Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

In the night Tom came and sat beside her.

‘You didn’t eat much,’ he said.

‘How did you know?’

‘I noticed.’

‘I didn’t feel up to the Christmas dinner,’ she said.

‘Would you like something now?’

‘A turkey sandwich. Let me go and ask the hostess.’

‘Leave it to me.

Tom told her he was now in the final stages of a divorce. His wife had no doubt had a hard time of it, his job taking him away so much. But she could have studied something. She wouldn’t learn, hated to learn.

And he was lonely. He asked her to marry him, and she wasn’t in the least surprised. But she said, ‘Oh, Tom, you don’t know me.

‘I think I do.’

‘We don’t know each other.’

‘Well, I think we should do.’

She said she would think about it. She said she would cancel her plans and come to spend some time in his flat in London at Camden Town.

‘I’ll have my time off within three days — by the end of the week,’ he said.

‘God, is he all right, is he reliable?’ she said to herself. ‘Am I safe with him? Who is he?’ But she was really carried away.

Around four in the morning she woke and found him beside her. He said, ‘It’s Boxing Day now. You’re a lovely girl.’

She had always imagined she was, but had always, so far, fallen timid when with men. She had experienced two brief love affairs in Australia, neither memorable. All alone in the first-class compartment with Tom, high in the air — this was reality, something to be remembered, the start of a new life.

‘I’ll give you the key of the flat,’ he said. ‘Go straight there. Nobody will disturb you. I’ve been sharing it with my young brother. But he’s away for about six weeks I should say. In fact he’s doing time. He got mixed up in a football row and he’s in for grievous bodily harm and affray. Only, the bodily harm wasn’t so grievous. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyway, the flat’s free for at least six weeks.’

At the airport, despite the early hour of ten past five in the morning, there was quite a crowd to meet the plane. Having retrieved her luggage, Cynthia pushed her trolley towards the exit. She had no expectation whatsoever that anyone would be there to meet her.

Instead, there was her father and his wife, Elaine; there was her mother with her husband Bill; crowding behind them at the barrier were her brother and his girlfriend, her cousin Moira’s cousin by marriage, and a few other men and women whom she did not identify, accompanied, too, by some children of about ten to fourteen. In fact her whole family, known and unknown, had turned out to meet Cynthia. How had they known the hour of her arrival? She had promised, only, to ring them when she got to England. ‘Your cousin Moira,’ said her father, ‘told us your flight. We wanted you home, you know that.’

She went first to her mother’s house. It was now Boxing Day but they had saved Christmas Day for her arrival. All the Christmas rituals were fully observed. The tree and the presents — dozens of presents for Cynthia. Her brother and his girl with some other cousins came over for Christmas dinner.

When they came to open the presents, Cynthia brought out from her luggage a number of packages she had brought from Australia for the occasion. Among them, labelled for her brother, was a plaster Nativity set, made in China.

‘What a nice one,’ said her brother. ‘One of the best I’ve ever seen, and not plastic.’

‘I got it in Moira’s boutique,’ Cynthia said. ‘She has very special things.

She talked a lot about Australia, its marvels. Then, at tea-time, they got down to her aunt’s will, of which Cynthia was an executor. Cynthia felt happy, in her element, as an executor to a will, for she was normally dreamy, not legally minded at all and now she felt the flattery of her aunt’s confidence in her. The executorship gave her some sort of authority in the family. She was now arranging, too, to spend New Year with her father and his second clan.

Her brother had set out the Nativity figures on a table. ‘I don’t know, she said, ‘why the mother and the father are kneeling beside the child; it seems so unreal.’ She didn’t hear what the others said, if anything, in response to this observation. She only felt a strange stirring of memory. There was to be a flat in Camden Town, but she had no idea of the address.

‘The plane stopped at Bangkok,’ she told them.

‘Did you get off?’

‘Yes, but you know you can’t get out of the airport. There was a coffee bar and a lovely shop.’

It was later that day, when she was alone, unpacking, in her room, that she rang the airline.

‘No,’ said a girl’s voice, ‘I don’t think there are curtains with yellow flowers in the first-class cabins. I’ll have to ask. Was there any particular reason …?’

‘There was a co-pilot called Tom. Can you give me his full name please? I have an urgent message for him.’

‘What flight did you say?’

Cynthia told her not only the flight but her name and original seat number in Business Class.

After a long wait, the voice spoke again, ‘Yes, you are one of the arrivals.’

‘I know that,’ said Cynthia.

‘I can’t give you information about our pilots, I’m afraid. But there was no pilot on the plane called Tom … Thomas, no. The stewards in Business were Bob, Andrew, Sheila and Lilian.’

‘No pilot called Tom? About thirty-five, tall, brown hair. I met him. He lives in Camden Town.’ Cynthia gripped the phone. She looked round at the reality of the room.

‘The pilots are Australian; I can tell you that but no more. I’m sorry. They’re our personnel.’

‘It was a memorable flight. Christmas Day. I’ll never forget that one, said Cynthia.

‘Thank you. We appreciate that,’ said the voice. It seemed thousands of miles away.

The First Year of My Life

I was born on the first day of the second month of the last year of the First World War, a Friday. Testimony abounds that during the first year of my life I never smiled. I was known as the baby whom nothing and no one could make smile. Everyone who knew me then has told me so. They tried very hard, singing and bouncing me up and down, jumping around, pulling faces. Many times I was told this later by my family and their friends; but, anyway, I knew it at the time.

You will shortly be hearing of that new school of psychology, or maybe you have heard of it already, which after long and far-adventuring research and experiment has established that all of the young of the human species are born omniscient. Babies, in their waking hours, know everything that is going on everywhere in the world; they can tune in to any conversation they choose, switch on to any scene. We have all experienced this power. It is only after the first year that it was brainwashed out of us; for it is demanded of us by our immediate environment that we grow to be of use to it in a practical way. Gradually, our know-all brain-cells are blacked out although traces remain in some individuals in the form of ESP, and in the adults of some primitive tribes.

It is not a new theory. Poets and philosophers, as usual, have been there first. But scientific proof is now ready and to hand. Perhaps the final touches are being put to the new manifesto in some cell at Harvard University. Any day now it will be given to the world, and the world will be convinced.

Let me therefore get my word in first, because I feel pretty sure, now, about the authenticity of my remembrance of things past. My autobiography, as I very well perceived at the time, started in the very worst year that the world had ever seen so far. Apart from being born bedridden and toothless, unable to raise myself on the pillow or utter anything but farmyard squawks or police-siren wails, my bladder and my bowels totally out of control, I was further depressed by the curious behaviour of the two-legged mammals around me. There were those black-dressed people, females of the species to which I appeared to belong, saying they had lost their sons. I slept a great deal. Let them go and find their sons. It was like the special pin for my nappies which my mother or some other hoverer dedicated to my care was always losing. These careless women in black lost their husbands and their brothers. Then they came to visit my mother and clucked and crowed over my cradle. I was not amused.