Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

‘I’ve missed an important telephone call, a vital —’

‘Can’t you telephone to your friend from here?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s impossible, it’s too bad.’

Jonathan did not have a telephone in his studio. I wondered whether I should send him a wire and even drafted one, ‘Sorry love your letter arrived too late was out please ring at once love Gloria.’ I tore this up on the grounds that I couldn’t afford the expense. And something about the torment of the affair attracted me, it was better than boredom. I decided that Jonathan would surely ring again during the afternoon. I prepared, even, to sit in the little office by the telephone with my sense of suspense and vigilance, all afternoon. But, ‘I’ll be here till five o’clock,’ said the secretary; ‘of course, of course, I’ll send for you if the call comes.’

And so there I was by the window waiting for the summons. At three o’clock I washed and made up my face and changed my frock as if this were a propitiation to whatever stood between Jonathan’s telephone call and me. I decided to stroll round the green-gold courtyard where I could not fail to miss any messenger. Once round, and still no one came. Only Miss Pettigrew emerged from the cloisters, crossing the courtyard towards me.

I was so bemused by my need to talk to Jonathan that I thought, as she approached, ‘Perhaps they’ve sent her to call me.’ Immediately I remembered, that was absurd, for she carried no messages ever. But she continued so directly towards me that I thought again; ‘She’s going to speak.’ She had her dark eyes on my face.

I made as if to pass her, not wishing to upset her by inviting approach. But she stopped me. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘I have a message for you.

I was so relieved that I forgot to be surprised by her speaking.

‘Am I wanted on the telephone?’ I said, half-ready to run across to the office.

‘No, I have a message for you,’ she said.

‘What’s the message?’

‘The Lord is risen,’ she said.

It was not until I had got over my disappointment that I felt the shock of her having spoken, and recalled an odd focus of her eyes that I had not seen before. ‘After all,’ I thought, ‘she has a religious mania. She is different from the neurotics, but not because she is sane.’

‘Gloria!’ — this was the girl from the repository poking her head round the door. She beckoned to me, and, still disturbed, I idled over to her.

‘I say, did I see Miss Pettigrew actually speaking to you, or was I dreaming?’

‘You were dreaming.’ If I had said otherwise the news would have bristled round the monastery. It would have seemed a betrayal to reveal this first crack in Miss Pettigrew’s control. The pilgrims would have pitied her more if they had known of it, they would have respected her less. I could not bear to think of their heads shaking sorrowfully over Miss Pettigrew’s vital ‘The Lord is risen.

‘But surely,’ this girl pursued, ‘she stopped beside you just now’.

‘You’ve got Miss Pettigrew on the brain,’ I said. ‘Leave her alone, poor soul.’

‘Poor soul!’ said the girl. ‘I don’t know about poor soul. There’s nothing wrong with that one. She’s got foolish medieval ideas, that’s all.’

‘There’s nothing to be done with her,’ I said.

And yet it was not long before something had to be done with Miss Pettigrew. From the Sunday of the fourth week of my stay she went off food. It was not till supper-time on the Monday that her absence was noticed from the refectory.

‘Anyone seen Miss Pettigrew?’

‘No, she hasn’t been down here for two days.’

‘Does she eat in the town, perhaps?’

‘No, she hasn’t left the Abbey.’

A deputation with a tray of food was sent to her room. There was no answer. The door was bolted from the inside. But I heard her moving calmly as ever in her room that evening.

Next morning she came in to breakfast after Mass, looking distant and grey, but still very neat. She took up a glass of milk, lifted the crust end of the bread from the board and carried them shakily off to her room. When she did not appear for lunch the cook tried her room again, without success. The door was bolted, there was no answer.

I saw Miss Pettigrew again at Mass next morning, kneeling a little in front of me, resting her head upon her missal as if she could not bear the weight of head on neck. When at last she left the chapel she walked extremely slowly but without halting in her measure. Squackle-wackle ran to help her down the steps. Miss Pettigrew stopped and looked at her, inclining her head in recognition, but clearly rejecting her help.

The doctor was waiting in her room. I heard later that he asked her many questions, used many persuasives, but she simply stared right through him. The Abbot and several of the monks visited her, but by then she had bolted the door again, and though they tempted her with soups and beef broth. Miss Pettigrew would not open.

News went round that her relatives had been sent for. The news went round that she had no relatives to send for. It was said she had been certified insane and was to be taken away.

She did not rise next morning at her usual seven o’clock. It was not till after twelve that I heard her first movement, and the protracted sounds of her slow rising and dressing. A tiny clatter — that would be her shoe falling out of her weak hands; I knew she was bending down, trying again. My pulse was pattering so rapidly that I had to take more of my sedative than usual, as I listened to this slow deliberated performance. Heavy rhythmic rain had started to ping on the roof.

‘Neurotics never go mad,’ my friends had always told me. Now I realized the distinction between neurosis and madness, and in my agitation I half-envied the woman beyond my bedroom wall, the sheer cool sanity of her behaviour within the limits of her impracticable mama. Only the very mad, I thought, can come out with the information ‘The Lord is risen’, in the same factual way as one might say, ‘You are wanted on the telephone,’ regardless of the time and place.

A knock at my door. I opened it, still shaking with my nerves. It was Jennifer. She whispered, with an eye on the partition dividing me from Miss Pettigrew,

‘Come along, Gloria. They say you are to come away for half an hour. The nurses are coming to fetch her.’

‘What nurses?’

‘From the asylum. And there will be men with a stretcher. We haven’t to distress ourselves, they say.’

I could see that Jennifer was agog. She was more transparent than I was. I could see she was longing to stay and overhear, watch out of the windows, see what would happen. I was overcome with disgust and indignation. Why should Jennifer want to satisfy her curiosity? She believed everyone was ‘the same’, she didn’t acknowledge the difference of things, what right had she to possess curiosity? My case was different.

‘I shall stay here,’ I said in a normal voice, signifying that I wasn’t going to participate in any whispering. Jennifer disappeared, annoyed.

Insanity was my great sort of enemy at that time. And here, clothed in the innocence and dignity of Miss Pettigrew, was my next-door enemy being removed by ambulance. I would not miss it. Afterwards I learned that Jennifer too was lurking around when the ambulance arrived. So were most of the neurotics.

The ambulance came round the back. My window looked only on the front but my ears were windows. I heard a woman’s voice, then in reply the voice of one of our priests. Heavy footsteps and something bumping on the stairs and strange men’s voices ascending.

‘What’s her name, did you say?’

‘Marjorie Pettigrew.’