by Muriel Spark
‘Her name,’ said Lina, with an air of first things first.
‘Deborah,’ he said.
‘How old?’
‘About thirty-eight, with two children, one ten the other thirteen, both girls, sulky and ugly.’
‘Deborah is ugly?’
‘Maybe she is now. I haven’t seen her for three weeks. She had a tough face and a lanky figure. No make-up and she didn’t comb her hair very much, maybe twice a week. Occupation, journalist, very spiteful in her writing. The house was a terrible mess, especially the bedroom. It was a pretty house in itself, very expensive, but Deborah let everything go, maybe years ago, as she let her husband go. She trails around with long skirts and droopy shoulders all day. She drinks and she takes a little drugs. Not much to sleep with, but it was an experience, a love-affair for the time being; you can’t get much in London.’
‘Rich?’ said Lina.
‘Oh, yes. Of course she thought she was poor. She always complained about money. But she had money from the husband and maybe that money was really for the children, but she lived off it. When there was someone she didn’t like, she would try to make money out of them. It seemed so, all the time. First, the husband, and then when she needed money badly she would write an article against someone in the public eye, attacking them for the best parts of their work, people like sculptors or writers: she would pick out the best of their work and make it out to be the worst, or maybe she would attack a man for his car, or a woman for her clothes, all the time pretending to be the social conscience of her age. The articles made her a lot of money as she told me she made a private joke of them. Bernard Shaw used to do it, she said, and built up his reputation by attacking the reputations already made. There is no such thing as objective judgment in London. Deborah lives how she likes; she can order in the carpenter to build cupboards in her house whenever she likes; there were eight rooms for three people, herself and the girls. She called herself left-wing, nearly communist. It’s very, very funny, Lina. You have to go there to realise how it is.’
‘Why did you go with Deborah if you despised her?’
‘I didn’t despise her. I just saw she didn’t know what she was doing or saying. She was generous, sometimes. I couldn’t afford to buy her many presents, only little things like one flower, one dahlia on a stem, which she loved. She let me do some cooking in her kitchen and she bought in the food. Then sometimes we went out for a meal and paid each our own share, but sometimes she paid for us both.’
‘And the poor daughters?’
‘Hateful. Rude and horrible. I think Deborah could see they were terrible and secretly didn’t like them, either. She gave them money to go out and eat pizzas or English sandwiches at mealtimes, and they had money for the cinema. It was always money in the hands of those girls, a dreadful upbringing. One of them called me “that bloody Pole” in my own presence. Deborah merely said “Bulgarian”, and left it at that.’
Serge went on about Deborah and some of her friends in London, late into the evening. ‘Will you write to her?’ Lina asked. ‘Well, no, I don’t think so,’ said Serge, ‘and yet, maybe later on I’ll write a note. It depends how I feel later on. And then, you know, Deborah might be useful.’
‘She might be dangerous,’ Lina said.
‘That’s a very bright point. She might indeed. But she’s very boring, even to her friends, I could see that.’
‘Dangerous people often seem boring,’ said Lina.
‘So do useful people, very often,’ mused Serge.
He did not discern what type of alert interest Lina was taking in his story, his anecdotes of London, of university life, his hosts and hostesses, the Hampstead of Deborah and the Deborah of Hampstead. He understood only that she was entertained by his travellers’ tales, and the absurdity of the foreign ways he was describing.
