Symposium

by Muriel Spark

  ‘Maybe, knowing you’re an artist, she thought you might want to paint her?’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Hurley pondered this seriously for a while. ‘People do have crazy ideas about artists. But surely not … Oh, God, you would have thought she’d have more confidence, because William’s highly, deeply, broadly, narrowly, every direction, in love with her. She seems very positive, thoughtful but sunny and agreeable. A mixture, in a way.’

  ‘Why don’t you think the marriage will last?’ said Chris.

  ‘I don’t give it a year,’ he said. ‘Something tells me. Perhaps it will be more on his side than hers. He perhaps won’t make the break but I feel it will come from his side. There’s so much money there, besides.’

  ‘Hilda doesn’t hand it out to her children. She settles them in life then lets them get on with it. Very sensible.’

  ‘She’s bought the couple a flat in Hampstead.’

  ‘I know. It’s a wedding present. But nothing beyond that. She told me on the phone; she said, let them work like I did.’

  ‘A good idea.’

  ‘Did they thank you for our candelabra?’ said Chris.

  ‘No. Perhaps she hasn’t had time to sort out the presents and write, and so on.’

  ‘The young never write,’ said Chris. ‘They never thank. But it shouldn’t depend on her alone. William should thank, too. What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘They’re just back from their honeymoon. Give them a chance,’ he said.

  ‘But the name Murchie,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I’ve heard it before in connection with some affair, some case in the papers; something.’

  ‘Me, too,’ he said. ‘It’ll come to us sooner or later.’

  They went into the sitting-room for their coffee, sinking together into the beige downy cushions which were part of their domestic intimacy. Chris had in her hand some notes about their forthcoming dinner party, to which, as always, they were giving great thought.

  ‘Now the Suzys have accepted.’ she said. ‘The Cuthbert-Joneses couldn’t come, they’ll be at Frankfurt the whole month. Maybe just as well. So I phoned the Untzingers. She’s almost sure they’ll both make it. We’ll know by the middle of next week. If not, we can think again. Anyway, Ella fixed us up with that student of theirs to give us an extra hand.’

  ‘Who else is certain?’ said Hurley.

  ‘Roland Sykes.’

  ‘Ah, the melancholy gay.’

  ‘But he’s very good at a dinner,’ she said. ‘You can put him next to a tree and he will talk to it.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘That leaves Annabel. She thinks she can come. You know she wants to do a feature about you some time in the early spring. I know it isn’t like American television but Annabel’s show counts, it does count.’

  ‘Sure, it counts.’

  ‘She’s intelligent, too,’ said Chris. ‘In fact we’ve got an intelligent party, especially if both the Untzingers can come. I thought we would start with salmon mousse.’

  ‘Not salmon mousse,’ said Hurley.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Can’t we think of something original?’

  ‘You think of something original.’

  ‘I’ve been working all day in the studio. I’ve hardly got the paint off my fingers. What have we got a chef for?’

  ‘Oh, do we really want to leave it to him?’

  ‘I suppose not. Him and his nouvelle cuisine. Nobody feels satisfied when they’ve eaten his tomatoes made into tulips and his wild asparagus made into Snow-White’s cottage.’

  ‘I thought we could have pheasant with the trimmings, then salad, cheese and crème brûlée.’

  ‘That sounds delicious. I only think it’s not original enough since we do have Corby in the kitchen, and everyone knows it.’

  ‘I’ll think it over,’ she said. ‘If you have any ideas let me know.’

  ‘Do you know about the philosophy of Les Autres?’ said Hurley.

  ‘No,’ said Chris. ‘What does it involve?’

  ‘Well, according to Margaret Damien it’s a new French movement based on, I think, consideration for others. Like, I suppose: others first, me second.’

  ‘I’ve been practising that all my life,’ said Chris. ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I’ve expressed it in too elementary a way. Maybe there’s more to it than one might think.’

  ‘Les Autres,’ mused Chris. ‘Something new.

  ‘You could ask her about it,’ Hurley said, ‘on the 18th. She says that Hilda Damien is immersed in it.‘

  ‘Hilda?’

  ‘Yes, she said Hilda’s taken it up.’

