still raining? How priceless the weather is. Take my awning.’