He was unaware that the same story that can repel can also enchant, according to the listener. It happened that Lina’s imagination was inflamed with the exciting possibilities of western life, the more Serge reported what he had perceived as hilarious decadence. Taking it for granted she was exactly of his mind, he expounded on the wastefulness, the selfishness, the inequality, the social injustice and the hypocrisy of western left-wing ideas, illustrating them with anecdotes till Lina’s mother came home, looked in on them, smiled, said goodnight and went to bed. Even then Serge went on and on, while Lina drank in the marvels, as they appeared to her, of wearing long skirts and tangled hair in an eight-room house, very expensive, with two liberated daughters and a husband who wasn’t there but who paid the bills. She was stirred by the sheer magic of being a woman with enough money to take a handsome Polish or Bulgarian student out to dine at a restaurant and home to bed. Lina, who was then twenty-three, transformed in her mind as she listened, even the farthest peripheries of Serge’s account ‘… She was arranging flowers in the sitting-room. She had only just got home from the office, her car was still outside the gate. There was a ring at the bell; she opened the door; it was a man who said he was the piano-tuner for the people upstairs who had a flat there—you see it was a divided house. Well, she let him go up, without thinking any more about it, and do you know, he was a big-time thief, he took all their. …’ To Lina, the magic ideas were contained in the phrases, ‘just got home from the office … her car outside the gate’; ‘… piano-tuner for the people upstairs …’; ‘… she was arranging flowers in the sitting-room’; and it didn’t signify in the least to Lina that the story was about a big-time thief, so long as these phrases were dancing in her ears, making colours in the mind’s eye. It was rather like the time, only a few years ago, when a tourist-lady from Moscow had called with a letter of introduction to Lina’s mother in Sofia. The stranger had reminisced a while, talking wistfully about the years before the war, the late nineteen thirties, in the same way as the old White Russians were said to speak of the years before the revolution. The woman tourist’s husband had evidently been in trouble, there had been a misunderstanding. It was a long story, during which Lina made tea, sliced a lemon and prettily put out some sweet biscuits. The voice droned on: ‘… and, well, there was I with my husband in prison and my daughter Kyra to bring up and educate. She had to go to her dancing lessons, there was a state scholarship of course, but how could I manage to make her frocks? To walk to the dancing class she had her bronze velvet dress with lace collar and cuffs, so charming, but. …’ Whereupon Lina, careless of the woman’s past plight, was quite carried away by the thought of the small daughter being taken to her state dancing class in a velvet dress and lace collar, in the sunny Muscovian springtime. Lina, for all her twenty years at that time, felt a heart-yearning for Moscow, and spent many months brooding how she could manage a student-exchange or some sort of work-permit to leave Bulgaria and go to the Soviet Union, to Leningrad even, or wonderful Moscow.
But her dreams fed on Serge’s stories of London after that first night of his return, and on subsequent warm nights when they had taken a boat down the river all day under the blazing sun. More and more she wanted to hear about the ‘sociology’ of the West. She slept with Serge as if he was a bourgeois sea with the waves breaking over her. She told him she had found out a lot more recently about her father; he had been ‘killed in the war’ only so far as it was during the war that he died, and his calling had something to do with the court of King Boris, but he had not been in the army, he had been in the Bulgarian consular service; what he had been doing actually during the war in Venice, where they said he was buried, she did not know, since there never had been a Bulgarian consulate in Venice. Lina said she would like to find out, and meant to travel to Italy one day.
That would be a good thing, said Serge; she ought to travel. One could appreciate the Republic of Bulgaria better having been away for a while.
She already had a job as an art teacher in a secondary school. Many years after Serge’s return, Lina managed to get a trip to Paris with an educational group tour. There, on the day before she was d
ue to return, she left her hotel, left the group, went to the police station and defected. ‘Name: Lina Pancev … Sex: female … Occupation: painter and teacher of art, advanced grades. Degree in Education 2nd Class. University of Sofia, Bulgaria. Former residence Sofia, Bulgaria. The above-described individual states that she seeks refuge in the West for political and ideological reasons. We are informed that her group …’
This had been a year before she met Robert Leaver in Paris. At first, she had caused a public stir; her name was in all the newspapers of Western Europe ‘Red Girl Painter Defects’ and ‘Balkan Woman Artist Makes Getaway’: ‘Lina Pancev a top Bulgarian artist was today reported to be in hiding under the protection of wellwishers after her defection Tuesday. Pancev, who also teaches art, left her group of Bulgar educationists, requesting asylum from the French government and pleading that she had been followed for over one year by the secret police and she “couldn’t stand it any more”. She made her bid for freedom at 11 a.m. yesterday and is being held in a secret location while her position is being clarified. Miss Pancev had declared herself fearful of reprisals by Balkan agents in Paris.’
