Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

‘Awning?’

‘Umbrella, umbrella, umbrella,’ said Daisy, jabbing her finger at it fractiously.

Like ping-pong, Miss Rilke’s glance met Lotti’s, and Lotti’s hers. She took the umbrella and went.

‘What are you looking at?’ Daisy said quickly to Lotti.

‘Nothing,’ said Tom Pfeffer, thinking he was being addressed and looking up from his book.

‘Not you,’ said Daisy.

‘Do you mean me?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said, and kept her peace.

Miss Rilke returned to say that the shop would give Mrs Overend no more credit.

‘This is the end,’ said Daisy as she shook out the money from her purse. ‘Tell them I’m livid.’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Rilke, looking at Lotti.

‘What are you looking at?’ Daisy demanded of her.

‘Looking at?’

‘Have you got the right money?’ Daisy said.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, go.’

‘I think,’ said Daisy when she had gone, ‘she’s a bit dotty owing to her awful experiences.’

Nobody replied.

‘Don’t you think so?’ she said to Lotti.

‘Could be,’ said Lotti.

Tom looked up suddenly. ‘She’s bats,’ he hastened to say, ‘the silly bitch is bats.’

As soon as Miss Rilke returned Daisy started becking and calling in preparation for her party. Her papers, which lay on every plane surface in the room, were moved into her bedroom in several piles.

The drawing-room was furnished in a style which in many ways anticipated the members’ room at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Mrs Overend had recently got rid of her black-and-orange striped divans, cushions and sofas. In their place were curiously cut slabs, polygons, and three-legged manifestations of Daisy Overend’s personality, done in El Greco’s colours. As Daisy kept on saying, no two pieces were alike, and each was a contemporary version of a traditional design.

In her attempt to create a Contemporary interior she was, I felt, successful, and I was quite dazzled by its period charm. ‘A rare old Contemporary piece,’ some curio dealer, not yet born, might one day aver of Daisy’s citrine settle or her blue glass-topped telephone table, adding in the same breath and pointing elsewhere, ‘A genuine brass-bracket gas-jet, nineteenth century…’ But I was dreaming, and Daisy was working, shifting things, blowing the powdery dust off things. She trotted and tripped amid the pretty jigsaw puzzle of her furniture, making a clean sweep of letters, bills, pamphlets, and all that suggested a past or a future, with one exception. This was the photograph of Daisy Overend, haughty and beplumed in presentation dress, queening it over the Contemporary prospect of the light-grey grand piano.

Sometimes, while placing glasses and plates now here, now there, Daisy stopped short to take in the effect; and at this sign we all of us did the same. I realized then how silently and well did Daisy induce people to humour her. I discovered that the place was charged on a high voltage with the constant menace of a scene.

‘I’ve put the papers on your bed,’ said Miss Rilke from the bedroom.

‘Is she saying something?’ said Daisy, as if it were the last straw.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Rilke in a loud voice.

‘They are not to go on my bed,’ replied Daisy, having heard her in the first place.

‘She’s off her head, my dear,’ said the poet to his mistress, ‘putting your papers on your bed.’

‘Go and see what she’s doing,’ said Daisy to me.

I went, and there found Miss Rilke moving the papers off the bed on to the floor. I was impressed by the pinkness of Daisy’s bedroom. Where on earth did she get her taste in pink? Now this was not in the Contemporary style, nor was it in the manner of Daisy’s heyday, the 1920s. The kidney-shaped dressing-table was tricked out with tulle, unhappy spoiled stuff which cold cream had long ago stained, cigarettes burned, and various jagged objects ripped. In among the folds the original colour had survived here and there, and this fervid pink reminded me of a colour I had seen before, a pink much loved and worn by the women of the Malay colony at Cape Town.

No, this was not a bedroom of the twenties; it belonged, surely, to the first ten years of the century: an Edwardian bedroom. But then, even then, it was hardly the sort of room Daisy would have inherited, since neither her mother nor her grandmother had kicked her height at the Gaiety. No, it was Daisy’s own inarticulate exacting instinct which had bestowed on this room its frilly bed, its frilly curtains, the silken and sorry roses on its mantelpiece, and its all-but-perished powder-puffs. And all in pink, and all in pink. I did not solve the mystery of Daisy’s taste in bedrooms, not then nor at any time. For, whenever I provide a category of time and place for her, the evidence is in default. A plant of the twenties, she is also the perpetrator of that vintage bedroom. A lingering limb of the old leisured class, she is also the author of that pink room.

I devoted the rest of the evening to the destruction of Daisy’s party, I regret to say, and the subversion of her purpose in giving it.

Her purpose was the usual thing. She had joined a new international guild, and wanted to sit on the committee. Several Members of Parliament, a director of a mineral-water factory, a Brigadier-General who was also an Earl, a retired Admiral, some wives, a few women journalists, were expected. In addition, she had asked some of her older friends, those who were summoned to all her parties and whom she called her ‘basics’; they were the walkers-on or the chorus of Daisy’s social drama. There was also a Mr Jamieson, who was not invited but who played an unseen part as the chairman of the committee. He did not want Mrs Overend to sit on his committee. We were therefore assembled, though few guessed it, to inaugurate a campaign to remove from office this Mr Jamieson, whose colleagues and acquaintances presently began to arrive.

Parted from the drawing-room by folding doors was an ante-room leading out of the flat. I was put in charge of this room where a buffet had been laid. Here Daisy had repaired, when dressing for the party, to change her stockings. It was her habit to dress in every room in the house, anxiously moving from place to place. Miss Rilke had been sent on a tour of the premises to collect the discarded clothes, the comb, the lipstick from the various stations of Daisy’s journey; but the secretary had overlooked, on a table in the centre of this ante-room, a pair of black satin garters a quarter of a century old, each bearing a very large grimy pink disintegrating rosette.

Just before the first guests began to arrive, Daisy Overend saw her garters lying there.

‘Put those away,’ she commanded Miss Rilke.

The Admiral came first. I opened the door, while with swift and practised skill Daisy and Lotti began a lively conversation, in the midst of which the Admiral was intended to come upon them. Behind the Admiral came a Member of Parliament. They had never been to the house before, not being among Daisy’s ‘basics.

‘Do come in,’ said Miss Rilke, holding open the folding doors.

‘This way,’ said Tom Pfeffer from the drawing-room.

The two guests stared at the table. Daisy’s garters were still there. The Admiral, I could see, was puzzled. Not knowing Daisy very well, he thought, no doubt, she was eccentric. He tried to smile. The political man took rather longer to decide on an attitude. He must have concluded that the garters were not Daisy’s, for next I saw him looking curiously at me.

‘They are not mine,’ I rapidly said, ‘those garters.’

‘Whose are they?’ said the Admiral, drawing near.

‘They are Mrs Overend’s garters,’ I said, ‘she changed her stockings in here.’