The Complete Short Stories

by Muriel Spark

  Now, I take these cards and again deal them. You mustn’t think that because I take my gifts seriously, I take them solemnly. It is all an airy dream of mine, unsinkable because it is light. I don’t play the eerie fortune-teller at all; I don’t play anything when I tell the cards; I am simply myself.

  Well, I take the cards that have fallen to my client’s lot and deal them under the following headings: (1) the secret self; (2) the known self (by which I mean, the more limited aspect of the person as he is observable by others); (3) the client’s hopes; (4) the client’s degree of self-ignorance; (5) his present destination (I don’t say his ‘destiny’ for this reason, that any destiny I might take from the cards would be prematurely conceived and would fail to allow for a client’s probable divergence from his present destination. Circumstances change. There can be a change of heart. Human nature is essentially unpredictable in the long run. But ‘destination’ none the less often answers for destiny. No clairvoyant, believe me, can say more); (6) affairs of the heart, which means the prevailing love; that is, of any object, including, from time to time, that of money; (7) the wish — will it or won’t it come true?

  Again I see Mme Dessain in the friendly library of her house leaning over the table, those many years ago, with her husband by her side as I began to tell her cards.

  While she was shuffling I saw that she was extremely punctilious about the performance. While I dealt and discarded according to my secret method she watched me with an intensity that meant, to me, a decided confidence in my powers. Her wish was evidently of critical importance. She seemed absorbed by the cards that fell to constitute her fortune, but I advised her light-heartedly not to give weight to them herself, to concentrate hard on the wish, and to leave the interpretation in due time to me.

  ‘There are many spades,’ observed Mme Dessain. ‘And there is an ace of spades, Madame.’ I was puzzled as to why she insisted on addressing me as ‘Madame’ when I was plainly ‘Mademoiselle’. I was dealing the third cycle. In my conjuring out of the meaning of cards I never go by the tradition. It is true that no one is delighted by the ace of spades but it does not necessarily mean a personal death. It might mean the death of a hope, or the end of a fear. Everything depends on the combination. Anyway, I was dealing the third cycle. I said, ‘Leave it to me,’ and finished.

  Now I gathered up Mme Dessain’s cards.

  ‘Will the rain never stop?’ said Mme Dessain, her eyes wandering to the enormous french windows. She was putting this on, this absent air as if she didn’t care in the least about her fortune.

  ‘Concentrate on your wish, Madame,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I am concentrating. The rain is a tourist attraction if they like the flooded fields, very beautiful.’ So she laughed off her fortune-telling, but I could see she was eager, even a little agitated. Her husband, too, watched with care. I wanted to remind them it was only a game, but I refrained; I didn’t want to bring their nervousness to light.

  I dealt the cards under their seven headings, which naturally I didn’t pronounce. Thirteen cards had emerged from the process of selection. I noticed the high proportion of court cards in Mme Dessain’s set.

  Now, in the first round to her secret self, came up the eight of spades, to her known self the six of spades.

  ‘Spades in my wish!’ said Mme Dessain immediately.

  ‘Have patience,’ I said, still setting forth the cards. It was obvious to me now that she was trying to penetrate my method for when I put down the king of hearts she said, ‘a fair, handsome lover.’ But I gave no sign, although I felt annoyed at the interruption.

  Her cards finally came out as follows:

  Secret self: eight of spades and six of clubs

  Known self: six of spades and nine of diamonds

  Things hoped for: king of hearts and ace of spades

  Self-ignorance: five of hearts and king of clubs

  Present destination: queen of hearts and three of hearts

  Affairs of the heart: queen of clubs and three of diamonds

  The wish: knave of hearts.

  Mme Dessain was really perplexed. She saw all seven sets of cards placed out before her, but she had no way of guessing the private headings I had placed them under. Her eyes were bright upon the cards as if she were telling my fortune, not me hers.

  ‘You have got your wish,’ I said at once, seeing that she had come in for one card only, the knave of hearts, under that heading, and there was no opposition. ‘However, it is a wish that you should not have made.’

