Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

I took them off for a moment. I rather liked her for her innocence in not recognizing me, though she looked hard and said, ‘There’s a subconscious reason why you wear them.’

‘Dark glasses hide dark thoughts,’ I said.

‘Is that a saying?’

‘Not that I’ve heard. But it is one now.

She looked at me anew. But she didn’t recognize me. These fishers of the mind have no eye for outward things. Instead, she was ‘recognizing’ my mind: I daresay I came under some category of hers.

I had my glasses on again, and was walking on.

‘How did your husband react to his sister’s accusations?’ I said.

‘He was remarkably kind.’

‘Kind?’

‘Oh, yes, in the circumstances. Because she started up a lot of gossip in the neighbourhood. It was only a small town. It was a long time before I could persuade him to send her to a home for the blind where she could be looked after. There was a terrible bond between them. Unconscious incest.’

‘Didn’t you know that when you married him? I should have thought it would have been obvious.’

She looked at me again. ‘I had not studied psychology at that time,’ she said.

I thought, neither had I.

We were silent for the third turn about the lake. Then she said, ‘Well, I was telling you how I came to study psychology and practise it. My husband had this breakdown after his sister went away. He had delusions. He kept imagining he saw eyes looking at him everywhere. He still sees them from time to time. But eyes, you see. That’s significant. Unconsciously he felt he had blinded his sister. Because unconsciously he wanted to do so. He keeps confessing that he did so.’

‘And attempted to forge the will?’ I said. She stopped. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Does he admit that he tried to forge his mother’s will?’

‘I haven’t mentioned anything about a will.’

‘Oh, I thought you had.’

‘But, in fact, that was his sister’s accusation. What made you say that? How did you know?’

‘I must be psychic,’ I said.

She took my arm. I had become a most endearing case history.

‘You must be psychic indeed,’ she said. ‘You must tell me more about yourself. Well, that’s the story of my taking up my present profession. When my husband started having these delusions and making these confessions I felt I had to understand the workings of the mind. And I began to study them. It has been fruitful. It has saved my own reason.

‘Did it ever occur to you that the sister’s story might be true?’ I said. ‘Especially as he admits it.’

She took away her arm and said, ‘Yes, I considered the possibility. I must admit I considered it well.’

She saw me watching her face. She looked as if she were pleading some personal excuse.

‘Oh do,’ she said, ‘please take off those glasses.

‘Why don’t you believe his own confession?’

‘I’m a psychiatrist and we seldom believe confessions.’ She looked at her watch as if to suggest I had started the whole conversation and was boring her.

I said, ‘He might have stopped seeing eyes if you’d taken him at his word.’

She shouted, ‘What are you saying? What are you thinking of? He wanted to give a statement to the police, do you realize …’

‘You know he’s guilty,’ I said.

‘As his wife,’ she said, ‘I know he’s guilty. But as a psychiatrist I must regard him as innocent. That’s why I took up the subject.’ She suddenly turned angry and shouted, ‘You damned inquisitor, I’ve met your type before.’

I could hardly believe she was shouting, who previously had been so calm. ‘Oh, it’s not my business,’ I said, and took off my glasses to show willing.

I think it was then she recognized me.

The Ormolu Clock

The Hotel Stroh stood side by side with the Guesthouse Lublonitsch, separated by a narrow path that led up the mountain, on the Austrian side, to the Yugoslavian border. Perhaps the old place had once been a great hunting tavern. These days, though, the Hotel Stroh was plainly a disappointment to its few drooping tenants. They huddled together like birds in a storm; their flesh sagged over the unscrubbed tables on the dark back veranda, which looked over Herr Stroh’s untended fields. Usually, Herr Stroh sat somewhat apart, in a mist of cognac, his lower chin resting on his red neck, and his shirt open for air. Those visitors who had come not for the climbing but simply for the view sat and admired the mountain and were sloppily waited upon until the weekly bus should come and carry them away. If they had cars, they rarely stayed long — they departed, as a rule, within two hours of arrival, like a comic act. This much was entertainingly visible from the other side of the path, at the Guesthouse Lublonitsch.

I was waiting for friends to come and pick me up on their way to Venice. Frau Lublonitsch welcomed all her guests in person. When I arrived I was hardly aware of the honour, she seemed so merely a local woman — undefined and dumpy — as she emerged from the kitchen wiping her hands on her brown apron, with her grey hair drawn back tight, her sleeves rolled up, her dingy dress, black stockings, and boots. It was only gradually that her importance was permitted to dawn upon strangers.

There was a Herr Lublonitsch, but he was of no account, even though he got all the marital courtesies. He sat punily with his drinking friends at one of the tables in front of the inn, greeting the guests as they passed in and out and receiving as much attention as he wanted from the waitresses. When he was sick Frau Lublonitsch took his meals with her own hands to a room upstairs set aside for his sickness. But she was undoubtedly the boss.

She worked the hired girls fourteen hours a day, and they did the work cheerfully. She was never heard to complain or to give an order; it was enough that she was there. Once, when a girl dropped a tray with five mugs of soup, Frau Lublonitsch went and fetched a cloth and submissively mopped up the mess herself, like any old peasant who had suffered worse than that in her time. The maids called her Frau Chef. ‘Frau Chef prepares special food when her husband’s stomach is bad,’ one of them told me.

Appended to the guesthouse was a butcher’s shop, and this was also a Lublonitsch possession. A grocer’s shop had been placed beside it, and on an adjacent plot of ground — all Lublonitsch property — a draper’s shop was nearing completion. Two of her sons worked in the butcher’s establishment; a third had been placed in charge of the grocer’s; and the youngest son, now ready to take his place, was destined for the draper’s.

In the garden, strangely standing on a path between the flowers for decorating the guests’ tables and the vegetables for eating, facing the prolific orchard and overhung by the chestnut trees that provided a roof for outdoor diners, grew one useless thing — a small, well-tended palm tree. It gave an air to the place. Small as it was, this alien plant stood as high as the distant mountain peaks when seen from the perspective of the great back porch where we dined. It quietly dominated the view.

Ordinarily, I got up at seven, but one morning I woke at half-past five and came down from my room on the second floor to the yard, to find someone to make me some coffee. Standing in the sunlight, with her back to me, was Frau Lublonitsch. She was regarding her wide kitchen garden, her fields beyond it, her outbuildings and her pigsties where two aged women were already at work. One of the sons emerged from an outbuilding carrying several strings of long sausages. Another led a bullock with a bag tied over its head to a tree and chained it there to await the slaughterers. Frau Lublonitsch did not move but continued to survey her property, her pigs, her pig-women, her chestnut trees, her beanstalks, her sausages, her sons, her tall gladioli, and — as if she had eyes in the back of her head — she seemed aware, too, of the good thriving guesthouse behind her, and the butcher’s shop, the draper’s shop, and the grocer’s.