She made friends with a girl ballet-dancer who had defected from Romania and a young man who had positively fled from Czechoslovakia; she was taken up and put down again by several hostesses of the art world; she was taken on a trip to London. She lamented the lack of her own former paintings which she despaired of getting out of Bulgaria: ‘I have nothing to show. I can’t get my work out.’ She painted some men fishing in the Seine, but nobody bought her pictures.
Lina could never understand the illogic of the West. ‘What have we defected for?’ she used to say, along with some of the more obscure refugees from communist countries who used to gather together in certain cafes or sometimes in the Orthodox churches on a Sunday. In London, Lina thought that the charwomen, going to work in Hampstead where she insisted on staying, were far too well dressed, not nearly shabby enough in comparison to the housewives who employed them.
She was at first less followed by secret agents than she thought she was. Very hard, she tried to trace the address of ‘Deborah’, the girl-friend whom Serge had described with semi-ridicule. The glamour of that woman and all her circumstances which had so gripped Lina, grew as she looked from face to face; long hair, long skirts, no make-up, not very pretty, rich and with alimony, very careless, very untidy. There were plenty of Deborahs, no matter which was the real one. Lina was unable to make her own good hair untidy, but she went into long dresses. She had boy-friends and slept with them, always preaching at them, whether they cared or not, the evils of East-West détente—‘What have we defected for?’ Sometimes she remembered Serge’s white teeth biting into the peach on that summer evening far away.
Chapter Five
AT THE INVITATION OF the voice over the loudspeaker, Grace Gregory, the former matron of Ambrose College, looked out of the plane window at the Alps below and, having found no apparent fault with them, returned her attention to her companion.
‘Leo,’ she said, ‘I’m sure we’re doing the right thing. I can’t wait to get there. Poor Anthea, she’s the injured party all along the line and I’m going to sort out those two debauchees there in Venice.’
‘Well,’ said young Leo. ‘We’ll have a good time, Grace, depend on that. I don’t myself see that there’s much to choose between the injured party and the other parties. It’s all one and the same, isn’t it?’
‘Adultery,’ mused Grace. ‘Rather than fornication. Anyway, I’m a definite friend to Anthea and injury or no injury I’m going to add insult to it. Fancy her going to a private detectives’ and giving them the story. She never had reason to go to a private detective when I was Matron at Ambrose. I used to keep Arnold temperate myself in the sick-bay when there were no boys sick. Otherwise he would have been a libertine. I remember so clearly the smell of hyacinths on the window-sill and the sparkling medicine-trolley. If Anthea didn’t suspect it she should have, and been grateful. Well, all that’s past, Leo, and I appreciate the reduction on the ticket and this opportunity to sort them out. Mary Tiller’s a cook, Leo, a whole cook and nothing but a cook. I’m a Matron. That’s the difference.’
‘Oh, never mind them,’ said Leo. ‘It’s Venice we’re going to see.’
‘Oh, the gondoliers!’ Grace said.
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Leo, ‘compared to the people in the rest of Italy the Venetians are very austere.’
Violet de Winter, chief agent of Global-Equip Security Services Ltd for Northern Italy and adjacent territories, had been feeling the pinch of modern immorality, as she put it. Over the past ten years her business, on the GESS side, had deteriorated by seventy-five percent largely because unmarried lovers no longer chose Venice as the most desirable place to be together and, moreover, the lovers’ husbands and wives no longer seemed to care if they did. The bottom has fallen out of the love-bird business,’ she frequently told her old friend Curran, who, in his turn, had always found her useful in many ways.