  ‘Which cards represent my wish?’ she asked, almost in a panic, strange for such a grand lady.

  I wouldn’t tell her. I smiled at her and said, ‘This is only a game, after all.’

  She put on an air that she was pacified, pulled together. But I could see that she was not.

  Altogether, from this moment what her cards told me was one thing and what I told her was another. I had reason to be cautious. As I looked at the whole picture that was formed by the seven groups of cards it was at first a coloured mass, changing into a tableau of patterns until one idea protruded larger and more brilliantly than the others. And so, it appeared to me all in a quick moment that Mme Dessain was herself a natural clairvoyant; she was able to read my mind perhaps better than I was able to read her cards. What had been to me a laughing matter, a game, seemed now to veer rather dangerously towards myself, and I knew that her wish had been in some way connected with me. I say connected with me, not directed at me, because there was something indirect about it; at the same time it was distinctly malevolent.

  I braved out the performance. I told her a certain amount of nonsense, but as I spoke I could see she discerned that I wasn’t as frank as I might have been. More specifically than before I could now see under the heading of the secret self that she was clairvoyant.

  Now, for instance, I looked at the known self in a special way. I felt that her very attractive, haggard and aristocratic appeal was by no means as artless as it had seemed when she was working around the outhouses or busy with the vast baronial pans in the great stone kitchen. She looked airily up at the beautiful windows, now, those tall windows with leaded corners. I was aware of her husband’s attention upon her and thought he seemed jealous, wondering what had been her wish and looking for her reaction to everything I said.

  I continued to say many sweet things with a grain of what seemed probable. ‘You are hoping,’ I said, ‘for a visit from a tall bearded man, I should imagine an Englishman, who has an interest in gardening —’Indeed I received from Mme Dessain’s cards a very strong premonition concerning the garden.

  ‘That’s Camillo, our odd-job man,’ said the anxious husband. ‘He’s been away for five days, and he’s overdue. But he’s Italian.’

  ‘Alain!’ rebuked Mme Dessain. ‘Let Mme Lucy continue.’

  I continued. It did seem to me very plainly that Mme Dessain had set her heart on a visitor. He would be about her age, probably an American or an Englishman (he could have been a German but for the fact it was extremely unlikely that a woman of Mme Dessain’s age and ethos would have a German lover). She was, however, moving towards this love affair full tilt. I was sure he had been a guest at the château, certainly married then, if not now, and decidedly rich. It was a disastrous enough attachment for her house and family.

  All this I saw, and Mme Dessain knew that I saw it. What she was unaware of, or was bound by her infatuation to ignore, was the vast amount of bother and anxiety this course was leading her to. Her husband, though not in the least faithful to her, would make nothing but bitterness of the affair.

  ‘You may be unaware that certain benefits will come to the house as a result of your visitor’s appearance,’ I said. And I told her the visitor would be poor, and warned her against unforeseen expenditure. The husband rejoiced to hear these words, and I wound up, ‘Tomorrow you will receive a very important family letter,’ — one of the few honest comments on Mme Dessain’s cards that I chose to make. In
deed, I thought it was harmless, for the husband said, ‘That will be from our son, Charles,’ and Mme Dessain once more cried out ‘Alain! You interrupt.’

  I said, ‘I’ve finished.’

  Mme Dessain was looking beyond me. ‘Here comes Madame’s husband,’ she said ambiguously; anyway, I looked round and saw Raymond approaching. I guessed he had quarrelled with Sylvia who, leaving the room, looked round smiling with that deplorable angry leer of hers, which quite ruined her appearance.

  I left next day. The tense atmosphere between my married friends was not to be borne by me. When I went to pay my bill Mme Dessain sent a maid to take the money and with the message that she was occupied.

  But Raymond came running after me as my luggage went into the taxi. His face was fairly frantic. It struck me that he would have been rather handsome without his beard.

  ‘Lucy,’ he said. ‘Lucy.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Raymond. But I have to go.

