Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

‘Well, of course!’ I said. ‘Of course I’ll lend you half-a-crown. I’ve got plenty of change. I didn’t understand and I got the message all wrong; I thought she wanted it for herself and that you wouldn’t like that.’

Jennie looked doubtful. I funked explaining the whole of Marjie’s act. It isn’t easy to give evidence against a child of five.

‘Oh, they never ask for money,’ said Jennie. ‘I would never allow them to ask anyone for anything. They never do that.’

‘I’m sure they don’t,’ I said, floundering a bit.

Jennie was much too kind to point out that this was what I had just been suggesting. She was altogether too nice to let the incident make any difference during my stay. That night, Simon came home just after six. He had bought two elaborate spinning-tops for the twins. These tops had to be wound up, and they sang a tinny little tune while they spun.

‘You’ll ruin those children,’ said Jennie.

Simon enjoyed himself that evening, playing with the tops.

‘You’ll break them before the children even see them,’ said Jennie.

Simon put them away. But when one of his friends, a pilot from a nearby aerodrome, looked in later in the evening, Simon brought out the tops again; and the two men played delightedly with them, occasionally peering into the works and discussing what made the tops go; while Jennie and I made scornful comments.

Little Marjie and Jeff were highly pleased with the tops next morning, but by the afternoon they had tired of them and gone on to something more in the romping line. After dinner Simon produced a couple of small gadgets. They were the things that go inside musical cigarette-boxes, he explained, and he thought they would fit into the spinning-tops, so that the children could have a change of tune.

‘When they get fed up with “Pop Goes the Weasel”,’ he said, ‘they can have “In and Out the Windows”.’

He got out one of the tops to take it apart and fit in the new tune. But when he had put the pieces together again, the top wouldn’t sing at all. Jennie tried to help, but we couldn’t get ‘In and Out the Windows’. So Simon patiently unpieced the top, put the gadgets aside, and said they would do for something else.

‘That’s Jeff’s top,’ said Jennie, in her precise way, looking at the pieces on the carpet. ‘Jeff’s is the red one, Marjie has the blue.’

Once more, Simon started piecing the toy together, with the old tune inside it, while Jennie and I went to make some tea.

‘I’ll bet it won’t work now,’ said Jennie with a giggle.

When we returned, Simon was reading and the top was gone.

‘Did you fix it?’ said Jennie.

‘Yes,’ he said absently. ‘I’ve put it away.’

It rained the next morning and the twins were indoors.

‘Why not play with your tops?’ Jennie said.

‘Your Daddy took one of them to pieces last night,’ Jennie informed them, ‘and put all the pieces back again.’

Jennie had the stoic in her nature and did not believe in shielding her children from possible disappointment.

‘He was hoping,’ she added, ‘to fit new tunes inside it. But it wouldn’t work with the new tune … But he’s going to try again.’

They took this quite hopefully, and I didn’t see much of them for some hours although, when the rain stopped and I went outside, I saw the small boy spinning his bright-red top on the hard concrete of the garage floor. About noon little Jeff came running into the kitchen where Jennie was baking. He was howling hard, his small face distorted with grief. He held in both arms the spare parts of his top.

‘My top!’ he sobbed. ‘My top!’

‘Goodness,’ said Jennie, ‘what did you do to it? Don’t cry, poor wee pet.’

‘I found it,’ he said. ‘I found my top all in pieces under that box behind Daddy’s car.

‘My top,’ he wept. ‘Daddy’s broken my top.’ Marjie came in and looked on unmoved, hugging her blue top.

‘But you were playing with the top this morning!’ I said. ‘Isn’t yours the red one? You were spinning it.’

‘I was playing with the blue one,’ he wept. ‘And then I found my own top all broken. Daddy broke it.’

Jennie sat them up to their dinner, and Jeff presently stopped crying.

Jennie was cheerful about it, although she said to me afterwards, ‘I think Simon might have told me he couldn’t put it together again. But isn’t it just like a man? They’re that proud of themselves, men.

As I have said, it isn’t easy to give evidence against a child of five. And especially to its mother.

Jennie tactfully put the pieces of the top back in the box behind the garage. They were still there, rusty and untouched, in a pile of other rusty things, seven years later, for I saw them. Jennie got skipping ropes for the twins that day and when they had gone to bed, she removed Marjie’s top from the toy-cupboard. ‘It’ll only make wee Jeff cry to see it,’ she said to me. ‘We’ll just forget about the tops.

‘And I don’t want Simon to find out that I found him out,’ she giggled. I don’t think tops were ever mentioned again in the household. If they were, I am sure Jennie would change the subject. An affectionate couple; it was impossible not to feel kindly towards them; not so, towards the children.

I was abroad for some years after that, and heard sometimes from Jennie at first; later, we seldom wrote, and then not at all. I had been back in London for about a year when I met Jennie in Baker Street. She was excited about her children, now aged twelve, who had both won scholarships and were going off to boarding schools in the autumn.

‘Come and see them while they’ve got their holidays,’ she said. ‘We often talk about you, Simon and I.’ It was good to hear Jennie’s kind voice again.

I went to stay for a few days in August. I felt sure the twins must have grown out of their peculiarities, and I was right. Jennie brought them to meet me at the station. They had grown rather quiet; both still extremely good-looking. These children possessed an unusual composure for their years. They were well-mannered as Jennie had been at their age, but without Jennie’s shyness.

Simon was pruning something in the garden when we got to the house.

‘Why, you haven’t changed a bit,’ he said. ‘A bit thinner maybe. Nice to see you so flourishing.’

Jennie went to make tea. In these surroundings she seemed to have endured no change; and she had made no change in her ways in the seven years since my last visit.

The twins started chatting about their school life, and Simon asked me questions I could not answer about the size of the population of the places I had lived in abroad. When Jennie returned, Simon leapt off to wash.

‘I’m sorry Simon said that,’ said Jennie to me when he had gone. ‘I don’t think he should have said it, but you know how tactless men are.

‘Said what?’ I asked.

‘About you looking thin and ill,’ said Jennie.

‘Oh, I didn’t take it that way!’ I said.

‘Didn’t you?’ said Jennie with an understanding smile. ‘That was sweet of you.’

‘Thin and haggard indeed!’ said Jennie as she poured out the tea, and the twins discreetly passed the sandwiches.

That night I sat up late talking to the couple. Jennie retained the former habit of making a tea-session at nine o’clock and I accompanied her to the kitchen. While she was talking, she packed a few biscuits neatly into a small green box.

‘There’s the kettle boiling,’ said Jennie, going out with the box in her hand. ‘You know where the teapot is. I won’t be a minute.’

She returned in a few seconds, and we carried off our tray.

It was past one before we parted for the night. Jennie had taken care to make me comfortable. She had put fresh flowers on the dressing-table, and there, beside my bed, was the little box of biscuits she had thought-fully provided. I munched one while I looked out of the window at the calm country sky, ruminating upon Jennie’s perennial merits. I have always regarded the lack of neurosis in people with awe. I am too much with brightly intelligent, highly erratic friends. In this Jennie, I decided, reposed a mystery which I and my like could not fathom.