  ‘What absolute rot. Hilda doesn’t take up philosophies and ideas. She’s a very busy active woman. The girl must be mad.’

  It is the 18th and it seems to Hurley Reed that the dinner is going well. Pheasant seems to have been a good idea, after all, although Hurley had feared it would be boring. Chris had pointed out that it all depended on the quality of the pheasant, and how it was cooked.

  Many were the ideas for this course put forth by Hurley and Chris on those evenings, in those few weeks, before the party, when they customarily discussed whatever concerned their ordinary lives. They could have been eating aiguillette de canard, consisting of long, very thin slices of duck in red berry sauce, with peas and braised celery. Served with Côtes du Rhône.

  But they are eating pheasant, and Hurley notes that the party is going well. For an artist (or possibly this is an integral part of his special type of artistic nature), he is scrupulous about the treatment of his guests when he entertains them to dinner. He dresses well on such occasions: a velvet coat and dark trousers. Chris Donovan loves entertaining with all her heart. It isn’t often that Hurley can spare the time but, once he has put aside an evening, he plans it well in advance. They talk about it, over and over, the two of them, till they get all the details right. And so there is always a special sort of lustre — it is not quite an honour, indeed it is almost something finer and sweeter —attached to an invitation to dinner with Hurley and Chris.

  Chris Donovan says to Ernst Untzinger, on her left, ‘Ask Margaret about the new philosophy of Les Autres that she’s keen about.’ It is a good excuse to get Ernst to talk to Margaret Damien, his other neighbour.

  Hurley now is involved with Ella Untzinger, on his left, whom he suddenly finds is charming. She has that upside-down type of mouth, so that if you were to picture it the other way up, the lower lip would smoothly smile upward, while the upper would wavily fit in place: with Ella, all is reversed, and Hurley, like many others, finds it enchanting. Helen Suzy, on his right, is now chatting merrily to her neighbour Roland Sykes, not that that will get her anywhere, Hurley imagines. However Hurley continues, with fascinating Ella, the conversation already inaugurated with Helen Suzy.

  The subject is marriage. Forget St Uncumber. Go on to something else, on the same lines, for Ella has been following the talk between Hurley and Helen Suzy about marriage in general, and, in fact, Hurley can’t very well change the topic.

  ‘And you,’ he says to Ella while the pheasant once more goes on its rounds, ‘what are your views on marriage?’

  ‘Well,’ says Ella, ‘I’m a Catholic.’

  ‘Which means that marriage is final?’ says Hurley.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Why are you afraid?’ Hurley enquires. ‘You should fear nothing if you’re a Catholic. Otherwise, what’s the point of being a Catholic? My dear Ella, I speak as a Catholic myself. I can’t agree, and I speak as a Catholic, very much so, that marriage is final.’

  ‘How do you work that out?’ says Ella. She is clever, and knows that any challenge to the Catholic religion has to be absolutely worked out.

  But Hurley, now helping himself, last man of the ten, to a second piece of pheasant, has thought well on this subject. He himself has never married. Partly because of his own temperament, partly because his beloved Chris Donovan,
for family and tax reasons, never wanted to be married. Hurley gives Ella the fruit of his thoughts:

  ‘The vows of marriage’, says he, ‘are mostly made under the influence of love-passion. I am talking of modern marriages where the partners have been free to choose for themselves. They are in love. I am not talking about arranged marriages where the parents, the families, have combined to bring about the union. Good. We have a love-match. Let me tell you’, says Hurley. ‘that the vows of love-passion are like confessions obtained under torture. Erotic love is a madness. Neither of the partners know what they are doing, saying. They are in extremis. The vows of love-passion should at least be liable to be discounted. That is why it is possible, and in fact imperative, for a Catholic, who is supposed to belong to the most rational religion, to believe in divorce between people who have been in love, the marriage vows being made in a state of mental imbalance, which amorous love is. There is a reservation, under Catholic laws of annulment, that allows for madness.

  ‘You mean,’ says Ella, ‘you should be able to obtain a divorce on the grounds that you were madly in love with the spouse?’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ says Hurley.

  ‘I never heard that before,’ says Ella.

