Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

The Dark Glasses

Coming to the edge of the lake we paused to look at our reflections in the water. It was then I recognized her from the past, her face looking up from the lake. She had not stopped talking.

I put on my dark glasses to shield my eyes from the sun and conceal my recognition from her eyes.

‘Am I boring you?’ she said.

‘No, not a bit, Dr Gray.

‘Sure?’

It is discouraging to put on sun-glasses in the middle of someone’s intimate story. But they were necessary, now that I had recognized her, and was excited, and could only honourably hear what she had to say from a point of concealment.

‘Must you wear those glasses?’

‘Well, yes. The glare.’

‘The wearing of dark glasses,’ she said, ‘is a modern psychological phenomenon. It signifies the trend towards impersonalization, the weapon of the modern Inquisitor, it —’

‘There’s a lot in what you say.’ But I did not remove my glasses, for I had not asked for her company in the first place, and there is a limit to what one can listen to with the naked eye.

We walked round the new concrete verge of the old lake, and she continued the story of how she was led to give up general medical practice and take up psychology; and I looked at her as she spoke, through my dark glasses, and because of the softening effect these have upon things I saw her again as I had seen her looking up from the lake, and again as in my childhood.

At the end of the thirties Leesden End was an L-shaped town. Our house stood near the top of the L. At the other extreme was the market. Mr Simmonds, the oculist, had his shop on the horizontal leg, and he lived there above the shop with his mother and sister. All the other shops in the row were attached to each other, but Mr Simmonds’ stood apart, like a real house, with a lane on either side.

I was sent to have my eyes tested. He took me into the darkened interior and said, ‘Sit down, dear.’ He put his arm round my shoulder. His forefinger moved up and down on my neck. I was thirteen and didn’t like to be rude to him. Dorothy Simmonds, his sister, came downstairs just then; she came upon us silently and dressed in a white overall. Before she had crossed the room to switch on a dim light Mr Simmonds removed his arm from my shoulder with such a jerk that I knew for certain he had not placed it there in innocence.

I had seen Miss Simmonds once before, at a garden fête, where she stood on a platform in a big hat and blue dress, and sang ‘Sometimes between long shadows on the grass’, while I picked up windfall apples, all of which seemed to be rotten. Now in her white overall she turned and gave me a hostile look, as if I had been seducing her brother. I felt sexually in the wrong, and started looking round the dark room with a wide-eyed air.

‘Can you read?’ said Mr Simmonds.

I stopped looking round. I said, ‘Read what?’ — for I had been told I would be asked to read row after row of letters. The card which hung beneath the dim light showed pictures of trains and animals.

‘Because if you can’t read we have pictures for illiterates.’

This was Mr Simmonds’ joke. I giggled. His sister smiled and dabbed her right eye with her handkerchief. She had been to London for an operation on her right eye.

I recall reading the letters correctly down to the last few lines, which were too small. I recall Mr Simmonds squeezing my arm as I left the shop, turning his sandy freckled face in a backward glance to see for certain that his sister was not watching.

My grandmother said, ‘Did you see —’

‘— Mr Simmonds’ sister?’ said my aunt.

‘Yes, she was there all the time,’ I said, to make it definite. My grandmother said, ‘They say she’s going —’

‘— blind in one eye,’ said my aunt.

‘And with the mother bedridden upstairs —’ my grandmother said.

‘— she must be a saint,’ said my aunt.

Presently — it may have been within a few days or a few weeks — my reading glasses arrived, and I wore them whenever I remembered to do so.

I broke the glasses by sitting on them during my school holidays two years later.

My grandmother said, after she had sighed, ‘It’s time you had your eyes tested —’

‘— eyes tested in any case,’ said my aunt when she had sighed.

I washed my hair the night before and put a wave in it. Next morning at eleven I walked down to Mr Simmonds’s with one of my grandmother’s long hat-pins in my blazer pocket. The shop front had been done up, with gold lettering on the glass door: Basil Simmonds, Optician, followed by a string of letters which, so far as I remember, were FBOA, AIC, and others.

‘You’re quite the young lady, Joan,’ he said, looking at my new breasts.

I smiled and put my hand in my blazer pocket.

He was smaller than he had been two years ago. I thought he must be about fifty or thirty. His face was more freckled than ever and his eyes were flat blue as from a box of paints. Miss Simmonds appeared silently in her soft slippers. ‘You’re quite the young lady, Joan,’ she said from behind her green glasses, for her right eye had now gone blind and the other was said to be troubling her.

We went into the examination room. She glided past me and switched on the dim light above the letter card. I began to read out the letters while Basil Simmonds stood with folded hands. Someone came into the front shop. Miss Simmonds slid off to see who it was and her brother tickled my neck. I read on. He drew me towards him. I put my hand into my blazer pocket. He said, ‘Oh!’ and sprang away as the hat-pin struck through my blazer and into his thigh.

Miss Simmonds appeared in the doorway in her avenging white overall. Her brother, who had been rubbing his thigh in a puzzled way, pretended to be dusting a mark off the front of his trousers.

‘What’s wrong? Why did you shout?’ she said.

‘No, I didn’t shout.’

She looked at me, then returned to attend to the person in the shop, leaving the intervening door wide open. She was back again almost immediately. My examination was soon over. Mr Simmonds saw me our at the front door and gave me a pleading unhappy look. I felt like a traitor and I considered him horrible.

For the rest of the holidays I thought of him as ‘Basil’, and by asking questions and raking more interest than usual in the conversation around me I formed an idea of his private life. ‘Dorothy,’ I speculated, ‘and Basil.’ I let my mind dwell on them until I saw a picture of the rooms above the shop. I hung round at tea-time and, in order to bring the conversation round to Dorothy and Basil, told our visitors I had been to get my eyes tested.

‘The mother bedridden all these years and worth a fortune. But what good is it to her?’

‘What chance is there for Miss Simmonds now, with that eye?’

‘She’ll get the money. He will get the bare legal minimum only.’

‘No, they say he’s to get everything. In trust.’

‘I believe Mrs Simmonds has left everything to her daughter.’

My grandmother said, ‘She should divide her fortune —’

‘— equally between them,’ said my aunt. ‘Fair’s fair.’

I invented for myself a recurrent scene in which brother and sister emerged from their mother’s room and, on the narrow landing, allowed their gaze to meet in unspoken combat over their inheritance. Basil’s flat-coloured eyes did not themselves hold any expression, but by the forward thrust of his red neck he indicated his meaning; Dorothy made herself plain by means of a corkscrew twist of the head — round and up — and the glitter of her one good eye through the green glasses.

I was sent for to try on my new reading glasses. I had the hat-pin with me. I was friendly to Basil while I tested the new glasses in the front shop. He seemed to want to put a hand on my shoulder, hovered, but was afraid. Dorothy came downstairs and appeared before us just as his hand wavered. He protracted the wavering gesture into one which adjusted the stem of my glasses above my ear.