Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

The guests arrived for my birthday. It was so sad, said one of the black widows, so sad about Wilfred Owen who was killed so late in the war, and she quoted from a poem of his:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

The children were squealing and toddling around. One was sick and another wet the floor and stood with his legs apart gaping at the puddle. All was mopped up. I banged my spoon on the table of my high chair.

But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town;

When spring trips north again this year,

And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous.

More parents and children arrived. One stout man who was warming his behind at the fire, said, ‘I always think those words of Asquith’s after the armistice were so apt …’

They brought the cake close to my high chair for me to see, with the candle shining and flickering above the pink icing. ‘A pity she never smiles.’

‘She’ll smile in time,’ my mother said, obviously upset.

‘What Asquith told the House of Commons just after the war,’ said that stout gentleman with his backside to the fire, ‘— so apt, what Asquith said. He said that the war has cleansed and purged the world, by God! I recall his actual words: “All things have become new. In this great cleansing and purging it has been the privilege of our country to play her part…”’

That did it. I broke into a decided smile and everyone noticed it, convinced that it was provoked by the fact that my brother had blown out the candle on the cake. ‘She smiled!’ my mother exclaimed. And everyone was clucking away about how I was smiling. For good measure I crowed like a demented raven. ‘My baby’s smiling!’ said my mother.

‘It was the candle on her cake,’ they said.

The cake be damned. Since that time I have grown to smile quite naturally, like any other healthy and house-trained person, but when I really mean a smile, deeply felt from the core, then to all intents and purposes it comes in response to the words uttered in the House of Commons after the First World War by the distinguished, the immaculately dressed and the late Mr Asquith.

The Gentile Jewesses

One day a madman came into my little grandmother’s shop at Watford. I say my little grandmother but ‘little’ refers only to her height and to the dimensions of her world by the square foot — the small shop full of varieties, her parlour behind it, and behind that the stone kitchen and the two bedrooms over her head.

‘I shall murder you,’ said the madman, standing with legs straddled in the door frame, holding up his dark big hands as one about to pounce and strangle. His eyes stared from a face covered with tangled eyebrows and beard.

The street was empty. My grandmother was alone in the house. For some years, from frequent hearing of the story, I believed I was standing by her side at the time, but my grandmother said no, this was long before I was born. The scene is as clear as a memory to me. The madman —truly escaped from the asylum in a great park nearby — lifted his hairy hands, cupped as for strangling. Behind him was the street, empty save for sunshine.

He said, ‘I’m going to murder you.

She folded her hands over her white apron which lay over the black apron and looked straight at him.

‘Then you’ll get hung,’ she said.

He turned and shuffled away.

She should have said ‘hanged’ and I remember at one telling of the story remarking so to my grandmother. She replied that ‘hung’ had been good enough for the madman. I could not impress her with words, but I was so impressed by the tale that very often afterwards I said ‘hung’ instead of ‘hanged’.

I seem to see the happening so plainly in my memory it is difficult to believe I know it only by hearsay; but indeed it happened before I was born. My grandfather was a young man then, fifteen years younger than his wife and dispossessed by his family for having married her. He was gone to arrange about seedlings when the madman had appeared.

My grandmother had married him for pure love, she had chased him and hunted him down and married him, he was so beautiful and useless. She never cared at all that she had to work and keep him all his life. She was astonishingly ugly, one was compelled to look at her. In my actual memory, late in their marriage, he would bring her a rose from the garden from time to time, and put cushions under her head and feet when she reclined on the sofa in the parlour between the hours of two and three in the afternoon. He could not scrub the counter in her shop for he did not know how to do it, but he knew about dogs and birds and gardens, and had photography for a pastime.

He said to my grandmother, ‘Stand by the dahlias and I will take your likeness.’

I wished she had known how to take his likeness because he was golden-haired even in my day, with delicate features and glittering whiskers. She had a broad pug nose, she was sallow skinned with bright black eyes staring straight at the world and her dull black hair pulled back tight into a knot. She looked like a white negress; she did not try to beautify herself except by washing her face in rain water.

She had come from Stepney. Her mother was a Gentile and her father was a Jew. She said her father was a Quack by profession and she was proud of this, because she felt all curing was done by the kindly manner of the practitioner in handing out bottles of medicine rather than by the contents. I always forced my elders to enact their stories. I said, ‘Show me how he did it.’

Willingly she leaned forward in her chair and handed me an invisible bottle of medicine. She said, ‘There you are, my dear, and you won’t come to grief, and don’t forget to keep your bowels regular.’ She said, ‘My father’s medicine was only beetroot juice but he took pains with his manners, and he took pains with the labels, and the bottles were three-pence a gross. My father cured many an ache and pain, it was his gracious manner.’

This, too, entered my memory and I believed I had seen the glamorous Quack Doctor who was dead before I was born. I thought of him when I saw my grandfather, with his gracious manner, administering a tiny dose of medicine out of a blue bottle to one of his small coloured birds. He opened its beak with his finger and tipped in a drop. All the little garden was full of kennels, glass and sheds containing birds and flower-pots. His photographs were not quite real to look at. One day he called me Canary and made me stand by the brick wall for my likeness. The photograph made the garden look tremendous. Perhaps he was reproducing in his photographs the grander garden of his youth from which he was expelled avengingly upon his marriage to my grandmother long before I was born.

After his death, when my grandmother came to live with us I said to her one day,

‘Are you a Gentile, Grandmother, or are you a Jewess?’ I was wondering how she would be buried, according to what religion, when her time came to die.

‘I am a Gentile Jewess,’ she said.

All during the time she kept the shop of all sorts in Watford she had not liked the Jewish part of her origins to be known, because it was bad for business. She would have been amazed at any suggestion that this attitude was a weak one or a wrong one. To her, whatever course was sensible and good for business was good in the sight of the Almighty. She believed heartily in the Almighty. I never heard her refer to God by any other title except to say, God bless you. She was a member of the Mothers’ Union of the Church of England. She attended all the social functions of the Methodists, Baptists and Quakers. This was bright and agreeable as well as being good for business. She never went to church on Sundays, only for special services such as on Remembrance Day. The only time she acted against her conscience was when she attended a spiritualist meeting; this was from sheer curiosity, not business. There, a bench fell over on to her foot and she limped for a month; it was a judgment of the Almighty.