Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

He pats his knee. ‘Sit here, dearie, lass.’ He has a glass and a bottle by him. ‘I want to give you a drop. Come on. I don’t want sex.’

She perches on his lap. He has not counted the dogs. Alice Long will be up to ninety-nine, but it’s Hamilton’s fault from now. Hamilton has taken the dogs.

‘Now sip.’

She recognizes whisky.

‘Take a good swallow.’

He gives her a lemon drop to hide her breath, then gives her a kiss on her mouth while she is still sucking the sweet.

‘I’m going now. I hope the dogs are all right.’

‘Oh, the dogs, they’re all right.’

He takes her hand and goes to find one of the workmen who are mending the House. Alice Long is not home yet from her meeting, and she will not miss the workman for a few minutes.

Mamie climbs into the foreman’s car beside the workman. The seat is covered with white dust, but she does not brush it off the seat before sliding on to it. Her clothes will be spoiled. She feels safe beside the driver. The whisky has given her back a real afternoon.

‘What’s the time, please?’ she asks.

‘About twenty past four.’

The man backs and turns. Hamilton has gone into his quarters. The car skirts the House, turning by the large new clearing where, in the summer, the tourists’ coaches come.

‘You can’t get many up here in Northumberland. They all swarm to the old houses in the South. Here, it’s out of the way …’

‘Well, it’s an experience for those who do come, Miss Long. Especially the Catholics.’

The House was once turned into a hospital for the wounded English soldiers after the Battle of Flodden, which the English won.

The House was a Mass centre at the times of the Catholic Persecution. Outside the armoury, there is a chalice in a glass case dating from Elizabethan times. It has been sold to a museum, but the museum allows the family to keep it at the House during Sir Martin’s lifetime. Mamie has been inside the priest hole, where the priests were hidden when the House was searched for priests; they would sometimes stay there several days. The hole is a large space behind a panel that comes out of the wall, up among the attics. You can stand in the priest hole and look up at the beams, where, in those days, food was always stored in case of emergency.

The workmen are mending the roof.

‘Did you see the priest hole?’ Mamie feels talkative.

‘What’s that?’

‘A place where the priests used to hide, up in the roof. It’s historic. Haven’t you seen it?’

‘No, but I seen plenty dry rot up there in that roof.’

The gates are closed. The man gets out to open them; then he drives off again.

Is it possible that one of the dogs is lost? Mamie is confused. There must have been five. I found the lost one, tied to the tree. But then she sees herself again counting them outside Hamilton’s door. One, two, three, four. Only four. No, no, no, it’s not real. Hamilton has taken the dogs. It’s for him to count.

The workman says, ‘Do you like the Beatles?’

‘Oh, yes, they’re great. Do you like them?’

‘So-so. I’d like just one day’s earnings that the Beatles get. Just one day. I could retire on it.’

Sister Monica has said that there is no harm in the Beatles, and then Mamie felt indignant because it showed Sister Monica did not properly appreciate them. She ought to lump them together with things like whisky, smoking, and sex; the Beatles are quite good enough to be forbidden.

‘I like dancing,’ Mamie says.

‘Rock — ‘n’— roll stuff?’

‘Yes, but at school we only get folk dancing. I’m learning the sword dance. It’s historic in the Border country.

All the rest of the week, she hurries home from school to see if Alice Long has been to see her mother about the missing dog.

I counted. One, two, three, four. But I had five when I left the wood. I brought five out of the wood, and up the hill. I had five at the Lodge. I must have had …

Alice Long will be up to ninety-nine. She will come to Mamie’s house to make inquiries:

‘Hamilton says she only brought four …’

‘Hamilton says he didn’t count them, he just took the leads from her hand …’

‘Hamilton must have been drinking and let one of them slip out of the door …’

‘I’ve only just counted them. One must have been missing since Monday. When Mamie …’

By Friday, Alice Long has not come. Mamie’s mother says, ‘Alice Long hasn’t dropped in. I must take a pie up to the House on Monday and see what’s doing.’

On Sunday afternoon, Alice Long’s car stops at the door. ‘Come in, Miss Long, come in. Have you no family down this weekend?’

Mamie’s father shuts away the television, puts on his coat, says good afternoon, and goes upstairs.

Alice Long sits trembling on the sofa beside Mamie while her mother puts on the tea.

She says, ‘It’s Hamilton.’

‘The same thing again?’

‘No, worse. A tragedy.’ Alice Long shuts her lips tight and pats Mamie’s hair. Her hand is shaking.

‘Mamie, go out and play,’ says her mother.

When Alice Long has driven her car away, Mamie comes in with the ends of her skipping-rope twined around her gloves. Her father comes down, takes off his coat, and opens up the television. ‘Oh, don’t turn it on,’ says her mother, in anguish.

Mamie eats some of the remnants of cake and sandwiches while she listens.

‘Hanging in the priest hole — all of them. She looked for them all night. Hamilton’s gone, cleared off. It’s the drink. The police have got a warrant out. They were found hanged on the beams after Mass this morning. Didn’t I say poor Alice Long was looking bad at Mass? I thought it must be her father again. But she’d been up all night looking for the dogs, and at Mass she still didn’t know where they were. It was after Mass they found them, herself and Mrs Huddlestone. Think of the sight! Five of them hanging in a row. Poor little beasts. Hamilton disappeared yesterday. They’ll get him, though, just wait.’

‘He’s a bit of a lunatic,’ Mamie’s father says.

‘Lunatic! He’s vicious. He ought to be hung himself. They were all Alice Long had. But he’ll be caught!’

Her father says, ‘I doubt it. Not Hamilton. Even the roe-buck called him Pussyfoot.’ He laughs at his own joke. The mother turns away her head.

Mamie says, ‘How many were hanging in the priest hole?’

‘All of them in a row.’

‘How many?’

‘Five. You know she had five. You took them out, didn’t you?’

Mamie says, ‘I was only wondering if there was room for five in the priest hole. Did she really say there were five? It wasn’t four?’

‘She said all five of them. What are you talking about, no room in the priest hole? There’s plenty room. He’d have killed six if she’d had six. She was so good to him.’

‘A shocking affair,’ says her father.

Mamie feels weightless as daylight. She waves her arms as if they are freed of a huge harness.

‘Five of them.’ I counted wrong. I didn’t lose one. There were five.

She skips over to fetch the shining brass pokers from the fender and places them crisscross on the linoleum to practise her sword dance. Then she starts to dance, heel-and-toe, heel-and-toe, over-and-across, one-two-three, one-two-three. Her mother stands amazed and is about to say stop it at once, this is no time to practise, children have no heart, Alice Long pays your school fees and I thought you loved animals. But her father is clapping his hands in time to her dancing — one-two-three, heel-and-toe, hand-on-hip, right-hand, left-hand, cross-and-back. Then her father starts to sing as well, loudly, tara rum-tum-tum, tara rum-tum-tum, clapping his hands while she dances the jig, and there isn’t a thing anyone can do about it.