  He nearly says, very pompously: ‘Ella, my dear girl, in this house you will hear a great many things that you haven’t heard before.’ But he forbears to say it. He says nothing, and leaves a little silence.

  She then says, ‘Do you think arranged marriages most likely to succeed?’

  ‘Only in some parts of the world. India. South America, maybe. With us, it’s all finished. Arranged marriages only work where the parents know best. With us, the parents know nothing.’

  ‘I agree with you there,’ says Ella.

  The menu could so easily have been hot salmon mousse, not cold, followed by that thin-sliced duck, or lobster on a bed of cabbage with raspberry vinegar, which were among the many ideas for food that Chris and Hurley had discussed over the past weeks. This homely pheasant in preference to thin-sliced duck, their final triumphant choice, is delicious. The pheasant was hung just right. Do all among them appreciate it? Perhaps more than one might expect. ‘I’m glad your mother’s back in London,’ Hurley says to William.

  ‘Yes, she came a couple of days ago,’ William says.

  ‘She’s busy about our flat,’ says Margaret. ‘It’s wonderful.’

  ‘Your mother’s coming in after dinner,’ says Chris. ‘I spoke to Hilda on the phone this afternoon. She said she’d look in after dinner.’

  ‘Good.’

  But Hilda Damien will not come in after dinner. She is dying, now, as they speak.

  IT had been in September, while the young Damiens were still on their honeymoon, that Chris Donovan had heard how the couple had met. She learned the details from her old friend Hilda Damien who had come from Australia for the wedding. Chris and Hurley had been in New York at the time, arranging a show for Hurley at a very good gallery in Manhattan.

  Hilda on the phone was announced by Charter-house, the name, believe it or not, of the new young acquisition from the Top-One School of Butlers: ‘Yes, pass her to me,’ said Chris, among her breakfast muddle of coffee-pot and toast-rack. She was in bed. It was only nine-twenty in the morning.

  ‘Now I ask myself’, said Hilda, ‘what she was doing in the fruit section of Marks & Spencer’s? It’s not that anyone of that type and generation might not go and buy her fruit there. But, as it happens, she was staying in a half-board hostel at the time she met him. What would she want with fruit and vegetables? She said vegetables — actually vegetables. She had her lunch out. Where would she cook, and why? The story doesn’t hang together.’

  Chris thought of her friend, already at this hour, up and about, sitting at a desk in her London office.

  ‘Come for lunch,’ said Chris. ‘I have jet-lag. We just got back from New York.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Hilda. ‘I can’t see you this visit. I’m leaving tomorrow but I’ll be back in a few weeks’ time to see about their flat. That’s all I’m giving them. A flat in Hampstead, full stop.’

  ‘It’s a big enough “all”,’ said Chris.

  ‘That’s what I say. They should be thankful.’

  Chris said, ‘I’ll be giving a dinner round about the 17th, 18th of October. Will you be here then?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll ring. I don’t believe a word that girl says.

  ‘Murchie, the name Murchie …’ said Chris, ‘it rings a bell. What are they like?’

  What the Murchies were like was something Hilda didn’t want to discuss. It was not that she didn’t trust Chris Donovan, but that she would have found it impossible to explain what she felt. She was a decidedly practical woman, and it wasn’t in her to flounder about with words. There had been more than one occasion for her to experience a sensation of oddness in the two days she had seen the Murchies before and after the wedding in St Andrews. But the wedding itself, all their friends, were entirely conventional and friendly, just what you would expect a wedding to be for a man like her son.

  Hilda said to Chris before she rang off: ‘Oh, the Murchies are all right. I don’t know them at all. On the whole, I’ll be glad to get away. Sometimes I think Australia’s not far enough.’

  ‘If it wasn’t for Hurley,’ said Chris, ‘I’d be with you.’

