Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

When everyone had recovered George said, ‘She put in her thumb and pulled out a plum.’ Then away we were into our merciless hacking-hecking laughter again.

The needle had gone fairly deep into the thumby cushion and a small red river flowed and spread from this tiny puncture. So that nothing of our joy should lag, George put in quickly,

‘Mind your bloody thumb on my shirt.’

Then hac-hec-hoo, we shrieked into the hot Borderland afternoon. Really I should not care to be so young of heart again. That is my thought every time I turn over my old papers and come across the photograph. Skinny, Kathleen and myself are in the photo atop the haystack. Skinny had just finished analysing the inwards of my find.

‘It couldn’t have been done by brains. You haven’t much brains but you’re a lucky wee thing.’

Everyone agreed that the needle betokened extraordinary luck. As it was becoming a serious conversation, George said,

‘I’ll take a photo.’

I wrapped my hanky round my thumb and got myself organized. George pointed up from his camera and shouted,

‘Look; there’s a mouse!’

Kathleen screamed and I screamed although I think we knew there was no mouse. But this gave us an extra session of squalling hee-hoo’s. Finally we three composed ourselves for George’s picture. We look lovely and it was a great day at the time, but I would not care for it all over again. From that day I was known as Needle.

One Saturday in recent years I was mooching down the Portobello Road, threading among the crowds of marketers on the narrow pavement when I saw a woman. She had a haggard, careworn, wealthy look, thin but for the breasts forced-up high like a pigeon’s. I had not seen her for nearly five years. How changed she was! But I recognized Kathleen, my friend; her features had already begun to sink and protrude in the way that mouths and noses do in people destined always to be old for their years. When I had last seen her, nearly five years ago, Kathleen, barely thirty, had said,

‘I’ve lost all my looks, it’s in the family. All the women are handsome as girls, but we go off early, we go brown and nosey.’

I stood silently among the people, watching. As you will see, I wasn’t in a position to speak to Kathleen. I saw her shoving in her avid manner from stall to stall. She was always fond of antique jewellery and of bargains. I wondered that I had not seen her before in the Portobello Road on my Saturday-morning ambles. Her long stiff-crooked fingers pounced to select a jade ring from among the jumble of brooches and pendants, onyx, moonstone and gold, set out on the stall.

‘What do you think of this?’ she said.

I saw then who was with her. I had been half-conscious of the huge man following several paces behind her, and now I noticed him.

‘It looks all right,’ he said. ‘How much is it?’

‘How much is it?’ Kathleen asked the vendor.

I took a good look at this man accompanying Kathleen. It was her husband. The beard was unfamiliar, but I recognized beneath it his enormous mouth, the bright sensuous lips, the large brown eyes forever brimming with pathos.

It was not for me to speak to Kathleen, but I had a sudden inspiration which caused me to say quietly,

‘Halo, George.

The giant of a man turned round to face the direction of my face. There were so many people — but at length he saw me.

‘Halo, George,’ I said again.

Kathleen had started to haggle with the stall-owner, in her old way, over the price of the jade ring. George continued to stare at me, his big mouth slightly parted so that I could see a wide slit of red lips and white teeth between the fair grassy growths of beard and moustache.

‘My God!’ he said.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Kathleen.

‘Halo, George!’ I said again, quite loud this time, and cheerfully.

‘Look!’ said George. ‘Look who’s there, over beside the fruit stall.’

Kathleen looked but didn’t see.

‘Who is it?’ she said impatiently.

‘It’s Needle,’ he said. ‘She said “Halo, George”.’

‘Needle,’ said Kathleen. ‘Who do you mean? You don’t mean our old friend Needle who —’

‘Yes. There she is. My God!’

He looked very ill, although when I had said ‘Halo, George’ I had spoken friendly enough.

‘I don’t see anyone faintly resembling poor Needle,’ said Kathleen looking at him. She was worried.

George pointed straight at me. ‘Look there. I tell you that is Needle.’

‘You’re ill, George. Heavens, you must be seeing things. Come on home. Needle isn’t there. You know as well as I do, Needle is dead.’

I must explain that I departed this life nearly five years ago. But I did not altogether depart this world. There were those odd things still to be done which one’s executors can never do properly. Papers to be looked over, even after the executors have torn them up. Lots of business except, of course, on Sundays and Holidays of Obligation, plenty to take an interest in for the time being. I take my recreation on Saturday mornings. If it is a wet Saturday I wander up and down the substantial lanes of Woolworth’s as I did when I was young and visible. There is a pleasurable spread of objects on the counters which I now perceive and exploit with a certain detachment, since it suits with my condition of life. Creams, toothpastes, combs and hankies, cotton gloves, flimsy flowering scarves, writing-paper and crayons, ice-cream cones and orangeade, screwdrivers, boxes of tacks, tins of paint, of glue, of marmalade; I always liked them but far more now that I have no need of any. When Saturdays are fine I go instead to the Portobello Road where formerly I would jaunt with Kathleen in our grown-up days. The barrow-loads do not change much, of apples and rayon vests in common blues and low-taste mauve, of silver plate, trays and teapots long since changed hands from the bygone citizens to dealers, from shops to the new flats and breakable homes, and then over to the barrow-stalls and the dealers again: Georgian spoons, rings, earrings of turquoise and opal set in the butterfly pattern of true-lovers’ knot, patch-boxes with miniature paintings of ladies on ivory, snuff-boxes of silver with Scotch pebbles inset.

Sometimes as occasion arises on a Saturday morning, my friend Kathleen, who is a Catholic, has a Mass said for my soul, and then I am in attendance, as it were, at the church. But most Saturdays I take my delight among the solemn crowds with their aimless purposes, their eternal life not far away, who push past the counters and stalls, who handle, buy, steal, touch, desire and ogle the merchandise. I hear the tinkling tills, I hear the jangle of loose change and tongues and children wanting to hold and have.

That is howl came to be in the Portobello Road that Saturday morning when I saw George and Kathleen. I would not have spoken had I not been inspired to it. Indeed it’s one of the things I can’t do now — to speak out, unless inspired. And most extraordinary, on that morning as I spoke, a degree of visibility set in. I suppose from poor George’s point of view it was like seeing a ghost when he saw me standing by the fruit barrow repeating in so friendly a manner, ‘Halo, George!’

We were bound for the south. When our education, what we could get of it from the north, was thought to be finished, one by one we were sent or sent for to London. John Skinner, whom we called Skinny, went to study more archaeology, George to join his uncle’s tobacco farm, Kathleen to stay with her rich connections and to potter intermittently in the Mayfair hat shop which one of them owned. A little later I also went to London to see life, for it was my ambition to write about life, which first I had to see.