Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

‘Oh, George, I quite understand. You were lonely, I suppose.

‘You didn’t even ask me to your twenty-first. If you and Skinny had been nicer to me, I would never have lost my head and married the woman, never.

‘You didn’t ask me to your wedding,’ I said.

‘You’re a catty bissom, Needle, not like what you were in the old times when you used to tell us your wee stones.

‘I’ll have to be getting along,’ I said.

‘Mind you keep the secret,’ George said.

‘Can’t I tell Skinny? He would be very sorry for you, George.’

‘You mustn’t tell anyone. Keep it a secret. Promise.’

‘Promise,’ I said. I understood that he wished to enforce some sort of bond between us with this secret, and I thought, ‘Oh well, I suppose he’s lonely. Keeping his secret won’t do any harm.’

I returned to England with Skinny’s party just before the war.

I did not see George again till just before my death, five years ago.

After the war Skinny returned to his studies. He had two more exams, over a period of eighteen months, and I thought I might marry him when the exams were over.

‘You might do worse than Skinny,’ Kathleen used to say to me on our Saturday morning excursions to the antique shops and the junk stalls.

She too was getting on in years. The remainder of our families in Scotland were hinting that it was time we settled down with husbands. Kathleen was a little younger than me, but looked much older. She knew her chances were diminishing but at that time I did not think she cared very much. As for myself, the main attraction of marrying Skinny was his prospective expeditions to Mesopotamia. My desire to marry him had to be stimulated by the continual reading of books about Babylon and Assyria; perhaps Skinny felt this, because he supplied the books and even started instructing me in the art of deciphering cuneiform tablets.

Kathleen was more interested in marriage than I thought. Like me, she had racketed around a good deal during the war; she had actually been engaged to an officer in the US navy, who was killed. Now she kept an antique shop near Lambeth, was doing very nicely, lived in a Chelsea square, but for all that she must have wanted to be married and have children. She would stop and look into all the prams which the mothers had left outside shops or area gates.

‘The poet Swinburne used to do that,’ I told her once.

‘Really? Did he want children of his own?’

I shouldn’t think so. He simply liked babies.’

Before Skinny’s final exam he fell ill and was sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland.

‘You’re fortunate after all not to be married to him,’ Kathleen said. ‘You might have caught TB.’

I was fortunate, I was lucky … so everyone kept telling me on different occasions. Although it annoyed me to hear, I knew they were right, but in a way that was different from what they meant. It took me very small effort to make a living; book reviews, odd jobs for Kathleen, a few months with the publicity man again, still getting up speeches about literature, art and life for industrial tycoons. I was waiting to write about life and it seemed to me that the good fortune lay in this, whenever it should be. And until then I was assured of my charmed life, the necessities of existence always coming my way and I with far more leisure than anyone else. I thought of my type of luck after I became a Catholic and was being confirmed. The Bishop touches the candidate on the cheek, a symbolic reminder of the sufferings a Christian is supposed to undertake. I thought, how lucky, what a feathery symbol to stand for the hellish violence of its true meaning.

I visited Skinny twice in the two years that he was in the sanatorium. He was almost cured, and expected to be home within a few months. I told Kathleen after my last visit.

‘Maybe I’ll marry Skinny when he’s well again.’

‘Make it definite, Needle, and not so much of the maybe. You don’t know when you’re well off,’ she said.

This was five years ago, in the last year of my life. Kathleen and I had become very close friends. We met several times each week, and after our Saturday morning excursions in the Portobello Road very often I would accompany Kathleen to her aunt’s house in Kent for a long weekend.

One day in the June of that year I met Kathleen specially for lunch because she had phoned me to say she had news.

‘Guess who came into the shop this afternoon,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘George.’

We had half imagined George was dead. We had received no letters in the past ten years. Early in the war we had heard rumours of his keeping a nightclub in Durban, but nothing after that. We could have made inquiries if we had felt moved to do so.

At one time, when we discussed him, Kathleen had said,

‘I ought to get in touch with poor George. But then I think he would write back. He would demand a regular correspondence again.’

‘We four must stick together,’ I mimicked.

‘I can visualize his reproachful limpid orbs,’ Kathleen said.

Skinny said, ‘He’s probably gone native. With his coffee concubine and a dozen mahogany kids.’

‘Perhaps he’s dead,’ Kathleen said.

I did not speak of George’s marriage, nor of any of his confidences in the hotel at Bulawayo. As the years passed we ceased to mention him except in passing, as someone more or less dead so far as we were concerned.

Kathleen was excited about George’s turning up. She had forgotten her impatience with him in former days; she said,

‘It was so wonderful to see old George. He seems to need a friend, feels neglected, out of touch with things.’

‘He needs mothering, I suppose.’

Kathleen didn’t notice the malice. She declared, ‘That’s exactly the case with George. It always has been, I can see it now.’

She seemed ready to come to any rapid new and happy conclusion about George. In the course of the afternoon he had told her of his wartime night club in Durban, his game-shooting expeditions since. It was clear he had not mentioned Matilda. He had put on weight, Kathleen told me, but he could carry it.

I was curious to see this version of George, but I was leaving for Scotland next day and did not see him till September of that year, just before my death.

While I was in Scotland I gathered from Kathleen’s letters that she was seeing George very frequently, finding enjoyable company in him, looking after him. ‘You’ll be surprised to see how he has developed.’ Apparently he would hang round Kathleen in her shop most days, ‘it makes him feel useful’ as she maternally expressed it. He had an old relative in Kent whom he visited at weekends; this old lady lived a few miles from Kathleen’s aunt, which made it easy for them to travel down together on Saturdays, and go for long country walks.

‘You’ll see such a difference in George,’ Kathleen said on my return to London in September. I was to meet him that night, a Saturday. Kathleen’s aunt was abroad, the maid on holiday, and I was to keep Kathleen company in the empty house.

George had left London for Kent a few days earlier. ‘He’s actually helping with the harvest down there!’ Kathleen told me lovingly.

Kathleen and I planned to travel down together, but on that Saturday she was unexpectedly delayed in London on some business. It was arranged that I should go ahead of her in the early afternoon to see to the provisions for our party; Kathleen had invited George to dinner at her aunt’s house that night.

‘I should be with you by seven,’ she said. ‘Sure you won’t mind the empty house? I hate arriving at empty houses, myself.’

I said no, I liked an empty house.

So I did, when I got there. I had never found the house more likeable. A large Georgian vicarage in about eight acres, most of the rooms shut and sheeted, there being only one servant. I discovered that I wouldn’t need to go shopping, Kathleen’s aunt had left many and delicate supplies with notes attached to them: ‘Eat this up please do, see also fridge’ and ‘A treat for three hungry people, see also 2 bttles beaune for yr party on back kn table’. It was like a treasure hunt as I followed clue after clue through the cool silent domestic quarters. A house in which there are no people — but with all the signs of tenancy — can be a most tranquil good place. People take up space in a house out of proportion to their size. On my previous visits I had seen the rooms overflowing, as it seemed, with Kathleen, her aunt, and the little fat maidservant; they were always on the move. As I wandered through that part of the house which was in use, opening windows to let in the pale yellow air of September, I was not conscious that I, Needle, was raking up any space at all, I might have been a ghost.