The point about GESS was that they operated on a commercial basis, and Violet got ten percent. She had a strict range of territory in which to operate. Everything about GESS was strict, especially her instructions within the territory. Violet’s job was to:
1. locate the subjects (two or more, as may be);
2. find out as quickly as possible their financial status;
3. exercise persuasion on any rich or susceptible party;
4. if none of the subjects was really rich, drop the enquiry and report back to GESS.
For ‘persuasion’ read blackmail. In this way, GESS was able to pursue its policy of dealing only on a strictly commercial basis. For the most part, they regretfully told their clients that ‘after prolonged investigations nothing of importance has emerged relating to your esteemed enquiry. Yours sincerely, [squiggle for signature] Global-Equip Security Services.’
Ca’ Winter, the large palace on the Grand Canal where Violet still lived, was in a fair state of preservation. She owned part of it and gathered in the rents from several of the apartments. The other parts were owned by other people, and by the relatives of the dead Count de Winter whom Violet, an Englishwoman, had married in 1935 after meeting him in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Now, occupying a quite splendid flat in the palace, she considered herself to be one of the stones, if not the pillars, of Venice. At the same time she practised several small money-making activities, never letting any opportunity pass, such as the publicising of an American art exhibition or a German film show. She worked hard at these jobs of public relations lest some evil should befall her; a cosy study in her apartment was dedicated to files and card indexes. Maybe it was the memory of a hard-up youth that made her feel for ever in need of picking up a small fee here and there. Certainly, the Countess de Winter had been left quite well-off by her husband, and although feeling the pinch compared to the old days, she still managed to keep her private motor-boat.
While Grace Gregory with her young friend Leo was high over the Alps on her way to foreign Venice, its waterways and its bridges, to sort things out, Violet’s thoughts were on the discreet letter she had received from GESS which, being decoded, offered her the exciting prospect of a small job.
Curran was in no way objective about Violet de Winter. To him, who had known her as a young woman, she had improved over the years; to him, she was a late-blooming person. What to him was the result of a long hard haul to improve herself from the sallow and sullen English girl he had known before the war, would be to a newcomer in her life a remnant of some braver and more glittering social personality. That she had been of service to Curran throughout the long years of their friendship made her features beautiful to him, now that she was sixty-four, beyond what they actually were. And she had attained, little by little, the power to infuriate him, whereas thirty years ago it had been the other way round.
The day after Violet got her missive from GESS came a telephone call from Curran.
‘I heard you were in Venice,’ she said.
‘Naturally,’ he said.
‘Well, I just heard you were in Venice, that’s all. Did you read about Carla’s cocktail-party in Verona?’
‘No, why should I?’
‘It was in all the papers. Connie threw a vase at Ruffolo the sculptor and said he should have been a bricklayer.’
‘Oh, yes, I heard about that, I—’
‘Well, I was there.’
‘Why are you boasting about it? I’d hush that up if I were you.’
‘Well, Curran, it was something to see, I can tell you. I arranged the publicity. It was quite something. When are you coming over? Are you at the Lord Byron?’
‘Yes. May I come now?’
‘Not now. No, please don’t come just now. Come at five this afternoon. I’ve got a job on; I’m busy. I’ll send my boat over for you at five.’
‘I can walk across the bridge at five.’
‘But it’s a filthy day. You—’
‘See you at five,’ he said.
At five in the afternoon it was still raining and a gale blew up making the dark grey sea send the ships anchored in the lagoon into a static gallop. The canals were at low tide, chopping up their smells.
Violet had her central heating well regulated; she had switched on the rosy lamps, and shut out the very watery view by drawing the silvery satin curtains an hour before the reasonable time. Curran thought how like Violet to do that. She always made her own environment. She seemed to rule Nature, more and more as she got older. More and more he felt her to be his equal.
‘Well, how is Robert?’ she said when he had settled himself with a drink. The last time she had seen Curran had been a few months ago in his house in Paris, where Robert was still installed.