  He was really inarticulate and I thought it quite civil of him to feel for me and my embarrassment at being on the scene of a messed-up marriage.

  ‘Lucy.’

  ‘My apologies to Sylvia,’ I said. ‘She’ll understand.’

  That was the last I saw of Raymond, watching my taxi depart, as he did.

  Everything but the physical memory of the lovely château went far away to the back of my mind in the general nuisance of changing my holiday plans. The next week I returned to London and took up my life. Mme Dessain and the telling of her cards slept latent for year after year, but with each detail regularly arranged in case it should ever be needed, as is the way with memory.

  Some time over the following year I heard that Sylvia and Raymond had finally separated; I was told that Sylvia was married again, to a social worker much younger than herself, and that after the divorce Raymond had given up his good job and gone to live abroad. Abroad is a big place and the rumours were equally too large and amorphous for me to take any account of, so busy with my own life as I was. When occasionally I thought of that holiday I shared with them I thought of the beautiful château, but a cloud came over my thoughts when I remembered how uncomfortable I felt as the third party. I didn’t know till much later that they stayed on at the château for another week.

  Not long ago I came across M. Dessain. I didn’t recognize him at first. I was aware only of a little wizened man walking out of the Black Forest at Baden-Baden. I should say that it isn’t unusual for anything whatsoever to walk out of the Black Forest, so I took no particular notice. Moreover he was dressed in beige, and I might say that every visitor to Baden-Baden wears beige, both men and women. Their clothes and their shoes are beige and their faces are beige; in which respect they are quite lovable.

  But I noticed him again that day seated alone at a lunch table in the dining room of my hotel. Even then, I failed to see anything familiar about him; I only noticed that he looked at me once or twice, briefly, but in a decidedly curious way.

  That evening I was sitting in the public room of the hotel playing with my cards. I was alone, waiting for a friend to join me there the next day. I shuffled my cards and dealt them out in my own style which seems so haphazard; I don’t ever tell my own fortune, but I can’t keep away from the cards. I shuffle and deal and see what comes up, and in the meantime my ideas take form as if the cards were a sort of sacrament, ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,’ as the traditional definition goes.

  Up to me at my table came the wizened guest, him of the Black Forest. He sat down on the edge of a sofa, watching me. I felt he was sad, and I was about to ask him if he would like me to tell his fortune.

  ‘Mlle Lucy,’ he said.

  Then I recognized him, the once chubby little husband of Mme Dessain, and I saw how the years had withered him. In all its formal detail of ten years ago or more, I remembered the features of the room in the château where I told Mme Dessain’s fortune while she, intense and distressed, perceived in her clairvoyance all that I was about. I remembered the two chess players sitting quietly apart, the tall shapes of Sylvia and Raymond moving away impatiently from the scene, the worn floral fabric on the chairs. I wondered if Mme Dessain’s lover had materialized, and I recalled vaguely some of my light-hearted predictions which hadn’t fooled Mme Dessain one bit. ‘You are hoping for a visit from a tall, bearded Englishman, interested in the garden.’ And my own sincere prediction, ‘You will have a family letter.’

  I looked at M. Dessain and said, ‘What a long time ago. Are you on holiday?’

  ‘I am here for my health.’

  ‘How is Mme Dessain?’ I said.

  ‘She does very well. As you predicted, the letter came next day.’

  ‘Oh, dear. I hope it was a good letter.’

  ‘Yes. It came from her cousin Claude. It announced his engagement. I was delighted, because Claude was my wife’s lover.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, that must have solved a problem for you, M. Dessain.’

  ‘It was a good thing for Claude,’ he said. ‘And a good thing for you, Mlle Lucy.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘My wife changed your destiny,’ said the said and withered man. He repeated, ‘Your destiny, Mlle Lucy. She saw that you were destined to marry your friend Raymond, and she intervened.’

  ‘Marry Raymond? I never thought of such a thing. There was nothing at all between us. He was on bad terms with his wife but that had nothing to do with me.