  Hilda Damien, aged fifty-three, had a well-preserved look which was only possible to people of her age who had surplus energy. It took energy, also stamina, to apply a routine of physical upkeep such as Hilda had adopted as soon as she realized she was going to have a successful life in her long widowhood. Artists, musicians, writers and poets tend to neglect themselves and their appearance while pursuing their burning and fugitive aims. With many types of business people it is different; they know instinctively the value to their trade of having been massaged and pummelled, groomed and creamed and slimmed, and they give great, assiduous, attention to their smart appearance. Hilda had started as a journalist and now, a real magnate, she took it as a matter of course that she should rise earlier than anyone else so as to fit in the manicurist and masseuse, or the hairdresser.

  Her white hair undulated back from her tan-glow forehead, her teeth gleamed, her good bones held up her facial features; she looked like a mild sunset, she had a strong body.

  At fifty-three, unbeknown to her children, she wanted to get married again, the only reason for her secrecy in this respect being that she didn’t yet know anyone whom she could marry. But she was convinced, and rightly, that she would easily find a man, preferably a widower, rich, suitable, attractive.

  Hilda was not a feminist. She was above and beyond feminism. She had no need of a tame husband to help her with domestic chores, she had no domestic chores. She needed an equal, a mate. And she had always been sexually shy, so she knew very little about all that, without being unaware of the power of sexual attraction.

  Although she had no idea whom she might marry she had a good sense of how to go about it. She was relieved that William had got married, and, not expecting the marriage to last, thought she should marry before William’s marriage broke up.

  Hilda had a woman friend who, in the early days of one of her wealthy widowhoods, sat in the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel in Rome with a little dog on her lap. Before long, a man of suitable age and means turned up to caress the little dog and get into conversation with the widow. Hilda’s friend didn’t look further. She married this man, who was verging on elderly, and remained happily married till he died. She then returned to the lobby of the Excelsior. Another of Hilda’s women friends, well on in her sixties and three times widowed, decided to find a husband about her own age. She went to the Bahamas, where she had some property, and soon met a charming business man at a smart cocktail party. He was her fourth husband and they were still married — she, wrapped in a cloud of contentment. These were the sort of examples Hilda had in mind. She felt, reasonably, that it was a matter of focusing one’s mind on th
e possibility: someone would come and fill the screen. Someone, perhaps, on the plane to or from Australia. Hilda had even thought, how nice it would be to meet a future partner at William’s wedding.

  The Murchies had made a very good, unspectacular wedding for their daughter. They lived in a turreted edifice near St Andrews called Blackie House, with fewer, and more poky, rooms than the outside suggested. The fact that the rooms were so small was, according to Margaret’s mother, Greta, a godsend: ‘Otherwise we could never afford to heat the place.’ Her husband, Dan Murchie, said his family had occupied the place since 1933. He put a strong emphasis on this insignificant fact, as if 1933 was hundreds of years ago.

  ‘Oh, how often’, Dan said to Hilda, ‘I was a page-boy at weddings! How I remember the satin suits, the tartan kilts. The blond heads of hair at those weddings, the bridesmaids’ curls, and our curls — I could show you photographs. Every month or so a yellow satin suit, a pale blue suit! In a way our parents had money to burn. In another way they didn’t have a penny.

  ‘Luxuries, as we would call them luxuries today, were cheaper. Dressmakers were cheap,’ said Greta.

  Hilda let them speak on as much as possible. It was her habit to let people speak on.

  Hilda stayed with the Murchies for one night, before the wedding. Her room was comfortable in a way that was irreproachable. It had the right curtains co-ordinated with the right bedcovers. It had paper tissues and cotton wool. There was a bathroom attached, pale mushroom-coloured with white birds in flight on the tiles. The towels were right. Everything was right. Hilda had just arrived, been shown to her room. Everything was right, including the piece of Dresden china on a shelf, a silly little man with pink breeches playing a violin. What was wrong with these people? Hilda changed her clothes, which wasn’t necessary, or should not have been, as she had arrived in a very smart pair of trousers and a woollen jacket. She looked at the bedside books: three paperbacks by Anthony Powell, The Trumpet Major by Thomas Hardy, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, three paperbacks by Agatha Christie, one by P. D. James, something by Thackeray, something by Alan Sillitoe. Nothing wrong with that selection, not a hair out of place. Hilda wore a dress and jacket, black with some white, very good and striking. She went down to meet the Murchies. It was seven-thirty in the evening.