Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

I inquired closely about spiritualism. ‘They call up the dead from their repose,’ she said. ‘It vexes the Almighty when the dead are stirred before they are ready.’

Then she told me what happened to spiritualists after a number of years had passed over their heads. ‘They run up the garden path, look back over their shoulders, give a shudder, and run back again. I dare say they see spirits.’

I took my grandmother’s hand and led her out to the garden to make her show me what spiritualists did. She ran up the path splendidly with her skirts held up in her hands, looked round with sudden bright eyes, shuddered horribly, then, with skirts held higher so that her white petticoat frills flickered round her black stockings, she ran gasping back towards me.

My grandfather came out to see the fun with his sandy eyebrows raised high among the freckles. ‘Stop your larks, Adelaide,’ he said to my grandmother.

So my grandmother did it again, with a curdling cry, ‘Ah-ah-ah’.

Rummaging in the shop, having climbed up on two empty fizzpop crates, I found on an upper shelf some old bundles of candles wrapped in interesting-looking literature. I smoothed out the papers and read, ‘Votes for Women! Why do you Oppress Women?’ Another lot of candles was wrapped in a larger bill on which was printed an old-fashioned but military-looking young woman waving the Union Jack and saying, ‘I’m off to join the Suffragettes.’ I asked my grandmother where the papers came from, for she never threw anything away and must have had them for another purpose before wrapping up the candles before I was born. My grandfather answered for her, so far forgetting his refinement as to say, ‘Mrs Spank-arse’s lark’.

‘Mrs Pankhurst, he means. I’m surprised at you, Tom, in front of the child.’

My grandfather was smiling away at his own joke. And so all in one afternoon I learned a new word, and the story of my grandmother’s participation in the Women’s Marches down Watford High Street, dressed in her best clothes, and I learned also my grandfather’s opinions about these happenings. I saw, before my very eyes, my grandmother and her banner, marching in the sunshiny street with her friends, her white petticoat twinkling at her ankles as she walked. In a few years’ time it was difficult for me to believe I had not stood and witnessed the march of the Watford Suffragettes moving up the High Street, with my grandmother swiftly in the van before I was born. I recalled how her shiny black straw hat gleamed in the sun.

Some Jews came to Watford and opened a bicycle shop not far from my grandmother’s. She would have nothing to do with them. They were Polish immigrants. She called them Pollacks. When I asked what this meant she said, ‘Foreigners.’ One day the mama-foreigner came to the door of her shop as I was passing and held out a bunch of grapes. She said, ‘Eat.’ I ran, amazed, to my grandmother who said, ‘I told you that foreigners are funny.’

Among ourselves she boasted of her Jewish blood because it had made her so clever. I knew she was so clever that it was unnecessary for her to be beautiful. She boasted that her ancestors on her father’s side crossed over the Red Sea; the Almighty stretched forth his hands and parted the waves, and they crossed over from Egypt on to dry land. Miriam, the sister of Moses, banged her timbrel and led all the women across the Red Sea, singing a song to the Almighty. I thought of the Salvation Army girls who quite recently had marched up Watford High Street in the sunshine banging their tambourines. My grandmother had called me to the shop door to watch, and when they and their noise were dwindled away she turned from the door and clapped her hands above her head, half in the spontaneous spirit of the thing, half in mimicry. She clapped her hands. ‘Alleluia!’ cried my grandmother. ‘Alleluia!’

‘Stop your larks, Adelaide, my dear.’

Was I present at the Red Sea crossing? No, it had happened before I was born. My head was full of stories, of Greeks and Trojans, Picts and Romans, Jacobites and Redcoats, but these were definitely outside of my lifetime. It was different where my grandmother was concerned. I see her in the vanguard, leading the women in their dance of triumph, clanging the tambourine for joy and crying Alleluia with Mrs Pankhurst and Miriam the sister of Moses. The hands of the Almighty hold back the walls of the sea. My grandmother’s white lace-edged petticoat flashes beneath her black skirt an inch above her boots, as it did when she demonstrated up and down the garden path what happens to spiritualists. What part of the scene I saw and what happened before I was born can be distinguished by my reason, but my reason cannot obliterate the scene or diminish it.

Great-aunts Sally and Nancy, my grandfather’s sisters, had been frigidly reconciled to him at some date before I was born. I was sent to visit them every summer. They lived quietly now, spinsters of small means. They occupied themselves with altar-flowers and the vicar. I was a Gentile Jewess like my grandmother, for my father was a Jew, and these great-aunts could not make it out that I did not look like a Jew as did my grandmother. They remarked on this in my presence as if I could not understand that they were discussing my looks. I said that I did look like a Jew and desperately pointed to my small feet. ‘All Jews have very little feet,’ I claimed. They took this for fact, being inexperienced in Jews, and admitted to each other that I possessed this Jewish characteristic. Nancy’s face was long and thin and Sally’s was round. There seemed to be a lot of pincushions on tiny tables. They gave me aniseed cake and tea every summer while the clock ticked loudly in time to their silence. I looked at the yellowish-green plush upholstery which caught streaks of the sunny afternoon outside, I looked until I had absorbed its colour and texture in a total trance during the great-aunts silences. Once when I got back to my grandmother’s and looked in the glass it seemed my eyes had changed from blue to yellow-green plush.

On one of these afternoons they mentioned my father’s being an engineer. I said all Jews were engineers. They were fascinated by this fact which at the time I thought was possibly true with the exception of an occasional Quack. Then Sally looked up and said, ‘But the Langfords are not engineers.’

The Langfords were not Jews either, they were Gentiles of German origin, but it came to the same thing in those parts. The Langfords were not classified as foreigners by my grandmother because they did not speak in broken English, being all of a London-born generation.

The Langford girls were the main friends of my mother’s youth. There was Lottie who sang well and Flora who played the piano and Susanna who was strange. I remember a long evening in their house when Lottie and my mother sang a duet to Flora’s piano playing, while Susanna loitered darkly at the door of the drawing-room with a smile I had never seen on any face before. I could not keep my eyes off Susanna, and got into trouble for staring.

When my mother and Lottie were seventeen they hired a cab one day and went to an inn, some miles away in the country, where they drank gin. They supplied the driver with gin as well, and, forgetting that the jaunt was supposed to be a secret one, returned two hours later standing up in the cab, chanting ‘Horrid little Watford. Dirty little Watford. We’ll soon say goodbye to nasty little Watford.’ They did not consider themselves to be village girls and were eager to be sent away to relatives elsewhere. This was soon accomplished; Lottie went to London for a space and my mother to Edinburgh. My mother told me the story of the wild return of carriage and horses up the High Street and my grandmother confirmed it, adding that the occurrence was bad for business. I can hear the clopping of hooves, and see the girls standing wobbly in the cab dressed in their spotted muslins, although I never actually saw anything but milk-carts, motor cars and buses, and girls with short skirts in the High Street, apart from such links with antiquity as fat old Benskin of Benskins’ Breweries taking his morning stroll along the bright pavement, bowing as he passed to my grandmother.