Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

‘You must have a Season of course,’ said Mrs Pridham. ‘Have you arranged anything?’

‘I’m here for two years at least.’ Then she remembered about the London Season, and said, ‘No, I have nothing arranged. But my uncle has written to various friends.’

‘It’s getting a little late in the year,’ said Mrs Pridham.

‘Really,’ said Daphne, ‘I just want to see England. I’d like to see London. I’d like to see the Tower, and Uncle Chakata’s friends.’

‘I shall take you to the Tower tomorrow afternoon,’ said Mr Pridham.

He did, and afterwards they went for a spin round Richmond and Kingston. He pulled up at a pleasant spot. ‘Daphne,’ he said, ‘I love you.’ And he pressed his lips of sixty summers to hers.

As soon as she could disengage herself, she casually wiped her mouth with her handkerchief— casually, for she did not want to hurt his feelings. However, she told him she was engaged to be married to someone in the Colony.

‘Oh dear, I’ve done the wrong thing. Have I done the wrong thing?’

‘Daphne is engaged to a lucky fellow in Africa,’ he said at dinner that night. Mole was present. He looked at Daphne. She looked back helplessly. Mrs Pridham looked at her husband, and said to Daphne, ‘Before you do anything, you must have your London Season. Stay six weeks with us, do. I’ve brought out girls before. It’s too late of course to do anything much but —’

‘Do stay with us,’ said Mr Pridham.

Later, when Daphne explained the tale of her ‘engagement’ to Mole, he said, ‘You can’t stay with the Pridhams. I know someone else you can stay with, the mother of a friend of mine.’

Mrs Pridham looked said when Daphne told her she could not prolong her visit. For the rest of the week she unmistakably cast Daphne into her husband’s way, frequently left them alone together, and often arranged to be picked up somewhere in the car, so that Daphne was obliged to dine with Mr Pridham alone.

Daphne mentioned to Mole, ‘She hasn’t the least suspicion of what he’s like. In fact, she seems to throw the man at me.’

‘She wants to hot him up,’ said Mole. ‘There are plenty of women who behave like that. They get young girls to the house simply in order to give the old man ideas. Then they get rid of the girls.’

‘Oh, I see.’

She went to stay as a paying guest with the mother of Mole’s friend, Michael. It was arranged by letter.

Michael Casse was thin and gangling with an upturned nose. He had been put to stockbroking with an uncle, but without success. He giggled a great deal. His mother, with whom he lived, took a perverse pride in his stupidity. ‘Michael’s hopelessness,’ she told Daphne, ‘is really…’ During the war, his mother told her, she had been living in Berkshire.

Michael came home on leave. She sent him out with the ration book one day after lunch to buy a packet of tea. He did not return until next morning. He handed his mother the tea, explaining that he had been held up by the connections.

‘What connections?’ said his mother.

‘Oh, the trains, London, you know.’

And it transpired that he had gone all the way to Fortnum’s for the tea, it never having occurred to him that tea could be bought in the village, nor indeed anywhere else but Fortnum’s. Daphne thought that very English.

Michael now lived with his mother in her fiat in Regent’s Park. Greta Casse was as gangling as her son, but she gangled effectively and always put her slender five foot ten into agreeable poses, so that even her stooping shoulders and hollow chest, her bony elbows akimbo, were becoming. She spoke with a nasal drawl. She lived on alimony and the rewards of keeping PGs.

She took vastly too much money from Daphne, who suspected as much, but merely surmised that Greta Casse was, like her son, stupid, living in an unreal world where money hardly existed, and so one might easily charge one’s PGs too much. Daphne frequently slipped out to Lyons for a sandwich, so hungry did she go. She assumed at first that society women were simply not brought up to the food idea, but when she saw Greta Casse tucking in at anyone else’s expense, she amended her opinion, and put Greta’s domestic parsimony down to her vagueness about materialistic things. This was a notion which Greta fostered in various ways, such as always forgetting to give Daphne the change of a pound, or going off for the day and leaving nothing in the house for lunch.

That she was, however, a society woman, in a sense that Daphne’s relations were not, was without doubt. Molly and Linda had been presented, it was true. And Daphne had seen photographs of her mother and Aunt Sarah beplumed and robed, in the days when these things were done properly. But they were decidedly not society women. Daphne mused often on Greta Casse, niece of a bishop and cousin of an earl, her distinctive qualities. She went to see Pooh-bah one weekend, and mentioned Greta Casse to a Miss Barrow, a notable spinster of the district who had come to tea. Daphne was surprised to learn that this woman, in her old mannish Burberry, her hands cracked with gardening, her face cracked with the weather, had been a contemporary of Greta’s. They had been to various schools together, had been presented the same year.

‘How odd,’ Daphne remarked to Pooh-bah later, ‘that two such different people as Mrs Casse and Miss Barrow should have been brought up in the same way.

He gave a verbal assent, ‘I suppose so, yes,’ but clearly he did not understand what she meant about it being odd.

Back she went to Regent’s Park. Greta Casse arranged a dinner party for Daphne at a West End restaurant, followed by an all-night session in a night-club. About twenty young people were invited, most of them in their early teens, which made Daphne feel old, and she was not compensated by the presence of a few elders of Greta’s generation. Michael came, of course. Englishman though he was, Daphne could not take him very seriously.

The party was followed by another, and that by another. ‘Can’t we invite Mole?’ Daphne said.

‘Well,’ said Greta, ‘the whole idea is for you to meet new people. But of course, if you like…’

The bill for these parties used up half of Daphne’s annual allowance. Luncheons, at which she met numerous women friends of Greta’s, used up the other half. Daphne longed to explain to Mrs Casse that she had not understood what was involved by becoming her lodger. She did not want to be entertained, for she had merely counted on somewhere jolly to stay. Daphne had not the courage to put this to Greta who was so uncertain, precarious, slippery, indefinite and cold. She wrote to Chakata for money. ‘Of course,’ she wrote, ‘when I’ve had my fun I’ll take a job.’

‘I hope you are seeing something of England,’ he replied when he sent his cheque. ‘My advice to you is to go on a coach tour. I hear they are excellent, and a great advance on my time, when there was nothing of that sort.’ She rarely took much notice of Chakata’s advice, for so much of it was inapplicable. ‘Do introduce yourself to Merrivale at the bank,’ he had written. ‘He will give you sherry in the parlour, as he used to do me when I was your age.’ On inquiring for Mr Merrivale at the bank, Daphne was unsuccessful. ‘Ever heard of a chap called Merrivale?’ the clerks asked each other. ‘Sure it’s this branch?’ they asked Daphne.

‘Oh yes. He used to be the manager.

‘Sorry, madam, no one’s heard of him here. Must have been a way back.’

‘Oh, I see.’

Daphne got into the habit of ignoring Chakata’s questions, ‘Have you been to Hampton Court?’

‘Did you call on Merrivale at the bank? He will give you sherry…’