  ‘Nevertheless, my wife foresaw the outcome. You would have married Raymond, but after your departure, before the week was out she had him for her new lover. He is still at the château. She forestalled your destiny.’

  ‘Not my destiny, then,’ I said, ‘only my destination.’ And seeing that he looked so sad and so beige, I asked, ‘Would you like me to tell your fortune, M. Dessain?’

  He didn’t answer the question. He only said, ‘Raymond is very good in the garden and in the grounds.’

  The Fathers’ Daughters

  She left the old man in his deck-chair on the front, having first adjusted the umbrella awning with her own hand, and, with her own hand, put his panama hat at a comfortable angle. The beach attendant had been sulky, but she didn’t see why one should lay out tips only for adjusting an umbrella and a panama hat. Since the introduction of the new franc it was impossible to tip less than a franc. There seemed to be a conspiracy all along the coast to hide the lesser coins from the visitors, and one could only find franc pieces in one’s purse, and one had to be careful not to embarrass Father, and one …

  She hurried along the Rue Paradis, keeping in the hot shade, among all the old, old smells of Nice, not only garlic wafting from the cafés, and of the hot invisible air itself, but the smells from her memory, from thirty-five summers at Nice in apartments of long ago, Father’s summer salon, Father’s friends’ children, Father’s friends, writers, young artists dating back five years at Nice, six, nine years; and then, before the war, twenty years ago — when we were at Nice, do you remember, Father? Do you remember the pension on the Boulevard Victor Hugo when we were rather poor? Do you remember the Americans at the Negresco in 1937 — how changed, how demure they are now! Do you remember, Father, how in the old days we disliked the thick carpets — at least, you disliked them, and what you dislike, I dislike, isn’t it so, Father?

  Yes, Dora, we don’t care for luxury. Comfort, yes, but luxury, no.

  I doubt if we can afford to stay at an hotel on the front this year, Father.

  What’s that? What’s that you say?

  I said I doubt if we ought to stay on the front this year, Father; the Promenade des Anglais is becoming very trippery. Remember you disliked the thick carpets …

  Yes, yes, of course.

  Of course, and so we’ll go, I suggest, to a little place I’ve found on the Boulevard Gambetta, and if we don’t like that there’s a very good place on the Boulevard Victor Hugo. Within our means, Father, modest and …

  What’s that you s
ay?

  I said it wasn’t a vulgar place, Father.

  Ah. No.

  And so I’ll just drop them a note and book a couple of bedrooms. They may be small, but the food …

  Facing the sea, Dora.

  They are all very vulgar places facing the sea, Father. Very distracting. No peace at all. Times have changed, you know.

  Ah. Well, I leave it to you, dear. Tell them I desire a large room, suitable for entertaining. Spare no expense, Dora.

  Oh, of course not, Father.

  And I hope to God we’ve won the lottery, she thought, as she hurried up the little street to the lottery kiosk. Someone’s got to win it out of the whole of France. The dark-skinned blonde at the lottery kiosk took an interest in Dora, who came so regularly each morning rather than buy a newspaper to see the results. She leaned over the ticket, holding her card of numbers, comparing it with Dora’s ticket, with an expression of earnest sympathy.

  ‘No luck,’ Dora said.

  ‘Try again tomorrow,’ said the woman. ‘One never knows. Life is a lottery …’

  Dora smiled as one who must either smile or weep. On her way back to the sea-front she thought, tomorrow I will buy five hundred francs’ worth. Then she thought, no, no, I’d better not, I may run short of francs and have to take Father home before time. Dora, the food here is inferior. — I know, Father, but it’s the same everywhere in France now, times have changed. — I think we should move to another hotel, Dora. — The others are all very expensive, Father. — What’s that? What’s that you say? — There are no other rooms available, Father, because of the tourists, these days.

  The brown legs of lovely young men and girls passed her as she approached the sea. I ought to appreciate every minute of this, she thought, it may be the last time. This thoroughly blue sea, these brown limbs, these white teeth and innocent inane tongues, these palm trees —all this is what we are paying for.